- cross-posted to:
- environment@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- environment@beehaw.org
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Unwillingness not inability.
A meaningless distinction. Assuming for the sake of argument that there are actions we can take that would solve our predicament, we are unable to persuade the people, governments, and various powers that be to take these actions. That is inability.
To suggest that is not inability reminds me of the joke where the mathematician sees his room on fire, and sees the fire extinguisher, and declares the solution obvious and goes back to sleep. Politics is real.
The distinction is a meaningful one.
I didn’t stop the Holocaust - I couldn’t. I wish I could have, but that’s not on me. On the other hand, if I was able stop it and chose not to, that’d be evil.
Now scale up from what seems like an extreme example of millions of people to billions of people and a huge chunk of all the life on earth.
Inability to defeat republiQans then. We can address climate change in 1000 ways. We are able.
It’s not a meaningless distinction, it’s a key distinction. If the headline said “2023 is when republiQans publicly agreed to destroy the planet” it’d have a very different effect. It’s hardly meaningless.
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I dont think there will be much looking back actually…
Why were we able to come together for the ozone layer in the 80s but not the climate change in the 00s?
Legit question… Like what happened?
Ozone layer was portrayed as a science issue, not a political issue. Climate change became political quite early. The fossil fuel lobby was also more powerful than the aerosol lobby. Aerosol industry also developed better cooling gasses quite quickly, but few alternatives to fossil fuels that oil industry could quickly pivot to exist.
Aerosol industry also developed better cooling gasses quite quickly
The solution was even easier than it appears. Industrial and large cooling units already mostly used a non-ODP gas, ammonia. The ammonia cycle dates back to the dawn of refrigeration and was extremely mature.
CFCs were never even necessary, being outperformed in many ways by simple hydrocarbons like propane (R290) and butane (R600a). Non-flammability was literally the only reason to use CFCs, aside from market control and big money for chemical companies.
Ultimately as common refrigeration applications only require a gas that fits into fairly loose specifications, it was easy to replace CFCs with similar HFCs and still have non-flammable gas. HFCs have massive GWP, but hey, that’s a slow burn problem compared to the ozone problem, right? Looking back, we clearly should have just gone straight to hydrocarbons as a drop in and CO2 for specialized applications, as lost HFCs now make up a significant portion of the greenhouse effect.
Propellant gas was even easier with modern aerosols containing HFCs, propane or CO2 depending on application.
Fossil fuels on the other hand, have powered our world for centuries and only recently was the need to switch away from them apparent. They are a cheap, dense source of energy and far, far more integrated into all of our industries and supply chains. It’s a much bigger problem to solve than swapping out some gases.
Exactly. And now Kigali is sort of trying to right the HFC wrong, but the chemical industry isn’t going down without a fight and we’ll be left with TFAs everywhere because of the new shitty HFOs. Everyone needs to just use natural refrigeratants.
For anyone reading and wondering what they can do, next time you buy a refrigerator make sure it’s R600a (isobutane) and also write your elected leaders or bribe your dictator to mandate natural refrigerants. If you’re in the right market, buy R290 monoblock heat pumps. Buy a car with an R744 heat pump if you can. Also make sure any product with refrigerant that you own is disposed of properly.
Fun fact - the Montreal protocol that replaced CFCs with HFCs prevented more warming than the Kyoto protocol, which was explicitly designed to do just that while it was a complete afterthought for Montreal. Refrigerants really matter.
CFCs was only a few small industries. CO2 is a lot of really big industries, so a whole lot more pushback and lobbying and fossil fuel propaganda.
Why is it a difficult concept of, “no earth, no profit”?
Because all the people that will lose profit will be dead by then so they don’t care
Tragedy of the commons, benefit to an individual incentives a larger harm to everyone.
More like tragedy of capitalism, since it’s the only system in world history where so called “tragedy of the commons” actually happens with any regularly, proven by the fact there were sucessfully managed Commons millenia old before capitalism ruined them and claimed they were always doomed from the start
Capitalism turned rabid via fearmongering/FOMO, and the old fux in Congress know they won’t see consequences.
Amount of money in the status quo with oil + petrodollar shenanigans
I mean there is still a massive hole in the ozone so I’m sot sure what you’re on about.
From a volcano, per the source you linked:
"The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano — which violently erupted in January 2022 and blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into the stratosphere – likely contributed to this year’s ozone depletion. That water vapor likely enhanced ozone-depletion reactions over the Antarctic early in the season.
“If Hunga Tonga hadn’t gone off, the ozone hole would likely be smaller this year,” Newman said. “We know the eruption got into the Antarctic stratosphere, but we cannot yet quantify its ozone hole impact.”
Not to make light of the situation, but Hunga Tonga makes me laugh.
I love the rhythm of this language. “Honga Tonga Honga Ha’apai” is so much fun to say.
Inability?
It’s the will to do something! There a lot of green washing out there like Carbon capture and hydrogen cars. I don’t Private planes being be taxed out of existence.
The big problem is that the environmental movement has been hijacked by corrupt business interests. They have effectively gaslighted the entire movement to oppose their own goals. Instead of pushing real solutions like mass transit or hydrogen, they are now wasting huge amounts of resources on idea like battery powered cars. Even carbon capture will be needed eventually.
What is necessary is for the environmental movement to have a major shakeup. It needs to kick out the scam artists and adopt more functional solutions.
There are no simple or single answers. As many simultaneous solutions as possible would be nice. Electric cars are a good stop gap.
Not really, they aren’t stop gapping anything, a mild slowdown at most even if every single car ever was replaced. The majority of pollution is caused by like a handful of companies, electric cars will do exactly nothing to fix that while still massively contribute to the microplastic issue we got going.
Only a stopgap though. Not the true solution.
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Sure. Fine. Good talk. Six months until death by fire.
Yeah, in a way, I still find it shocking how we’ve come out of a year of climate-related crisis and the COP, which could have been a crisis taskforce meetup was just a handwaving event.
There were several nations represented there, that got hit hard this year by climate change. Why are these not demanding measures to limit damages?Honestly even, why are there still people working against this? What the hell are you going to do with your immorally amassed wealth in a world that’s falling apart?
I’ve been reading about what some of what the rich and powerful openly state they believe, and it’s pretty scary. They are extremely out of touch with reality. I wonder what they believe that they’re not open about.
So far, I’ve read about:
Effective altruism
- seems to be about exploiting people to amass as much wealth as they can, then use that wealth to “help” humanity by building space ships to launch rich people into space or something.
Effective accelerationism
- explicitly doesn’t care about humanity, only “technocapitalism.” Is fine with AI destroying humanity, because that would be the natural evolution of intelligence.
Peter Theil
- believes all kinds of crazy shit. Women and democracy are a danger to humanity because they’re anti-“libertarian”. World should be a collection of city-states or floating cities ruled by corporations.
Back in the '90s I worked at an Internet startup that was playing the usual game of desperately seeking venture capital money to keep going. At one point we were wooing RJR Nabisco, a conglomerate that included the former RJ Reynolds Tobacco company that had branched out into venture capital because it was the fucking ‘90s and what else were they going to do with their gigantic piles of cash? One day some RJR-N executives came to visit and although we were a non-smoking company in a non-smoking building (our lease even disallowed smoking) we put ashtrays in the conference room and these motherfuckers spent the entire day chain-smoking. We had no ventilation to speak of and by the end of the day the smoke everywhere was so thick that you couldn’t see the end of the 50’ hallway. The office stank for weeks afterwards. My bosses almost fired me because I made a point of coughing really loudly every time I walked past the conference room door. And it was all for nought because they never gave us a penny.
The thing is, these executives had so thoroughly bought in to the corporate need to suppress factual information about the negative health consequences of smoking that they were perfectly willing to suffer those negative consequences themselves (and it’s highly likely that they’re all dead now thirty years on, which warms my heart a bit). It’s no surprise at all that the people making gobs of money from fossil fuels have convinced themselves that global warming isn’t really happening.
Didn’t you see Don’t Look Up? They’re all hoping for a golden ticket to the naked people planet.
On a more serious note, it’s because all the rich and powerful people killing the planet will be dead before it gets really bad.
That’s why they have no reason to care, but it’s not a reason why they’re actively working against humanity. They’re hopefully not planning to bequeath their wealth, because of, you know, the whole destroying-the-planet thing.
So, once they’re rich enough to live the rest of their lives in prosperity, just like, stop? Their life won’t garner more meaning by having the bank account high score. In fact, they’re destroying meaning, because of, you know, the whole destroying-the-planet thing.I’m sorry, this rant isn’t directed at you. I just get angry thinking about that asshat with his self-righteous smile.
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humanity? don’t lay this at our feet, you know who’s to blame
I’m not responsible!!! It’s all your fault!!!
Does anyone ever say no to advertising? Is it even possible to not buy from amazon? Have you ever walked past McDonalds hungry? Noooo I must buuuuuuuy!
Yup, God’s will and the gays.
I’m really curious - if it’s not humanity, who forced us to do this? Who’s forcing people to travel and over-consume? The capitalist hellscape sure facilitates and accelerates it, but it doesn’t force people to over-consume, travel tens of thousands of miles a year, etc… Most of the people who don’t do these things only refrain because the system isn’t allowing them the wealth to afford it.
The number of people who actually live sustainable lifestyles through choice is utterly miniscule. Most of us have the option of accepting the radical extreme poverty that would be required to sustain 8 billion people on earth, but just about none of us take it.
the reptiles at the top who support the system, don’t pass any meaningful reform, and encourage consumption
It would not take radical extreme poverty to combat climate change or sustain 8 billion people, it would merely require dismantling our capitalist society and reallocating the trillions of dollars that have been stolen and hoarded by the death cult billionaires and ugh that this word ever even reached relevance but trillionaires. The average person would be better off if wealth were redistributed. Very few except the most fortunate would feel anything except relief.
Meh, that’s more an “the past 5 decades” thing, and not so much an inability as much as a “don’t give a shit”.
We knew since well over a century ago. For the past 5 decades it was clear to all governments that this was to be THE issue that would face humanity.
What did we get?
It’s a hoax! But muh economy!
So humanity is fucked, nobody stopped those in charge, we get what we deserve.
Until the majority of normal people suffer, politicians won’t have a real reason to do much more than providing themselves a quasi-alibi. “Look we tried, but it just didn’t work out” *sips on wine in climate controlled cellar*
It is too late.
It’s too late for zero impact. It’s not too late to stabilize temperatures at a civilization-supporting level.
Never too late to limit the impact as much as we can.
Well since you’ve been meddling in all affairs yes…
True. Quite depressing.
https://www.collapsemusings.com/should-we-tell-people-its-too-late-to-save-civilization/
Nonsense. Just picture a “Mad Max: Beyond Thunder Dome” type of world.
or also the year in which the contradictions of late capitalism became so evident that they are no longer possible to be masked
