YouTube’s climate deniers turn into climate doomers — A new report documents a sharp rise in arguments that clean energy and climate policies won’t work::A new report documents a shift away from climate denial and a sharp rise in arguments that clean energy and climate policies won’t work.
Here’s my thing: I absolutely believe that clean energy and radical climate policies would work. However I have basically 0 hope that enough countries will implement these things to evade climate catastrophe.
Mitigation is a spectrum not a binary outcome. Anyone arguing to not try does not understand the problem or is being dishonest.
Countries already are. Slower than we’d like, but change is happening. Big changes start small, but gain momentum. Look at the rollout of renewables and EVs. If you’d described where we are now to past me only 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you.
It’s gotta be a peer pressure thing, diplomatically, to work. The countries taking the biggest steps need to be loud about it so the ones dragging their feet (hi from the US) get their pride hurt if they don’t take action. The ozone hole fix worked that way too (though of course that didn’t have major political powers denying it was a problem).
I agree. Additionally, I don’t believe that, without controlled depopulation (restrictive birth control, not killing people), we can achieve climate stability and solve other issues like increasing pollution of the entire environment. I believe that the population should have stopped growing in the 90s (at about 4 billion), of course, this number is a hunch, not knowledge.
We have reached a point far beyond sustainability; we are on artificial life support. Without this support, even getting dressed would be a challenge, given the lack of a natural and clean source of textile materials. Nearly all clothes are made of plastic or contain some plastic additives. As we wash these clothes in our machines, we inadvertently consume plastic particles in our food and drink.
Speaking of machines, the devices produced today have an increasingly shorter lifespan. Simultaneously, the recycling of these devices is problematic, as our waste is often massively exported to third-world countries.
Another concern is the escalating scarcity of drinking water, among various other challenges. The list goes on and on. Anyone expecting the Earth to accommodate an unlimited number of people is plain insane or doesn’t understand the complexity of the issue.
We must act now on all the fields, even those unpopular ones (like population control).
Those who are against population control, please take a look at this initiative: https://populationmatters.org/ and its patrons (like Sir David Attenborough and Jane Goodall).
The amount of Doomers on Lemmy and Reddit is depressingly large as well. It’s du jour to act like any talk of climate positivity is naive, change is impossible and collapse is inevitable. Just look at the popularity of whole subs dedicated to Collapse and Doomer material. It’s exhausting trying to challenge the position of some of these users, yet we must try. Hope is an important part of tackling the climate challenges we’re facing, and the glamorisation of defeatism isn’t going to help foster that.
Mindless optimism isn’t the answer either. We need real change immediately, the window to slam on the brakes as a species is already behind us arguably. The only answer is to be both realistic AND ambitious.
No one said anything about mindless optimism. You are correct, change is needed and fast, but relentless pessimism achieves nothing except foster defeat. I’m advocating for a realistic approach to how we look at climate change mitigation. Part of being realistic is understanding that things may not be as hopeless as parts of the Internet would live you to believe.
DuJour means friendship!
It’s not a shift away from corporate bullshit: the same people that were arguing that changing something is bad because the climate isn’t changing now are arguing that changing something is bad because it’s too late and let’s ride into the sunset giving trillions to oil companies.
An argument I hadn’t seen until recently was “Man-made climate change is real, it’s an existential problem, and the only way to combat it is to burn as much fossil fuel as we can right now to boost the economy and increase our efforts to find a solution.”
Because scientific endeavors work in real life exactly like Sid Meier’s Civilization?
If only Gandhi were around to nuke those idiots.
I think if we found an organism that drives hundreds of other species to extinction a day, we’d do our damndest to eradicate it.
Unfortunately that organism is us. Human exceptionalism is gross. We deserve to go extinct.
It’s sad that you think that way
No, the sad thing is that he is right. We could coexist with other species, but instead we choose to exploit the natural environment to its limits.
I was referring to the “we should go extinct” part, I agree that what we’re doing to nature is horrible but I don’t think collectively dying is the answer. Honestly it would speak wonders for human exceptionalism if we actually managed to get this under control.
Just curious what you think it says about us if we don’t manage to get it under control?
Our societies and technologies evolved faster than our instincts and minds could
Couldn’t have said it better myself
I’m sad for the natural world that we are taking down with us. 70% of all species. 150 different species permanently erased every day.
so, we’ve moved from “ots not real” through past “maybe its real, but its not.human caused” all the way to “its real and we can’t do anything about it”/“its too late to do anything about ot”
I doubt it’s a natural evolution.
Climate change denial was the product of oil companies and worked on idiots. The “it’s too late anyway” is likely also the work of oil companies and works on people who think they’re smarter than the idiots.