This false dichotomy between “lost” and “won” against climate change is not a helpful message at all.
Yes, we have done irreversible harm to the earth, but every little bit we can limit temperature rise over 1.5C will avoid even worse outcomes. Telling people that we’ve “lost” is self defeating. If people believe that then we truly will lose everything.
Humanity has “lost the fight against climate change” …because of a few stubborn, greedy governments who have done everything they can to get us all to believe it’s because we didn’t recycle enough.
No ordinary person ever had any power to change this. We could only make change happen if we all came together but we won’t because apparently we’re the problem.
Also worth noting that getting people to feel apathetic and fatalistic using messages like this post is actually a well known strategy to destroy motivation for change. The battle is definitely ongoing and we may yet win it. Don’t give up hope or they win.
getting people to feel apathetic and fatalistic using messages like this post is actually a well known strategy to destroy motivation for change
That may be true but it also has no bearing on reality.
How do you mean?
I mean it can be true that the idea is used maliciously while also being true.
It came down to a choice between making some logical and reasonable and obvious changes to benefit the bulk of humanity or protecting the obscene privilege of a relative handful of psychopathic shitweasels, and the shitweasels won.
Note that that could also serve broadly as a description of the end days of Dynastic Egypt, Imperial Rome, Ancien Regime France and the Russian Empire, among others.
The pandemic really killed off any hope I had that we would do anything against climate change. The environment got better for a few days and weeks while we were all working from home, and everyone around me was like “I can’t wait to go back to my commute”. People were eager to go back to the way they were. Pollution, inequalities, and all.
If a pandemic didn’t budge us from overconsumption and the hyper capitalism that is slowly condemning humanity, nothing will. The threat was immediate and we didn’t change the system.
What’s also telling is that every election in my country or province, the most important issue is always the economy. That and the price of gas. You know, less environmental taxes and more money in the pockets of ordinary people so they can consume more. And pay for gas.
So with a threat that is “far” in the future, and immediate preoccupations like constant economic growth and low gas prices, the outlook is grim.
For me in the us, it was the election. We finally had goal, funding and progress toward renewable energy. We had the government working for us, not against us. We were building momentum on the switch to EVs and residential electrification. Sure, it was too little too late, but it was progress and it was a huge change of “attitude “ and direction. No longer fighting the idea but actually responding.
Then the pendulum of politics in the us swung the other way, all that slow painful progress undone, an administration actively working to make things worse. All those corporate resolutions to become good corporate citizens disappear under the slightest pressure.
Didn’t notice we fought? Did we?
So realistically, what can we do? Where are the best places to move to?
Where are the best places to move to?
The amount of resources it would take to terraform a new planet would be a tiny fraction of what it would take to fix the one that molded us.
Mars. Earth has been Venused
The amount of fucking up this here globe we need to be doing before fixing it up is harder than terraforming mars is inconceivable. Even building a small dome and making sure we have our basic needs meet is on a completely different level of complexity and resource spending than sorting things out here.
Even when we have to move underground and scavenge for water and basic needs that’s still utopia in comparison to some mars base with what the earth would still provide us for free.
