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This is an excellent point. The energy transition is more accurately an energy addition. Some renewables on top of a still-increasing pile of burning fossil fuels.

Same with EVs. More are being sold every year but more ICE cars are being sold, too.

Until the fossil fuel industry actually shrinks, things are hopeless.

Seeing those alfalfa farms all over my desert state turns me into an extremist.

Nothing really matters until we stop pulling carbon-based fuels out of the ground and lighting them on fire.

I say it all the time. The only possible way to keep carbon from outside the carbon cycle from entering the carbon cycle is to stop taking carbon from outside the carbon cycle and putting it into the carbon cycle. No amount of coal plant filtration or growing trees or building wind farms will take carbon from inside the carbon cycle out of the carbon cycle.

400 ppm is too much, and the mechanisms for putting that carbon in the ground is gone and never coming back. The best we can possibly do is stop making it worse, and we won't, because everyone wants to have a whole chicken in their fridge that'll end up rotting because the availability of goods, whether we'll actually consume them or not, is the most important thing in the world.

To lose hope for a better tomorrow is to roll over and accept the worst

I'll fight to my dying breath for a better tomorrow because I have hope in achieving that goal

Even if that better tomorrow is only slightly better than no change or if that better tomorrow is making sure that those I care about aren't completely up a creek if shit goes sideways

Anything is better than rolling over and letting the world go to shit like a loaded up semi with no brakes down a mountain

Because the alternative is to become a pessimistic doomer and tune out pretending it's all hopeless?

Oh the earth will recover eventually! It's even possible humanity survives in some form!

I don't have any hope, but I'm sure as hell not going to roll over and take it.

society lacks a plan. wealth inequality has been going up since before 2000. but somehow, society just carried on. "if we work hard, i'm sure it will turn out alright."

the current social divide (poor/rich, not dem/rep) was predictable long ago. what do you expect? 10 or 20 years ago would have been the perfect time to question the fundamentals of society and decide where society really wants to go - to develop in the long term.

now we're here. now's the 3rd best time to figure out how society should develop in the long term. think about it.

It's hard not to feel nihilistic. Especially because even in the worst case scenario, it's extremely unlikely that humans will become extinct. No, the worst case scenario is worse than that: the people who are most responsible for exacerbating the climate crisis will also be the ones with the resources available to shield themselves from the devastation. Even if society as we know it completely collapses, people will survive, and on our current trajectory, those people will be the worst of us.

For me, it's less about saving the planet from the climate crisis, more about doing what little I can to maximise the likelihood that the people who inherit the earth aren't the assholes who are willfully profiting from human misery — the ones who see themselves as the greater good.

Sometimes when I feel hopeless about humanity's chance to liberate ourselves before climate catastrophe truly rolls in, I wonder whether it'd be better if humans were gone entirely. Maybe I'd rather see the world burn completely than for it to go to the disgusting people who make me ashamed to be human. Ultimately, I don't believe this — I'd be dead already if I did. I don't think my life matters all that much, but I'm not one of the people who would be deemed worth saving by the billionaires and autocrats, so I might as well stick around and fight for, and with all the other forsaken people to build things that are worth preserving; I figure that communities and solidarity will be even more crucial in the future than now.

A few years ago, my best friend was in a coma and on a ventilator for a few months, before eventually dying. The hardest part of that period was when we didn't know whether he would survive or not, because I had to go about my life despite his absence, and yet I couldn't grieve yet. That feels sort of like how climate change feels now. I want to grieve, but I can't, because there's still work to do. The earth isn't dead yet, and unlike when my friend was in hospital, my actions do have an impact on the end outcome. The analogy breaks down though, because I did get the chance to grieve my friend's death, there won't be a checkpoint like that for me, because the world won't end, per se. The only thing that'll be ending is my ability to impact the world, when I'm too dead to grieve for anything.

I imagine my desire to see the world burn rather than hand it over to the undeserving probably stems from a desperate desire to grieve what has already been lost, and what has not yet been lost, but will be. I wish I could allow myself the chance to despair, because that can be healing, eventually, but there simply isn't time to do that precisely because this isn't about me and my grief. There's still work to do, and I can't let myself collapse now, lest even more of our descendants future is eroded. I feel hopeful for the future because I have to in order to survive long enough to give the people who come after me a better shot at building something I never could. It's a tremendous amount of pressure though.

You won’t. We’re combatting near-exponential growth. Each year we need to increase our efforts just to prevent worsening, let alone reversal.

This is because the largest accelerant is completely out of our control now. As the ice caps melt, desalinating our oceans, rich black soil is exposed. This soil absorbs and retains heat far more readily than the white ice, accelerating the warming of nearby ground ice. As bacteria begins to break down the newly thawed decaying organisms, large amounts of methane is released into the atmosphere. Methane traps 28x more heat than CO2, then it breaks down into CO2 and water after a decade where it continues to retain heat for centuries.

But we’re out of ideas!

The solution is simple: we just need to collapse another 100 USSRs and drop that to two USSRs per year. We did it guise, we solved the climate crisis!

vote

Stopped reading right there.

politicians who take climate change seriously

lol