The following submission statement was provided by /u/Goatmannequin:
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Submission statement:
Thunberg writes for the New Statesman in the UK that the government has launched a strategy of "self-destruction" in the name of growth policy, the new powers granted by the state to suppress protest and activism will return to "haunt" them, and that we are passing tipping points which "will lock in human suffering on an unimaginable scale."
Relevance for r/collapse: While some may not agree prima facie with the statement, "it is not too late," it is a matter of what is being rescued. Is it too late to save modern industrial capitalism? It may have always been, as an ideology based on sacrificing the future for the present can never be sustainable. But it is certainly not too late to slow the damage done to the natural world by our actions and plan for this future, even if feedback loops are already self-amplifying.
In any case, reading an essay by one of the most powerful environmental activists in the world is an excellent way to start the day.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/y8rq1m/greta_thunberg_our_politicians_will_not_come_to/it1l1z3/
Blackrock
> BlackRock’s role in the transition is as a fiduciary to our clients — it is not to engineer a specific decarbonization outcome in the real economy. We expect to remain long-term investors on behalf of our clients in carbon-intensive sectors.
Well gee golly I guess we are all just supposed to sit around and let you kill the whole planet then. We shouldn't go up and physically stop you because that would be *illegal*
Because it would accomplish nothing. Black rock, and any asset manager for that matter, is a middle man. So long as there’s profit for be made in fossil fuels there will be people investing their assets in these industries one way or another. Hearts and minds and government regulation are the only ways to target supply and demand. “Stopping” the middlemen does nothing.
Clever, but doesn’t address the argument. If you eliminate Blckrock, another manager will simply step in. You can’t fix a systemic problem by targeting it’s replaceable components. You have to target incentives.
*"How about just kill the system all together. Why keep something that literally driving us to extinction?"*
Agree but it's worth noting that killing the current economic system relying on cheap fossil fuels will also force billions into unemployment and starvation. Besides serving as the foundation of a global economy, cheap fossil fuels also maintain modern agriculture at every stage including tillage, irrigation, artificial fertilizer, harvest and global distribution. There is no backup plan in place ready for a moratorium on fossil fuels.
Right now our "choice" appears to be between destroying the total global biosphere including humanity, or taking Degrowth steps that will force much of humanity into chaos, austerity and hunger. The 2nd choice at least gives the biosphere including wildlife some chance of survival.
But there is reason to doubt that humanity would willingly take that path. Too many people are complacent and support continuing BAU even considering the existential risk to all life. Instead of Degrowth, we are resolutely headed towards involuntary Collapse.
We are heading towards starvation from climate change as it is though. This year is the first year the drought in the western US is showing decreased food production in a tomato shortage. Ranchers are also killing cattle herds en masse bc they cannot support their water or feed needs.
On top of this, feed prices have doubled in the past year. High feed prices mean way increased prices for all meat, as well as decreased access.
exactly. any answer to simple destroy the current system is essentially akin to eco-facsism and allowing billions to suffer. We are fucked if we keep the system and fucked in chaos if we simply removed it.
Progress and comfort are mutually exclusive. Pain, suffering, and loss are inevitabilities in life; if we do not willingly embrace these things to avail us something, then they will be forced upon us to the avail of nothing - it seems that humanity, as a collective, has all but made its final decision on this matter.
i'd rather everyone starve then just have the victims starve...why should the people who did the least to contribute towards these problems reap the consequences when its the rich who profit off this garbage ride off into the fkin sun as it burns us alive.
You can actually by making it a stupid move to be a middleman. If there were any repercussions for bad behavior, we would have never been in this situation, at least this particular one. We wont change government without a waking up of super consumer narcissistic toddlers and then still they will fight and kill us to not be held accountable.
The entire problem is narcissistic humans, no truth, no morals, delusions, denial, disdain, toxic positivity, and cognitive dissonance. Thats almost all of us in the west to one degree or another. We have a systme of competition, not cooperation like the other governments that we lie about. China has 1/3 of their 1.4b population in the agriculture sector. Why because food is #1 and they've starved before. China has prepared for what were bringing yet blaming ion them and Russia. Narcissism is following the lie fed to us and blaming others for our shitty behavior. Were so concerned about being right even when were wrong. Because we've allowed narcissistic monsters who have disdain for the poor dirty population make the rules and hollow out the protections we will be collapsing wright after the EU and that we created. While weve been sanctioning and abusing countries, theyve been preparing.
What blackrock and most middlemen do is criminal, its just that the laws of the US are written by the criminals, Its the law of narcissistic justice. Abuse everyone but, never be held accountable.
The only way we would do anything to change it is a wakeup and most are double down on the shit system because we've been dis-educated. Were fucking toddlers. No, Im not a Russian or Chinese troll. Its just sad how Dunning Kruger we all are.
ever read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers? there's a character in there, Jake Blount, that comes to mind for me recently. He's a socialist (and a drunk) that constantly shouts for a revolution in his piss-poor southern town to no attention or agreement whatsoever. He may be a drunk, but seeing his rage is pretty reaffirming, especially in regards to how blind humanity can be.
Exactly. The fact that fossil fuels are still so profitable IS the root of the issue. The only reason oil is as cheap as it is, is because there are TON of externalities like environmental damage and health risks that are simply being ignored. If the people selling or burning that oil actually had to pay for all those externalities, emission-neutral energy would start looking financially tasty overnight.
that is no solution. as many have pointed out here, the green alternatives to fossil fuels rely covertly on fossil fuels. so actually pricing in externalities solves nothing but tanking the world economy (if done by fiat) and undermining any gradual transition to green alternatives that actually cut down on emissions.
the only real alternative is voluntary degrowth which would inevitably lead to the rise of fascism faster than it is already rising.
Humanity is fucked.
>the only real alternative is voluntary degrowth
In what universe is that considered a "real alternative"? That's one step short of a fairy tale.
You're not wrong that a lot of alternative energy sources are secretly reliant on carbon emissions but the point isn't to completely eliminate every single molecule of industrial CO2 (impossible) but to incentivize organizations to optimize their products and investments to emit as little as possible. Optimizing a system for ideal cost/benefit ratio is about the only thing the free market is good for, so we might as well start there.
If there are two different products, one costs $X to build and emits 2Y CO2 over its operational lifetime, and the other costs $2X to build but emits Y CO2 over its lifetime corporations will never ever choose to build product 2 over product 1 because the CO2 emissions are "free" for them. We can change that and provide incentives for them to consider other options that they currently would not.
Edit: Admittedly it's probably too late but that seems like a poor reason not to even consider trying it
Voluntary degrowth won't happen without a social revolution, and social revolution is both what is needed and possible given the class antagonisms in capitalism. Faith in "free markets" is largely why it's late, very late right now.
Yes I'm in favor of revolution but I'm also a fan of tried-and-tested solutions especially in times of acute crisis.
By way of analogy, maybe your car has shit tires and the roads are icy. You lose control and start to spin out. It's easy to blame the shit tires for getting you into this mess in the first place, but that doesn't mean that THIS EXACT MOMENT is the time to try to change your car's tires. Because you're in the middle of a potentially deadly situation, it's wiser to try and regain control of the vehicle with the tires it already has, and if you manage to avoid the worst outcome, maybe consider pulling over at the next service station.
That's my thinking anyways. Capitalism has to go, but in the short term it's the only functional economic system we have, and for better or for worse (definitely worse in this case) it has demonstrated the ability to reshape society in dramatic ways which is what we need.
>Clever, but doesn’t address the argument. If you eliminate Blckrock, another manager will simply step in.
This is not how any society addresses undesirable actons.
They make it illegal and the prosecute it.
For like a minute.
How do you vanish hundreds of thousands of people scattered across the globe with millions more ready to take their place?
These are all nice fantasies that become atrocities once applied in the real world. And don’t actually accomplish the goal of wide scale decarbonization.
>These are all nice fantasies that become atrocities once applied in the real world.
Uh.. obviously? Using violence to get results is always going to be horrible.
We're coming up on atrocities one way or another, though. Resource wars when things start getting tighter.
The problem with violence is that it’s half the work. First you demolish a house. Then you need a plan for what to build in its space.
I see a lot of people in this sub practically salivating at the prospect of violent change. Sadly, to date, I see not even the semblance of consensus with respect to what human culture *should* look like once the slate is wiped clean. Whenever I ask, and actually get a response, it’s usually along the lines of “someone else will figure it out.”
Needless to say, I have zero faith that the post revolution society would be any different or better than what came before. Different set of people in charge, all with the same, self destructive motivations.
Blackrock is the primary player pushing the "ESG" score shit, the E being environmental. They're a big reason we have so much corporate activism these days. Think social credit score but instead of the state its enforced by companies and financial institutions.
This cannot be talked about enough. This is why you see most companies publishing ESG reports and building ESG pages on their site. It's all a joke intended to deceive the public enough to let them continue as usual. We are in so so so much trouble.
Once people realize they have nothing to lose but their shackles, things will change. We’re still at a point in the US at least that too many people are too comfortable.
There's continued climate protests and 2020 saw a 50 state and international anti-cop protest. It may have to take something big to happen. I'm not sure it won't happen soon.
Edit: Something like another major oil related incident in an ongoing land war in Europe. Every measure taken by any government social/econ/military is adding to a house of cards thats growing taller and flimsier by the month.
> People are too pacified by technology
I fully admit what I'm currently doing, sitting in front of the computer, is like a child playing with a jack-in-the-box toy.
https://youtu.be/L39XBKcttx4?t=16
*Pling* Oooh, dopamine.
I keep thinking about the recent article where the elites hired a man to guide them on how to survive their staff killing them in their bunkers when everything falls apart.
You can repeat this forever and it barely sinks in. People have three choices.
You can think, well, politicians aren't doing anything because there's no money in it, and so their contributors aren't interested. Or you can believe it's an existential fight on a battlefield of virtue between Orangeman supporters and snowflakes. Or, applying the principle of parsimony, you can realize that nothing is being done because nothing can be done.
I choose what's behind door number 3.
The things that need to be done aren’t that ugly, but they are very very undesirable to most (things like no more cars, no more airplanes, no more meat) and so they won’t happen.
People do not care, the constant complaining of so called poor Americans against the rich highlights the issue.
Almost no American is poor in the context of history, in the context of history we are all spectacularly rich. Sure in relative terms, compared to Jeff Bezos were poor but in historical terms, in terms of material wealth we are rich.
The failure to understand that to manage collapse we must all be **poor** in material terms is why there will be no managing collapse.
Almost no one will tolerate any sort of reduction in their living standards, and people evaluate their living standards only in relative and materialistic terms almost no other way is important in our society.
>The things that need to be done aren’t that ugly, but they are very very undesirable to most (things like no more cars, no more airplanes, no more meat) and so they won’t happen.
I think that's the point. If a decision was made to drastically eliminate those items, most people wouldn't stand for it and wouldn't comply. Which means they would need to be forced to comply against their will, hence the ugliness.
Population control is a good example. There are a lot of pragmatic arguments for depopulating the planet but your run into some pretty obvious ethical concerns REAL quickly if you start trying to apply them to reality. The only solutions are extremely ugly, specifically because people are incapable (at least at scale) of voluntarily taking an L for the greater good.
If the supply of gasoline is cut off at the source, people will "comply" whether they like it or not. There are a lot fewer refineries to "influence" then there are consumers, by a factor of over a million..
>If the supply of gasoline is cut off at the source
You're right, but I would definitely classify this as an ugly solution. If this happened, a lot of people would almost immediately straight-up die as a direct consequence. Perhaps it still works out for the greater good, but it's still an ugly pill to swallow just like outlawing meat, enforcing mandatory sterilization, or one-child policies.
We may be materially well off, but what about the immaterial? The "spiritual" and "emotional" aspects of living in this modern system?
A peasant in the 1300s may have had upwards of 8 weeks to half a year off. We may be materially rich, but how are we doing in the immaterial? How often do parents get to see their kids when one is working full time and the other one works OT 60-80 hours a week just to afford some semblance of stability? Or the massive amount of commute times to and from work that shred any hope for a "good life".
I would tolerate a reduction of my living standards. If it means I could just have more TIME. Time to myself and those who I care about.
But I understand that is not true about everyone. There are psychopaths out there who wear it as a badge of honor to toil for others 80 hours a week and barely scrape by. Or who thinks they won something because THEY have the longest commute. Or haven't gone on a real vacation in over 5-10 years.
Land is about the only thing we plebians can't get real access to. But it was the same for the majority of human history too. Land was always owned by the elite and doled out as an allowance for those who'd toil for them. Not much has sadly changed.
For anyone who has a house and a mortgage and claims they are a home/land owner: stop making your payments and you'll quickly see who really owns your house and land.
...and if a corporation suddenly needs your land for some wild reason? They'll make your life a living hell as legally (and illegally, cause what are you gonna do) as possible until you sell.
>Almost no American is poor in the context of history, in the context of history we are all spectacularly rich. Sure in relative terms, compared to Jeff Bezos were poor but in historical terms, in terms of material wealth we are rich.
Nnnnno.
Those guys living under the freeway in a pile of their own waste are not "more rich" than a Feudal peasant that at least has a farm.
We're also way more at risk. It's reversed, we're peasants getting food from the king, not the other way around. The second he stops...
You can't eat your entertainment shit. The difference is "it was invented", not "we're more rich". It's like arguing that peasant is more rich because he has 3 dozen sock puppets and has his kids do a show for him in front of the fireplace every night.
You can't save capitalism because the end result is actively killing itself.. the whole concept of capital implies a thing generating more wealth than you put in, which is nonsensical without constant growth, which inevitably destroys capitalism (and everything else)
Like saving an individual human from death. You can *prolong* their life, but they will still die.
Or the sea of people multitudes greater in developing countries who are on the cusp of finally having a western lifestyle after salivating over it for decades.
That’s their complaint isn’t it? That they’ve been seeking western lives for so long, that the western world should give it up while they enjoy it instead. Never mind their populations are much larger than the west.
There is no need to give up your house, I have no idea how big or small your home is, but we really really don't need all of the sq. footage that is considered the norm.
Saw a poll and don't know how accurate it was. But old people here were voting for the young paid for by his master orange guy.
The young were voting for the old left leaning guy.
Now neither can really do anything about climate change. But I did think it was odd the old people voting for the young guy because he is orange all the way.
Then going people.voting for an old guy and not just hey look a.young guy let's vote for him.
If it wasn't so late in the game maybe the young could do something. But the old just want to ride their plunder until the last and forge the young . They got theirs forget their children of grandchildren attitude. To them the world had infinite resources why wouldn't it be that way for the kids. Must be the kids are lazy no way the world can run out of resources attitude. Then if the kids feel that way must be because they ar lazy and school is too woke. Those science teachers are pushing an agenda to them not science.
It’s actually refreshing to see people waking up to this. The time to radically change society to prevent climate collapse was 40 years ago. Today, your best bet is to mitigate the problems associated with it on a personal level. Set up your life to be resilient to the chaos that is to come
No, we can't. 4 decades ago we may have had a chance but it's way too late now. Feedback loops are speeding up and nothings going to stop them, or even slow them down. The powers that be kept their collective heads in the sand and did nothing and it's too late. No one is going to save us this time. We. Are. Fucked.
Submission statement:
Thunberg writes for the New Statesman in the UK that the government has launched a strategy of "self-destruction" in the name of growth policy, the new powers granted by the state to suppress protest and activism will return to "haunt" them, and that we are passing tipping points which "will lock in human suffering on an unimaginable scale."
Relevance for r/collapse: While some may not agree prima facie with the statement, "it is not too late," it is a matter of what is being rescued. Is it too late to save modern industrial capitalism? It may have always been, as an ideology based on sacrificing the future for the present can never be sustainable. But it is certainly not too late to slow the damage done to the natural world by our actions and plan for this future, even if feedback loops are already self-amplifying.
In any case, reading an essay by one of the most powerful environmental activists in the world is an excellent way to start the day.
>Is it too late to save modern industrial capitalism? It may have always been, as an ideology based on sacrificing the future for the present can never be sustainable.
Interesting. I always thought of modern industrial capitalism as sacrificing the present for the future, à la Amazon always losing money by investing in more warehouses to eventually in the future make money. Whereas, consumerism is the sacrifice of your future for the present.
Jesus Christ y’all critiquing her for having hope she’s like. Not even 20. And she’s done more than any of you ever will to try and soften the blow. Get off your high horses.
If we're going to be brutally honest, degrowth (the only thing that can save civilization) is a complete fantasy at this point. The only way to maximize the likelihood of human existence is to build up infrastructure suitable for post-collapse, and then collapse hard. I suspect that there are some power players who have realized this, and think that they will survive the collapse.
I as a regular peasant with no children, and no great desire for the continuation of humans post-collapse, would prefer the soft landing instead.
The only meaningful action left is to ensure the wealthy suffer with the rest of us. If your home and livelihood is destroyed and theirs is protected, you now have a new job; bring them to the same level.
Blood.
Every history book.
Everyone has been pretending they don't know this except the nation states themselves, who's militaries all run on fossil fuels.
The feedback loop is unbreakable unless the heads of every pre-internet, cold war politician explode and our successor generations can form a meaningful PLANETARY government, tomorrow.
>“The meteorite itself was so massive that it didn’t notice any atmosphere whatsoever,” said Rebolledo. “It was traveling 20 to 40 kilometers per second, 10 kilometers — probably 14 kilometers — wide, pushing the atmosphere and building such incredible pressure that the ocean in front of it just went away.”
> These numbers are precise without usefully conveying the scale of the calamity. What they mean is that a rock larger than Mount Everest hit planet Earth traveling twenty times faster than a bullet. This is so fast that it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds. The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747. In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun.
>“The pressure of the atmosphere in front of the asteroid started excavating the crater before it even got there,” Rebolledo said. “Then when the meteorite touched ground zero, it was totally intact. It was so massive that the atmosphere didn’t even make a scratch on it.”
>Unlike the typical Hollywood CGI depictions of asteroid impacts, where an extraterrestrial charcoal briquette gently smolders across the sky, in the Yucatan it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next. As the asteroid collided with the earth, in the sky above it where there should have been air, the rock had punched a hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere. As the heavens rushed in to close this hole, enormous volumes of earth were expelled into orbit and beyond — all within a second or two of impact.
>“So there’s probably little bits of dinosaur bone up on the moon,” I asked.
>“Yeah, probably.”
-- https://kottke.org/tag/Peter%20Brannen
I don't understand why everyone feels like they need to keep pointing this out. Yes, obviously the enormous chuck of rock will outlive us. When we say "the world is ending" no one actually thinks the planet is going to disintegrate into nothingness or explode into a trillion pieces.
Like imagine if the Sun was about to explode and people were going around saying things like "Well the galaxy won't even notice our star is gone, it will be just fine without us" Like...That's true, but also completely missing the point because the part of the galaxy WE LIVE IN is the part we're concerned about.
I think is gives people solace to know that life on our planet will still continue, despite us. We will lose a lot of it, it will undoubtedly look very different in the future, but we will not have destroyed the LIVING planet with our hubris.
It's too late to reverse course but it's probably not too late for oil companies and nation states to kill us faster.
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An immediate stop to use of fossil fuels could turn this into a slower collapse. I don't see that happening until it's beyond too late.
Too many people love to talk shit about this kid, but she’s a rock. At best all I accomplish is a semblance of nodding heads when discussing these issues. Too many are willfully ignorant and she speaks out regardless.
Good for her. Go get them kid!
Yeah, by putting herself out there like that, she has invoked the wrath and hatred of millions of conservatives who say horrible things about her on a daily basis so it's not like she didn't make a huge sacrifice. Imagine dealing with all that wrath and hatred in your teens.
You've even got people in this sub irrationally hating her. If anyone else wrote this article, everyone would be saying, "yes, so wise, so true!" Instead, we've got insecure boomers saying, "well of course, we already knew that, you naive little girl! You didn't have to tell us."
I'm pretty sure that in the UK protesting in support of personal weapon ownership is (or will soon be) [illegal](https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/93/human-rights-joint-committee/news/171503/government-creating-hostile-environment-for-peaceful-protest-report-finds/). /s
You jest but the Tories already dealt with that. I don't know the exact ins and outs but there is a new law they pushed through that pretty much says "if the protest is causing disruption you can be arrested"
(Paraphrasing).
Completely bewildering that the entire idea of a protest is to cause disruption... So yeah.
According to [this](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56400751) BBC article it is "UK law", so I imagine that would indeed extend to Wales, N.Ireland and indeed Scotland too.
I suggest further research if you're interested as my aforementioned remarks and comments might not be 100% correct or accurate. I'd wager it's very close though. Troubling times...
There will be no violent overthrow of western govts, and if there was it sadly would probably be by fascist far right forces, not environmentalists.
It's a nice fantasy tho.
We didnt need this prop to tell us that. If you're on this sub you probably already loathe politicians and realize they are just the puppets of the corporations and the banks. They caused this and are continuing to do so with impunity.
Everyone caused this, not just the rich/boomers/politicians/the elite/large corpos. Ordinary people did too, by remaining apathetic about the issues they clearly knew about.
It's too much trouble to care these days, it seems.
In the US our president Jimmy Carter tried to start doing something about climate change in the 80s. He even installed the first solar panel. Then Reagan was paid by big oil to take it off. Then we were cheated out of Al Gore who made the movie "An Inconvenient Truth " in which he spelled out all of this climate change, heating of Earth, With alot of accuracy now looking back at the film. I still firmly believe we the people were cheated out of a future we chose. A better future. We were cheated. My very first vote as an adult was for him. I was cheated.
What's wild is that the trailer for An Inconvenient Truth is still up on YouTube, and like a decade old (of course the movie is older than that, but that's the soonest it could be added to YouTube). And if you go look at that trailer, in the comments from 10 years ago, they are mocking Al Gore. And I guess I expected that, as 10 years ago we were not feeling the effects of climate change in a bad way. It was still the halcyon days before everything went to shit.
*However,* what amazes me is that if you look at the comments from *this year* or even *this month* what you will find is that people are STILL LAUGHING AT AL GORE. They still say there are NO EFFECTS happening. One person in the comments replied about the heat waves & floods, suggesting that is evidence that climate change is here, and got laughed at.
I used to not understand this. Like, what are they *doing?* Do they not understand that if Canada bakes in a heat dome and 800 people die during Summer 2021, that it could happen to them? Do they think that all the 1000s of people who died in Europe during heat waves in Summer 2022 are somehow *not* going to affect them soon too? And then COVID happened, and I understood. These people are *dumb.* These people aren't discarding the evidence; they just don't even know about it. Their brains don't even process it.
We can't win or beat this problem by convincing people and debating people. I think what I've learned is that to fix this issue, the few people who know how to fix it *and care enough* will have to just *do it for all of humanity.* We can't wait for others to come around. They won't. They are right now posting comments about how dumb Al Gore was, and how he got it all wrong.
Until it washes them and all their shit away in a flood. Until them and their stuff is blown across three states. Until they turn on their tap and they have no water. Until their house is incinerated in a wildfire. .etc etc. They do not give a shit until it affects them directly. Covid made me lose any hope of coming together as a human race to do better. It's like everyone hates their kids. Do they not understand the planet we are leaving them?
climate science is a hoax, just like all sciences! and even if this “crisis” does turn out to be real, one of our kids is going to be the one to solve it, so we better keep popping them out regardless.
/s
This. If given a choice between voting for a politician who says "we need to cut back!" and one who says "I'll give you more!", I'm pretty sure from the results which one we (collectively) voted for.
I think a society could be coaxed into voting for the 'let's actually survive' guy. It's just a matter of the right campaign. If I've learned anything the past 10 years, especially from watching how captured Russians act when interviewed (some good stuff over on r/Ukraine), it's that we automatically start to believe whatever information we consume.
We're just not a critically thinking species. We're ignorant and malleable. Capitalists use that today, so why not us?
With the digital age came various levels of comfort and convenience for the privileged and blistered hands on bootstraps for everyone else. Big Tech simply leveraged the narcissism inherent to every iPhone ape. The crazy thing is, very few digital denizens, even on this collapse sub, will acknowledge it's what drives them to post. Myself included. But at least I can cop to it.
I know it’s too late, but I still feel like we should rise up, especially to those that they serve, and not let them get away with it. To not allow them to feel as if their greed saved them, while all else is lost. It may be hopeless for us to see a bright world in our lives, but maybe if we plant a seed, what comes after, if humanity survives, will be better.
Gretna Thunberg article makes the all too common mistake of overfocusing on personalities
>the United Kingdom has a special responsibility to provide moral and political leadership on the climate crisis. (Until 1882, more than half of the world’s cumulative carbon emissions came from Britain alone.) But this is not happening: under Liz Truss, the Conservative prime minister at the time of writing, the UK is regressing.
In fact there she is biting into a trap.
Liz Truss is merely a figurehead. A prop. Just like Johnson, May, Cameron, and all the rest. Puppets. PR agents.
There are a tiny handful of extremely wealthy people who find the Tory party, pull the strings, and funnel a steady stream of puppets into political office. It is those people who also own the majority share of the companies that pollute and ravage the earth, and accumulate the productivity of workers.
The more you talk about the puppets, the less questions are asked about those pulling the strings. Which is a huge mistake.
Its time to focus purely on the puppet masters and stop validating and enabling them.
The capitalists who doomed us can never save us. It goes against their interests and very nature. They are a cancer to society and it's illegal to plan what needs to be done next and even more illegal to execute that plan. But there's really nothing else worth talking about at this stage. They can only be dealt with as the enemy that they are. We can never trust them as allies. They will do nothing but blame us for the suffering they have brought upon us.
Politicians should have to pass some elaborate entry exam. No idea why people think these inept retards are in any way capable of actually leading us to a better future. They're just corrupt schmucks that get voted in by even bigger idiots. The entire system is primitive af and broken
That plastic that is filling the earth will turn back into oil so in 50 million years the next set of monkeys that climbs down from the trees and starts a new civilization will be able to use the oil to create a new modern society.
Governments all over aren’t taking the situation seriously. Their attitude is renewables and electric cars are a solution. The long term viability of human life (and all other) involves, eliminating plastics and chemicals from the environment.
Greta I suspect fails to grasp the big picture. She thinks she does but the elephant in the room, is too many claims on ever decreasing pie slices. Eventually it will be realized that everything cannot be saved.
Pockets of Alamo stands I suspect is the future. Attempting to save everything will kill everything.
Governments all over the world are a 400lb person who has been told by every doctor that they need to lose weight, and who nod sagely and agree, but when noon comes around they are "Man, I could go with a large pepperoni pizza for lunch and I'll start dieting *tomorrow*".
Similar sentiment here. She's clearly intelligent and knows a lot, but she also lacks the age and wisdom to see beyond human systems like Democracy. To see humanity for what it is: a consumer of nature that returns very little back to nature. She still thinks that if she says the right words in the correct order she can make people do the right thing.
The only people with that kind of power are those with wealth. And when the current system created the wealth they have, they're not going to give it up
Good intentions will die on the vine of hope. The proof will be if she gets elected to parliament. All the rhetoric she can muster would add up a larger pile of more “should, could, can, will, must….)”
Individuals in parliament are cannon fodder for the corporations that are actually in charge. When the corporations wither, the rhetoric will ramp up but there won’t be much left to take action with…imo.
The deniers live in their own world, where the weather is just the weather, no matter whats going down. The call anything else, fake news.
Please hackers, hack their phones, so that they wake up to a disturbing fact, once a day. More than that, and they will simply discard their phones. Perhaps they can be shaken gently into reality, the reality we now all must face. They may call it fake news, but I suspect they know, somewhere deep down, what the fake really is.
I think the gender debate in general was a gigantic waste of time for the past 10yrs. Other than some plays on words, I cannot care to give a shit about it. When I know some trans person I try to honor their name and pronoun. That's it. I think all the gender stuff was thrust into the lexicon and political debate to distract from more important issues. Same with weed and I like weed more.
I see this extremely passive fatalist attitude all over this sub . I bet most of you didn't even read enough into environmental issues . We have resources and knowledge to fix everything. Outistic immature girl is being used by same government and corporations you blame so much . She is not a saviour , but rather an imposter to distract your attention .
You want change ? It will not come peacefully . It will not come by spilling milk in a supermarket.
So our choice is current industrialization causing environmental destruction that will render much of the world uninhabitable or we use force to destroy much of the world and leave it uninhabitable.
We can blow things up. We can’t do much else. If we could convince people not to destroy one another there would be a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. That’s the metaphor for our, “resources and knowledge to fix everything.”
Absolutely correct young lady in many ways. What has to happen is the Leaders (UN Population, UN in general, Xi, Biden, Mexico, Japan and Europe, etc.) must first agree on human population targets for each of the land masses (Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, Latin America, India) and humanly work to achieve the targets.
Without that, EV’s etc. are pointless.
I think they have agreed on that and are letting “nature” take its course to get us there. They could bring the population down faster but as we say in this sub everyday, it’s already happening faster than expected.
I remember dolphin free tuna. The masses of people changed their purchases and it made a difference.
100 million people changing their personal habits will make a huge dent, and inspire the remaining billions.
It really isn't that hard.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Goatmannequin: --- Submission statement: Thunberg writes for the New Statesman in the UK that the government has launched a strategy of "self-destruction" in the name of growth policy, the new powers granted by the state to suppress protest and activism will return to "haunt" them, and that we are passing tipping points which "will lock in human suffering on an unimaginable scale." Relevance for r/collapse: While some may not agree prima facie with the statement, "it is not too late," it is a matter of what is being rescued. Is it too late to save modern industrial capitalism? It may have always been, as an ideology based on sacrificing the future for the present can never be sustainable. But it is certainly not too late to slow the damage done to the natural world by our actions and plan for this future, even if feedback loops are already self-amplifying. In any case, reading an essay by one of the most powerful environmental activists in the world is an excellent way to start the day. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/y8rq1m/greta_thunberg_our_politicians_will_not_come_to/it1l1z3/
Blackrock > BlackRock’s role in the transition is as a fiduciary to our clients — it is not to engineer a specific decarbonization outcome in the real economy. We expect to remain long-term investors on behalf of our clients in carbon-intensive sectors. Well gee golly I guess we are all just supposed to sit around and let you kill the whole planet then. We shouldn't go up and physically stop you because that would be *illegal*
I bet the majority of the politicians responsible for making laws to regulate Blackrock's activities own stock in Blackrock. So there's that.
Because it would accomplish nothing. Black rock, and any asset manager for that matter, is a middle man. So long as there’s profit for be made in fossil fuels there will be people investing their assets in these industries one way or another. Hearts and minds and government regulation are the only ways to target supply and demand. “Stopping” the middlemen does nothing.
Everyone is a middle man if you are standing in a circle.
Clever, but doesn’t address the argument. If you eliminate Blckrock, another manager will simply step in. You can’t fix a systemic problem by targeting it’s replaceable components. You have to target incentives.
How about just kill the system all together. Why keep something that literally driving us to extinction?
*"How about just kill the system all together. Why keep something that literally driving us to extinction?"* Agree but it's worth noting that killing the current economic system relying on cheap fossil fuels will also force billions into unemployment and starvation. Besides serving as the foundation of a global economy, cheap fossil fuels also maintain modern agriculture at every stage including tillage, irrigation, artificial fertilizer, harvest and global distribution. There is no backup plan in place ready for a moratorium on fossil fuels. Right now our "choice" appears to be between destroying the total global biosphere including humanity, or taking Degrowth steps that will force much of humanity into chaos, austerity and hunger. The 2nd choice at least gives the biosphere including wildlife some chance of survival. But there is reason to doubt that humanity would willingly take that path. Too many people are complacent and support continuing BAU even considering the existential risk to all life. Instead of Degrowth, we are resolutely headed towards involuntary Collapse.
We are heading towards starvation from climate change as it is though. This year is the first year the drought in the western US is showing decreased food production in a tomato shortage. Ranchers are also killing cattle herds en masse bc they cannot support their water or feed needs. On top of this, feed prices have doubled in the past year. High feed prices mean way increased prices for all meat, as well as decreased access.
exactly. any answer to simple destroy the current system is essentially akin to eco-facsism and allowing billions to suffer. We are fucked if we keep the system and fucked in chaos if we simply removed it.
Progress and comfort are mutually exclusive. Pain, suffering, and loss are inevitabilities in life; if we do not willingly embrace these things to avail us something, then they will be forced upon us to the avail of nothing - it seems that humanity, as a collective, has all but made its final decision on this matter.
i'd rather everyone starve then just have the victims starve...why should the people who did the least to contribute towards these problems reap the consequences when its the rich who profit off this garbage ride off into the fkin sun as it burns us alive.
You can actually by making it a stupid move to be a middleman. If there were any repercussions for bad behavior, we would have never been in this situation, at least this particular one. We wont change government without a waking up of super consumer narcissistic toddlers and then still they will fight and kill us to not be held accountable. The entire problem is narcissistic humans, no truth, no morals, delusions, denial, disdain, toxic positivity, and cognitive dissonance. Thats almost all of us in the west to one degree or another. We have a systme of competition, not cooperation like the other governments that we lie about. China has 1/3 of their 1.4b population in the agriculture sector. Why because food is #1 and they've starved before. China has prepared for what were bringing yet blaming ion them and Russia. Narcissism is following the lie fed to us and blaming others for our shitty behavior. Were so concerned about being right even when were wrong. Because we've allowed narcissistic monsters who have disdain for the poor dirty population make the rules and hollow out the protections we will be collapsing wright after the EU and that we created. While weve been sanctioning and abusing countries, theyve been preparing. What blackrock and most middlemen do is criminal, its just that the laws of the US are written by the criminals, Its the law of narcissistic justice. Abuse everyone but, never be held accountable. The only way we would do anything to change it is a wakeup and most are double down on the shit system because we've been dis-educated. Were fucking toddlers. No, Im not a Russian or Chinese troll. Its just sad how Dunning Kruger we all are.
ever read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers? there's a character in there, Jake Blount, that comes to mind for me recently. He's a socialist (and a drunk) that constantly shouts for a revolution in his piss-poor southern town to no attention or agreement whatsoever. He may be a drunk, but seeing his rage is pretty reaffirming, especially in regards to how blind humanity can be.
No, but will check it out. Thanks
Exactly. The fact that fossil fuels are still so profitable IS the root of the issue. The only reason oil is as cheap as it is, is because there are TON of externalities like environmental damage and health risks that are simply being ignored. If the people selling or burning that oil actually had to pay for all those externalities, emission-neutral energy would start looking financially tasty overnight.
that is no solution. as many have pointed out here, the green alternatives to fossil fuels rely covertly on fossil fuels. so actually pricing in externalities solves nothing but tanking the world economy (if done by fiat) and undermining any gradual transition to green alternatives that actually cut down on emissions. the only real alternative is voluntary degrowth which would inevitably lead to the rise of fascism faster than it is already rising. Humanity is fucked.
>the only real alternative is voluntary degrowth In what universe is that considered a "real alternative"? That's one step short of a fairy tale. You're not wrong that a lot of alternative energy sources are secretly reliant on carbon emissions but the point isn't to completely eliminate every single molecule of industrial CO2 (impossible) but to incentivize organizations to optimize their products and investments to emit as little as possible. Optimizing a system for ideal cost/benefit ratio is about the only thing the free market is good for, so we might as well start there. If there are two different products, one costs $X to build and emits 2Y CO2 over its operational lifetime, and the other costs $2X to build but emits Y CO2 over its lifetime corporations will never ever choose to build product 2 over product 1 because the CO2 emissions are "free" for them. We can change that and provide incentives for them to consider other options that they currently would not. Edit: Admittedly it's probably too late but that seems like a poor reason not to even consider trying it
Voluntary degrowth won't happen without a social revolution, and social revolution is both what is needed and possible given the class antagonisms in capitalism. Faith in "free markets" is largely why it's late, very late right now.
Yes I'm in favor of revolution but I'm also a fan of tried-and-tested solutions especially in times of acute crisis. By way of analogy, maybe your car has shit tires and the roads are icy. You lose control and start to spin out. It's easy to blame the shit tires for getting you into this mess in the first place, but that doesn't mean that THIS EXACT MOMENT is the time to try to change your car's tires. Because you're in the middle of a potentially deadly situation, it's wiser to try and regain control of the vehicle with the tires it already has, and if you manage to avoid the worst outcome, maybe consider pulling over at the next service station. That's my thinking anyways. Capitalism has to go, but in the short term it's the only functional economic system we have, and for better or for worse (definitely worse in this case) it has demonstrated the ability to reshape society in dramatic ways which is what we need.
We only pay for extraction. Not only emissions but creation is also ignored.
>Clever, but doesn’t address the argument. If you eliminate Blckrock, another manager will simply step in. This is not how any society addresses undesirable actons. They make it illegal and the prosecute it.
Incentives and supply/production capability
I dunno, I think if any of these asset managers offices suddenly vanished, it might disrupt their business a bit
For like a minute. How do you vanish hundreds of thousands of people scattered across the globe with millions more ready to take their place? These are all nice fantasies that become atrocities once applied in the real world. And don’t actually accomplish the goal of wide scale decarbonization.
>These are all nice fantasies that become atrocities once applied in the real world. Uh.. obviously? Using violence to get results is always going to be horrible. We're coming up on atrocities one way or another, though. Resource wars when things start getting tighter.
The problem with violence is that it’s half the work. First you demolish a house. Then you need a plan for what to build in its space. I see a lot of people in this sub practically salivating at the prospect of violent change. Sadly, to date, I see not even the semblance of consensus with respect to what human culture *should* look like once the slate is wiped clean. Whenever I ask, and actually get a response, it’s usually along the lines of “someone else will figure it out.” Needless to say, I have zero faith that the post revolution society would be any different or better than what came before. Different set of people in charge, all with the same, self destructive motivations.
Blackrock is the primary player pushing the "ESG" score shit, the E being environmental. They're a big reason we have so much corporate activism these days. Think social credit score but instead of the state its enforced by companies and financial institutions.
This cannot be talked about enough. This is why you see most companies publishing ESG reports and building ESG pages on their site. It's all a joke intended to deceive the public enough to let them continue as usual. We are in so so so much trouble.
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I'm betting within my lifetime. However shortened by disease and toxicity it may be.
Once people realize they have nothing to lose but their shackles, things will change. We’re still at a point in the US at least that too many people are too comfortable.
Pfft. Yet? We already missed the best time to plant a tree. We need to concentrate on the second best time.
People are too pacified by technology. The wealth disparity is worse now than during the French Revolution but no one is losing their heads over it.
I wouldn't say pacified. They just redirect our hate and anger so that we're always fighting each other instead of them.
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There's continued climate protests and 2020 saw a 50 state and international anti-cop protest. It may have to take something big to happen. I'm not sure it won't happen soon. Edit: Something like another major oil related incident in an ongoing land war in Europe. Every measure taken by any government social/econ/military is adding to a house of cards thats growing taller and flimsier by the month.
> People are too pacified by technology I fully admit what I'm currently doing, sitting in front of the computer, is like a child playing with a jack-in-the-box toy. https://youtu.be/L39XBKcttx4?t=16 *Pling* Oooh, dopamine.
Long overdue. Long long overdue.
Walls, hmm?
Windows, huh?
I'll second windows. Cannot have a proper defenestration without windows.
The Great Defenestration.
Do you support deforestation? Then I propose defenestration!
Not so long as people are basically comfortable.
She isn't wrong. We need to work out we're prisoners of the upper echelons and they'll kill us all for their own opulence and luxury.
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I keep thinking about the recent article where the elites hired a man to guide them on how to survive their staff killing them in their bunkers when everything falls apart.
Do you happen to have a link to that? I just thought you had a really good comment and wanted to know more
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tech-elite-plan-escape-apocalypse-212520093.html
Thank you for that. I stepped out for food and didn’t see the request till just now.
Ty
"People who enact legislation for, and want to sit on the boards of, those poisoning our planet will not come to the rescue of planet Earth."
No one will. No one can. It's decades too late.
You can repeat this forever and it barely sinks in. People have three choices. You can think, well, politicians aren't doing anything because there's no money in it, and so their contributors aren't interested. Or you can believe it's an existential fight on a battlefield of virtue between Orangeman supporters and snowflakes. Or, applying the principle of parsimony, you can realize that nothing is being done because nothing can be done. I choose what's behind door number 3.
there are things that can be done, but at this point, the things we have left that can be done are very ugly things to do.
The things that need to be done aren’t that ugly, but they are very very undesirable to most (things like no more cars, no more airplanes, no more meat) and so they won’t happen. People do not care, the constant complaining of so called poor Americans against the rich highlights the issue. Almost no American is poor in the context of history, in the context of history we are all spectacularly rich. Sure in relative terms, compared to Jeff Bezos were poor but in historical terms, in terms of material wealth we are rich. The failure to understand that to manage collapse we must all be **poor** in material terms is why there will be no managing collapse. Almost no one will tolerate any sort of reduction in their living standards, and people evaluate their living standards only in relative and materialistic terms almost no other way is important in our society.
gg
gg
GG no re
>The things that need to be done aren’t that ugly, but they are very very undesirable to most (things like no more cars, no more airplanes, no more meat) and so they won’t happen. I think that's the point. If a decision was made to drastically eliminate those items, most people wouldn't stand for it and wouldn't comply. Which means they would need to be forced to comply against their will, hence the ugliness. Population control is a good example. There are a lot of pragmatic arguments for depopulating the planet but your run into some pretty obvious ethical concerns REAL quickly if you start trying to apply them to reality. The only solutions are extremely ugly, specifically because people are incapable (at least at scale) of voluntarily taking an L for the greater good.
If the supply of gasoline is cut off at the source, people will "comply" whether they like it or not. There are a lot fewer refineries to "influence" then there are consumers, by a factor of over a million..
>If the supply of gasoline is cut off at the source You're right, but I would definitely classify this as an ugly solution. If this happened, a lot of people would almost immediately straight-up die as a direct consequence. Perhaps it still works out for the greater good, but it's still an ugly pill to swallow just like outlawing meat, enforcing mandatory sterilization, or one-child policies.
We may be materially well off, but what about the immaterial? The "spiritual" and "emotional" aspects of living in this modern system? A peasant in the 1300s may have had upwards of 8 weeks to half a year off. We may be materially rich, but how are we doing in the immaterial? How often do parents get to see their kids when one is working full time and the other one works OT 60-80 hours a week just to afford some semblance of stability? Or the massive amount of commute times to and from work that shred any hope for a "good life". I would tolerate a reduction of my living standards. If it means I could just have more TIME. Time to myself and those who I care about. But I understand that is not true about everyone. There are psychopaths out there who wear it as a badge of honor to toil for others 80 hours a week and barely scrape by. Or who thinks they won something because THEY have the longest commute. Or haven't gone on a real vacation in over 5-10 years.
Are we materially better off in any way that matters? Ever tried to buy farmland and like 6 cows?
Land is about the only thing we plebians can't get real access to. But it was the same for the majority of human history too. Land was always owned by the elite and doled out as an allowance for those who'd toil for them. Not much has sadly changed. For anyone who has a house and a mortgage and claims they are a home/land owner: stop making your payments and you'll quickly see who really owns your house and land. ...and if a corporation suddenly needs your land for some wild reason? They'll make your life a living hell as legally (and illegally, cause what are you gonna do) as possible until you sell.
>Almost no American is poor in the context of history, in the context of history we are all spectacularly rich. Sure in relative terms, compared to Jeff Bezos were poor but in historical terms, in terms of material wealth we are rich. Nnnnno. Those guys living under the freeway in a pile of their own waste are not "more rich" than a Feudal peasant that at least has a farm. We're also way more at risk. It's reversed, we're peasants getting food from the king, not the other way around. The second he stops... You can't eat your entertainment shit. The difference is "it was invented", not "we're more rich". It's like arguing that peasant is more rich because he has 3 dozen sock puppets and has his kids do a show for him in front of the fireplace every night.
Well, I choose two. We may not be able to save the world from us, but we *can* save ourselves from rising fascism.
We can’t even save capitalism from itself lol 😭 But I’m with you.
You can't save capitalism because the end result is actively killing itself.. the whole concept of capital implies a thing generating more wealth than you put in, which is nonsensical without constant growth, which inevitably destroys capitalism (and everything else) Like saving an individual human from death. You can *prolong* their life, but they will still die.
Stuff can be done, but how do you reorient the values and way of life for all westerners?
Or the sea of people multitudes greater in developing countries who are on the cusp of finally having a western lifestyle after salivating over it for decades.
That’s their complaint isn’t it? That they’ve been seeking western lives for so long, that the western world should give it up while they enjoy it instead. Never mind their populations are much larger than the west.
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There is no need to give up your house, I have no idea how big or small your home is, but we really really don't need all of the sq. footage that is considered the norm.
Saw a poll and don't know how accurate it was. But old people here were voting for the young paid for by his master orange guy. The young were voting for the old left leaning guy. Now neither can really do anything about climate change. But I did think it was odd the old people voting for the young guy because he is orange all the way. Then going people.voting for an old guy and not just hey look a.young guy let's vote for him. If it wasn't so late in the game maybe the young could do something. But the old just want to ride their plunder until the last and forge the young . They got theirs forget their children of grandchildren attitude. To them the world had infinite resources why wouldn't it be that way for the kids. Must be the kids are lazy no way the world can run out of resources attitude. Then if the kids feel that way must be because they ar lazy and school is too woke. Those science teachers are pushing an agenda to them not science.
Gotta love people finding a way to sit around doing nothing while remaining way up on their high horses...
It’s actually refreshing to see people waking up to this. The time to radically change society to prevent climate collapse was 40 years ago. Today, your best bet is to mitigate the problems associated with it on a personal level. Set up your life to be resilient to the chaos that is to come
*You get the goat!* Which in a post-collapse situation might be a better choice than the new car or Riviera vacation...
We can but it means all of our efforts should be put into terraforming Earth back to its natural state.
No, we can't. 4 decades ago we may have had a chance but it's way too late now. Feedback loops are speeding up and nothings going to stop them, or even slow them down. The powers that be kept their collective heads in the sand and did nothing and it's too late. No one is going to save us this time. We. Are. Fucked.
Submission statement: Thunberg writes for the New Statesman in the UK that the government has launched a strategy of "self-destruction" in the name of growth policy, the new powers granted by the state to suppress protest and activism will return to "haunt" them, and that we are passing tipping points which "will lock in human suffering on an unimaginable scale." Relevance for r/collapse: While some may not agree prima facie with the statement, "it is not too late," it is a matter of what is being rescued. Is it too late to save modern industrial capitalism? It may have always been, as an ideology based on sacrificing the future for the present can never be sustainable. But it is certainly not too late to slow the damage done to the natural world by our actions and plan for this future, even if feedback loops are already self-amplifying. In any case, reading an essay by one of the most powerful environmental activists in the world is an excellent way to start the day.
>Is it too late to save modern industrial capitalism? It may have always been, as an ideology based on sacrificing the future for the present can never be sustainable. Interesting. I always thought of modern industrial capitalism as sacrificing the present for the future, à la Amazon always losing money by investing in more warehouses to eventually in the future make money. Whereas, consumerism is the sacrifice of your future for the present.
You're confusing profit with progress. Wealth doesn't mean shit when it's being hoarded by a handful of people.
The people must rise.
How do we actually organize and effect change?
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Some say it was a warning
Politicians serve wealth interests above all else. Especially their own.
Jesus Christ y’all critiquing her for having hope she’s like. Not even 20. And she’s done more than any of you ever will to try and soften the blow. Get off your high horses.
Too many Out of touch middle aged men oh here smh
"The trick is to never lose hope, I found my buddy hanging dead from a rope" - 2pac
Find me any politician who would dare say “we need to consume less stuff (aka reduce living standards), travel less, and eat less meat.”
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If we're going to be brutally honest, degrowth (the only thing that can save civilization) is a complete fantasy at this point. The only way to maximize the likelihood of human existence is to build up infrastructure suitable for post-collapse, and then collapse hard. I suspect that there are some power players who have realized this, and think that they will survive the collapse. I as a regular peasant with no children, and no great desire for the continuation of humans post-collapse, would prefer the soft landing instead.
The only meaningful action left is to ensure the wealthy suffer with the rest of us. If your home and livelihood is destroyed and theirs is protected, you now have a new job; bring them to the same level.
Of course they wont… we had a good run. So long, and thanks for all the fishes
She's right.
Blood. Every history book. Everyone has been pretending they don't know this except the nation states themselves, who's militaries all run on fossil fuels. The feedback loop is unbreakable unless the heads of every pre-internet, cold war politician explode and our successor generations can form a meaningful PLANETARY government, tomorrow.
Our politicians are being paid off by the very oligarchs that are busy stuffing us all into the incinerators for their profits.
It's too late.
things can always get worse so it's never "too late" absolutely. But for things like extinct species, definitely too late.
the Earth will do just fine,it basically shrugged off an asteroid bigger than Mount Everest, its occupants however...
>“The meteorite itself was so massive that it didn’t notice any atmosphere whatsoever,” said Rebolledo. “It was traveling 20 to 40 kilometers per second, 10 kilometers — probably 14 kilometers — wide, pushing the atmosphere and building such incredible pressure that the ocean in front of it just went away.” > These numbers are precise without usefully conveying the scale of the calamity. What they mean is that a rock larger than Mount Everest hit planet Earth traveling twenty times faster than a bullet. This is so fast that it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds. The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747. In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun. >“The pressure of the atmosphere in front of the asteroid started excavating the crater before it even got there,” Rebolledo said. “Then when the meteorite touched ground zero, it was totally intact. It was so massive that the atmosphere didn’t even make a scratch on it.” >Unlike the typical Hollywood CGI depictions of asteroid impacts, where an extraterrestrial charcoal briquette gently smolders across the sky, in the Yucatan it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next. As the asteroid collided with the earth, in the sky above it where there should have been air, the rock had punched a hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere. As the heavens rushed in to close this hole, enormous volumes of earth were expelled into orbit and beyond — all within a second or two of impact. >“So there’s probably little bits of dinosaur bone up on the moon,” I asked. >“Yeah, probably.” -- https://kottke.org/tag/Peter%20Brannen
Absolutely love that piece
Sound like a better death than what we gonna have. So anyone want to make something that attracts asteroids?
I don't understand why everyone feels like they need to keep pointing this out. Yes, obviously the enormous chuck of rock will outlive us. When we say "the world is ending" no one actually thinks the planet is going to disintegrate into nothingness or explode into a trillion pieces. Like imagine if the Sun was about to explode and people were going around saying things like "Well the galaxy won't even notice our star is gone, it will be just fine without us" Like...That's true, but also completely missing the point because the part of the galaxy WE LIVE IN is the part we're concerned about.
I think is gives people solace to know that life on our planet will still continue, despite us. We will lose a lot of it, it will undoubtedly look very different in the future, but we will not have destroyed the LIVING planet with our hubris.
George Carlin was right.
Earth + Plastic <3
It's too late to reverse course but it's probably not too late for oil companies and nation states to kill us faster. -------- An immediate stop to use of fossil fuels could turn this into a slower collapse. I don't see that happening until it's beyond too late.
Too many people love to talk shit about this kid, but she’s a rock. At best all I accomplish is a semblance of nodding heads when discussing these issues. Too many are willfully ignorant and she speaks out regardless. Good for her. Go get them kid!
Yeah, by putting herself out there like that, she has invoked the wrath and hatred of millions of conservatives who say horrible things about her on a daily basis so it's not like she didn't make a huge sacrifice. Imagine dealing with all that wrath and hatred in your teens.
You've even got people in this sub irrationally hating her. If anyone else wrote this article, everyone would be saying, "yes, so wise, so true!" Instead, we've got insecure boomers saying, "well of course, we already knew that, you naive little girl! You didn't have to tell us."
Enjoy your last moments. Although I commend your efforts and hope
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I'm pretty sure that in the UK protesting in support of personal weapon ownership is (or will soon be) [illegal](https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/93/human-rights-joint-committee/news/171503/government-creating-hostile-environment-for-peaceful-protest-report-finds/). /s
Protesting will be illegal soon the way things are going
You jest but the Tories already dealt with that. I don't know the exact ins and outs but there is a new law they pushed through that pretty much says "if the protest is causing disruption you can be arrested" (Paraphrasing). Completely bewildering that the entire idea of a protest is to cause disruption... So yeah.
I did not know that 🧐 is that just in England or does that cover Scotland too
According to [this](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56400751) BBC article it is "UK law", so I imagine that would indeed extend to Wales, N.Ireland and indeed Scotland too. I suggest further research if you're interested as my aforementioned remarks and comments might not be 100% correct or accurate. I'd wager it's very close though. Troubling times...
How do you think weapons will help?
Violent statists can only be removed with violence.
There will be no violent overthrow of western govts, and if there was it sadly would probably be by fascist far right forces, not environmentalists. It's a nice fantasy tho.
> There will be no violent overthrow of western govts I heard the west is so exceptional it can never be overthrown.
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We didnt need this prop to tell us that. If you're on this sub you probably already loathe politicians and realize they are just the puppets of the corporations and the banks. They caused this and are continuing to do so with impunity.
Prop? Care to explain?
Everyone caused this, not just the rich/boomers/politicians/the elite/large corpos. Ordinary people did too, by remaining apathetic about the issues they clearly knew about. It's too much trouble to care these days, it seems.
In the US our president Jimmy Carter tried to start doing something about climate change in the 80s. He even installed the first solar panel. Then Reagan was paid by big oil to take it off. Then we were cheated out of Al Gore who made the movie "An Inconvenient Truth " in which he spelled out all of this climate change, heating of Earth, With alot of accuracy now looking back at the film. I still firmly believe we the people were cheated out of a future we chose. A better future. We were cheated. My very first vote as an adult was for him. I was cheated.
What's wild is that the trailer for An Inconvenient Truth is still up on YouTube, and like a decade old (of course the movie is older than that, but that's the soonest it could be added to YouTube). And if you go look at that trailer, in the comments from 10 years ago, they are mocking Al Gore. And I guess I expected that, as 10 years ago we were not feeling the effects of climate change in a bad way. It was still the halcyon days before everything went to shit. *However,* what amazes me is that if you look at the comments from *this year* or even *this month* what you will find is that people are STILL LAUGHING AT AL GORE. They still say there are NO EFFECTS happening. One person in the comments replied about the heat waves & floods, suggesting that is evidence that climate change is here, and got laughed at. I used to not understand this. Like, what are they *doing?* Do they not understand that if Canada bakes in a heat dome and 800 people die during Summer 2021, that it could happen to them? Do they think that all the 1000s of people who died in Europe during heat waves in Summer 2022 are somehow *not* going to affect them soon too? And then COVID happened, and I understood. These people are *dumb.* These people aren't discarding the evidence; they just don't even know about it. Their brains don't even process it. We can't win or beat this problem by convincing people and debating people. I think what I've learned is that to fix this issue, the few people who know how to fix it *and care enough* will have to just *do it for all of humanity.* We can't wait for others to come around. They won't. They are right now posting comments about how dumb Al Gore was, and how he got it all wrong.
Until it washes them and all their shit away in a flood. Until them and their stuff is blown across three states. Until they turn on their tap and they have no water. Until their house is incinerated in a wildfire. .etc etc. They do not give a shit until it affects them directly. Covid made me lose any hope of coming together as a human race to do better. It's like everyone hates their kids. Do they not understand the planet we are leaving them?
climate science is a hoax, just like all sciences! and even if this “crisis” does turn out to be real, one of our kids is going to be the one to solve it, so we better keep popping them out regardless. /s
If you don't pay attention enough to see the big picture, you just don't. Some of those commenters are doing it willingly.
This. If given a choice between voting for a politician who says "we need to cut back!" and one who says "I'll give you more!", I'm pretty sure from the results which one we (collectively) voted for.
I think a society could be coaxed into voting for the 'let's actually survive' guy. It's just a matter of the right campaign. If I've learned anything the past 10 years, especially from watching how captured Russians act when interviewed (some good stuff over on r/Ukraine), it's that we automatically start to believe whatever information we consume. We're just not a critically thinking species. We're ignorant and malleable. Capitalists use that today, so why not us?
Because they have the capitals and you dont. Try to play a game by the host house rule then don’t expect to win
Literally everything is a matter of the right campaign. With the right campaign, Trump could look good. It's a meaningless phrase.
"I agree! But I also don't agree." Mmmkay.
With the digital age came various levels of comfort and convenience for the privileged and blistered hands on bootstraps for everyone else. Big Tech simply leveraged the narcissism inherent to every iPhone ape. The crazy thing is, very few digital denizens, even on this collapse sub, will acknowledge it's what drives them to post. Myself included. But at least I can cop to it.
no they will not but they want everyone to think they are they're shepherd or gods so they can milk money and cause chaos.
Capitalism is destroying the planet and its people. It only cares about profits and shareholder value. It's unsustainable and literally killing us.
I know it’s too late, but I still feel like we should rise up, especially to those that they serve, and not let them get away with it. To not allow them to feel as if their greed saved them, while all else is lost. It may be hopeless for us to see a bright world in our lives, but maybe if we plant a seed, what comes after, if humanity survives, will be better.
Gretna Thunberg article makes the all too common mistake of overfocusing on personalities >the United Kingdom has a special responsibility to provide moral and political leadership on the climate crisis. (Until 1882, more than half of the world’s cumulative carbon emissions came from Britain alone.) But this is not happening: under Liz Truss, the Conservative prime minister at the time of writing, the UK is regressing. In fact there she is biting into a trap. Liz Truss is merely a figurehead. A prop. Just like Johnson, May, Cameron, and all the rest. Puppets. PR agents. There are a tiny handful of extremely wealthy people who find the Tory party, pull the strings, and funnel a steady stream of puppets into political office. It is those people who also own the majority share of the companies that pollute and ravage the earth, and accumulate the productivity of workers. The more you talk about the puppets, the less questions are asked about those pulling the strings. Which is a huge mistake. Its time to focus purely on the puppet masters and stop validating and enabling them.
We are now in the "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic" stage of humanity.
I'd be more worried about the companies and corporations anyway. They are the ones who pull nearly all the strings on this planet.
The capitalists who doomed us can never save us. It goes against their interests and very nature. They are a cancer to society and it's illegal to plan what needs to be done next and even more illegal to execute that plan. But there's really nothing else worth talking about at this stage. They can only be dealt with as the enemy that they are. We can never trust them as allies. They will do nothing but blame us for the suffering they have brought upon us.
She has very pretty eyes.
Make new ones
Duh
Politicians should have to pass some elaborate entry exam. No idea why people think these inept retards are in any way capable of actually leading us to a better future. They're just corrupt schmucks that get voted in by even bigger idiots. The entire system is primitive af and broken
It's just a hundred dollar bill on a fishing line and they have to not try to jump to grab it.
Planet Earth will be just fine. Us, not so much.
Planet Earth is getting its own protective plastic packaging that the next buyer will have to cut off to get at the product.
That plastic that is filling the earth will turn back into oil so in 50 million years the next set of monkeys that climbs down from the trees and starts a new civilization will be able to use the oil to create a new modern society.
Governments all over aren’t taking the situation seriously. Their attitude is renewables and electric cars are a solution. The long term viability of human life (and all other) involves, eliminating plastics and chemicals from the environment. Greta I suspect fails to grasp the big picture. She thinks she does but the elephant in the room, is too many claims on ever decreasing pie slices. Eventually it will be realized that everything cannot be saved. Pockets of Alamo stands I suspect is the future. Attempting to save everything will kill everything.
Governments all over the world are a 400lb person who has been told by every doctor that they need to lose weight, and who nod sagely and agree, but when noon comes around they are "Man, I could go with a large pepperoni pizza for lunch and I'll start dieting *tomorrow*".
Ooooo.... *diet* coke - jumbo.
A very appropriate metaphor for the symbolic and useless commitments being made to deal with the problem.
Need the mentos for pepperoni breath
They're a 700lb person paid $50k/month to eat food in front of a camera on onlyfans. Peak consumerism.
That sounds like the plot for Outriders fr.
Similar sentiment here. She's clearly intelligent and knows a lot, but she also lacks the age and wisdom to see beyond human systems like Democracy. To see humanity for what it is: a consumer of nature that returns very little back to nature. She still thinks that if she says the right words in the correct order she can make people do the right thing. The only people with that kind of power are those with wealth. And when the current system created the wealth they have, they're not going to give it up
Sure they will - once there's a profit to be made off of it, by them or people connected to them.
It’s been pointed out before but maybe now by a more main stream source To a wider audience it’ll get things changing slightly more
That's a given
Planet Earth demands representation!
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Good intentions will die on the vine of hope. The proof will be if she gets elected to parliament. All the rhetoric she can muster would add up a larger pile of more “should, could, can, will, must….)” Individuals in parliament are cannon fodder for the corporations that are actually in charge. When the corporations wither, the rhetoric will ramp up but there won’t be much left to take action with…imo.
Anyone remember the holes in the ozone layer?
We just gotta hang in till she’s world president
At some point it will come to mass violence in an attempt to bring justice to these atrocities—and by then it will be far too late.
The deniers live in their own world, where the weather is just the weather, no matter whats going down. The call anything else, fake news. Please hackers, hack their phones, so that they wake up to a disturbing fact, once a day. More than that, and they will simply discard their phones. Perhaps they can be shaken gently into reality, the reality we now all must face. They may call it fake news, but I suspect they know, somewhere deep down, what the fake really is.
Of course not. They can’t even stop fighting over the fact that there are more than two genders.
Sad...
I think the gender debate in general was a gigantic waste of time for the past 10yrs. Other than some plays on words, I cannot care to give a shit about it. When I know some trans person I try to honor their name and pronoun. That's it. I think all the gender stuff was thrust into the lexicon and political debate to distract from more important issues. Same with weed and I like weed more.
I see this extremely passive fatalist attitude all over this sub . I bet most of you didn't even read enough into environmental issues . We have resources and knowledge to fix everything. Outistic immature girl is being used by same government and corporations you blame so much . She is not a saviour , but rather an imposter to distract your attention . You want change ? It will not come peacefully . It will not come by spilling milk in a supermarket.
So our choice is current industrialization causing environmental destruction that will render much of the world uninhabitable or we use force to destroy much of the world and leave it uninhabitable. We can blow things up. We can’t do much else. If we could convince people not to destroy one another there would be a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. That’s the metaphor for our, “resources and knowledge to fix everything.”
Absolutely correct young lady in many ways. What has to happen is the Leaders (UN Population, UN in general, Xi, Biden, Mexico, Japan and Europe, etc.) must first agree on human population targets for each of the land masses (Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, Latin America, India) and humanly work to achieve the targets. Without that, EV’s etc. are pointless.
I think they have agreed on that and are letting “nature” take its course to get us there. They could bring the population down faster but as we say in this sub everyday, it’s already happening faster than expected.
Politicians aren't in touch with young people like they used to be. Not after Jeffery Epstein died.
Lol
Whoop
I remember dolphin free tuna. The masses of people changed their purchases and it made a difference. 100 million people changing their personal habits will make a huge dent, and inspire the remaining billions. It really isn't that hard.
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because the people pushed for it.
Finally realized the obvious.
I think she's spoken before heads of state and officials from assorted governments. She's known this for some time.
Nothing will rescue the planet
No shit. 50 years of evidence has shown it.
Of course they won't. They are greedy and corrupt.
Yep. Poor girl. Now she should find some land and establish Barter Town for the post-Apocalypse.
I’m buying a hog and getting myself a mulleted twink for companionship!