this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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Environment
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I'm not entirely convinced that anything we do at this point can save us – or rather, save modern industrial society.
The human race will likely be fine in almost any scenario except some sort of Venus-like hellscape (which probably isn't as unlikely as we'd like to think…), but we've set in motion such enormous changes that the damage is already done even if we went carbon negative right at this very second, so personally I think it's unlikely that current mass-scale industrial society will survive a 100 years or that we'll be able to avert billions of deaths.
Even if you're right, I think its important to not get into a defeatist attitude. There are levels of global catastrophe and having a philosophy of "its already too late" could lead to an even worse outcome.
Personally, I think we should plan for hot world and try to reduce emissions. I have very little faith in decarbonization efforts.
I have connections to inner energy company circles that work in renewables. When they get drunk, they openly admit to green washing. Unless governments seriously address this with sanctions and legal actions, it will never happen.
It's like clogging your toilet. Unclogging it sucks, but it's your fault. I don't see this being fixed without serious uncomfortable painful corrective action. Governments don't seem interested in that.
That's more or less how I think about this. We need to face the fact that we're some amount of fucked regardless, and start planning for how we're going to survive that without society turning into a reenactment of Cormac McCarthy's The Road
A while ago, I did a rough calculation that we could create floating islands from tying plastic bottles together. My calculation accounted for enough dirt for trees (several meters of dirt) and enough land to grow vegetables and such.
Accounting for food and housing needs, it was like 10k people from Europe's plastic bottle waste for a year.
Personally, I think something like Netherlands dikes would work in many places.
Not sure how to deal with the heat though. Unfortunately heat is thermodynamically useless without a sink. Space is a bad sink. Deep ocean maybe.
Realism isn't defeatist. We are, in fact, losing badly. That's just the objective reality. The issue now is much more than people want to think their current ways of life can continue; that is the real risk now. It's also true that everyone can take meaningful actions today and tomorrow to improve the situation in the future. To your point, the "well will just live even more lavish now bc there is no hope" mindset is very dangerous. But so is thinking we do not have to change. Anyone in anything like the industrialized world will have to shift how they live in the very near term.
I don't know if it's defeatist. We should really start coming to terms with the fact that things are most likely going to get extremely bad regardless of what we do, and instead of putting most of our effort into trying to stop things, we should increase focus on how we're going to deal with what's coming.
Not that trying to eg. get global CO^2^ production down or whatever wouldn't be worth it, but unless this economic system is more or less torn down completely or someone comes up with an actually viable fusion reactor, we can't pin too much of our hopes on the people in power suddenly starting to act selflessly.
If a defeatist attitude means people just won't procreate but still continue eating loads of animal products, not recycling (lmao) and regularly buying new things and driving everywhere- it would actually be a good thing for the hypothetical future where it's possible to reverse the damage we've caused.