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This is the place for discussing the potential collapse of modern civilization and the environment.
Collapse, in this context, refers to the significant loss of an established level or complexity towards a much simpler state. It can occur differently within many areas, orderly or chaotically, and be willing or unwilling. It does not necessarily imply human extinction or a singular, global event. Although, the longer the duration, the more it resembles a ‘decline’ instead of collapse.
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The absolute rate didn't go down, but the proportional rate did. Because our energy consumption has increased.
It's kind of like arguing that there are more pirates today than there were 400 years ago. Yes, technically correct in absolute terms. In fact there's more of everything today. But that doesn't mean we are living in the age of piracy (the naval kind). And it shouldn't mean the current deployment of renewables is making no progress.
dude, we should have gotten to 0 emissions yesterday to prevent global ecological collapse. Any year in which we keep emitting at this rate, it's millions of preventable deaths in the years to come.
What is happening is that any renewable development slightly lowers the price of energy and so energy consumption increases, because there are no meaningful degrowth policies in place. This is a complete failure for the ideology of transition and for humankind as a whole.
Except there is the same amount of Earth that was before & even less biodiversity & (wild) biomass.
Any increase in environment effects like that (even a local level) by a single species would be considered an infestation.
You sure can make the case that humans are an invasive species, but the fact is that we are the overwhelmingly dominant species on this planet, so it is what it is.
There's a lower limit of 20 quadrillion ants on earth, so I'd say their species(es) are dominating us. Don't even get me started on bacteria, they're just puppeting us for their own benefit. I think even chickens are like 3:1 with humans.
Maybe by technology though, we definitely have the best cars, guns and microplastic.
I’m judging dominance by influence, not numbers.
No, every other animal, bacteria, fungi, plans, aliens that visited earth, have microplastics in them as well. It will probably remain a forever mystery how it all got everywhere.
The current planetary events will be marked by a distinctive line of plastics in the sediment rock (the 'F-U boundary' as the future crab historians will be calling it).
Hopefully we fuck it enough to permanently delete us. It will take millions of years, but the biosphere will recover eventually.
Yes, but dominant (especially "intelligent") does not need to mean destructive. Nor to multiply beyond sustainable levels (ie until we hit hard walls, at the end of the current extinction event).
The pirate example would be more accurate if there was a static, critical number of pirates that the world could handle before triggering a global catastrophic event. (I guess maybe that's technically already true?)
Global temperatures aren't going to reduce because we're putting 'proportionally less' CO2 into the atmosphere.
It's kind of like arguing that there are more pirates today than there were 400 years ago. Yes, technically correct
citation needed
The article is oversimplifying it by looking at global data. When looking at data from individual countries there have been some energy transitions, so it is not like it is impossible to do. But yeah, the point of the article isn't complete non-sense.
the transition in post-industrial countries happens because they can consume industrial goods produced in other countries that are not transitioning. It's the same trick they use to make you believe plastic is recyclable.
Except that the primary limiter on the rate at which the poorer countries are transitioning is a lack of capital with which to build new cheaper renewables in a country scale example of it being expensive to be poor. Building local industrial goods is giving them the capital necessary to build renewables, it’s just lagging because Fossil companies are putting huge amounts of capital into slowing it.
This logic totally makes sense in the world of university economy books, or international cooperation, but it's still going to kill most people on the planet.
Unfortunately, we are a global society.
As a german guy I was confused about the article for a second. As its possible to see less coal usage because of solar and wind on day