I’ve been trying to
Okay, jokes aside, how do I convince my dad?
He’s Silent Generation (86), and he’s very smart and savvy otherwise (he’s an aerospace engineer, still has his 9-5 job in airplane development and has recently started driving for Uber to fill his spare time), and plays VR games on Oculus with me and my sister on weekends, but he doesn’t have patience for our climate change talk. He’s extremely liberal otherwise, but he thinks this is all overblown and the natural cycle of climate, telling us he’s seen these changes before.
How do I convince him this is different? Im at a loss. Or maybe I shouldn’t bother because at his age it doesn’t matter and I should just let him ‘be right’?
My sister is disturbed by his attitude, but im not sure it matters, really.
Does your dad believe that we can continue with our current rate of emissions and waste without consequence though? Maybe it’s worth discussing from an environmentalist point of view rather than climate change specifically. Perhaps the phrase has become taboo for him.
That’s an angle I hadn’t considered, thanks. Fortunately he’s not closed minded. But I think you’re right, the phrase ‘climate change’ has likely become taboo. Growing up in the 70s to 80s, I saw the propaganda. It was bad.
I live in Michigan where we just had at least 7 tornadoes yesterday, and NOAA is basically saying get used to it, this is the new normal. I’ve been in this house for 20 years and I’ve never seen devastation like this. I’ll be without power for several more days because massive 200 year old oaks were snapped like toothpicks and my street is littered with downed power lines.
7 people have died, and when this happens in winter (which they’re saying it will), people will freeze to death in the aftermath. Things will get ugly soon.
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That’s what history suggests, yeah.
And by then it’ll be too late or whatever solution they come up with will only help them.
You’re both right. The rich people have been doomsday prepping for several years now: buying private islands, building underground bunkers beneath them, and hiring private armies to defend them.
They say out loud that climate change is a hoax, but they’ve been frantically preparing for it because they know the truth, because they can pay for the truth.
And they can pay to keep us from it: that we should already have been in a panic about it, but they’re paying to stop us from panicking – at least until they can get out of the killzone.
I’m thinking of moving to a state that’s colder where I can buy land that has water within the property.
I also think to do anything sizeable you need the resources a company can bring. Our problems are at scale. You need a scaled resource pool and reinvestment in that to work up to some of the issues. I like the idea of carbon extraction for example, but I don’t see any resources invested in it from US companies.
Carbon extraction isn’t a viable solution until its whole area is running on green energy. With current technology, at least, running it on a green power source will make less of an impact than hooking that green power source up to replace some fossil fuels.
In other words, don’t rely on heal spells until the battle’s over. They’ll never outpace incoming damage.
Also, as far as resource costs go, planting tree is more efficient at capturing carbon then any industrial scrubber. Research should still be done, but anyone trying to sell a scrubber plant is just fishing for VC funds.
Yes, I was going to mention trees too, but I wasn’t sure of the impact.
They’re also typically embraced by fossil companies, selling both the disease and cure. If they can socialize the costs of sequestration they can keep drilling for profit. We are in desperate need of a carbon tax.
You need those heal spells to stop the incoming damage from killing you immediately though.
If you’re on the brink of death, yes. If you can take another round, better to take out more enemies first.
But that’s not the way our situation works. Until the whole grid is green, carbon scrubbers just give corporations a way to virtue signal without having to make changes to their supply line, and actually do more harm than good. Because the power it takes to run them puts out more carbon than they collect.
We’re on the brink of death right now so I will support people trying to start CO2 sequestration even while coal plants in other countries no one can stop are still running, please and thank you.
Does your country run on green energy? If so, cool. Go for it.
If not, it’s better to switch from existing fossil fuel plants to green energy. Running a carbon scrubber on fossil fuels puts out more carbon than it saves. It’s like casting heals from HP when they cost more than they heal. There might be a time for that, but it’s not during combat.
Even if the scrubber itself is on green energy, if the whole grid isn’t green, the energy it’s using could have gone to replace fossil fuel consumption, so it’s the same cost.
If you want to sequester CO2 without putting out more than you take, plant trees.
We are not on the brink of death. We may be on the brink of the point of no return (or past it depending who you ask,) but that’s not immediate death. The world isn’t going to die of heat in the next 10 years. There’s no need to rush to something that sounds good but does more harm.
Hey, so be careful if you’re planning to move up north-up north.
The ground has started exploding in some areas that have permafrost, and some of the lakes are starting to release a lot of methane. Think Alaska and Siberia.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201130-climate-change-the-mystery-of-siberias-explosive-craters
The weather is probably going to be fucky in one way or another everywhere you go. I don’t think there will be an area that you can move to to really escape climate change. Wildfires are kicking the butts of many communities that are further north, and the winter ice storms that happen are pretty deadly too. I can’t imagine that those things will go away or improve anytime soon, since they are heavily thought to be linked to climate change.
Some of the great lakes are so polluted now that the governments of both the US and Canada have recommend a safe yearly maximum number of fish to consume. The limit for at least one of those species is literally zero, due to how much fish absorb from the water around them. These are “forever chemicals” that are being absorbed.
We still need to try to work on climate change, regardless of location. I hope that people don’t think moving north will protect them from the effects of climate change, because it probably really won’t.
I know that you probably already know that, but I would like more people to see this stuff. I’ve seen too many people saying that they think just moving up north will make them safe from climate change.
Carbon extraction, for the moment, is useless.
Most energy production still emits carbon. Adding in loses, you’d spend 100 carbon for each maybe 50 carbon you captured. You’d literally be making it worse.
Same goes for electrical cars. Car engines are pretty much as efficient as burning fuels get, so with electrical you have extra losses (losses in electrical transmission, extra conversions, storage in batteries, then the electrical engine itself) so they may actually end up emitting more carbon than fuel cars.
Want to stop this? Make all electrical generation carbon frer
Air and sunlight are cute but fractional and likely will remain that forever
We need nuclear power plants, and loads of them. Spent fuel there IS a problem but it’s a manageable one.
Even if we replace all cars and powerplants for non carbon within the next ten years, it’ll still take centuries for the atmosphere to return to normal.
Want to carbon capture? That is HARD because of loads of technical problems but one to keep in mind: all that carbon (yes yes, CO2) in the air is because we took energy from a system and used it. CO2 was the result. You want to take out that CO2, you need to spend the same amount of energy to take it back. With losses in conversion, you’ll need to spend probably double that. With what nature can remove by itself, you mght get a 10% discount.
What does this mean? We need to spend the same amount of energy as we generated over the past two centuries on top of the energy we need every day to be able to capture all that CO2. That is a metric shit tonne of CO2 and capturing it requires first and foremost that ALL our energy production is CO2 free.
Ah also: for technical reasons airplanes will never be electrical, cargo trucks neither. Yeah yeah, tesla truck blah, nobody will use it and musk, besides being an absolute moron, is also a scammer. Electrical trucks are not worth it because of battery weight. Think batteries will magically become 2000% more efficient? They won’t. Batteries are pretty much elat the roof of what’s possible and barring some revolutionary new energy storage that may or may not exist, batteries won’t become much more efficient beyond maybe tops 30% more than we have today. Either way, cargo trucks d Airplanes need light batteries and even li-ion batteries (lithium being the lightest metal) won’t cut it. Cargo trucks would lost most of their cargo capacity in batteries or would require recharging (and waiting for hours) way WAY too many times. Fuel based trucks lose their gas whilst driving and become lighter. This adds range and cargo weight. Electrical ones don’t. Electrical (heavy) trucks aren’t practical and won’t be used.
Also, battery fires are a BITCH and are almost impossible to put out. All it takes is one electrical fire from a car in a tunnel that will kill a few hundred people to make people reconsider battery cars. Now imagine trucks.
Same for airplanes. A laptop battery in and airplane is risky. An electrical plane would require 50-70% of it’s weight in batteries (so we transport 100 people instead of 300) and of that thing catches fire, which happens a lot, those 100 people are screeeeewed.
Hydrogen also won’t work as the atoms in the gas are so small that they escape though just about everything. You’ll need very heavy tanks to transport it compressed enough so you’ll again lose the “weight war”, if you will.
So we’ll continue puahing CO2 in the air with airplanes and trucks, but cars are doable. Powerplants are doable.
But look at the will of politicians. More and more politicians are willing to lie about climate change because that’s what their conspiracy theory believing base believe, so they’ll happily parrot that bullshit because they’ll watch the world burn if it means they can rule the ashes.
Then there are the millions of scammers with perpetual motion machines or their magic clean water from air machines or their Hyperloop ideas that were refuted over a century ago yet we spend literally billions into that because humanity is stupid and dickish…
I dunno. This can be solved if we wanted to but I think humanity in part doesn’t care. The young just watch TikTok, the old are too dumb, somehow.
Call me cynical all you like but I see a humanity ending problem in front of us and it can be solved but share holders and the rich must be kept happy before that! And if you try to say anything about that, you get the army of trained retards (yes, that is the acceptable word for people that have a good brain but refuse to use it) yelling over you that theyr read a Facebook post saying that science is evil.
In a sidenote, various diseases that were nearly eradicated are coming back as well because of anti vaxxers now. Humans suck.
So before you can even start thinking about solving this you first need to fix the retard problem. People need to start believing in science and reality again because too many people are now with their heads stuck in fantasy world where “god would never allow this” or "scientists are evil because EVERY GODDAMN TV SHOW AND MOVIE NOW SHOWS EVIL SCIENTISTS.
/rant.
But I do encourage you to tell me I’m worng in anything I said. Please, if you think there is a solution, please please tell me
You want to take out that CO2, you need to spend the same amount of energy to take it back.
Non sequitur. Nobody said we had to turn atmospheric carbon back into the same fuel it originally came out of.
Electrical trucks are not worth it because of battery weight.
This is only an issue for long-haul trucks, so, obvious solution: electric trains. No battery required.
Also, battery fires are a BITCH and are almost impossible to put out. All it takes is one electrical fire from a car in a tunnel that will kill a few hundred people to make people reconsider battery cars. Now imagine trucks.
There are plenty of EVs on the road already. If that was as likely as you’re trying to make it sound, it would have happened many times already.
Yeah, lithium-ion batteries are volatile, but they aren’t that volatile. Solid-state batteries are even less so.
retards (yes, that is the acceptable word for people that have a good brain but refuse to use it)
I won’t comment on whether it’s acceptable, but it definitely isn’t correct. The R word refers to people whose brains are impaired, not merely underused.
Call me cynical all you like but I see a humanity ending problem in front of us and it can be solved but share holders and the rich must be kept happy before that!
That’s the real problem, not the technology. We can solve this problem. We don’t even have to sacrifice our modern civilization and creature comforts to do it. But we won’t, because some very lucrative businesses would become obsolete in the process, and their owners would sooner burn down the world and rule over the ashes than tolerate the loss of their wealth.
non sequitur
No it’s not. If you want to lower the CO2 in the atmosphere then you need to break up the carbon bonds, that leaves you with carbon. For all I care you make diamonds out of it, it’s irrelevant. If you want to break CO2 in O2 you need to spend that same energy. That was my point. If them youale fuel or whatever out of it that is a wholly different story that too will require yet more energy.
Trains indeed resolve the long haul truck issue but they’re hardly anywhere in the US. Good luck with building new train tracks there.
We haven’t had an electrical fire in a tunnel yet. Fires in tunnels are bad but can be controlled. Electrical battery fed fires are a nightmare as they have all the ingredients to keep going all by themselves. This is why fire departments see these cars as a problem as they require more water to put out than they can carry.
Li-ion batteries are indeed volatile and no they won’t explode by the thousands but if you have hundreds of millions of them, then statistically yes, you will get thousands of fires world wide every day. Tunnel fires are just a waiting to happen. I’m not saying there is no solution, but it IS a huge problem.
Yeah at the end of the day, this is a failure of our government. It’s so stuck on profits and processes, it can’t save itself from certain death.
Dont sit around and do nothing waiting for death. Grab a gun and take some rich people with you.
I would suggest to, first, join your local Eco-social organizations. Normally the “take a gun a shoot a motherfucker” approach, while very satisfying to say, it’s usually way less effective than organize with your community.
I don’t know where you live, but here the government doesn’t give a shit about eco-social organizations until they start to destroy costly things.
Totally agree, hence, the need for organized non-institutional action 😉. In institutional terms, the difference between a bunch of eco-anarchist and eco-terrorist is pretty nebulous to say the truth!
Most rich people don’t just stand around outside waiting to get shot. Especially not if they know someone is gunning for them. They may be morally bankrupt, but they’re not stupid.
Of course they dont, but they also not always stay hidden.
@electriccars @memes I don’t appreciate unfunny memes. :-(
I’m sorry. Here’s a modified version of the meme:
Hey, it’s not easy being …green.
It’s all already slowly spinning out of control…
That’s what the hurricane said
It’s already happening, collapse on this scale is a slow process, and hard to observe from within.
The roman empire didn’t collapse from start to end in a single lifetime, after all.
Nobody alive today will be around to see the “collapse” collapse, the extremely dire breakdown that comes as a sudden crisis in civilisation terms, but we will continue to see a lot of hardship from our dated and crumbling institutions and our society slowly losing its grasp on what it is, etc.
In the end, just like the romans, our civilisation’s collapse doesn’t mean apocalypse, it’s not the end.
All civilisations rise and fall, and while ours is by far the grandest and strongest in many respects, it’s also the weakest, relying entirely on extremely fragile global systems that, should they fail for even a single month, would throw the planet into chaos (electricity grids/Internet), hastening or even triggering that final sudden crisis, once three slow rot of a dying civilisation has already set in.
But until then, such events will be overcome. Not until that rot has truly set in, and a sudden crisis is upon us all, will things finally collapse as we know it.
So that’s kinda good news for us, right? :-)
expect they’ve found a way to ‘profit’ off the collapse already. might be one of the reasons they’re doing nothing to stop it
People will be paying a lot to find habitable places, and trying to
mitigatewhat should have been avoided. There will always be someone to profit off this process.Deflection towards hydrogen mining. Shell UK got absolutely grilled over it, showing that it was nowhere close to carbon neutral.
And when the last land is a desert, the last river dry, the last field poisoned, the last tree cut down, will they realise that one cannot eat money.
Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.
They’ll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.
Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations… Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.
Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.
On the one hand I don’t like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it’s damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.
Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.
I dunno mate… antarctica is collapsing much faster than anyone anticipated. Brazil’s winter was a scorcher.
Canada’s on fire. Tropical storms are hitting LA. sadlol… I suspect we might be around to see even worse.
Are we supposed to be comforted about the timeline being decades? That’s generations alive today.
Scientists are also finding their estimates getting outpaced alarmingly often right now.
The Russia Ukraine war has disrupted civilisation quite significantly with 6 million refugees. We could see over 1 BILLION climate refugees by 2050. 1000 MILLION people having to leave their homes.
We are on course for significant disruption to food supply before 1.5C warming. Doesn’t matter how rich your country is, with global food supplies low and that maybe people on the move, civilisation as we know it will change significantly. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/global-heating-likely-to-hit-world-food-supply-faster-than-expected-says-united-nations-desertification-expert
To be clear: I am not a doomerist. Don’t dwell on this and do nothing. Get angry! This is being done to you. This was not inevitable, it was the decisions of the most powerful and richest people in the world. Get out there and take action, the movement needs you.
I mean, I feel like this year in particular illustrates quite well that there are already very real impacts of climate change in rich countries, with Canada, Greece, Hawaii etc. burning. Which makes it worth to delay climate change as much as possible, even if we can’t or don’t want to stop it at livable levels.
You can’t have this both ways.
When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn’t happening because it’s snowing…
“That’s weather not climate!”
When there’s a wildfire somewhere…
“That’s global warming!”
We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can’t attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.
Problem is also that there have always been catastrophes… Earthquakes, wildfires, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc.
Maybe in the past they should have also been attributed to climate change, but I don’t think the average human being can draw the distinction yet
, but I don’t think the average human being can draw the distinction yet
considering the massive heat domes spread worldwide, I suspect the average human has been more impacted than you have.
Brazil had a scorcher of a winter. Antarctica is falling apart much faster than anyone predicted.
Rule 1 of life: be skeptical when someone presents their opinion as facts.
Looking at Western European countries like Germany, the Netherlands and the UK to an extent, the road to net-zero is disrupting. Probably because necessary steps have been delayed until the last moment. Large numbers of refugees have a destabilising effect on democracy as well.
Some steps that are necessary for net-zero are expensive investments (like heat pumps) that are causing conflicts in society. Going ahead with it as well as delaying is sure to be met with very loud resistance. Don’t think that Germany can miss it’s climate goals without some serious protests, perhaps worse than they’ve ever seen.
At the same time, I wonder how well UK households are going to deal with even higher food prices as the percentage of failed harvests increases. There isn’t a lot of buffer space here.
It’s not so much whether rich countries have enough money to deal with climate change, but rather how well democracy will fare when it’s under duress.
If we’re going to electrify everything we need nuclear power plants.
The federal government should be dumping tens of billions of dollars into modular nuclear plants that can be built in a factory and then shipped places.
Slowly…
In human time, yes. In world time, no.
The problem IMHO is that the ”information“ feels like propaganda. “You need to stop doing this, because the planet needs you to“ I mean come on, 80% of all the greenhouse gas emissions come from 10 companies.
Don’t FridayForFuture us, FridayForFuture them.
Oh, and one thing to add to trigger a whole lot of people: Most of the people are dependent on those companies, because they earn too little to get an alternative. And saying they are the reason is like telling a POW that their crafting of shells kills Americans.
It’s not really propaganda, it’s just deflection. Call out corporations for contributing the most to the climate catastrophe, and they/the media/losers on social media immediately go “oh well what have you done personally to stop it” or “well you use their product means you’re part of the problem” or “you’re not recycling”, deflecting the blame from corporations to individuals.
As long as these people are in power, nothing is going to change, only half assed unhelpful compromises.
So… a lot of important people have to vanish… kind of like an undertale run where you kill all the bosses.
I also like to say “big oil paid you to say that!“ and just be ignorant. I know it didn’t happen, but their reaction is funny.
The final generation? Well they are strawmen who destroy the cars of normal people to bring hate towards those who are in for the movement.
Car dealerships in the US are whining that they can’t move the expensive EV’s car makers are producing. Meanwhile the world is burning. We need a crash program to replace every damned gas powered vehicle needed, while eliminating hundreds of thousands completely off the road where possible. Cities should have sidewalks, bikepaths, and mass rail transit everywhere in the US.
If we don’t do it, we’re pissing in the wind.
edit: same with renewable generation - no more nimby bullshit. build it all. no one’s view is worth another summer like this.
It’s an excellent moment to remind you that even if we manage to dodge this, there is still the heat death of the universe, so it’s just a matter of how long do we want to waste energy postponing the unavoidable
You do realize that the heat death of the universe would only likely take place in literally trillions and trillions and trillions of years time? Climate change is happening now.
Yeah, and dying today or in a trillion years is indifferent in the end, if it’ll end up happening anyways
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I often wonder, before society collapses, if the corporations who hid this shit for 45 years will ever face the consequences of their lies. Not really calling for pitchforks but, well, it’s the ecosystem… it’s our civilization they profited on destroying, and they did so gleefully and the profits were obscene. If there was ever a time to get the torches and pitchforks out…?
The think with ‘justice’ is that’s a social process. That’s why we use pitchforks, to make sure to get that message across: there are consequences for non-equivocally evil deeds.
I think there’s a concerted effort to keep the scale of how bad things are now, and how exceptionally shitty they’re going to be much sooner than anyone thought - because the frog won’t jump out of a slowly boiling pot. And by the time we know it’s fucked, we’ll be hiding from the sun in bunkers or dead from never ending 50c+ heat waves.
You are right. That means we better hurry !
Just look at Brazil’s winter - https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/08/25/winter-heatwave-another-south-american-country-is-sweltering-in-record-temperatures
Four state capitals recorded the year’s highest temperature on Wednesday. Cuiabá, in central-western Brazil, the highs reached 41.8°C. Residents in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil’s two most populous cities, were also hit by the heatwave. In Rio, temperatures reached 38.7°C on Thursday - the city’s second hottest day of 2023.
what’s going to happen in summer? it’s hard not to be hopeless. when people are driving their fucking gas guzzling coal rollers around like nbd going to walmart fuck the libs…
we could put all the world on renewable energy and I still suspect the assholes will demand their feedumb to pollute the already wrecked atmosphere.
Indeed. Yet, hope to live in a green and tolerant society is never dead until we “the greens”, “the anarchists”, “the socialists”, “the terrorists”, “the hippies”, are all dead.
Hopelessness gives space to inaction, and the power to change things requires being active. I firmly believe in the people, like you, who cares and take action. Hence, is reason enough for me to keep on fighting: connect means and ends. It is possible that we’ll die and we’ll still not be where we want to be, but the mere act to organize and work on this project is to make the idea a material reality. It will make easier for more people to follow.
My friend, let’s not give more space to hopelessness, since the work we have to do is to not let it grow. And if we can, even plant the seeds of hope like the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) or Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) show us. Or even, in the case for Brazil, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST).
No one will face consequences. Everything the companies are currently doing is legal or unenforceable.
and with fanboy shitbirds like you to stick up for them, perhaps the world isn’t worth saving anyway.
Trust me I wish there would be consequences, so most of us could be alive in 20 years.
holding them accountable for genocide wouldn’t change the results, it would simply be some iota of justice. there’s no turning the bus at this point, the crazies and coal rollers are just gonna keep pushing the gas - we’ve already gone off the cliff. The question that remains is can anything be saved that will resemble our civilization? It will take hundreds of years to reduce back from 2c and we def won’t stop at 2c.
The question that remains is can anything be saved that will resemble our civilization?
Yes, giant geo engineering projects will kill way less people than runaway global warning. Let’s do the Matrix movie thing where we covered our planet in continuous cloud cover. \s
this is why I’d prefer to skip geoengineering and, though the scale is mind-boggling and the costs tremendous, go full hog on a solar occluder. a big disc in space made of lunar regolith and recycled space junk. this is a herculean task, but would prevent us from playing scary games with our one breathing, semi-functional atmosphere. by blocking a small but growing percentage of sunlight, as the project goes on, it should be possible to keep ground level temps from getting deadly hot. eventually you could build solar generation on such a space object and microwave gigawatts back to earth, while simultaneously lowering global temps in a controllable manner.
I know a lot of this sounds pie-in-the-sky, but really it’s the convergence of many, many different fields opening possibilities never speculated upon in the past. Automated manufacturing, robot mining, lunar-based perskovite solar cell manufacturing, SpaceX’s starship to haul all this shit to the moon and start building - so many of these individual parts either didn’t exist at all 20 years ago, or were fantastic leaps of science fiction - and now they’re literally coming together. And boy do we need 'em all.
I see this is as the ultimate make/break point for our species, yeah we achieved spaceflight and nuclear power and, I dunno, The Rolling Stones, but if we can’t survive the effluence our industrial output exhales we really aren’t shit as a species. We’ll have to work together too.
so… \s or not, if we don’t do this and traipse down the road of injecting some more shit into the atmosphere attempting to correct temporarily for the other shit we injected into the atmosphere for 300 years, I suspect it’s gonna be a rougher road and end in a very interesting fossil record thesis for some future species’ exo-anthropology dissertation.
