*edited to correct conversion in title
This is fine, we just need to switch from plastic bugs and make caps attached to bottles and everything will be alright! Together we can fight at least 1% of the carbon emissions from top 100 corporations in the world :)
I really think this narrative is counterproductive. It’s not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it’s fun. They’re doing it to produce goods that people want at the absolute minimal price possible.
No corporation is going to choose more environmentally friendly practices out of the goodness of their own hearts unless those practices are cheaper. And given that that is very rarely the case, we have to look at things like carbon taxes to actually price in the externalities of climate damage. But that is going to increase the prices of some goods, and that requires a level of political will that has proven very difficult to come by. “Just make corporations pay” to fix things, whether that’s a carbon tax or taxes on oil company executive pay or dividends or whatever else the proposal may be is always going to mean “increase prices to compensate for climate-related externalities”.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that all costs of addressing climate change must directly fall on consumers; government subsidies to reduce the costs of environmentally sustainable practices can also be extremely beneficial. But ultimately, this is a problem that we’ve all created, and we’re all going to have to be part of solving it. Blaming corporations, even if partially accurate, doesn’t actually get us any closer to solving things.
Yes and No. Yes, it’s not only corporations and we must act ourselves.
No, it’s the rules that set the game. Corporations play within the rules. Politics is owning and can change the rules. The society and corporations will follow accordingly. If we really want to change we can. Look what happened during Covid. In retrospect, some insane rules (eg Germany kids not allowed to enter playgrounds. Kids couldn’t play to save the elderly). However, society obeyed to those rules.
It’s not us, it’s the rules that must change. In my view this should be the priority.
Blaming the public over corporations is the #1 reason why we are in this mess in the first place. For decades, the narrative has been “it’s your fault and you need to change your habits”. It is a pointless and useless narrative because nobody is going to actively change anything like that until they are forced to. Even when we make moderate, easy efforts to do stuff like recycling, the recycling companies bitch and moan about how they can’t ship this shit off to China to let them do the work, and then throw away most of it, anyway. We PAY recycling companies to recycle this shit and they can’t be bothered to figure out how to recycle it. We PAY THEM to take away materials to use in new products, not the other way around.
In every aspect of people’s lives, you will find that corporations use up 90% of the resources that the general public use because corporations deal in economies-of-scale far bigger than anything a person or even a country can do. Corporations have been pushing the “blame the public” narrative to shift focus away from the decades of abuse they will continue to inflict on the planet. Corporation shit all over everything, and they will continue to do so in the name of profit. That is exactly what they are designed to do.
It takes governmental effort and regulations against the corporations to stop this sort of thing. They do it for clean water, and CFCs, and automotive design, and architecture, and many many other things. Why? Because a minority group of people who are struggling to make a living is never going to have enough power and clout as a large corporation or a government.
In North Carolina, we had a “winter that wasn’t” and now we have a summer of “surface of the sun” heat. Triple digit heat index every day last week. Good luck getting the locals to admit that climate change is real though. At this point I think some of them are actually starting to see the truth, but it just pisses them off and they dig in to denial even harder, because if there’s one thing they can’t do it’s admit they were wrong.
When I mentioned the hot weather forecast to my super libertarian crazy father in law, he was went off on a tangent on how the government is controlling the weather and causing all of this on purpose 🤦
I had to stop going to my favorite Saturday morning breakfast restaurant for pretty much the same reason. They were ranting about how all the wildfires up here were lit by the government in order to put out enough smoke to block out the sun so our crops would fail. Then everyone would rely on the government for food and they could purge the people they didn’t want around.
‘It’s not normal’
It is now.
Where I stay these temperatures can be quite normal in summer. I’m now just worried that a hot summer’s day here will now go from 45 to 55. I’ve felt 50 before. It’s not fun. But besides that, I think of the implications for the agricultural sector. Good luck my European friends. I’ll report back in our summer.
where are you? desert country? if mine have that temp, there would be so many dead people.
Humidity level does matter, a 50c in a dry weather is pretty hot, but not as hot as how people accustomed to high humidity level make it sound.
It’s the lack of sure conditioning in Europe that makes it especially brutal.
Sure, there are hotter climates but they are usually more prepared with AC. Certainly not always, I know.
AC doesnt help construction or farm workers, doesnt help against wildfires and also not against drought.
The economy and society asba whole arent prepared for these temperatures. We would need a cultural shift even in northern Europe, where siestas need to become normal. Too bad if you would need to commute 2h back and forth for your siesta break.
Honestly I will never forgive people who STILL continue to deny climate change is happening and refuse to legilslate on it.
At this point Don’t Look Up is a documentary. I honestly cannot imagine what it’s like to he a climate scientist who actively studies this, only to have some fox news watching crazy uncle parroting cherry-picked data, thinking they somehow know better than global scientific consensus. I imagine some at this point may be going, “fuck it. Let it burn.” And honestly, I can’t blame them.
kinda late even if they did now 😔
The response I’ve heard to this, which I tend to agree with, is that even if it’s not completely stopped, maybe some action will mean it won’t be as bad. 120F is bad, maybe instead of throwing up our hands and letting it get to 140F, we can head it off at 130F. Still not good, but better than the alternative. And for each bit we avoid, we get a lot of additional livable area. If we start seeing migrations of people, that extra land is going matter a lot.
We fucked around, now we’re going to start finding out.
Captain Planet tried to tell us
So did Al Gore.
Do you mind posting something meaningful instead of a tired and boring aphorism?
I was so hoping that crap like this, FAFO, and the other weak sauce bullshit wouldn’t make it over here. I was stupid for even hoping that.
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It’s not about being goofy. It’s about repeating the same damn thing for the millionth time. It gets annoying and adds no value to the conversation.
That’s what I really disliked about what reddit had become. A post with 500+ comments and having to scroll through the same fucking comment over and over again because everyone thinks they’re so fucking clever but didn’t bother to read any of the comments and see that a dozen other schmucks have made the exact same comment.
“we”
Yes, we. While some are of the impression, that climate change is only because of a select few, it’s because every single one of us consumers is to blame as well.
We have the option to buy climate friendly stuff, lots of times it’s just more expensive or maybe a little bit inconvenient. Also, why does one need the next new iPhone after owning the last one for just over a year? Why do we have to eat Avocados in some cases a few times a day, that are shipped around the world and need heaps of water to grow? Same as Bananas or Strawberries in Winter…the list is very long. Same as plastic free vegetables - “the cucumber has a brown spot? Nope, not getting that, I demand it’s spotless!” So companies wrap them in plastic.
If there’s demand, companies will fulfill that demand, if there’s no demand, companies stop doing that shit, because it doesn’t make any money. Every single one of us is responsible in some way or another, even if the percentage is very miniscule.
I just wanted to say, this is a very good comment.
When people say it’s not “we” and it’s just a few people, or just companies, it always seems to me that they are - consciously or subconsciously - just making excuses for not having to actually do anything and hoping someone else will solve the problem for them. They want the problem to be solved, while not having to do anything or change their lifestyle.
There are some very obvious and clear examples of this; here’s two of them:
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Studies have shown most people are in favour of carbon taxes. But with carbon taxes, companies would just shift the extra cost onto the consumers by increasing prices. One thing affected by carbon tax, would be the price of gas itself. And when prices (especially gas prices) increase, that usually results in a lot of anger and protests. So why would any democratically elected politician ever implement a carbon tax? If they did, they would be voted out, and the next one to come in would just undo it.
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Another obvious example, is meat. We know one of the major protagonists in CO2 emissions is animal farming. Red meat especially is responsible for a huge source of those emissions. And yet most people don’t even wanna think about eating less meat, and they will still crack jokes about vegans and look at them sideways. And as for regulations regarding meat, the example from before still applies.
As you seem to be implying, what really needs to happen is a whole cultural shift. Trying to shift blame onto to a few people and hope they get the guillotine, won’t change anything as long as people keep demanding all the same things because then someone else will come in to fulfil that demand. Whether we like it or not, we have to accept that it’s the sum of all our actions that will determine the future, and our actions can influence other people’s actions; therefore, one way or another, we are all responsible.
Sorry for typing some much at you since you’re basically making the same point already, but I just felt like adding on.
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New normal, folks. So begins the era of climate migration.
A reminder that this is why we should never tolerate selfishness. We’re now largely screwed because we, as a species, valued our individual comfort over expert research.
We knew what we needed to do - but no, profits. Such a dumb way to die.
Climate and Healthcare migration. I can’t afford to retire here in the states. It’s coming.
you will probably not be entirled tobhealthcare in Europe either then.
Usually the idea is that you pay as a worker into the healthcare system. If you never paid in here you will probably have to fo dor private insurance and you’ll be faced with similiar rates like in the US because the age of entry is crucial for the rates of private health insurance
Some countries have “universal healthcare” for all citizens, you only pay as a worker to get a retirement fund.
So you can end up penniless and homeless, but they will keep you alive (…sometimes to suffer for as long as possible, but that’s a different matter).
It’s so much worse than the new normal. It’s going to keep changing just as fast, or faster. “Normal” isn’t going to exist much longer.
Detroit ftw.
This has been the mildest summer in my 5 years living in the area, I’m loving it
Tornado watches are becoming more frequent tho
Same here in montreal, my grass has never been this green in the middle of july. Kinda weird that we had all those forest fires when the summer’s been pretty damn mild for now
Mild in Montreal, maybe, but check out the Canadian Drought Monitor as the rest of Canada is in drought. Like, the entire rest of Canada. https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/agricultural-production/weather/canadian-drought-monitor/current-drought-conditions
Over here in the west it’s never been so dry. Pastures are brown, hay and crops aren’t just stunted but are dying before maturity. Trees are yellowing and dropping leaves. Plague of grasshoppers eating everything that was still green. Every day is hot and the air is full of smoke, it feels like the end of the world over here.
That isn’t “just” climate change though, it’s also urbanisation and the way you guys over there use ground water. It’s a combination of a lot of things, climate change is only one puzzle piece in the whole scheme of things.
Also, the drought thing is easily combatable with desalination, which has a few other benefits. The main caveat is, it’s expensive. But, it’s a lot cheaper than having to deal with various other things due to the droughts.
Guessing you’ve never been to Western Canada. We only have a couple major cities, and we don’t use that much groundwater both as it tends to be saline and because we have plenty of surface water to use due to snowmelt runoff. Also we don’t have anything to desalinate, unless we’re talking about that low-quality groundwater, which is a very expensive proposition as you say to get any significant volume.
We’re not concerned about water for drinking, city usage etc. Most cities are on major rivers that are running near normally. Hydro dams have tons of storage to run until next winter’s snow. On my farm I have dugouts that capture runoff, they are full. I have shallow wells on GUDI aquifers where the water is near the top of the casing! I’m irrigating my garden and my orchard like mad out of my yard dugout and that usage isn’t even noticeable compared to evaporation losses.
We’re concerned that our crops are dying, our livestock are starving (sold mine already) and almost none of our land is irrigated. In BC the trees are dying and burning for lack of rain and there is no way to irrigate them of course. This part of the country has long relied on a steady cycle of June and July thunderstorms for moisture - but the thunderstorms have dried up.
It just won’t rain, that’s all.
What suprises me the most when watching news on this. You will see people in Rome getting interviewed in the middle of a plaza in the burning sun. And there are many walking outside. I would crawl into a cool cellar and only come out at night.
They live in apartments without AC and also have to go to work.
Everything is fine, the earth simply won’t be habitable for humans. The Earth will spin on without us when we inevitably allow industry to destroy humanity by making earth uninhabitable by human life.
It’s what we deserve for being so stupid as to see this happening and doing nothing about it to stop it or slow it down. There’s plenty of climate change advocates which are almost always drowned out by the chorus of companies and climate deniers who believe propaganda over science.
You make it sound like humans are the only ones affected by climate change. Sea turtles, elephants, polar bears, pandas, there’s a fuck load of animals we’re directly killing off. Everything is most certainly not fine, even if you don’t give a single shit about innocent human lives.
How many insects do you remember seeing around stadium lights as a kid? Look now. We will not last another two generations
I remember when I passed my test the mid 00’s if I did a long motorway journey my bumper and windscreen would be an insect graveyard… now it’s next to nothing.
We will take a large chunk of the planets life with us. I don’t think we can destroy it all however, the planet will get to intelligent life eventually.
I don’t think we can destroy it all
Oh, I’m sure we can engineer something to that end.
No. That’s simplistic and wrong. Huge swaths of the planet will remain nicely habitable. But large swaths won’t, and disease increase and economic failures will make things very terrible.
But this “all gonna die” stuff is dumb and wrong. Sorry.
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Once we have nations fighting for water resources (tied directly to food production) it wouldn’t take long before the entire population is at risk
Ontario’s great lakes have been threatened with receding volume, pollution, and mass algae blooms that show how fragile even that massive resource is
Ground water across the globe has been mass polluted and drained to nothing in large areas.
We are a lot more vulnerable than it seems
It won’t matter if a small area is still habitable. The resolution of 7 billion people trying to fit into a space that fits a fraction of the population will end the species.
It took less than 1% of the population of Europe moving around to nearly break the EU. Watch what happens when it’s 10 to 20% of everyone everywhere.
Will end the current age of civilization? Most definitely.
Will it end organized societies as we know them? Probably?
Will the human beings go extinct? Probably not. Its not crazy to think that we’d face a bottleneck of only a few hundred million humans or less. But there are people all across the economic and geographic spectrum who are prepping. The rich will survive at their polar fortresses. The poorer will survive underground, or at high altitudes.
It´s called climate change and this is just the beginning. Scientists have warned us for decades now but humanity chose to ignore that until it was too late. Now you can see the consequences of that fatal ignorance. Humanity is fucked thanks to the greedy people who own the industry and the corrupt politicians who never properly regulated them. Enjoy!
And please everyone keep in mind: Donald Trump Thinks Global Warming Will Only Lead to 'Slightly More Seafront Property
I mean, not as if 40C was unheard of in the Mediterranean?..
Climate change is real, but not sure how useful is thinking about it without carefully measuring your options.
When you pay more for a green alternative to something very much not green, you may be causing lots of bad things indirectly.
I mean, if a thing itself is 100% green energy\resource\process, then money you pay for it are maybe 20% green and 80% pretty much brown. So if it costs twice and you pay for that, you may be creating a demand for dirtier production just to soothe your conscience about global warming.
That’s simplifying life to a neanderthal level.
It’s a average temperature. Sure there have always been single days with extra high temperatures… but not every day for multiple weeks.
You’re just a moron
Finally instead of glueing together entities you don’t understand in text, as neural nets may do, you use the only argument available to your kind. I’m satisfied by this conversation finally.
That’s simplifying life to a neanderthal level
Is exactly what’s wrong with your argument. Your logic smells kinda…brown.
I think my logic is still sufficient, and your comment is still insufficient.
You see, “neanderthal” is a metaphor, it doesn’t mean an actual neanderthal-level person can argue with me.
In my case I’m using it as a hyperbolic simile to indicate that your “shouldn’t use green stuff because some might use brown stuff to make it” argument is simplistic to the point of being primitive and regressive.
It relies on a false assumption that progress can’t be achieved because anything that’s good for the planet is created by processes much worse than what’s currently destroying the planet.
Oh, I’ll write it even simpler.
What matters is how much brown stuff you spend total. So if you directly spend less brown stuff, replacing it with green stuff, but indirectly more brown stuff, then you are making things worse. Because the goal is a good total of carbon emissions or whatever else for the whole planet, not just for your own western country where the dirtier parts may not be done.
It’s not that I didn’t understand you the first time. It’s that you were and are wrong in a way typical of both paid and unpaid status quo apologists.
Ah. No, I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that spending more energy produced the “dirty” way is worse than spending less.
Though if somebody disagrees with this two times, trying again makes little sense.
I don’t see how much in common does the linked article have with this subject.
Your argument is clear. There’s an opportunity cost to Green.
What you’re missing is the momentum of green. A single solar panel in a sea of coal power plants is certainly dirtier than coal in the short term. For the exact reasons you outlined.
But you have 2 flaws in your logic.
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we aren’t in that situation right now and I’d like to understand why you think we are. As we become more green then green things result in less brown, so there’s a snowball effect you’re ignoring here. Furthermore that snowball effect has already begun!
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Renewable energy, like panels, result in brown during manufacturing and installation. Once they’re up they generate power for, on average, 25 years. The electricity-per-co2-ton is better than coal over 25 years.
- The indication of this is distorted by subsidies for green. And “we” here ignores most of the planet.
It’s good that it’s begun.
- Is it better than nuclear?
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40C is not 118F
It’s 48°C, not 40. The title is incorrect.
If you could read you would have noticed it says fluently 40C 104F and could reach 48C 118F. Two separate groups of numbers.
If you could read you would have noticed the title says “temperature tops 40C 118f”.
If you weren’t an asshole, you’d have seen someone mentioned that the title was incorrect. It’s since been fixed.
The world, especially US china EU, has such vertically entangled petro consumption, infrastructure, and maybe worst of all as far as making changes go, growth corporations feeding off it/us, well probably have rapid, vs slower and assimilable, collapse.
Hell today’s “homeless problem” will be a trivial joke relative to millions of people fleeing situations literally in-tolerable for countless reasons, probably soon enough – if this took place over 25 years it would be painful enough. If we get rapid migrations it’ll be war.
If it takes 100 or 200 years, we’ll still have war.
There is an argument to be had that many of the wars we’ve seen over the past 25 years, have already been at least in part rooted in access to water. Billions more will get impacted like that over the next century, with tens of millions of migrants a year, every year fleeing from both war and unhabitable conditions, for the next 100+ years.
We’ve barely seen the beginning of it.
I don’t know if you’ve realized it, but without help from some advanced alien species, we are already as good as gone. The entire world is controlled by the absolutely worst people, and there’s no indication that anything can be done to save us at this point. Climate disasters, AI, lies and deceit on a global scale, astronomical imbalance of wealth… folks, we’re already fucked.
My dipshit family in the UK are all right wingers (with the exception of a few member) and completely deny climate change. I sent them this article as well as the article about the water in Florida getting up to 100F…”Don’t be daft. We’re in a warming phase.” Ya….whatever THAT means you fucking chodes.
I was having a conversationg with some red necks a few years ago. They were all talking about winter’s not the same here anymore, above freezing half the winter, not as much snow, summer is weird is goes right through October now and we don’t really get an autumn anymore.
“Weather’s not like it used to be,” one of thems said, and I said, “yep the climate is changing.” They stared at me with their mouths open.
These retards are literally watching it happen with their own eyes and they still won’t believe it. It’s insane.
Because it’s “politicized.” I get so frustrated with this idiots that I give myself headaches from clinching my teeth.
The biggest problem with politics these days is there can’t be ANY overlap between the parties. They can’t agree on ANYTHING. If a democrat says “I like breathing oxygen,” a republican will say he prefers breathing something else. There’s so much that people in both parties agree on in principle, but they can never say it. I think the left is more willing to agree with the right, because the left is more principled, but a republican is simply incapable of telling someone on the left “you’re right and I agree with you.” They instead have to be contrarian about everything. Whatever the left says, never agree with it, and make a statement of complete opposition, no matter what. When the left starts supporting a war against Russia, the right starts supporting Russia. It’s sickening.
While it may be arrogant to insist it’s all mankind’s doing, it’s foolish to assume it isn’t.
My conservative family loves to use the arrogance argument. What I hear is that they don’t want to believe humans can change the climate, because they’re scared of humanity being responsible or accountable for their actions.
How is it arrogant to believe what every scientist says the data shows?
”Don’t be daft. We’re in a warming phase.”
Yeah, here’s what you tell them. Temperatures were at baseline when the industrial revolution began. That’s just a handful of generations. We’ve now seen an increase of, what 2 degrees C since then? I don’t know the exact number. The point is, this sort of increase is not present anywhere else in the geological record. It takes thousands of years for average global temperatures to naturally increase to a point like this one. There are literally no hard spikes–until the industrial revolution began. The only credible takeaway is that humans are the problem.
You’re right of course, but logical arguments aren’t the way with these people. It’s emotional at this point, and that is where you have to meet them.
The only way to win with these people is to not play
My housemate is like that, came up with some nonsense about how he saw a video the other day about how there was climate change happen when the Vikings were around or something so it’s not as clear cut as people think. And today, with it barely breaking 20 degrees in July, said half jokingly that we need more carbon. The shit summer here this year is fuel for his fire. Complete moron.
Don’t even waste your breath convincing idiots like that. They are too uninformed on too many topics to be worth investing the effort in. You’ve got a good shot at convincing people who are on the fence but culture warriors who rely on Steven Crowder for their talking points aren’t going to be convinced by anyone or anything.
I’m Italian myself. The issue with this heat is that it’s humid too, I live in the riviera and we’ve had constant 35-37°C weather with high humidity for a week now
What RH% were you reaching? In the UK we have been spared the high heat (for now, it will probably come later) but we had 70%+ and it’s not nice that high as everything feels damp.
I just spent a week in Sorrento (South West Italy), we could not handle the outdoor weather of 35-38C + 70-80% humidity for more than an hour tops.
