I wondered where this article got the idea that "half the planet" would die "in 26 years or less" with 3°C of warming. It appears to be a misreading of the table in https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... "Figure 12: Planetary solvency risk impact and likelihood definitions (illustrative)" qualified by "A risk impact matrix is a methodology for ranking potential impacts, not a prediction or
central scenario."
In particular, they rate ≥50% mortality as Extreme and also rate warming by 3°C or more by 2050 as Extreme (this is relevant for the colorful severity/likelihood grids that are the focus of the paper) and somebody appears to have made the incorrect connection that an Extreme climate would cause Extreme mortality, and also by the time the Extreme climate is reached and not afterwards. Elsewhere, the paper mentions that "We have not
shown an assessment for mortality in this illustration, as very
limited research has been carried out on the potential for
large-scale loss of life in relation to these interconnected risks on which to base an assessment."
Unfortunately, that makes the article title highly ironic.
It's quite striking to note how media coverage of climate change and pollution have gone down so much. I remember in the 90's it was very much in the popular mileu.
What's more we are living through an actual green revolution. Solar power and batteries have never been so cheap - and still promising to get cheaper and better with sodium ion batteries.
In the 90s it was something to deal with later. Now that it's something to deal with right now, of course they won't cover it. In a few decades they'll cover it again, but only to say how it's too late now.
Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.
Thermal systems are slow. On the planetary scale of pump and dump heat the lag is something like 30 years. So the change you’re experiencing today is the effect of what was exhausted in the 90s. What we’re getting in 2050 is already locked in.
Some reports indicate it is already to late for emission reduction, or even elimination, to halt the feedback effects that continue the trend. But it won't be too late for active climate engineering until the effects of the climate change prevent our ability to do that engineering.
The bigger factor is probably the global pandemic, economic degradation, looming nuclear winter, genocide, WW3, aliens, and singularity. Not to mention orange clowns. We have surpassed the Britney Spears controversy era. Unless the polar bears are going to invade DC and attack ICE, we might not hear much about the climate change until these other problems go away.
That is fundamentally the problem with whole thing. Vast majority of population on Earth is not ready for personal sacrifices needed. And if some government will get to around it, I am pretty sure they will be replaced and most things are rolled back.
My guess is that we somehow end up geoengineering it with even more debt...
I agree, because (and I'm being a bit flippant) I sure as hell am not giving up my gas stove while billionaires fly around in private jets and MAGA guys are coal-rolling in their F-250s...
It seems to me that carbon capture technology plus renewables and nuclear + dream energy (fission) will be the future but we're probably not going to go off of fossil fuels much, which will necessitate in part the need to suck this stuff out of the atmosphere.
Why would they be when they see the hypocrisy of the chattering classes? How many celebrities or billionaires have curtailed their own lifestyles while pitching for climate change? Has the number of luxury jets and superyatches gone up or down over time?
The average person may seem stupid but they are paying attention to the actions, and it all sounds like "I got mine, screw yours" to them.
Hypocrisy is really not as useful as people think. Imagine if some man, who beat his wife, made a career of talking about the important and harrowing issues of domestic abuse.
People would rightly scratch their heads at such an over-the-top hypocrite. But surely, the man would be correct: domestic abuse is an important issue. And imagine a response from the peanut gallery? "I'm not going to stop beating my _own_ wife until that hypocrite gets his comeuppance!"
And people in developing countries complain that "why should beef or jet vacations be taxed more, those Westerners got to enjoy it, and now when we want to enjoy it, it's suddenly bad?".
And we rich Westerners think it's sacrifice to have to drive an EV or pay more for beef...
at the end of the day 'personal changes' as a fix for climate change are just another lie big corporations fed us to make it feel like the onus was on a personal level.
the amount of co2 that industries pollute and that various regulation would be able to change is multiple orders of magnitude compared to regular personal responsibility.
This sounds right. An individual person can’t change a complex system that gives him everything they have, from plastic forks to gas cars. The society can get together and agree on things, but the society clearly just isn’t concerned enough. There is no solution or workaround to this, unless certain scientific discoveries get made that change the warming trends by sheer coincidence. They would have to coincide with popular demand, like more attractive electric cars, and new materials, or fusion energy that’s cheap. Or, perhaps, AGI decide it for us.
For the accumulation of wealth and power. This is the natural consequence of unregulated capitalist incentives. Do you think the corporations care about the individuals?
Personal changes against the grain or personal changes following the grain.
Imagine I want to be responsible by drinking soy milk but it's hidden in a corner of the supermarket.
Now imagine every supermarket prominently displays soy milk and cow milk is hidden in the corner. Seems easier to make the change, right? Many people will change automatically because they don't really care and just do what's easiest.
Well "climate change" as understood today wasn't really talked about much in the 90s, as I remember it. Some broad, apocalyptic concern about creeping temperatures and knock on effects over many decades.
But I do remember quite a bit about "pollution" and like general acute environmental issues. Smog in LA, the hole in the ozone, etc. Those were both more understandable and visible to your average person and more tractable. And there was the obvious hook about energy independence after the fairly recent (at that time) oil embargo and such.
The Green party (are they still around?) talked about more vague issues like ocean plastic and six pack wrappers on birds, but I don't think we made a ton of progress there, but then that was less consequential anyway.
I feel like we went down the worst timeline since then when it became very political and people burn gas for the hell of it, and others hate people who do so. Solar and nuclear (or hell even just solar) could give us clean, cheap energy abundance, but the people championing solar tend not to do it from the abundance perspective, but in tandem with cutting energy use which is a hard sell and not necessary anyway, in my opinion.
Are you asking for data to show there's reduced media coverage about climate change? If you look at the article there's a graph in there from Media Matters showing the decline. This isn't reddit, here you're expected to do more than read the headline ;)
I was reading somewhere that we are already fucked even if we were to completely halt greenhouse emissions today. Apparently we kickstarted some positive feedback loop (I think it was the thawing of the permafrost in Siberia/Canada) which releases enormous quantities of Methane and that with the higher temperatures we already reached we decreased Earth albedo as there is less snow/ice reflecting light into space.
I really hope that particular article was wrong, because the alternative is that we have to resort to geo engineering. Considering that the governments can't really coordinate in preventing this, I don't see them coordinate in fixing it, especially because the scale and costs of the "fixes" are astronomical.
While it's great that green energy is now economically feasible, the idea that there will quickly (say, in the next 50 years) be a "green transition" that eliminates the usage of carbon fuels is still highly dubious.
What we've seen is new renewable capacity carving out a tiny sliver in the energy mix, sometimes even being able to meet all new demand in the installation period, but we still have all the existing demand running on the old stack.
There's also the fact that global society is not a real time strategy game being managed by a well intentioned min-maxing actor driving compounding efficiency gains in resource usage. It's a free for all where everyone is paranoid that they'll be destroyed if they don't use every dirty trick they can (on a global geopolitical level), entrenched oligarchies permanently lobbying for their inefficient, destructive structures to continue (on a domestic economy level) and so on.
Which shows how badly the popular media cover hard news. "Social justice" is all the rage now thrown together with anything else that's exciting to watch on video.
Just in case you miss it: The author of the post, Adam McKay, "is the Academy Award-winning director of The Big Short, Vice, and Don’t Look Up and the founder of Yellow Dot Studios."
Sadly I think the only solution is to invest to build more energy infrastructure and more AI, so that in the future when the shit really hits the fan we have enough energy and assistance from AI to create a scalable technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere proactively.
In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening. This is one of those problems where the train is already running down the hill, and we need to engineer a way to catch it. We cannot stop it anymore.
I think us people do not have the capacity as societies to effectively anticipate and solve problems that we can see approaching but have not become catastrophic yet. We always act shortsightedly and ..hope for the best. Most of the people will just not vote/support anything that might bring them some minuscule pain. Even if we know by logic that the problem is coming, we tend to follow whomever will tell us that it's not a problem and base our hopes on him/her. Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.
It is very hopeful that renewables are being pursued and developed by China at least to some degree and have become economically attractive. That's the only feasible way to minimize the damage that's already been done.
It's not even at society scale IMO. How many times do people at a company deprioritize small-to-medium fixes on things that may/will become a problem later? Sometimes you have to wait until a problem gets "big enough" before you can get buy-in from colleagues to address it.
Of course details matter and what I mentioned above is not a universal truth. It is an often observed pattern though.
> Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.
My favorite counterexample is the ozone layer. When I was a kid, that was the Big Bad environmental concern. But we actually worked together on a global scale to fix it.
Broader climate change is a much bigger problem with stronger financial and political incentives, but in principle we've done it before.
The people who deny climate change have won, and accepted the [now] inevitable downfall of humanity as we know it. They are enriching themselves to have the financial power to give them the personal power to adapt to climate change. The rest can rot in hell. In essence, they're able to build their own Arc of Noah, and you and 99,999999% of everyone else (nevermind all the animals) aren't on the guest list.
In order to not cause chaos, they lie (by denying climate change, sowing FUD) or ensure the issue isn't mentioned/covered (by owning media, self-censorship). "Keep calm, everything is going extremely well."
I believe Earth isn't badly off with a lot less humans, I just don't like the distribution of survivorship isn't going to be random. Survivorship bias is going to contain heroic stories, but in the end a lot of people without power/money are going to take the shortest straw. And, that wasn't necessary.
The track Extrawelt - Phoebe has an excellent quote on the matter.
Our economy is an abstract intangible system which requires infinite growth and debt issuance, this in reality requires more caloric expenditure and resource consumption. Thermodynamically this is pretty bad news. At one point the see-saw is gonna tip the other way, then it might cool off for a spell.
Okay great. We’re out of time. Fine, we get it. But the problem with this article, and many other similar articles, is it seems like it’s just designed to scare the shit out of us.
No call to action, no recommendations in what to do about it. It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible.
As there in-lies the problem, and it makes me furious. The onus to engineer our way out of a climate catastrophe is not on the regular people. The onus is on the people who engineered is into this problem. Government, industry, politicians, scientists, literal engineers.
If this is really as urgent they say it is, then why aren’t they acting faster to retool our infrastructure? Joe Schmoe doesn’t have the ability to build more electric cars. He can’t go out and build more nuclear power plants, or build solar farms.
The problem here is every time you read an article like this you’re left feeling guilty. We’re told we’re the problem. Joe Rogan (and others) are the problem. Not the people who actually got us into this situation. The energy here is so misguided. It’s infuriating.
I love you Adam McKay and your art, but us normal folks are just living life, with the tools & systems that were engineered for us by other people. Stop telling us we’re the problem.
I don't see him as blaming us regular people. Just liars (which he takes pains to enumerate thoroughly). Of course most of us are just living our lives. But sometimes even us normal folk have an opportunity, when we bump into one of these liars or have a conversation about one, and we can at least remind folks this is still a problem.
The main thrust of the article is that the attention to the uncomfortable issue of climate change has been replaced with noise about everything else and comfortable lies about things being fine, and that the drop in attention correlates strongly with climate change worsening as such making the case that even just bringing more attention back to the issue could help prevent it.
This is a tough read. I'm not sure who it's aimed at, since the article mentions only 14% of Americans (surely one of the most climate denying countries) don't believe climate change is real. It's alarmist in a way that is whistlecalling but not in a useful way.
It also lies with graphs in a way that I just hate -- we have surface temperature charts that show growth trends going all the way back to ... 2024. Please. This page from wikipedia shows a much longer range with a lot more context: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature..., and reasonable qualifiers on the methods used to go back.
Useful proposals always welcomed, ideally ones that in a game theoretic sense do not reward defection and are realistic about the economics of releasing more CO2 as part of power production, but this essay isn't it.
At this point I’m not sure what to do about it. I already live a low-ish carbon life. I barely ever fly. Only drive when I need to. Try and use items that are non-plastic where feasible. I don’t buy extra clothes.
It’s at the point where I wish it were solvable, but I don’t believe it is, so I can’t afford to think about it. Maybe people better than me can, and good luck to them.
It's not at all about individual action. This scale of problem requires policy intervention and investment at national levels, and inter-governmental coordination internationally.
The big, meaningful wins come from things like stopping the use of coal, not signing-off on new oil and gas exploration, tax-incentives and disincentives, grid work, fining polluters.
We instinctively frame this as an individual problem, the cynic might say we've been encouraged to, but the reality is that whether or not you fly this summer has precisely dick-all impact globally. It's the actions of our governments that count.
> It's not at all about individual action. This scale of problem requires policy intervention and investment at national levels, and inter-governmental coordination internationally.
It is all about individual action. And then the emergence from that to what amounts to the multi-pronged solutions that are needed to address a wicked problem. Like create the "big meaningful wins" you mention. There is no mailbox where you drop off "stop the use of coal", and it happens, neither is there a magic button. A complicating factor is that we are not able to see how our small individual actions contribute to solving the wicked problems, and we are not able to coordinate them at scale.
At least in theory, our governments are voted in place exactly by us. Trump voters loved his ideas and he's implementing them now, yay success. Also industrial pollution is fueled by our buying habits just as well - if nobody would order stuff brought by ship from overseas, well, we wouldn't have many of those huge(ly) polluting ships around. So I wouldn't leave out the personal responsibility here: we make decisions every day, and giving up paper straws is only the most insignificant one.
It's about taking a holistic view of the situation as well. Shipping is a big producer world wide, but stopping it entirely barely makes a dent. A lot more is industry, appliances, heating.
And those boats make a lot less of an impact than all those trucks driving everything across land.
Actually if that can bring up your morale, just replacing coal power plants with nuclear (or other 24x7 clean energy source) would keep up at the 1.5°C objective.
Most people dont know covid hasnt disappeared. It keeps evolving and there are strains out there still causing issues. But thanks to the attention economy dynamics, all sorts of random people were acting like they were virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists at its peak. They have all disappeared ie shifted focus to whatever else. Meanwhile the ecosystem and infra dedicated to keep track of this stuff chuggs along keeping the lights on. All am saying is there is no reason to keep everyone in a freaked out state.
Political change is needed to achieve any of this. Changing your individual behavior or even the individual behavior of everyone you know – while certainly not wrong! – won’t solve this.
This is like trying to abolish slavery in 19th century US by not owning slaves and trying your very best to not buy anything that involves slave labor … laudable, but not a way to abolish slavery.
Exactly! Politics try to appease the mass. If the mass would be willing to put climate change first we would have other policies, instead we follow the dark visions of lunatic billionaires
So we should not own pets, because the real polluters (companies) are lobbying to keep polluting? What bothers me so much about this idea of individual responsibility is that we get blamed for a choice we couldn't possibly make. It is up to the people in power to start making change, and it is important that people vote and educate themselves, but IMO this idea of individual responsibility for societal problems like climate change is ridiculous and only leads to inaction! We need to hold companies accountable, and we need to hold governments accountable. Own a dog, enjoy your life!
Collapsing human-optimum climate, a temporary state Earth entered about 15 thousand years ago and made modern civilization possible.
The truly sad thing about it all is not the damage to some abstract "environment". The fact remains that we had an Eden-like planet for a few thousand years and completely and utterly wrecked it to maximize the "wealth" of a few generations of elites.
Limiting temperature change by every additional 0.1°C is still worthwhile from a human welfare perspective.
In that sense it is never to late. We can always do something to limit the damage. It’s just that it gets harder and harder and some damage becomes irreversible at a certain point.
Had we done more 25 years ago it would all have been cheaper, easier and led to less damage overall. That doesn’t mean doing something now is suddenly not worth it.
in some way i guess thats always been an issue with the messaging on climate change and the issue in general.
its always a problem and its slow moving enough and cumulative enough that it will always be better to fix it sooner but the real dangers are many years off.
when the jet stream collapses overnight then we'll be forced to deal with it
I hate when such (great) articles end with "we have a lot to do". Please give at least a couple of examples of a constructive action. "Write to your government", "Support this NGO". Do not loose the moment of attention you have just won.
In this case, do the things that it says are no use focusing on. Change your individual behavior to align with the position you profess to have taken about whether or not climate change is a serious and urgent problem.
I wondered where this article got the idea that "half the planet" would die "in 26 years or less" with 3°C of warming. It appears to be a misreading of the table in https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... "Figure 12: Planetary solvency risk impact and likelihood definitions (illustrative)" qualified by "A risk impact matrix is a methodology for ranking potential impacts, not a prediction or central scenario."
In particular, they rate ≥50% mortality as Extreme and also rate warming by 3°C or more by 2050 as Extreme (this is relevant for the colorful severity/likelihood grids that are the focus of the paper) and somebody appears to have made the incorrect connection that an Extreme climate would cause Extreme mortality, and also by the time the Extreme climate is reached and not afterwards. Elsewhere, the paper mentions that "We have not shown an assessment for mortality in this illustration, as very limited research has been carried out on the potential for large-scale loss of life in relation to these interconnected risks on which to base an assessment."
Unfortunately, that makes the article title highly ironic.
It's quite striking to note how media coverage of climate change and pollution have gone down so much. I remember in the 90's it was very much in the popular mileu.
What's more we are living through an actual green revolution. Solar power and batteries have never been so cheap - and still promising to get cheaper and better with sodium ion batteries.
In the 90s it was something to deal with later. Now that it's something to deal with right now, of course they won't cover it. In a few decades they'll cover it again, but only to say how it's too late now.
Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.
>Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.
Yea, they figured it just now, in the 2010s and 20s. During the 90's the thought just didn't occur to them...Makes complete sense.
Nothing discredits an idea so much like the proponents of it being total idiots.
Why would it be too late?
Thermal systems are slow. On the planetary scale of pump and dump heat the lag is something like 30 years. So the change you’re experiencing today is the effect of what was exhausted in the 90s. What we’re getting in 2050 is already locked in.
Some reports indicate it is already to late for emission reduction, or even elimination, to halt the feedback effects that continue the trend. But it won't be too late for active climate engineering until the effects of the climate change prevent our ability to do that engineering.
It'll already be summer temperatures in winter and most life will have died off
And government.
The bigger factor is probably the global pandemic, economic degradation, looming nuclear winter, genocide, WW3, aliens, and singularity. Not to mention orange clowns. We have surpassed the Britney Spears controversy era. Unless the polar bears are going to invade DC and attack ICE, we might not hear much about the climate change until these other problems go away.
And let’s also not forget, we all want the climate crises fixed, but nobody is willing to personally make any changes to their lifestyle!
All parties are incentivized against fixing this problem.
That is fundamentally the problem with whole thing. Vast majority of population on Earth is not ready for personal sacrifices needed. And if some government will get to around it, I am pretty sure they will be replaced and most things are rolled back.
My guess is that we somehow end up geoengineering it with even more debt...
The solution will have to come from growth and technical innovations, not personal sacrifice.
I agree, because (and I'm being a bit flippant) I sure as hell am not giving up my gas stove while billionaires fly around in private jets and MAGA guys are coal-rolling in their F-250s...
It seems to me that carbon capture technology plus renewables and nuclear + dream energy (fission) will be the future but we're probably not going to go off of fossil fuels much, which will necessitate in part the need to suck this stuff out of the atmosphere.
Why would they be when they see the hypocrisy of the chattering classes? How many celebrities or billionaires have curtailed their own lifestyles while pitching for climate change? Has the number of luxury jets and superyatches gone up or down over time?
The average person may seem stupid but they are paying attention to the actions, and it all sounds like "I got mine, screw yours" to them.
Hypocrisy is really not as useful as people think. Imagine if some man, who beat his wife, made a career of talking about the important and harrowing issues of domestic abuse.
People would rightly scratch their heads at such an over-the-top hypocrite. But surely, the man would be correct: domestic abuse is an important issue. And imagine a response from the peanut gallery? "I'm not going to stop beating my _own_ wife until that hypocrite gets his comeuppance!"
Standard tragedy of the commons behavior...
And people in developing countries complain that "why should beef or jet vacations be taxed more, those Westerners got to enjoy it, and now when we want to enjoy it, it's suddenly bad?".
And we rich Westerners think it's sacrifice to have to drive an EV or pay more for beef...
What have luxury jets and superyachts got to do with the chattering classes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattering_classes
Gas stoves and ordinary jets do.
at the end of the day 'personal changes' as a fix for climate change are just another lie big corporations fed us to make it feel like the onus was on a personal level.
the amount of co2 that industries pollute and that various regulation would be able to change is multiple orders of magnitude compared to regular personal responsibility.
This sounds right. An individual person can’t change a complex system that gives him everything they have, from plastic forks to gas cars. The society can get together and agree on things, but the society clearly just isn’t concerned enough. There is no solution or workaround to this, unless certain scientific discoveries get made that change the warming trends by sheer coincidence. They would have to coincide with popular demand, like more attractive electric cars, and new materials, or fusion energy that’s cheap. Or, perhaps, AGI decide it for us.
Who do these corporations pollute for? Isn't it for individuals?
Who benefits from a corporation? Is it the customers, the workers or the owners?
In many cases, it's all three.
For the accumulation of wealth and power. This is the natural consequence of unregulated capitalist incentives. Do you think the corporations care about the individuals?
"The amount[...] that industries pollute" is just "personal changes" with more steps.
Personal changes against the grain or personal changes following the grain.
Imagine I want to be responsible by drinking soy milk but it's hidden in a corner of the supermarket.
Now imagine every supermarket prominently displays soy milk and cow milk is hidden in the corner. Seems easier to make the change, right? Many people will change automatically because they don't really care and just do what's easiest.
Changes to those corporations will obviously have downstream effects that voters will largely not tolerate.
I mean, in the real world, people will just vote out politicians who raise their gas prices.
Doesn't seem to have worked this time.
Well "climate change" as understood today wasn't really talked about much in the 90s, as I remember it. Some broad, apocalyptic concern about creeping temperatures and knock on effects over many decades.
But I do remember quite a bit about "pollution" and like general acute environmental issues. Smog in LA, the hole in the ozone, etc. Those were both more understandable and visible to your average person and more tractable. And there was the obvious hook about energy independence after the fairly recent (at that time) oil embargo and such.
The Green party (are they still around?) talked about more vague issues like ocean plastic and six pack wrappers on birds, but I don't think we made a ton of progress there, but then that was less consequential anyway.
I feel like we went down the worst timeline since then when it became very political and people burn gas for the hell of it, and others hate people who do so. Solar and nuclear (or hell even just solar) could give us clean, cheap energy abundance, but the people championing solar tend not to do it from the abundance perspective, but in tandem with cutting energy use which is a hard sell and not necessary anyway, in my opinion.
This isn't reddit. If you have data that supports this assertion, show it.
Are you asking for data to show there's reduced media coverage about climate change? If you look at the article there's a graph in there from Media Matters showing the decline. This isn't reddit, here you're expected to do more than read the headline ;)
I was reading somewhere that we are already fucked even if we were to completely halt greenhouse emissions today. Apparently we kickstarted some positive feedback loop (I think it was the thawing of the permafrost in Siberia/Canada) which releases enormous quantities of Methane and that with the higher temperatures we already reached we decreased Earth albedo as there is less snow/ice reflecting light into space.
I really hope that particular article was wrong, because the alternative is that we have to resort to geo engineering. Considering that the governments can't really coordinate in preventing this, I don't see them coordinate in fixing it, especially because the scale and costs of the "fixes" are astronomical.
There's an old joke that goes about like:
How do you solve Global Warming? Nuclear Winter ...
I really hope this is not how we end up geo-engineering our way out of Climate change.
While it's great that green energy is now economically feasible, the idea that there will quickly (say, in the next 50 years) be a "green transition" that eliminates the usage of carbon fuels is still highly dubious.
What we've seen is new renewable capacity carving out a tiny sliver in the energy mix, sometimes even being able to meet all new demand in the installation period, but we still have all the existing demand running on the old stack.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
This book talks about this: https://www.amazon.com/More-All-Consuming-History-Energy/dp/...
There's also the fact that global society is not a real time strategy game being managed by a well intentioned min-maxing actor driving compounding efficiency gains in resource usage. It's a free for all where everyone is paranoid that they'll be destroyed if they don't use every dirty trick they can (on a global geopolitical level), entrenched oligarchies permanently lobbying for their inefficient, destructive structures to continue (on a domestic economy level) and so on.
It's not looking good overall.
Until this administration which is actively canceling wind projects with taxpayer money.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208314
Which shows how badly the popular media cover hard news. "Social justice" is all the rage now thrown together with anything else that's exciting to watch on video.
What does this even mean?
Are you talking about US media?
Seems like a delusion to me. Social justice is yet another banned topic under conservative corporate ownership.
Quick headline check:
- Trump claims to have invented a word that exists
- “Burger King’s New Whopper Strikes a Blow in Fast Food Wars”
- “US strikes $1.2bn deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects” (is this a social justice topic?)
- Attorney General confirmation political reporting
- school shooting reporting (is this social justice??)
Your balcony solar is a drop in the ocean of CO2 that USA, China and India keep spewing out.
https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025
Just in case you miss it: The author of the post, Adam McKay, "is the Academy Award-winning director of The Big Short, Vice, and Don’t Look Up and the founder of Yellow Dot Studios."
Eight excruciating paragraphs before the author stops rambling and gets to their thesis. So much fluff.
This. Maybe I am impatient but I was just scrolling through the first half.
I think its an article about gourds? With some climate change opinions in the middle.
The climate change part raises some good points, but why gourds?
Cast away the gourd! Follow the shoe!
Don't Look Up
Sadly I think the only solution is to invest to build more energy infrastructure and more AI, so that in the future when the shit really hits the fan we have enough energy and assistance from AI to create a scalable technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere proactively.
In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening. This is one of those problems where the train is already running down the hill, and we need to engineer a way to catch it. We cannot stop it anymore.
I think us people do not have the capacity as societies to effectively anticipate and solve problems that we can see approaching but have not become catastrophic yet. We always act shortsightedly and ..hope for the best. Most of the people will just not vote/support anything that might bring them some minuscule pain. Even if we know by logic that the problem is coming, we tend to follow whomever will tell us that it's not a problem and base our hopes on him/her. Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.
It is very hopeful that renewables are being pursued and developed by China at least to some degree and have become economically attractive. That's the only feasible way to minimize the damage that's already been done.
It's not even at society scale IMO. How many times do people at a company deprioritize small-to-medium fixes on things that may/will become a problem later? Sometimes you have to wait until a problem gets "big enough" before you can get buy-in from colleagues to address it.
Of course details matter and what I mentioned above is not a universal truth. It is an often observed pattern though.
> Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.
My favorite counterexample is the ozone layer. When I was a kid, that was the Big Bad environmental concern. But we actually worked together on a global scale to fix it.
Broader climate change is a much bigger problem with stronger financial and political incentives, but in principle we've done it before.
The people who deny climate change have won, and accepted the [now] inevitable downfall of humanity as we know it. They are enriching themselves to have the financial power to give them the personal power to adapt to climate change. The rest can rot in hell. In essence, they're able to build their own Arc of Noah, and you and 99,999999% of everyone else (nevermind all the animals) aren't on the guest list.
In order to not cause chaos, they lie (by denying climate change, sowing FUD) or ensure the issue isn't mentioned/covered (by owning media, self-censorship). "Keep calm, everything is going extremely well."
I believe Earth isn't badly off with a lot less humans, I just don't like the distribution of survivorship isn't going to be random. Survivorship bias is going to contain heroic stories, but in the end a lot of people without power/money are going to take the shortest straw. And, that wasn't necessary.
The track Extrawelt - Phoebe has an excellent quote on the matter.
Our economy is an abstract intangible system which requires infinite growth and debt issuance, this in reality requires more caloric expenditure and resource consumption. Thermodynamically this is pretty bad news. At one point the see-saw is gonna tip the other way, then it might cool off for a spell.
Okay great. We’re out of time. Fine, we get it. But the problem with this article, and many other similar articles, is it seems like it’s just designed to scare the shit out of us.
No call to action, no recommendations in what to do about it. It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible.
As there in-lies the problem, and it makes me furious. The onus to engineer our way out of a climate catastrophe is not on the regular people. The onus is on the people who engineered is into this problem. Government, industry, politicians, scientists, literal engineers.
If this is really as urgent they say it is, then why aren’t they acting faster to retool our infrastructure? Joe Schmoe doesn’t have the ability to build more electric cars. He can’t go out and build more nuclear power plants, or build solar farms.
The problem here is every time you read an article like this you’re left feeling guilty. We’re told we’re the problem. Joe Rogan (and others) are the problem. Not the people who actually got us into this situation. The energy here is so misguided. It’s infuriating.
I love you Adam McKay and your art, but us normal folks are just living life, with the tools & systems that were engineered for us by other people. Stop telling us we’re the problem.
I don't see him as blaming us regular people. Just liars (which he takes pains to enumerate thoroughly). Of course most of us are just living our lives. But sometimes even us normal folk have an opportunity, when we bump into one of these liars or have a conversation about one, and we can at least remind folks this is still a problem.
The main thrust of the article is that the attention to the uncomfortable issue of climate change has been replaced with noise about everything else and comfortable lies about things being fine, and that the drop in attention correlates strongly with climate change worsening as such making the case that even just bringing more attention back to the issue could help prevent it.
This is a tough read. I'm not sure who it's aimed at, since the article mentions only 14% of Americans (surely one of the most climate denying countries) don't believe climate change is real. It's alarmist in a way that is whistlecalling but not in a useful way.
It also lies with graphs in a way that I just hate -- we have surface temperature charts that show growth trends going all the way back to ... 2024. Please. This page from wikipedia shows a much longer range with a lot more context: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature..., and reasonable qualifiers on the methods used to go back.
Useful proposals always welcomed, ideally ones that in a game theoretic sense do not reward defection and are realistic about the economics of releasing more CO2 as part of power production, but this essay isn't it.
I skimmed over half way through and they were still talking about gourds.
At this point I’m not sure what to do about it. I already live a low-ish carbon life. I barely ever fly. Only drive when I need to. Try and use items that are non-plastic where feasible. I don’t buy extra clothes.
It’s at the point where I wish it were solvable, but I don’t believe it is, so I can’t afford to think about it. Maybe people better than me can, and good luck to them.
It's not at all about individual action. This scale of problem requires policy intervention and investment at national levels, and inter-governmental coordination internationally.
The big, meaningful wins come from things like stopping the use of coal, not signing-off on new oil and gas exploration, tax-incentives and disincentives, grid work, fining polluters.
We instinctively frame this as an individual problem, the cynic might say we've been encouraged to, but the reality is that whether or not you fly this summer has precisely dick-all impact globally. It's the actions of our governments that count.
> It's not at all about individual action. This scale of problem requires policy intervention and investment at national levels, and inter-governmental coordination internationally.
It is all about individual action. And then the emergence from that to what amounts to the multi-pronged solutions that are needed to address a wicked problem. Like create the "big meaningful wins" you mention. There is no mailbox where you drop off "stop the use of coal", and it happens, neither is there a magic button. A complicating factor is that we are not able to see how our small individual actions contribute to solving the wicked problems, and we are not able to coordinate them at scale.
At least in theory, our governments are voted in place exactly by us. Trump voters loved his ideas and he's implementing them now, yay success. Also industrial pollution is fueled by our buying habits just as well - if nobody would order stuff brought by ship from overseas, well, we wouldn't have many of those huge(ly) polluting ships around. So I wouldn't leave out the personal responsibility here: we make decisions every day, and giving up paper straws is only the most insignificant one.
It's about taking a holistic view of the situation as well. Shipping is a big producer world wide, but stopping it entirely barely makes a dent. A lot more is industry, appliances, heating.
And those boats make a lot less of an impact than all those trucks driving everything across land.
Wise choices are needed.
did our buying habits force AI into everything?
Actually if that can bring up your morale, just replacing coal power plants with nuclear (or other 24x7 clean energy source) would keep up at the 1.5°C objective.
Lot of info overload going on.
Most people dont know covid hasnt disappeared. It keeps evolving and there are strains out there still causing issues. But thanks to the attention economy dynamics, all sorts of random people were acting like they were virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists at its peak. They have all disappeared ie shifted focus to whatever else. Meanwhile the ecosystem and infra dedicated to keep track of this stuff chuggs along keeping the lights on. All am saying is there is no reason to keep everyone in a freaked out state.
I do all those things freely, and that offsets your carefulness. But I don’t/won’t have kids, so I’m not even a drop in the bucket.
Maybe convince your relatives to do the same?
That’s pointless.
Political change is needed to achieve any of this. Changing your individual behavior or even the individual behavior of everyone you know – while certainly not wrong! – won’t solve this.
This is like trying to abolish slavery in 19th century US by not owning slaves and trying your very best to not buy anything that involves slave labor … laudable, but not a way to abolish slavery.
Isn't political change brought about by collective changes in behaviors of an individual and of those around them?
Exactly! Politics try to appease the mass. If the mass would be willing to put climate change first we would have other policies, instead we follow the dark visions of lunatic billionaires
Don't have a pet cat or dog.
Owning an unnecessary carnivorous animal is rather bad news from a CO2 perspective. A dog can be responsible for higher CO2 emissions than a car.
https://impact.ed.ac.uk/research/climate-environmental-crisi...
https://www.zerosmart.co.uk/post/the-average-carbon-footprin...
(Que outrage from pet owners and people suggesting I'm a crazy vegan.... I'm most certainly not vegan or veggie!)
So we should not own pets, because the real polluters (companies) are lobbying to keep polluting? What bothers me so much about this idea of individual responsibility is that we get blamed for a choice we couldn't possibly make. It is up to the people in power to start making change, and it is important that people vote and educate themselves, but IMO this idea of individual responsibility for societal problems like climate change is ridiculous and only leads to inaction! We need to hold companies accountable, and we need to hold governments accountable. Own a dog, enjoy your life!
Not "collapsing the climate"
Collapsing human-optimum climate, a temporary state Earth entered about 15 thousand years ago and made modern civilization possible.
The truly sad thing about it all is not the damage to some abstract "environment". The fact remains that we had an Eden-like planet for a few thousand years and completely and utterly wrecked it to maximize the "wealth" of a few generations of elites.
> This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change... we have more time.”
This time we have no more time but 25 years ago when we had no more time it was true?
Or we've never had more time?
Limiting temperature change by every additional 0.1°C is still worthwhile from a human welfare perspective.
In that sense it is never to late. We can always do something to limit the damage. It’s just that it gets harder and harder and some damage becomes irreversible at a certain point.
Had we done more 25 years ago it would all have been cheaper, easier and led to less damage overall. That doesn’t mean doing something now is suddenly not worth it.
I suppose millions can die in slightly more comfort.
in some way i guess thats always been an issue with the messaging on climate change and the issue in general.
its always a problem and its slow moving enough and cumulative enough that it will always be better to fix it sooner but the real dangers are many years off.
when the jet stream collapses overnight then we'll be forced to deal with it
Are we ready to have a discussion about seeding the upper atmosphere with SO2 yet?
Can we say for certain that doing so would not have an unintended side effect, given how complex the biodome is? If not, then likely no.
One day the calculation is going to be "do nothing and cook ourselves to death" vs. "Put SO2 in the atmosphere and see what happens next".
If the SO2 brings about destruction sooner, I'm of the camp that "well, we were destined for death anyway...".
I hate when such (great) articles end with "we have a lot to do". Please give at least a couple of examples of a constructive action. "Write to your government", "Support this NGO". Do not loose the moment of attention you have just won.
Vote. It's literally the best thing you can do, apart from going into politics yourself
In this case, do the things that it says are no use focusing on. Change your individual behavior to align with the position you profess to have taken about whether or not climate change is a serious and urgent problem.
Just think of all the good NGOs have done