How to say Marx was right without saying “Marx was right”.
1950’s oil execs funded studies that show how they will kill the planet if they don’t stop, transition to something else, hell they had enough fore warning they could have R&D’d solar and monopolize the tech, but NO! They needed to make faster money faster and stopping yourself from killing the human race isn’t THAT important, and they knew they’d be dead by now.
They might have been able to monopolize SOME of the tech, but they knew they could never own access to the sun. But yeah, they knew that they were incinerating us for decades. Which makes it premeditated murder in my books.
Thanks to big corporations effectively owning governments and big politicians the world over, things aren’t bound to get better anytime soon, because “the economy”. Fuck that shit
And thank the Saudis too. Guess where the previous conference on phasing out fossil fuel, but agreed to slow down the process, was held.
All that’s left is to make the rich suffer.
“The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”
~Utah Phillips
Inb4 some pedant quibbles that “the planet itself is not dying.” Yeah, but we and our fellow creatures are. It should be understood that is what Mr. Phillips meant.
Let’s be clear about something; climate scientists almost universally agree that there is no such thing as “winning” or “losing” the fight against climate change (Suzuki, for the record, is a zoologist, not a climate scientist). This isn’t a game, there’s no referee, and no one gets a trophy at the end.
The battle against climate change is about mitigating harm. The worse we do, the more harm there will be. But there is never a point where it is “too late”. The car is going to crash, but the sooner you hit the brakes, the less damaging the impact will be. Everything we do to push the needle will save lives. There is never a point where we get to throw up our hands and succumb to the comforting fantasy that it’s “too late” to change anything.
I have a lot of respect for Suzuki, and I don’t blame him for feeling defeated with everything that’s happening, but spreading this kind of message is, dangerous, damaging, and flies entirely in the face of the science.
Sort of? I don’t think he mentioned tipping points anywhere in there, it was pretty non-specific and ranty, but if we’ve passed a tipping point it becomes less a matter of applying a brake and more of actively causing massive climate change in the other direction. Failing that, the warming trend and other shifts will stop when the Earth reaches a new balance and no sooner.
Nobody really knows where those tipping points are. The Paris thresholds were our expert’s best guesses for a “safe” amount of warming.
Even if we do pass some kind of “tipping point” (and you need to understand that every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people’s attention to the problem), we can still mitigate the damage. There is never a point where fighting climate change becomes worthless. The less we do now, the greater the damage will be in the future. That’s all there is to it. Tipping points are just a way of illustrating that.
every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people’s attention to the problem
That is completely, utterly wrong. Climate scientists are talking about the physical concept of the tipping point, which is observed in nature and also comes out of their models. In climate, it’s the point at which reversing a change that originally happened over decades would take thousands of years. For example, this has been the huge concern with the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which plays a large role in the climate of western Europe: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2791639/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation
Especially read the sections about Stability and vulnerability, Effects of an AMOC slowdown, and Effects of an AMOC shutdown.
My point is, tipping points are absolutely not an arbitrary thing. They are very solid predictions based on the physics of the climate. We don’t necessarily understand exactly how close we are, even though we’re observing some effects of being close to them, but the impacts of crossing them will make climate change even worse and hence the alarm.
Edit: If anyone reads these links and your eyes glaze over and you don’t understand of word of what’s written, then you need the humility to listen and accept what climate scientists have been trying to tell you. Some of the smartest people on the planet have been working on this for decades.
If that’s what we’re meaning when we talk about “tipping points”, yes, they exist. But as you yourself said, “We don’t necessarily understand exactly how close we are.” The idea that passing some arbitrary line like “1.5 degrees” is a point of no return is unscientific nonsense, and that’s what the vast majority of people mean when they say “tipping points.”
And the point is, none of that changes the need to keep working towards improvement. Every fraction of a degree less the planet heats will make a difference. Even as monumental climate changes occur, those changes can be lessened, their impact reduced, by any amount that we decarbonise the atmosphere.
If you’re under the impression that I’m arguing against climate change being real in any way shape or form, or that I’m arguing against it being utterly catastrophic, you’ve missed my point so badly that you might as well be reading it in a different language. My point is very, very simple; there is never a point where we get to give up.
No matter what happens, every effort to reduce the damage to our climate will save lives. Things can always be worse, and because things can always be worse it ontologically follows that things can always be better, even when the definition of "better’ is “fewer people die.”
The fight isn’t lost or won. Get those concepts out of your mind. Suzuki - as brilliant as he may be - is an idiot for invoking them like this. He’s speaking about a very limited, very specific piece of the fight, but he should have understood that the public would take his words entirely out of context. The people who want to poison and destroy our planet for profit are, right now, actively pushing the propaganda that the battle against climate change is over. They are wrong, and they are lying. The battle against climate change is a battle to reduce harm, and you can always reduce harm, now matter how great the scale of the eventual harm may be.
I think it helps to look at other problems caused by fossil fuel use. Higher CO2 concentrations make breathing air worse. Ocean acidification kills fish etc.
I think the bigger impact is thinking about changing weather patterns long term leading to new and larger deserts in the centres of continents and regular, massive storms on the coasts. That’s a changing climate beyond “everybody is a few degrees hotter” that is implied by global warming. CO2 isn’t going to effect breathing, but does cause acidification.
Back before George W Bush directed NASA to call it climate change, it was called global warming, and you can definitely win against that - by stopping the earth from warming. That’s unwinnable due to feedback loops that have now begun.
Does not remotely address my point. We can always - always - work to reduce the harm caused by climate change.
The point where the harm could be reduced to “none” is decades past us. If that’s the point where you give up then fuck off. Climate change is actively causing harm as we speak, and it is still worth fighting. We can still make life better for ourselves and future generations.
The notion that climate change is some kind of runaway engine that will continue amok without any further human input is nonsense. Yes, I’m aware of ideas like “Permafrost methane bombs” and I’ve also done enough research to be aware that only a small fringe of climate scientists actually support those ideas. They’re flashy and exciting and get big press, but they are not widely accepted climate science.
What climate science shows is that the climate actually responds faster to reductions in CO2 than our older models predicted. That means that debacarbonization can have real and meaningful positive impacts beyond what we previously thought possible.
There is real damage already done, and there is damage that we cannot undo, but there is never a point where the problem goes beyond our input. The climate fight is always worth fighting.
Has been for ages. It’s now question of how bad, and we are still making it worse.
And we’re gonna increasingly train more AI, mine more crypto, open more coal mines, industrially kill more animals, fight more wars.
I’m sick of this WE, im not a billionaire pumping more Co2 per day with my yacht fleet than a town of people do in their life. I’m sick of being blamed for this shit, when all my conservation is undone in a minute by a corporation. I refuse to take equal blame any longer
Good point. I try my best, but even if like 90 % of the population tried harder, it would barely offset the billionaire companies killing our planet.
They’re the problem, always has been that way.
I think it’s time to stop them.
The best we can do for the planet is toss a few billionaires into a volcano as a sacrifice to earth
Now that’s some carbon sequestration
This simply isn’t correct. While the billionaires yacht fleet and jet setting make them have insane carbon footprints individually, it is their business practices that actually register in terms of contributing significant chunks of the carbon budget for humanity. Bezo’s jets and yachts pale in comparison to Amazons delivery fleet and manufacturing all that junk. It’s counterproductive to focus on their personal emissions, when it’s the interaction of their businesses, government, and consumers that are burning the earth. We have 2 levers on that problem.
You’re right. I was thinking more about the individuals responsible capture and refining of fossil fuels.
But the pretty ubiquitous use of Amazon delivery does greatly contribute a lot. Didn’t really think about it in that aspect. Thanks for pointing that out.
Well, one way in which we can help fight against climate change is by not eating meat or dairy products.
For anyone curious about the subject, there’s some good science backing that up, though the links I’m providing are lazy DDG searches, so if anyone wants to do it, they can probably find better sources out there with more information.
Going vegan, or at least mostly vegan, is the way to go. Can start with going vegetarian and at least swapping out meat sources. Alternative vegan protein sources
With that being said, I do not practice what I preach. I should, though.
The actual problem is democratic oligarchism/zionism/neocon warmongering/US colonialism. Protecting establishment is easily supported when higher priorities than human sustainability can be manufactured. The more miserable you are made, the less you care about “higher level Maslow hierarchy needs” at political level.
The best way to reduce all the excess manufacturing for livestock is by not buying it their products. If it’s all about ROI for them, give them a reason to reduce their manufacturing with your purchasing power.
The best way to reduce all the excess manufacturing for livestock is by not buying it their products.
has that ever worked?
Again though, I do all these things and it doesn’t matter cause my entire life’s output of CO2 is being put out by one guy in an hour. I’m turning off lights and corporate buildings are running all the lights and AC 24/7
