- denier (perhaps the happiest group)
- defeatist (I recycle and cycle to work, but what can I do? I'm just one person, its all so bad, I'm depressed)
- activist (I'm going to do something about this now, they can't do this to my children)
I think one of the biggest problems facing us on climate change is somehow making better use of people who care than letting them fall into defeatist mode.
Trust me, even taking small actions against an impossibly large problem feels about 1000 times better than sitting there wringing your hands over it.
What are some things that you are doing?
I don't mean to suggest that I have The Best strategy or tactic that you should deploy right now. These are hard problems we're talking about, and my long-term aims are plotted over 10-30 year timescales, and realistically the chances of achieving those are very tiny. I pursue a political approach because that's where my knowledge and skills seem likely to have the most effect.
I'm not sure that we need to necessarily go back to pre-industrial lifestyles in some sort of neo-primitivism movement. Perhaps I'm wrong and this will be forced upon us, but I believe that our capacities for invention and redeployment of our resources make it possible to change direction as a species. That has never been done before, and it will be fearfully difficult, even dangerous. But I prefer failure to passivity.
I've mentioned the 'deep green resistance' group partly because this thread is focused on ecology and partly because it's a good overview of the different theories and techniques of activism. Maybe if I were talking to one of the authors I'd get castigated for being too focused on political considerations and not putting the environmental issue at front and center of my efforts. But that's where my bets are placed for the time being.
Lets assume we're going to survive climate change. After all, we have to.
And lets assume we're going to survive it without needing to go back to our pre-industrial lifestyles:
- we're going to drive around in our EVs, charged from renewable sources
- we're going to sit at home playing video games and living in VR (because that's a nice energy efficient way to spend our days)
- we'll hopefully have access to modern medicine and the other benefits of our existing economy
I think once we start viewing survival from climate change more positively, we can start making better decisions.
For example, if we're going to survive, do we want to do so inside some sealed dome, hooked up to a desalination plant, where our day jobs are manually pollinating the few species of plant that have survived?
Or do we aspire for nature to remain at least somewhat intact, and for our plants to be pollinated in the current way - magically, by insects?
They're rhetorical questions of course. I hardly expect you to come up with a solution for the globe's ills (hats off to you if you can; I certainly don't have a clue). But the exclusive focus on climate change is itself one of the biggest dangers we face. It tempts with the prospect of a narrow technical fix while leaving current ideologies and institutions intact. We know where that road leads, with or without further climate change (in addition to that already locked in).
But I feel we might make more progress if we can tell people that they will be able to keep playing their video games, rather than have to fall back to some peasant existence where they till fields from dawn to dusk.
Because we do have technology on our side, we will need to travel, and its impossible to imagine us living in anything other than a capitalist structure where people are still working, enjoying themselves, competing with others. Even if its competing for the best quarters within the biodome rather than the biggest beachfront house.
I feel that talk of the death of "current ideologies and institutions" is probably scary to many, and (I don't know if you're suggesting this) starting from the point of having to stop all economic growth will alienate many.
> (I don't know if you're suggesting this) starting from the point of having to stop all economic growth
I sort of am, except that I put "economic growth" in scare quotes not as a childish jibe, but because I believe it is a fiction. The 'growth' is just a transfer of matter from living ecologies to dead technologies. A certain amount of that could clearly have been managed, but as (from most accounts) we're already roughly at 200-300% of the earth's carrying capacity, degrowth (ie. reducing matter transfer out of real complex ecologies so they can re-establish themselves) is now the only thing that could save us. And it won't happen, presumably.
Facebook as one example has seen enormous growth. Was it bad for the planet? (apart from the incalculable cost of being an attack vector against the more easily manipulated members of society, leading to an anti-environmental administration).
Maybe not. Facebook users sit quietly, hunched over their phones, sipping small amounts of energy. Comparing them to someone who drives their 4WD for a hobby, they look good.
There was much talk in the 90s of decoupling economic growth from 'resource use' (sorry about the scare quotes again: I also think the term 'resource' masks a related myth). There were even individual companies that claimed to be getting there (eg. IIRC a carpet company that leased carpets to offices so they could control the whole lifespan?).
But evolution has had millions of years to explore state spaces using recycling. Carpet companies notwithstanding, on a planetary scale I doubt we can do it any more efficiently than evolved systems do, without developing systems of comparable complexity. And we're clearly centuries (at least) away from being up to that, and we don't have centuries to play with.
It's a shame so much political activism is protest rather than construction. That's probably inevitable given the configuration of political power and the sheer speed of the destruction (locally for example I certainly don't want the Adani lunacy to go ahead). And protest can develop community which can be a usefully subversive form of construction. But there's something slightly unsatisfying there, and it doesn't suit everyone's predispositions.
> I do recognize that it's not enough and we all need to basically go back pre-industrial lifestyles to really make enough of a change to matter.
Bah. Charge a dollar per kg of carbon released and the problem will almost solve itself. It's much more a problem of political will than it is a problem of technical capability.
Sorry, if humanity allows it to come as far as requiring mineshafting for pure self-inflicted ecological overexploitation, it does not deserve survival.
Things like electricity, the automobile, air travel and the internet went from nonexistent to universal in developed countries in phenomenally short time spans. Renewable energy appears to be following a similar trajectory, leaving all the estimates in the dust and emerging faster than most people realize or can keep track of. Fast enough? Well, we'll find out. But at this point you can't say it's slow.
Firstly: climate change is only one of the problems caused by a culture based almost entirely on the ecocidal fantasy of stolen-from-the-future 'economic growth'. We are losing topsoil at a dizzying pace. Fresh water is disappearing. The habitats on which natural systems depend are being ripped apart. Novel substances are being created and released into our air, water and land with unknown consequences. Climate change is a single crisis piled upon multiple others. Case in point: Australia's Queensland inner reefs are almost completely gone, and the outer reefs have only a few decades left. Causes: multiple, from nutrient-rich agricultural runoff (largely from pointless vanity sugar cane production), to wholesale destruction of coastal ecosystems including mangroves, which are crucial nurseries for many reef fish. Increasing ocean temperatures deal the final blow to already critically weakened ecosystems. This is our planet in miniature. Climate change isn't the problem. It's yet another symptom of the same fundamental dynamic, delivered as just the latest and largest of a series of blows many ecosystems will not survive.
Secondly: the changes needed are not only (and perhaps not primarily) technological. They require planetary coordination and cooperation to handle on political and social levels, and the defeat of a crazed unthinking ideology of unhindered 'economic growth'. Fundamental changes of attitude and societal organisation need to be agreed upon in the next few decades, and implemented without delay. Yet we can't even agree on obvious tiny measures like removing nuclear weapons, and rogue wealthy nations resist nearly every attempt to do anything meaningful about any of the critical issues. We just don't know how to do what's needed, and there are no solutions on the horizon. And we are still locked into fantasies of national government and sovereignty, despite being (factually & physically) a global civilisation.
Look at the political convulsions happening now as a consequence of current worldwide refugee crises. But that's minuscule compared to what's coming. Imagine what happens when ocean level rises cause two billion refugees to seek somewhere to live. Given our level of global immaturity, what do you think will happen? It will be all wars and walls. And our capability, in the midst of such convulsions, to make (and keep) difficult international agreements? Nil.
I'd absolutely love to be wrong. But all physical and social indicators are pointing in the same direction.
I suspect that crispinb deems something much more paradigmatic necessary than just a bit of reprorization in economic policies and everybody using less plastic bags. Some paradigm shifts are so big that it is very difficult to even think about them loudly without getting universally shunned.
What if, for example, you are convinced that for long term planetary survival (on a level that can support the human species), individualistic basic human rights will have to occasionally take a second place? That's what tyranny is made of, but that's also what desperate measures are made of. You won't win any popularity contests with that...
> individualistic basic human rights will have to occasionally take a second place?
One could argue that this is the case right now. That the lack of protection of individual human rights is what got us into this mess. It wasn't individuals in communities that asked for their lands to be taken by a wealthy few or by corporations, to be used for generating profit through environmental destruction. Many people actively struggled against the acquisition and destruction of local ecological habitats. They were a majority opposing a small few powerful people or businesses. But the "individual rights" of those few were valued more and now the many must suffer the consequences...
Oh, hey, thats about the same "phenomenally short time span" that everything started going to shit.
Too late for that. And I don't see anyone offering easy answers.
But pretending that what's happening in the real world isn't happening, or frantically waving totems of electronic consumer satisfaction about, won't make those physical realities go away.
But everyone wants to live on an island of asphalt with a sterile, depression patch of grass in front, at least three miles away from the nearest place to buy a cup of coffee (a disposable cup, natch).
Actually, not everyone does, but those who do, made it illegal to build anything else. At least in the US.
... I love how the cliche environmentalists worldview is to reduce these problems to entirely the result personal choice. As if consumers chose petroleum as the most efficient and widespread fuel in the earth's crust, and the combustion engine, then decided they wanted highways and suburbs, etc. Instead of thousands of small choices over a century (or more) based on circumstance, central planning, present needs, etc - things largely out of their control. Combined with other biological human flaws like short term thinking and favouring political populism and emotion when voting/buying.
Not to mention, the widespread adoption of suburbs was not a product of market capitalism or consumerism... it was the result of government zoning and regulatory policy:
https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Regulation-Transportation-M...
You may be convinced and have deep knowledge of the subject but it's far from common knowledge. Understanding of climate issues is very low and it's not entirely the result of ignorance or malice or compromise because someone loves having a big lawn.
I tried to educate myself on the subject, I love to read, but even I found it difficult to find good books on the subject, specifically books that were balanced and scientific instead of sounding like the ravings of an ideologue.
I've asked on HN for book recommendations on climate change multiple times and each time I've been pointed to websites with dry 150 page reports by non-profit organizations. It's far from easy to know better.
Yes everything leads to that question: How can a problem of global scaled be solved, if it seems to be almost impossible to make some progress domestically?
I think I begin to see what the "solution" is going to be like.
The good news is: The planet is not going to die. The bad news: I guess you not gonna like the solution.
I'm convinced that in 10-20 we are going to live much more eco friendly. It will become much more expensive to waste natural resources. But as a downside of this we will loose a lot of personal freedom. Our highly individualized society will come to an end and we will live in a much more controlled environment.
Harmfull behaviour will either be punished with legal sanctions (like corruption) or in some form of social disaproval.
TLDR: In the next 20 we will see a greener but also more unfree world.
I'm not sure how useful the knowledge is at this late stage. Turning things around would require changes of a pace and scale that we have no idea how to motivate and coordinate. Fork and done, I reckon.