Re:Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2...
by yashap on Thursday September 06, 2018 @06:19PM
(#17930142)
My point is that due to the way our brains work (looking out mostly for ourselves and those close to us, placing very little importance on things happening on the scale of 10s to 100s of years from now), it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to form global, effective ways to protect the environment, until the environmental degradation is having a MASSIVE negative impact on our lives. We form organizations to exploit resources at scale, because that benefits us as individuals quickly. But protecting the environment is bad for us as individuals in the short term, AND it relies on global buy-in, so I can’t see humans doing it anytime soon.
FWIW I think this is a tragedy, but also a likely reality.
Sure, and people are just collections of molecules. And the structure involved in arranging elements matters.
Further, the problem is hardly that humans are selfish but that we have developed complex structures that allow large scale exploitation of resources (and each other) but which don't allow large-scale protection of resources and situations that we (selfishly) want.
Of course, if we were just random configurations of humans spread-about the landscape doing hunting and gathering, we wouldn't have the ability to burn massive fossil fuel resources to generate climate change, however selfish we might be.