Over the years we have tried to solve the climate disaster with some (but very limited) success. Methods including carbon tax, international agreements and green infrastructure. However these efforts have always stopped short of being implemented on a necessary scale (international agreements especially). It is a hard problem only because modern politicians are unwilling to implement any of the necessary policy to tackle it (even though most voters generally want it; green infrastructure especially).
20 years later, you should watch that film again and see the manipulative fear mongering that is in play.
And let's not forget that Al is heavily invested in 'green' tech.
No snow on Kilimanjaro? but: https://glacierhub.org/2018/04/04/greatest-snowfall-on-kilim...
20-foot rise in sea levels caused by melting ice caps?
shutting down of the ocean conveyor?
Hurricanes are getting stronger?
Pacific Islands drowning?
https://www.livescience.com/climate-change-hurricanes-strong...
Islands drowning:
https://www.businessinsider.com/pacific-islands-stunning-pho...
Ice caps melting:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warmin...
Oceans rising:
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sealevel.html
Ocean conveyor slowdown:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circu...
(Courtesy of Google.)
Unfortunately, I'm not prepared to trust what I think are politicised governance authorities. At least not if they go against or do not cohere with my personal experience.
I really don’t even believe Al Gore would have saved us from the Climate Disaster. I’m guessing he would have had a similar success as Obama giving health care for all.
The point is that Al Gore could run on an anti-climate change platform with the Democratic party 20 years ago. Today even a train-loving Biden is hard against investing in the green infrastructure we needed 20 years ago, even though the majority of his voters desperately want it.
The crux of my frustration is that 20 years ago there was a political will to do something about this, while now—as the west coast is literally on fire, the gulf states are being bombarded with unprecedented hurricanes and the east coast just lived through horrible heat waves—solving the climate crisis is a hard problem because politicians are unwilling to take the necessary actions.
And before that we were going to have a mini ice age...
Also, can I say I find it odd when people talk using the pronoun 'we'. The Queen does that when she talks about her country. That's called the royal 'we'.
What global warming effect can you say you've witnessed? I don't think I can say I've noticed a single thing. Nothing. Some warm summers some cold winters - ie weather. As a cyclist it seems the quality of air has improved and I'm noticing more birds. So 20+ years of talk and fear, and there's nothing to see?
I'm at the point where I see that all that fear serves a purpose in its own right. I don't think the rhetoric matches the reality. But putting people in a state of fear that they are also powerless to address does serve a purpose. The purpose is that it supports government. It supports global governance too. Government plays up a problem that only it can solve, and it can only solve that problem by reducing the freedoms of the people it governs. So less freedom of travel, closer monitoring, etc. For me, it's one of the justifications given for what is shaping up to be a technocratic hell. And technologists are unwittingly building the infrastructure.
What I see with Al Gore is, on the one side - a self-serving politician, happy to talk up the importance of governance when he is a member of the governing class, and on the other - a salesman doing a sales job given he is invested in green energies.
While at the same time we have already had mass surveillance and travel restrictions imposed on us from the global war on terror (started under George Bush a year after winning the election against Al Gore), while not having any enforced international carbon reduction treaty all the while global carbon emission keeps expanding out of control.
If this was a true conspiracy so far they’ve done a very poor job with it for the past 20 years, and I say you have nothing to worry about.
> If this was a true conspiracy so far they’ve done a very poor job with it for the past 20 years.
What's poor about their job? I think they have done an excellent job. Most people defer to experts over their own experience. Imagine, one's own experience not carrying any weight with one's own beliefs! So, they have done an excellent job.
Currently under investigation as arson.
The people chopping down rainforest and planting oil palms are dispossessed, former farmers.
The people making them do it are wealthy and politically well connected who arrange to have their land confiscated.
Those who wish to protect must be on guard every day and win every fight.
Those who wish to destroy must only win once and can choose the best time.
It's worth it.
In a successful democracy, the people don’t have the option to vote them self a dictator.
Swiss politics also makes heavy use of referendums, and any aspect of federal/cantonal/local law can be decided in a referendum if there's enough support.
https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik/ue...
Note: I am a recent transplant to Switzerland so I'm still learning the ways in which the Swiss system has advantages and, crucially, disadvantages (I'd guess stalemate/slow progress are some).
Imagine an almost perfectly balanced democracy where everyone has nearly equal agency and power. At some point, maybe at the political level of brownian motion, someone will have a tiny edge. They will naturally use that bit of extra power to garner a little more power. Because the most useful thing to with a little extra power is always to capture some more.
Compound that over many iterations and your democracy is dead.
Thus, I believe that all systems of equality and democracy need active, constant recalibration to maintain fairness. There is no perfectly written constitution that you can set in motion like clockwork and have it run flawlessly forever. There is no static equilibrium, but you can have dynamic equilibrium. Constant vigilance.
I think this has been statistically proven[1]. So I should probably add that in addition to a well crafted constitution that prevents any single party from enacting a damaging law, such a constitution needs to be revised or rewritten whenever a single party has been deemed to gain such power.
Revising and rewriting the constitution needs to be done with the utmost care off course and have ample democratic safeguards to prevent a dictator.
A true democracy has the power to revise its constitution when that constitution is no longer able to protect the democracy it defines from a dictator.
---
1. Almost 10 years ago I learned D3 by building an interactive graph testing this in a game of capitalism. After a few rounds of completely fair zero-sum trades where all parties start with the same amount, the bulk of the wealth will always accumulate on few hands.
> Large plantations cultivate export crops on about 15 percent of the total agricultural area, but the majority of farmers (68 percent) are smallholders operating on less than one hectare.
Indonesia's population is still growing. If you're an uneducated farmer in a large family with a small farm, the only option you have to make a living may be to work in a palm oil plantation.
Armed thugs, rape, fired crops, ... everything.
My point is that redistributing wealth in a better way, we would get less opposition to upgrade our production means and people like that poor farmers and others will get a bigger piece of the cake in a more healthy environment and conserving their culture and land.
I agree with you, thou. The current mindset is that the super-rich are super-rich and their wealth cannot be touched. So, we are left with limited options on how to manage with the scraps. If we think out of the box and realize that we can redistribute wealth better, there will be still very rich people but also farmers would get a more fair price for their contribution.
If we just took this situation as strictly unacceptable, then we are working with a much larger range of options.
The idea that big reward == all that innovation needed is pretty sick. It assumes all it takes is innovation to solve literal planet scale problems.
Just as often as big operations contributing to this, it’s the mom or pop or children doing this in a subsistence manner. A contributing factor is encroachment due to local population growth.
If the rich world really cared about the wildlife in Madagascar we would fund green local infrastructure projects so that the local population could enjoy a sustainable lifestyle on their own.
At one point we’ll have to say “Earth can only feed X billion people if we want to have a medium pressure on our environment”.
The problem is not rising population, it's rising affluence and inert technology.
As people earn more, they consume more in general, and more of environmentally harmful products like meat, cars, and plane trips in particular.
Meanwhile we're not improving core technologies quickly enough.
We make buildings using Portland cement. Cement making is responsible for about 1/20 of total carbon emissions by itself. Planes are not electric yet; nor are cars. Cities are badly designed for pedestrians. Meat substitutes aren't good enough or cheap enough yet. We burn coal to make electricity, thanks to the coal industry's astroturfing campaign against nuclear in the 1960s and 1970s.
We also burn coal to make steel. We cut down forest to make biofuels, a bizarre and depraved practice.
Eh every large city I've been to that isn't in US or Canada is extremely pedestrian friendly. To the point of being actively nicer and easier to navigate by foot than by car.
Even NYC and SF are way faster to navigate by foot/bike than by car. I've stopped using Uber in SF because it's faster (and cheaper) to get places with a rented bike.
That is one part of the problem. But, as we have seen, there is alternatives. Because the pandemic, more people is working from home, playing video games instead of traveling or even learning new skills.
I love to travel, but also to play games or read books. A change of culture will help with that. Governments could also apply "sin taxes" to luxuries that harm the environment in favor of more social and cultural activities that hire more people but consume less natural resources.
https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2020/urban-density-...
Most countries, the significant exceptions being in Sub-Saharan Africa, have TFR below or near replacement (2.1).
When girls are allowed to learn to read, and when people move to cities women don't have all that many kids.
Most of the world's current population growth is due to increasing lifespan.
So don't worry about managing population. In a few decades the worry will be about keeping it up, not down. (With Sub-Saharan Africa, again, as the exception.)
This is a hard political problem. The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc. want to keep their fortune and to move them to renewable/plant-base/new-tech solutions make them lose that edge and creates real competition.
The problem with economy/ecology is that many people are addicted to easy money. We have the tech and knowledge (or we are close in some fields) to replace the problematic industries.
The change for the better is a matter of time and pushing politicians and big investors to do the right thing.