people won't change. they are addicted to convenience, low prices, diversity in options, and unlimited availability. which is also great for corporate profits.
as a species, humans plan and invest very little beyond our own lifetimes. but we're just animals after all. all the talk about becoming an interplanetary (mars) species for our own survival has to be the most absurd statement that can be made to dismiss the very real problems we should solve here first. but billionaires need an excuse to play Tony Stark.
it's not cool or profitable to do the boring work of unfucking ourselves.
You just won't say the real people who are to blame. You want to lay the blame on all people equally
80% of 0.001% is a rounding error. scale matters. just because a first-world country of 5M can do something does not make this attainable for the other 99.999% of the human population.
> Renewables in Europe are still moving at great speed
imo, nuclear (not fusion, mind you) + electric, is the only realistic way out of the energy mess.
they didnt get your message in Nigeria
I would also suggest it’s more akin to blaming drug users instead of drug dealers, but whatever metaphor floats your boat.
> addicted to convenience, low prices, diversity in options, and unlimited availability
applies just as much to Norway as to other rich countries. Maybe not in exactly the same way as in the US, but in their own way.
The idea that Norway holds some sort of moral high ground with respect to fossil fuels is offensive.
They at the very LEAST deserve the moral high ground of largely distributing the economic benefits of those fossil fuels to their citizens rather than to a dozen billionaires while their nation's infrastructure becomes dilapidated
But we can change our behavior by showing ourselves less ads. And that would solve a lot of other problems too.
i have uBO chrome extension installed, so i'm doing pretty good by that metric!
Not every change we need to make will benefit people. More often they will require more work, more resources, or less enjoyment at rhe individual level (recycling, not driving certain types of vehicle).
This is a thinly veiled dig at Elon musk. It's so weird that you think what he's doing is the problem, with his efforts bringing about electric cars earlier than what would have happened.
He might be a loud mouth jerk, but surely he's not symbolic of the real problem here?
Government subsidies and his engineers brought that about. Not Elon freaking musk. Stop drinking his kool aid.
I don't think Elon is a saint, there's plenty not to like. But I think that you're so angered by him (probably drinking an alternative brand coolaid) that you're willing to discount any positive contribution, action, or utterance from Elon. Usually people aren't all good or all bad, as much as we'd like the world to be that simple.
what do you think $44 billion in climate lobbying would look like?
teslas still have to be manufactured. he probably would have a had a greater climate impact if he purchased everyone on earth the same model of bicycle that can be be repaired/reused indefinitely.
we should be trying to remove cars, reduce production, and replace it with public transit, etc. but that's neither cool nor profitable; electric cars are both of those things.
electric energy storage, on the other hand, is useful. so making batteries cheap is a good thing, and tesla definitely helped that a lot.
Now if only they were affordable by the masses....
Elon Musk, the guy who floats insane ideas like tunneling and hyperloop to derail public transit projects?
You can go back to the 70's.
There was a fascinating amount of experimentation in education when I grew up in the 70's. I went to two rather interesting "experimental" schools — one public, one private. But regardless, there was a Zeitgeist in the 70's both of danger (over-population, pollution) but also of optimism — that we could change course as a society if we wanted.
As an anecdote, I remember a fascinating visitor when I was in elementary school. A man showed up in our class with a fascinating machine that was described as a "computer"! (This was perhaps 1973 or so — it may well have been an analog computer.) The thing was upright and perhaps the size of a Pachinko machine. He explained that you could set some dials to represent perhaps human growth, energy use ... something like that. I mean, I was quite young so I think a lot of it flew over my head — perhaps his audience was generally an older age. In any event it was supposed to calculate ... something ... maybe how many years before we ran our of food or fissile fuel or space on the planet....
Afterword: Sadly, speaking of Zeitgeist, it seems something happened around the close of President Carter's term and when Reagan's presidency began. The Metric System they had taught us in elementary school was out the window. Ha ha, even national markers in the U.S. that had added Metric to the Imperial(?) units would dropped the metric units....
> Opposition to DDT was focused by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. It talked about environmental impacts that correlated with the widespread use of DDT in agriculture in the United States, and it questioned the logic of broadcasting potentially dangerous chemicals into the environment with little prior investigation of their environmental and health effects. The book cited claims that DDT and other pesticides caused cancer and that their agricultural use was a threat to wildlife, particularly birds. Although Carson never directly called for an outright ban on the use of DDT, its publication was a seminal event for the environmental movement and resulted in a large public outcry that eventually led, in 1972, to a ban on DDT's agricultural use in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#History
By the way, you can get Silent Spring for free on https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20151002 – and it is still very much worth reading; eloquent and poetic while still being factual, informative and balanced. The producers of DDT and other poisons started a smear-campaign after the publication, but it only lead to a Streisand-effect. See also this little clip from her single TV interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nriVjC0H8I
You're blaming the media for not talking about species going extint but about flooding. If people don't change even with the threat of human life being lost then there's no way they care if multiple species of birds goes extinct.
We've created a culture where being selfish is acceptable. Where polluting by modifying your vehicle is cool. Where caring about the environment makes you part of a conspiracy and who do you blame? The media for not talking about it more.