Solution-delusions - why are responses to climate change are so hopelessly-inadequate
Posted by JacksonDamian@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 19 comments
A review of our current meaningless climate-change ‘solutions’ - and the collective psychological factors that are seriously not helping.
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Monk_Boy@reddit
Because f*k Florida, let em drown.
gnostic_savage@reddit
This is a great essay. One of the best I've read. It brings to mind David Wallace-Wells' article in the Atlantic, The Uninhabitable Earth. While I appreciate the entire work very much, I especially love this one:
"This toxic-positivity relies on the psychologically-stupid concept that rational alarm must not be raised, to avoid provoking some form of imagined paralysis."
Don't anyone dare promote the dreaded hopelessness, also known as being realistic, or you'll make people give up! And that's the worst thing that a person can do, according to far too many people. This toxic-positivity relies on the psychologically-stupid concept that rational alarm must not be raised, to avoid provoking some form of imagined paralysis. Collectively, we're just not sane enough. Or, smart enough. It is our doom. And it's close.
Bandits101@reddit
There are no “climate change solutions”. Why do people believe that electric cars and solar panels dissipate heat and remove GHG’s, the delusion is astounding. The GHG’s in the atmosphere now, can and will continue to trap excess heat.
The excess GHG’s will remain until Earth’s geological processes remove them over a very long time. During that time (the oceans mainly) will absorb and store most of the heat, until they can no longer.
If emissions miraculously ceased now, warming would continue and even accelerate. Former carbon sinks are reversing, ice is melting at an unprecedented rate.
I guess the vast majority will cling to the delusion that humans will invent a technological marvel that will save the day. I don’t think so but I’m open to being shouted down and shown the error of my ways.
shook70@reddit
They have to cling to the delusion. Otherwise, their entire lives have been wasted trying to achieve whats increasingly unattainable.
A stable and fulfilling life.
They would have to accept that they, their parents, grandparents, and children have been the victims of the greatest scam the world has ever known. And that there's nothing they can do about it.
Until the reality of the situation forces them to acknowledge that it's all over. Until then they will play their part and dream of a better life until even that is impossible to do.
boneyfingers@reddit
The question of degrowth seems poorly framed. Degrowth, however painful, is not a choice. We don't get to decide whether or not it will happen. The choice has always been to do it intentionally, with care and reason and foresight, or to have it forced upon us, with violence, chaos and brutality. And now, the die is cast.
We know what is killing us, but that very thing is for many the best thing about life. The comfort and pleasure we derive from industrial consumer capitalism is worse than heroin. (At least heroin only harms those who take it.) It is as though we have a gangrene infection, and our only hope is to amputate our favourite limb, so we refuse to cut it off. The limb will die anyway, and the rest of us along with it, unless we snap to our senses in time. But we won't.
I don't put much hope in the effort to convince people or governments to choose between growth and degrowth, because that is a nonsensically false choice. What you have written is correct and reasonable, but you are ranting in an opium den, and no one will hear you. Better to break shit.
AtaraxianBear@reddit
Climate protection will never be developed quickly enough under capitalism. It's impossible. If we want to understand the current and future environmental disasters, we need to discuss capitalism.
stillsmallacts@reddit
I realized this too. We're diligently doing our part but it feels like it's not enough. Even with frameworks like the Paris Agreement or the Inflation Reduction Act in place, it’s hard not to feel that these are just small patches on a much deeper systemic wound. There’s a gap between those official promises and the immediate action the world actually needs, but maybe acknowledging that inadequacy is the only honest way to keep our footing.
relianceschool@reddit
Thank you Jackson! I enjoyed reading this and I think we need to keep banging this drum, however uncomfortable the sound. I'm also glad to see that you're advocating for degrowth, as I can't see any other way out of this predicament.
I'm wondering if you could provide links/sources for a couple statements:
As I would love to be able to read and reference these in my own writings.
JacksonDamian@reddit (OP)
Thank you! Here you go for the Bottcher ref https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/stellungnahmen-der-dpg/klima-energie/klimaaufruf/? - translation available on the site and plenty of more general coverage in the media. For Becl and Bill McG - google is your friend! Both often stated this and-or similar.
relianceschool@reddit
Thank you! I searched for "Bill McGuire climate collapse," but all his quotes were for 2050 (or 25 years from now). Still very soon - and on par with Limits to Growth, just not the 15 years figure. I did find a quote for 5 years from Greta in this article.
JacksonDamian@reddit (OP)
Pecl sorry as in Prof Greta Pecl Marine Biologist Uni of Tasmania
Urshilikai@reddit
If the status quo is going to make Earth uninhabitable then literally anything should be justifiable. For any entity (person, state, government, bloc, continent, etc.) to make rational choices internally about degrowth, prioritizing longevity and sustainability over profit, definitionally opens them up to exploitation by any entity that chooses not to. Say the US hypothetically rejected oil and it's use, other countries that decided not to hold themselves to the same ethical/moral/axiomatic beliefs would simply have more oil to exploit. Any solution that isn't global is doomed to failure, how do we expect Russia, china, or broadly the global south to accept some kind of sustainable austerity without some global body of governance and enforcement. How do you think a global body of governance and enforcement would go if we tried to establish that right now (protip we already have it with the IMF and UN security council).
I'm not saying don't try, but the actual logic of this situation is game theory and in the past century of scientific discovery of planetary boundaries nobody lays out the necessary political structures that might actually address the situation. You want to solve this problem, then figure out how to get every single power structure on the planet to intentionally self-limit according to a sustainable civilization axiom. What do you typically have to do in an ecosystem to keep population of some animal in check? Introduce its predator or introduce an immune system that terminates cancerous growths. Those are the options. Nobody talks about either of those because they are completely unpalatable, in either case if you live beyond your means something just comes and kills you. It's either that in a sustainable way, or that in a cataclysmic way.
We're in overshoot, there will be a correction. I think the best we can hope for is to build power structures that promote the axioms of sustainability to be the ones that survive the correction and come out on top afterwards. They should probably model the biological systems behavior above, since ultimately we are still bound to that. Capitalism is cancer.
NyriasNeo@reddit
Because most do not care. "Drill baby drill" won. That tells you something.
DoubtSubstantial5440@reddit
Yep most people would rather keep their heads in the sand than admit the status quo is going down in a fire
CorvidCorbeau@reddit
Great article! And it touches on a lot of my frustrations as well. But, in all fairness, share of primary energy and reducing alternative power generation to just electricity are misleading.
Almost 2/3 of the primary energy that comes from fossil fuels is wasted, it's just lost, mostly as heat. And fossil fuels gain a massive share on the charts by powering other stuff, not just electricity, most of which can be powered through other means as well.
The so far unsolvable problem (or predicament if you like) is that even if the materials required to produce those alternatives are available, we couldn't make them fast enough. And even if we could, they still don't reduce the ecological pressure we exert on the biosphere, they don't stop the already emitted GHGs from warming the Earth, they don't remove persistent pollutants, etc.
I'm by no ways suggesting FF alternatives are some miracle, they are not, and I hate that people are being fooled into believing they are. But I also want to be fair where it's warranted, those charts skew reality.
Key_Pace_2496@reddit
Pfft that's not even our response so far. If anything we're spraying gasoline on the fire.
JacksonDamian@reddit (OP)
Harsh but not completely unfair - the article goes into more detail about the specifics.