The Economist is torn, because on the one hand they try to appear clever, but on the other hand they generally support unrestrained capitalism. It’s not possible to do both at the same time.
I've read it since 1995 and I vividly remember them enthusiastically stanning Bjorn Lomborg's denialism. That's when I learned that the Economist is actually the world's first manifestation of a phenomenon now associated with ChatGPT: immaculately-phrased ideological assertions that are presented as common sense that all good, clever, right-thinking people already know.
Like ChatGPT, the findings are delivered with polish and confidence, and like ChatGPT, you would not like what's in the sausage, were you to understand its provenance.
It's devastatingly effective on a certain kind of man.
Birth rates are in decline. The global population is estimated to peak in the 2080s. I suspect that could be later than reality as the endless doom (like this article) inspires more and more people to not have kids. Then as the population declines precipitously, nature takes back over and begins resolving the problem itself.
Population decline will not solve climate change, we already passed multiple points of no return that will result in worsening climate for the next 50-100y. And there won’t be a way to roll back those changes
> And there won’t be a way to roll back those changes
It's possible to sequester CO2, and here are a couple ways.
1. Use permaculture or regenerative agriculture to aggressively increase SOM (soil organic matter) / carbon content of the soil. Typical degraded farmland is around 1.5% SOM. For every 0.1% increase per acre, roughly 1 ton of carbon is sequestered. Setting an ambitious increase to 10% would take decades but would increase yields along the way. There are billions of acres of farmland, so a lot of carbon can be removed from the biosphere. Additionally, since people naively mimic farmers for home gardening etc., if farmers were part of the solution, then more home growers would be, too. With a couple decades of regenerative ag you can go from 1.5% to 7.5%, but with more time and motivation you can go higher.
2. Research and then put into practice industrial-scale pyrolysis for energy generation. So, instead of burning methane (aka "natural gas") to boil water to spin a turbine, we could pyrolysize organic material to emit and burn syngas to boil water to spin a turbine. The resulting biochar can be co-composted and when finished, used as a soil amendment.
With a different mindset a lot can change, and quickly.
In my own veg garden, I have noticed that my soil quality starts degrading around >6% of carbon contents.
It wasn't a problem until recently, but with all the droughts in recent years, too high carbon can make it hydrophobic and lead to water run-off that happens too quick once it has entirely dried out. I.e. it becomes too lose/aereated. This then means that the occasional heat storm no longer replenishes water reserves and you end up a bit wirh the same problem as if you had 1% Carbon.
My soil is still way more resilient at the beginning of the drought (I can easily cover 1mo eithout rain without having to water most crops, except some smaller spices). But in recent times I have stopped mulching for a while.
Not saying you’re wrong, but sequestering CO2 probably isn’t enough. Ecosystems are connected systems and can be resilient in the long term, but a domino can fall that has a huge, negative impact on everything downstream.
For example, coral reefs provide protection and a vibrant home for a lot of sea life. But when the water gets a couple degrees too warm, it can essentially die, and when it does, the rest of the ecosystem disappears too.
Imagine if you were a human and your body temp was even a couple degrees above normal. You’d have a fever.
And these are only tiny examples… life finds away, but it also needs time to grow back.
> Not saying you’re wrong, but sequestering CO2 probably isn’t enough.
My comment was in response to someone suggesting or implying that nothing can be done, not that the 2 points I made were enough.
I agree with you, especially about the ocean. The oceans have absorbed an enormous amount of CO2, increasing ocean acidity and killing ecosystems not even including the heat they've absorbed, also killing ecosystems. Meanwhile commercial fisherman (aqua farmers) are literally bombing coral as a fishing "method." We need an international effort at changing the people who do farming because the people we have are the worst we can get and they do an enormous amount of harm at basically all levels. Besides the ecological harm, they're just so bad at their jobs that despite selling one of only 3 products humans can't live without, they still can't stay in business without bailouts so routine they don't even consciously recognize them as such.
We need a lot less naysaying and a lot more concrete plans led by people who have successfully done it. I've already done the 2 things I mentioned (soil carbon, biochar) on the scale that is available to me. Additionally our rooftop solar covers maybe 1/3 of the roof and produces 2-3x our annual usage in an all-electric house. We're freegan. My used EV burns no fossil fuel. We compost aggressively including toilet material and make biochar which we co-compost. We have a xeriscape garden and use an amount of water most people would probably consider impossibly low. This is all with a mindset of continuous improvement, always assuming that more gains are yet to be discovered and put into practice. Anyone can adopt this mindset. If anyone thinks the above is way too much for you, I started it all just by switching the incandescent light bulbs in my house to LEDs. That was the first step, and then I took another, and then another. That's all. And we're saving a ludicrous amount of money but that's not the only reason we're doing it, and wasn't the original motivation.
I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
Already then you could find this exact article title in a dozen publications per year, especially in academic publications. Al Gore made a third career out of it.
It was alarmist and too soon then but it’s not alarmist and too soon now?
Nobody upvotes an article titled “Things are about 0.5% more concerning than they were two decades ago”
> Up to 70% of residents between North Carolina and Florida, and a trillion dollars in property, could be impacted by the end of the century with just over three feet of sea rise. South Florida represents the vast majority of that risk, with about 7.5 million people and $750 billion dollars in property expected to face increasing risks as groundwaters rise, the study found.
Thwaites Glacier and the glaciers locked behind it are predicted to raise sea levels by 3 metres in the next 50 years. And that's just one source -- it doesn't include Greenland's glaciers, other parts of Antarctica, and the expansion effect of warming the ocean water.
Florida is particularly vulnerable because it's porous. We could build sea walls around NYC to protect it, but that wouldn't work well for Florida.
> I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
I don't doubt that is your recollection, but nobody back then was predicting it would happen in 20 years. The time frames given were much longer. But, the vibe was definitely that we need to wake up and do something right now, because by the time climate change hits real hard it will be too late to avert the calamity.
> The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”
> Active private home insurance policies in Florida declined by 78% over roughly a decade, with the state's insurer of last resort skyrocketing to 63% of the market share, as reported by PRNewswire and republished on Yahoo. That is a dramatic pullback in a state where storm risk has long shaped the housing market.
I recognize this is deeply cynical and definitely doomerist. What can I as an individual actually do to stop this? Why should I even bother reading articles like this at this point? I can't do anything. I can't action it. I can collect my recycling, pop solar panels on my roof and be the most carbon footprint conscious person and it wouldn't move the needle an atom's width.
Politicians don't care, and the ones that do can't make a difference either. Corporations definitely don't care. I can go protest, and that gets a lot of media attention but it doesn't change a voter's mind when their main concern is who gets to play in school sports.
I know this is vitriolic, but I am genuinely curious about it. What can I do? What can I do outside of putting my ballot in the box and hoping something changes?
Political participation -- voting, organising for the groups you support, actively engaging in meetings and public forums, building social groups of like-minded individuals. It is hugely effective. The worst doomerism is the idea that politics is ineffective. It is incredibly effective, and only the people that participate in it have any effect on it.
There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. But accepting the supine position of "well I can't do anything" only guarantees your powerlessness. Fight for the future you want! Convince 5 people that something is important, and you're already 500% up. It scales like crazy.
Three quarters of the world live in autocracies, and another 19% outside liberal democracies.
That will require adapted tactics. I'm not very qualified to speak on how to convince people in leadership positions there. How do you convince Erdogan, Modi, Putin, Trump, Xi, the North Korean dynasty and others?
On the topic of climate change, off the top of my head, these countries don't have a per capita carbon footprint as large as the US, and the significant ones are I suppose India and China, and China seems open to dialogue on the topic, and is even leading in renewable energy.
> I can collect my recycling, pop solar panels on my roof and be the most carbon footprint conscious person and it wouldn't move the needle an atom's width.
The more people who do that, the faster the needle moves. You create economic incentives for businesses to cater to you, and you set an example for others to follow.
That's why I only buy electric cars, put solar on my roof, and heat with a heat pump. A few years later, my parents put in a heat pump, and an extended family member (who is a denier) also put in a heat pump.
Just a thought, which at T+36 min hasn't been mentioned yet.
Many systems are chaotic. At particular points in state space, a very small delta can result in very different subsequent trajectories.
Viral influence being one example. I'm reminded of Tamim Ansary's email[1] to 20 odd friends after 9-11, that went massively viral ("We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. [...]").
Also, some moments of teaching can change lives. And in everyday life, sometimes recognized and sometimes not, things done and not done can have big impacts on people. Ripples.
It is said of serendipity and opportunity, that you can't control them, but you can shut yourself off from them. And thus advice to live in a way that leaves yourself open to them, and to cultivate the awareness and skills to recognize and execute when they go by.
One can't know when one is a potential part of a state space fork. But might one make throwing spaghetti at the wall part of one's life? An occasional hobby? Support spaghetti throwing? Or potluck spaghetti throwing communities? Or pasta R&D or manufacture? Trebuchets?
Perhaps a category of "Things worth doing all the time, which are far from being worth doing every time, but are still worth doing each time." Or Chesterton’s "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."
An contrasting addendum: Most causal chains^H roots are deep and hairy, and most roles are supporting roles, rather than a principal with clear story impact. That friend who forwarded Ansary's email onward.
So maybe your question prompts some response here, which the author or someone then improves upon when this topic rolls around again, which someday affects a list Claude generates when someone asks it to aggregate "What can I do?" ideas from the web, which ... who knows? But better the question was asked than not. And better the responses are novel and insightful and compelling, than not. And better our discussion here refines those ideas, than not. No?
"Better", in some hopeful but poorly-instrumented fuzzy-metric sense. Which is a difficulty. Whether it's worth the opportunity cost of however else you might be spending your time this evening... perhaps better this topic/thread, than at least some others?
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
Short of becoming the Luigi of the environmental movement, there is nothing an individual can do. You have to take part in some kind of ongoing collective action. This can include joining a campaign against the oil and gas industry, going door to door for candidates who will reverse climate change, or engaging in direct action against environmentally destructive projects -- or even all three at the same time.
Trying to go it alone is pointless. At best, you'll go down a rabbit hole of becoming the most virtuous consumer alive. At worst, you'll be spend all your time mad-posting on social media.
There’s an interesting study to be made on whether there was a reduction in insurance claim rejections in the aftermath, and what the morbidity/mortality impact was.
Luigi accomplished nothing but folk hero status, United Healthcare premiums increased by double-digit percentages this year. Change requires a pattern not a moment.
Nonsense. This is defeatist talk. This is the logic folks use when they make dozens of small actions that add up, like buying more plastic cuz "it doesn't matter". The honest truth is people who use this logic have made the decision and just don't want to say, "I don't care." Small actions make big differences at scale.
8 billion people all making hundreds of decisions a day make a difference.
Once an individual starts to make those decisions they have a sunk cost, which encourages more action. This leads to voting a certain way, making more sacrifice(giving up excess), encouraging others, etc.
This whole "I'm a victim and have no recourse" benefits the bad actors.
Capitalism has filled our society and expectations with extreme excess. Modern folks eat diets that are insanely luxurious. Giving up our excess is the crux here, and capitalism tries damn hard to give us reasons to justify every little excess. Then those things are accepted and the baseline shifts down, capitalism then gives us more excuses and the baseline drops again.
I was watching an old movie from like 1985 the other day. A character in the movie was a horrible person and part of making that character a horrible seeming person was giving her a small dog as a pet, because it added to her aura of extreme excess. It made me and my friends laugh cuz nowadays that's expected of most people, to have a small dog. The character only had one! Nowadays it's normal to have 2 or 4 small dogs. Lol. Did you know cats/dogs in the US consume more meat than the entire nation of france? Good luck getting anyone to forego their emotional support pets nowadays. The baseline drops.
It’s not a novel take, in some ways capitalism trades comfort for externalities. Now that we have to pay for centuries of externalities, nobody wants to give back an ounce of comfort.
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
You've never been responsible for the entire world, that's a defeatist fiction put on your shoulders by people who want you to give up and not take responsibility for your actions.
Take some real time to think about your own actions, your share of the blame. Then begin the process of improving your actions. As a handy benefit, you'll begin saving money, and you can reinvest the savings into more projects that also save money. Eventually your carbon footprint will be a small fraction of what it was and in its place you'll have a pile of money.
Focus on the missing prerequisites that are critical for any viable solution. It doesn't matter what anyone does if we literally lack the technical infrastructure required to make a meaningful difference. The first step is making it at least possible.
For example, halting the increase in atmospheric CO2, never mind reversing it, requires an astronomical amount of new clean energy far beyond what we produce today from all sources, clean or dirty. If we were serious about this we'd be building countless terawatts of new carbon-free electrical production as fast as possible instead of letting NIMBYs and activists bury these for decades in lawsuits and paperwork.
The infrastructure modernization that needs to happen will be economically impossible as long as it primarily exists as a mechanism for corruption, graft, and rent-seeking e.g. California's high-speed rail. Even if we had the political will, we literally couldn't afford it unless it became radically more efficient. Letting political constituencies hijack every building project so they can smuggle in unrelated agendas is something that is fundamentally at odds with addressing climate change in a serious way. That's a choice.
If we don't solve these two problems then anything else we do as individuals won't matter. Being able to address climate change in a meaningful way is downstream of these two challenges.
Even without the possibility of solving the problem, individuals can still choose to stop contributing to it. You might feel better about the whole thing at the very least. As an added bonus, the more people that choose to stop contributing, the easier it becomes for others to do the same (e.g. less driving --> more cyclists and pedestrians --> better cycling and pedestrian environment).
I think "how to stop this" is the wrong objective. It's like "what I can do to achieve world peace tomorrow?". There is no answer to that. Yes, people promise to solve wars "in a day" but that does not work.
Depending on your situations different actions will have a different impact.
I do try to choose what I can to help. I am not obsessed with "the impact". If I buy a train ticket instead of a plane ticket - that can mean trains get more money. If I keep my phone for one more year, less waste is produced.
Would I help with the situation if I would buy a car consuming lots of gas, take international trips every years etc. (I could afford it, that's not the issue) ? I think not.
Can I say that my actions significantly influence the outcome? Definitely not, but we are 8 billions on this planet, so it all depends on averages. But if I don't do it (I am convinced there is an issue), how could I expect others to have my position...
As a first step, what do you want? Would you rather live your life in peace, bettering the controllable world around you? Or would you rather live your life in stress and action and possibly fixing the problem?
I chose one of those for myself and can't blame anyone for choosing differently. They're both valid.
There is nothing you can do as an individual, unfortunately. You can reduce your own impact, that’s something that personally makes me feel better and I would highly recommend (vegetarianism is the simplest way to do so). And if you’re motivated you can join advocacy or activist groups. But it’s a collective issue, individual have no actual power here. We need to act as a group to make meaningful changes.
Though, obviously do not vote for the pro fossil fuel parties (which is pretty much all right wing parties in the west)
There's very little to do in Europe. South Korea, Iran, Thailand, Egypt or South Africa e.g. put out significantly more CO2 than say the UK or France (which are towards the top). India and China are higher than the whole EU and are only continuing to pollute more as their standards of living improve. Essentially the only way to stop it is to keep the 3rd world impoverished (in Africa, people often argue that green energy is a Western conspiracy to keep them down). Western economies have already largely stagnated and most of Europe's pollution's fallen to lower per capita than China, let alone South Korea or Russia or... Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and such.
Pro-nuclear efforts are the best hope we have: generate enough electricity and we can scrape the atmosphere clean
I know what definitely won't work: Luigi Mangione style action. That will only set people up against one another.
Here's two stories that might inspire:
- I've seen a desperate, fragile grandfather seriously contemplate peaceful Gandhi style sit-ins targeting fossil fuel infrastructure, "so my grandchildren would know I at least tried".
- I've seen a couple radically cut their consumption of about everything. "Taking good care of the earth is a tenet of our religious views. We're realistic enough to realise our efforts won't help anyone directly, but perhaps it might inspire others."
Getting more noses worldwide pointing in the same direction could perhaps make a sliver of difference. The tricky bit will be getting specific groups on board. I can think of a few challenging ones:
- the downtrodden struggling for survival as it is already. They have other priorities, like food on the table.
- those outside liberal democracies (93% of the world!) in a position to bring change. They have to count with sociopaths with little accountability in charge.
- those that won't make a noise because historical experience has taught them to shut up.
- those with too little education/intelligence/eagerness to understand. They will require simple stories and example behaviour/idols/heroes to copy.
Nature's alarm signals itself will induce some fear. That will be the best publicity for change.
People got together and got us all to stop smoking cigarettes against the same kind of opposition. Probably individuals can get together, help educate others which will eventually drive changes through voting or force businesses to change
There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. And the more directly the electorate can keep people accountable. But I think it's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater to declare that accountability is impossible, therefore there is no point in enagaging.
Politicians can only be held accountable as long as their base is willing to hold them to account. And unfortunately the old and wealthy have practiced the maximal mantra of FYGM. The degree with which not only do they hoard wealth but do everything in their power to ensure the old ways they made their wealth stay empowered tilts politics heavily.
If you live in a western democracy your politicians are held very accountable to the opinion and will of the people who vote. They are not kings or inherited aristocracy, they do what the people want (roughly) or get voted out.
The people who vote by-and-large don't believe climate change is real, don't believe it is serious, or are not willing to tolerate the level of discomfort necessary to solve the problem.
At least in my country, politician's hands are completely utterly tied from fighting climate change, because if they do something serious enough to actually matter they will immediately be voted out of office and whatever they did rolled back.
Here in America we love to blame the politicians (they do indeed suck). All the while voter turnout is a complete joke. Perhaps this is actually helpful, because we are rife with various subcultures that openly celebrate ignorance, so, yeah. Blame the shitty politicians, speak not of the ignorant and unbothered masses.
To be fair, the US electoral system is designed to discourage or outright disenfranchise most voters:
* First-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections ensure that anyone who isn't living in a swing state/district may as well not bother.
* Heavy gerrymandering exacerbates this effect.
* Voter suppression tactics like attacking mail-in ballots and closing voting locations makes it more difficult for those people who still want to vote. Note that Voter ID laws are included in this because there still live today people who were denied birth certificates due to segregation-era hospitals refusing non-white mothers delivery care.
* Holding elections on non-holiday weekdays makes it harder for those living paycheck-to-paycheck and working hourly jobs, though this is blunted somewhat by states which allow early voting.
If you live in a Western democracy your politicians are very accountable to media owners and corporate donors. Voters are a very long way down the influence list, because media owners and corporate donors have sophisticated and very expensive - but high ROI - ways to shape voter opinion.
Some are simple censorship - like X and FB throttling the reach of unwanted content and promoting the reach of the opposite.
Others appear believably organic.
The obvious ones are crude, but they still work on huge swathes of the population.
The first step to recovery is to accept that this is how the system really works, and the idea that voters pick leaders based on a rational consideration of their record and potential benefits is absolute fantasy.
That's mostly a feature of elections with single-member districts or other winner-take-all mechanisms. Every successful politician must have a wide coalition behind them, and marginal groups that could back either major candidate determine the winner.
Proportional elections have different dynamics, especially if elected candidates are determined by personal votes (and not by predetermined ranks on the party list). A successful politician mostly needs to find a niche and maintain their visibility and support within that niche.
Discussion is pointless . -All- of it. Germany has reduced emissions by what, 20% ? It costs its world industrial leadership . No AI to power by electricity . And Germany has 3% of world CO2 output . Meanwhile , China emissions exploding almost exponentially , as they produce all the good and bad things for you .
We might not stop what is already happening or what will happen, but we still have time to make it less severe than it would be if no action would be made.
We still can save lives, not all of them but some and for this people it will make a difference.
In my family, about 5 out of 100 people believe climate change is even real. So ya, I think the average at this point is "I'm ambivalent, climate change may not even be real. But mostly I don't care"
The poorest in society are the lowest CO2 emitters - they don't fly often, many don't own a car and use public transport - they can't afford meat in every meal - can't afford air con in summer or heating in winter.
Conversely, the wealthiest are frequent flyers, are chauffeured about in SUVs and rarely walk. They have everything they'll ever need and don't concern themselves about running the AC or heating.
They're preaching to the poor guy about what he needs to do to stop climate change.
Even if the poor guy wanted to care, he can't do much, but the people who claim to care could do a lot more, if they really did care.
The media circus tries to put the blame on the poor, while ignoring the emissions of the celebrities and treating them as royalty. Is it any wonder most people simply don't care?
If the media cared, they would be making villains of the celebrities and idols of the poor.
If you’re talking about a world democracy like the USA, the consumption gap between rich and poor effectively doesn’t matter from a climate change perspective. You could vanish the top 75% of Americans and still we’d have a climate change problem (albeit less of one for sure).
People get confused by some of the research because it often publishes emissions by who owns the asset emitting and not who consumes it (eg Starr et al paper breaks down both, and consumption vs ownership is wildly different, and you can tell what bent people have by which number they pick to report on…)
Another way I’d put it: if you’re not ready for gas to be $40/gallon and beef to be $100/lb ground, then you’re not really ready to fight climate change. And no one is, so it’s not going to happen unless we get a technology miracle.
Lots of things are wealth gap problems. Climate change is not, it’s an everyone problem.
Yes, exactly, what time do people think they have? It's here, it's now, it's happening, it's all around us. This headline would have made a little more sense ten years ago.
We're already cooked, the Paris Agreement was aiming for avoiding 1.5°C global increase by 2030 and we're pretty much at that now. We're already seeing global weather shifts as the beginning of what appears to be rapid climate change and we're not yet at the peak of carbon output.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
Because it also happened to be profitable for a large company (DuPont), which was also the company largely responsible for the whole ozone layer thing. They lobbied against ozone layer protections while they had a patent on Freon, but as soon as it expired, they came up with a new more expensive alternative and started supporting environmental regulations forcing people to switch to the new one.
Saving the ozone layer required changing practices in a relatively small part of the economy (refrigeration, mostly). In 1994, the total cost of the transition in the US was estimated to less than $100 billion [1], about 1.3% of GDP ($7.3 trillion [2]).
Reducing global carbon emissions to reach net zero by 2050 has been estimated to cost $9.2 trillion per year [3]. World GDP is currently $126 trillion [4]. That means 7.3% of current world GDP per year, or 1.8x of it over a quarter century.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
For the ozone layer, it was deemed possible to eliminate (or significantly reduce) certain chemical emissions.
For generalised climate change, the common enemy of all people is the transnational petroleum industry. This corporate alliance will topple democracies rather than reduce its profits and influence.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
If you want the honest, brutal take it is because I remember, at least in my country, that for the ozone stuff there was a lot of scientific people taking lead roles in educating the masses. Especially those with credibility who were otherwise not media savvy.
Climate change on the other hand, whenever I think about the words, I can only get Greta Thunberg and her antics in my mind. Even for someone who believes in climate change I can't help but feel these crazed lunatics have only caused massive damage to what should have otherwise been a wake up call. It is like how COVID got associated with Fauci and Gain-of-function.
> is it too politicized, are the required changes too damaging to the economy to start agressively implementing them?
Ofcourse it was politicized. It became a party vs party, an ideology vs ideology thing. Science took a backseat.
This is a take I often see recently, and it such a weird one. Greta Thunberg and her "crazed lunatics" have caused massive damage? By that do you mean that in a world without them, there would be much more efforts to fight climate change?
That is demonstrably false. Greta Thunberg only became famous in 2018. The world before 2018 was that world without "crazed lunatics", and things weren't any better than. Greta Thunberg got frustrated precisely because after all this time practically nothing was being done.
Also, exactly why do you call Greta a crazed lunatic? What has she done to deserve such a negative designation? What could she have done that in your eyes would have made a positive impact?
Also also, lots and lots of scientists have been telling the world about climate change, just as scientists did regarding ozone. It's just that the media or politicians or the industry or whoever decided their reports were inconvenient and they got largely ignored.
Because with the ozone layer, the causes of the problem were much more narrow, the solutions were orders of magnitude cheaper, and they affected a much smaller industry, much less dramatically.
It’s not that the changes are “too damaging to the economy,” it’s that they’d need to be much more widespread. For example, everyone should have stopped driving gasoline engine cars at least by 2010, when the scientific evidence had already been undeniable for years, for anyone studying the matter in good faith. No such action was needed to deal with the ozone layer.
Compounding the problem for climate change mitigation is that it threatens the wealth of people in the oil, gas, and related industries. Changing refrigerant type for ozone hole mitigation was not an existential threat to any industry. The fossil fuel industry has plowed billions of dollars into propaganda and political influence to prevent or slow down changes.
Yeah ditching cars is very hard in some places where public transport is not good. (US)
But I am seeing that it's not that hopeless by 2030 43% of energy would come from renewable sources like solar. Maybe there's still hope. It would be profoundly stupid if as a species we died off because we couldn't curb CO2 emissions.
Was an industry really hurt by the actions needed to rebuild the ozone layer? I don’t think so, at least not as far as I can remember. On the other hand the fossil fuel industry has an insane amount of control over politics since a century or so?
Global warming fix requires basically banning most of airline travel, phasing out the meat industry, and other massive life changes. And people would rather enjoy the lives themselves instead of giving a fuck about the planet they leave for future generations.
Magazines like The Economist helped bring us here by describing Oil Companies still has a bright future and a great investment in the 80s and 90s.
Instead if they had authored high profile articles about how fossil fuels are driving this world to disaster, maybe we would be in a better place.
Doing that would have made their advertisers mad, so they kept writing about clean coal and oil for better $. It was the exact same with politicians, they did not want to loose most of their bribes (ie: political contributions) so they hid their head in the sand.
So now this magazine is writing articles about Climate Change, no thanks.
Edit: I stand corrected. A better way to phrase it is that their business model does not rely on advertising, and they traditionally did not run ads until recently.
> The world’s biggest oil company has withdrawn an advertising campaign that boasted it was “powering a more sustainable future”, after dozens of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.
> The adverts appeared in The Week magazine and The Economist online at the beginning of the year. Baines said it was wrong for publications to accept them in the midst of a climate crisis.
> In a statement, the Economist said: “Advertising is not editorial content and does not imply any endorsement on our part. In the case of this particular ad, it was put on hold at the request of the client.”
Inside of the cover (page 2), ad saying portugal is the smart choice for data centres and ai computing. Page 11, two NGO job ads and an ad for timeshare holiday homes. Page 75, ad for Economist Education Online Courses. Page 75 (back cover) ad for a cruise.
Last week's edition: Rolex, page 2. Page 11, executive recruitment network ad, NGO job ad, teaching job ad. Page 11-12, ad for timeshares. Page 15, barclays bank account ad. Page 20: Ad saying amazon employees' working conditions are good. Page 25: Ad for 'securing identity for the ai enterprise'. Page 32, ad for european cybersecurity investments, page 84 (back page) ad for Oracle.
Do they need advertisers for garbage like this? Just another entry in the decades-long disinformation campaign
"Who bears responsibility for reducing the carbon footprint of those products? Shell, the companies that pumped the oil, the carmakers whose engines burn the fuel, or the people who drive the vehicles? The answer is probably a combination of all of them.
To heap the blame for global warming on the oil industry alone would be to oversimplify the emissions problem. True, companies like Shell could have been more open about evidence of the risks from climate change, and they sometimes lobby against steps to reduce emissions. But everyone bears responsibility."
This goes for almost every institution you can think of, save higher education and the field of climate science - and, even then, you can make an argument for lax funding and marketing on their part, in terms of overwhelming politicians and industry with the truth, no doubt at the behest of wealthy donors looking at their portfolios. But journalism, especially: essentially asleep at the wheel, when the gravity of the situation is considered. Too many people obsessed with their careers and with blinders on.
Every prediction we make seems to be reached sooner than expected. There is so many effects that we don't understand yet.
Keeping with the "this is surprising" narrative, or like this title, implying that we have any time at all, is not helping.
I would expect a less naive title from a platform like the economist.
The Economist is torn, because on the one hand they try to appear clever, but on the other hand they generally support unrestrained capitalism. It’s not possible to do both at the same time.
Clearly you don’t read the economist
I've read it since 1995 and I vividly remember them enthusiastically stanning Bjorn Lomborg's denialism. That's when I learned that the Economist is actually the world's first manifestation of a phenomenon now associated with ChatGPT: immaculately-phrased ideological assertions that are presented as common sense that all good, clever, right-thinking people already know.
Like ChatGPT, the findings are delivered with polish and confidence, and like ChatGPT, you would not like what's in the sausage, were you to understand its provenance.
It's devastatingly effective on a certain kind of man.
Honest Q: why are people so oblivious to what a shitrag the economist is?
Honest Question: what bearing does that have on the words written by and opinion of:
I first read The Economist in the 1980s. Name a counterexample and I’ll show you how you’ve allowed yourself to be duped.
Birth rates are in decline. The global population is estimated to peak in the 2080s. I suspect that could be later than reality as the endless doom (like this article) inspires more and more people to not have kids. Then as the population declines precipitously, nature takes back over and begins resolving the problem itself.
Population decline will not solve climate change, we already passed multiple points of no return that will result in worsening climate for the next 50-100y. And there won’t be a way to roll back those changes
> And there won’t be a way to roll back those changes
It's possible to sequester CO2, and here are a couple ways.
1. Use permaculture or regenerative agriculture to aggressively increase SOM (soil organic matter) / carbon content of the soil. Typical degraded farmland is around 1.5% SOM. For every 0.1% increase per acre, roughly 1 ton of carbon is sequestered. Setting an ambitious increase to 10% would take decades but would increase yields along the way. There are billions of acres of farmland, so a lot of carbon can be removed from the biosphere. Additionally, since people naively mimic farmers for home gardening etc., if farmers were part of the solution, then more home growers would be, too. With a couple decades of regenerative ag you can go from 1.5% to 7.5%, but with more time and motivation you can go higher.
2. Research and then put into practice industrial-scale pyrolysis for energy generation. So, instead of burning methane (aka "natural gas") to boil water to spin a turbine, we could pyrolysize organic material to emit and burn syngas to boil water to spin a turbine. The resulting biochar can be co-composted and when finished, used as a soil amendment.
With a different mindset a lot can change, and quickly.
In my own veg garden, I have noticed that my soil quality starts degrading around >6% of carbon contents.
It wasn't a problem until recently, but with all the droughts in recent years, too high carbon can make it hydrophobic and lead to water run-off that happens too quick once it has entirely dried out. I.e. it becomes too lose/aereated. This then means that the occasional heat storm no longer replenishes water reserves and you end up a bit wirh the same problem as if you had 1% Carbon.
My soil is still way more resilient at the beginning of the drought (I can easily cover 1mo eithout rain without having to water most crops, except some smaller spices). But in recent times I have stopped mulching for a while.
Not saying you’re wrong, but sequestering CO2 probably isn’t enough. Ecosystems are connected systems and can be resilient in the long term, but a domino can fall that has a huge, negative impact on everything downstream.
For example, coral reefs provide protection and a vibrant home for a lot of sea life. But when the water gets a couple degrees too warm, it can essentially die, and when it does, the rest of the ecosystem disappears too.
Imagine if you were a human and your body temp was even a couple degrees above normal. You’d have a fever.
And these are only tiny examples… life finds away, but it also needs time to grow back.
> Not saying you’re wrong, but sequestering CO2 probably isn’t enough.
My comment was in response to someone suggesting or implying that nothing can be done, not that the 2 points I made were enough.
I agree with you, especially about the ocean. The oceans have absorbed an enormous amount of CO2, increasing ocean acidity and killing ecosystems not even including the heat they've absorbed, also killing ecosystems. Meanwhile commercial fisherman (aqua farmers) are literally bombing coral as a fishing "method." We need an international effort at changing the people who do farming because the people we have are the worst we can get and they do an enormous amount of harm at basically all levels. Besides the ecological harm, they're just so bad at their jobs that despite selling one of only 3 products humans can't live without, they still can't stay in business without bailouts so routine they don't even consciously recognize them as such.
We need a lot less naysaying and a lot more concrete plans led by people who have successfully done it. I've already done the 2 things I mentioned (soil carbon, biochar) on the scale that is available to me. Additionally our rooftop solar covers maybe 1/3 of the roof and produces 2-3x our annual usage in an all-electric house. We're freegan. My used EV burns no fossil fuel. We compost aggressively including toilet material and make biochar which we co-compost. We have a xeriscape garden and use an amount of water most people would probably consider impossibly low. This is all with a mindset of continuous improvement, always assuming that more gains are yet to be discovered and put into practice. Anyone can adopt this mindset. If anyone thinks the above is way too much for you, I started it all just by switching the incandescent light bulbs in my house to LEDs. That was the first step, and then I took another, and then another. That's all. And we're saving a ludicrous amount of money but that's not the only reason we're doing it, and wasn't the original motivation.
Yes but the easiest wins are to reduce the main polluters: Richest 1% emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-emit-much-...
We need to do everything, no buts.
Stop buying personal iPhones, TVs, logoff HN to reduce demand for new servers as they die...
Sure we can say the rich peoples businesses make the mess but their efforts are broadly consumed
Any day now right HN? Gonna stop spinning up consumer SaaS apps in the cloud propping up demand beyond need for logistics and healthcare research?
Rich countries population declines , so much as a win from Club of Rome. Yet poor countries don’t care
Good luck with that.
Hilariously naive take. Typical HN.
I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
Already then you could find this exact article title in a dozen publications per year, especially in academic publications. Al Gore made a third career out of it.
It was alarmist and too soon then but it’s not alarmist and too soon now?
Nobody upvotes an article titled “Things are about 0.5% more concerning than they were two decades ago”
> I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
This doesn't seem plausible - the worst-case predictions for sea level rise by the end of the century are around 2m.
That would certainly be bad for Florida, but like 80% of the population lives higher than 2m above sea level, so it certainly wouldn't be unliveable.
I'd note that "under water" isn't the only issue at hand.
Florida's homeowners insurance industry has largely collapsed in recent years.
Rising sea levels can impact fresh water supplies (https://www.wusf.org/weather/2024-11-27/trillion-dollar-hidd...).
> Up to 70% of residents between North Carolina and Florida, and a trillion dollars in property, could be impacted by the end of the century with just over three feet of sea rise. South Florida represents the vast majority of that risk, with about 7.5 million people and $750 billion dollars in property expected to face increasing risks as groundwaters rise, the study found.
Power failures get scarier in high temp, high humidity scenarios, too. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature)
Thwaites Glacier and the glaciers locked behind it are predicted to raise sea levels by 3 metres in the next 50 years. And that's just one source -- it doesn't include Greenland's glaciers, other parts of Antarctica, and the expansion effect of warming the ocean water.
Florida is particularly vulnerable because it's porous. We could build sea walls around NYC to protect it, but that wouldn't work well for Florida.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5wB2ur1S2w
A beautiful island archipelago with heaps of cool snorkeling in the ruins just below the surface.
> I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
I don't doubt that is your recollection, but nobody back then was predicting it would happen in 20 years. The time frames given were much longer. But, the vibe was definitely that we need to wake up and do something right now, because by the time climate change hits real hard it will be too late to avert the calamity.
Some were predicting it, and those predictions got a lot of publicity.
https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2019/09/20/nolte-clima...
In 1992 Al Gore’s book said 60% of the population of Florida will have to relocate due to flooding. He didn’t mean in 100 years.
The actual quote is a little more circumspect than you portray it to be.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/free-expression/al-gores-long-an...
> The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”
It's possible to be right on the substance and wrong on the timing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry 's investor revolt.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/floridas-private-home-insuran...
> Active private home insurance policies in Florida declined by 78% over roughly a decade, with the state's insurer of last resort skyrocketing to 63% of the market share, as reported by PRNewswire and republished on Yahoo. That is a dramatic pullback in a state where storm risk has long shaped the housing market.
Take a walk up the alps, compare to pictures from 20 years ago and see for yourself
I recognize this is deeply cynical and definitely doomerist. What can I as an individual actually do to stop this? Why should I even bother reading articles like this at this point? I can't do anything. I can't action it. I can collect my recycling, pop solar panels on my roof and be the most carbon footprint conscious person and it wouldn't move the needle an atom's width.
Politicians don't care, and the ones that do can't make a difference either. Corporations definitely don't care. I can go protest, and that gets a lot of media attention but it doesn't change a voter's mind when their main concern is who gets to play in school sports.
I know this is vitriolic, but I am genuinely curious about it. What can I do? What can I do outside of putting my ballot in the box and hoping something changes?
Political participation -- voting, organising for the groups you support, actively engaging in meetings and public forums, building social groups of like-minded individuals. It is hugely effective. The worst doomerism is the idea that politics is ineffective. It is incredibly effective, and only the people that participate in it have any effect on it.
There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. But accepting the supine position of "well I can't do anything" only guarantees your powerlessness. Fight for the future you want! Convince 5 people that something is important, and you're already 500% up. It scales like crazy.
Three quarters of the world live in autocracies, and another 19% outside liberal democracies.
That will require adapted tactics. I'm not very qualified to speak on how to convince people in leadership positions there. How do you convince Erdogan, Modi, Putin, Trump, Xi, the North Korean dynasty and others?
On the topic of climate change, off the top of my head, these countries don't have a per capita carbon footprint as large as the US, and the significant ones are I suppose India and China, and China seems open to dialogue on the topic, and is even leading in renewable energy.
Downvote me all you want, naysayers. If politics didn't work, then the people you don't like wouldn't be in power.
If you didn't use so many negatives in your sentence, then I may not have misunderstood what you didn't not intend to say.
I would expect people I don't like in power. They should represent more than just me, and most of the population has quite some different opinions.
I would just hope most people don't like them either and they look for the "next one". Otherwise you transform politicians in a cult...
I totally get you and in theory you are right.
And yet, in the USA you have gerrymandering and apparently _wanted_ Trump.
Twice.
Something has to be very wrong somewhere.
> I can collect my recycling, pop solar panels on my roof and be the most carbon footprint conscious person and it wouldn't move the needle an atom's width.
The more people who do that, the faster the needle moves. You create economic incentives for businesses to cater to you, and you set an example for others to follow.
That's why I only buy electric cars, put solar on my roof, and heat with a heat pump. A few years later, my parents put in a heat pump, and an extended family member (who is a denier) also put in a heat pump.
Just a thought, which at T+36 min hasn't been mentioned yet.
Many systems are chaotic. At particular points in state space, a very small delta can result in very different subsequent trajectories.
Viral influence being one example. I'm reminded of Tamim Ansary's email[1] to 20 odd friends after 9-11, that went massively viral ("We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. [...]").
Also, some moments of teaching can change lives. And in everyday life, sometimes recognized and sometimes not, things done and not done can have big impacts on people. Ripples.
It is said of serendipity and opportunity, that you can't control them, but you can shut yourself off from them. And thus advice to live in a way that leaves yourself open to them, and to cultivate the awareness and skills to recognize and execute when they go by.
One can't know when one is a potential part of a state space fork. But might one make throwing spaghetti at the wall part of one's life? An occasional hobby? Support spaghetti throwing? Or potluck spaghetti throwing communities? Or pasta R&D or manufacture? Trebuchets?
Perhaps a category of "Things worth doing all the time, which are far from being worth doing every time, but are still worth doing each time." Or Chesterton’s "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."
[1] https://cmsw.mit.edu/reconstructions/expressions/tamim.html
An contrasting addendum: Most causal chains^H roots are deep and hairy, and most roles are supporting roles, rather than a principal with clear story impact. That friend who forwarded Ansary's email onward.
So maybe your question prompts some response here, which the author or someone then improves upon when this topic rolls around again, which someday affects a list Claude generates when someone asks it to aggregate "What can I do?" ideas from the web, which ... who knows? But better the question was asked than not. And better the responses are novel and insightful and compelling, than not. And better our discussion here refines those ideas, than not. No?
"Better", in some hopeful but poorly-instrumented fuzzy-metric sense. Which is a difficulty. Whether it's worth the opportunity cost of however else you might be spending your time this evening... perhaps better this topic/thread, than at least some others?
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
Short of becoming the Luigi of the environmental movement, there is nothing an individual can do. You have to take part in some kind of ongoing collective action. This can include joining a campaign against the oil and gas industry, going door to door for candidates who will reverse climate change, or engaging in direct action against environmentally destructive projects -- or even all three at the same time.
Trying to go it alone is pointless. At best, you'll go down a rabbit hole of becoming the most virtuous consumer alive. At worst, you'll be spend all your time mad-posting on social media.
What did Luigi accomplish? If nothing, then why the comparison?
Because the commenter wanted to call for violence in a clever way that wouldn’t end up being reported and removed.
There’s an interesting study to be made on whether there was a reduction in insurance claim rejections in the aftermath, and what the morbidity/mortality impact was.
We know now that it changed nothing other than ruining two families’ lives forever.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/04/health/insurers-prior-authori...
Luigi accomplished nothing but folk hero status, United Healthcare premiums increased by double-digit percentages this year. Change requires a pattern not a moment.
I didn’t know the Luigi reference. Google has led me to either Luigi Galleani or Luigi Mangione, as strangely similar options from different eras.
Nonsense. This is defeatist talk. This is the logic folks use when they make dozens of small actions that add up, like buying more plastic cuz "it doesn't matter". The honest truth is people who use this logic have made the decision and just don't want to say, "I don't care." Small actions make big differences at scale.
8 billion people all making hundreds of decisions a day make a difference.
Once an individual starts to make those decisions they have a sunk cost, which encourages more action. This leads to voting a certain way, making more sacrifice(giving up excess), encouraging others, etc.
This whole "I'm a victim and have no recourse" benefits the bad actors.
Capitalism has filled our society and expectations with extreme excess. Modern folks eat diets that are insanely luxurious. Giving up our excess is the crux here, and capitalism tries damn hard to give us reasons to justify every little excess. Then those things are accepted and the baseline shifts down, capitalism then gives us more excuses and the baseline drops again.
I was watching an old movie from like 1985 the other day. A character in the movie was a horrible person and part of making that character a horrible seeming person was giving her a small dog as a pet, because it added to her aura of extreme excess. It made me and my friends laugh cuz nowadays that's expected of most people, to have a small dog. The character only had one! Nowadays it's normal to have 2 or 4 small dogs. Lol. Did you know cats/dogs in the US consume more meat than the entire nation of france? Good luck getting anyone to forego their emotional support pets nowadays. The baseline drops.
Capitalism enables too much material wealth. Astounding.
It’s not a novel take, in some ways capitalism trades comfort for externalities. Now that we have to pay for centuries of externalities, nobody wants to give back an ounce of comfort.
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
You've never been responsible for the entire world, that's a defeatist fiction put on your shoulders by people who want you to give up and not take responsibility for your actions.
Take some real time to think about your own actions, your share of the blame. Then begin the process of improving your actions. As a handy benefit, you'll begin saving money, and you can reinvest the savings into more projects that also save money. Eventually your carbon footprint will be a small fraction of what it was and in its place you'll have a pile of money.
Focus on the missing prerequisites that are critical for any viable solution. It doesn't matter what anyone does if we literally lack the technical infrastructure required to make a meaningful difference. The first step is making it at least possible.
For example, halting the increase in atmospheric CO2, never mind reversing it, requires an astronomical amount of new clean energy far beyond what we produce today from all sources, clean or dirty. If we were serious about this we'd be building countless terawatts of new carbon-free electrical production as fast as possible instead of letting NIMBYs and activists bury these for decades in lawsuits and paperwork.
The infrastructure modernization that needs to happen will be economically impossible as long as it primarily exists as a mechanism for corruption, graft, and rent-seeking e.g. California's high-speed rail. Even if we had the political will, we literally couldn't afford it unless it became radically more efficient. Letting political constituencies hijack every building project so they can smuggle in unrelated agendas is something that is fundamentally at odds with addressing climate change in a serious way. That's a choice.
If we don't solve these two problems then anything else we do as individuals won't matter. Being able to address climate change in a meaningful way is downstream of these two challenges.
Even without the possibility of solving the problem, individuals can still choose to stop contributing to it. You might feel better about the whole thing at the very least. As an added bonus, the more people that choose to stop contributing, the easier it becomes for others to do the same (e.g. less driving --> more cyclists and pedestrians --> better cycling and pedestrian environment).
I think "how to stop this" is the wrong objective. It's like "what I can do to achieve world peace tomorrow?". There is no answer to that. Yes, people promise to solve wars "in a day" but that does not work.
Depending on your situations different actions will have a different impact.
I do try to choose what I can to help. I am not obsessed with "the impact". If I buy a train ticket instead of a plane ticket - that can mean trains get more money. If I keep my phone for one more year, less waste is produced.
Would I help with the situation if I would buy a car consuming lots of gas, take international trips every years etc. (I could afford it, that's not the issue) ? I think not.
Can I say that my actions significantly influence the outcome? Definitely not, but we are 8 billions on this planet, so it all depends on averages. But if I don't do it (I am convinced there is an issue), how could I expect others to have my position...
You're right.
"What I can do to achieve world peace today"
As a first step, what do you want? Would you rather live your life in peace, bettering the controllable world around you? Or would you rather live your life in stress and action and possibly fixing the problem?
I chose one of those for myself and can't blame anyone for choosing differently. They're both valid.
I guess you people can post publicly suggesting we improve things. If everyone did that there would be consensus to make changes.
On a personal level I also plan to get aircon which may not help the planet but may help me.
There is nothing you can do as an individual, unfortunately. You can reduce your own impact, that’s something that personally makes me feel better and I would highly recommend (vegetarianism is the simplest way to do so). And if you’re motivated you can join advocacy or activist groups. But it’s a collective issue, individual have no actual power here. We need to act as a group to make meaningful changes.
Though, obviously do not vote for the pro fossil fuel parties (which is pretty much all right wing parties in the west)
So you can prepare for what is to come.
Volunteer with a group trying to do something to improve the situation. There are plenty.
There's very little to do in Europe. South Korea, Iran, Thailand, Egypt or South Africa e.g. put out significantly more CO2 than say the UK or France (which are towards the top). India and China are higher than the whole EU and are only continuing to pollute more as their standards of living improve. Essentially the only way to stop it is to keep the 3rd world impoverished (in Africa, people often argue that green energy is a Western conspiracy to keep them down). Western economies have already largely stagnated and most of Europe's pollution's fallen to lower per capita than China, let alone South Korea or Russia or... Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and such.
Pro-nuclear efforts are the best hope we have: generate enough electricity and we can scrape the atmosphere clean
Their emissions are generally higher because they produce the goods other nations buy.
This entire mentality of "but them" is bad.
> There's very little to do in Europe.
Plenty to do. We don’t have oil or natural gas so relying on fossil fuel to power our economy is stupid.
Europe does have oil and gas (Russia, Norway). But your overall point stands
It's hard to accept, but there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
I know what definitely won't work: Luigi Mangione style action. That will only set people up against one another.
Here's two stories that might inspire:
- I've seen a desperate, fragile grandfather seriously contemplate peaceful Gandhi style sit-ins targeting fossil fuel infrastructure, "so my grandchildren would know I at least tried".
- I've seen a couple radically cut their consumption of about everything. "Taking good care of the earth is a tenet of our religious views. We're realistic enough to realise our efforts won't help anyone directly, but perhaps it might inspire others."
Getting more noses worldwide pointing in the same direction could perhaps make a sliver of difference. The tricky bit will be getting specific groups on board. I can think of a few challenging ones:
- the downtrodden struggling for survival as it is already. They have other priorities, like food on the table.
- those outside liberal democracies (93% of the world!) in a position to bring change. They have to count with sociopaths with little accountability in charge.
- those that won't make a noise because historical experience has taught them to shut up.
- those with too little education/intelligence/eagerness to understand. They will require simple stories and example behaviour/idols/heroes to copy.
Nature's alarm signals itself will induce some fear. That will be the best publicity for change.
Nothing
People got together and got us all to stop smoking cigarettes against the same kind of opposition. Probably individuals can get together, help educate others which will eventually drive changes through voting or force businesses to change
Stop trying to imagine yourself as the hero saving the day all by yourself. It is a fantasy. And learn about the paradox of voting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting
You can totally be the hero and make an outsized impact on climate change.
You'll just end up in supermax for the rest of your life. Pros and cons I suppose.
As long as there is no accountability for politicians, we will always have at least as much time as the next guy plans to stay in power.
Hard to blame this on politicians when raising gas prices is one of the most reliable ways of making voters mad.
Well, when the U.S. president calls it a China Hoax, I think it’s pretty easy to blame them.
There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. And the more directly the electorate can keep people accountable. But I think it's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater to declare that accountability is impossible, therefore there is no point in enagaging.
Politicians can only be held accountable as long as their base is willing to hold them to account. And unfortunately the old and wealthy have practiced the maximal mantra of FYGM. The degree with which not only do they hoard wealth but do everything in their power to ensure the old ways they made their wealth stay empowered tilts politics heavily.
And companies
If you live in a western democracy your politicians are held very accountable to the opinion and will of the people who vote. They are not kings or inherited aristocracy, they do what the people want (roughly) or get voted out.
The people who vote by-and-large don't believe climate change is real, don't believe it is serious, or are not willing to tolerate the level of discomfort necessary to solve the problem.
At least in my country, politician's hands are completely utterly tied from fighting climate change, because if they do something serious enough to actually matter they will immediately be voted out of office and whatever they did rolled back.
Here in America we love to blame the politicians (they do indeed suck). All the while voter turnout is a complete joke. Perhaps this is actually helpful, because we are rife with various subcultures that openly celebrate ignorance, so, yeah. Blame the shitty politicians, speak not of the ignorant and unbothered masses.
> All the while voter turnout is a complete joke.
To be fair, the US electoral system is designed to discourage or outright disenfranchise most voters:
* First-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections ensure that anyone who isn't living in a swing state/district may as well not bother.
* Heavy gerrymandering exacerbates this effect.
* Voter suppression tactics like attacking mail-in ballots and closing voting locations makes it more difficult for those people who still want to vote. Note that Voter ID laws are included in this because there still live today people who were denied birth certificates due to segregation-era hospitals refusing non-white mothers delivery care.
* Holding elections on non-holiday weekdays makes it harder for those living paycheck-to-paycheck and working hourly jobs, though this is blunted somewhat by states which allow early voting.
If you live in a Western democracy your politicians are very accountable to media owners and corporate donors. Voters are a very long way down the influence list, because media owners and corporate donors have sophisticated and very expensive - but high ROI - ways to shape voter opinion.
Some are simple censorship - like X and FB throttling the reach of unwanted content and promoting the reach of the opposite.
Others appear believably organic.
The obvious ones are crude, but they still work on huge swathes of the population.
The first step to recovery is to accept that this is how the system really works, and the idea that voters pick leaders based on a rational consideration of their record and potential benefits is absolute fantasy.
That's mostly a feature of elections with single-member districts or other winner-take-all mechanisms. Every successful politician must have a wide coalition behind them, and marginal groups that could back either major candidate determine the winner.
Proportional elections have different dynamics, especially if elected candidates are determined by personal votes (and not by predetermined ranks on the party list). A successful politician mostly needs to find a niche and maintain their visibility and support within that niche.
Discussion is pointless . -All- of it. Germany has reduced emissions by what, 20% ? It costs its world industrial leadership . No AI to power by electricity . And Germany has 3% of world CO2 output . Meanwhile , China emissions exploding almost exponentially , as they produce all the good and bad things for you .
China's emissions peaked in 2025 and have been declining since. They have rolled out massive amounts of renewables, unlike the US.
It's strange that anyone's still thinking there's "still time until we have to act". Is this really the average view out there?
Hopefully not average, but I guarantee there are forces out there actively pushing it. Two versions, eventually:
1. Don't do anything that might interfere with our profits, time is available/needed to consider what to do.
2. Don't do anything that might interfere with out profits, it's too late anyway.
Because there is still time.
We might not stop what is already happening or what will happen, but we still have time to make it less severe than it would be if no action would be made.
We still can save lives, not all of them but some and for this people it will make a difference.
I don't know anyone or ever see any media reflecting such a weird standpoint. It's more "better act now than even later"
In my family, about 5 out of 100 people believe climate change is even real. So ya, I think the average at this point is "I'm ambivalent, climate change may not even be real. But mostly I don't care"
The poorest in society are the lowest CO2 emitters - they don't fly often, many don't own a car and use public transport - they can't afford meat in every meal - can't afford air con in summer or heating in winter.
Conversely, the wealthiest are frequent flyers, are chauffeured about in SUVs and rarely walk. They have everything they'll ever need and don't concern themselves about running the AC or heating.
They're preaching to the poor guy about what he needs to do to stop climate change.
Even if the poor guy wanted to care, he can't do much, but the people who claim to care could do a lot more, if they really did care.
The media circus tries to put the blame on the poor, while ignoring the emissions of the celebrities and treating them as royalty. Is it any wonder most people simply don't care?
If the media cared, they would be making villains of the celebrities and idols of the poor.
If you’re talking about a world democracy like the USA, the consumption gap between rich and poor effectively doesn’t matter from a climate change perspective. You could vanish the top 75% of Americans and still we’d have a climate change problem (albeit less of one for sure).
People get confused by some of the research because it often publishes emissions by who owns the asset emitting and not who consumes it (eg Starr et al paper breaks down both, and consumption vs ownership is wildly different, and you can tell what bent people have by which number they pick to report on…)
Another way I’d put it: if you’re not ready for gas to be $40/gallon and beef to be $100/lb ground, then you’re not really ready to fight climate change. And no one is, so it’s not going to happen unless we get a technology miracle.
Lots of things are wealth gap problems. Climate change is not, it’s an everyone problem.
Better late than never.
The average view is that "climate change" == "higher/lower temperatures". Nobody really thinks of all the secondary effects.
a lot of people think that the time to do something is when your house is already flooded
https://archive.is/UwGSh
Paywall free link
Less time than it thinks? We ran out of time a while ago, it's already well in progress.
Yes, exactly, what time do people think they have? It's here, it's now, it's happening, it's all around us. This headline would have made a little more sense ten years ago.
The world thinks it has time left, but it doesn’t. Seems accurate to me.
Archive link? Paywall blocks content
https://archive.is/UwGSh
Usually people trying to be helpful just post an archive link, instead of requesting others to do so...
I had a lot of trouble finding one
I tried to create one for archive.is but it failed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean works
We're already cooked, the Paris Agreement was aiming for avoiding 1.5°C global increase by 2030 and we're pretty much at that now. We're already seeing global weather shifts as the beginning of what appears to be rapid climate change and we're not yet at the peak of carbon output.
why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
is it too politicized, are the required changes too damaging to the economy to start agressively implementing them?
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
Because it also happened to be profitable for a large company (DuPont), which was also the company largely responsible for the whole ozone layer thing. They lobbied against ozone layer protections while they had a patent on Freon, but as soon as it expired, they came up with a new more expensive alternative and started supporting environmental regulations forcing people to switch to the new one.
Saving the ozone layer required changing practices in a relatively small part of the economy (refrigeration, mostly). In 1994, the total cost of the transition in the US was estimated to less than $100 billion [1], about 1.3% of GDP ($7.3 trillion [2]).
Reducing global carbon emissions to reach net zero by 2050 has been estimated to cost $9.2 trillion per year [3]. World GDP is currently $126 trillion [4]. That means 7.3% of current world GDP per year, or 1.8x of it over a quarter century.
[1] https://cei.org/studies/the-high-cost-of-cool-the-economic-i...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
[3] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-ins...
[4] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/OEMDC/ADVE...
This worked so well because we had suitable replacement gases and the industry had little financial incentives to push against it.
It's a very different situation with fossil fuels.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
For the ozone layer, it was deemed possible to eliminate (or significantly reduce) certain chemical emissions.
For generalised climate change, the common enemy of all people is the transnational petroleum industry. This corporate alliance will topple democracies rather than reduce its profits and influence.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
If you want the honest, brutal take it is because I remember, at least in my country, that for the ozone stuff there was a lot of scientific people taking lead roles in educating the masses. Especially those with credibility who were otherwise not media savvy.
Climate change on the other hand, whenever I think about the words, I can only get Greta Thunberg and her antics in my mind. Even for someone who believes in climate change I can't help but feel these crazed lunatics have only caused massive damage to what should have otherwise been a wake up call. It is like how COVID got associated with Fauci and Gain-of-function.
> is it too politicized, are the required changes too damaging to the economy to start agressively implementing them?
Ofcourse it was politicized. It became a party vs party, an ideology vs ideology thing. Science took a backseat.
This is a take I often see recently, and it such a weird one. Greta Thunberg and her "crazed lunatics" have caused massive damage? By that do you mean that in a world without them, there would be much more efforts to fight climate change?
That is demonstrably false. Greta Thunberg only became famous in 2018. The world before 2018 was that world without "crazed lunatics", and things weren't any better than. Greta Thunberg got frustrated precisely because after all this time practically nothing was being done.
Also, exactly why do you call Greta a crazed lunatic? What has she done to deserve such a negative designation? What could she have done that in your eyes would have made a positive impact?
Also also, lots and lots of scientists have been telling the world about climate change, just as scientists did regarding ozone. It's just that the media or politicians or the industry or whoever decided their reports were inconvenient and they got largely ignored.
Industry groups saw the ozone scenario unfold and said "never again".
Same thing happened after Nixon - it led directly to the founding of Fox News (https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2011/memo-from-197...).
Reducing CFCs, while difficult and requiring global cooperation, was far more simplistic and targeted than decreasing co2 emissions
This has actually been studied. The question even has it's own wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion_and_climate_ch...
Because with the ozone layer, the causes of the problem were much more narrow, the solutions were orders of magnitude cheaper, and they affected a much smaller industry, much less dramatically.
It’s not that the changes are “too damaging to the economy,” it’s that they’d need to be much more widespread. For example, everyone should have stopped driving gasoline engine cars at least by 2010, when the scientific evidence had already been undeniable for years, for anyone studying the matter in good faith. No such action was needed to deal with the ozone layer.
Compounding the problem for climate change mitigation is that it threatens the wealth of people in the oil, gas, and related industries. Changing refrigerant type for ozone hole mitigation was not an existential threat to any industry. The fossil fuel industry has plowed billions of dollars into propaganda and political influence to prevent or slow down changes.
Yeah ditching cars is very hard in some places where public transport is not good. (US)
But I am seeing that it's not that hopeless by 2030 43% of energy would come from renewable sources like solar. Maybe there's still hope. It would be profoundly stupid if as a species we died off because we couldn't curb CO2 emissions.
Was an industry really hurt by the actions needed to rebuild the ozone layer? I don’t think so, at least not as far as I can remember. On the other hand the fossil fuel industry has an insane amount of control over politics since a century or so?
Ozone layer "fix" was invisible to the public.
Global warming fix requires basically banning most of airline travel, phasing out the meat industry, and other massive life changes. And people would rather enjoy the lives themselves instead of giving a fuck about the planet they leave for future generations.
Magazines like The Economist helped bring us here by describing Oil Companies still has a bright future and a great investment in the 80s and 90s.
Instead if they had authored high profile articles about how fossil fuels are driving this world to disaster, maybe we would be in a better place.
Doing that would have made their advertisers mad, so they kept writing about clean coal and oil for better $. It was the exact same with politicians, they did not want to loose most of their bribes (ie: political contributions) so they hid their head in the sand.
So now this magazine is writing articles about Climate Change, no thanks.
You should look into the economist a bit more.
For one, they have no advertisers to keep happy.
Edit: I stand corrected. A better way to phrase it is that their business model does not rely on advertising, and they traditionally did not run ads until recently.
The top of economist.com has a 250px high `adComponent_adcontainer__eooQr` div.
My Pihole blocks its content, but I have a guess as to what it is.
They seem to think they have advertisers. https://myaccount.economist.com/s/article/How-do-I-advertise...
The ads they accept are basically just classifieds for high-level positions in NGOs.
I turned off anblocking and see zero ads on the site.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/29/saudi-aramc...
> The world’s biggest oil company has withdrawn an advertising campaign that boasted it was “powering a more sustainable future”, after dozens of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.
> The adverts appeared in The Week magazine and The Economist online at the beginning of the year. Baines said it was wrong for publications to accept them in the midst of a climate crisis.
> In a statement, the Economist said: “Advertising is not editorial content and does not imply any endorsement on our part. In the case of this particular ad, it was put on hold at the request of the client.”
I have their print magazine right here.
Inside of the cover (page 2), ad saying portugal is the smart choice for data centres and ai computing. Page 11, two NGO job ads and an ad for timeshare holiday homes. Page 75, ad for Economist Education Online Courses. Page 75 (back cover) ad for a cruise.
Last week's edition: Rolex, page 2. Page 11, executive recruitment network ad, NGO job ad, teaching job ad. Page 11-12, ad for timeshares. Page 15, barclays bank account ad. Page 20: Ad saying amazon employees' working conditions are good. Page 25: Ad for 'securing identity for the ai enterprise'. Page 32, ad for european cybersecurity investments, page 84 (back page) ad for Oracle.
So there are some ads - not many, but some.
Do they need advertisers for garbage like this? Just another entry in the decades-long disinformation campaign
"Who bears responsibility for reducing the carbon footprint of those products? Shell, the companies that pumped the oil, the carmakers whose engines burn the fuel, or the people who drive the vehicles? The answer is probably a combination of all of them.
To heap the blame for global warming on the oil industry alone would be to oversimplify the emissions problem. True, companies like Shell could have been more open about evidence of the risks from climate change, and they sometimes lobby against steps to reduce emissions. But everyone bears responsibility."
https://www.economist.com/business/2019/07/06/shells-boss-de...
I remember that mag with that name from the 80s seeing it on news stands. Is this a different one and the other one closed ?
No. Same one.
Their business model is basically selling business intelligence. The magazine is for publicity, although subscriber revenue is significant.
This goes for almost every institution you can think of, save higher education and the field of climate science - and, even then, you can make an argument for lax funding and marketing on their part, in terms of overwhelming politicians and industry with the truth, no doubt at the behest of wealthy donors looking at their portfolios. But journalism, especially: essentially asleep at the wheel, when the gravity of the situation is considered. Too many people obsessed with their careers and with blinders on.
al gore, hold me!