Til' then the world's just gonna be allowed to burn basically unabetted by the people in charge?
We have to look at this like marxists. The use of fossil fuel is essentially baked into our ability to function as a society (and not just as a form of energy, but as products like plastic)
We can not change the cultural idea of consumption itself under capitalism. Trust me, some of the best minds in the world are working on ways to sequester carbon, many are promising, but these are only bandaids to allow us to continue consuming in our current pattern. There is no seriously altruistic endeavor in any capitalist country to address climate change for a reason: capital is not truly threatened by it. Capitalism loves crisis, it’s a chance to consolidate capital. Despite the massive risk to the wellbeing of humanity at large, so long as the piles of money of the wealthy aren’t threatened we will continue our doomed march towards the precipice of climate disaster.
I stand firmly in the belief that the driving force behind many future revolutionary efforts are going to be climate related, either directly or indirectly, and that will threaten the piles of money of the wealthy and be the actual hope for change. People may not notice their spending power drop 3% or quality of life drop in small yearly increments. People will notice when the tap has no more potable water and grocery shelves are empty.
I predict they will respond with a kind of climate fascism where the nations of the imperial core monopolise dwindling resources and leave people in the global south to die.
I'll go further and say that liberals and conservatives in the imperial core have been planning for this eventuality for 30 years and public climate denial and climate policy is largely theater.
there'll be the Inside World and Outside World, dependent on whether you're within the modular-nuke-plant-powered air conditioning bubbles
And "problem people" will not be allowed to use cars, they will cut off heating of certain neighborhoods...
They don't even have to do that, they'll just put enough green taxes on fuel and heating that the undesirable can't afford it.
Wait till we start having mass migrations within the US and people start talking about interstate border walls. I don't know how many people remember Katrina, but Fox News and other right wing outlets made a pretty penny demonizing the Black refugees who were temporarily evacuated to Texas. As this shit becomes more long-term the ecofascism dial is gonna get cranked right up to 11.
I don’t know how many people remember Katrina...
We don't have to go back that far. The 2018 pre-election "caravan" was a threat to America. Until the day of the election - and then - poof - it wasn't anything at all.
They're talking about a hate specifically towards climate refugees from within the United States, though.
The phony caravan thing was to drum up hate for refugees from outside the US.
Right, but I'm talking about internal to the US; US citizens. Puerto Rico after Hurricane Matthew would be another good more recent example.
Republicans don't know Puerto Ricans are American citizens lol
the post-Katrina discourse was maybe the single most radicalizing period of my life
Sadly, it wasn't till the Obama years when I really internalized the Liberals weren't left. The Bush years made it very easy to blame everything on Republicans.
I was trying to explain to my parents that building wind farms and solar panels is not climate action.
They just got annoyed at me and started suggesting that I would never be happy with any progress at all.
I said it was good to build and invest in these things but our entire mode of production is antithetical to surviving on this planet indefinitely.
there will probably be a desperate attempt at geoengineering by the superrich at some point and it will probably make things worse
Geoengineering isnt necessarily bad. Like they've done artificial extensions to coral reefs to maintain them in the face of sea level and ocean acidity. However, it would really only work in conjuction with a massive reduction in carbon output (something capitalism seems incapable of). And so if we get desperate enough to try large scale solar geoengineering, not only is it a geopolitical nightmare to enact, but it could cause unforeseen side effects around the world.
the thing that fucks with me the most is how easy it would have been to stop climate change all together like 20 years ago.
"The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period." -Bush the Elder at 1992 Earth Summit, but the de facto stance of every president since Carter the Pious told folks to wear a sweater for chrissake and lost his reelection
This is a pretty popular take, but is there really any reason solar geoengineering wouldn’t work?
It would. Dimming is cheap, and only takes powdered chalk.
China + India + Africa need to nukeshare and begin global dimming, IMO. That's the only way to force the light-starved West to confront the problem. Since heating only helps the north, but dimming hits them where they're already hurting--low sunlight.
Of course, that would mean global race war. Hence the nukesharing.
I guess it’s too much to hope we could just coordinate and dim as much as needed to reach pre-industrial levels of heat?
The point of dimming would be putting the onus on the West. Dimming alone is not a solution, because it doesn't kill the CO2 problem. Dimming just turns the problem of rising temps into a problem of darkening skies.
Whites don't care about heat because it helps them.
Whites WILL care about dimming because they're already at the edge of habitability. Any darker and their crops all die. Equatorial plants would be mostly fine.Of course this will also have blowback effects on a few Southern countries that are food insecure and depend on the North. But it's a lot better than making the entire South a desert
there will probably be a desperate attempt at geoengineering by the superrich at some point and it will
probablyalmost certainly make things worse
My vote is no. I am certain that the Pentagon knows how bad the climate situation will get. I am almost certain that they’ve done the necropolitics and know that as long as the climate crisis is distributed across the country / planet, people will watch one another die with a somber expression and a Starbucks in their hand.
This, combined with a captive media system that gives people cope and theater, means that we are looking at some extremely grim times ahead.
During the cold war people at RAND and within the government had already gamed out nuclear confrontation. They had already figured it was okay to pre-emptively strike the USSR and deal with the fallout. They knew that a lot of places would be bad but there could still be enough for them and their families to live a relatively normal life. They admitted as much on national TV.
They definitely have already done the math on this and have made plans for most of us to die. They know who to save and what places must be preserved for strategic purposes. I'm sure they're already stockpiling water reserves for the government and contractors.
We're all expendable and part of a game. Don't think for a minute that they must preserve most of us, or all of us, for our labor. There are levels of survival they're willing to accept including one with no poor people pack mules.
Yup. The cringiest whitest thing I've ever heard is from r/collapse, which goes something like
me: "the rich are going to fuck off to their bunkers when shit hits the fan, and many of us will die overnight"
r*dditors: "b-b-but without THE REST OF US, they won't have any WORKERS powering their civilization heh"
It's like these guys are actually incapable of imagining the elites hunting their own animals or doing literally anything outside of exploiting labor. It's as if they really think the elites will die if they aren't exploiting other humans, and that they lack the ability to finger a trigger and shoot a deer.
Eh, I look at ultra-wealthy people and I honestly don't think many of them would actually be capable of hunting well enough to survive (not to mention there probably won't be much to hunt). Remember all those articles from a couple years back about billionaires trying to figure out how to keep the staff in their bunkers in line after shit really hits the fan? They're not planning on doing the grunt work.
those articles from a couple years back about billionaires trying to figure out how to keep the staff in their bunkers in line after shit really hits the fan? They’re not planning on doing the grunt work.
just because a few of them aren't doesn't mean all of them aren't
there probably won’t be much to hunt
there'll be plenty...in the unpopulated areas where they built their bunkers.
It's been a while since I watched this talk , but IIRC he goes over how all of the major militaries have plans for dealing with climate change and they do not involve substantial societal change.
I'm just baffled by the fact that there are still many people that believe climate change is a hoax
What belief would make you sleep easier at night?
- That you are part of a system that is on the the path to a drastic civilization-changing catastrophy that can only be averted through radical changes in lifestyle and the abandonment of many of the things that are considered comforts today and that those in power are going to do nothing about it. or
- That those silly liberals are at it again and think they can change the weather by making you pay higher taxes
Sure part of it is blatant ignorance but somewhere in there I'd imagine denial is a kind of defense mechanism against reality, against looking deeper into how capitalism, the thing they were told their entire lives is holy, is actually dooming them.
There’s a lot of horror in realizing that cars are bad. Accept that climate change is happening, and then realize that there’s nothing a single person can do to stop it. All you’re usually left with is angst
I think for a lot of these people it's easier to simply dismiss it as a Chinese hoax and continue ignoring it. But, quickly, it's going to become impossible to ignore any longer.
People will deny it 100 years from now. Believing something afactual right now won’t stop people from believing the same thing later, just like a conspiracy theory.
And I think there quite a few people who don’t believe in climate change, while also not believing that it’s China’s fault
Shit, they can't even pass an infrastructure bill that repairs existing infrastructure.
In today's news, the Democratic "At Least Put Some Traffic Cones Over The Cracks" bill was defeated in the Senate with a 50-50 split with VP Harris presiding. The Biden Administration has declined to comment at this time on the defeat of the eighteenth attempt at a bipartisan infrastructure bill. Senator Schumer told the press "This is a setback, but not the end. We'll continue to work with our fellow Senators in the GOP on a bipartisan infrastructure bill." We reached out to Republican Senator McConnell, who stated that placing traffic cones on top of visibly crumbling infrastructure is a blatantly partisan and divisive attempt to virtue signal towards the Democratic base. Three bridges and eight condos collapsed this week, with survivors demanding that traffic cones be placed on the heaps of rubble.
In other news, the Department of Defense today completed sea trials for the $3.5 billion USS Trump, its latest aircraft carrier.
Please, try to be reasonable.
It'll be the USS Ronald Reagan II, and they cost about 13 billion per now
No, but there will be something significant done against climate refugees.
We have enough carbon in the atmosphere right now to basically guarantee 2C warming. Anything else that's done will be more in the vein of "stave off extinction".
The climate movement was really picking up speed just before the pandemic, so it remains to be seen if it reignites and continues radicalizing.
very good chance the pacific northwest literally reignites during or shortly after the heat wave
I'm dying of curiosity what climate package the dems finally pass. Whatever the dollar amount is - it will be tiny compared to the threat. Still, the big brains will tell everybody that it's significant and "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good".
I think it'll be something like $250 million that goes to actual climate programs. The total "climate" number (whatever it is) will be highly inflated and ridiculous. For show - more than $1 billion?
That number will include shit like giving Exxon money to "research" wind turbines. Biden will say "green jobs" and the big brains will tell us how "strong" he is on climate.
And the dems will promise that they'll do more later. Which is pretty fucking funny because they're going to lose the house if not not the senate too next year.
You know how alwx jones said the elte are planning to kill off most the population?
He does not miss it seems
The thing about virtually all reactionary conservative mouthpieces is that they have surprisingly good intuitions re: borgeiouse elite and their plans to fuck over everyone else, but because they're in the pocket of those same people they have to then torture an otherwise obvious class-conscious reading into one that scapegoats some other group (gays, muslims, migrants, china, etc) to fit the narrative.
I swear to god, like half the blue-collared conservatives I've met through the course of my life were about two steps away from becoming Marxist, if they would only see their own critiques through to their logical conclusions. This is why we have a multi-billion dollar propaganda industry.
Recently I've gotten my Republican father to definitively agree billionaires should not exist. It was a long uphill battle, but he actually agrees now. But the moment I start talking about actually taking their wealth and companies and using them for the good of everyone, the decades of propaganda kick in and he shuts down. If we could just do something about the media, then we could radicalize the poorest of them who'd be most receptive to leftist radicalization. At times they can get so close, but yet so far. America really has mastered the art of propaganda better than any country before.
It was a really slow process and I don't think it was just any one specific thing. But for the most part I noticed he already disliked specific billionaires like Bezos for the usual reasons a conservative would. So I focused on directing that dislike away from reactionary reasons and toward leftist ones. Eventually he started to grasp just how much control all billionaires exert on us, how ridiculous it is that they aren't accountable to anyone but other billionaires, and how much excess they have while others are barely scraping by.
He's still extremely reactionary and jingoistic, and I don't know if I'll ever get him to care about people outside of America, but he does have some amount of empathy for people within the country. When I stick to showing him things like just how bad the homeless have it here is when I get him to really start questioning things.
But overall the decades of propaganda are way too ingrained, and I doubt it'll be possible for him to become a comrade before he dies of old age. But when I see that sometimes he can change on small issues here and there it gives me some more hope that with more time and with heightening contradictions maybe younger generations like gen x will have a chance to one day understand.
he already disliked specific billionaires like Bezos for the usual reasons a conservative would.
why don't they like him?
I swear to god, like half the blue-collared conservatives I’ve met through the course of my life were about two steps away from becoming Marxist, if they would only see their own critiques through to their logical conclusions.
we need to give them all a little push then
Yes.
Actually sufficiently addressing climate change requires us to convert to nuclear ASAP, completely transform industrial production, restructure transportation to be more focused on mass transit, end the vast majority of flights, including those used for rapid shipping, adopt a completely different approach to industrialized agriculture, which currently requires fossil fuel inputs, and generally adopt degrowth / anticonsumption.
Most of those will create a crisis for capitalism all by itself. All of them require central planning. Degrowth is strictly incompatible with capitalism.
This is why we should all be ecosocialists as well: revolution is necessary to address existential threats to our environment and make a shared baseline of human existence sustainable.
