been feeling like shit last few days. anyone have any reasons not to be fully doomer? (preferably important stuff and not individual level things like "my cat is pretty") (though by all means do share cat pics as well)

  • Owl [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    Basically every doomer take is "things will get worse next year" + "here's the worst things can get in that direction" therefore we're about to hit the magical tipping point where we skip everything in between those two points. The magic tipping point doesn't come from material analysis, but rather from people consuming too much media about war and apocalypses, so their easily available mental models are those, rather than Jim Crow, the Dust Bowl, The Troubles, etc. Maybe things get worse and keep getting worse, but they don't suddenly jump off the hook just because you don't feel like thinking about the space between Bad and Maximally Bad.

    All of our problems have well-understood solutions. More and more people are getting on board with the fact that socialism is prerequisite to those solutions. We have a variety of historic methods to build socialist movements, and new ones are being developed. The only thing between us and a better world is a mountain of work, and although there's a lot of it, none of the steps are hard, and most of them involve getting other people to start helping.

    • Skinhn [they/them,any]
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      4 years ago

      The cost of deploying enough shitty and highly expensive CO2 scrubbers to reach net emissions is only ten percent of global GDP. The only challenge is a lack of political will which will increasingly erode as things worsen.

      The doomer narrative is certainly promoted to shore up eco fascism and to stop people demanding change.

        • Skinhn [they/them,any]
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          4 years ago

          You'll have to jump on Google scholar for the source, sorry.

          I haven't watched the video but did try to read some of his arguments and he seems borderline ecofascist from what I read. Obviously negative emissions technology does exist, even if it's harnessing natural processes otherwise Earth would look like Venus. On the ecofascist claim (apologies for the fucked PDF text:

          Meanwhile, in an Indian village where my offset money has helped to fund a wind turbine, the villagers now have the (low-carbon) electricity to watch television, which provides advertisers of a petrol-fuelled moped with more viewers, and customers. A fuel depot follows, to meet the new demand, and encourages others to invest in old trucks to transport goods between villages. Within 30 years, the village and surroundings have new roads and many more petrol-fuelled mopeds, cars and trucks. Meanwhile, the emissions from my original flight are still having a warming impact, and will do for another 100 years or so.

          • aqwxcvbnji [none/use name]
            ·
            4 years ago

            ecofascist

            That's a very big claim. In the lecture I posted he said the West should learn from the Global South in how to live fulfilling, less carbon intensive lives. Hardly something a fascist would say. A fascist would advocate killing certain ethnic groups.