I've always found it interesting that on Hacker News, articles like this pretty much fly by without commentary and are routinely downvoted, while articles speculating about the inevitable doom of mankind due to AI generate hundreds of comments and lively discussion.
We're so in search of novelty, we ignore the bus steadily making its way straight towards us as we stand in the middle of the road, doing absolutely nothing - and with no hint that anything or anyone will come to save us - and instead we keep reading tea leaves and imagining more fascinating and wonderful dangers that have a near zero chance of manifesting before the bus hits us.
To some extent, the bus ending is just too boring it seems for anyone to really become engaged by it - narratively speaking.
The other bus ending (buses always travel in packs, as any bus commuter knows) is fertility collapse. People are just not getting around to having children. That's a big yawn too. How do you make a drama out of nothing happening?
Trying to tackle CO2, while nothing is being done about other, more noticeable, particulates is tragic. Maybe it will be triaged incidentally, when priorities shift.
But even worse in my opinion, our focus on replacing CO2 production lives firmly in the mindset of not changing our ways of live. We'd rather replace coal with solar -- or more realistically expand coal with solar -- than change the way we live.
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
> seemingly endless string of heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and storms
The headline states that we just went through a year of extreme events, but this is all that the NOAA mentions in the article to back that up? Seemingly endless string of extreme events?
We should definitely decarbonize, quickly, but this is nothing more than propaganda. They provide nothing to quantify their claim that last year saw more extreme weather events than previous ones. No mention of El Niño at all.
I have chosen to not have kids and live life like humanity is not gonna make it. I’m done being super worried about if I’m using an aluminum can or if this paper bag is more energy intensive than this plastic one, or if when I fart I’m causing global warming. I let those things cause a good percentage of my daily stress for too long when I have no control over anything and the rest of humanity takes a literal shit on the whole planet. So you know what? I’m not gonna worry anymore.
That’s not to say I’m a super polluter now and drive a hellcat on VP fuel and dump paint in the river. My lifestyle hasn’t changed much. But I’m giving up on lying to myself about “it’s gonna get figured out”.
I’m glad awareness is out there and all. But greed is more powerful, and I don’t have the time or energy to build a group of protesters against big oil and plastics and shipping shit from China to organize other shit from China people buy on temu.
Anyone else given up on keeping track of how much we’re fucking up?
Not worrying about aluminum cans and paper bags is the right choice. They were never the problem. Some of that was deliberate disinformation by polluters trying to push the problem on you; some was well-meaning environmentalists lacking perspective.
However, I would suggest that you should still vote as if humanity is going to survive. We're not going to go extinct, and I think it would be a moral choice to leave a decent planet for whoever is here. Doing that will require collective action, not individual action, and voting is the one way you can influence the collective action.
I'll give you another reason to do the same: the people who have engaged in climate disinformation are likely to be making other bad choices as well. Voting for improved climate may not affect your life, but it's likely that you're voting for other issues that do.
It's not the most you can do, but it's the biggest result for the least effort.
Readit News
We're so in search of novelty, we ignore the bus steadily making its way straight towards us as we stand in the middle of the road, doing absolutely nothing - and with no hint that anything or anyone will come to save us - and instead we keep reading tea leaves and imagining more fascinating and wonderful dangers that have a near zero chance of manifesting before the bus hits us.
To some extent, the bus ending is just too boring it seems for anyone to really become engaged by it - narratively speaking.
Trying to tackle CO2, while nothing is being done about other, more noticeable, particulates is tragic. Maybe it will be triaged incidentally, when priorities shift.
But even worse in my opinion, our focus on replacing CO2 production lives firmly in the mindset of not changing our ways of live. We'd rather replace coal with solar -- or more realistically expand coal with solar -- than change the way we live.
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
The headline states that we just went through a year of extreme events, but this is all that the NOAA mentions in the article to back that up? Seemingly endless string of extreme events?
We should definitely decarbonize, quickly, but this is nothing more than propaganda. They provide nothing to quantify their claim that last year saw more extreme weather events than previous ones. No mention of El Niño at all.
I’m glad awareness is out there and all. But greed is more powerful, and I don’t have the time or energy to build a group of protesters against big oil and plastics and shipping shit from China to organize other shit from China people buy on temu.
Anyone else given up on keeping track of how much we’re fucking up?
However, I would suggest that you should still vote as if humanity is going to survive. We're not going to go extinct, and I think it would be a moral choice to leave a decent planet for whoever is here. Doing that will require collective action, not individual action, and voting is the one way you can influence the collective action.
I'll give you another reason to do the same: the people who have engaged in climate disinformation are likely to be making other bad choices as well. Voting for improved climate may not affect your life, but it's likely that you're voting for other issues that do.
It's not the most you can do, but it's the biggest result for the least effort.