Just in time to be 40 years too late to do anything.
There is still coal, oil, and gas in the ground unextracted. There are forests yet standing. It may be too late to achieve zero warming, but we can still limit the damage
We could, and we should. But you know we won’t. Don’t get me wrong, you want to raise an army and start proactively defending the future of the human race, tell me where we’re going to meet up. But you and me don’t amount to much more than a hill of beans in this crazy world. There’s too many narcissists thinking they can pay to shield themselves from the coming collapse. And they are probably right, they will survive longer than the poor people.
Maybe, but the more airtime these issues get, the more ingrained they are in the zeitgeist. If climate change is a mainstream topic that we all agree we should fix, that has a ton of power behind it. And the tone has been shifting in the last few years, so it is working to some extent.
I get the nihilism, I really do, but if we give up it definitely won’t change… at least this way it’s only -unlikely- to change… for now, until it’s likely.
The rich and powerful only have what we allow them. We could collectively, tomorrow, decide that their money is no good anymore. We won’t, but we could. We, the masses, have the power to effect change. We just need to stop thinking it’s futile.
Eh, even if we go extinct, we can at least make the good years last longer, and delay the horrors a bit. Hopefully. Maybe if we buy enough time some wiz can find a crazy solution involving fusion power, geoengineering or duct tape.
That’s literally the attitude that got us here. Nobody wanted to sacrifice their comfort for future generations.
Not sure which attitude you mean. I say we should do what we can. What we can may not be enough. We should still do it.
But there is no magic button to do so. We demonstrated, a half million people in the streets of Montreal, in a province that numbers 8 million. That was years ago. Nothing meaningful changed. The provincial government is still basing it’s strategy on electric cars. Cars are still mostly fuel based and growing in size and those electric cars are still growing. Public transit options here are stagnating (the pandemic hurt their budget, since fewer people travel, and the government doesn’t want to fill the gap). There is no ongoing major discussion about cutting down on meat subsidies (not even on cutting down on the meat/dairy/eggs industry, we’re still subsidizing this crap).
Society is like a mountain to move.