"We have failed to shift the narrative and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems," said David Suzuki in an exclusive interview with iPolitics. "For me, what we've got to do now is hunker down."
How to say Marx was right without saying “Marx was right”.
Fuck that. It’s never lost, it’s just that we are constantly heading towards worse outcomes.
If we as humanity start taking it seriously tomorrow, it would still be a victory over only starting in a decade.
It’s not lost, it’s just getting worse, and that should make people want to fight.
saying that the fight is lost is just creating more disengagement and hopelessness.
I like the saying “The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best is today.” Because it is almost universally true about any long term goal.
You are using the broadest possible definition of “lost.”
Lost as in no more human civilization. It doesn’t matter when you start doing stuff, that future is coming. We could maybe slow it at this point, but not much else and even that is up for debate with all the tipping points being reached. They will have a far greater effect on the climate than anything that we do now.
Human civilization is bound to die at some point. If we give up now it will just happen faster and with more suffering. If we fight we will still improve things, maybe not everything will be okay, but when has it ever been?
I suppose it wasn’t clear in my comment but I’m not advocating for doing nothing. Just to have realistic expectations about what is possible. If you sell everyone on reversing everything, and then fail, it will breed discontent further than being honest. That’s all.
We kill 80 billion land animals per year for factory farming and we’ve caused almost 2 species of animal per year, every year, to go completely extinct over the last 500 years.
We are going to destroy almost all life on this planet.
Even if we intentionally released as much co2 as we could all life on earth is not at risk. Remember that there’s a fair amount of life that is virtually unchanged since the paleozoic period when all that co2 was in the air. Beyond that there’s stuff that hangs out in volcanic vents, rapidly evolving life that can adapt even to rapid change, bacteria, molds, mosses and algae. And who knows maybe there’s even a small adaptable mammal or 2 that gets out and evolves enough for a second attempt at sapience.
Don’t get me wrong the climate disaster is truly a unique and devastating extinction event, but humans are not so powerful as to leave the earth a completely lifeless rock.
We have started to reduce how much worse we make it, and a fair bit of progress has been made there in some countries, UK carbon emissions are less than half what they were per capita several decades ago.
When I was young we had a fireplace and would often burn coal in winter. Now I have a heat pump to warm my entire house by extracting thermal energy from the atmosphere.
Fuck that. It’s never lost, it’s just that we are constantly heading towards worse outcomes.
If we as humanity start taking it seriously tomorrow, it would still be a victory over only starting in a decade.
It’s not lost, it’s just getting worse, and that should make people want to fight.
saying that the fight is lost is just creating more disengagement and hopelessness.
I like the saying “The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best is today.” Because it is almost universally true about any long term goal.
You are using the broadest possible definition of “lost.”
Lost as in no more human civilization. It doesn’t matter when you start doing stuff, that future is coming. We could maybe slow it at this point, but not much else and even that is up for debate with all the tipping points being reached. They will have a far greater effect on the climate than anything that we do now.
Human civilization is bound to die at some point. If we give up now it will just happen faster and with more suffering. If we fight we will still improve things, maybe not everything will be okay, but when has it ever been?
I suppose it wasn’t clear in my comment but I’m not advocating for doing nothing. Just to have realistic expectations about what is possible. If you sell everyone on reversing everything, and then fail, it will breed discontent further than being honest. That’s all.
There’s also the biosphere to think about. Even in we go, it doesn’t mean that all life has to go with us
We kill 80 billion land animals per year for factory farming and we’ve caused almost 2 species of animal per year, every year, to go completely extinct over the last 500 years.
We are going to destroy almost all life on this planet.
Even if we intentionally released as much co2 as we could all life on earth is not at risk. Remember that there’s a fair amount of life that is virtually unchanged since the paleozoic period when all that co2 was in the air. Beyond that there’s stuff that hangs out in volcanic vents, rapidly evolving life that can adapt even to rapid change, bacteria, molds, mosses and algae. And who knows maybe there’s even a small adaptable mammal or 2 that gets out and evolves enough for a second attempt at sapience.
Don’t get me wrong the climate disaster is truly a unique and devastating extinction event, but humans are not so powerful as to leave the earth a completely lifeless rock.
So this is the meagre hope I cling to now. I guess it’ll have to do.
Exactly. Fuck the humans, at this point I just want as much as else possible to be saved.
But we’re not starting tomorrow. It’s not that we’re clueless, we know what to do and why, but we don’t.
Luigis for billionaires would be a great start.
We are light years a head of where we were a century ago. And I hope in a few decades it will be true about today.
We have started to reduce how much worse we make it, and a fair bit of progress has been made there in some countries, UK carbon emissions are less than half what they were per capita several decades ago.
When I was young we had a fireplace and would often burn coal in winter. Now I have a heat pump to warm my entire house by extracting thermal energy from the atmosphere.