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What If People Don’t Need to Care About Climate Change to Fix It?
(www.nytimes.com)
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
I haven't read the author's book, but I think her position in the article still misses the mark and is naively dangerous, having us all just look at the flowers and embrace market solutions while we collapse the biosphere at stunning pace.
Honestly I'm not seeing any 'solutions' that are on a timeline relevant to the crisis. But I think any first step will have us coming to terms with climate change not being the problem, but a symptom of our economic system and our relationship to the environment. We're going to have to reorient away from growth, because that growth is literally consuming the biophysical basis of our own existence.
Large-scale solutions aside, I think we're going to start seeing a growing desire in people to somehow 'exit' this system. I know I feel it in myself, deep in my bones, and it pisses me off to no end that I'm forced into destructive behavior because of the system I'm trapped in. All this waste, plastic and destruction just to exist each day, and I'm not even having a good time! If anyone has made some progress in this area I would love to hear about it. I imagine it must start with some rejection of what the market 'values', choosing not to participate in this whole game that is making us miserable, and somehow trade material wealth for greater awareness and connection to our humanity. If Elon and Jeff want it all, they can fucking have it, I just want out of this nightmare and to find peace with nature somehow.