Here's my thing: I absolutely believe that clean energy and radical climate policies would work. However I have basically 0 hope that enough countries will implement these things to evade climate catastrophe.

The amount of Doomers on Lemmy and Reddit is depressingly large as well. It's du jour to act like any talk of climate positivity is naive, change is impossible and collapse is inevitable. Just look at the popularity of whole subs dedicated to Collapse and Doomer material. It's exhausting trying to challenge the position of some of these users, yet we must try. Hope is an important part of tackling the climate challenges we're facing, and the glamorisation of defeatism isn't going to help foster that.

An argument I hadn't seen until recently was "Man-made climate change is real, it's an existential problem, and the only way to combat it is to burn as much fossil fuel as we can right now to boost the economy and increase our efforts to find a solution."

Because scientific endeavors work in real life exactly like Sid Meier's Civilization?

To be fair, destroying the planet and foresaking future generations is easier than admitting you were wrong.

It's not a shift away from corporate bullshit: the same people that were arguing that changing something is bad because the climate isn't changing now are arguing that changing something is bad because it's too late and let's ride into the sunset giving trillions to oil companies.

so, we've moved from "ots not real" through past "maybe its real, but its not.human caused" all the way to "its real and we can't do anything about it"/"its too late to do anything about ot"

We're past the point of averting the climate crisis. We're now at the point where any effort to mitigate climate change, to reduce emissions, is damage control. But there's little doubt of a global population correction, likely in my lifetime, and probably defining the latter half of my grandson's life.

The risk for human extinction due to ecology collapse is no longer insignificant. More likely we'll be reduced tens of thousands. Civilization is going to collapse, and all that we do today, culture wise, is unlikely to survive.

Others have thought about this more than I. A good deep dive is The World Is Not Ending by Sophie From Mars (on YouTube) who points out that we're more inclined to imagine the end of the world than we are the end of capitalism. She imagines two outcomes; one in which we embrace mutualism sooner and one in which we hold onto our capitalist values and grind industry until the last possible moment.

I think the general response of the international community to Greta Thunberg's call to action demonstrates pretty well what the climate response movement is up against: The aristocrats and plutocrats that control our industries and nations will not listen to anyone that doesn't drop on them with nine feet of rainfall and 115 MPH winds. And even then they haven't budged.

Now from my perspective, it's not a matter of willpower, but whether our species is capable of organizing a response to the climate crisis when it threatens established edifices of economic and political power. All signs say that we just have not worked out a sociological method to change minds who would rather die and see their own species go extinct before giving up their own wealth. It's a fox and grapes situation, and may well doom the human species.

The human animal has demonstrated itself unable to be able to choose reason when wealth and power are on the line, and then once we pry it from the cold dead fingers of our elites, we can't trust anyone else who has it momentarily not to abuse it. And that is the great filter that will kill us.

I think if we found an organism that drives hundreds of other species to extinction a day, we'd do our damndest to eradicate it.

Unfortunately that organism is us. Human exceptionalism is gross. We deserve to go extinct.

Nobody listened when they kept telling us we were reaching Peak Oil back in the early '00s and now look at us. Completely out of oil. We need to listen to the climate scare ppl for suresies!!