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This comic is from 2009, over 14 years ago. Good thing we took action and have made great strides towards combating climate change during that time. Could you imagine how screwed we’d be if our world leaders had sat on their asses and did fuck all instead? /S
We aren’t doing enough but we are doing something.
Renewables are up YoY and solar and wind are quickly becoming the predominant deployed energy generators (in the US anyway).
Idk what all the world leaders have & haven’t done, but I know we’ve made great progress in green technology. Compared to 2009, we’re poised to more than double the efficiency of solar panels & the installation price per watt has fallen from $8.50 to $2.77. Bigger, better, better understood…and also cheaper.
This is what you want to see if you want the whole world adopting renewable energy sources.
Okay. We still need to do a lot more. The science is clear that this is the make or break decade. Either we severely curtail emissions now or we break the 1.5C/3F limit for the bad scenarios to happen.
And everything has happened faster than predicted so any millennials thinking this isn’t going to really effect their life is deluding themselves. It’s just going to hit while we have silver hair. We’ll all be hungry, thirsty, and trying to figure out several billion refugees.
I’ve been hearing “it’s make or break right now” for 20 years. I’m pretty sure we were absolutely screwed a long time ago.
Yes well at first we wanted to stop any increase. So there was a deadline for that. Then we wanted to cap it and the earlier we act the better it is. Now we’ve realized that at 1.5C some nasty chain reactions kick in and we’d really like to avoid that. However if you want to be reductionist about it then yes the time to act was when we learned the basics of this problem in the 1800’s.
But the next best time is now. It just gets worse the longer we wait until at some point the planet hands us an eviction notice.
Who is the “we” in your comment? This is an international site
We = humanity? This is a humans’ site
On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog!
With all those distant jobs it’s now easier than ever to earn a living when you’ve accidentally turned into an animal during an obscure scientific experiment
In Australia we are moving in the right direction towards more energy efficient houses, solar and now batteries. By no means are we close to the low emission society, but 500Pj of renewable electricity generation in a year is not bad, and increasing day by day
You mean you finally have a (president? Prime Minister? Whatever it is) hat doesn’t do everything they can to kill the great barrier reef ?
Need to drop meat & dairy consumption in rich nations if we have any hope of managing climate change while we transition out of fossil fuels, which will take time.
Its already too late though. Even if we stopped all emissions suddenly we would still get the increase of 4 degrees
This is just not true, to my understanding. The climate scientists I’ve seen talking about it say that if we stop emitting, climate change will start reverting. What’s your source on this?
Phew
Rich people won’t make as much money.
We could eat them. Wdyt?
I make some mean barbacoa and egg tacos. Save me their cheeks.
We could but we won’t, because we are not organized.
Ideas on how to organize better?
Not really. Organization of any kind is not my strong point to begin with. But stuff like unions is a good start, would be nice if the cooperation within countries was stronger ( like it seems to be in Sweden ) and I think more international cooperation is needed, since corporations act global nowadays.
They’re not organic, and pumped full of plastics and preservatives
They actually have studies that show they’d make even more, which makes sense when you realize that the economy is designed to make them richer. They’ve had these studies since the mid '70s. Cruelty and head counts are the point, at this point. They know they’d be better off as well, and are just seeing how many of us they can murder before we do something about it.
If things progress as they are, with accelerating warming, in 20 years the economies start to break down and money can’t buy you things anymore. Making money is over by then.
I’ve given this a lot of thought since the comic above was first published, actually. I think it really reduces to the Tragedy of the Commons. This is where everyone involved sees a limited resource and “gets theirs” since there will always be someone else to do the same if you don’t. That explains petroleum writ large, but I think it also explains general wealth hoarding and exploiting market forces for gain. If you don’t, the next guy will.
So if the global economy really is headed for a collapse in 20 years, you can bet these animals will spend 19.5 years making cash that other people can’t. The remaining few months will be spent buying their way out of the hole they dug, assuming they can get the timing right.
But the tragedy of the commons is possible due to other circumstances. One of that is a different model of ownership that is used now. If land is owned, you can use it was you want. That’s your right. Something that’s not owned, like the sea of air, is can be exploited. In the past, there was shared ownership over lands, and if you tried to exploit it you got slapped. Or you only owned something for a time and then came a reshuffle according to their needs. What we have now is en exercise in how far you can take individual ownership until it breaks.
And in the past, there was more a steady state model. Population only grows slowly. Now with fast growing population. Back then you also had money as a hard currency. You wanted more, you had to dig more out of the ground. Now we have a monetary system that gets its value by promising even more value tomorrow. It forces growth on everybody and everything basically as a religion.
Combine the two and things go horribly wrong.
That’s what’s probably held us back the most.
I see three situations among the affluent that created a substantial delay in any “Green” products becoming a thing faster:
In the first case, someone making money hand over fist. They will let someone else take on the risk of research and development, and getting it off the ground. I’m happy with my stock in BP.
The second case, disgruntled owners of shares in companies forced to “be more green” in some way shape or form, like factories that need some post processing of their waste products, or that need to pay for their waste to be processed or disposed of. “The only thing this ‘save the planet’ nonsense has done, is cost me profits” (or whatever).
The last is driven by the numbers. There’s no way to take the plan to go green and turn it into sales/profits. If someone were to propose any “Green” solution with a business plan that results in them making money, they’re on board, but climate activists aren’t necessarily good with business plans.
I mean, look at what happened with EVs, and solar. As much as I’m personally not a fan of musk, he was willing to take the risk to create Tesla. As soon as he started shipping hundreds of thousands of units at $90k+ each, within a few years, other companies had, at least, HEVs available. Solar panel research is starting to push out some pretty efficient panels, those panels are appearing on big retailers stores to offset costs. Solar companies are buying eachother out, it’s a crazy market. The demand, not just from eco-conscious consumers, but from businesses, has exploded. The reason is that the return on investment of solar is very very clearly laid out. Spend some money putting them in, and you’ll pay less in the long run on electricity. Any retailer with any future vision and roof space would be stupid not to put them in.
If you think about what’s important to these capitalists, and adjust to how risk averse they are, this is all very clear as to why this has been moving so slowly. Fact is, if you can demonstrate that the tech works and show the difference, on paper, for operating costs, you’ll easily have more orders than you can handle for whatever green product you can think of.
The main issue right now is getting physics to work with you, in your favor, to get the thing to work. There are some serious engineering and physics challenges when it comes to most green technologies that usually makes them “not economically viable” aka, they cost more than alternatives. Once we figure out how to make them cost less, you’ll be amazed how fast things change.
Curious that this list is missing short-term shareholder value 🤔
Won’t anybody think of the poor shareholders?
They are my reason.
Mankind has been cheating for decades now, building a super consuming inefficient society without the means to actually do so sustainably.
We failed the Candy challenge, we chose to eat our candy now instead of receiving more candy in the future. We wanted to have new toys constantly, make stuff cheap and throw-away, because we want new stuff anyways. We wanted to eat large amounts of meat every day. We wanted to travel across the world. We wanted to have our own large homes with large gardens and heat/cool them to be perfect for living in all the time. We wanted to have our own personal tanks to drive around in perfect comfort, to use as we wish, to go as we wish. But we wanted it, so we made it so. We used the ultimate cheat code called fossil fuels.
Using fossil fuel is like going to a bar and putting everything on the tab. You can drink and eat all you want, but at one point in the future you are going to have to pay up. Previous generations didn’t really care, they would just pass along the tab to the next generation, they will figure it out. And with technological progress as it was, it would have seemed likely a solution would be found. Especially in the atomic era the solution to a lot of problems was within our grasp. Unfortunately because a lot of reasons that never panned out.
No solution is within sight and the bill is coming due. But in order to at least pay some of that bill, it would mean we are going to have to give up a lot of riches we’ve come accustomed to. With a lot of people it isn’t they don’t want a better future for the Earth and the next generations, it’s that they don’t want to be the one who gives up those riches. They don’t want to give up their car, not even for a day. They don’t want to stop eating meat, even if it’s only half of the time.
its nicely written, but i think ur wrong abt some of these points.
We wanted to eat large amounts of meat every day. We wanted to travel across the world. […] We wanted to have our own personal tanks to drive around in perfect comfort, to use as we wish, to go as we wish. But we wanted it, so we made it so.
Most of this stuff only got popular bc of mass advertising. For example, the idea that bacon & egg makes a good, healthy breakfast was made up and marketed by paying doctors to say its true (look into Edward Bernays). This ofc helped the meat industry sell their dead animals to more ppl. and yet nearly 50% of our food produce is thrown away bc it couldnt be sold. why do they produce so much??
SUVs were heavily marketed to ppl in the US bc theyre classified as “light trucks”, making them not subject to “cafe” (corporate average fuel economy) standards in the US and were therefore cheaper to produce and sell. Look into what cars are around in europe today; most of them are still small, efficient, and safe.
the real issue of this is that corporations have a need to make more money every year. it all needs to keep growing to please their shareholders.
this means more aggressive advertising; more shit nobody really needs has to be sold to those who can barely afford it bc we need to be paid less for them to make more.
capitalism is the real problem here. and it needs to stop. we need an economic system thats based on ppls necessities, not on making the most money (selling the most stuff).
That doesn’t make them wrong. It just helps explain how we got here.
i think the “we wanted it, so we made it so” implies this is some inherently human thing.
i see it all too often unfortunately, that ppl just think human do bad, therefore human is bad and theres no changing it. we should murder a large chunk of the population or just go extinct entirely.
as if those were the only “solutions” there could ever be.
So the bar analogy works, and I hate to agree with an idiot, but when the tab comes due, some people just go to a different bar.
Let’s get off planet.
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Ahh but only 5x easier than living in low orbit and watching the poors die horribly!
Not sure that’s true. Terraforming another world is mostly a science problem, fixing Earth is more of a sociopath problem.
I’d love to do this, but we literally don’t have the energy budget for that. At least, not for everyone. Rockets require crazy stupid amounts of energy for relatively small amounts of mass, just to leave Earth’s gravity well. Nevermind that space is an incredibly hostile environment requiring technology we don’t even have yet, or that our next best bets for settlement (Mars and Titan) aren’t much better. We’d be far better off terraforming the Sahara.
Absolutely agree. I just think the earth environment thing is already a wash, so we could try our damnedest to get off the rock.
Let’s fix the planet. It’s possible, especially if we greatly expand hemp production. Once that’s done, we ship the tiny minority of greedy assholes to Ceres. They can figure out asteroid mining, we can even give them MOABs to help out, but no nukes.
The saddest thing about this is that I’ve been hearing this joke since at least the 1990s.
This particular joke is from 2009.
So yeah.
God forbid we do something to improve the world without a profit motive.
edit
Even though the profit motive would be healthier people, and happier people, and numerous studies have shown happy, healthy people are far more productive in a orwellian people-as-product labor kind of way.
Even though the profit motive would be healthier people, and happier people, and numerous studies have shown happy, healthy people are far more productive in a orwellian people-as-product labor kind of way.
Yes but they have studies that say that KEEPING people happy and healthy is a huge cost center. Also, healthy happy people live longer, meaning that the labor pool will take longer to refresh. On the whole, it’s not entirely profitable to keep people healthy and happy, because any profit they generate from their labor is almost immediately offset by the costs involved in maintaining their health.
and that comes back to fair pay and happy and healthy labor.
employees that are paid a fair wage spend more money, which increases profits.
So not making employees happy and healthy is a myopic, short term, kneejerk greed response that hampers and prevents growth and profits.
And I fully agree. But I’m not a CEO. I’m not a shareholder. I’m a worker. Am I paid fairly? Maybe. According to the market-based raise I got last year, I am. Our own CEO admitted that our wages don’t scale with CoL, though.
her head is on backwards. i hope she’s okay
Owl in disguise
I heard someone say owl and I came as soon as i could!
May I recommend today’s breaking owl news story:
What a Twist! : New study says owls may actually be able to turn their heads a full 360 degrees
Visit [email protected] for all your owl-related concerns!
An owl in disguise?
Who?
That’s the thing, we don’t-
( ͡ಠ ʖ̯ ͡ಠ)
I kind of get these kind of comics, but isn’t the reality that all of humanity is still in a competition with eachother, and doing all the wrong things gives you more power than doing all the right things, so that’s what continues happening.
In these climate debates the reality is that it’s a global chicken on the road, we all go toward self annihilation at a steady pace, and the first who flinches and tries to take action will get taken advantage of and ruined. So it’s slooooooow talks about doing tiny things and kind of maybe a bit cooperating while noone really wants to, because any advantage they can get over another country will be taken advantage of…
Maybe i’m a bit too pessimistic, but it’s my assumption that things work like that, and then all this bullshit suddenly makes sense >_<…
Slightly more complicated than that. It’s also that some countries are way more affected by changes then others. Sure everyone uses fossil fuels but only specific countries export it so you are basically asking a country to cripple itself for you. Same when people suggest we should just not cut down the rainforests. In both cases it would likely be done if other countries paid for it. But right now it’s what you say as well as asking people to handicap themselves
From the view of the global West, I believe this comic still applies. I’m very much not a fan of asking developing countries to not go through the same industrial revolution we went through, it’s the lack of action at home that bothers me. Here in the US, we’ve got half the population railing against EVs instead of wanting to invest in them and find more environmentally friendly ways to produce them; people who want to gut the FDA and EPA and reduce regulation; people who who don’t give a damn about those who are going to be the first affected by rising water; those who think terraforming Mars is a sexier (and magnitudes more expensive) project than using those resources here on Earth. And so on and so on. Those, I think, are the target of this comic. It’s a very Western perspective, I agree, but I also think the West is in the best position to do anything about it.
It for sure applies to voters, but not to the politicians present at climate conventions as this cartoon portrays. And in the end it’s them that have to broker a solution, not individual voters.
They’ll of course use such language to their voters since whatever gains votes is fair game, but i very much doubt they themselves are this stupid. Behind the scenes it’s just finding ways to screw with the others.
Yup, i wish talking about issues like this would be more common here rather than “what if we accidentally create a better world”, and other really populistic views of what’s happening.
Well it’s more of tragedy of the commons situation than a game of chicken.
How many times do you hear someone say “why should we change if CHINA is going to keep on polluting the air?”
I just counter with, “who’s the leaders of the world? Is China the world leader and we can’t doing anything until they do it first?”
I can see the point though. The CCP’s philosophy is pretty “So what, we’re winning. Cry about it lol.”
A great example is how we used to do a lot of recycling stateside. They "economy of scale"d it to death and suddenly recycling stateside was no longer worth it and most of it closed up. Now recycled goods aren’t worth much to them either so they’re like “Oh well who cares.” and it never recovered.
So if we compromise first, they’ll likely want to take advantage. If they compromise, they’re probably convinced (perhaps rightly so), that we’ll do some underhanded thing to pull power from them instead.
It’s utterly ridiculous seeing as we share a planet, but, yeah…
And even then, China is doing more than the US despite US being the superpower. China’s $890bn investment in clean-energy sectors is almost as large as total global investments in fossil fuel supply in 2023 – and similar to the GDP of Switzerland or Turkey. And republican’s are going to let China take the lead of future efficiency through renewable energy all because they want to protect fossil fuel interests. The one good thing out of this is that at least China seem to be taking it seriously and are looking like they will transition even without the US taking the lead. And if they continue, then at least republicans can’t keep saying “what about China”. They’ve really put themselves into a corner with that rhetoric.
You’re absolutely right. We are driven by evolutionary forces like all life on Earth and that’s just part of being a living being.
What’s funny is, most people on the ground that I have talked to about this issue agree that the world would be objectively better. They just don’t want to make the effort if it would benefit somebody if they don’t agree with.
Yeah it would suck if we lived in a world where psychopaths like Vlad Putin and Mr. Bonesaw no longer had power over the world’s economy. We’d have to pay the equivalent to the monetary cost of one war in the Middle East to achieve this but without the human cost that a war involves.
Maybe Biden should declare a war on global warming? Or does not actually work because a war on global warming would have an achievable goal?
I dunno we declared a war on drugs and look how that turned out!
Would the mobilization required to wage war on global warming create more global warming, or worse, a super profitable black market for greenhouse gasses? D:
Lol
Yeah, what have those damn kids done for us today?
Then the billionaires would still be billionaires, people would still be starving, and we’d continue to find unique was to kill each other.
That’s just the human condition though.
Its a trade off at best. You would need to make everyone poorer and accumulate more power in the government to make it happen. And the biggest issue is if its even doable.
“Poorer”.
“Everyone”.
You mean the wealthy wouldn’t be as wealthy and everyone else would be subject to strict controls on energy, transportation, and meat consumption. Which describes the lives of our recent ancestors. Air conditioning and heating would be for survival, not comfort. Most people will depend on mass transit and not own cars. And meat becomes a treat you get every now and then. But dairy products and eggs will still be plentiful.
It’s not like we’re going to be eating peanut butter sandwiches and starving while working 3 part time jobs. Unless that’s already your reality. Then it will likely still be your reality because capitalism.
The vast majority of humans could live a perfectly fine, alternative, lifestyle and the planet would be okay.
Yeah fair enough analysis other than blaming capitalism for everything. A thing that you missed was that when people in poor countries get poorer, they can die of starvation or other things. Why do you believe that is worth it?
You missed the point entirely. We don’t need to cut calories produced. The new arable land from not raising cattle and the turn of farm land from live stock feed to human feed will provide more than enough food.
This isn’t a situation where we have to live in some dystopia, as long as we act now.
Sure, in the developed richer countries, but not in the poor countries. Millions to hundrends of millions of people in poor countries would die.
Why? Why would going green mean they can’t grow food suddenly? What about coal power and cow farts means you can’t grow corn?
It doesnt mean you cant, it means that everything is more expensive, and means people in foreign countries cant afford things they need even more. If something like a billion people in the world are food insecure, a mild drought could make them starve.
Meat would get more expensive yes. But energy production is perfectly capable of switching over without a bump. And non meat farm products would actually become cheaper as supply increases. We’re not magically causing a drought with such a changeover, at least not any extra ones.
But we shouldn’t aim for “doable” we should aim for perfection
But what if perfection destroys the vehicle to make it doable?
You mean aiming for perfection ist worse than fucking the Planet a little less?
The more that you do with repect to climate change, the more it will harm the economies and the people in them. If you make it harder to get gas, poor people wont have access to it, and all the various costs will go up and crush them.
People are dying because of the climate Change, and increasingly so, but please Somebody think about the economy… Really?
Gas will be accessible to them in need, If those who don’t need to use it step back.
No sane Person needs a 3t heavy pick up truck wit 600hp for their groceries…
You are thinking of this a western problem. What happens to the more than a billion people around the world the are food insecure, and it gets harder to get food?
And the biggest issue is if its even doable.
Right we all didn’t think of that, in that case let’s just keep on overexploiting our finite resources and generate as much short term shareholder value as possible, because we don’t know whether a sustainable approach would even fix some things that are possibly already beyond fixing due to overexploitation and generating short term value in the past.
The sustainable approach at this point would be eco-dictatorship, not sure if it’s so easily achievable
I also want a clean world where everything is renewable and such, the problem is that I dont think it is achievable with our current technology. Take for instance the “Green New Deal” that came out a few years back, it was literally impossible. So personally I dont want to damage people that are doing the work that will get us to the tech we need in order to pretend we are solving the problem.
It’s not a better world if it’s achieved through dishonesty and manipulation.
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It’s equivalent to “for no reason” not to “for no cost”
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It would cost far more to not address the issue.
But the man in the comic assumes there is no issue at play.
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No, it’s making fun of that assumption.
So, you don’t believe those things are worth the cost, absent the threat of climate change?
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What conversation are we having?
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You think preventing climate change is more expensive than not preventing climate change? That’s an interesting point of view. I’m not sure the facts agree with you.
Wildfires that burn down houses and gigantic forests every summer, massive storms that take out coastal cities, that kind of stuff tends to have an expensive price tag attached to it.
It’s easy to forget, but the most effective first step for individuals who want to prevent climate change is: Reduce. And that costs nothing at all. It actually saves money. Of course there are many other things that ought to be done as well, but let’s keep in mind the starting point.
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So you’re saying our economy is a pyramid scheme based on a flawed system?
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It’s basically exactly what you said.
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Let’s depopulate the planet and rebuild the economy to healthy and sustainable levels!
I like your thinking.
You think consuming less would stop the economy dead in it’s tracks. And … Is that a bad thing? As we know, “economy” means “rich people’s yachts”.
And just as obviously, reducing consumption is not binary. There’s no way to go to zero, nor would anyone seriously propose it. But anyway, with an increasing population and limited global resources, it’s inevitable that people will have to reduce at some point, so the disaster you hypothesize would strike us anyway. And in that case, gradual change now is better than catastrophic change later.
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Reusing? I thought we were talking about reducing. And I don’t think anyone is talking about reversing.
More expensive for the rich, yes. The rest of us want to stop having to pay for things we don’t want through degrading our surrounding environment.
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Whoosh.
