Climate Summit
(midwest.social)
Science Memescross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11479731
It's not real science, because the fire is not as harmful as the pollution or gasses, but you have to remember that most conservatives are so self involved they forget about other people and the scale of the problem
How many teenie tiny fires would it take to make the world a bit warmer?
A million? A billion? Maybe a trillion little fires.
There are 1.699B cars on the road. By conservative estimates, average time of the road per day is ~30 minutes. If we pretend that they're all 4 cylinder engines, and average 1500RPM, both low estimates, that engine fires 3000 times per minute. For 30 minutes a day. For 1.669B cars.
Over the course of a year that's 55,810,000,000,000 fires. 55.81 quadrillion. In one year.
And that's just cars. Not planes. Not trains. Not boats. Not power plants. Not even cow farts.
They know that there is some number that's too much. They know we've passed it.
Most people don't really understand numbers with more that 5 or 6 0s
That is conservatism at play.
In the conservative worldview, this is already the best world.
Nah, 50 years ago was the best world for them.
Many people would rather everyone suffer pollution and climate catastrophe than those people have a nice life.
This is true for so many of the world's problems and it's disgusting.
Nah, they choose to believe it's a hoax because they're kinda rich and don't want to lower their standard of living. And the others believe the lies about the environment because they're bundled with the lies about brown people.
I expect that's some people, yeah. Accepting that climate change is real means accepting uncomfortable ideas. Like that they're responsible, at least a little.
Some people can't accept that they're everything less than a saint. You tell them that walking to the store is better for them and the environment than driving and they go berserk. Can't handle the implication that they're not perfectly faultless.
That man is paid by the oil industry.
No, that one is just brain-damaged by all the propaganda.
The paid stooges are far ahead and don't actually question stuff but plain out claim that it is indeed a hoax. One to kill all industry, tech and even people out of ideological insanity. Why else would they try to build green power production that obviously doesn't work and even reduce CO₂ when we all know that plants need that CO₂ to survive? 😉
The thing I don't get is how is reliance on foreign oil not a national security thing. Like surely that angle should tickle someone in the American chain of command.
The U.S. is now the world's largest oil producer. On top of that, its government really couldn't be any more corrupt.
Of course, the same question arises in other countries, but I think the answer is always the same: corrupt politicians.
Yes but there is a fat stack of money tickling the trump family.
Why should they care when they get paid regardless?
You can't apply normal person logic to the rich and politicians. They genuinely cannot bring themselves to care about anyone else, or anything but money and power. They don't think a full scale war could ever show up on their doorstep, and even if it does they have enough money to live anywhere on the planet, far away from conflicts that might interfere with their disgusting personal lives.
I literally said this to my climate change denying MAGA relative just to see how they would react and they unironically agreed with me. I have no hope for these people anymore.
Yeah, I said something similar to co-worker. I was like, oh no, that sounds awful. We're creating more jobs and more industry for people to work in and he just stared at his shoes.
I don't get it, that does seem hopeful?
Yeah we need more etc. etc.
I'm a big fan of protecting our environment but this fails because it's a straw man.
Everyone knows that the things we get far more than "nothing" from our rampant pollution. We get fast transportation, abundant food, and vast material wealth.
If we were really giving up "nothing" it would be an easy choice. Very few people would be willing to pollute just for the sake of polluting. Even if we only got a little bit of benefit from pollution there would still be incentive to pollute.
Instead we get a ton of benefit out of pollution and we'd have to give them up if we wanted to stop polluting.
The more honest take is that polluting activities have a tradeoff. If we keep polluting at our current rate, we'll eventually push the ecosystem to a state where it can't sustain us. We need to be willing to make some hard sacrifices to prevent that and we need to identify those sacrifices, rather than pretending they don't exist.
I think you should look up definitions of for nothing.
The phrase in this context means "for no reason".
And, yes, the author of the comic could have been a bit clearer and could have written "for no reason". I personally find that "for nothing" sounds more provocative and fits in the exclamation better.
Quite a lotta opinions people have on this comment chain, lemme throw mine in too while the gettin' is good! Also Tl;Dr: We can fix it, but think of the shareholders!
I've come to interpret a lot of these modern problems and solutions as questions of capital. To sound like a broken record, having as highly capitalist of an economic system as we do creates a lot of these incentives, so much so that I feel the question itself isn't necessarily a question of climate policy, but rather a question of our relationship between company and government. Partially because we have a cyclical system of: company lobbies for good law -> good law nets company more money -> repeat, but in the direction of environmental policy.
The EPA exists for a reason, the FDA exists for a reason, basically all three letter burecracies exist for a reason, It's to preserve something that is found to be important. Increasingly though, companies are exerting larger and larger power on government, and that's serving to pursue their interests, which in many cases means reductions or cuts to these agencies that can get in their way of profits.
I'm curious why you see my comment as a defense of shareholders?
The beneficiaries of faster transportation, abundant food, and vast material wealth are the consumers. The shareholders only benefit indirectly in that they can take their money and consume goods and services that others have produced.
That's a tradeoff that happens no matter what economic system we choose. I'm also not even suggesting that we pull back on addressing climate change; I'm saying that this is an ineffective way to advocate for it.
Thank you for saying this, same kind of strawman thinking along the lines of governmental privacy violations not mattering if you have nothing to hide.
Instead we get a ton of benefit out of pollution
No, the producers of fossil fuels get a ton of benefits in the form of money. You get health issues, climate change and desinformation (paid by a fraction of those big amounts of money) telling you how the clean and more efficient alternative isn't working and so you will have to suffer if you chose the alternative.
Also the polution's drawbacks from global climate change to your personal health problems aren't real... or they are real but not as severe as people claim... well actually they are severe but we can totally fix those easier than transitioning away from burning the planet... okay maybe we can't fix it but totally demolishing our economy by not killing the planet would be much more expensive... and so on, ad infinitum ad nauseam.
When you look around your room do you not see a plethora of goods made by polluting industries?
Do you travel exclusively by foot?
Do you eat only foods that can be brought to your area without refrigerated trucks?
Other's have certainly reaped the lions share of the profits from pollution but we reaped huge benefits from it. None of us are willing to give up the computers or network infrastructure we're using to have this conversation so it's safe to say that those computers and the network infrastructure are benefits that we value.
I think you misunderstood the meaning of nothing. I think the idea is not that you have to give up nothing to create a better world.
I think it means that all those measures to fight against global warming would create a better world even if it turns out that global warming was really just a big hoax and the fight against it was for 'nothing'.
Rather than argue semantics I'd rather rephrase the same statement using different words in the hopes that that removes confusion.
The comic essentially argues that we can fight climate change at no cost. That's nonsense. The cost is there and it's quite steep. The better argument is that even the high cost is worth it because the cost of not fighting climate change are much higher.
