My nephew will be 38 in 2050. Sure makes it seem a lot closer.

Well, I started hearing “2050” in the 1980s and it seemed impossibly far off. 2100 really ain’t that far off either.

Yeah, it’s not bullshit to be conservative with climate models because they are incredibly complex. It’s good practice. However, because of the political climate around climate change, scientists probably er on the side of being extra-conservative, and the models are still dire! So, if the real world trends happen to go outside the bell curve, not in our favor, which keeps happening, we’re fucked.

On geological time scales, this is very much like your car crash analogy.

Unfortunately, most people don’t seem to be capable of understanding time at that scale.

The rich are on the top decks where the valve controls are, they don’t have wet feet, why should they close the valves?

It’s definitely satire.

100% satire

I think that’s ok. We don’t need to take everything here seriously. You can take it seriously, I can take it satirically. OP can say they can’t remember original intent.

Those damn demons causing global warming

Way to minimise the last 40-50 years of capitalists actively working to stop any real progress on climate change. Sure progress is being made now after they figured out it was getting bad and there was money to be made in green tech. That doesn’t excuse the decades of lobbying and and actual propaganda put out by capital interests that we are all paying for now.

That you are spouting off about “communist propaganda” tells me you either grew up in the 80’s and really bought the red scare line or you bought the far right propaganda telling you to be scared of ‘CHI-NAH’ (to quote the orange traitor).

Most environmental solutions are also being created in capitalist societies, and the richest countries (which by coincidence are capitalist) are the ones that are decreasing their emissions by a considerable amount.

Only because those capitalists societies are offloading the work that generates those emissions on to poorer countries because it’s cheaper to do it there.

I take no offense to being called a communist, even though I’m a socialist. I have a great deal of pity for the sycophants of capitalism, though, cheering their own exploitation and oppression as their masters terraform the planet to be hostile towards human life in the name of quarterly profit expectations.

Your family will be burning from the global oligarch’s fine work, and you’ll be blaming the invisible communists and socialists that countries like the US used military means to decimate through global destabilization the world over to further capitalist interests. The capitalists won, are fully in charge, and have captured their own regulatory bodies in most of the world. This is the world of capitalists own making. They run the show, we are living in what the capitalists would consider their utopia, where they live like modern Pharoahs as most of the species subsists to further enrich them.

We crossed that threshold years ago, man made climate alteration is a runaway train of multigenerational suffering at best, and possibly the end of human civilization for ages at worst. Have fun cursing the dirty commies when you’re thirsty with no recourse 🤣

nuclear plants that are shut off are almost always replaced with fossils, with the specific fossil fuel of choice often being coal.

Being from Germany, I have often read such arguments and at least here that is simply not true.
The decrease in nuclear power was accompanied by a decrease in fossil fuel.
Could that decrease have been larger if nuclear had been kept around longer? Possibly.
But if we are talking about building new power plants, the money is typically better invested in renewables. They’re faster to build and produce cheaper energy.

There is massive work being done to improve large scale energy storage (big batteries) so the renewables become less and less situational. Large scale energy storage is significantly less constrained than car batteries, because weight is a one time cost. Even gravity based batteries could become viable.

Also, in response to the previous commenter, electricity generation is by far and large the main source of emissions accounting for more than half, with more than a quarter being agriculture. Transportation is 14%, and given the future transition to electric vehicles, one might argue that half of that can be tack’d on to electricity generation’s share. (Half because electric cars are more than twice as efficient at energy conversion than petrol cars. Toss in some power line losses and that’s a reasonable estimate)

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They made exactly one nuke-powered cruise ship. It never made money.

I’m all for getting rid of the cruise ships. Floating land-whale-buffet reef-destroying pollution devices is what they are. I’ve seen firsthand the effect they have on Caribbean islands they make their destination, and it’s never good.

it’s a zero sum game. Our consumption is essentially inelastic, because we are all complete assholes

Even if that’s the premise there are still other power sources -> more than two choices -> false dichtonomy.
But then, blaming “people who disregarded nuclear energy” - instead of people who don’t want to change anything in the face of a historically unprecedented worldwide disaster - seems a bit short sighted.

Lobbies. The German “green” party if fully funded by Russia, which has a vested interest in keeping coal, but especially nat gas (which despite the CO2 emission is still labelled as “green”) being the primary source of energy.

I mean nonviolent protests DO work.

Non-disruptive DOES NOT work though.

MLK Jr didn’t peacefully sit in a park. They ran boycotts, sit ins, shut down streets, trespassed into white only areas, and drove businesses insane.

If MLK Jr was your enemy you were going to have a miserable time when he rolled into town.

Ghandi had people illegally burn documents and basically smuggled salt against all regulations.

Oh yeah? Tell that to Gandhi

Yup, the only real revolution is a violent revolution.

Now is absolutely not the time to give up on democracy.

No one wants to give up democracy, we just recognize that liberal bourgeois democracy only serves to create an illusion of democratic voice. The only interests taken into account in the so-called modern “democracies” are those of capital, and that is no democracy at all.> Now is absolutely not the time to give up on democracy.

We need direct democracy. What we live in is no democracy at all, they choose for us and then we just pick the worst of two evils.

I don’t mean to be a doomer but we can’t. We’re passed the point of no return. The best we can do is organize so that we can reduce the amount of death from here on out.

By starting early enough and being persistent. It will take time, but we had this issues for decades and we will have it for decades more. Best time to start a revolution is yesterday, second best is today.

But what about the feelings of the rich people? They might not like that!

The “momentarily-embarrassed millionaires” don’t help, either.

You may be underestimating how many stupid people there are.

Now let’s see them actually do it, and hold the fascist scumbags trying to do a coup and commit genocide against trans people accountable in a court of law for that matter. ~Strawberry

Figured I’d ask here since this thread seems to be getting informative. The number of door to door sales people for solar that come by my area really make solar feel like a scam. How should one go about finding a proper deal on getting solar without having to work with sleazy sales practices?

Why I say it feels scammy: the area I’m in has a lot of older middle class (not upper middle class or anything) residents. From talking to some solar reps, this is their target. There are much wealthier neighborhoods a town or so over but the salespeople I’ve spoken to say the business would rather sell financed installations to collect incentives and that it’s easy to convince people they’ll save money in the long run. But in this community, we’re generally fine financially as long as nothing big hits. When they gave me the numbers, it fell into the category of a big upfront payment due to down payments and high annual costs that would only slightly be offset by electricity savings. I don’t recall the term, but it was not something we could budget for. The paperwork is all showing the future savings and the savings on electricity, until you look into the details. There are two houses that I’ve seem go for it nearby.

there’s payment plans for solar panels That still doesn’t mean they are affordable.

That’s only one relatively minor factor among many. Anyone who points to it without also mentioning the much more significant impacts of things like global supply chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine is either ignorant, or is trying to spin a particular narrative while being intellectually dishonest about their priors.

Sounds like a good reason to have some money to me.

This is just propaganda from the 90s/00s. The amount of carbon that any one middle class home generates is nothing compared to the private jet class and the corporate desolation of the environment. I hate capitalism. I hate consumerism. I hate cars. But don’t act like the onus is on what basically amounts to a peasant class that already pays for almost everything and does nearly all of the work (the middle class). It’s systemic greed, deregulation, and industrial rape of the world’s resources by shit governments and corporations that have put us here. Stop making the middle class responsible for something they have no power to change even though most of us are anxious as fuck about it. If enough individuals can simultaneously change their carbon footprint to the point that it actually affects the coming consequences, then we should have just formed a general strike already to reverse capitalism caused climate change. But we didn’t.

I’ve been trying to make changes to my consuming habits for a good number of years in pro of contributing (however small it might be) to the climate change fight. But, just as on wintermule says in the comments. It might be a lost fight for us mere individuals.

Just look at the data and then you’ll realise that corporatins have been screwing the planet for a long long time now.

I always find it strange that the most immediate and effective change any individual can make is giving up or greatly reducing their animal product intake. Will it fix the world? No. But would it actually at least somewhat of a difference? Yes. Is it something you can do right now, today, without any real effort whatsoever? Yep.

But what is pretty much no one willing to do? Give up/reduce animal products in their lives.

It was the easiest change I ever made. 31 years ago. No meat. No dairy. No eggs.

Oh, and no car.

Guess that’s too hard for people and they’d rather die in a war over water.

People don’t make any sense.