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‘We are damned fools’: scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Yeah, quite a bit personally. I live in the West, so my lifestyle is quite carbon heavy.
Don't feed into the narrative that it's an "all of us" thing. Your actions in society are decided by what that society makes available, and what it doesn't.
As a fellow Westerner, our only flaw was that we didn't use every available means to get the corporations and governments who actually bear the blame to own the issue and fix it with their own ill-gotten gains.
It's not 'all of us' its those of us in the West/ Global North (the rich bit)
We flew, we drove, we ate all the meat. We shipped fantastical trinkets around the world. Our politicians gave us what we wanted.
The super rich really did it a lot, and brought all the media and fed us racist stereotypes. They brought the politicians. But we lap it up. It's on us too.
In the US, climate change/global warming has rarely been important to voters.
Here are the "issues of the day" for the presidential elections since the 60s (scraped from here):
Regular people aren't totally innocent here.
EDIT: fixed some formatting
Barring things like a mass-exodus or populist uprising, a population is at the mercy of the infrastructure around it. I am not responsible for the waste caused by my day-to-day activities if there is no other way possible through the means at my disposal.
People need to be careful. The "personal responsibility" re: climate change bullshit is toxic and plays straight into the capitalist narrative. The real numbers speak for themselves, and the primary force behind rampant pollution couldn't be clearer.
I totally agree, but people also need to be careful when they're trying to place blame in general. My main question is: how could it have possibly been any different? Anger and blame are pointless and unhelpful. Unless it's like the oil company situation where they knew and then actively deceived. Those fuckers should be beaten to death in front of their families (this is totally a joke, of course, or is it? idk).
Much of this comes down to human nature and one thing leading to the next like dominoes. The US is setup as a representative democracy & humans can't see beyond the tip of their noses -> people vote for today and ignore the future -> politicians don't risk their jobs over something their voters don't care about -> climate change kills a shitload of people, eliminates snowmelt, and scorches bread baskets -> mass migrations, war, famine, chaos. The most important questions is: what will we do with today to shape the future?
The time you took to explain your position paid off. I totally get your perspective, and appreciate you persisting.
I don't think we disagree on anything. Except I don't joke about beating oil barons to death. The prospect is the only motivation I need to get up in the morning. So that, but unironically.
(Oh, and my deleted comment was a duplicate of the previous comment)