We have been racing all-out towards the consequences of our actions, consequences of which we are only now beginning to see the more... impossible to ignore, even for the layperson. We, as a...
We have been racing all-out towards the consequences of our actions, consequences of which we are only now beginning to see the more... impossible to ignore, even for the layperson.
We, as a species, have known what we were, and are, sprinting towards for decades. Many decades.
Climate Scientist: "Well, mass migrations, food and water shortages, the spread of deadly disease, endless wildfires; way too many to keep under control, storms that have the power to level cities, blacken out the sky and create permanent darkness."
We have been seeing climate driven migration for a while now as wells and rivers dry up. Areas of India and China are recent examples. I recall the Yangtze river going dry to the point you could simply walk across the riverbed in 2022.
COVID started at the end of 2019.
The massive Canadian wildfires (which resulted in smoke inhalation hazards thousands of miles away) happened in 2023. I remember doing my driving while wearing a 3M respirator and running a Corsi–Rosenthal Box all the time in our home to keep the air breathable and my ailing girlfriend from getting sick.
Just earlier this year (2024) we saw the next stage of the ever-increasing devastation to our cities and states along the southeast coast - devastation which reached much further inland from the coast and in a more severe manner than we have seen in the past. (I am speaking from the perspective of living in the USA)
The show the clip is from, The Newsroom, aired from 2012 to 2014.
My father, a retired professor of history and humanities, a professor who has studied and taught some of the truly darkest parts of human history, has long said that we are watching the extinction of the human race unfold before our eyes.
I have a slightly different view, but not so much better. We humans are cockroaches, we are adaptable and very survivable. I do not think we are facing extinction - extinction would literally be every last human dying, and as I mentioned, we are survivable little cockroaches. ... I do think, however, that this generation will have a front-row seat to the crumbling, and later, collapse, of human civilization as we currently know it. With our current trajectory, and the consequences already baked-in from emissions already released, I have a difficult time imagining the death toll over the coming decades to be anything short of hundreds of millions, soon thereafter reaching past a billion. We'll be sure to help things along with resource wars - honestly we are already into that phase now in my view (though that gets into attributing specific motivations for the wars we are seeing around the world right now, and is a bit more murky to pin down and say 'X is because of Y'.
It makes me fucking cry when I think about it, which at this point I try not to do too deeply.
We should be exploring space, we have the capabilities and technology to end world hunger and have clean energy, we could be using the tools of automation we have to enable everyone to have a living wage while working so much less, letting all of us devote more of our lives to finding what we are each truly passionate about and pursuing that.
Instead, a handful of individuals at the pinnacle of wealth and power laugh while soaking our homes in gasoline with a firehose, competing for who can profit the most from burning everything down the fastest, secure in the knowledge that they, at least, will have the resources to enjoy what they have until they die of old age, because who cares about anyone else after that, right?
I agree with almost everything you've said. As a result, I don't have children. I also drive an electric car, generate 90% of it's charge (stat from this morning's aggregated data), heat/cool my...
I agree with almost everything you've said.
As a result, I don't have children.
I also drive an electric car, generate 90% of it's charge (stat from this morning's aggregated data), heat/cool my home and generate all my hot water over the course of year with my solar panels, and generally do what I can to reduce my emissions.
I also consume meat, pollute the world with my tire particles, over-consume consumer electronics, and invest in the total market rather than exclusively renewable focused corporations.
End of the day, my helping is irrelevant compared to the problems at hand. I blow away months worth of reductions when I consider my share of the emissions of one trans-Atlantic flight.
Nothing matters. It won't be fixed proactively. Live your life and enjoy your ride. Make community. Grow food. Celebrate the lives of those you care about.
I look forward to seeing private citizens sink cargo ships, down private jets (and ultimately passenger jets) until the owners get the message and change. Kim Stanley Robinson's exploration of when eco terrorism becomes morally appropriate is a fascinating thing.
We need every petroleum CEO to be afraid of being publicly known. And even that isn't enough. We need our governments to be afraid of us again.
Yeah, the individual impacts we have, either positive or negative, are vanishingly minuscule. Enforced governmental policies and enforced international treaties are the scale of what is required...
I also drive an electric car, generate 90% of it's charge (stat from this morning's aggregated data), heat/cool my home and generate all my hot water over the course of year with my solar panels, and generally do what I can to reduce my emissions.
I also consume meat, pollute the world with my tire particles, over-consume consumer electronics, and invest in the total market rather than exclusively renewable focused corporations.
End of the day, my helping is irrelevant compared to the problems at hand. I blow away months worth of reductions when I consider my share of the emissions of one trans-Atlantic flight.
Yeah, the individual impacts we have, either positive or negative, are vanishingly minuscule. Enforced governmental policies and enforced international treaties are the scale of what is required to have any effect.
Kim Stanley Robinson's exploration of when eco terrorism becomes morally appropriate is a fascinating thing.
Is this from his Mars series? If so, I need to bump that higher up on my to-read list. At the moment I'm just listing to escapism junk food and switching to something of higher quality input for my mind wouldn't be a bad thing.
We need every petroleum CEO to be afraid of being publicly known. And even that isn't enough. We need our governments to be afraid of us again.
The KSR bit is a reference to The Ministry for the Future. If you feel at all like I do about this, it's a nice glimpse of hope in a sad world. Well worth the read.
The KSR bit is a reference to The Ministry for the Future. If you feel at all like I do about this, it's a nice glimpse of hope in a sad world. Well worth the read.
I hope we don’t see private citizens taking out passenger jets, because I think that would be spectacularly ineffective at sending a message or achieving much of anything else for that matter. The...
I hope we don’t see private citizens taking out passenger jets, because I think that would be spectacularly ineffective at sending a message or achieving much of anything else for that matter. The entirety of commercial aviation is responsible for about 2.5% of global emissions, and passenger flights are only a slice of that, so if people all stopped flying tomorrow the difference it’d make would be quite small. It also isn’t likely to earn sympathy for the cause or ire towards CEOs from the general public, many of whom have come to rely on flights to be able to spend time with their families after being forced to move for opportunity, and this includes many on the lower end of the economic spectrum (it’s not just rich people flying). At most this would bolster public support for hardcore crackdowns on anything that could pose a threat to an airplane and maybe even for ramping up of authoritarianism (as seen post 9/11).
Cargo ships on the other hand I agree on. Ocean shipping can be cut down significantly without a reduction in quality of life — much of it only occurs because of economic absurdities (there is no reason for grocery stores in San Francisco to stock garlic from China when garlic capitol Gilroy is literally a couple of hours down the road), to sell hoards of cheap junk that is destined for a landfill in a year or less, or to enable manufacturing of things that could be made domestically at marginally cheaper rates.
Yeah I doubt that’d get much in the way of begrudgement. As we’ve seen, the greater public doesn’t identify with the ultra-wealthy, and from an impact standpoint anybody who has a private jet is...
Yeah I doubt that’d get much in the way of begrudgement. As we’ve seen, the greater public doesn’t identify with the ultra-wealthy, and from an impact standpoint anybody who has a private jet is dramatically worse than the average citizen could ever be.
How can you possibly justify taking transatlantic flights yourself while also calling for ecoterrorism? How did a call for shooting down passenger jets get this many votes?
I blow away months worth of reductions when I consider my share of the emissions of one trans-Atlantic flight.
...
I look forward to seeing private citizens sink cargo ships, down private jets (and ultimately passenger jets) until the owners get the message and change.
How can you possibly justify taking transatlantic flights yourself while also calling for ecoterrorism?
How did a call for shooting down passenger jets get this many votes?
You might have missed the overall tenor of conversation and context that u/davek804's comment was part of. While I dislike speaking on another person's behalf since I'm no mind reader, I believe...
You might have missed the overall tenor of conversation and context that u/davek804's comment was part of.
While I dislike speaking on another person's behalf since I'm no mind reader, I believe the comparison of months of their efforts at carbon output reduction being made meaningless by a single flight was to outline the futility and uselessness of trying to tackle the issue of climate change with individual, personal action (such as installing energy-efficient upgrades and clean energy augmentation to one's home).
As to the ecoterrorism reference, that was (if I understood their reference and meaning correctly) an exploration of when such actions become morally justifiable, in part in reference to the mentioned literary work of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future.
I took it as a current day context examination of the break between what is legal and what is moral. A historical example would be back before the American Civil War, during a time when slavery was legal. A similar discussion within historical context could be compared to hoping for plantation owners to be killed and their property stolen - or said from a different viewpoint, hoping for brutal slavers to be killed and their slaves freed. In that historical context, slavery was legal, and killing a slave owner or smuggling away a slave to freedom was likewise illegal - but it was also morally correct.
The current day example is that of large corporate entities who have systematically co-opted the rule of law through legalized bribery in pursuit of ever more wealth and power. The pursuit of maximum wealth also entails poisoning the world, dooming hundreds of millions to early deaths and literally erasing small island nations with rising sea levels - all because it's cheaper to not try to convert over to clean energy and make things in a way that doesn't dump pollution wherever is convenient. All legal, or legal enough so long as they can keep attention away from the worst of their ecological and sociological atrocities - legal, but not moral. So that was the context - in the framework of an overall system that protects such actions, because said system has been co-opted by bad-faith actors, at what point do illegal actions become morally correct in the pursuit of either the greater good, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the pursuit of preventing the greater harm?
I'm not convinced that's what was meant - it's an awful lot of extrapolation. And if he did mean to say "when does it become ok to do bad things for good reasons?", saying "I can't wait for people...
I'm not convinced that's what was meant - it's an awful lot of extrapolation. And if he did mean to say "when does it become ok to do bad things for good reasons?", saying "I can't wait for people to shoot down passenger planes" is a pretty poor way to get that message across.
To your points, a few rejoinders. The legal vs. moral debate is not particularly relevant when we're talking about murdering several hundred people. This is not stealing bread to feed your family, or engaging in an illegal public demonstration. Murdering hundreds of people is a massive moral harm; the fact that you'd be breaking the law to do so is so trivial that it doesn't even matter.
I want to underscore this again. We're talking about murdering hundreds of innocent people. This is not some trolley problem scenario where you could save the entire world by having a small random number die. The idea of shooting down a plane would be to what, scare everyone into not flying anymore? That wouldn't even work; the September 11 attacks didn't stop flying. The shootdown of MH17 didn't stop flying. The comparison to killing a slaveowner to free slaves completely falls apart, not least because you're comparing killing a guilty man to killing innocents.
Here's why I'm fighting this so hard. A lot of people are devastated about climate change and have become incredibly callous. I get that. What I don't get - will never accept - is saying that one can't wait for the murder of hundreds of innocent people. That's not acceptable, even as a rhetorical device, and it frightens me that so few people on this website seem to have a problem with it.
These are fair issues to point out in that there is a false equivalence in the two situations, at least when looking at the specific situations instead of a more general whole. I acknowledge the...
To your points, a few rejoinders. The legal vs. moral debate is not particularly relevant when we're talking about murdering several hundred people.
I want to underscore this again. We're talking about murdering hundreds of innocent people.
The comparison to killing a slaveowner to free slaves completely falls apart, not least because you're comparing killing a guilty man to killing innocents.
These are fair issues to point out in that there is a false equivalence in the two situations, at least when looking at the specific situations instead of a more general whole. I acknowledge the point there.
What I don't get - will never accept - is saying that one can't wait for the murder of hundreds of innocent people. That's not acceptable, even as a rhetorical device, and it frightens me that so few people on this website seem to have a problem with it.
For specific discussion on this, it really would need to be @davek804 responding instead of me as I've already gone pretty far down the rabbit hole of interpreting what I believe a given viewpoint to be, and the further down any specific path I go the more likely error becomes.
I will however, speak to my view on this. I'll also add the disclaimer that I am not personally advocating for the specific action of shooting down passenger aircraft. I could go down the rabbit hole of a thought experiment about specific methods for preventing the use of such aircraft without the loss of life, but out of an abundance of self preservation I am not going to describe anything like a how-to technical roadmap to achieve such things.
I will touch on two topics, both of which are controversial and discomforting. The second one far more so.
1: The oft-used phrase of "Violence is never the answer." (with or without emotional or volume emphasis)
and
2: The unjustifiability of loss of innocent life. To be more specific, causing (or by knowing inaction, allowing to be caused) the loss of innocent life.
"Violence is never the answer." I really would love to live in a world where this held true. I would love to live in a society where this was a viable part of a social structure and the abuse of those unwilling (or unable) to employ violence simply did not occur.
I hate using absolutes. I refuse to say such a society is impossible, but I will say it is both improbable and non-linearly scales up in difficulty in relation to societal population (example: much easier for a small village of 20 people or so to live in peace than a city of 20 million).
Anyway, as to "violence is never the answer" and variations on that position. I can only point to all recorded human history as an example and state "violence has been the answer throughout history" for reasons good, bad, and so many murky or debatable positions in between those comfortable simple positions. Labor rights in the United States have a history bathed in blood and massacre - and I do mean literal massacres. Racial equality (or rather, a reduction in racial inequality) DID NOT come about solely though peaceful protest. Slavery did not end bloodlessly. Buchenwald, Dachau, and the more widely remembered name of Auschwitz - these places were not stopped without violence.
On to topic 2.
The death of innocents. This topic is harder, and it is horrible - on that we are agreed.
There is once again accepted precedent in history, including modern history. World War II is again filled with obvious examples, but by no means should it be viewed as an isolated set of examples. The allies bombed German cities, knowingly causing civilian deaths. Were these actions wrong? Like so many complicated issues, there is no comfortable 'certain truth' to be had here. Or the most devastating individual examples of the Allies killing civilians during the war: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Between those two cities burned in nuclear fire, the allies killed very roughly 200,000 civilians - men, women, and children.
The first argument against this being a fair comparison might be that it was war, and total war at that, with many peoples and cultures facing existential threat from the Axis.
Is Climate Change not an existential threat? Is that existential threat not being driven and protected by the interests of a specific group? In this case, not Germany, Italy, and Japan, but by the collective uncaring self-interest of those with unthinkable wealth?
An additional point of note on how unacceptable the killing of innocents is: I rather largely agree with you. Now, looking through that lens, how unacceptable is it that lives are being ended, degraded, shortened, and caused to exist in a state of suffering due to the consequences of climate change, and the knowing continuation of the unfathomable greed that continues to drive it, even with those in the driver seat being fully aware of who is suffocating in their exhaust?
I appreciate the effort you put into this post. I don't agree with all of your examples, but I understand where you're coming from and I respect the thought process behind your arguments.
I appreciate the effort you put into this post. I don't agree with all of your examples, but I understand where you're coming from and I respect the thought process behind your arguments.
Thank you. I completely understand not agreeing. This is something I appreciate about discussion here on Tildes, we tend to have many more good-faith discussions in a polite manner even with...
Thank you. I completely understand not agreeing.
This is something I appreciate about discussion here on Tildes, we tend to have many more good-faith discussions in a polite manner even with strongly differing views.
I do on and off miss discussion on Reddit, but I'm wondering if there is a fundamentally inverse relationship between community size and... politeness / civility / genuine good-faith discourse. Or maybe I'm drawing a false equivalence there and it is more along the lines of larger communities will tend to have a larger total amount of 'noise' trying to drown out signal, even if the percentage is similar. Maybe there is some social science that has been done on the topic somewhere.
Time to turn all for-profit organizations into non-profits, dissolve the stockmarket and devote all available capital to projects dedicated to curbing climate change. EDIT: To clarify, I believe...
Time to turn all for-profit organizations into non-profits, dissolve the stockmarket and devote all available capital to projects dedicated to curbing climate change.
EDIT:
To clarify, I believe profits only serve to keep your company from going under, which is logical. Either by innovating and making new products or services, or by expanding and growing your market share. But this also means that the bigger the profits, the bigger the threat to other players in your field.
This in turn means companies will start doing anything to get things their way. Today in the US that is lobbying and less regulations. We've seen what's happening in healthcare right now, people are getting fed up and incidents happen.
Enter degrowth. The process of accepting less profits, less comfort, less pay (CEO's mostly) and an actual livable world. If all your needs are met and you can live a fulfilling life then money is essentially useless.
We have been racing all-out towards the consequences of our actions, consequences of which we are only now beginning to see the more... impossible to ignore, even for the layperson.
We, as a species, have known what we were, and are, sprinting towards for decades. Many decades.
I will simply leave you with this clip from the HBO show, The Newsroom.
A quote from the scene:
News Anchor: "What would all this look like?"
Climate Scientist: "Well, mass migrations, food and water shortages, the spread of deadly disease, endless wildfires; way too many to keep under control, storms that have the power to level cities, blacken out the sky and create permanent darkness."
We have been seeing climate driven migration for a while now as wells and rivers dry up. Areas of India and China are recent examples. I recall the Yangtze river going dry to the point you could simply walk across the riverbed in 2022.
COVID started at the end of 2019.
The massive Canadian wildfires (which resulted in smoke inhalation hazards thousands of miles away) happened in 2023. I remember doing my driving while wearing a 3M respirator and running a Corsi–Rosenthal Box all the time in our home to keep the air breathable and my ailing girlfriend from getting sick.
Just earlier this year (2024) we saw the next stage of the ever-increasing devastation to our cities and states along the southeast coast - devastation which reached much further inland from the coast and in a more severe manner than we have seen in the past. (I am speaking from the perspective of living in the USA)
The show the clip is from, The Newsroom, aired from 2012 to 2014.
My father, a retired professor of history and humanities, a professor who has studied and taught some of the truly darkest parts of human history, has long said that we are watching the extinction of the human race unfold before our eyes.
I have a slightly different view, but not so much better. We humans are cockroaches, we are adaptable and very survivable. I do not think we are facing extinction - extinction would literally be every last human dying, and as I mentioned, we are survivable little cockroaches. ... I do think, however, that this generation will have a front-row seat to the crumbling, and later, collapse, of human civilization as we currently know it. With our current trajectory, and the consequences already baked-in from emissions already released, I have a difficult time imagining the death toll over the coming decades to be anything short of hundreds of millions, soon thereafter reaching past a billion. We'll be sure to help things along with resource wars - honestly we are already into that phase now in my view (though that gets into attributing specific motivations for the wars we are seeing around the world right now, and is a bit more murky to pin down and say 'X is because of Y'.
It makes me fucking cry when I think about it, which at this point I try not to do too deeply.
We should be exploring space, we have the capabilities and technology to end world hunger and have clean energy, we could be using the tools of automation we have to enable everyone to have a living wage while working so much less, letting all of us devote more of our lives to finding what we are each truly passionate about and pursuing that.
Instead, a handful of individuals at the pinnacle of wealth and power laugh while soaking our homes in gasoline with a firehose, competing for who can profit the most from burning everything down the fastest, secure in the knowledge that they, at least, will have the resources to enjoy what they have until they die of old age, because who cares about anyone else after that, right?
I agree with almost everything you've said.
As a result, I don't have children.
I also drive an electric car, generate 90% of it's charge (stat from this morning's aggregated data), heat/cool my home and generate all my hot water over the course of year with my solar panels, and generally do what I can to reduce my emissions.
I also consume meat, pollute the world with my tire particles, over-consume consumer electronics, and invest in the total market rather than exclusively renewable focused corporations.
End of the day, my helping is irrelevant compared to the problems at hand. I blow away months worth of reductions when I consider my share of the emissions of one trans-Atlantic flight.
Nothing matters. It won't be fixed proactively. Live your life and enjoy your ride. Make community. Grow food. Celebrate the lives of those you care about.
I look forward to seeing private citizens sink cargo ships, down private jets (and ultimately passenger jets) until the owners get the message and change. Kim Stanley Robinson's exploration of when eco terrorism becomes morally appropriate is a fascinating thing.
We need every petroleum CEO to be afraid of being publicly known. And even that isn't enough. We need our governments to be afraid of us again.
Yeah, the individual impacts we have, either positive or negative, are vanishingly minuscule. Enforced governmental policies and enforced international treaties are the scale of what is required to have any effect.
Is this from his Mars series? If so, I need to bump that higher up on my to-read list. At the moment I'm just listing to escapism junk food and switching to something of higher quality input for my mind wouldn't be a bad thing.
Just before reading your post, I was listening to this song made by Trevor Moore from the old comedy show The Whitest Kids U'Know. Sounds like you would also enjoy it.
The KSR bit is a reference to The Ministry for the Future. If you feel at all like I do about this, it's a nice glimpse of hope in a sad world. Well worth the read.
And will be discussed by the Tildes bookclub at the end of January
It's The Ministry for the Future!
I hope we don’t see private citizens taking out passenger jets, because I think that would be spectacularly ineffective at sending a message or achieving much of anything else for that matter. The entirety of commercial aviation is responsible for about 2.5% of global emissions, and passenger flights are only a slice of that, so if people all stopped flying tomorrow the difference it’d make would be quite small. It also isn’t likely to earn sympathy for the cause or ire towards CEOs from the general public, many of whom have come to rely on flights to be able to spend time with their families after being forced to move for opportunity, and this includes many on the lower end of the economic spectrum (it’s not just rich people flying). At most this would bolster public support for hardcore crackdowns on anything that could pose a threat to an airplane and maybe even for ramping up of authoritarianism (as seen post 9/11).
Cargo ships on the other hand I agree on. Ocean shipping can be cut down significantly without a reduction in quality of life — much of it only occurs because of economic absurdities (there is no reason for grocery stores in San Francisco to stock garlic from China when garlic capitol Gilroy is literally a couple of hours down the road), to sell hoards of cheap junk that is destined for a landfill in a year or less, or to enable manufacturing of things that could be made domestically at marginally cheaper rates.
passenger jets no but something tells me that private jet shootdowns would have people broadly responding "ok, so what?"
Yeah I doubt that’d get much in the way of begrudgement. As we’ve seen, the greater public doesn’t identify with the ultra-wealthy, and from an impact standpoint anybody who has a private jet is dramatically worse than the average citizen could ever be.
Almost every aspect of your first paragraph is explored in depth in that book!
How can you possibly justify taking transatlantic flights yourself while also calling for ecoterrorism?
How did a call for shooting down passenger jets get this many votes?
You might have missed the overall tenor of conversation and context that u/davek804's comment was part of.
While I dislike speaking on another person's behalf since I'm no mind reader, I believe the comparison of months of their efforts at carbon output reduction being made meaningless by a single flight was to outline the futility and uselessness of trying to tackle the issue of climate change with individual, personal action (such as installing energy-efficient upgrades and clean energy augmentation to one's home).
As to the ecoterrorism reference, that was (if I understood their reference and meaning correctly) an exploration of when such actions become morally justifiable, in part in reference to the mentioned literary work of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future.
I took it as a current day context examination of the break between what is legal and what is moral. A historical example would be back before the American Civil War, during a time when slavery was legal. A similar discussion within historical context could be compared to hoping for plantation owners to be killed and their property stolen - or said from a different viewpoint, hoping for brutal slavers to be killed and their slaves freed. In that historical context, slavery was legal, and killing a slave owner or smuggling away a slave to freedom was likewise illegal - but it was also morally correct.
The current day example is that of large corporate entities who have systematically co-opted the rule of law through legalized bribery in pursuit of ever more wealth and power. The pursuit of maximum wealth also entails poisoning the world, dooming hundreds of millions to early deaths and literally erasing small island nations with rising sea levels - all because it's cheaper to not try to convert over to clean energy and make things in a way that doesn't dump pollution wherever is convenient. All legal, or legal enough so long as they can keep attention away from the worst of their ecological and sociological atrocities - legal, but not moral. So that was the context - in the framework of an overall system that protects such actions, because said system has been co-opted by bad-faith actors, at what point do illegal actions become morally correct in the pursuit of either the greater good, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the pursuit of preventing the greater harm?
I'm not convinced that's what was meant - it's an awful lot of extrapolation. And if he did mean to say "when does it become ok to do bad things for good reasons?", saying "I can't wait for people to shoot down passenger planes" is a pretty poor way to get that message across.
To your points, a few rejoinders. The legal vs. moral debate is not particularly relevant when we're talking about murdering several hundred people. This is not stealing bread to feed your family, or engaging in an illegal public demonstration. Murdering hundreds of people is a massive moral harm; the fact that you'd be breaking the law to do so is so trivial that it doesn't even matter.
I want to underscore this again. We're talking about murdering hundreds of innocent people. This is not some trolley problem scenario where you could save the entire world by having a small random number die. The idea of shooting down a plane would be to what, scare everyone into not flying anymore? That wouldn't even work; the September 11 attacks didn't stop flying. The shootdown of MH17 didn't stop flying. The comparison to killing a slaveowner to free slaves completely falls apart, not least because you're comparing killing a guilty man to killing innocents.
Here's why I'm fighting this so hard. A lot of people are devastated about climate change and have become incredibly callous. I get that. What I don't get - will never accept - is saying that one can't wait for the murder of hundreds of innocent people. That's not acceptable, even as a rhetorical device, and it frightens me that so few people on this website seem to have a problem with it.
These are fair issues to point out in that there is a false equivalence in the two situations, at least when looking at the specific situations instead of a more general whole. I acknowledge the point there.
For specific discussion on this, it really would need to be @davek804 responding instead of me as I've already gone pretty far down the rabbit hole of interpreting what I believe a given viewpoint to be, and the further down any specific path I go the more likely error becomes.
I will however, speak to my view on this. I'll also add the disclaimer that I am not personally advocating for the specific action of shooting down passenger aircraft. I could go down the rabbit hole of a thought experiment about specific methods for preventing the use of such aircraft without the loss of life, but out of an abundance of self preservation I am not going to describe anything like a how-to technical roadmap to achieve such things.
I will touch on two topics, both of which are controversial and discomforting. The second one far more so.
1: The oft-used phrase of "Violence is never the answer." (with or without emotional or volume emphasis)
and
2: The unjustifiability of loss of innocent life. To be more specific, causing (or by knowing inaction, allowing to be caused) the loss of innocent life.
"Violence is never the answer." I really would love to live in a world where this held true. I would love to live in a society where this was a viable part of a social structure and the abuse of those unwilling (or unable) to employ violence simply did not occur.
I hate using absolutes. I refuse to say such a society is impossible, but I will say it is both improbable and non-linearly scales up in difficulty in relation to societal population (example: much easier for a small village of 20 people or so to live in peace than a city of 20 million).
Anyway, as to "violence is never the answer" and variations on that position. I can only point to all recorded human history as an example and state "violence has been the answer throughout history" for reasons good, bad, and so many murky or debatable positions in between those comfortable simple positions. Labor rights in the United States have a history bathed in blood and massacre - and I do mean literal massacres. Racial equality (or rather, a reduction in racial inequality) DID NOT come about solely though peaceful protest. Slavery did not end bloodlessly. Buchenwald, Dachau, and the more widely remembered name of Auschwitz - these places were not stopped without violence.
On to topic 2.
The death of innocents. This topic is harder, and it is horrible - on that we are agreed.
There is once again accepted precedent in history, including modern history. World War II is again filled with obvious examples, but by no means should it be viewed as an isolated set of examples. The allies bombed German cities, knowingly causing civilian deaths. Were these actions wrong? Like so many complicated issues, there is no comfortable 'certain truth' to be had here. Or the most devastating individual examples of the Allies killing civilians during the war: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Between those two cities burned in nuclear fire, the allies killed very roughly 200,000 civilians - men, women, and children.
The first argument against this being a fair comparison might be that it was war, and total war at that, with many peoples and cultures facing existential threat from the Axis.
Is Climate Change not an existential threat? Is that existential threat not being driven and protected by the interests of a specific group? In this case, not Germany, Italy, and Japan, but by the collective uncaring self-interest of those with unthinkable wealth?
An additional point of note on how unacceptable the killing of innocents is: I rather largely agree with you. Now, looking through that lens, how unacceptable is it that lives are being ended, degraded, shortened, and caused to exist in a state of suffering due to the consequences of climate change, and the knowing continuation of the unfathomable greed that continues to drive it, even with those in the driver seat being fully aware of who is suffocating in their exhaust?
I appreciate the effort you put into this post. I don't agree with all of your examples, but I understand where you're coming from and I respect the thought process behind your arguments.
Thank you. I completely understand not agreeing.
This is something I appreciate about discussion here on Tildes, we tend to have many more good-faith discussions in a polite manner even with strongly differing views.
I do on and off miss discussion on Reddit, but I'm wondering if there is a fundamentally inverse relationship between community size and... politeness / civility / genuine good-faith discourse. Or maybe I'm drawing a false equivalence there and it is more along the lines of larger communities will tend to have a larger total amount of 'noise' trying to drown out signal, even if the percentage is similar. Maybe there is some social science that has been done on the topic somewhere.
Time to turn all for-profit organizations into non-profits, dissolve the stockmarket and devote all available capital to projects dedicated to curbing climate change.
EDIT:
To clarify, I believe profits only serve to keep your company from going under, which is logical. Either by innovating and making new products or services, or by expanding and growing your market share. But this also means that the bigger the profits, the bigger the threat to other players in your field.
This in turn means companies will start doing anything to get things their way. Today in the US that is lobbying and less regulations. We've seen what's happening in healthcare right now, people are getting fed up and incidents happen.
Enter degrowth. The process of accepting less profits, less comfort, less pay (CEO's mostly) and an actual livable world. If all your needs are met and you can live a fulfilling life then money is essentially useless.