33
votes
On 'hottest day in history of France,' world told 'do not look away' as police tear-gas climate campaigners in Paris
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- Authors
- Common Dreams, Andrea Germanos, staff writer
- Published
- Jun 28 2019
- Word count
- 375 words
Heatwaves this year are off the charts globally, leaving aside all the other screwed up weather indicators.
I'm not sure what universe climate change deniers live in, but in the U.S. at least, the monetary costs are becoming impossible to ignore.
Please feel free to comment on conditions or political activity in your region of the world.
In Lower-Silesia, the summers are becoming glorious for non-farmers such as myself. However, I am surrounded by people who still do family-farming for a living, and their crops are all showing lower yields in the last 3 years. Last year farmers got a bailout due to official drought conditions. This year was looking up, but the wheat that surrounds my home is now wilting. Historically there has been little need for irrigation in Poland in general, as compared to the farms in the USA. The rightist government is denying climate change, while at the same time having to plan small reservoirs across the country for irrigation. AFAIK, Poland (The land of farm fields) is the breadbasket of the EU. Not a good sign around here. Two days ago it hit 33C (91F) and most folks were freaking out. No one is used to this type of climate here in the mountains.
It's all about money, tribalism, and/or an unwilingness to change your lifestyle. There are powerful people in oil and coal who look only to maximize their short-term profits, which gives them a vested interest in fighting off renewable energy. There's also a whole lot of tribalism right now (at least in the United States) where you have people who hate on Priuses or have coal rollers just because they want to spite someone else. There's also a group that wants to help fight global warming and hopefully votes for policies to that effect, but they're not going to do anything beyond that like drive less, eat less meat, drive a more fuel-efficient car, et cetera.
The scale of this problem is so far beyond individual changes at this point. If we were really having a serious discussion on fixes we would be talking about
Ending ocean shipping (something like the 16 largest cargo ships emit as much greenhouse gas as every car in the world)
Abolishing the military (the single largest consumer of fossil fuels, they emit more greenhouse gas than most countries)
Ending economic growth, at least for a while
Depopulation of unsustainable areas (looking at you, almost the entire states of Arizona and Nevada).
Massive reforestation/re-wilding (which could fail because of environment changes)
...and we wouldn't see a benefit for decades, because of the physics of climate change. So I'm going to say we would probably have to ditch democracy too.
Reminds me of this short story: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/10/02/when-the-yogurt-took-over-a-short-story/
Now an episode of Love, Death + Robots on Netflix!
It's probably worth having the correct philosophy about it... In that sense, being wasteful just for the sake of being wasteful isn't good. Teaching the philosophy of being less wasteful, of being environmentally and wcologically friendly, those things are important because you may end up influencing someone who could have far, far more impact and reach than you.
Do have children. Your kids may end up being the politicians, CEOs or lobbyists powerful enough to have a large impact.
Or maybe you. There's still time.
I think it's kind of a walk and chew bubblegum situation. What we can't do is fall into the trap of thinking personal choices alone are going to change our trajectory. We are going to require real paradigm-shifting change to just survive, let alone thrive. Even the idea of what thriving is, is going to have to change in a world with zero emissions. I think it is important to consider making life changes like eating less meat and driving less often, but some people like to use that as a way to attack others or discredit their commitment to a survivable future and I think that's misguided.
This is the vast majority of non-deniers (most people) and "environmentally conscious" people in my experience. I have family and friends who in the same breath will go from railing against plastic straws (or deniers) or crying about what they saw on the latest Attenborough documentary to bragging about their holiday to Bali and the new wardrobe they brought for it. It's in vogue for middle class, environmentally/politically aware millennials (~25-~35 year olds) to be vocal about the environment but outside of silly shit like like straws and bottles, the serious lifestyle changes simply haven't caught up to their rhetoric.
I meant, I just don't know how long the obstinate parts of the general populace can keep pretending it's God, or normal weather variation, or immigrants/globalists, or chemtrails, or whatever excuse of the week Fox News programming and fossil fuel industry propaganda presents. At some point, nearly everyone's interests are harmed, and the lies will fall through.
We can only hope everyone comes around.
Last year was definitely crazier in my eyes.
Here in the UK we had a magnitude 4.4 earthquake, a typhoon and a heatwave lasting almost two months with temperatures hitting a high of 34 degrees.
My ex had it worse over in her country, which got hit by a 6.6 magnitude earthquake, had one of its major airports submerged by a tsunami and had a similar heatwave coming close to 40 degrees.
The issue is human nature, how the brain works ... and on different subjects, Liberals are potentially just as capable of being idiots.
Nutshell, though, it's basically the 'sunk cost' fallacy for ideas. It's less painful for a person to keep believing their bullshit, keep searching for ever-more-extreme defenses of their beliefs ... than to admit they are wrong, have been wrong for decades, and have been actively helping to destroy the world their children have to live in.
And the result is that many—perhaps most—deniers will absolutely never change their minds, no matter how overwhelming the evidence. Many will be prepared to, literally, go to war against the Liberal Conspiracy, rather than to consider that they might be wrong.
And because our brains work that way, maybe we deserve to go extinct. Give termites a shot at higher order intelligence.