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But now we are herding people back into the offices after 2-3 years of alleged spectacular productivity gains while working remote - because being in the office is “more productive”, and any talk about the emissions and environmental impact is getting completely lost in the noise of the celebration to this “return to normal”.
Apple, Amazon, and the rest tout their marginal green initiatives while signaling that those who fail to make the energy guzzling and pollution spewing daily commute from however far to the office - will need to find new jobs.
Kids on reddit are usually not yet broken and jaded enough to swallow ladle-fulls of hypocrisy like the rest of us “adults with responsibilities and 401Ks” can.
The majority of CO2 emissions aren't from wealthy nations but developing nations - this might not be true in per capita terms, but the atmosphere doesn't care about per capita terms.
A molecule is a molecule, and if you want fewer of them in the atmosphere, then you can't blame the wealthy - there simply aren't that many of them. It's the regular people who would need to cut back, and that's especially unfair when it's being asked of people whose economies never fully developed in the first place.
It's popular to mock them for using private planes or using their yachts, but that sort of activity is dwarfed - by orders of magnitude - by cement production in China, or steel from India.
What can wealthy westerners do about that?
Case in point:
https://www.newswise.com/articles/richest-10-of-americans-em...
> “In this way,” says Starr, “we could really incentivize the Americans who are driving and profiting the most from climate change to decarbonize their industries and investments. It’s divestment through self-interest, rather than altruism. Imagine how quickly corporate executives, board members and large shareholders would decarbonize their industries if we made it in their financial interest to do so. The tax revenue gained could help the nation invest substantially in decarbonization efforts.”
Mine is that the wealthy should risk their money in order to invest in more sustainable economies for those less developed nations. That would solve the problem, right? Wonder why they won't do it...
> any change that would result in less money for the wealthy
No. This seems incoherent to me - you are blaming the wealthy for inaction due to their greed, then claiming those same greedy people would be able to solve the problem if they invested in developing economies.
It seems far more likely that they would just use those investments as new avenues for control / extraction, as we've seen for centuries. Or are you expecting those greedy wealthy people to just start being altruistic?
I'm not claiming to have a solution. It's very tricky and I doubt a neat solution exists, unless we stumble unto some incredible new technology. It's about tradeoffs instead, and then that becomes a political question. The answer isn't "blame the rich."
That is hyperbole.
Our planet and the natural world are facing their biggest threat in millennia.
Not hyperbole.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/19/world/libya-floods-climat...
No, now you are mixing two different topics together for your agenda.
Climate Change did not cause that flood, nor did Climate Change kill those people. The government of Libya did - anything else is a misdirection.
We see this everywhere. Wildfires, hurricanes, floods, etc. These things have always happened - yet our responses and preparations are lacking - therefore "what could we possibly do? climate change!" is usually the answer. Never do we accept responsibility for our actions, such as decades of mismanagement, reduced budgets, indecisive leadership, and worse.
The root cause of these floods was actually identified - decades of mismanaging their dam infrastructure. But, somehow, when the rotting dams finally gave way it's suddenly Climate Change at fault - not the incompetent Libyan government.
> Climate Change did not cause that flood, nor did Climate Change kill those people.
It is all a probability game so you can't never say certainly, but it is very probable that flood wouldn't have happened, at least not that strong, without that much more energy, moisture etc in the atmosphere, so you are very likely wrong.
He said "Humanity has opened the gates of Hell", which, I think, is a much more sensible and down-tempo way to phrase it.
Here's the thing: they're kids. They're not capable of having the same measured responses that adults have.
If they were, they're be much more reasonable about the growing uncertainties of food and water security in the richest empire in human history. They'd be calmer about the real-time collapse of natural and social systems that every other generation has depended upon for every need. They would know what the upper limits of their future problems would be by rationally predicting the effects of impossible-to-predict catastrophic changes on earth, like you and I do.
But mark my words, no matter how many of the direst predictions become true by 2026, someone is sure to find one or several corners of the world where the prediction does not quite match, and they will then turn it around and state the very untrue: "all climate alarmism is lies! see, look at this website!".
It is very hard to get the general public to understand that if you cannot predict precisely the bad thing that will happen, then you are not in a position to propose actions to prevent what you can still estimate will certainly be bad.
in most people's experience, a bit if complacency is reasonable, things usually work out not as bad as you'd expect.
Worst of all, this complacency can I think be directly traced back to the comfort and easy-does-it outcomes afforded by one century of cheap-as-hell usable and plentiful liquid oil energy :-G
I ask because I recall hearing these exact catastrophic arguments (methane hydrates, changes in albedo) more than a dozen years ago.