What's more we are living through an actual green revolution. Solar power and batteries have never been so cheap - and still promising to get cheaper and better with sodium ion batteries.
Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.
It really doesn't. Climate change is a global problem. It would need a global solution, and everyone should know that that's beyond unlikely to appear... So the only thing you can do is reduce local pollution - which is meaningful in it's way (better quality of life), but has no long term impact on the climate.
It's just finding new narratives to protect the incumbent moneyed interests from ever having their infinitely increasing rate of growth threatened.
Civilisation takes millennia of stable, plentiful resources to create, and a week without food for 30 percent of the population to utterly destroy.
I’d love to be wrong, if you disagree please say why.
Who is this "media"? Is this the same "media" that Trump and his dullards claim is so corrupt and contrary to The Truth? Are you influenced by this "media"? I don't read The Guardian or Jacobin, but I'm occasionally exposed to their headlines and they are certainly reporting on climate change. Are they part of the "media"?
There is no monoculture "media" and to the extent there is, it is (in the US at least) overwhelmingly left-leaning. And ironically, when there were fewer outlets for information, those outlets (because they served such a large and diverse audience) hewed to a common sense/conventional wisdom understanding of the facts.
No is one controlling media. Maybe the CCP through TikTok steering.
This is highly unusual for a newspaper, most media don't have that kind of independence. The Guardian is also unusual in having made a commitment to covering the climate crisis very extensively. I don't think it's a coincidence.
It's not even news! MAGAs I bet are resigned to a warmer climate, just arguing over cause and mitigation.
I guess was drives me nuts is "mysterious Greedy Fatcats are controlling the world" when much simpler explanations satisfy. (I'll allow that I'm sympathetic CCP steering of TikTok).
This would have any meaning behind it if e.g. Jacobin had the same reach and viewership as Fox News. But it doesn't, so your entire argument rests on false assumptions.
I would love to think that http://thedispatch.com would become the standard bearer of thoughtful conservation of liberal values, but it would probably be ONN or some shit.
in the US, it's Fox "News", and the other big networks - NBC, CBS, ABC, to a letter extent CNN, NYT, WaPo
look up the ownership of those networks. why do you think the Ellisons and Trump are trying so hard to get Paramount to take over Warner Bros after it already took over SkyDance?
He holds the microphone, all day, everyday. The World Cup provides a moment's respite, until... Trump grabs the microphone.
If the lurch to the left succeeds, the leftist agenda will dominate the headlines (modulo Trump's extraordinary ability to dominate all conversations, national to dinner table).
All parties are incentivized against fixing this problem.
My guess is that we somehow end up geoengineering it with even more debt...
It seems to me that carbon capture technology plus renewables and nuclear + dream energy (fission) will be the future but we're probably not going to go off of fossil fuels much, which will necessitate in part the need to suck this stuff out of the atmosphere.
The tipping point is one bad summer. Photosynthesis stops at 40-45c (some plants like cactuses can do night processing based on stored energy, but staple crops don’t do that). If we have just one bad summer, billions will die. Civilization is perpetually just a week or two without food for 30 percent of the population away from complete collapse, and it takes thousands of years of stable conditions to recreate.
If we have a bad summer in the northern hemisphere, we could easily lose the capability to sequester carbon or manage planetary albedo in a meaningful way. Stopping emissions is not a solution at this point, we are already way too deep in self reinforcing methane loops for that to even be the primary factor in warming acceleration.
It’s an inconvenient truth, to be sure.
The average person may seem stupid but they are paying attention to the actions, and it all sounds like "I got mine, screw yours" to them.
People would rightly scratch their heads at such an over-the-top hypocrite. But surely, the man would be correct: domestic abuse is an important issue. And imagine a response from the peanut gallery? "I'm not going to stop beating my _own_ wife until that hypocrite gets his comeuppance!"
And people in developing countries complain that "why should beef or jet vacations be taxed more, those Westerners got to enjoy it, and now when we want to enjoy it, it's suddenly bad?".
And we rich Westerners think it's sacrifice to have to drive an EV or pay more for beef...
the amount of co2 that industries pollute and that various regulation would be able to change is multiple orders of magnitude compared to regular personal responsibility.
Imagine I want to be responsible by drinking soy milk but it's hidden in a corner of the supermarket.
Now imagine every supermarket prominently displays soy milk and cow milk is hidden in the corner. Seems easier to make the change, right? Many people will change automatically because they don't really care and just do what's easiest.
Other plant milks are 3x the price of the cow one because of economies of scale and subsidies. It's all a big joke.
So the soy yoghurt in Germany is called Alpro - the brand name. The dairy industry even fucked themselves over, because even their real yoghurt doesn't meet the strict definition and has to be called "mild yoghurt" instead.
However, this does not mean corporations aren't actively trying to influence and manipulate them, or that they don't exert pressure on politicians. Aren't Americans responsible as a whole for electing Donald Trump, for example?
I figure if those guys, at least as smart as I am and way, way better informed, think it’s probable then I should consider it a significant possibility.
I really hope they are all full of shit lol.
Yea, they figured it just now, in the 2010s and 20s. During the 90's the thought just didn't occur to them...Makes complete sense.
Nothing discredits an idea so much like the proponents of it being total idiots.
But I do remember quite a bit about "pollution" and like general acute environmental issues. Smog in LA, the hole in the ozone, etc. Those were both more understandable and visible to your average person and more tractable. And there was the obvious hook about energy independence after the fairly recent (at that time) oil embargo and such.
The Green party (are they still around?) talked about more vague issues like ocean plastic and six pack wrappers on birds, but I don't think we made a ton of progress there, but then that was less consequential anyway.
I feel like we went down the worst timeline since then when it became very political and people burn gas for the hell of it, and others hate people who do so. Solar and nuclear (or hell even just solar) could give us clean, cheap energy abundance, but the people championing solar tend not to do it from the abundance perspective, but in tandem with cutting energy use which is a hard sell and not necessary anyway, in my opinion.
Both sat at the top of the news agenda for months! Not to mention years of features, long-form journalism, and documentaries. And then the denialist backlash began to kick off in the late 90s, which (initially) added to the media storm.
It isnt nice to talk about climate change because it's become extremely obvious that blaming the rich and the government is not working. The responsibility lies on the 8 billion individuals making excuses.
So the news isn't really covering it anymore because PEOPLE COMPLAIN.
I really hope that particular article was wrong, because the alternative is that we have to resort to geo engineering. Considering that the governments can't really coordinate in preventing this, I don't see them coordinate in fixing it, especially because the scale and costs of the "fixes" are astronomical.
How do you solve Global Warming? Nuclear Winter ...
I really hope this is not how we end up geo-engineering our way out of Climate change.
What we've seen is new renewable capacity carving out a tiny sliver in the energy mix, sometimes even being able to meet all new demand in the installation period, but we still have all the existing demand running on the old stack.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
This book talks about this: https://www.amazon.com/More-All-Consuming-History-Energy/dp/...
There's also the fact that global society is not a real time strategy game being managed by a well intentioned min-maxing actor driving compounding efficiency gains in resource usage. It's a free for all where everyone is paranoid that they'll be destroyed if they don't use every dirty trick they can (on a global geopolitical level), entrenched oligarchies permanently lobbying for their inefficient, destructive structures to continue (on a domestic economy level) and so on.
It's not looking good overall.
Are you talking about US media?
Seems like a delusion to me. Social justice is yet another banned topic under conservative corporate ownership.
Quick headline check:
- Trump claims to have invented a word that exists
- “Burger King’s New Whopper Strikes a Blow in Fast Food Wars”
- “US strikes $1.2bn deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects” (is this a social justice topic?)
- Attorney General confirmation political reporting
- school shooting reporting (is this social justice??)