Scientists have been warning us for a long time now. It seems like the general public doesn’t care about the impending collapse of civilization.
Impending*
I wish disaster would strike already, I want to at least live to see the glorious “I told you so” about climate change.
Sadly, this isn’t how it’s going down. Climate change disaster is already here, it’s just a slow burn. The fuel in that burn is just normal people trying to make a living. Another couple decades go by and power consolidates. We’re buying our water ration from Nestle Amazon Walmart or whatever the fuck. I’m tired.
I’m curious if the die-off of Boomers, and the (very) left-wing leaning of GenZ will mean we will rapidly start addressing it. Too late, obviously, but still I think it will happen within 10-15 years.
One can hope. I read an article recently that said in the US, millennials and gen z should be the largest voting bloc by 2028. The problem is, how many of them are voting? In my anecdotal experience, very few of my millennial peers vote. We’re gonna need a way to fight the doomerism mindset with younger people and make them realize we have the numbers to turn this around.
It seems to depend on the group. My kids are all able to vote now, and they are fervently convincing their friends to vote. Just through the three of them they got 12 other votes. So I think the doomerism mindset can be assuaged slightly by pointing out just how many Conservative boomers are gone.
And lord help the Cons if they win the next election. Life is about to get very rough for everyone, and frankly a kick of Poilievre-led Cons will motivate Gen Z to vote pretty quickly, I think.
Many of us also see the things happening to the south of the border and are very FOR voting.
I don’t care if I have to walk across town next time. I’m there.
If you aren’t fighting conservatism, you aren’t fighting climate change. Conservatives (including neo-liberals) serve coporate interests, even to the point of killing everyone on earth.
Global warming cannot be addressed unless we disable the power of conservatives to protect corporate interests. There is no work around. Conservatives (including neo-liberals) are the reason corporations have legal protections to destroy the earth.
We no longer can, but we’re going to anyway. Getting any person in a position of power to act meaningfully on climate change is seemingly impossible.
There’s a lot of doomerism in this thread, but I think we have a pretty reasonable plan at least leaning towards carbon neutrality by 2050. As everyone points out, it’s hard to make people care, but I think the liberals are at least half caring about it.
One problem with getting people to address the climate crisis is that there’s been a continuous stream of these “this is our last chance to fix X” headlines for many, many years now. I’ve seen so many of these where the deadline has passed that I can totally understand people getting jaded by this and considering new ones to be just chicken little alarmism. Or alternately, people deciding “guess it’s too late to change now, might as well eat drink and be merry.”
I’m not really sure what the “solution” to this is, but maybe we don’t really need one. For example, this article itself says:
Energy efficiency, renewable energy and energy storage solutions have advanced by leaps and bounds, far faster than anticipated. Not only that, but costs have fallen to the point that renewable energy is less expensive than coal, oil and gas. Overall, we’d all be better off economically if we shifted rapidly to more affordable renewables, especially given the volatility of fossil fuel markets.
If that’s the case then we can just let natural human greed kick in and the transition to renewables will simply happen.
