Now the climate crisis is self-evident, a common argument by those who STILL defend polluters is that “NZ is too small to make a difference, and so shouldn’t have to stop intensive dairy farming or driving Ford rangers to school in Auckland”
Rod Carr destroys it in this mic-drop moment.
Yes… climate change is happening, things are going to heat up, weather extremes are going to get worse. There is no way to stop that happening completely… but I suggest you should think about leaping to extremes… just because things are bad (or worse than we thought) does not mean hopelessness is justified. If you go to hospital with a broken arm and they do some tests and say “looks like you’ve also got diabetes”, you don’t instantly give up on life because things are bad. With climate change, things are bad, but not hopeless. Again, read what the scientists are saying… very few (if any) legitimate scientists are saying we are 100% doomed and shouldn’t even try to fix this.
First, that parts not true. Emissions in 2020 dropped around 7%. It was largely due to COVID lockdowns, but still shows it’s possible.
We have a pretty clear scientific and technical plan to limit climate change by reducing emissions. I’m not saying it will be easy or that it will definitely even work. But there’s absolutely no reason at this point in time to think it’s impossible. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”. Going back to the medical analogy, if someone says you can have an operation that will give you a 50% chance of survival, but if you don’t have it, you’ve got 100% change of dying, what would you do?
And what makes you think that because something has never been done before it can’t be done now? People said we’d never abolish slavery or go to the moon… Every new thing humanity has done had never been done before at one point.
It’s also worth thinking about who a “doomerism”/“hopelessness” mindset serves? If it’s completely hopeless, then there’s no point doing anything. The people with the money (e.g. fossil fuel giants) would absolutely love for us to do nothing, because they’ll be able to keep raking it in. And they can (or think they can) use that money to avoid the catastrophic shit that is coming. For them, hopelessness is as good as climate denial. And you can bet they are trying to foster that as much as they can with disinformation campaigns.
Did the global emissions drop or did the rate of increase drop?
Because the mechanisms that caused the problem are still in place and you aren’t going to upend capitalism anytime soon.
No they want you to do stuff and take responsibility so they don’t have to. There is a reason you think the burden is on you and me instead of the corporations and the governments.
Absolute global emissions dropped 7%, see: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region?time=2010..latest
(If you expand out the date range, you’ll also see there are other years where there were drops).
I am glad for you that you can be 100% confident about what will happen in the future!
This is quite different from what we’ve been talking about so far. We’ve been discussing whether society as a whole can do anything about climate change, and you’ve been arguing that there’s absolutely nothing we can do.
There’s a separate discussion about who or what is responsible and/or needs to make changes. All our say about that is that it will be everyone who needs to make changes.
Here, I zoomed the chart out a bit so you can get the real picture
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region?time=1980..latest
Yes I am 100% confident that we will not upend capitalism just like you are 100% confident the world will not emit any CO2 by 2050.
You can do whatever you want. It won’t undo the damage and it won’t help.