Zero Hedge
17 December 2020 07:33![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
m_d_hMany years ago I used to follow the Zero Hedge blog as a source of truthful information that was not widely covered. But now it has turned into a relatively standard pro-Trump right-wing anti-mask COVID-skeptic blah blah website.
One person I follow on LJ who doesn't follow me back (which is OK) has also been skeptical of government public health responses to COVID, but she is definitely not a pro-Trump bullshitter. Instead, she recently wondered about the inconsistency in our temporary willingness to shut things down to reduce the COVID death toll, while pretty much ignoring the ongoing destruction to our atmosphere.
Some global warming activists have expressed hope -- I think misguided hope -- that the global shutdowns we've endured to fight COVID could become a model for fighting global warming.
As a global species, we have cut our CO2 emissions this year, by a single digit probably, somewhere between 2% and 9% -- according to estimates. This isn't enough, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is still growing. We'd have to cut our emissions by far far more than this to stop the growth in atmospheric CO2. Imagine your bathtub is overflowing, and instead of shutting off the water, you nudge the faucet a bit and declare victory.
-----
But if you think Quarantine Fatigue is spreading in late 2020, try imagining Global Warming Fatigue. Let's impose 10x the economic catastrophe of 2020 to stabilize atmospheric CO2, and then tell people this is a permanent change. Not just until After the Vaccine, but forever. And then, even though we'd have stabilized atmospheric CO2, the planet would continue warming for another 1,000 years anyway, until after the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melted into the ocean, drowning every coastal city on every continent, because that amount of warming is already "baked in" due to the CO2 we've already burned.
If people like my brother won't take responsibility for the spread of a novel coronavirus, what makes environmental activists think they'll take responsibility for fixing the global climate?
You could say "that's depressing" ... but you could also say, "that's human nature." It's just who we are. The majority of us want to get on with our lives and not worry about the destruction we're causing.
-----
Last night, during the family group chat, my Trump-supporting brother N basically bullied everybody else into silence with his 20-minute unhinged idiotic rant. We liberals in the family decided "this isn't the forum to argue this point" and the moderates in the family wished we liberals had never brought up politics at all.
And that's just about COVID.
Imagine if I tried using the family group chat to argue that we should ban fossil fuels and extracting metals from the ground.
Some would say global warming is a hoax, some would say it's not our fault (so implicitly we can't do anything about it), some would say I shouldn't bring it up in this forum, some would say something like "I agree but first we need to build a new national infrastructure for 100 million electric cars" ...
Imagine if I said to the family group chat, "COVID was likely caused by global warming, and we'll have more frequent pandemics if we keep burning fossil fuels."
I wonder whether the existence of, and discovery of, global warming is what has truly broken our politics. We're faced with such a devastating and all-encompassing global crisis, acknowledgement of which would require such deep sacrifices, that it has broken everybody's heads. We can't accept how bad this crisis is, and how much we'd have to change to fix it, so no matter your politics otherwise, you've seceded from reality.
I know the other day I blamed Republicans for seceding from reality in refusing to acknowledge that Biden won the election. But I think that's only one symptom of a more general secession from reality that our scientific understanding of global warming has provoked.
If we really believed the science, if we really wanted to fix the planet, we'd have to enact a permanent shutdown 10x the COVID shutdown, and we'd have to switch from capitalism to a sharing economy (call it socialism if you want) to survive.
That's not "negativity", that's not "depressing", it's just the damned truth. But if you can't accept this truth, then I'm not sure you have any business blaming Republicans for their smaller delusions.
We've all been forced into delusion by our rapacious capitalist system, we have no other path -- it's either delusion, or agree to dismantle everything.
Well, some of us have agreed to go "carbon neutral" by 2050 ... Another way of understanding this pledge is: we've pledged to develop and build new technologies that don't yet exist that will allow our rapacious capitalist system to continue without further harming the global environment. Good luck with that. If we get to 2050 and it didn't work, will our children then agree to dismantle everything, or will they agree to go carbon neutral by 2080?
"We can't just dismantle everything overnight," I'm sure everybody including myself would say.
-----
If we really believed in going carbon neutral by 2050 (or any other date), wouldn't we cap our carbon emissions at their current level, and then cut them by 3% per year? Do that, and I'll believe you.
Stop making things worse, and then start dismantling.
But as a country we won't do that, so ... personally I don't know what to do, or even say. I'm at the "trying to get rid of my own delusions" stage. What does the science tell me -- it tells me we've already baked in catastrophic climate change that will continue to get even worse unless we cut our carbon emissions by 97% right now.
One person I follow on LJ who doesn't follow me back (which is OK) has also been skeptical of government public health responses to COVID, but she is definitely not a pro-Trump bullshitter. Instead, she recently wondered about the inconsistency in our temporary willingness to shut things down to reduce the COVID death toll, while pretty much ignoring the ongoing destruction to our atmosphere.
Some global warming activists have expressed hope -- I think misguided hope -- that the global shutdowns we've endured to fight COVID could become a model for fighting global warming.
As a global species, we have cut our CO2 emissions this year, by a single digit probably, somewhere between 2% and 9% -- according to estimates. This isn't enough, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is still growing. We'd have to cut our emissions by far far more than this to stop the growth in atmospheric CO2. Imagine your bathtub is overflowing, and instead of shutting off the water, you nudge the faucet a bit and declare victory.
-----
But if you think Quarantine Fatigue is spreading in late 2020, try imagining Global Warming Fatigue. Let's impose 10x the economic catastrophe of 2020 to stabilize atmospheric CO2, and then tell people this is a permanent change. Not just until After the Vaccine, but forever. And then, even though we'd have stabilized atmospheric CO2, the planet would continue warming for another 1,000 years anyway, until after the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melted into the ocean, drowning every coastal city on every continent, because that amount of warming is already "baked in" due to the CO2 we've already burned.
If people like my brother won't take responsibility for the spread of a novel coronavirus, what makes environmental activists think they'll take responsibility for fixing the global climate?
You could say "that's depressing" ... but you could also say, "that's human nature." It's just who we are. The majority of us want to get on with our lives and not worry about the destruction we're causing.
-----
Last night, during the family group chat, my Trump-supporting brother N basically bullied everybody else into silence with his 20-minute unhinged idiotic rant. We liberals in the family decided "this isn't the forum to argue this point" and the moderates in the family wished we liberals had never brought up politics at all.
And that's just about COVID.
Imagine if I tried using the family group chat to argue that we should ban fossil fuels and extracting metals from the ground.
Some would say global warming is a hoax, some would say it's not our fault (so implicitly we can't do anything about it), some would say I shouldn't bring it up in this forum, some would say something like "I agree but first we need to build a new national infrastructure for 100 million electric cars" ...
Imagine if I said to the family group chat, "COVID was likely caused by global warming, and we'll have more frequent pandemics if we keep burning fossil fuels."
I wonder whether the existence of, and discovery of, global warming is what has truly broken our politics. We're faced with such a devastating and all-encompassing global crisis, acknowledgement of which would require such deep sacrifices, that it has broken everybody's heads. We can't accept how bad this crisis is, and how much we'd have to change to fix it, so no matter your politics otherwise, you've seceded from reality.
I know the other day I blamed Republicans for seceding from reality in refusing to acknowledge that Biden won the election. But I think that's only one symptom of a more general secession from reality that our scientific understanding of global warming has provoked.
If we really believed the science, if we really wanted to fix the planet, we'd have to enact a permanent shutdown 10x the COVID shutdown, and we'd have to switch from capitalism to a sharing economy (call it socialism if you want) to survive.
That's not "negativity", that's not "depressing", it's just the damned truth. But if you can't accept this truth, then I'm not sure you have any business blaming Republicans for their smaller delusions.
We've all been forced into delusion by our rapacious capitalist system, we have no other path -- it's either delusion, or agree to dismantle everything.
Well, some of us have agreed to go "carbon neutral" by 2050 ... Another way of understanding this pledge is: we've pledged to develop and build new technologies that don't yet exist that will allow our rapacious capitalist system to continue without further harming the global environment. Good luck with that. If we get to 2050 and it didn't work, will our children then agree to dismantle everything, or will they agree to go carbon neutral by 2080?
"We can't just dismantle everything overnight," I'm sure everybody including myself would say.
-----
If we really believed in going carbon neutral by 2050 (or any other date), wouldn't we cap our carbon emissions at their current level, and then cut them by 3% per year? Do that, and I'll believe you.
Stop making things worse, and then start dismantling.
But as a country we won't do that, so ... personally I don't know what to do, or even say. I'm at the "trying to get rid of my own delusions" stage. What does the science tell me -- it tells me we've already baked in catastrophic climate change that will continue to get even worse unless we cut our carbon emissions by 97% right now.