The Economist is torn, because on the one hand they try to appear clever, but on the other hand they generally support unrestrained capitalism. It’s not possible to do both at the same time.
Birth rates are in decline. The global population is estimated to peak in the 2080s. I suspect that could be later than reality as the endless doom (like this article) inspires more and more people to not have kids. Then as the population declines precipitously, nature takes back over and begins resolving the problem itself.
Population decline will not solve climate change, we already passed multiple points of no return that will result in worsening climate for the next 50-100y. And there won’t be a way to roll back those changes
I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
Already then you could find this exact article title in a dozen publications per year, especially in academic publications. Al Gore made a third career out of it.
It was alarmist and too soon then but it’s not alarmist and too soon now?
Nobody upvotes an article titled “Things are about 0.5% more concerning than they were two decades ago”
> I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
I don't doubt that is your recollection, but nobody back then was predicting it would happen in 20 years. The time frames given were much longer. But, the vibe was definitely that we need to wake up and do something right now, because by the time climate change hits real hard it will be too late to avert the calamity.
> The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”
> Active private home insurance policies in Florida declined by 78% over roughly a decade, with the state's insurer of last resort skyrocketing to 63% of the market share, as reported by PRNewswire and republished on Yahoo. That is a dramatic pullback in a state where storm risk has long shaped the housing market.
I recognize this is deeply cynical and definitely doomerist. What can I as an individual actually do to stop this? Why should I even bother reading articles like this at this point? I can't do anything. I can't action it. I can collect my recycling, pop solar panels on my roof and be the most carbon footprint conscious person and it wouldn't move the needle an atom's width.
Politicians don't care, and the ones that do can't make a difference either. Corporations definitely don't care. I can go protest, and that gets a lot of media attention but it doesn't change a voter's mind when their main concern is who gets to play in school sports.
I know this is vitriolic, but I am genuinely curious about it. What can I do? What can I do outside of putting my ballot in the box and hoping something changes?
I think "how to stop this" is the wrong objective. It's like "what I can do to achieve world peace tomorrow?". There is no answer to that. Yes, people promise to solve wars "in a day" but that does not work.
Depending on your situations different actions will have a different impact.
I do try to choose what I can to help. I am not obsessed with "the impact". If I buy a train ticket instead of a plane ticket - that can mean trains get more money. If I keep my phone for one more year, less waste is produced.
Would I help with the situation if I would buy a car consuming lots of gas, take international trips every years etc. (I could afford it, that's not the issue) ? I think not.
Can I say that my actions significantly influence the outcome? Definitely not, but we are 8 billions on this planet, so it all depends on averages. But if I don't do it (I am convinced there is an issue), how could I expect others to have my position...
> I can collect my recycling, pop solar panels on my roof and be the most carbon footprint conscious person and it wouldn't move the needle an atom's width.
The more people who do that, the faster the needle moves. You create economic incentives for businesses to cater to you, and you set an example for others to follow.
That's why I only buy electric cars, put solar on my roof, and heat with a heat pump. A few years later, my parents put in a heat pump, and an extended family member (who is a denier) also put in a heat pump.
Political participation -- voting, organising for the groups you support, actively engaging in meetings and public forums, building social groups of like-minded individuals. It is hugely effective. The worst doomerism is the idea that politics is ineffective. It is incredibly effective, and only the people that participate in it have any effect on it.
There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. But accepting the supine position of "well I can't do anything" only guarantees your powerlessness. Fight for the future you want! Convince 5 people that something is important, and you're already 500% up. It scales like crazy.
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
You've never been responsible for the entire world, that's a defeatist fiction put on your shoulders by people who want you to give up and not take responsibility for your actions.
Take some real time to think about your own actions, your share of the blame. Then begin the process of improving your actions. As a handy benefit, you'll begin saving money, and you can reinvest the savings into more projects that also save money. Eventually your carbon footprint will be a small fraction of what it was and in its place you'll have a pile of money.
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
Short of becoming the Luigi of the environmental movement, there is nothing an individual can do. You have to take part in some kind of ongoing collective action. This can include joining a campaign against the oil and gas industry, going door to door for candidates who will reverse climate change, or engaging in direct action against environmentally destructive projects -- or even all three at the same time.
Trying to go it alone is pointless. At best, you'll go down a rabbit hole of becoming the most virtuous consumer alive. At worst, you'll be spend all your time mad-posting on social media.
There’s an interesting study to be made on whether there was a reduction in insurance claim rejections in the aftermath, and what the morbidity/mortality impact was.
Luigi accomplished nothing but folk hero status, United Healthcare premiums increased by double-digit percentages this year. Change requires a pattern not a moment.
Nonsense. This is defeatist talk. This is the logic folks use when they make dozens of small actions that add up, like buying more plastic cuz "it doesn't matter". The honest truth is people who use this logic have made the decision and just don't want to say, "I don't care." Small actions make big differences at scale.
8 billion people all making hundreds of decisions a day make a difference.
Once an individual starts to make those decisions they have a sunk cost, which encourages more action. This leads to voting a certain way, making more sacrifice(giving up excess), encouraging others, etc.
This whole "I'm a victim and have no recourse" benefits the bad actors.
Capitalism has filled our society and expectations with extreme excess. Modern folks eat diets that are insanely luxurious. Giving up our excess is the crux here, and capitalism tries damn hard to give us reasons to justify every little excess. Then those things are accepted and the baseline shifts down, capitalism then gives us more excuses and the baseline drops again.
I was watching an old movie from like 1985 the other day. A character in the movie was a horrible person and part of making that character a horrible seeming person was giving her a small dog as a pet, because it added to her aura of extreme excess. It made me and my friends laugh cuz nowadays that's expected of most people, to have a small dog. The character only had one! Nowadays it's normal to have 2 or 4 small dogs. Lol. Did you know cats/dogs in the US consume more meat than the entire nation of france? Good luck getting anyone to forego their emotional support pets nowadays. The baseline drops.
It’s not a novel take, in some ways capitalism trades comfort for externalities. Now that we have to pay for centuries of externalities, nobody wants to give back an ounce of comfort.
As a first step, what do you want? Would you rather live your life in peace, bettering the controllable world around you? Or would you rather live your life in stress and action and possibly fixing the problem?
I chose one of those for myself and can't blame anyone for choosing differently. They're both valid.
Even without the possibility of solving the problem, individuals can still choose to stop contributing to it. You might feel better about the whole thing at the very least. As an added bonus, the more people that choose to stop contributing, the easier it becomes for others to do the same (e.g. less driving --> more cyclists and pedestrians --> better cycling and pedestrian environment).
There is nothing you can do as an individual, unfortunately. You can reduce your own impact, that’s something that personally makes me feel better and I would highly recommend (vegetarianism is the simplest way to do so). And if you’re motivated you can join advocacy or activist groups. But it’s a collective issue, individual have no actual power here. We need to act as a group to make meaningful changes.
Though, obviously do not vote for the pro fossil fuel parties (which is pretty much all right wing parties in the west)
There's very little to do in Europe. South Korea, Iran, Thailand, Egypt or South Africa e.g. put out significantly more CO2 than say the UK or France (which are towards the top). India and China are higher than the whole EU and are only continuing to pollute more as their standards of living improve. Essentially the only way to stop it is to keep the 3rd world impoverished (in Africa, people often argue that green energy is a Western conspiracy to keep them down). Western economies have already largely stagnated and most of Europe's pollution's fallen to lower per capita than China, let alone South Korea or Russia or... Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and such.
Pro-nuclear efforts are the best hope we have: generate enough electricity and we can scrape the atmosphere clean
People got together and got us all to stop smoking cigarettes against the same kind of opposition. Probably individuals can get together, help educate others which will eventually drive changes through voting or force businesses to change
There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. And the more directly the electorate can keep people accountable. But I think it's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater to declare that accountability is impossible, therefore there is no point in enagaging.
If you live in a western democracy your politicians are held very accountable to the opinion and will of the people who vote. They are not kings or inherited aristocracy, they do what the people want (roughly) or get voted out.
The people who vote by-and-large don't believe climate change is real, don't believe it is serious, or are not willing to tolerate the level of discomfort necessary to solve the problem.
At least in my country, politician's hands are completely utterly tied from fighting climate change, because if they do something serious enough to actually matter they will immediately be voted out of office and whatever they did rolled back.
Here in America we love to blame the politicians (they do indeed suck). All the while voter turnout is a complete joke. Perhaps this is actually helpful, because we are rife with various subcultures that openly celebrate ignorance, so, yeah. Blame the shitty politicians, speak not of the ignorant and unbothered masses.
To be fair, the US electoral system is designed to discourage or outright disenfranchise most voters:
* First-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections ensure that anyone who isn't living in a swing state/district may as well not bother.
* Heavy gerrymandering exacerbates this effect.
* Voter suppression tactics like attacking mail-in ballots and closing voting locations makes it more difficult for those people who still want to vote. Note that Voter ID laws are included in this because there still live today people who were denied birth certificates due to segregation-era hospitals refusing non-white mothers delivery care.
* Holding elections on non-holiday weekdays makes it harder for those living paycheck-to-paycheck and working hourly jobs, though this is blunted somewhat by states which allow early voting.
If you live in a Western democracy your politicians are very accountable to media owners and corporate donors. Voters are a very long way down the influence list, because media owners and corporate donors have sophisticated and very expensive - but high ROI - ways to shape voter opinion.
Some are simple censorship - like X and FB throttling the reach of unwanted content and promoting the reach of the opposite.
Others appear believably organic.
The obvious ones are crude, but they still work on huge swathes of the population.
The first step to recovery is to accept that this is how the system really works, and the idea that voters pick leaders based on a rational consideration of their record and potential benefits is absolute fantasy.
That's mostly a feature of elections with single-member districts or other winner-take-all mechanisms. Every successful politician must have a wide coalition behind them, and marginal groups that could back either major candidate determine the winner.
Proportional elections have different dynamics, especially if elected candidates are determined by personal votes (and not by predetermined ranks on the party list). A successful politician mostly needs to find a niche and maintain their visibility and support within that niche.
Politicians can only be held accountable as long as their base is willing to hold them to account. And unfortunately the old and wealthy have practiced the maximal mantra of FYGM. The degree with which not only do they hoard wealth but do everything in their power to ensure the old ways they made their wealth stay empowered tilts politics heavily.
We're already cooked, the Paris Agreement was aiming for avoiding 1.5°C global increase by 2030 and we're pretty much at that now. We're already seeing global weather shifts as the beginning of what appears to be rapid climate change and we're not yet at the peak of carbon output.
We might not stop what is already happening or what will happen, but we still have time to make it less severe than it would be if no action would be made.
We still can save lives, not all of them but some and for this people it will make a difference.
In my family, about 5 out of 100 people believe climate change is even real. So ya, I think the average at this point is "I'm ambivalent, climate change may not even be real. But mostly I don't care"
The poorest in society are the lowest CO2 emitters - they don't fly often, many don't own a car and use public transport - they can't afford meat in every meal - can't afford air con in summer or heating in winter.
Conversely, the wealthiest are frequent flyers, are chauffeured about in SUVs and rarely walk. They have everything they'll ever need and don't concern themselves about running the AC or heating.
They're preaching to the poor guy about what he needs to do to stop climate change.
Even if the poor guy wanted to care, he can't do much, but the people who claim to care could do a lot more, if they really did care.
The media circus tries to put the blame on the poor, while ignoring the emissions of the celebrities and treating them as royalty. Is it any wonder most people simply don't care?
If the media cared, they would be making villains of the celebrities and idols of the poor.
If you’re talking about a world democracy like the USA, the consumption gap between rich and poor effectively doesn’t matter from a climate change perspective. You could vanish the top 75% of Americans and still we’d have a climate change problem (albeit less of one for sure).
People get confused by some of the research because it often publishes emissions by who owns the asset emitting and not who consumes it (eg Starr et al paper breaks down both, and consumption vs ownership is wildly different, and you can tell what bent people have by which number they pick to report on…)
Another way I’d put it: if you’re not ready for gas to be $40/gallon and beef to be $100/lb ground, then you’re not really ready to fight climate change. And no one is, so it’s not going to happen unless we get a technology miracle.
Lots of things are wealth gap problems. Climate change is not, it’s an everyone problem.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
If you want the honest, brutal take it is because I remember, at least in my country, that for the ozone stuff there was a lot of scientific people taking lead roles in educating the masses. Especially those with credibility who were otherwise not media savvy.
Climate change on the other hand, whenever I think about the words, I can only get Greta Thunberg and her antics in my mind. Even for someone who believes in climate change I can't help but feel these crazed lunatics have only caused massive damage to what should have otherwise been a wake up call. It is like how COVID got associated with Fauci and Gain-of-function.
> is it too politicized, are the required changes too damaging to the economy to start agressively implementing them?
Ofcourse it was politicized. It became a party vs party, an ideology vs ideology thing. Science took a backseat.
Saving the ozone layer required changing practices in a relatively small part of the economy (refrigeration, mostly). In 1994, the total cost of the transition in the US was estimated to less than $100 billion [1], about 1.3% of GDP ($7.3 trillion [2]).
Reducing global carbon emissions to reach net zero by 2050 has been estimated to cost $9.2 trillion per year [3]. World GDP is currently $126 trillion [4]. That means 7.3% of current world GDP per year, or 1.8x of it over a quarter century.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
Because it also happened to be profitable for a large company (DuPont), which was also the company largely responsible for the whole ozone layer thing. They lobbied against ozone layer protections while they had a patent on Freon, but as soon as it expired, they came up with a new more expensive alternative and started supporting environmental regulations forcing people to switch to the new one.
Was an industry really hurt by the actions needed to rebuild the ozone layer? I don’t think so, at least not as far as I can remember. On the other hand the fossil fuel industry has an insane amount of control over politics since a century or so?
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
For the ozone layer, it was deemed possible to eliminate (or significantly reduce) certain chemical emissions.
For generalised climate change, the common enemy of all people is the transnational petroleum industry. This corporate alliance will topple democracies rather than reduce its profits and influence.
Because with the ozone layer, the causes of the problem were much more narrow, the solutions were orders of magnitude cheaper, and they affected a much smaller industry, much less dramatically.
It’s not that the changes are “too damaging to the economy,” it’s that they’d need to be much more widespread. For example, everyone should have stopped driving gasoline engine cars at least by 2010, when the scientific evidence had already been undeniable for years, for anyone studying the matter in good faith. No such action was needed to deal with the ozone layer.
Compounding the problem for climate change mitigation is that it threatens the wealth of people in the oil, gas, and related industries. Changing refrigerant type for ozone hole mitigation was not an existential threat to any industry. The fossil fuel industry has plowed billions of dollars into propaganda and political influence to prevent or slow down changes.
Yeah ditching cars is very hard in some places where public transport is not good. (US)
But I am seeing that it's not that hopeless by 2030 43% of energy would come from renewable sources like solar. Maybe there's still hope. It would be profoundly stupid if as a species we died off because we couldn't curb CO2 emissions.
Global warming fix requires basically banning most of airline travel, phasing out the meat industry, and other massive life changes. And people would rather enjoy the lives themselves instead of giving a fuck about the planet they leave for future generations.
Yes, exactly, what time do people think they have? It's here, it's now, it's happening, it's all around us. This headline would have made a little more sense ten years ago.
Magazines like The Economist helped bring us here by describing Oil Companies still has a bright future and a great investment in the 80s and 90s.
Instead if they had authored high profile articles about how fossil fuels are driving this world to disaster, maybe we would be in a better place.
Doing that would have made their advertisers mad, so they kept writing about clean coal and oil for better $. It was the exact same with politicians, they did not want to loose most of their bribes (ie: political contributions) so they hid their head in the sand.
So now this magazine is writing articles about Climate Change, no thanks.
Edit: I stand corrected. A better way to phrase it is that their business model does not rely on advertising, and they traditionally did not run ads until recently.
> The world’s biggest oil company has withdrawn an advertising campaign that boasted it was “powering a more sustainable future”, after dozens of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.
> The adverts appeared in The Week magazine and The Economist online at the beginning of the year. Baines said it was wrong for publications to accept them in the midst of a climate crisis.
> In a statement, the Economist said: “Advertising is not editorial content and does not imply any endorsement on our part. In the case of this particular ad, it was put on hold at the request of the client.”
Inside of the cover (page 2), ad saying portugal is the smart choice for data centres and ai computing. Page 11, two NGO job ads and an ad for timeshare holiday homes. Page 75, ad for Economist Education Online Courses. Page 75 (back cover) ad for a cruise.
Last week's edition: Rolex, page 2. Page 11, executive recruitment network ad, NGO job ad, teaching job ad. Page 11-12, ad for timeshares. Page 15, barclays bank account ad. Page 20: Ad saying amazon employees' working conditions are good. Page 25: Ad for 'securing identity for the ai enterprise'. Page 32, ad for european cybersecurity investments, page 84 (back page) ad for Oracle.
Do they need advertisers for garbage like this? Just another entry in the decades-long disinformation campaign
"Who bears responsibility for reducing the carbon footprint of those products? Shell, the companies that pumped the oil, the carmakers whose engines burn the fuel, or the people who drive the vehicles? The answer is probably a combination of all of them.
To heap the blame for global warming on the oil industry alone would be to oversimplify the emissions problem. True, companies like Shell could have been more open about evidence of the risks from climate change, and they sometimes lobby against steps to reduce emissions. But everyone bears responsibility."
This goes for almost every institution you can think of, save higher education and the field of climate science - and, even then, you can make an argument for lax funding and marketing on their part, in terms of overwhelming politicians and industry with the truth, no doubt at the behest of wealthy donors looking at their portfolios. But journalism, especially: essentially asleep at the wheel, when the gravity of the situation is considered. Too many people obsessed with their careers and with blinders on.
Every prediction we make seems to be reached sooner than expected. There is so many effects that we don't understand yet.
Keeping with the "this is surprising" narrative, or like this title, implying that we have any time at all, is not helping.
I would expect a less naive title from a platform like the economist.
The Economist is torn, because on the one hand they try to appear clever, but on the other hand they generally support unrestrained capitalism. It’s not possible to do both at the same time.
Clearly you don’t read the economist
Birth rates are in decline. The global population is estimated to peak in the 2080s. I suspect that could be later than reality as the endless doom (like this article) inspires more and more people to not have kids. Then as the population declines precipitously, nature takes back over and begins resolving the problem itself.
Population decline will not solve climate change, we already passed multiple points of no return that will result in worsening climate for the next 50-100y. And there won’t be a way to roll back those changes
Hilariously naive take. Typical HN.
I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
Already then you could find this exact article title in a dozen publications per year, especially in academic publications. Al Gore made a third career out of it.
It was alarmist and too soon then but it’s not alarmist and too soon now?
Nobody upvotes an article titled “Things are about 0.5% more concerning than they were two decades ago”
> I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
This doesn't seem plausible - the worst-case predictions for sea level rise by the end of the century are around 2m.
That would certainly be bad for Florida, but like 80% of the population lives higher than 2m above sea level, so it certainly wouldn't be unliveable.
> I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
I don't doubt that is your recollection, but nobody back then was predicting it would happen in 20 years. The time frames given were much longer. But, the vibe was definitely that we need to wake up and do something right now, because by the time climate change hits real hard it will be too late to avert the calamity.
In 1992 Al Gore’s book said 60% of the population of Florida will have to relocate due to flooding. He didn’t mean in 100 years.
The actual quote is a little more circumspect than you portray it to be.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/free-expression/al-gores-long-an...
> The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”
It's possible to be right on the substance and wrong on the timing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry 's investor revolt.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/floridas-private-home-insuran...
> Active private home insurance policies in Florida declined by 78% over roughly a decade, with the state's insurer of last resort skyrocketing to 63% of the market share, as reported by PRNewswire and republished on Yahoo. That is a dramatic pullback in a state where storm risk has long shaped the housing market.
Take a walk up the alps, compare to pictures from 20 years ago and see for yourself
I recognize this is deeply cynical and definitely doomerist. What can I as an individual actually do to stop this? Why should I even bother reading articles like this at this point? I can't do anything. I can't action it. I can collect my recycling, pop solar panels on my roof and be the most carbon footprint conscious person and it wouldn't move the needle an atom's width.
Politicians don't care, and the ones that do can't make a difference either. Corporations definitely don't care. I can go protest, and that gets a lot of media attention but it doesn't change a voter's mind when their main concern is who gets to play in school sports.
I know this is vitriolic, but I am genuinely curious about it. What can I do? What can I do outside of putting my ballot in the box and hoping something changes?
I think "how to stop this" is the wrong objective. It's like "what I can do to achieve world peace tomorrow?". There is no answer to that. Yes, people promise to solve wars "in a day" but that does not work.
Depending on your situations different actions will have a different impact.
I do try to choose what I can to help. I am not obsessed with "the impact". If I buy a train ticket instead of a plane ticket - that can mean trains get more money. If I keep my phone for one more year, less waste is produced.
Would I help with the situation if I would buy a car consuming lots of gas, take international trips every years etc. (I could afford it, that's not the issue) ? I think not.
Can I say that my actions significantly influence the outcome? Definitely not, but we are 8 billions on this planet, so it all depends on averages. But if I don't do it (I am convinced there is an issue), how could I expect others to have my position...
> I can collect my recycling, pop solar panels on my roof and be the most carbon footprint conscious person and it wouldn't move the needle an atom's width.
The more people who do that, the faster the needle moves. You create economic incentives for businesses to cater to you, and you set an example for others to follow.
That's why I only buy electric cars, put solar on my roof, and heat with a heat pump. A few years later, my parents put in a heat pump, and an extended family member (who is a denier) also put in a heat pump.
Political participation -- voting, organising for the groups you support, actively engaging in meetings and public forums, building social groups of like-minded individuals. It is hugely effective. The worst doomerism is the idea that politics is ineffective. It is incredibly effective, and only the people that participate in it have any effect on it.
There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. But accepting the supine position of "well I can't do anything" only guarantees your powerlessness. Fight for the future you want! Convince 5 people that something is important, and you're already 500% up. It scales like crazy.
Downvote me all you want, naysayers. If politics didn't work, then the people you don't like wouldn't be in power.
I would expect people I don't like in power. They should represent more than just me, and most of the population has quite some different opinions.
I would just hope most people don't like them either and they look for the "next one". Otherwise you transform politicians in a cult...
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
You've never been responsible for the entire world, that's a defeatist fiction put on your shoulders by people who want you to give up and not take responsibility for your actions.
Take some real time to think about your own actions, your share of the blame. Then begin the process of improving your actions. As a handy benefit, you'll begin saving money, and you can reinvest the savings into more projects that also save money. Eventually your carbon footprint will be a small fraction of what it was and in its place you'll have a pile of money.
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
Short of becoming the Luigi of the environmental movement, there is nothing an individual can do. You have to take part in some kind of ongoing collective action. This can include joining a campaign against the oil and gas industry, going door to door for candidates who will reverse climate change, or engaging in direct action against environmentally destructive projects -- or even all three at the same time.
Trying to go it alone is pointless. At best, you'll go down a rabbit hole of becoming the most virtuous consumer alive. At worst, you'll be spend all your time mad-posting on social media.
I didn’t know the Luigi reference. Google has led me to either Luigi Galleani or Luigi Mangione, as strangely similar options from different eras.
What did Luigi accomplish? If nothing, then why the comparison?
Because the commenter wanted to call for violence in a clever way that wouldn’t end up being reported and removed.
There’s an interesting study to be made on whether there was a reduction in insurance claim rejections in the aftermath, and what the morbidity/mortality impact was.
We know now that it changed nothing other than ruining two families’ lives forever.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/04/health/insurers-prior-authori...
Luigi accomplished nothing but folk hero status, United Healthcare premiums increased by double-digit percentages this year. Change requires a pattern not a moment.
Nonsense. This is defeatist talk. This is the logic folks use when they make dozens of small actions that add up, like buying more plastic cuz "it doesn't matter". The honest truth is people who use this logic have made the decision and just don't want to say, "I don't care." Small actions make big differences at scale.
8 billion people all making hundreds of decisions a day make a difference.
Once an individual starts to make those decisions they have a sunk cost, which encourages more action. This leads to voting a certain way, making more sacrifice(giving up excess), encouraging others, etc.
This whole "I'm a victim and have no recourse" benefits the bad actors.
Capitalism has filled our society and expectations with extreme excess. Modern folks eat diets that are insanely luxurious. Giving up our excess is the crux here, and capitalism tries damn hard to give us reasons to justify every little excess. Then those things are accepted and the baseline shifts down, capitalism then gives us more excuses and the baseline drops again.
I was watching an old movie from like 1985 the other day. A character in the movie was a horrible person and part of making that character a horrible seeming person was giving her a small dog as a pet, because it added to her aura of extreme excess. It made me and my friends laugh cuz nowadays that's expected of most people, to have a small dog. The character only had one! Nowadays it's normal to have 2 or 4 small dogs. Lol. Did you know cats/dogs in the US consume more meat than the entire nation of france? Good luck getting anyone to forego their emotional support pets nowadays. The baseline drops.
Capitalism enables too much material wealth. Astounding.
It’s not a novel take, in some ways capitalism trades comfort for externalities. Now that we have to pay for centuries of externalities, nobody wants to give back an ounce of comfort.
As a first step, what do you want? Would you rather live your life in peace, bettering the controllable world around you? Or would you rather live your life in stress and action and possibly fixing the problem?
I chose one of those for myself and can't blame anyone for choosing differently. They're both valid.
Even without the possibility of solving the problem, individuals can still choose to stop contributing to it. You might feel better about the whole thing at the very least. As an added bonus, the more people that choose to stop contributing, the easier it becomes for others to do the same (e.g. less driving --> more cyclists and pedestrians --> better cycling and pedestrian environment).
Nothing
There is nothing you can do as an individual, unfortunately. You can reduce your own impact, that’s something that personally makes me feel better and I would highly recommend (vegetarianism is the simplest way to do so). And if you’re motivated you can join advocacy or activist groups. But it’s a collective issue, individual have no actual power here. We need to act as a group to make meaningful changes.
Though, obviously do not vote for the pro fossil fuel parties (which is pretty much all right wing parties in the west)
There's very little to do in Europe. South Korea, Iran, Thailand, Egypt or South Africa e.g. put out significantly more CO2 than say the UK or France (which are towards the top). India and China are higher than the whole EU and are only continuing to pollute more as their standards of living improve. Essentially the only way to stop it is to keep the 3rd world impoverished (in Africa, people often argue that green energy is a Western conspiracy to keep them down). Western economies have already largely stagnated and most of Europe's pollution's fallen to lower per capita than China, let alone South Korea or Russia or... Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and such.
Pro-nuclear efforts are the best hope we have: generate enough electricity and we can scrape the atmosphere clean
> There's very little to do in Europe.
Plenty to do. We don’t have oil or natural gas so relying on fossil fuel to power our economy is stupid.
Europe does have oil and gas (Russia, Norway). But your overall point stands
Their emissions are generally higher because they produce the goods other nations buy.
This entire mentality of "but them" is bad.
So you can prepare for what is to come.
It's hard to accept, but there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
People got together and got us all to stop smoking cigarettes against the same kind of opposition. Probably individuals can get together, help educate others which will eventually drive changes through voting or force businesses to change
Stop trying to imagine yourself as the hero saving the day all by yourself. It is a fantasy. And learn about the paradox of voting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting
You can totally be the hero and make an outsized impact on climate change.
You'll just end up in supermax for the rest of your life. Pros and cons I suppose.
Volunteer with a group trying to do something to improve the situation. There are plenty.
As long as there is no accountability for politicians, we will always have at least as much time as the next guy plans to stay in power.
Hard to blame this on politicians when raising gas prices is one of the most reliable ways of making voters mad.
There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. And the more directly the electorate can keep people accountable. But I think it's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater to declare that accountability is impossible, therefore there is no point in enagaging.
And companies
If you live in a western democracy your politicians are held very accountable to the opinion and will of the people who vote. They are not kings or inherited aristocracy, they do what the people want (roughly) or get voted out.
The people who vote by-and-large don't believe climate change is real, don't believe it is serious, or are not willing to tolerate the level of discomfort necessary to solve the problem.
At least in my country, politician's hands are completely utterly tied from fighting climate change, because if they do something serious enough to actually matter they will immediately be voted out of office and whatever they did rolled back.
Here in America we love to blame the politicians (they do indeed suck). All the while voter turnout is a complete joke. Perhaps this is actually helpful, because we are rife with various subcultures that openly celebrate ignorance, so, yeah. Blame the shitty politicians, speak not of the ignorant and unbothered masses.
> All the while voter turnout is a complete joke.
To be fair, the US electoral system is designed to discourage or outright disenfranchise most voters:
* First-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections ensure that anyone who isn't living in a swing state/district may as well not bother.
* Heavy gerrymandering exacerbates this effect.
* Voter suppression tactics like attacking mail-in ballots and closing voting locations makes it more difficult for those people who still want to vote. Note that Voter ID laws are included in this because there still live today people who were denied birth certificates due to segregation-era hospitals refusing non-white mothers delivery care.
* Holding elections on non-holiday weekdays makes it harder for those living paycheck-to-paycheck and working hourly jobs, though this is blunted somewhat by states which allow early voting.
If you live in a Western democracy your politicians are very accountable to media owners and corporate donors. Voters are a very long way down the influence list, because media owners and corporate donors have sophisticated and very expensive - but high ROI - ways to shape voter opinion.
Some are simple censorship - like X and FB throttling the reach of unwanted content and promoting the reach of the opposite.
Others appear believably organic.
The obvious ones are crude, but they still work on huge swathes of the population.
The first step to recovery is to accept that this is how the system really works, and the idea that voters pick leaders based on a rational consideration of their record and potential benefits is absolute fantasy.
That's mostly a feature of elections with single-member districts or other winner-take-all mechanisms. Every successful politician must have a wide coalition behind them, and marginal groups that could back either major candidate determine the winner.
Proportional elections have different dynamics, especially if elected candidates are determined by personal votes (and not by predetermined ranks on the party list). A successful politician mostly needs to find a niche and maintain their visibility and support within that niche.
Politicians can only be held accountable as long as their base is willing to hold them to account. And unfortunately the old and wealthy have practiced the maximal mantra of FYGM. The degree with which not only do they hoard wealth but do everything in their power to ensure the old ways they made their wealth stay empowered tilts politics heavily.
We're already cooked, the Paris Agreement was aiming for avoiding 1.5°C global increase by 2030 and we're pretty much at that now. We're already seeing global weather shifts as the beginning of what appears to be rapid climate change and we're not yet at the peak of carbon output.
It's strange that anyone's still thinking there's "still time until we have to act". Is this really the average view out there?
Hopefully not average, but I guarantee there are forces out there actively pushing it. Two versions, eventually:
1. Don't do anything that might interfere with our profits, time is available/needed to consider what to do.
2. Don't do anything that might interfere with out profits, it's too late anyway.
Because there is still time.
We might not stop what is already happening or what will happen, but we still have time to make it less severe than it would be if no action would be made.
We still can save lives, not all of them but some and for this people it will make a difference.
I don't know anyone or ever see any media reflecting such a weird standpoint. It's more "better act now than even later"
In my family, about 5 out of 100 people believe climate change is even real. So ya, I think the average at this point is "I'm ambivalent, climate change may not even be real. But mostly I don't care"
The poorest in society are the lowest CO2 emitters - they don't fly often, many don't own a car and use public transport - they can't afford meat in every meal - can't afford air con in summer or heating in winter.
Conversely, the wealthiest are frequent flyers, are chauffeured about in SUVs and rarely walk. They have everything they'll ever need and don't concern themselves about running the AC or heating.
They're preaching to the poor guy about what he needs to do to stop climate change.
Even if the poor guy wanted to care, he can't do much, but the people who claim to care could do a lot more, if they really did care.
The media circus tries to put the blame on the poor, while ignoring the emissions of the celebrities and treating them as royalty. Is it any wonder most people simply don't care?
If the media cared, they would be making villains of the celebrities and idols of the poor.
If you’re talking about a world democracy like the USA, the consumption gap between rich and poor effectively doesn’t matter from a climate change perspective. You could vanish the top 75% of Americans and still we’d have a climate change problem (albeit less of one for sure).
People get confused by some of the research because it often publishes emissions by who owns the asset emitting and not who consumes it (eg Starr et al paper breaks down both, and consumption vs ownership is wildly different, and you can tell what bent people have by which number they pick to report on…)
Another way I’d put it: if you’re not ready for gas to be $40/gallon and beef to be $100/lb ground, then you’re not really ready to fight climate change. And no one is, so it’s not going to happen unless we get a technology miracle.
Lots of things are wealth gap problems. Climate change is not, it’s an everyone problem.
The average view is that "climate change" == "higher/lower temperatures". Nobody really thinks of all the secondary effects.
a lot of people think that the time to do something is when your house is already flooded
why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
is it too politicized, are the required changes too damaging to the economy to start agressively implementing them?
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
If you want the honest, brutal take it is because I remember, at least in my country, that for the ozone stuff there was a lot of scientific people taking lead roles in educating the masses. Especially those with credibility who were otherwise not media savvy.
Climate change on the other hand, whenever I think about the words, I can only get Greta Thunberg and her antics in my mind. Even for someone who believes in climate change I can't help but feel these crazed lunatics have only caused massive damage to what should have otherwise been a wake up call. It is like how COVID got associated with Fauci and Gain-of-function.
> is it too politicized, are the required changes too damaging to the economy to start agressively implementing them?
Ofcourse it was politicized. It became a party vs party, an ideology vs ideology thing. Science took a backseat.
Saving the ozone layer required changing practices in a relatively small part of the economy (refrigeration, mostly). In 1994, the total cost of the transition in the US was estimated to less than $100 billion [1], about 1.3% of GDP ($7.3 trillion [2]).
Reducing global carbon emissions to reach net zero by 2050 has been estimated to cost $9.2 trillion per year [3]. World GDP is currently $126 trillion [4]. That means 7.3% of current world GDP per year, or 1.8x of it over a quarter century.
[1] https://cei.org/studies/the-high-cost-of-cool-the-economic-i...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
[3] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-ins...
[4] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/OEMDC/ADVE...
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
Because it also happened to be profitable for a large company (DuPont), which was also the company largely responsible for the whole ozone layer thing. They lobbied against ozone layer protections while they had a patent on Freon, but as soon as it expired, they came up with a new more expensive alternative and started supporting environmental regulations forcing people to switch to the new one.
Was an industry really hurt by the actions needed to rebuild the ozone layer? I don’t think so, at least not as far as I can remember. On the other hand the fossil fuel industry has an insane amount of control over politics since a century or so?
This worked so well because we had suitable replacement gases and the industry had little financial incentives to push against it.
It's a very different situation with fossil fuels.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
For the ozone layer, it was deemed possible to eliminate (or significantly reduce) certain chemical emissions.
For generalised climate change, the common enemy of all people is the transnational petroleum industry. This corporate alliance will topple democracies rather than reduce its profits and influence.
Industry groups saw the ozone scenario unfold and said "never again".
Same thing happened after Nixon - it led directly to the founding of Fox News (https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2011/memo-from-197...).
Reducing CFCs, while difficult and requiring global cooperation, was far more simplistic and targeted than decreasing co2 emissions
This has actually been studied. The question even has it's own wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion_and_climate_ch...
Because with the ozone layer, the causes of the problem were much more narrow, the solutions were orders of magnitude cheaper, and they affected a much smaller industry, much less dramatically.
It’s not that the changes are “too damaging to the economy,” it’s that they’d need to be much more widespread. For example, everyone should have stopped driving gasoline engine cars at least by 2010, when the scientific evidence had already been undeniable for years, for anyone studying the matter in good faith. No such action was needed to deal with the ozone layer.
Compounding the problem for climate change mitigation is that it threatens the wealth of people in the oil, gas, and related industries. Changing refrigerant type for ozone hole mitigation was not an existential threat to any industry. The fossil fuel industry has plowed billions of dollars into propaganda and political influence to prevent or slow down changes.
Yeah ditching cars is very hard in some places where public transport is not good. (US)
But I am seeing that it's not that hopeless by 2030 43% of energy would come from renewable sources like solar. Maybe there's still hope. It would be profoundly stupid if as a species we died off because we couldn't curb CO2 emissions.
Ozone layer "fix" was invisible to the public.
Global warming fix requires basically banning most of airline travel, phasing out the meat industry, and other massive life changes. And people would rather enjoy the lives themselves instead of giving a fuck about the planet they leave for future generations.
Less time than it thinks? We ran out of time a while ago, it's already well in progress.
Yes, exactly, what time do people think they have? It's here, it's now, it's happening, it's all around us. This headline would have made a little more sense ten years ago.
The world thinks it has time left, but it doesn’t. Seems accurate to me.
Archive link? Paywall blocks content
Usually people trying to be helpful just post an archive link, instead of requesting others to do so...
I had a lot of trouble finding one
Magazines like The Economist helped bring us here by describing Oil Companies still has a bright future and a great investment in the 80s and 90s.
Instead if they had authored high profile articles about how fossil fuels are driving this world to disaster, maybe we would be in a better place.
Doing that would have made their advertisers mad, so they kept writing about clean coal and oil for better $. It was the exact same with politicians, they did not want to loose most of their bribes (ie: political contributions) so they hid their head in the sand.
So now this magazine is writing articles about Climate Change, no thanks.
You should look into the economist a bit more.
For one, they have no advertisers to keep happy.
Edit: I stand corrected. A better way to phrase it is that their business model does not rely on advertising, and they traditionally did not run ads until recently.
The top of economist.com has a 250px high `adComponent_adcontainer__eooQr` div.
My Pihole blocks its content, but I have a guess as to what it is.
They seem to think they have advertisers. https://myaccount.economist.com/s/article/How-do-I-advertise...
The ads they accept are basically just classifieds for high-level positions in NGOs.
I turned off anblocking and see zero ads on the site.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/29/saudi-aramc...
> The world’s biggest oil company has withdrawn an advertising campaign that boasted it was “powering a more sustainable future”, after dozens of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.
> The adverts appeared in The Week magazine and The Economist online at the beginning of the year. Baines said it was wrong for publications to accept them in the midst of a climate crisis.
> In a statement, the Economist said: “Advertising is not editorial content and does not imply any endorsement on our part. In the case of this particular ad, it was put on hold at the request of the client.”
I have their print magazine right here.
Inside of the cover (page 2), ad saying portugal is the smart choice for data centres and ai computing. Page 11, two NGO job ads and an ad for timeshare holiday homes. Page 75, ad for Economist Education Online Courses. Page 75 (back cover) ad for a cruise.
Last week's edition: Rolex, page 2. Page 11, executive recruitment network ad, NGO job ad, teaching job ad. Page 11-12, ad for timeshares. Page 15, barclays bank account ad. Page 20: Ad saying amazon employees' working conditions are good. Page 25: Ad for 'securing identity for the ai enterprise'. Page 32, ad for european cybersecurity investments, page 84 (back page) ad for Oracle.
So there are some ads - not many, but some.
Do they need advertisers for garbage like this? Just another entry in the decades-long disinformation campaign
"Who bears responsibility for reducing the carbon footprint of those products? Shell, the companies that pumped the oil, the carmakers whose engines burn the fuel, or the people who drive the vehicles? The answer is probably a combination of all of them.
To heap the blame for global warming on the oil industry alone would be to oversimplify the emissions problem. True, companies like Shell could have been more open about evidence of the risks from climate change, and they sometimes lobby against steps to reduce emissions. But everyone bears responsibility."
https://www.economist.com/business/2019/07/06/shells-boss-de...
I remember that mag with that name from the 80s seeing it on news stands. Is this a different one and the other one closed ?
This goes for almost every institution you can think of, save higher education and the field of climate science - and, even then, you can make an argument for lax funding and marketing on their part, in terms of overwhelming politicians and industry with the truth, no doubt at the behest of wealthy donors looking at their portfolios. But journalism, especially: essentially asleep at the wheel, when the gravity of the situation is considered. Too many people obsessed with their careers and with blinders on.
al gore, hold me!