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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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That's temporary, as you would know if you had paid attention.
...
That whooshing sound was the point going right over your head.
We're past the point of fixing the soil. The advanced farming we've been doing is what has been depleting topsoil. When your growing regions change around you, it's not going to matter how much you try to compost.
And concrete production, which is a cornerstone (pun not intended) of our civilization. At this point, there is no viable electric alternative for commercial transport (Nikola is bankrupt, and the owner if going to jail for fraud), and there's no viable way to make public transport work in about 99% of the country. You would need to entirely re-build the infrastructure of the US in order for public transit to be practical for the majority of people, and we're already out of time. Let's say you could do that in a mere ten years (which is hopelessly, impossibly optimistic); you'd still have ten years of increasing carbon emissions that have already started to create a cascading, self-perpetuating chain reaction. We're already seeing a 1.5C rise in seawater temperatures, and that's over a decade earlier than was worried about. We're fucked. We're bleeding out from a severed artery, EMS hasn't even gotten in the bus, and you're saying, nah, it's just a little cut. It's fucking delusional. If we'd been doing this shit 40 years ago, when I was a kid and we were talking about stopping acid rain and holes in the ozone, maybe we wouldn't be fucked. But it's all too little, too late.
That's cyclical. More heat generating larger stormfronts is the norm. A destabilized jetstream that triggers more polar drift is the norm. The fundamental hazard of the next century isn't simply going to be higher-than-average temperatures but enormous hurricanes plowing through urban areas, unleashing megatons of wind force and teraliters of water, onto real estate wholly unprepared for the damage.
But the notion that we're simply not going to have rain anymore because of rising heat is... incorrect on a few very basic levels.
We've made more progress reclaiming desert territory in the last twenty years than humans have achieved in the last millennia. The question isn't whether we can but whether we choose to dedicate the human labor and industrial capital to actually do the thing.
The great thing about a shrinking global population is a decreased demand for new concrete.
Denying that trains even exist.
Denying that buses actually exist
You would not. If anything, we've overbuilt infrastructure and would do well to tear down a bunch of the surplus and consolidate in denser urban centers. But we can get by just fine on what we've already built, assuming we're willing to maintain it and shift to bus/train transit over everyone driving their own cars.
Industrial scale changes are going to take place whether we want them to or not. The current pace and direction of development isn't sustainable.
But huge drop-offs in human activity - the Mississippi cultural collapse being a classic example as is the Chernobyl zone - can and does result in quick reversals and reclamation of territory by wildlife.