Uplifting News

Me: dusts off hands Installed solar on the roof, bicycling to work, updated the insulation on all my windows, and drastically reduced the amount of plastic in my life.

Tech Company Next Door: CONSUMES 70 MwH OF POWER FOR TWO YEARS STRAIGHT POWERING AN UNOPTIMIZED AI

Me: Begins flipping through a copy of How To Blow Up A Pipeline

I agree, many of us have maxed out passive improvements. Now let's work on active.

Call your local oil company CEO. Get a job at Exxon and really half ass it. Visit your town government and demand better public transport and electric busses. Take a dump on the nearest gas pump.

Only some of those are jokes and I'm not sure which.

Don't poop on stuff you don't own.

No offense, but this is exactly the kind of active pessimism that this post is trying to combat. The only mindset that creates positive change is active optimism. In other words, hope for better and taking action to try and get there.

Note that this is not to be confused with inactive optimism. "Everything will just work out on its own". That also doesn't work.

Active pessimism is the most damaging mindset, though, because it actively drains others of their will to make things better. Feeling hopeless is real and understandable, I've been feeling it, too. Spreading it around and shutting down those who are trying to do better isn't the way to process it, though.

Okay. But every minute we can delay reaching that threshold will be worth it.

To me it's the same as the US democracy right now. Yes it's far too late to see no ill effects and we are already facing the consequences, but every act of resistance to unlawful, immoral and unconstitutional orders slow them down, and with enough co-ordination may slow them down enough before Trump and the oligarchs become truly unstoppable.

For any issue that effects our world's existence, stand boldly and take action. Don't let the fear of the inevitability of it consume you.

“The Earth will just shake us off like a bad case of fleas.”

It'll at least determine how many species survive. And the threshold to total human extinction is very high, so every ton of co2 is part of a life saved.

There are always best and worst case scenarios.

We are currently comprehensively losing the battle for 3C@2100 (which comes with increasingly harmful-to-devastating impacts in the intervening years and decades: future climate refugees will make the current not-far-off-a-London a decade seem like a picnic. A situation fascists will no doubt exploit).

It looks like the only way to prevent 4C plus and, a future Earth only described in science fiction, is mass civil disobedience.

But the UK government appears to be the worst in any civilised country in terms of squashing dissent, and most of the public appears to be more concerned with not being delayed on their commutes.

A few billionaires and rich old assholes decided not to fight climate change. They have a disproportional amount of time behind the mic.

You're right, better just give up now.

God forbid someone tries to think past the next quarter.

If the future can't be livable and people just wants a quiet suicide for the human race I've got good news. There's a very easy solution for avoiding that discomfort that also happens to be the #1 way to reduce your carbon footprint.

But if you want to keep living and not just surviving, suck it up...

I didn’t get that at all from the OP, what I saw was “every bit matters so keep fighting.”

If anything the current political context makes what needs to be done pretty clear. There's a difference between downplaying the problem and realizing that if laying down and dieing isn't an option.

A bit sad how pessimistic everyone is.

Americans are pessimistic because we don't have a functional democracy and our fascist oligarchs are too stupid to use their resources to fight climate change.... And the rest of the world is pessimistic because the world's most powerful economy and military has fallen to fascist oligarchy.

Nothing will change until we abolish the billionaires and replace our two party system with a modern multiparty parliamentary system with proportional representation

That's because billionaires like Robert Murdock own all our media and they use their power to push disinformation to undermine class solidarity and democracy.

If we want to save the world then we have to get rid of the billionaires asap as they are the greatest threat to democracy.

You're confusing completely averting things, with mitigating how bad they are.

Well, at this point, we're fucked. The only difference now is how fucked we are.

It's the difference between "really bad" and "even worse".

I don't know if it's really selfish more people are a part of a system that is bigger than them that forces them into situations that have a negative impact on CO2 levels

Working a job that has low pay which probably force people to housing that is further from their work place, in America most cities don't have a great public transportation infrastructure nor do they have alternative commuting options like protected bike lanes. This forces people to have to drive more.

The Return to Office bullshit has forced more cars on the road that were not there 4 years ago which is impacting CO2 levels

These are just 2 of many different things that the system has created that have put people in situations that make slowing CO2 levels more difficult.

Remember that it can always be worse. Even if it's irreversible in our lifetimes, it can always be hotter and more extreme.