giggle Delightfully reprehensible of you.
I recently rewatched ‘The Newsroom’ and found my self nodding during that interview. Collectively, the world is taking no meaningful action to address climate change, and it continues to worsen. In my advanced age, death may afford me the only opportunity to avoid its consequences.
The current plan is to just let the US implode (that is working out better than our wildest dreams, who knew the whole country would just bend over and take it?)
That gives the rest of the world a bit of room to get our affairs in order.
Worldwide economic disaster - which is the best case scenario for a US collapse - will do the opposite of letting the world put things in order. You’ll have nations doubling down on burning the cheapest fuel and extracting resources in the cheapest and dirtiest ways possible, out of desperation if nothing else. And not being able to invest in future solutions even if they wanted to.
While you guys let yourself be taken for a ride by the car industry (or more specifically Elmo) China has been building high speed rail, has been cleaning up their industry at an unbelievable rate.
Europe is slowly turning in the right direction.
Keep destroying yourself, we’ll be fine without you.
Your life expectancy is already lower than in China, Keep it up! Guns and cars will save the world!
That’s what Russia and China want him to think.
It would be completely in character if he believed that climate change was going to be good for Russia, with all the thawing in Siberia, turning it into fertile land. I am sure Putin has told him so and he wants to believe anything the murderer claims. Putin has certainly said so in public in the past.
It is wrong on several levels, BTW.
Not really, no. The US is too big a presence in the world economy, it falling apart or even having a major economic downturn hurts everyone else. Not because the world inherently needs the US, but because that’s just how the world economic system is structured; the US is a load bearing member and having it yanked out will not be good for everyone else.
And that’s if the nukes don’t fly, which I consider a near-certainty at some point.
I’m reminded of the old expression that goes something like “when you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s easy to forget that your original objective was to drain the swamp”.
The political problem with climate change as an issue is that it’s an ever-present and slow-moving issue, whereas things like war, the rise of fascism, and economic collapse are more in-your-face immediate. If Trump tariffs are about to put my company out of business, that’s a hell of a lot more urgent than my carbon footprint.
I’ve often wondered about what elements of modern life we would really not be willing to forego in the name of resource conservation and climate change mitigation. Industrial farming is, I think, one of those things. 8B mouths is a lot to feed, and we’re not going to be able to do it without farm machinery, fertilizers, pesticides, and a transportation infrastructure to get food from where it’s grown to where it gets eaten.
Modern health care is another thing. I mean we could live without it - people in many parts of the world do so - but there would be considerably more misery and shorter lifespans. What does it take to provide modern health care? In broad terms, you need hospitals, medical equipment (respirators, MRIs, X-ray machines, surgical lamps, etc.), medical supplies, medicines, antibiotics, and vaccines.
Clean water? You’ll need treatment plants, chemicals, an industry to produce the pipes for your municipal water system, another industry for the excavators to install those pipes, and a transportation infrastructure to get all those parts and equipment from where they’re made to where they’re needed.
As long as there are independent nations with competing agendas, each nation will feel a need to maintain its own military and equip/train it to the best of their ability. They’ll want planes, tanks, guns, and bombs, and they’ll consume plenty of resources on an ongoing basis just to maintain warfighting competency. As with agriculture, militaries will want a transportation infrastructure to quickly position resources.
Each item in each of those lists requires a massive infrastructure and supply chains to give birth to it. Want a farm tractor? You need mining and processing industries to produce the steel and aluminum for it, a chemical industry to make the coatings that protect those materials from corrosion, and a petroleum industry to fuel it. If we’re not willing to revert to slide rules and pencils to design those tractors, then we’ll need an IT industry to provide computers for the design work and automated manufacturing machinery (and the IT industry needs its own supply chains and infrastructure). Think through what it takes to provide anything else in those lists, and you’ll end up with a similar list of supply chains, even just people commuting to/from a job to design and build those tractors (meaning they will need transportation for their commute).
There’s certainly room to make many of those things more efficient than they are now, but that feels a bit like trimming some twigs off of a massive tree that’s leaning precipitously over your house. If we don’t want to eliminate or ration out those important/semi-critical things, then are we prepared to admit that maybe the long-term survival of some level of civilization is more important than e.g. the individual freedom to travel long distances for leisure, go waterskiing behind a powerboat, live 40 miles from where you work, or mine crypto? At what point will we start proscribing resource-intensive activities instead of merely trying to discourage them via taxation or social pressure? And if we really do want to sustain things like industrial farming, modern health care, clean water, and a robust military, then how much room really exists to trim resource consumption out of our lives?
I think a lot of that presupposes resources would support 8 billion people somewhat equally, which is the opposite of the direction we’re headed. Only a smaller percentage would get to enjoy them.
Probably you’d get a few tens of thousands of people wallowing in untold luxury, a few million around them doing extremely well, a few hundred million doing OK, and the rest starving and burning, but nobody will care. Kinda like now. We’re pretty darned good at tuning out starvation, genocide, disease, famine, etc. even when it’s just a few million people. When it’s billions, we don’t have the emotional capacity to even really begin to comprehend that… so we don’t bother.
IMO it’s very unlikely we’ll see any sort of collaborative reduction in resource consumption. I’d bet on a winner-take-all future. More likely Musk and friends will live out their days in a luxury yacht around Mars, ruling over what’s left of Earth with an army of puppet politicians and killer robots, occasionally starting new wildfires from satellite lasers just for the fun of it.
Doesn’t that happen somewhat regularly? Seems like it just makes new winners, like it did after WW2.
If the US collapses, China would probably be quite happy to step in and fill the void. They already govern 3x more people than we do with far less unrest.
The US is only two hundred years old. Who knows if we’ll even be in history books a few centuries from now?
Who’s “we” in this case? It’s hard to imagine a thriving Europe without American defense, Russian fuel, and Asian imports. They haven’t really been self sufficient in a while, no?
China might be able to scale better, especially if they partner with Russia. They can more easily enact painful policies that the democracies would reject as oppressive. And nobody left in the world would be a meaningful check against them.
Google “Maya climate change” and you’ll get a plethora of cites for how severe droughts precipitated the collapse of that civilization. And they’re far from alone.
As archaeologists continue to turn up ever more signs of collapsed civilizations, they are finding plenty of evidence that climate shifts are at least partly to blame for the decline in many cases. Those links offer the opportunity to protect the future of our own society by learning from the mistakes of our ancestors.
“When we excavate the remains of past civilizations, we very rarely find any evidence that they as a whole society made any attempts to change in the face of a drying climate, a warming atmosphere or other changes”, Ur says. “I view this inflexibility as the real reason for collapse.”
I doubt we’re going to do any better than previous civilizations, plus our collapse will be near enough to worldwide to threaten our species’ extinction – along with most other life on this planet.
With friends like the USA we (Europe) don’t need enemies.
You are openly toying with the idea of declaring war with NATO (attacking Canada and Denmark)
You have not been a reliable partner in our defence since 1945.
I see, thanks for clarifying.
Until the nukes fall and most of them die, because a fascist US would burn the world if it can’t control it. Hitler wanted to destroy everything as he went down, he just didn’t have the power; the US does have the power to wreck civilization.
I read somewhere that this is starting to cause problems in India. The central government has been sponsoring family planning programs for decades and now states that successfully lowered their birth rates are losing out on representation in Parliament in favor of states with higher birth rates.
Yes the rest of the world keeps Europe wealthy out of just charity <rolleyes>
A timely and pertinent video by one of my favorite Youtube science communicators:
Stranger