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Billionaires and the climate
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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7 years? That's a pretty old meme. We have already done irreparable damage and we could only mitigate it at this point.
The great thing about the earth is that it has a seemingly boundless capacity to renew itself.
The bad thing is that renewal takes time and often results in a radically different biosphere with organisms best suited to predate on prior iterations of life.
I'm less worried about how the earth will look in 10,000 years than I am worried about how humans will survive in the next 100.
You are absolutely right, I meant more for us humans. The earth will recover. With or without humans.
That's a 90's meme.
First, what makes you think we can? It's a strong claim to put forth without evidence.
Second, I won't be there in the future, so I'd like things not get too bad in the meantime.
There is a shocking amount of people on Lemmy that just simply seem to believe that science literally is magic and can do anything with enough money behind it.
No facts needed. No study in the field. And won't even take the word of specialists and actual scientists, cause they just feel right in their heart and the world/Internet has made them feel like that's enough.
Maybe it's over optimism to not be depressed but gosh is it annoying.
You sound like an AI. These mindless bots seem to be the only "magical" new technology that has come about in the past 7 years, and they are accelerating the climate catastrophe with the amount of power they draw.
Molten Salt Reactors, high density batteries, mRNA vaccines, and high efficiency electric flying machines also come to mind.
Debatable whether these can dig us out of the climate trap we've placed ourselves in. But we're definitely still advancing technologically.
No argument there. But the investor class will always find ways to burn more resources because of their growth addiction. I think the only way out of the climate trap is via social transformation (e.g. Green New Deal).
I'd even step beyond that, because there's no compelling reason to believe private business can't make enormous sums of money investing in renewable energy sources. This really does boil down to which investors are in charge. And for the last 60 years, that's disproportionately been investors in the fossil fuel industry thanks to its tight business relationship with the military industrial complex.
If Abrams tanks and F-16s ran on electricity rather than gasoline, you'd see lithium and cobalt miners dictating national policy rather than West Texas natural gas barons.
I agree, to an extent. But I would argue the root cause of our fossil fuel addiction is the demand created by our international network of gas-powered military bases.
I largely agree with you, with the caveat that we need to separate climate emergency from growth addiction and capitalism at large if we're going to talk about the military industrial complex.
We will inevitably end our reliance on fossil fuels because even an intransigent sect of fossil fuel barons will eventually fall prey to free market economics. And then we'll have a bunch of great power competition incentivizing carbon-free military tech, and we'll be desalinating the oceans to build our sodium battery-powered UAVs whose autonomous targeting systems are trained by blowing up coral atolls.
I hope you see my point. Joel Kovel did a masterful job laying this out in The Enemy of Nature (2008). When I say social revolution, I mean some way to organize society so that we can get the psychopaths out of positions of power, i.e. a society that rewards cooperation instead of competition.
You're not making any sense unfortunately. Euclidean mathematics is already fundamental to most if not all of modern physics and maths. It's by no means a new concept that hasn't been explored yet. As @Krauerking@lemy.lol put it in their response, science isn't magic. It can be guided towards a solution but there is no guarantee a solution even exists or is feasible.
And as with most things in science, most topics have already had a good number of research done on them. And the future does not look great for a breakthrough. Let alone one that can reverse all of climate change's effects. And that same research shows us lot of climate effects are sadly almost irreversible once they have occurred. They can only be mitigated.
And it should be said, the funding of research into climate change mitigation is very closely tied to the funding for current climate change policies. So if one isn't taken seriously, the other one most likely will not receive much either. It makes it very easy for politicians to pretend they are working against climate change too, by under funding climate change mitigation research and then saying "well the scientists should fix the issue and they aren't!"
We spent 10,000 years learning fancier techniques for using fire. But there's no technology that reverses entropy. All we seem capable of doing is burning more things at a faster rate.
We can fix it in the future has been an argument for decades at this point and we still haven't found that magical fix while barreling towards ecological desaster. All data points so far show that this magical technology will not arrive before we all suffer permanent and irreperable damage.
Only a child would believe marvel level technology is possible.