For us, not really. The generations that come after us? Probably.
And therein lies the problem. The people making the rules and pulling the strings don't have a bleeding, burning pressure to change course. And they won't until it's too late.
Complain all you want about climate and biodiversity and pollution, but nothing is going to be done until we've stunted the lives of the people at the top. That's just how the short-sighted, hill climbing algorithm called humanity works. We're like an ant colony, and we can't optimize for things happening outside of an N x (human lifespan), where 0 < N < 1.
A better solution might be to increase human lifespan to the point where people begin to worry about a hundred years from now. Because they're just not going to care enough to act otherwise. Everything else is more immediate, more pressing.
When's the last time you turned off your electricity? Or started a coup to remove the policy makers?
Humans aren't equipped to solve this. It's because of the algorithm of society.
>but nothing is going to be done until we've stunted the lives of the people at the top
Do people honestly believe "nothing" is being done? We are chipping away at these problems, otherwise you wouldn't be reading about it in a mainstream newspaper article. People (especially younger people) are more conscious about these issues than at any time in my lifetime. It's not like you can flip a switch and change a society that has developed over millennia.
The concern is that compared to what's necessary to change the apparent course of the planet, what has been done so far is basically nothing. On a global scale the amount of change necessary is orders of magnitude larger than what has changed so far, and it needs to happen fast (and the problem is getting worse: the second derivative isn't even in the right direction in that carbon emissions per year are still increasing globally. Given what we know about the climate it's not clear if we would avoid substantial shifts even if we reset the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to the levels from the start of the century). And the fact is much more action could be easily taken even right now, but some governments are still in denial that there's even a problem in the first place (and the fact is this is a problem which needs government action: individual consumers do not have the power to change the behaviour of industry, even if well organised).
No, "we" are not. Some people are chipping away at some of these problems, but "we" (in the global, UN-sized scheme of things) are still adding and exacerbating these problems much faster than the solutions are being developed and/or deployed.
It's not like you can flip a switch and change a society
Our response to the Corona virus suggests that yes, if the will is there, we can manage to flip at least some switches. But yes, I do realize that these measures are considered temporary, and Covid is a much more immediate threat than the implosion of society.
What is being done? Nearly every "green" initiative is much more marketing than reality when you look at the details. Renewable energy sources are widely supplementing not replacing hydrocarbons. Decreased emissions are largely from a financial switch from coal to natural gas and offloading your CO2 production to somewhere else. Global emissions are still rising.
Consumer capitalism is the largest driver of our CO2 usage and we have done worse than nothing about changing the way our economies operate. Consumer spending has been a perpetually increasing part of the US GDP. Currently 70% of the US GDP is consumer spending. We have a pandemic which has forced that to drop and everyone with political power is doing everything they can to get that back up.
> It's not like you can flip a switch...
Well unfortunately we don't have time. Historically every major sudden climate change period seems to have reached a tipping point where positive feedbacks initiated rapid temperature increases. We don't entirely know what these feedback are (we have some guesses that they might be methane hydrates and melting permafrost) but once we hit these it's over, it doesn't matter if you reduce CO2 emission to 0. It's worth noting that IPCC projections typically do not include feedbacks, which may explain why 'faster than expected' is the new norm.
We might see a blue ocean event before the decade is out. That will have immediate impact on the entire global climate.
There’s a lot to what you say, but: if you’re under 40-50 or so, I also expect a rough life. Assume you’re 30 and live to 85: 55 more years is until 2075.
I started to change my bevahiour. I stopped buying fruit and vegetables in plastic wrapping. I buy milk in glass or paper containers. In my household I pay super close attention to how much water is running when we do dishes. We fill up the sink and wash it there. We turn off lights wherever possible and use energy efficient devices.
I only bought A++ electrical kitchen appliances, we invested in a new energy efficient boiler and have a smart metre where we track our gas and electricity usage. I also switched our energy provider who uses 100% renewable energy.
I also stopped worrying about COVID and wearing masks and keeping social distance. If humans are weak and die from a begnin virus then it's part of the circle of life. Keeping everyone alive through unsustainable measures only harms our planet due to over population and further exploitation.
I stopped eating meat in 2018, don't own a car and I've started to book 15h train journeys when I travel to Europe instead of going on a 3 hour plane.
There is a lot we can do, but I agree the most effective way would be to start civil unrest and force leaders into their knees to enforce more measures to everyone and not rely on people's good will like myself.
“I also stopped worrying about COVID and wearing masks and keeping social distance. If humans are weak and die from a begnin virus then it's part of the circle of life. Keeping everyone alive through unsustainable measures only harms our planet due to over population and further exploitation.”
COVID-19 really is a benign virus, as far a viruses go. I don't agree with the rest of that statement, but its effects on people infected are absolutely mild when compared to some other viruses: Polio, HIV and Ebola have much worse effects.
Other viruses that we control for with vaccination regularly have much more severe long-term effects than we now know from COVID, like causing birth defects (Rubella), deafness (Mumps), immunocompromization (Measles) or cancer (HPV).
Yes, humans in previous generations wouldn't even bat an eyelid at the death rates. it wasn't long ago that people used to willingly go on boat journeys even though 10% of the passengers would typically die on the way
Deaths at sea definitely occurred. Credible accurate records don't seem to be available however, as this article's abstract notes:
Farley Grubb, "Morbidity and Mortality on the North Atlantic Passage: Eighteenth-Century German Immigration" (1987).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/204611
"Coffin ships" that carried the Irish fleeing the potato famine to America were notorious for their death rate and generally bad conditions. Of course, this was an already weakened population of passengers.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, my guess is the reference to COVID.
The earth is currently overpopulated for the system we have in-place to feed it. We are very inefficient in resource usage and waste over 1/2 the food we produce each year. COVID isn't the answer to this problem, but your point is valid.
Do you know anyone who died because they volunteered?
Besides that, when I was 10 years old and I asked at that time 30-40 year old people to not smoke cigarettes indoors because the passive smoking was damaging my young lungs and can lead to severe cancer and early death I was told that this is none of my business. Those people voluneered to damange their own health and knowingly also damanged my and other children's health. Now the same people are in their advanced age and demand from me to wear a mask because they don't want to bear the consequences of their earlier decisions. They essentially harmed themselves, and now they want to harm me again so that I have to carry the burden on my shoulders for their own wrongdoing. No thank you very much. I had COVID and my body fought it off in no time and I feel great. Other people have got their own immune system to deal with it. It's none of my business after all, like I was told.
So your solution to the problem is to just do as those 30-40 year olds did? This isn't a revolution that can be won with retribution. You have to be better than the people you're rallying against. Any time you sink to their level it's a tool they will use against you. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
It’s not preventable without harming other people as a result. My point was about unsustainable measures and that is definitely true. Sure, try to prevent getting COVID, but if that involves to harm other people, which it currently does, then you have zero support from me. If people die then at least they should die because of how nature intended us to die, which is from old age and becoming unhealthy. People should not die from being young and hungry which is exactly what the current response to COVID does.
"Feed it right now" is true. "Feed it sustainably" - that is, be able to keep feeding it - is also something we care about. And there are some worrying signs about sustainability - the Ogallala Aquifer, the collapse of ocean fish stocks, and so on.
Does that prove it's unsustainable? No. The way to prove it's unsustainable is to have a massive die-off, which is not a way I'm interested in proving anything.
A catastrophic failure in any food chain can make ANY population have a massive die off.
> that is, be able to keep feeding it - is also something we care about.
This is disingenuous. In general, no one cares about the famine in Syria except starving Syrians. When's the last time you heard that on the news over a Trump tweet?
Enforcing population limits in theory sounds like a great idea - in human practice, it will just be an excuse for genocide. The only ethical way to do it is to bring all of humanity out of poverty - which rich people do not want to pay for.
I don't know where you got the idea that I was talking about famine in Syria. I'm not. I'm talking about world-wide famine. If the way we feed the world isn't sustainable, then there's going to be a global problem eventually.
Nor am I talking about enforcing population limits.
Bringing all of humanity out of poverty isn't going to do it either, if they all want to have an American diet.
I didn't get that idea - I posited that idea. No one is talking about the famine in Syria. If people don't care that people are starving now, they won't care when a few billion more from poor countries are either.
> I'm talking about world-wide famine. If the way we feed the world isn't sustainable, then there's going to be a global problem eventually.
That's not how it works - the world has enough food for current population P + x offspring. Whenever food supply starts to dwindle P+x will go down. Less people will survive at the fringes - the poor will die, much like they do now, hence I brought up Syria, which no one on here talks about, because they don't care.
A worldwide famine would be the result of catastrophic failure. Catastrophic failures you're suggesting will impact any population size regardless of its sustainability. Sustainability is about maintaining resources without depleting them - it's inherently different than catastrophic events destroying most of the system. No amount of sustainable farming matters if, say, a meteor impacts the earth, or global warming renders most land un-farmable. There is no sustainability fix here.
> Bringing all of humanity out of poverty isn't going to do it either, if they all want to have an American diet.
It's the only proven way to reduce birthrate without war and disease.
