Id like lemmings take on how they would actually reduce emissions on a level that actually makes a difference (assuming we can still stop it, which is likely false by now, but let’s ignore that)
I dont think its as simple as “tax billionaires out of existence and ban jets, airplanes, and cars” because thats not realistic.
Bonus points if you can think of any solutions that dont disrupt the 99%'s way of life.
I know yall will have fun with this!
Aren’t we at the point of no return?
Passed it a while ago. That doesn’t mean we can’t slow down.
Humanity will evolve to deal with the changes, maybe. Maybe not.
Honestly, if capitalism stopped tomorrow, and we all did community planting. Were restricted on car usage, and did carbon capture techniques that were proven to work… All en mass, globally, I suspect we could change things.
The problem is Capitalism and freemarket “progress”. The endless carbon fuelled march to no where (in the name of money). A lot could be done without that humming away like nothing is wrong, but politicians want to protect Free Market Capitalism and aren’t laying down reasonable restrictions.
There are no carbon capture and storage technologies proven to work at a meaningful scale.
Geoengineering is probably the only way to counteract things now.
But that involves fucking around with the bottom of our food chain in the oceans so there’s obviously a good deal of reluctance to start down that path.
It’s not an on/off switch. Everything we can do will lessen the impact even if it can’t be stopped.
But as others mention, real impact comes from governments and international cooperation, not individual actions. Hence why voting is so important.
There’s always damage control that can be done
This is extremely important: we are not at the point of no return.
Climate change can be stopped, even now. It will take lots of work, but it’s possible.
ClimateAdam, who has a PhD in climate science from Oxford, made a video about this. It’s 5 years old, but he’s still making videos with similar points today. It’s my understanding this is still the predominant view amongst climate scientists. The main reason I think this is that there aren’t many calling for geoengineering, which if we were at the point of no return would be something we’d have to explore.
The reason this is so important is because as climate change denial becomes more and more infeasible, it will get replaced primarily with climate change defeatism. The sooner we start pushing back on this, the better.
No reasonable scientist is going to call for geoengineering unless they could be sure they are not making it worse. We are certainly in a point of no return in that we will not get back to 0 but until we are actually falling apart we won’t know for sure if we can’t survive at +3 or +5.
“Point of no return” is a simplistic concept. It depends on the your threshold for how bad it gets. Most climate scientists would agree that we’re just at or about to pass the 1.5°C target. But they would also agree that ever extra fraction of a degree matters. It’s not a question of “when are we fucked?” Its a question of “how quickly can we act to minimise severity of change?”
Source: am climate scientist, have been to a major climate conference in the last few months, and talk to other climate scientists regularly.
I am not a climate scientist and have not been to conferences but im a reasonably intelligent human who has five decades of experience on this planet and I can see we are already fucked in that things have changed in how the planet works. I see the storms (not just the news making ones but how unoften light rain has become around me and how often general storms have become), I see the flooding, I see the change in the seasons, etc. To me its now when are we fucked because again we already see that we are. To me its how roughly we want the fucking to be ultimately and can we bring it back down to a more tender and loving level.
More or less, yeah