I don’t think the ‘we’re fucked’ point of view is particularly helpful, even if it’s likely. It seems to give permission to not try and make anything better. We still have a very large part to play in just how fucked we are!
Still I do think mainstream voices do need to start being honest with people in just how difficult climate change is going to make every day life for most people, extreme hardships will be felt within our lifetimes. Both quality and longevity of life will fall sharply for the majority of the worlds population.
hahaha. no we don’t. there’s a handful of people at the wheel of this big ship and they are controlled by the almighty yen/riyal/ruble/dollar. Everything that is done in this world, revolves around the economics of change.
if that were not the case, we would have seen diesel adopted in north america 20+ years ago.
This week Farmer’s pulled out of Florida leaving 100,000 homeowners without insurance. The entire market here is in freefall. Homeowners are finding themselves either having to find payments for massively increased premiums they never planned on having to be able to pay, or getting pushed into the State run insurer of last resort. That is already expensive and doesn’t cover you very well, meaning we are hurtling into a situation where one bad storm in the wrong part of the state will leave either the state run insurer bankrupt or enough the population unable to rehome themselves because of the lack coverage they do get. Either way, a mass migration event, of likely poor down on their luck Americans, is a very real possibility in the not too distance future.
Do you vote @Semmy? If you do then I guess you understand that even though your single vote doesn’t change anything, combined with other people’s it makes a big difference. The same goes for everything we spend our money on, we get to decide who we make rich and which businesses we fund.
It goes beyond that. People don’t want to hear things they don’t like.
There’s still a small chance that we can still turn things around, but that means that everyone has to make radical lifestyle changes. And the vast majority of people won’t.
We’re not where we are because of individual choice though. It’s because of industrial practice and societal design. That’s the level at which change has to happen so that there are downstream effects that result in our range of individual choices being more compatible with a healthy planet.
the cynic in the back of my head, tells me that’s not how the system works.
politicians no longer have to keep their promises, they make legislation to enable their lobbyists and political contributors to get rich. very rare that politicans actually serve the common people anymore.
that model may work in an urban environment, but not in a rural one.
I was happy to live without a car when I was traveling. walking to a train station and traveling 30min by Sydney Transport system on my day job and bus to my night job. But that was when I was living in the city center. it doesn’t work all that well once you move to the suburbs.
Hardly simple though is it.
If all car users decided that from tomorrow morning they’d take public transport, the country would immediately grind to a halt.
I do get your logic though, but that change would take years to become effective.
What public transport? I live in a major metropolitan area and my old office was in the vacinity of one of the largest university campuses in the country. For me it was only a 15 min drive, but if I wanted to take the bus it would take me nearly 2 hours each way. If I lived close enough to walk the lack of pedestrian infrastructure in that part of town would make it not viable either. This is why you cant just demand that people make better choices, because the choices most are making are downstram of the social and industrial policy decisions that are really at the heart of the issue.
That’s the point. We spend the whole time complaining about big businesses or r politicians not doing enough and say that they should do more. Indeed they should but what we can control is our own actions. In Singapore I have told my circle of friends, stop talking big on social media, are you willing to cut one plastic bag per week? If all 5 million of us do that, that will stop 250mil bags going to waste per year. That’s the power of individuals doing one small thing collectively.
I still see people buy plastic bags - while I was in the uk and also where I am now. I know they are of low cost and reusable but if u know u have to pick something up - be prepared, get less or do without.
I think the choice you faced was living in Florida. Complaining about the lack of public transport is akin to complaining about the hot weather. Florida as a society is premised on an enormous individual consumption of energy, with very little in the way of possible alternatives.
This latest European heatwave may have broken the all-time recorded high for Europe (currently Sicily, 48.8 Call the way back in 2021). No direct measurements, but satellite imaging of Extremadura identified a couple of hot spots above 49 C.
It is a reality of living in Florida, but how many place in the US are meaningfully better? Even the NE where public transport is generally accepted to work, I’ve stayed with friends in the Hudson valley when working in the city and used the train to get in and out, but that that still required a 30min drive each way to get to the train station. There are only a small number of cities in the entire country where using public transportation for the majority of your personal journeys is viable, and even that requires you to limit where you choose to live in those cities.
Demanding people use solutions that industrial policy and community design does not facilitate is just sanctimonious nonsense. I have chosen to live in what I would consider a “15 minute city”. The combination of that and negotiating a work from home arrangement means I have a 9 year old car with only 30,000 miles on it. My ability to live this way is part of the reason I chose to stick around here after grad school. But again, this is only possible in a very small pocket of the city, and would be blown up the moment work required me to go back into an office. And even now if there was anywhere I wanted to go outside of my 15 minute bubble, it would absolutely require a car for at least a portion of the journey
