Can we similar mass-measures to mitigate climate change as we've taken w Covid?

Narz

Narz

keeping it real
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The public has shown that they're largely wiling to tolerate staying locked indoors for months upon months, having their businesses shut down, having their parents die alone w no visitors & in general dealing with extreme boredom & isolation. Corona was/is a problem directly effecting a handful per football stadium whereas climate change is gonna effect pretty much everyone & horrificly effect hundreds of millions and yet virtually nothing is being done about it (on the roads I see more SUV's, minivans & pickups than ever despite rising gas prices).

I guess it's human nature to have difficulty focusing on long-term more abstract problems. The consensus seems to be it's already too late to stop the dozens of simultaneous environmental crashes that are happening but we can mitigate suffering. Coronatimes has shown us a majority of people are willing to take a major hit to quality of life to deal w a crisis (some of the measures such as minimal driving & air travel even had some temporary environmental benefit). Why can't we collectively create climate change measures (a problem many, many, many orders of magnitude more harmful)?
 
My answer as to why this hasn't been done is that most mass changes that would mitigate (not solve) the climate crisis will strengthen communities and local businesses while taking power away from huge multinationals whereas the majority of the corona measures did just the opposite (making people even more dependent on a handful of businesses).
 
Narz said:
I guess it's human nature to have difficulty focusing on long-term more abstract problems.
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My optimistic/practical side says this is the problem.
Narz said:
My answer as to why this hasn't been done is that most mass changes that would mitigate (not solve) the climate crisis will strengthen communities and local businesses while taking power away from huge multinationals whereas the majority of the corona measures did just the opposite (making people even more dependent on a handful of businesses).
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My cynical/political conspiracy side says this is the reason.

My answer to the question in the title is yes, we could if we wanted to. However I suspect we will not. We do not really know how much we can release before the getting to the levels that cause positive feedback and threaten the existence of complex society. It could be that we have 50 years even at current levels, in which case generational change may allow for the sort of lifestyle changes that will be required to become possible. It could be that we are so close to the tipping point that nothing short of radical reductions in energy use and consumption will stop us spiralling into a future in which the world's human carrying capacity is a fraction of today's population. In that case we are lost.
 
I don't see why there should be covid-like restrictions to protect the world. Covid restrictions are there to protect those who are very old and/or near death, and they won't be around when climate change makes life unsustainable.

Reply without sarcastic vein: One should not ask for professional protectors, since any business needs to maintain demand.
 
Kyriakos said:
I don't see why there should be covid-like restrictions to protect the world. Covid restrictions are there to protect those who are very old and/or near death, and they won't be around when climate change makes life unsustainable.

Reply without sarcastic vein: One should not ask for professional protectors, since any business needs to maintain demand.
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This.

We are far past the point where mandates make sense. The pandemic is not over, but the need for special precautions has passed.

As to climate change, it is unclear if any human action will significantly reduce global warming. Nor is any major action needed.
 
No. Atmospheric temperatures will continue to increase for many decades, and ocean temperatures will
continue to rise for centuries.

We have also known about the problems of plastics for decades and nothing significant has been done.
Banning plastic straws and cutlery is almost a sick joke. About 8 million tonnes of plastic per year
ends up in the oceans. Without monumental changes, the amount of plastic in oceans will double in
about 10 years and will exceed the total mass of fish. None of the proposed clean-up solutions is of
sufficient scale to have a significant impact.

Humanity will just have to adapt to eating and breathing plastic.
Get it while it's hot!
 
Here's just a hint of the scale of changes the US should address. But won't.
milclimate.jpeg
 
onejayhawk said:
This.

We are far past the point where mandates make sense. The pandemic is not over, but the need for special precautions has passed.

As to climate change, it is unclear if any human action will significantly reduce global warming. Nor is any major action needed.
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Why do I get the feeling you've done some extremely stupid calculation, similar to the Cold War "If two Americans and one Russian survive a nuclear exchange, we win!", and decided you like the results?
 
The lockdown measures taken against COVID were extremely damaging, and we're not done experiencing that damage by any stretch. This is not the way to sell useful change for long-term climate management.
 
TheMeInTeam said:
The lockdown measures taken against COVID were extremely damaging, and we're not done experiencing that damage by any stretch. This is not the way to sell useful change for long-term climate management.
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I hesitate to post it, but the grundiad has a thing about the cost of covid that makes for depressing reading.
 
Narz said:
The public has shown that they're largely wiling to tolerate staying locked indoors for months upon months
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Really? Which part of the world are you talking about here, South Korea? In North America we have roving gangs of antivaxx and antimask morons who live in an alternate reality where expert advice doesn't matter but facebook posts do.

Even here in Canada these people exist in a decently large number. Our vaccination rate is fairly high, but there's a surprisingly large number of people who refuse to get vaccinated. These problems seem a lot higher in certain American states.

So uhmm.. no, western culture is nowhere near a place where we're willing to do what's needed for the greater good. I'm curious what makes you think that we are
 
warpus said:
So uhmm.. no, western culture is nowhere near a place where we're willing to do what's needed for the greater good. I'm curious what makes you think that we are
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In hospitals and on airplanes and at other large events I've been to I never heard any fuss. Only online. Have you seen lots of fuss irl?
 
Samson said:
I hesitate to post it, but the grundiad has a thing about the cost of covid that makes for depressing reading.
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I keep trying to explain to people that the cost of letting it rip is much higher than the cost of a coherent effort to wipe it out.

But the problem is all the propaganda saying the opposite. And the reason we're flooded with that propaganda is obvious. The covid crisis has not gone to waste. The wealthy oligarchs around the world used government responses, which they control, to get even wealthier during this crisis. They quickly came to like the pandemic crisis, just as they like high debt.

Climate change wont be mitigated under the current economic and political regimes.
 
Narz said:
In hospitals and on airplanes and at other large events I've been to I never heard any fuss. Only online. Have you seen lots of fuss irl?
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I check the news occasionally and see a lot of the nonsense that's going down in various American states and some Canadian provinces, yeah.. You can also directly check the vaccination numbers if you want, some states really stick out, at least last I looked..
 
Zelig said:
Climate change action is critically important, but let's not get carried away with hyperbole here. Neither covid-19 nor climate change are existential threats.

Is climate change an “existential threat” — or just a catastrophic one?
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Most models warn that as a result of climate change, the incredibly rapid progress humanity has been making in life expectancies and in ending extreme poverty will stall; we could even lose decades of the progress we’ve made. If extreme poverty gets as bad as it was in 1980 due to climate change, that will be an immeasurable humanitarian failure, and hundreds of millions of people will die. But the 1980s definitely did have human civilization, and the future in this version would too.
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This is a stupid paragraph after which I stopped reading.

There's been a ton of population growth, resource depletion and environmental degradation since then.

To make an analogy if you can't pay your rent and support 8 dependents how are you gonna pay your rent and support 13 when you have fewer resources.

We don't know what will happen but the assumption that global civilization can continue without growth is one based more on emotions than anything imo
 
Zelig said:
Climate change action is critically important, but let's not get carried away with hyperbole here. Neither covid-19 nor climate change are existential threats.

Is climate change an “existential threat” — or just a catastrophic one?
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But there’s a standard meaning of that phrase: that it’s going to wipe out humanity
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Existential can be used like that, but it can mean other things, eg. Iran is considered an existential threat by Israel not because they may wipe out humanity but they may wipe out that particular polity. Climate change could most certainly precipitate WW3, could cause a breakdown of global trade, could in the more general sense cause "The Collapse of Complex Societies". That is threatening the existence of the world as we know it, even if the human race may not go extinct.
 
onejayhawk said:
As to climate change, it is unclear if any human action will significantly reduce global warming. Nor is any major action needed.
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Are you the 1980's Oil Industry in disguise?
 
Zelig said:
Climate change action is critically important, but let's not get carried away with hyperbole here. Neither covid-19 nor climate change are existential threats.

Is climate change an “existential threat” — or just a catastrophic one?
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This seems to make an entire article out of a relatively semantic quibble over the specifics of "existential". We should invite the author here, to CFC OT :D

Like Samson has said, "existential" has a range of meanings, the fact that the article specifically chose one to try and nitpick the claim made is missing the forest for the trees.
 
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