I have kids. I am fucking livid that the assholes who pretend climate change isn’t happening have decided to sacrifice their kids and mine on the altar of making a quick buck.
You can’t eat money, assholes. And you can’t bring it with you when you die. If the future is nothing but more and more severe weather to the point that civilization collapses under the strain, then I hope you live long enough to see it and are unable to hide from reality anymore.
No… its simply not. Maybe Jimmy John and Mary sue having a dozen offspring in missouri are a slight part of the problem but your average person have one or two is not the problem.
As with everything in this world: Its the corporations. They are the problem. No amount of reuse, reduction, or recycling by any individual would even register on the graph of emissions/carbon footprint when compared to even a tiny company
I do agree that its irresponsible to subject yet another human being to the future we are careening towards
I mean, I get what you are saying, but if for a few generations only every 10th family would have only 1 child, GHG emissions would fall drastically. Having a kid basically more than doubles ‘your’ own carbon footprint.
Is this the only, the necessary, or the preferred way? Ofc not. Is it the biggest impact I can personally have on global warming? It is (voting, protesting, buying local & sustainable helps, but whatever you are doing the kids are doing it too).
It’s sad bcs there are so many ways we could solve this (at least achieve carbon neutrality, tho we need more than that now), but short-term profits of the current elite would suffer a little tiny bit so we can’t do it.
But additionally now we do need to prep to mitigate consequences and damage control (on top of green/ESG investments) … I wonder if all those profits will be used to finance this …
117.7 tonnes of Co2e per kid per parent per year in the USA (58.6 tonnes average when including all the poorer countries).Wynes et al. 2017
A conservative estimate is that we need to emit less than 2.1 tonnes in total per person per year to try to prevent catastrophic Anthropogenic climate change. Girod et al. 2013 (life expectancy/2050).
117.7 > 2.1
We need a fertility rate of about 0.01 for several decades.
Human overpopulation is not only the biggest contributor to push us into a climate-change tipping-points cascade, it’s also the root cause of almost all its other causes. It’s also the root cause of unsustainable habitat loss and pollution. It’s also the root cause of factory farming and industrial fishing, which causes more pain and suffering every year than all other atrocities ever committed combined.
As for corporations, they’re not burning the planet for shits and giggles - they’re psychopaths doing it because billions of people are choosing to buy their goods and services, which they want but don’t actually need.
Don’t worry about climate change, the US is hell bent on starting global thermonuclear war very soon. We can go fast and crispy instead of slowly choking.
It’s just announced plans to get rid of Mutually Assured Destruction and install nukes in Finland. Then they said they don’t care if their latest weapon ATACMS is used to attack civilians in Russia. This has been a red line for a long time, they just pushed it.
We’re closer to nuclear armoggedon now than ever in your lifetime before.
They think they do. No amount of money will protect a person from the collapse of a civilization. Never has, never will. Their plans are very much predicated on the assumption that markets will somehow magically continue to function after the general populace has lost all faith in them
The ultra-rich will still be dependent on their retinues of loyal followers, whose loyalties will of course be tested by the collapse of civilization. Unless their retinues are robots, of course.
These billionaires imagine they’re rich because they’re brilliant, not because they’re the biggest assholes and lucky (and born rich). They overestimate their independence from all the people and other creatures that actually make the planet and human society work. Once they get to their bunkers or their Mars outpost, perhaps reality will gradually get through to them. They can’t escape this using bunkers, rockets and weapons.
I think the reference to collars was more a hypothetical in the article as the author was challenging the bunker dudes how would they ensure the people keeping them safe remained loyal, and that none of them considered anything like “treat them like people before the cataclism”, it didn’t even occur to them at all, instead they proposed a bunch of more controlling measures, which included “disciplinary collars”
You’ve never talked to a single socialist, anarchist, leftist, etc. about civilian firearm ownership before? It’s very commonly thought of as a necessary evil to prevent systemic oppression. Maybe don’t spend so much of your time talking to trumpers and neoconservatives?
To wit: there is no “right people” to want to shoot, and anyone who thinks there is probably has their own tribalism issue to work out. Community defense specifically does not have a target right up until the point someone else is an aggressor, and ends when violence is no longer needed. This is why you never saw “antifa burns down trump supporter’s house” or whatever in the news.
Yea fortunately im not a redneck. I totally understand how that line if thinking can make people uneasy. I think 2A is more useful in an “arm the workers” type of way
Why did you choose to have kids knowing what kind of future they would have? This is the reason I didn’t, and also to reduce my footprint in the world. I mean even 20 years ago, it was obvious nothing was going to change. So I don’t know why somebody would willingly have children these days.
Well the guy acts surprised, like nobody has seen this coming for 50+ years and especially the last 20 years. Put some thought into having children before you do. If more people did, we wouldn’t be as deep in the shit as we are today. And people are allowed to criticise other poeple for having kids when they shouldn’t.
The world has always been a mess. What’s your solution, wait until the world has solved every problem before anyone has kids? Humans would never have even evolved if that’s the plan.
I don’t have a solution. You don’t either. And those that can do anything about this shit, won’t, because it’d cost them some of their precious precious money hoard.
Climate change is basically teetering at the feedback loop point, if it’s not already there. Inflation is out of control. Corporate profits across the board are at an alltime high. Shit’s only going to keep getting worse from here.
We had a good run. Good luck to the next species to dominate the earth. May you avoid religious dogma, find an economic system that respects your natural environment, and a political system that respects the right to live a clean and healthy world.
we did just waste a good few million years of evolution though (let’s say 65 million accounting for the rise of mammals). earth isn’t going to be habitable forever, from memory there’s less than a billion years left before the temp would increase with the expanding sun enough to make liquid water impossible. feels like we kind of shot earth in the foot a bit here
Here’s hoping; but that’s far from a safe assumption. The kicker about the changes we’re making to this planet is that a lot of them are positive feedback loops, so even if 100% of humans just got thanos-snapped out of existence RIGHT NOW, meaning a complete stop on fossil fuel consumption, deforestation, etc; the damage we’ve already caused will continue to get worse on its own with no further input from us.
So how far can those feedback loops go until they’re broken naturally? They might stabilize; they might just carry on until this planet is molten.
There will for sure be life after the last human dies, but given a few thousand more years, even the most resilient of critters could still be fucked because of us.
it seems pretty likely that microprocessors will survive us, and give a BIG jump start to any species that follows. literacy seems to be a longer shot, but still a possible stepping stone for some other organism to take over our work. my money is on fungi to figure out microprocessors. if not them, then plants, especially “weeds”. finally, ocean mammals might be able to work some of the junk we’ve made and cargo-cult themselves into the information age.
i really am hopeful for life on earth to survive the death of Sol.
they might just carry on until this planet is molten
The odds of true runaway warming are very low, the planet has both been much hotter and had much higher CO2 levels in the past. The Holocene is actually a cool period, geologically.
We’re just going to make it too hot to grow enough crops to feed the world.
The lake Toba Eruption caused a 4°C drop in global temperatures, covered asia in inches to feet of ash, and may have taken the climate 1000s of years to recover.
Even more extreme, the lava floods that created the Siberian Traps 250 million years ago raised ocean temps to 40°C, killed off 90% of all life, and might have taken millions of years to recover.
We are tiny. The climate and the Earth are formidable. Sure, we might have the capacity to destroy all multicellular life on earth, but she’s recovered from even worse.
We shouldn’t ever give up, but I think the earth is capable of handling even our worst fuck-ups.
There were a couple of hundred thousand years of humans managing not to fuck up the entire planet, before the two centuries of doing so for the sake of money.
There were periods in which we were nicer to the planet, but we’ve always been pretty horrible to each other. Even at the stage of civilization we’re at now - with all the advancements and comforts etc - we’re still going to war with each other just for the hell of it; murdering each other over shit like skin color or what we find sexually attractive; not only profiteering off the suffering of others, but actively manufacturing suffering to profiteer off.
we probably taste like shit.. they sit around the campfire and remember the good old days of fresh, free range Dino blood as far as the proboscis could poke.. not this Walmart meat they get now..
Realistically, extinction would be sweet relief compared to what is actually in store for humans with climate change. More likely that we hang around in smaller communities and death / suffering is even more widespread.
I mean realistically it’s all going to hell sooner or later. You’ll start with millions of climate refugees, closed borders, violence. Then climate wars (a wall with machine guns isn’t going to stop people who have no other way to survive). And if a country with nukes (like India) finds itself uninhabitable then things are really going south. Next up you have a possible nuclear war and the end of humanity as we know it.
Sure, a small amount of humans might survive, but civilization will go down in chaos. Even areas that are inhabitable and have plenty of water will break down, because the local infrastructure can’t support hundreds of thousands of refugees forcing their way in.
The whole Syria thing already caused us lots of issues in Europe. Arguably the civil war was caused in part by climate change exacerbating a drought. The surge in refugees helped the far right and populists across Europe and was a factor in brexit.
I can only imagine what'll happen if it gets worse. Children of Men is likely to be eerily prophetic.
I’ve seen estimates that say a billion dead by 2100 is the most optimistic possible outcome. Even the notoriously cautious IPCC is making the most unimaginably dire predictions:
In its report focusing on the impacts of global warming on people and the planet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that every inhabited continent is already experiencing multiple climate impacts, from droughts and flooding to biodiversity loss and falling food production. Between 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in areas “highly vulnerable to climate change,” the authors warn, with “additional severe risks” should the Earth warm beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). (From an article in Forbes magazine.)
They’re separate problems, linked mostly in terms of humans being a cause of both. With CFCs/HCFCs now phased out, the ozone layer is slowly repairing itself and should be back to pre-1980 levels in the next 30-40 years or so. This will be good for helping to prevent skin cancer, and it will marginally affect the climate (e.g. lower ozone is associated with lower humidity), but it’s not going to do much to mitigate global warming.
there is no hightech stuff. The idea that some miracolous savior technology will come around is peddled to prevent the transformation away from fossil fuels and our current economy of working too much to consume too much and stay in the hamster-wheel.
We already have the technologies and the sooner we scale them up the better. But we also need social and economic reforms, where we stop measureing society in terms of GDP and stop providing the means for uber rich individuals to get even more rich. We cannot afford the billionaires any longer and that is why they fight so much to ruin mankind as a whole, instead of providing a good lufe to everybody.
Again, I’m not going to read that. It will just make me sad and angry a d nothing will change.
Politicians don’t give a shit, even of they’d understand what is going on, they’re mostly too dumb…
Things are going to get a LOT worse and nobody seems to understand that there is no quick fix here. “Yeah but CO2 scrubbers can…” no they cannot. Building those generates tonnes of CO2, then run ing them effectively generates CO2 as well. Think about it. Even if you put them on a solar grid (which too will initially cost CO2, not hugely important but just to keep in mind), the electricity that that grid generates to pull 100 tonnes of CO2 out of the air will NOT be available to other systems which will generate 150 tonnes of CO2 for their electricity.
Untill ALL electricity is solar, wind or nuclear, it literally is just throwing away energy. It’s actually more efficient to just connect those solar cells for your CO2 scrubbers to the electrical grid. You won’t pull 100 out, but now at least somewhere else won’t put in 150 into the system.
And even if they work. Do you have any idea how much CO2 we currently generate, and worse, how much we have generated that is in the atmosphere that we need to pull out for things to get better?
The current state of CO2 scrubbers is close to carrying water out of the ocean with buckets.
You wanna pull the extra CO2 out of the air? We’ve been adding extra on an industrial scale for near 2 centuries. RHAT amount of CO2 is what we need to pull out to get back to what it should be.
You always have losses with conversions, but taking that the earth has beeb pulling more CO2 you can more or less say that getting all the extra CO2 out of the atmosphere will take at least the same amount of energy that we’ve been generating with burning fossil fuels for the past 2 centuries. Think about it, were talking spending energy to pull air through a system, spending energy to filter the CO2, spending energy to store it, spending the same amount of energy we got from bur ing fuels to split the c from the O2 (same process in reverse), then spend energy to process and store all that carbon. Mayke Plastics out of it, maybe? Storing co2 is a problem as the amounts are astronomical. Where do youbstire cubic kilometers of CO2 , every year? If it escapes your back to square one.
Yes, that is a shit load of energy that we can’t produce all at once. For the next decades we’ll have to dedicate 25-50% of our energy output to cleanit the atmosphere, there is no way around that, there are no free lunches here.
Electrical cars are NOT the solution. For a small part, maybe, but mostly not. Electrical cars require roughly the same amiunt of energy as a gas car, that still needs to be generated. We need to use less energy. Wasting tonnes on energy on transporting 2 tonnes just to move a 70kgs person for a few kms is just insane. Use bikes. Walk. Use public transportation.
You wanna solve the climate change crisis?
make sure all central electrical power generation is solar /wind /water /nuclear within 10 years. Until we are at that point, the rest doesn’t even matter.
1a) in parallel, start redesigning all our cities to become walkable. This doesn’t mean the conspiracy bullshit that American criminally lying politicians are saying, this means that stored and stuff we want is close by. Cities will be primarily for people, not cars. You can walk to stores because they’re close by. You can use bicycles to go everywhere we want. Public transportation can take care of the rest and with that we can get rid of 90+% of cars. Not because it’s forbidden, hit because we’ll designed cities don’t NEED cars.
There are loads of things that can’t go electrical, like airplanes. Reminds me: BUILD TRAINS. FFS America get your shit together and start building good railroads. Then you can get rid of half your airplane flights. Most flights are short enough that a high speed train is faster than flying anyway. The longer flights s yous still need cannot go electrical. You’ll need to build and run scrubbers spending the same amount of energy as those airplanes (and other systems that can’t go electrical) just to make sure their CO2 doesn’t add to the problem.
increase our energy capacity by a factor of two. We need to generate twice the amount of energy (all green) so that 50% can go to scrubbing our atmosphere for the next, say, century.
think about how to store all the captured CO2 or convert it to plastics or something.(double the energy required)
get ready to pay 2-3 times more for our energy. We’ve been the party generation who have enjoyed cheap energy from burning crap. The next 3-4 generations at least will be paying the bill, that is if they get to live to do so.
THIS IS IMPORTANT, I CANNOT CLARIFY THIS ENOUGH:
None of us will see this problem solved. Even if we actually seriously start working on fixing this shit today, we will be long dead and gone before this is done. THERE IS NO QUICK FIX. It took centuries to get here, it will take at least a century to get back where we started
Anyone claiming that this is easy to solve, sorry, is lying.
This is the biggest threat mankind has faced and people somehow just don’t give a shit and it is fucking depressing
Everything you said tracks except 5. Renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuels, and that’s with the subsidies for fossil fuels.
From a purely economic perspective fossil fuels don’t make sense anymore, they’re being kept around because fossil fuel companies are using immense amounts of money to fight against renewables.
People seem to forget renewable energy is essentially free. Sure there’s maintenance and upfront cost but that’s true for all energy generation. Fossil fuels simply can’t compete and it’s only going to get worse as we get better at collecting renewable energy.
We’re going to be paying 2-3 times more because we need to create enormous amounts of extra energy to clean the atmosphere.
That, and renewable energy isn’t free either. Solar panels require regular replacement as they (still) degrade quite a bit (too much) over time. If I’m not mistaken, they still require replacement every 10 or so years.
Windmills require regular maintenance. The power grid requires maintenance.
Wind and solar requires enormous batteries that degree and require regukar replacements.
Renewables are only so so renewable, don’t expect to pay anything less for the same amount of energy. Then now we will have to generate these enormous amounts of extra energy to take the CO2 out, who is going to pay for that? We all are.
So yeah, do expect to pay 2-3 times more for energy when this all starts, ideally tomorrow but likely 20 years from now as we’re still not done partying.
I’m not acting like anything. I am fully aware of the requirements of fossil fuels. I’m mentioning all the requirements for “renewables” because there people typically act as if there are zero costs (and pollution and maintenance) related with it.
I’m not pro fossil fuels, not at all. Don’t get me wrong. I’m simply saying that were Ina SERIOUSLY fucked situation that simply won’t be solved within our generation, if ever at all. We’re at a cliff and a small group just keeps partying while shuffling closer and the rest of the world gleefully shuffles right after them. A few renewables are not going to fix this
Price doesn’t matter if it’s cloudy like most winters with barely any sun and the wind is not blowing. Solar also won’t work at night and energy storage is crap, batteries are very much not renewable. Of course there is reversible hydro plants but these can’t be used everywhere and are a disaster for local ecosystems.
Everyone is acting like renewables will fix everything… They won’t. The only thing that can replace fossil fuels right now is nuclear, which is also not renewable, but at least we have plenty of fuel for it.
There are many solutions to storage, not many being used. If someone is talking about storage, in 90% of cases they mean batteries and until that changes the problem isn’t solved.
As for solar during winter, it might work, barely, but at much lower output just because you have a lot less sunlight during a day. So you have to cover 16-17 hours of no light with just 7-8 hours of sun. This varies wildly depending on location of course.
if we were to replace current fossil plants with nuclear, the fuel runs out in 70-100. years and will get much more expensive. Think about paying ten times your electricity bill in 20 years.
It is possible to run a 100% renewable grid, using technology like hydrogen or other chemical storage system.
Solar wont have the output in winter. Nuclear plants will have to shut down in summer, because the water supply will get unstable. France nuclear heavy energy production could collapse within the next two decades if the current trend of lower river water continues. And there is no reason to believe otherwise.
But the biggest issue is that the grid is thought the wrong way around. Currently the supply is adjusted to the demand. But for many applications the demand can be adjusted to the supply. On the household level that means your fridge and washing machine to run, when there is a lot of energy available. On the industrial level that means to automate productions and adjust their intensity to available energy.
Not all nuclear plants are the same. Some can use nuclear waste as fuel. Others are small and modular which allows them be turned on and off as needed and also be deployed easier and cheaper. We need solutions sooner, rather than later. Nuclear tech is here now, storage for renewables still needs more time to refine and streamline.
Modular reactors have been equiped to submarines for decades, they passed the concept stage long ago.
There are many kinds of nuclear reactors, but not much was invested into them to bring the cost down.
I am not saying that nuclear is perfect. Unless we figure out fusion it won’t be a long term solution. It’s just what we need right now to get rid of fossil fuels while we figure out the large scale renewable grids with good storage tech.
Hydrogen is a good option, if only EV manufacturers focused more on that… Charging the EV would be a matter of minutes not hours and there wouldn’t be issues with colder climates like the current batteries have.
Ha I’ve never seen the full comic before - only the first 2 panels. And I even own a “this is fine” plushie that I bought from the artist’s Kickstarter some years back
Add comment