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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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Quite often I feel like the climate transformation simply cannot be achieved - at least if we want it to be sustainable (socially) and want to keep the environmental base upon which human society is built - by profit driven or market economies in general. A mode of rational, democratized planning with public ownership of the economy (ideally decentralized into regions/administrative districts to be able to respond and adapt to local conditions) seems to be the only solution.
Best I can do is carbon credits and greenwashing.
Society as a whole needs to agree to take action and, unfortunately, human nature is such that people will only take action AFTER shit materializes and all members of society are affected. Right now the climate issue is such that the rich can simply pay more to mitigate direct individual impact, so they don't care. Also, USA and China each contribute to almost 45% of total emissions, action should be focused to bring their emissions down first. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-energy-data-explorer
That's why (imo) it is imperative to make a sustainable future a goal of class war. Those contradictions already exist and can be leveraged. Once ppl are polarized further agitation on less "felt" issues can take place more effectively
I mean it's roundabout 50 years that we let market forces solve this problem. How many years until we see that it actually works? Do we have this years left? What happens if it, mammon forbid, it actually can't solve climate change.
I'm not going to claim this is a positive take that will make you feel less hopeless, but the "climate transformation" is guaranteed to succeed. We will be hitting "peak carbon" and it will decline from there. The only choice we get is whether that transition is by choice in the next decade or two (the easy way) or if we are compelled to by cataclysmic collapse of the world systems we depend on to maintain our modern society (the hard way).
The transition is guaranteed, we just get to decide if we wanna do it the easy way and maintain a reasonable quality of life for billions of people, or the hard way and watch as millions of people die and put planet's ability to support humans is substantial cut down.
i like the way you put it, yet, in my ugly opinion, it won't be the easy way, since, for the last 40 years, there has been a lot of talk but no significant decrease. Worse : we continually increased our carbon emissions. So, it will be the hard way ... until, maybe, 10% of humanity survives ... maybe less.