this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
1428 points (98.2% liked)
Microblog Memes
8769 readers
2448 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Honestly, I hate to jump on the antinatalism bandwagon but having a child now would almost certainly condemn them to an existence of scarcity and pain.
What makes this doubly difficult is that if we had acted at the first sign of trouble, we almost certainly could have lived comfortable lives with minimal sacrifices and every year we put it off the sacrifices we would have to make in order to maintain our climate get more severe.
We aren't putting it off. Already many countries are deploying renewable energy like it's going out of fashion, and have been for years. China, France, the UK, Spain, and India all have significant parts of their energy coming from renewables and nuclear, or are building more as we speak. Here in England our largest source of power is wind. People are already doing stuff about it, just not fast enough or universally enough. Technology for renewables and energy saving has gotten progressively better over the past several decades. Even fossil fuel technologies like cars and natural gas plants have gotten markedly more efficient meaning they produce less CO2 than they did previously, while also emitting lower levels of other pollutants too. It's even possible now to power planes with biofuels.
Nobody is going fast enough.
The fastest efforts going right now are half assed solutions.
I don't think you understand how urgently fucked we are.
Climate scientists are scientists. They can only tell youbwhat thry know. Science inherently moves slow, moves with certainty. Kind of the best thing about it.
But all these climate models keep getting hit with 'shit we didnt know could happen' and 'feedback effect nobody's ever seen before', even the grim ones.
So however bad the models are, we are more fuckef than that.
The turn radius on this thing is so slow that we may already be past the point of no return. Everything from here on might be a death rattle. Maybe, if you're young, from before you were born. We don't know how bad it is, we have sort of repeatedly proven that we can't know how bad it is, and all we know is how good it isn't.
And babe, its not good enough to be so fucking casual about shit.
Whatever effect you are currently feeling is the effect from our collected fuckedness 30 40 50 years ago. However fucked this summer felt? Thats the damage we had accrued and sent out when your parents were born.
Edit: we need to be at zero cars zero meat zero fossil fuels and decarbonizing as much production as we possibly can by now. We told the timeline where we could switch over gently to fuck off and die 50 years ago. I wasnt even fucking born yet. We told the timeline where we coukd just cut the shit and practice purely technical solutions with little lifestyle change (beyond things that are mostly good for us anyway) to fuck off and die 25 years ago. We let this go untreated, and now that the body is so wracked with cancer it's effecting our range of motion, and the doctors are desperately scrambling to set up a course of radical chemo radiation starvation and cutting to the bone in the desperate hope that there's still room for luck, we have decided that okay, maybe we might feel a little under the weather, and we can finally take the doctor's advice, and treat that upstart henry ford fellow with a baby asprin. But nothing crazy is called for here!
Am i the only one who feels insane when i have to explain this?
This kind of talk isn't really useful and is making the problem worse. Where are you getting all this from? You must have some good sources to make claims like this.
There wasn't a time line 25 years ago where we could use only technological solutions as said technological solutions didn't exist. Those have only been invented since then, many still haven't been invented or are still being worked on now. Take batteries for example, it took us until the 2010s to manufacture enough lithium ion batteries with the right chemistry to even think about using them as grid storage. Said batteries still have limited lifespans and manufacturing them is costly to the environment and requires lithium which has a limited supply. We really need Sodium ion batteries but those are only ramping production now. Starting to switch over 50 years ago would have been even more impossible, not that we understood the problem fully 50 years ago. This is all revising history.
Fyi CO2 levels have been higher in the past than they are now. None of this is actually new, it's just changing far faster than it would naturally. It's the speed that's the issue, not the actual magnitude of the change. It's a case of changing things faster than nature takes to adapt. We are still technically in an ice age after all. Pollutants like microplastics and forever chemicals are the new thing, not greenhouse gasses. No one has any idea what that might lead to in the long term.
You feel insane because your suggesting things should have happened before they are actually possible. You are saying things that are extremely alarmist without giving evidence and without considering context.
Edit: There was one way to decarbonize earlier than 25 years ago or maybe before. It's called Nuclear. I wonder who prevented that? Oh wait it was climate activists. Funny that.
There was some tech stuff, new-deal-with-chinese-characteristics, and specifically a very climate conscious US president was elected, but everyone just let the other guy take office.
No. Dipshit appropriate environmental and residual anti nuclear activists, which were tangled up wuth a bunch of other movements, stopped it. Wouldve been nice though.
I think i said 'no changes (that wouldnt have improved our quality of life anyway)', so things like modal shifts in transportation and moving to dense walkable cities or well cared for and/or utilized rural places
Things like solar and wind power (and yes nuclear, especially back then)
Bitch have you not heard of jimmy fucking carter? Do you not remember the solar panels on the white house? Dude wasn't perfect, but he proposed both renewables and nuclear power, and i assume knew what the hell he was talking about (given his education). It would have taken some time, but if we had started then, i think we'd be in a pretty good place. I dont know much about the situation on the periphery, but i assume the USSR would have matched the americans if only for the sake of appearances.
Okay you dont seem like a serious person; i wish you luck at the fracktory.
I don't use the term whataboutism in my post anywhere. So I don't know who you are quoting.
The not serious person here is you, saying we are all going to die anyway instead of encouraging people to do anything. I had to look this up as I don't know anything about Carter, but it turns out the panels he was installing are for hot water. They don't generate electricity. This makes perfect sense as it took much longer than that to develop photovoltaics and get them ready for mass production. Even now modern photovoltaic panels are fairly inefficient devices.
We already have walk-able cities in much of Europe. It's not a compete solution by itself, we still have cars. You are weirdly fixated on USA history when this is a global problem. It's not all about the USA. Stop pretending it's the only country that exists. India and China are the biggest polluters these days if I remember correctly, you should be focusing on them.
Edit: Carter was also aiming for 20% of energy in the US to be made renewably by 2020. That wouldn't have been anywhere near enough to stop climate change.
Usa was a major turning point. Went worst direction, could have gone best. Not all i brought up.
As opposed to the fairy dust and prayers they used before.
Used to hear a lot of people i knew on that continemt talk about cities getting less walkable, more car.
Renewable. Does not include nuclear. Assuming he wanted some amount of that, given his degree in that. But if we had started, we could have accellerated in the right direction instead of the wrong one.
Okay you clearly can't read.
I can read fine. You can't write. Your messages so far have been full of spelling errors, are hard to understand, and you can't even quote properly. Come on now.
You act like I should know all about this Carter person, when they were in power long before I was born, in a country I don't even live in. It's daft. Most people on this site either wouldn't have been born or would have been small when Carter was talking about this stuff. That happened in the 1970s. If it isn't absolutely clear using renewables for everything in the 1970s wouldn't have been practical. Nuclear would have been great, but it's mainly environmentalists that put a stop to that, as they keep trying to do now. It seems most environmentalists and climate activists even now don't want nuclear, even though it's the obvious choice for certain applications like data centers and AI. The most staunch anti-nuclear people have always been environmentalists. Nuclear also wouldn't have solved any of the problems caused by cars. It doesn't even work without large grid storage or demand management, at least not using the reactor technology available back then. Those are things we are only just figuring out now for goodness sake. It could have at least replaced coal for baseload power, which is much better than nothing.
You can't say in one breath that the planet is already doomed, and in the next say we should make major changes. It's a contradiction. If people believe we are really doomed they aren't even going to try. This should be relatively straight forward to understand. So if you want people to make a change then stop saying we are already dead.
Read what i wrote. Or don't, if you can't.