AlbigensianGhoul

The only way that you could hope to gain traction in your stated mission to abolish capitalism is by convincing others that whatever comes next will stand the test of time, and so I am legitimately curious. I don’t think we can afford buying into pretty but empty promises.

First staunch flow, then treat infection, then do a course on first aid. If you do it the other way around you just die, though you at least get to be smug about it.

I really don’t understand what’s causing your vivid reaction here and you said nothing to help me understand it. But okay.

Vivid is a strange synonym for "sarcastic." If you actually think anything can be done in an organised social society while ignoring opinions by looking only at "science," I'm pretty sure you have no idea how anything, be it societal actions, be it actual research, gets done in practice. Have you ever heard the phrase "expert's opinion," or do you think data is some kind of holy word from god that speaks in tongues by itself?

You missed the forest for the tree, didn’t you? At the very least you deflected my question. In the present world order, how do those pertain to capitalism, and in the new world order that you propose, how are they addressed?

Nope. You pretend don't want to deal with social questions that are impossible to measure, yet most of your questions you want answers for are exactly those. Which follows with:

I know this is sarcasm and I have no idea where you are going with your dead people’s law, but at least in the case of the social questions above, science, and the IPCC in particular could provide some partial answers (e.g. how long/how big the sacrifice, how to adjust to many aspects of every-day’s life), which will absolutely help weather the incoming storm. I really don’t see the need to denigrate.

Showing that you have no idea how social sciences work. You yourself listed dead people's laws, which is why I pointed it out as absurd to measure scientifically. It's on you to actually provide some data-only opinion-less analysis that measures the impact of social concepts such as these, but spoilers, you won't find anything of value. They are unmeasurable and so are based on our human understanding which comes from studying and understanding many different perspectives and interpretations. There is no single "correct factual way" in social studies for the vast majority of cases, which is why I mocked your naïveté there. Good luck "factually" finding answers to your questions of interest in your future job at the IPCC.

Who exactly are my bourgeois overlords? And how are they compelling me to over-consume exactly?

Leave your computer device, pick your car, go to the supermarket, but some plastic with food in it, go back to your apartment, pay your rent, buy new electronic devices, maybe contract Hello Fresh because you don't have time to shop groceries or watch yet another multimillion Marvel production from your ever-increasing backlog. Then come back and tell me which of those things are absolutely necessary for you. Specially considering the human and ecological cost to all of those things that you probably ignore daily.

Perhaps it’s not obvious but you and I must be very close on the political spectrum, and I could be your best ally when it comes to proposing a more sustainable lifestyle for the future.

Best ally seems incredibly unlikely, what do you even do to help? Vote?

I live in a mostly socialist highly-educated country where our political landscape is diverse and organized in coalitions who must compromise.

I'd like you to actually define socialism because we have a bunch of libs thinking the NHS is socialism running around. Also not sure what "highly-educated" has to do with anything. Weird flex.

Capitalism isn’t something that I see practically affect my life

lol

I don’t think you did. All I (mis)read is that abolishing capitalism to be a condition for addressing climate change, and I’ve been begging to know more about how it will play out in practice.

Did on the other one. Either way if you want me to get a USA government body to analyse the carbon benefit of toppling the USA, you're gonna have to help me crowdfund it. I and others have shown here how capitalism is preventing us from democratically fighting climate change. Unless you know of some way to bypass those hurdles within capitalism (please don't say "vote harder"), it naturally follows that abolishing capitalism is at least the only alternative we know.

I can only offer my biased and limited opinion, sorry. Proceeds to blame the victim.

Have a read from scientific material. This might help you stop blaming civilians with no power.

So I take away that you are a science denialist. If so, I don’t see the point of continuing further, because this could be all fake news as well. And if not, then I’ll ask what you gain from removing the scientific step from the decision process. And I would re-iterate my offer to provide evidence that the IPCC is biased as you claim.

For that you'd need to have linked literally any research for me to deny it. You have only named the IPCC randomly without providing any specific article, and I have not denied the truth of the only one you actually provided (the ancient China one). If you think science is only looking at pretty graphs in OWID and pretending that's the whole picture, you might be a bit out of your league here, and that is why you're so set on your positions while being so vague and abstract about the issue at hand. I say this as an actual researcher, though not of physics or meteorology.

Every research institution has a bias, research is made by humans and they have limited resources to allocate to every avenue of research. Even simple stuff like choosing one metric over another is a source of bias that needs to always be taken into account in any serious research. I don't think it's that important to prove that "the IPCC is biased" knowing that, and again you have not even provided a direct source from the IPCC for that to be relevant. Research has to take account of a multitude of sources and be very aware of what is and is not actually being studied, as well as paying attention to whether experiments are shown to be reproducible. You might notice that the IPCC provides recommendations as well as data, and since the data collection methods, the analysis already always contain some biases, the recommendations themselves will have even more as they are based on (very informed) opinion. Being biased isn't a bad thing, it is natural, but failing to account for it is the problem. Not sure why liberals and laypeople keep getting this wrong.

But I guess I'll humour you. 1, 2, 3, 4. Those are very well known cases of meddling.

Edit: btw, if you don't want to split posts (please don't because they're annoying for me to reply to), then don't quote yourself from two replies ago. I can just go check it, as I repeatedly do, and you're just wasting space.

I challenge that very much: how can you hope to solve a problem that you chose deliberately to look at from a narrow angle and not in its entirety?

by not wasting time talking about things that are unrelated. If you're bleeding you first stop the flow, not try to find how to create steel skin. By focusing so much on abstract concepts and your liberal view of history, you're avoiding talking about this specific issue. Funnily enough though you still insist in pretending you're interested in it at all.

Where is this evidence again?

here. And here. Also all the other ones. "what evidence???".

Exponentially more people live, consume resources (food, shelter, heating, goods), and reproduce.

Look at this ~~photo~~ fucking graph. Now this one. One is up by like 6 times while the other one is almost a 100, so they're not proportional. "where's evidence?"

Are bacteria consuming nutrients till they cause their own extinction forming a capitalist structure, too?

Bacteria, famous for having governments, research institutions and social organisations. They also have opinions on the concept of private property and knowledge of their limited resources.

unless you consider that every member of the current elite defends capitalist ideals, which is fairly easy to disprove by just looking at the religious elite or nobility around the world.

Wait you don't? Then disprove it, please, since it's so easy.

First, I will laugh at the association of “China” with “anti-imperialist country”.

When was the last China-backed regime change? Then compare it with the last talks of doing a regime change in China itself. And then look into all the partnerships that China has through the BRICS and show how they were actually imperialist all along. Take your time.

Finally some data besides wikipedia I guess

First link with USA added, second link is broken but I fixed it and also doesn't say that they've "installed more coal than renewable" and in fact contradicts the notion of them developing thermal more than renewable.

The country generated 56.2% of its electricity using fossil fuels last year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, down from 63% in 2021. China's "ultralow emission, coal-fired capacity" reached 1,050 GWs, and its renewable energy capacity amounted to 1,200 GW -- nearly doubling capacity from five years earlier.

Third one I have no idea how you got "median" of the mix out of it or what you mean by that. It's even per capita. Change from relative to absolute and click the "play button and you'll see how quickly China has caught up on green energy production within just the last 20 years while the others stagnated. Also note how much energy Europe and the USA consume per capita compared to the world median.

Fourth one at least is interesting, but I think the tragedy here is how a rapidly developing country under a trade war is being blamed for not having access to the resources it needs to develop further. It sure would be lovely if the Capitalist developed countries exported their technology to help China develop its green energy further, but instead they have been blocking critical tech exports there. I guess we need to ignore that because it's political.

Either way, it's also very important to be careful when jumping between different metrics such as total, per capita and per KWh. Trying to consider all of those in a black or white manner will lead you to awkward and subtle mistakes and syllogisms. Here's a very well researched article that goes in depth on how the CPC is leading the way into actually producing more carbon-efficient energy. This twitter thread also has a lot of reading material on how China has been on a gigantic green energy growth spurt for the last 30 years both in internal production and also in importing infrastructure. Solar, Wind, Hydro. All those sources are political and not made by the IPCC, so be careful there.

It's okay to think they're not doing enough, but to pretend that the EU (which is very dependent on their polluter friend the USA) is somehow beating them at this despite their very minor improvements over the past 20 years is just disingenuous. If you remember energy production 20 years ago you'll notice that it has barely changed in capitalist countries, while anti-capitalist countries really care about it. This comes from the intuitive fact that the power serves the common proletarian, who are the most affected by climate change, rather than the stockholders.

This was actually the point of the discussion, and I'm happy you finally addressed it so I could rectify it. Now reply to me by ignoring all the listed sources, while moving the discussion to other nonsense abstract notions of bacteria and ancient civilisation, like you seem to enjoy doing.

I mean that is useful, but I at that point I didn't even know much about the difference between Hausa and Tuareg culture (and still am not confident in my knowledge of that), so my base was way too lacking. I was mostly interested in understanding and dispelling common myths about Muslim and broader MENA culture, which usually can be summed up as lumping them all as a single homogenous imaginary culture and then going "foreigner bad." Not sure how on-topic it would be for here, but I'd love to learn more about the cousins from Africa and Asia that are always misrepresented and simplified to absurdity by Northwesterners.

I've actually randomly stumbled upon a gringophile Brazilian article from 2014 that actually no joke said "it is good for the poor people that there exists poverty" because some Harvard professor wrote a book about it from his solid gold desk, and sadly the both authors are still alive. Here it is in a rough machine translation to English, if you wanna feel angry in Portuguese.

Makes sense, but that there is just one clearer instance of google autocorrecting queries about Niger to Nigeria. Like I was looking into cultural traditions it kept linking only articles about Nigeria. For example, I was trying to understand traditional clothing usage along MENA countries like head coverings and it didn't even bother to include a "did you mean...?"

I tried learning more about them a while back, but then discovered Google doesn't think they exist.

The other comment sums it up pretty well though and I have nothing to add.

I have no idea what this is even trying to say. Why are all countries represented by animals that are not indigenous to them?

Would be cool if they put disclaimers like that for known outlets for corporations too.

"YouTube is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. which is headquartered in the United States, and is funded in whole or in part through profiteering off of misinformation campaigns and ad scams. Propublica"

Supply and demand have basically no weight in the housing market, lots of capitalist countries have more empty homes than they have homeless people. Once landlords and mortgage banks form a cartel, it becomes only about fleecing the working class that can't live healthy lives without a roof.

What you describe there is actually a good example of escalation, where a good reform has some negative effects simply because real estate bourgeois types still want to keep profits. If people using the capped price to rent illegally is a systemic issue, then the next step is to curb ownership of multiple homes. If working with reform, every reform should usually be the stepping stone for the next one, and the blame should not fall on the reform itself if the ones causing issues are the same capitalists who made it necessary in the first place.

Yeah no, this ain't working...

Your argumentation is presentist and mine is anthropogenic/historic.

cute words for saying that I'm focusing on how to solve this specific crisis while you're philosophising over the tragedy of human nature and pretending you don't like capitalism while defending it till kingdom come.

Let’s suppose that we have it your way, and overnight we suppress everything undemocratic and capitalistic about this world. Would that solve climate change? Your conviction is “Yes, because such and such things that (you believe) caused it (but no evidence was given) are no longer there”. This is not only extremely naive (and unproven), this is also illogical: in essence you would have replaced something we know by something else we don’t (and that moreover could be worse), and be expecting a better outcome, out of pure faith, with no evidence.

A lot of people here have presented the evidence, you just chose to disregard it because it's "too political." You have yet to explain how the capitalist ruling class are doing anything to combat climate change (as we can see from the article they are just doubling down), while a majority of people support actually doing something about it. Like I said, look at all the AES/anti-imperialist countries and their track records on fighting climate change. Is it not evidence for you that China is leading the world in production of green energy? You're probably just gonna ignore this again and claim "no evidence!", which is why I'm tired of this discussion.

On top of that, how can you look at the world history (which you are hasty to dismiss) and still believe that whatever new world order of yours would be immune to the same power struggles, in and out fightings, and ultimately the same destructive behaviours which are contrarian to our own common benefit as a species? What would prevent the same griefs you currently hold against “Europe/North America” to be resurrected there or elsewhere, as they were countless times and universally throughout history?

Now you're moving the goalpost from fighting this specific climate crisis to preventing all ecological crises forever. I don't care enough to argue that point, even if I have strong opinions about it, because it's so beside the point that it would be a waste of my time. It seems almost intentional ngl.

Of course it is. I have a wonderful thing to teach you today: the material world doesn’t care about your (or mine) opinion, or this planet would have alternated between being flat, spherical, carried over the back of a giant turtle, concave, and all of those simultaneously. Similarly, we could unanimously decide that the branch we collectively sit on should be trimmed, and that wouldn’t make it a good decision either. Opinions alone are no reasonable basis to decide what to do next, the best thing we have is science, and the second best is history.

Okay yeah you have no idea how organising society works. Good luck doing anything in your life while ignoring your own opinions, or worse, equating them to scientific facts. What is your opinion on the IPCC, I wonder.

I trust science and the (very much apolitical) scientific method, which the IPCC embodies

Oh yeah, there is nothing political about allocating which kinds of research gets done or doesn't. Science is just a soup that we throw money at and stir around and funny theorems and statistics boil out. I bet your history also relies only on completely objective first sources that speak for themselves without any human interpretation. Humans, politics, groups and interests play no part in any of that, which is why the IPCC definitely does a yearly survey of the carbon footprint of expropriating every 1% property and instating a dictatorship of proletariat, obviously. Gringo, please.

You seem to have it all sorted out to explain me how that solely rests on the shoulders of “the villain capitalist West”, and not on the many other easy culprits, like, I don’t know “people are afraid of change/the unknown”, “significant changes always take a long time to be enacted”, “people like to postpone or avoid at all cost tough changes, especially those that are detrimental to their quality of life”, “why would I let other people decide for myself how to live my life, especially when I’m old and won’t have to deal with any of this”, “why should I have it worse than that other person”, “why am I hostage of the bad behaviours of other humans long dead”, “it takes a lot of mutual trust and reciprocal guarantees for committing to sacrifices with the assurance that the other side of the fence/border/geopolitical spectrum will not use it for its own short-term benefit”, and this goes on and on.

Oh look, a lot of political and social questions. All of those are valid of consideration, but the overarching system in which those are embedded isn't because it's "opinionated." Please feel free to quantify scientifically how much influence dead people's laws should have in society. The IPCC must have a couple of papers on it.

buncha wikipedia links

buncha wikipedia links

And sorry again for finding ludicrous the idea that taking out capitalism would do anything of substance.

Feel free to believe whatever you want. Unlike the material world and societal organisations, which can be moulded through collective decisions based on public opinions, your bourgeois overlords don't really care much about your opinion of what should be done to society. So long as you keep consuming as they want, they'll barely even think of you, and capitalist society will keep trudging on towards the 4ºC mark. Sorry for finding ludicrous the idea of trying to prove that a crisis the likes of which has never happened before, being exacerbated by the structure of our society despite overwhelming public support to prevent it, isn't related to this societal structure, but only by citing a bunch of unrelated crises from previous modes of production, without providing any proof that it can be solved under this current system.

I've provided some evidence of communism being a better alternative, you have provided literally zero evidence of the contrary. Haven't even acknowledged what I brought to the table, much less argued over it. Until you can actually show me some solution that is actually working under capitalism, keep reading Wikipedia and pretending to be an specialist in everything from anthropology to meteorology.

Riddle me this: What is, in your factual scientific opinion, that which is preventing humanity to actually combat global warming and climate change as they overwhelmingly want to? The answer will say a lot.

Honestly I'm kinda tired of this because you seem to be deliberately missing the point. Actually put an effort to understand what I'm saying to be able to argue against it properly, please. Add to that actually reading before you write.

There definitely were people all over the world waging massive wars to protect/expand their land and agricultural capacity instead.

Re-read what I wrote:

A thousand years in the past there weren’t people in Europe/North America waging massive wars to protect their sources of oil across the world.

At no point in history have we had cross-continental conflicts over control of oil deposits before industrialisation. No AES country today does those either. And again, for something to be "human nature" you don't need evidence of a significant number of civilisations doing something. You need to show that the opposite has never happened.

The global market of fossil fuel is only perpetuated today by capitalist interests against the democratic wishes of the workers. I don't particularly care about any pre-factory man-made ecological catastrophe because what I (and others here) argue is that this specific one is being perpetuated by the undemocratic owning of the means of production. There can be no redirecting of the economy towards democratic interests under capitalism because the economy itself is not democratic.

In our current specific case we have loads of research on what can be done to avoid catastrophe, and even the specific betrayed pledges on this article. Or the other source I and others provided. It is an unique event in the history of humanity and we're sleepwalking into it because we can't risk profit line going down, not due to lack of knowledge or any inherent human desire for all humans worldwide.

It is certainly not. That’s what organisms like the IPCC have been doing for decades: working on models to predict the future climate with as much certainty and accuracy as our understanding of physics possibly allows.

Congratulations, you equated a political group representing indigenous people who have no legal power in the USA with a governmental research group. The IPCC doesn't make manifestos nor do they advocate for political action, despite suffering from intense lobbying from both corporations and political parties. They work specifically under the framework of liberal capitalism and the directives of the USA government and bourgeois interest, even if the individual researchers are often honest and diligent.

It has this pretty neat thing about itself that it doesn’t care about your, or mine, opinions and political orientations, skipping entire avenues for unproductive debate and distractions.

I could laugh but I guess some people out there really think that "political orientations" are unproductive for deciding what to do politically. How useful are all of their reports if they are not put into practice through politics? And how politically diverse is the IPCC? Every single thing in society is political, specially when it comes to society and economy. You can't reasonably expect to solve this is issue by relying only on the USA government body and assuming that whatever comes out of there is "apolitical." How "productive" are those reports if there is no political will to put their recommendations in practice?

The most efficient way to enact change (IMO) is to commit to actionable goals in light of desired outcomes (e.g. how many plants of which type we need to open and close, how many cars and trucks on the roads, …).

Do go on, what "actionable goals" have been committed to and are being enforced right now in capitalist countries? Which ones are even likely to stay in force after an election cycle? How have capitalist countries fought against climate change when it went against the profit of their ruling class? The gist of it all is that all of those "actionable goals" need to be enforced politically, which has shown to be impossible (or at least very unsuccessful) under liberal capitalism over the past 30 years we've been aware of this crisis. Compare it with China.

I love that every headline on xtwitios now is like "The website formerly known as Twitter." I think this phenomenon is gonna last like 6 months.