I'm in complete agreement. Humanity will transition to sustainability the good way or the bad way. The good way involves making some tough decisions and calculated sacrifices, while the bad way involves despair, famine, mass migrations, war and genocide.
But it will all eventually settle down to sustainability, one way or another. That's why I'm an optimist.
We need to tax the externalities of antisocial behavior.
Blame zoning that makes building anything but single family houses illegal. With such sparse density you can't have public transit that is affordable and frequent. It is time to transform those money-sucking suburbs into walkable mixed-use medium density neighborhoods.
Nothing to apologize for. I understand that some people, particularly those who are young, environmentally conscious and lacking financial stability, look at the world and think that it's all going to shit.
I'm old enough to remember the cold war and the fear we had of nuclear holocaust and nuclear winter. It's just an example, there have been doomsday headlines every day for as long as I've lived and every single time humans have prevailed.
I'm not saying climate change isn't serious, it is very serious. I'm saying our children and grandchildren will, for the most part, live good lives. Better than our lives in some ways, worse in others, just like it's always happened. People adapt.
I have brought two wonderful people to this world because I don't underestimate humanity's ability to understand, adapt and overcome the challenges ahead. Humans have lived and thrived through much tougher times in history. A defeatist attitude sure won't help.
Canadians, like most developed countries, already have a very low birth rate. If you want to reduce the growth of human population, you have to look at countries and regions where the birth rate is significantly higher than two children per woman.
If you are concerned about the carbon footprint of individual people, you need to look at where most of that carbon goes and what can be done about it. In Canada, the two major contributors are heating and car use, both of which would be reduced by transforming suburban single family home developments into walkable medium density mixed-use neighborhoods.
Climate change makes these fires more likely every year, so what are we doing about it? I don't want my children to inherit ashes and badlands.
There are people of different skin tones and ethnicities at work and so far I haven't seen anybody get a pass, so I'm inferring that the financial department doesn't give a damn. Do you have any evidence of the contrary?
Did I get it right? He admits that he charged $14K of personal expenses on his governmental credit card, but his central argument is that he was more carefully scrutinized due to the color of his skin. I wish the article got into more detail. At my job I better justify my expenses down to the dollar, regardless of my skin color.
Never had a car, or even a driving license. Fuck cars.
The fifty year statistics were also computed wrong, for the same reason you already explained. It doesn't make much of a difference since the probabilities are so small anyway.
Being able to look at your children in the eyes and knowing that you aren't contributing to the pollution they are breathing, to the traffic noise they hear while they are trying to rest, or to the traffic that puts them in danger every time they go out.
Future generations will judge us for the shitty legacy we have left them.