This comic is from 2009, over 14 years ago. Good thing we took action and have made great strides towards combating climate change during that time. Could you imagine how screwed we’d be if our world leaders had sat on their asses and did fuck all instead? /S
Idk what all the world leaders have & haven’t done, but I know we’ve made great progress in green technology. Compared to 2009, we’re poised to more than double the efficiency of solar panels & the installation price per watt has fallen from $8.50 to $2.77. Bigger, better, better understood…and also cheaper.
This is what you want to see if you want the whole world adopting renewable energy sources.
Okay. We still need to do a lot more. The science is clear that this is the make or break decade. Either we severely curtail emissions now or we break the 1.5C/3F limit for the bad scenarios to happen.
And everything has happened faster than predicted so any millennials thinking this isn’t going to really effect their life is deluding themselves. It’s just going to hit while we have silver hair. We’ll all be hungry, thirsty, and trying to figure out several billion refugees.
I’ve been hearing “it’s make or break right now” for 20 years. I’m pretty sure we were absolutely screwed a long time ago.
Yes well at first we wanted to stop any increase. So there was a deadline for that. Then we wanted to cap it and the earlier we act the better it is. Now we’ve realized that at 1.5C some nasty chain reactions kick in and we’d really like to avoid that. However if you want to be reductionist about it then yes the time to act was when we learned the basics of this problem in the 1800’s.
But the next best time is now. It just gets worse the longer we wait until at some point the planet hands us an eviction notice.
Rich people won’t make as much money.
We could eat them. Wdyt?
I make some mean barbacoa and egg tacos. Save me their cheeks.
They’re not organic, and pumped full of plastics and preservatives
They actually have studies that show they’d make even more, which makes sense when you realize that the economy is designed to make them richer. They’ve had these studies since the mid '70s. Cruelty and head counts are the point, at this point. They know they’d be better off as well, and are just seeing how many of us they can murder before we do something about it.
If things progress as they are, with accelerating warming, in 20 years the economies start to break down and money can’t buy you things anymore. Making money is over by then.
I’ve given this a lot of thought since the comic above was first published, actually. I think it really reduces to the Tragedy of the Commons. This is where everyone involved sees a limited resource and “gets theirs” since there will always be someone else to do the same if you don’t. That explains petroleum writ large, but I think it also explains general wealth hoarding and exploiting market forces for gain. If you don’t, the next guy will.
So if the global economy really is headed for a collapse in 20 years, you can bet these animals will spend 19.5 years making cash that other people can’t. The remaining few months will be spent buying their way out of the hole they dug, assuming they can get the timing right.
But the tragedy of the commons is possible due to other circumstances. One of that is a different model of ownership that is used now. If land is owned, you can use it was you want. That’s your right. Something that’s not owned, like the sea of air, is can be exploited. In the past, there was shared ownership over lands, and if you tried to exploit it you got slapped. Or you only owned something for a time and then came a reshuffle according to their needs. What we have now is en exercise in how far you can take individual ownership until it breaks.
And in the past, there was more a steady state model. Population only grows slowly. Now with fast growing population. Back then you also had money as a hard currency. You wanted more, you had to dig more out of the ground. Now we have a monetary system that gets its value by promising even more value tomorrow. It forces growth on everybody and everything basically as a religion.
Combine the two and things go horribly wrong.
her head is on backwards. i hope she’s okay
Owl in disguise
I heard someone say owl and I came as soon as i could!
May I recommend today’s breaking owl news story:
What a Twist! : New study says owls may actually be able to turn their heads a full 360 degrees
Visit [email protected] for all your owl-related concerns!
The saddest thing about this is that I’ve been hearing this joke since at least the 1990s.
This particular joke is from 2009.
So yeah.
God forbid we do something to improve the world without a profit motive.
edit
Even though the profit motive would be healthier people, and happier people, and numerous studies have shown happy, healthy people are far more productive in a orwellian people-as-product labor kind of way.
Even though the profit motive would be healthier people, and happier people, and numerous studies have shown happy, healthy people are far more productive in a orwellian people-as-product labor kind of way.
Yes but they have studies that say that KEEPING people happy and healthy is a huge cost center. Also, healthy happy people live longer, meaning that the labor pool will take longer to refresh. On the whole, it’s not entirely profitable to keep people healthy and happy, because any profit they generate from their labor is almost immediately offset by the costs involved in maintaining their health.
and that comes back to fair pay and happy and healthy labor.
employees that are paid a fair wage spend more money, which increases profits.
So not making employees happy and healthy is a myopic, short term, kneejerk greed response that hampers and prevents growth and profits.
And I fully agree. But I’m not a CEO. I’m not a shareholder. I’m a worker. Am I paid fairly? Maybe. According to the market-based raise I got last year, I am. Our own CEO admitted that our wages don’t scale with CoL, though.
I kind of get these kind of comics, but isn’t the reality that all of humanity is still in a competition with eachother, and doing all the wrong things gives you more power than doing all the right things, so that’s what continues happening.
In these climate debates the reality is that it’s a global chicken on the road, we all go toward self annihilation at a steady pace, and the first who flinches and tries to take action will get taken advantage of and ruined. So it’s slooooooow talks about doing tiny things and kind of maybe a bit cooperating while noone really wants to, because any advantage they can get over another country will be taken advantage of…
Maybe i’m a bit too pessimistic, but it’s my assumption that things work like that, and then all this bullshit suddenly makes sense >_<…
Slightly more complicated than that. It’s also that some countries are way more affected by changes then others. Sure everyone uses fossil fuels but only specific countries export it so you are basically asking a country to cripple itself for you. Same when people suggest we should just not cut down the rainforests. In both cases it would likely be done if other countries paid for it. But right now it’s what you say as well as asking people to handicap themselves
From the view of the global West, I believe this comic still applies. I’m very much not a fan of asking developing countries to not go through the same industrial revolution we went through, it’s the lack of action at home that bothers me. Here in the US, we’ve got half the population railing against EVs instead of wanting to invest in them and find more environmentally friendly ways to produce them; people who want to gut the FDA and EPA and reduce regulation; people who who don’t give a damn about those who are going to be the first affected by rising water; those who think terraforming Mars is a sexier (and magnitudes more expensive) project than using those resources here on Earth. And so on and so on. Those, I think, are the target of this comic. It’s a very Western perspective, I agree, but I also think the West is in the best position to do anything about it.
It for sure applies to voters, but not to the politicians present at climate conventions as this cartoon portrays. And in the end it’s them that have to broker a solution, not individual voters.
They’ll of course use such language to their voters since whatever gains votes is fair game, but i very much doubt they themselves are this stupid. Behind the scenes it’s just finding ways to screw with the others.
Yup, i wish talking about issues like this would be more common here rather than “what if we accidentally create a better world”, and other really populistic views of what’s happening.
What’s funny is, most people on the ground that I have talked to about this issue agree that the world would be objectively better. They just don’t want to make the effort if it would benefit somebody if they don’t agree with.
Then the billionaires would still be billionaires, people would still be starving, and we’d continue to find unique was to kill each other.
Its a trade off at best. You would need to make everyone poorer and accumulate more power in the government to make it happen. And the biggest issue is if its even doable.
“Poorer”.
“Everyone”.
You mean the wealthy wouldn’t be as wealthy and everyone else would be subject to strict controls on energy, transportation, and meat consumption. Which describes the lives of our recent ancestors. Air conditioning and heating would be for survival, not comfort. Most people will depend on mass transit and not own cars. And meat becomes a treat you get every now and then. But dairy products and eggs will still be plentiful.
It’s not like we’re going to be eating peanut butter sandwiches and starving while working 3 part time jobs. Unless that’s already your reality. Then it will likely still be your reality because capitalism.
The vast majority of humans could live a perfectly fine, alternative, lifestyle and the planet would be okay.
Yeah fair enough analysis other than blaming capitalism for everything. A thing that you missed was that when people in poor countries get poorer, they can die of starvation or other things. Why do you believe that is worth it?
You missed the point entirely. We don’t need to cut calories produced. The new arable land from not raising cattle and the turn of farm land from live stock feed to human feed will provide more than enough food.
This isn’t a situation where we have to live in some dystopia, as long as we act now.
Sure, in the developed richer countries, but not in the poor countries. Millions to hundrends of millions of people in poor countries would die.
Why? Why would going green mean they can’t grow food suddenly? What about coal power and cow farts means you can’t grow corn?
It doesnt mean you cant, it means that everything is more expensive, and means people in foreign countries cant afford things they need even more. If something like a billion people in the world are food insecure, a mild drought could make them starve.
Meat would get more expensive yes. But energy production is perfectly capable of switching over without a bump. And non meat farm products would actually become cheaper as supply increases. We’re not magically causing a drought with such a changeover, at least not any extra ones.
But we shouldn’t aim for “doable” we should aim for perfection
But what if perfection destroys the vehicle to make it doable?
You mean aiming for perfection ist worse than fucking the Planet a little less?
The more that you do with repect to climate change, the more it will harm the economies and the people in them. If you make it harder to get gas, poor people wont have access to it, and all the various costs will go up and crush them.
People are dying because of the climate Change, and increasingly so, but please Somebody think about the economy… Really?
Gas will be accessible to them in need, If those who don’t need to use it step back.
No sane Person needs a 3t heavy pick up truck wit 600hp for their groceries…
You are thinking of this a western problem. What happens to the more than a billion people around the world the are food insecure, and it gets harder to get food?
And the biggest issue is if its even doable.
Right we all didn’t think of that, in that case let’s just keep on overexploiting our finite resources and generate as much short term shareholder value as possible, because we don’t know whether a sustainable approach would even fix some things that are possibly already beyond fixing due to overexploitation and generating short term value in the past.
The sustainable approach at this point would be eco-dictatorship, not sure if it’s so easily achievable
I also want a clean world where everything is renewable and such, the problem is that I dont think it is achievable with our current technology. Take for instance the “Green New Deal” that came out a few years back, it was literally impossible. So personally I dont want to damage people that are doing the work that will get us to the tech we need in order to pretend we are solving the problem.
