Who Cares About the Environement?

[Ahriman]

Yeah, people are recycling their trash and buying hybrid cars and are thus caring for the environment.

However, to save this planet from cooking us, we would most likely need a global mobilisation of people similar to that seen during the COVID pandemic: people should travel less (especially by airplanes), change their diet to free up land for new forests, buy less stuff so that there is less production and garbage, end all wars, and stop traveling by yachts.

But I guess the gambit is now on some new technology that will clean up the planet.

Yeah, not gonna happen.

[Fake Messiah]

Yeah, not gonna happen.

And what makes you say that? Is it because politicians just gave $100 billion to ICE instead of giving it to cleaning up the planet and inventing clean technologies?

But why does this happen? Is it because the media (and the police) are devoting their time to riling up the public against minor or fictitious problems like, not just immigrants, but poor people's crimes? Let's face it, pollution is a crime done by rich people, and their crimes usually go uncovered in daily news stories.

Air pollution kills 10 million people each year and causes untold additional illness and suffering. It kills at least 100,000 people in the United States alone annually. But it rarely features in daily news stories. Police and prosecutors ignore pollution, much of which is criminal, and so do most journalists. For example, federal prosecutors charge maybe 20 people with environmental offenses every year, and they charged more than 20,000 people with drug offenses in the same period.

Take the news media’s obsession with shoplifting that led to emergency actions by politicians across the U.S. to address the “crisis” of retail theft. Politicians felt intense political pressure to pass laws, hire and assign thousands more police officers, and increase “enforcement” budgets to tackle a supposed “wave” of retail theft, even as police-recorded theft crimes were going down. On the other hand, there is wage theft going on: those same chain stores make around $137 million in corporate wage theft that happens every day, but since that is a rich man's crime, politicians and journalists never project the urgency they have shown for wage theft.

The same absence of urgent reporting applies to the great criminal littering epidemic: several trillion pieces of plastic are thrown illegally into our waterways each year, and they make their way into the bodies and bloodstreams of every living organism on the planet, with profound consequences for all of us. Or the crime wave of the intentional insertion of lead, mercury, cyanide, and cadmium into the ground.

So people should first change the media narrative because what the news treats as urgent affects what people think is urgent. It shapes what and who people are afraid of. It helps dictate what people demand from the political system and from each other. Imagine if, every day for the last four years, every newspaper and TV station had “breaking news” stories and graphics about the thousands of deaths the night before from water pollution, about the death, destruction, cancer, infertility, and other harms to humans, animals, and ecosystems from criminal acts of industrial littering in cities across the U.S. every day.

You only need to look at Trump and how he won the presidency: he didn't win it because he was smart. No. He won because it was already prepared for him to win, years before he showed up on the political scene. Prepared for him by the media, like Fox News and the "good" ones who focus their daily news stories on the kinds of legal violations usually involving poor people. Just remember, years ago, the race between John McCain and Obama: at one point, McCain realized that people coming to his rallies were filled with hate toward Obama based on conspiracies and racist rhetoric (that he was a communist, Muslim, cannibal, and whatnot), but McCain decided he would have none of it and said that Obama was a "good and decent guy."

So in the end, even a moron like Trump could become a president because all had to do was to take the path that was prepared for someone who is greedy, narcissistic, spineless, and psychotic.

[Ahriman]

Trump isn't stupid at all. I don't like him at all, but he's not stupid.

[Alan V]

Per Google: "Equivocation is an informal fallacy where a word or phrase shifts meaning within an argument, invalidating the conclusion."

Trump may be clever, but smart people don't oppose experts and scholarship based on misinformation, or defend conspiracy theories and bigots.

Trump is more accurately seen as a malignant narcissist and demagogue.

[Leonardo17]

I don’t know about media coverage in the US (I don’t live there) but all main news outlets of the world like the BBC, France 24, DW, CNN, probably VOA have a rather good coverage of the issue. It’s not like the 1990’s when we were seen as neo-hippies for worrying on these “trivial” matters. Today everyone is in (even the rich). Just two days ago Richard Quest was reporting on the effect of climate change on the wine industry in France (together with Trump’s new tariffs on the industry). Things are becoming simpler every year: If we don’t invest on the energy transition, there will be no more luxury wines (at affordable prices) anymore.
 
Yet there is the power of habit and the ego-based belief (of some people) that their way of doing things is the best way of doing things.
 
One example is the economy. If the government messes with the economy instead of letting the market readjust itself on its own, you will end up crushing the economy:

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/look-...01288.html
 
So this is very similar. Actually, the market is shifting toward clean energies (on its own). And the west is terrified of more advanced and cheaper Chinese E-vehicles (and solar and wind panels) flooding the market.
 
That’s where we need some sort of organization of the issue. If there is a climate emergency, can we not use these Chinese products to our advantage while doing the necessary to protect local manufacturers?
 
/These are the challenges we are facing and I hate how Putin messed with the world in a time like this. Now everyone is back to investing into their militaries (France boosted its spending by 100% so did many other European countries) while the climate crisis is there still sitting in our lap

[The Grand Nudger]

Trump isn't stupid at all. I don't like him at all, but he's not stupid.

He's one of the dumbest people you'll never meet. Being as stupid as a rock doesn't prevent a person from succeeding here in the us, is all.

[Leonardo17]

Trump isn't stupid at all. I don't like him at all, but he's not stupid.

He's one of the dumbest people you'll never meet.  Being as stupid as a rock doesn't prevent a person from succeeding here in the us, is all.

I’ve just started to listen to this book by Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin called
“The Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5345...n-new-deal
 
The book is actually describing how the selfish, ego-centric attitude of a limited number of people who believe in short term profit and short term profit only is actually putting our organized society model at risk.
 
In the first chapter Pollin is even comparing this to an asteroid. He asks “If an asteroid had a 4% chance of hitting the earth in 50 years, would we just be sitting passively hoping that the technologies we will develop in 40 years will help us deflect the trajectory of this asteroid? Or would all governments immediately start acting on it?”
 
Anyway, Iran is currently becoming one of the first countries in which the government is being seriously challenged by severe temperatures and lack of water.
 
I’m also hearing that the US is dealing with severe temperatures as well. So good luck to you all if you are deciding to stay indoors.
 
So Yes, I have to agree with you on D. Trump. In fact the climate denialism of the Republican Party that goes back to the 70’s is not a good thing. There is a complex web of human greediness and foolishness that pushes a limited group of people to deny /thing that they know at least since the 1970’s) and convince everyone there is nothing to worry about.
 
I’ve heard that only 20% of US citizens see global warming as a human-induced phenomenon (the figure dates from 2020 / when the book was published).
 
So this book would be a nice addition to your library if you are interested in the “human cause” of climate inaction.

[Leonardo17]

This forest is probably suffering because of the low level of ground waters. I am hiking there on a regular basis. The temperature in this forest is usually 3-4 degrees bellow the ordinary heat of the City (Ankara). Some 20 years ago this was a suburban area of Ankara with less constructed sites (more ground water). + We had heavy snow in the 1990’s and early 2020’s. Beyond the ridge there is actually a lake (two lakes actually) which are keeping the whole area moisturized and less prone to fire. We even had heavy rainfall here a week ago. 




 
   But you can’t tell any of that to the vegetation. Prolonged temperatures beyond 95 Degree (35 degree Celsius) is a burden on the vegetation and the whole fauna living there. And the smallest mistake results in this kind of catastrophes. Darwin bless those helicopters and our firefighters who still managed to control the fire so quickly.

[The Grand Nudger]

60% as of 2024. Still a ridiculous number in context. Thing is, that increasing number also has a context - one in which the question is, for some portion of the remainder, a political prompt.

It's that political prompt that I would say is the human cause of climate inaction - not beliefs about climate change per se.

As for trees and development - we've actually seen alot more trees year over year than we lose due to abandoned agricultural land and suburban development plans - but as this relates to forests and climate change, we plant fewer seedlings than we lose to fires, for example. So it's complicated. We have an increase in tree cover even as we suffer through deforestation. The lowest point for us was the early 1900's.

[Leonardo17]

60% as of 2024.  Still a ridiculous number in context.  Thing is, that increasing number also has a context - one in which the question is, for some portion of the remainder, a political prompt.  

It's that political prompt that I would say is the human cause of climate inaction - not beliefs about climate change per se.

As for trees and development - we've actually seen alot more trees year over year than we lose due to abandoned agricultural land and suburban development plans - but as this relates to forests and climate change, we plant fewer seedlings than we lose to fires, for example.  So it's complicated.  We have an increase in tree cover even as we suffer through deforestation.  The lowest point for us was the early 1900's.

I think we have reached a point in which we need specialists to decide whether to plant trees in a region or not. Personally, I’m opposed to simply reforesting areas we lost to fires.
 
I don’t want to sound like track 6 of the famous 1993 Guns-N-Roses music album but this is getting serious. Yesterday we broke an 83 year old heat record here (101 degree Fahrenheit / 41 degree Celsius). The last time this city had reached 104 (40 degree Celsius) was in the year 2000. And the month of August here (in the new normal) is usually hotter than the month of July.
 
Nothing very alarming if you are a human here. I can turn on the AC, I can spend time in the mall, I don’t lack food or water, but what does the cattle do? What happens to our crops? What happens to water resources?  
 
This is why I’m going to drive your attention to the book “Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet” by Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin once again.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5345...n-new-deal
 
Greta Thunberg’s “The Climate Book” is a very concise and well organized book on the issue as well. But in “The Green New Deal” there is a roadmap. We don’t need to overthrow capitalism, we don’t need to walk to get to our jobs or schools, there will be some price to pay of course but nothing that would affect our way of lives in a substantial manner. Just by taking a few very decisive steps, humanity has the knowledge and capacity to avert this existential crisis while most people and most countries will gain much more from these changes than whatever cost they will have to pay for it.
 
The only thing on the way is actually human ego and arrogance (and the misinformation of the masses too).
 
To me this looks a lot like the guys who is told to quit drinking or smoking even tough it has become such an inherent part of his personality. It’s not an easy thing, but its necessary.