What it comes to climate change, most Americans think to themselves: someone will figure something out. And by someone, they probably mean the government. But this is the very same government that doesn’t seem to be able to address almost any other problem, most of which are much less complicated than climate change.
Don’t Worry, the Government Will Solve Climate Change Even Though They Can’t Solve Anything Else
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Thanks, Ted, you’ve restored my faith in the future of our species. Beautiful clean coal !…
Henri
Close, but baldy is more likely to say, “there ain’t no such animal”
The frog in boiling water story is very relevant here – change happens slowly enough that we don’t notice it so much. We adapt, we put it out of our mind, we deal with whatever is in front of us today. But even a frog is smart enough to hop out of the water if he can. We don’t have anywhere to hop, and unlike the frog we should be smart enough to figure out what’s happening ahead of time, and creative enough to come up with a solution.
Me, I’ve got native trees and plants that have lived for decades – but for the last four years or so they’ve been dying off. One day they just turn brown and that’s it.
“Can’t believe I’m going broke paying for my kid’s college”? Try “Can’t believe I couldn’t afford to have kids. Or a house. Or a retirement.”
The first humans in North America drove about 70 large land mammal species to extinction.
Fortunately, technological advances were slow enough to allow recognition of the problem before mass extinctions overcame humans too.
Someone figured out that if all the large land mammals were killed off, the first North American humans sustained by them would also die.
The great idea of these first humans was to recognize Bison as sacred animals, so that their numbers could increase again.
Unfortunately, modern humans don’t understand the meaning of sacred and will likely not discover the meaning before technological fundamentalism erases the possibility for survival of the nature that sustains us.
Meet tardigrade, our successor species.
Got to hand it to the Native Americans.
They had the sense to avoid sawing off the branch of the evolutionary tree that they were sitting on.
There’s quite a difference in … call it philosophy. Most of the Indians believe(d) that we are a part of the Earth. Christians believe that the Earth is a separate thing, over which man was meant to dominate.
My grandad was raised on an reservation, he learned a lot of respect for wildlife & the Earth, and went on to become a pioneer in alpine camping. (“Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints”)
(Oh, we’re mostly white – it’s the philosophy that makes the difference)
@CH
True.
Philosophy and culture.
I have heard White Nationalists philosophize that Native Americans have no culture.
Maggie Thatcher’s statement that “There is no society, only individuals” leads me to the conclusion that White Nationalism is bereft of culture.
It’s (tragically) funny the way the White Nationalists worry about the American Culture.
American Culture is a mixture of every other culture on the planet, it varies regionally, and it changes yearly. Most of our ‘sacred traditions’ all less than a century old. American Culture is rather bland – he potato salad of culture. There really isn’t all that much to protect.
The government as is can reduce global warming….but it will be ugly
The 2008 recession really cut in to carbon emissions, so take stock market greed, toss lack of financial regulation, sprinkle in one or more natural disaster(s) and ice it with a trade war or two and if you get a second global depression that will really cut carbon emissions.
Walls to keep the poor and prisoners from becoming serious consumers, fuel unburned.
Not enough….
A theory goes as follows: the genocide of Native Americans via contact with foreign diseases and warfare with the settlers left so much abandoned native agricultural land to be reclaimed by nature, that it drew enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cause the Little Ice Age, which was a period of global cooling between the 15th and 18th centuries.
So what could lower the population….
The stress of modern life (stagnant wages, moonlighting, long hours, health care expenses, student loans…….) has reduced the birth rate in many nation including the U.S. Birth rate in U.S. falls has fallen to lowest level in 32 years, CDC says. Looks like the government is working slowly to reduce the population.
The governments working hard to cut regulations, so there are reductions in toxic substance regulations, along with other cuts in health and safety regulations. Government getting into reducing emissions the hard way again.
Given our government’s lack of preparedness for pandemics, add in most our antibiotics have been outsourced and top with big pharma lack of interest in researching drugs that a patient only uses for short period of time; it looks like a recipe for an epidemic.
Cut the State Department, sell more arms to our rich friends, give some guns to our poorer friends…..smile when you meet trigger happy leaders that did far more than fight the drug cartels and chase a few terrorist.
Then comes warfare……a bloody scythe that can cut down thousands, millions, billions….of CO2 emitters.
There is no evidence of open fire in earth’s history when atmospheric levels of oxygen were lower than 16%, around 400 million years ago.
Anaerobic bacteria “polluted” earth’s atmosphere with oxygen, toxic to them, interfering with their own photosynthesis.
“Live by photosynthesis, die by photosynthesis” holds for anaerobic bacteria on whose waste we oxygen breathers depend.
Humans are fire apes (homo Incendiarious), the lone earth species that generates and uses fire to support its existence.
Anaerobic bacteria transformed earth’s carbon dioxide atmosphere into an oxygen bearing atmosphere.
Our dependence on fire is transforming the atmosphere from a high oxygen atmosphere back to a high carbon dioxide atmosphere.
“Live by fire, die by fire.”
Life goes on, with us or without us.
Corporate scientists propose extracting carbon dioxide from the air and storing it underground, called geological sequestration, replicating the underground storage of carbon dioxide accomplished by anaerobic bacteria over billions of years of spontaneous fossil fuel generation.
Climate change deniers, such as Trump, are attempting to protect themselves from climate change by such as sea walls in order to keep rising ocean water off of his resort golf courses.
Recognition of climate change and denial of climate change are not incompatible behaviors for those who desire to protect only their own interests.
I use Trump as an example but do not see one party as better than the other on this issue.
Yep – overpopulation is the cause of most of our woes. Fewer wars if there are enough resources to go around, less social strife if you can pick up your spear and head out on your own into unclaimed lands, etc.
What can the government do? Well, yeah, there’s war & genocide & stuffs – not my favorite approach but certainly effective.
I’d go for education, especially in how we socialize our young’uns. We’re still stuck on telling them that their destiny is to get married and make babies. Not everyone needs to make babies, and not everyone makes good mommies and daddies.
After that, attrition: us old folks will shuffleboard off this mortal coil soon enough.
“Given our government’s lack of preparedness for pandemics, add in most our antibiotics have been outsourced” to China.
So don’t piss off China because the US might get the same treatment from China that the US is now giving to Venezuela.