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Climate Change. Our Failure.

Lake Mead is drying up. The hottest temperatures ever recorded in London. Sparking unprecedented wildfires across Europe. The sea level consistently continues to not only rise but rise even faster as time goes on. The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet may totally collapse at the end of this century. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher now then they have been in more then 2 million years.

We've wasted decades of precious time doing almost nothing. Conservatives denied the scientific data for decades and still continue to do so. Their excuses growing more absurd as the effects of climate change become more extreme with the passage of time. Many governments of the world have had little success pushing impactful global warming legislation. Over the last century our collective negligence has created an impending climate change apocalypse for our children to live in and we are all responsible.
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fun4us2b · M
Did you see 60 minutes last night? They are using water from Colorado river to farm in the desert. Does that make any kind of sense?
Wol62 · 51-55, M
@fun4us2b Yes but conservatives will tell you "There is a solution". Just don't ask what it is, as they can't tell you. But there is one. Oh and you are a communist if you don't believe them.
SW-User
@fun4us2b not at all, the natural fauna of the Colorado River upstream of California have suffered for a long time just so a metropolis like Los Angeles can exist in the desert.

It's also not plausible, practical, sustainable or ethical to try to convert every biome on the planet to agriculture (never mind human settlements), some regions are more suitable for it than others, and considering that, nation states and borders make little sense on one planet ... it doesn't make sense for small nation states situated entirely in deserts to exist.

It also doesn't make sense to try to convert every bit of forest on the planet to agriculture (never mind human settlements), and humans have been doing this for millennia ... Sicily used to be much more forested but Roman deforestation and desertification had a side effect of also making the climate of the island hotter ... this sort of thing is repeated around the globe throughout time, but at least for most of history the human population of the planet was somewhat closer to a constant, and never really surpassed 2 billion ... but the Industrial Revolution, the discovery of petroleum put us on a trajectory for a population explosion, while advances in medicine started extending lifespans as well as making many ailments no longer death sentence.

So as the population expands (never mind that the technologies have made something like human-caused climate change even exponentially more malignant than it was in Roman times), the pressure to convert more lands to uses other than something more optimal for them grows and all of these problems will only accelerate ... in no small part because virtually all humans feel entitled to blindly procreate to excess, and it is not even remotely logical to believe that one planet can sustain infinite living things at the same time even without an extreme environment like significant global warming in the absence of technology.

Population control is something that is acceptable for all other animal species, but somehow humans are a sacred cow, just like MAGA considers Trump a sacred cow who can be above the law while no one else can. That's a luxury that in reality our species cannot afford, nor can other species, which actually make up 99.99% of life on Earth compared to the 0.01% that humans comprise, but the majority species do not destroy the planet (for all species).

Humans have to get less emotional, more rational*, less entitled to any random thing that they want at any given moment and with the expectation that gratification is instant. Population limits have to be on the table, and it does not have to be something draconian, dystopian or apocalyptic.

Extending that a bit further, procreation itself likely needs to be divorced from the body and the individual, which actually would have lots of positives, like no need for abortions in the first place, and the only remaining risk of sex being the transmission of diseases, not unplanned pregnancies (which happen even with the use of all forms of birth control other than the severing of tubes). The "decanting" gestation scheme of Brave New World is something that really makes sense.

* The fatal flaw of the Ayn Rand cult is that it presumed that humans were always already at that stage of rational thought, when we're still a long way from it. Thus her ideas were always a house of cards with no foundation but an imaginary notion of human perfection already attained to enable the construction of that house.
QueenOfZaun · 26-30, F
@SW-User I wish more people were as intelligent as you
SW-User
@QueenOfZaun thank you but I'm not intelligent, just opinionated
QueenOfZaun · 26-30, F
@SW-User Perhaps wise and educated would be better terminology
SW-User
@QueenOfZaun somewhat educated :)
fun4us2b · M
@SW-User Well said and so true that we are far from implementing rational policies. Hopefully we will see some glimmer of progress during our lifetimes.