YouTube’s climate deniers turn into climate doomers — A new report documents a sharp rise in arguments that clean energy and climate policies won’t work::A new report documents a shift away from climate denial and a sharp rise in arguments that clean energy and climate policies won’t work.

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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    10 months ago

    Here’s my thing: I absolutely believe that clean energy and radical climate policies would work. However I have basically 0 hope that enough countries will implement these things to evade climate catastrophe.

    • hglman@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Mitigation is a spectrum not a binary outcome. Anyone arguing to not try does not understand the problem or is being dishonest.

    • YungOnions@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      Countries already are. Slower than we’d like, but change is happening. Big changes start small, but gain momentum. Look at the rollout of renewables and EVs. If you’d described where we are now to past me only 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you.

      • setVeryLoud(true);@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        We need to roll out good public transit and get more people off the roads in general, too.

        EVs are a good step in energy independence, but they’re only mildly better ecologically than ICE vehicles (which should definitely be phased out). The whole ecological cost of maintaining road infrastructure is also not getting helped by heavier vehicles, so we need less of them on the road.

        • YungOnions@sh.itjust.works
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          10 months ago

          Agreed. I think better battery tech will allow for lighter EVs, but even so at the very least we need vehicle manufacturers to expand their EV range beyond massive SUVs and Sedans, to include more reasonably sized hatch backs etc.

          You’re right; however. Public transport is shocking where I live, and is in dire need of improvement.

    • hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org
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      10 months ago

      It’s gotta be a peer pressure thing, diplomatically, to work. The countries taking the biggest steps need to be loud about it so the ones dragging their feet (hi from the US) get their pride hurt if they don’t take action. The ozone hole fix worked that way too (though of course that didn’t have major political powers denying it was a problem).

    • Libertus@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I agree. Additionally, I don’t believe that, without controlled depopulation (restrictive birth control, not killing people), we can achieve climate stability and solve other issues like increasing pollution of the entire environment. I believe that the population should have stopped growing in the 90s (at about 4 billion), of course, this number is a hunch, not knowledge.

      We have reached a point far beyond sustainability; we are on artificial life support. Without this support, even getting dressed would be a challenge, given the lack of a natural and clean source of textile materials. Nearly all clothes are made of plastic or contain some plastic additives. As we wash these clothes in our machines, we inadvertently consume plastic particles in our food and drink.

      Speaking of machines, the devices produced today have an increasingly shorter lifespan. Simultaneously, the recycling of these devices is problematic, as our waste is often massively exported to third-world countries.

      Another concern is the escalating scarcity of drinking water, among various other challenges. The list goes on and on. Anyone expecting the Earth to accommodate an unlimited number of people is plain insane or doesn’t understand the complexity of the issue.

      We must act now on all the fields, even those unpopular ones (like population control).

      Those who are against population control, please take a look at this initiative: https://populationmatters.org/ and its patrons (like Sir David Attenborough and Jane Goodall).