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Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

AWOL
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Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431692

Postby AWOL » July 31st, 2021, 3:41 pm

Hi,

Am I mad or is humanity? I am worried sick about the planet and cannot stop worrying about the mess we are leaving behind for subsequent generations. I am gripped by a profound fear when I consider the planet. Not for me but for mankind and all the other inhabitants of Earth.

We are dangerously close to climate change cascading out of control, and on the verge of passing thresholds that we may never be able to get back across. Our world is polluted in so many ways... nitrates (thanks Max Born and Fritz Haber), pesticides, plastics, particulates, plasticizers, heavy metals, etc. We have been such poor custodians of our planet and because the timeframes don't align with our electoral systems politicians just greenwash policies and don't address the route causes. No need for unpopular short term pain when we can have catastrophes once they have left office!

My mind struggles to comprehend the risks we are taking and the way we all just plod on regardless; Perhaps planning on getting an electric car to save the day, even though all the benefits of electrification are being offset by the move towards more SUV style vehicles!

Am I alone in being anxious, fearful and panicked by the ecological course we are on?

When I find myself surrounded by people that just shrug about the situation I am seriously questioning my sanity. Somebody is crazy here... is it me? At least i'll die knowing we can send rich people on joy rides to the edge of space at enormous environmental cost.

Love,
AWOL

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431694

Postby Midsmartin » July 31st, 2021, 3:58 pm

No, you are not alone. I have read of climate scientists sent into depression or reduced to tears as they see how their findings are ignored.

Perhaps humans are just not clever enough to get out of this one. We have provided free education, but have not taught the basics of how life on earth is sustained, and how our actions might end comfortable civilization by filling nature with pollutants, and concreting it over.

As individuals, worries about paying the rent tomorrow over ride less tangible problems that are further away. This seems built into our brains. Many in the current government surely understand the problem (despite there being many other fact-deniers in parliament) but still they persist in building roads, airports etc.

Our economic model that requires infinite economic growth will surely lead to our demise. Even now you often hear talk of "sustainable growth" with little discussion of how infinite growth can be possible on a finite planet

I own shares, I'm a private investor. I like the products of capitalism; whether a fancy phone or driving off on holiday. But our entire financial and economic model is not compatible with our society still being here in a few hundred years.
.

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431708

Postby AWOL » July 31st, 2021, 4:48 pm

I find it reassuring not to alone in my concern. I had hoped, but not seriously expected, that the opportunity would be grasped to have a reset and to come out of lockdown with a real drive not to support the airline industry, to limit ourselves to one return flight a year, to take make polluters pay, to invest in green infrastructure and to restart the economy on a sustainable footing. I think we need more environmental crimes and punishments to be included in statute too.

Based on extensive corporate/multinational experience I don't think ESG investing is going to deliver more than greenwashing. However I have seen RoHS produce results and I think it's possible to legislate and introduce sufficient stick (or carrot) to change our trajectory.

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431726

Postby Itsallaguess » July 31st, 2021, 5:19 pm

AWOL wrote:
Am I alone in being anxious, fearful and panicked by the ecological course we are on?

When I find myself surrounded by people that just shrug about the situation I am seriously questioning my sanity.


I think it would take a particularly hard heart not to see the huge contradiction in a global financial system that worships at the alter of GDP, and a resource-limited world that's clearly struggling to cope with the human-demands placed upon it.

With that said, I don't think worrying about it can be worth it, if by doing so you end up feeling 'anxious, fearful and panicked'...

Do what you can as an individual, and support processes that might help to turn the tide, and beyond that, enjoy your own time on the planet...

I had the snip after we had our only child, as I very strongly believe that the number of people on the planet will ultimately have a larger bearing on how we survive as a species than Tesco charging 5p for a carrier bag...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431729

Postby AWOL » July 31st, 2021, 5:34 pm

I've had my children and they are my greatest source of joy. I just think we need to get mainstream politicians seriously engaged. The Greens are a fringe party with some very woolly economics so I think the mainstream parties need to be forced to wake up or the Green party needs to wake up and get mainstream.

I agree that worrying about things that are beyond my control is counterproductive but maybe we all need to stop thinking it's too big for us to control.

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431745

Postby ReformedCharacter » July 31st, 2021, 7:00 pm

Although I don't deny the problems I think there is scope for optimism. I believe that by the time my children, who are in their 20's reach middle age humans will have developed - among other technologies - artificial intelligence that will vastly increase the human ability to solve many of the problems that this planet faces. Although nuclear fusion energy production is always described as 30 years away, it's day will come and eventually energy, at least in the quantities that we use it today, will become very inexpensive such that it no longer a constraint in the way that it is today. That alone will transform our abilities as a species, almost anything can be achieved with sufficient cheap energy and that includes climate remediation, cleaning the oceans of plastic, cleaning the environment and providing sufficient resources to the human population to remove material poverty. Artificial intelligence will, I believe, follow a Moore's law trajectory and provide opportunities for technological development that we can only dream of today. At the moment were just at the beginning of the curve.

RC

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431746

Postby Midsmartin » July 31st, 2021, 7:11 pm

I hope you are right. However, plentiful low carbon energy from nuclear fusion could also be used to renew our onslaught on everything else; depletion of other resources, mining, polluting more, destroying remaining forests, mining the sea floor with catastrophic results on sea life. It's ok, they will say, we have fixed climate change. But climate change is just one symptom of our exponential growth, not the cause of the problem. I recall an article where someone calculated that even with zero carbon energy, with 3% growth for a couple of centuries, merely the heat resulting from the use of all that energy would be enough to cause catastrophic climate change. We have to get out of the growth habit.

We need low carbon energy. We also need to treat effect as an expensive scarce resource.

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431750

Postby Dod101 » July 31st, 2021, 7:29 pm

I suspect that as always, we humans will leave it to the last minute before making real change but then it will come very quickly. Over even the centuries that we can count, human ingenuity has overcome most things. The young people in my family (that is five grand daughters between the ages of 17 and 22) do not seem to be in the least concerned although they must be exposed just as much as the rest of us to the messages about the environment, climate change and so on. Personally I have no intention of spending my remaining years worrying about these things. Neither am I convinced that electric cars are going to be the answer, although there is no doubt that air pollution is in itself a major problem. I am on the side of RC in terms of being optimistic.

Dod

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431758

Postby dealtn » July 31st, 2021, 7:47 pm

Midsmartin wrote:
I own shares, I'm a private investor. I like the products of capitalism; whether a fancy phone or driving off on holiday. But our entire financial and economic model is not compatible with our society still being here in a few hundred years.
.


Do you think a non-capitalist economic model would better deliver investment in new technological advances and the means of reducing the things that concern you environmentally?

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431759

Postby JohnB » July 31st, 2021, 7:49 pm

People lived through wars with loved ones fighting overseas, and under the threat of nuclear destruction during the Cold War, without worrying that much. Its just not in the human psyche to worry about the future, as the harvest could always fail or the plague come. In the same way people will always value the present value of things even if it leads to the lack of them in future, hence the tragedy of the commons.

You won't change human behaviour, or its followon, politics, you can only hope for technological fixes.

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431765

Postby 88V8 » July 31st, 2021, 8:06 pm

Itsallaguess wrote:I had the snip after we had our only child, as I very strongly believe that the number of people on the planet will ultimately have a larger bearing on how we survive as a species than Tesco charging 5p for a carrier bag...

Unless there is a concerted effort to reduce the human population, everything else is just noise.
And yet in the few countries where the birth rate has fallen below replacement, instead of being greeted with relief it's regarded as a problem.
And BoJo has just announced yet another child, as if that's something to celebrate.

Already the middle east is on the verge of water wars.
In future, Europe will be overwhelmed with migrants from the primitive countries with excessive birthrates, running from rising sea levels. I'm glad I won't be here to see it.

And yet with COP26 upcoming, the subject of population has zero coverage whether from politicians or the media.
How very stupid we are.

V8 (deliberately no children)

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431769

Postby ReformedCharacter » July 31st, 2021, 8:17 pm

JohnB wrote:
You won't change human behaviour, or its followon, politics, you can only hope for technological fixes.

Not sure that's true. If you had said 'you won't change human nature' then I would agree. Human behaviour and it's politics does change, often led by the young. For example until 1970 there wasn't a minister of the environment. The world's first minister of the environment was Peter Walker, a Conservative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_minister

RC

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431771

Postby ReformedCharacter » July 31st, 2021, 8:33 pm

88V8 wrote:Unless there is a concerted effort to reduce the human population, everything else is just noise.

V8 (deliberately no children)

It's happening already. Not a reduction in the human population but a reduction in the rate of growth:

Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_rate_1950%E2%80%932050.svg

The global human population is projected to peak during the mid-21st century and decline by 2100

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth

AFAIK population growth decreases as standards of living increase.

RC

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431774

Postby AWOL » July 31st, 2021, 8:45 pm

ReformedCharacter wrote:
JohnB wrote:
You won't change human behaviour, or its followon, politics, you can only hope for technological fixes.

Not sure that's true. If you had said 'you won't change human nature' then I would agree. Human behaviour and it's politics does change, often led by the young. For example until 1970 there wasn't a minister of the environment. The world's first minister of the environment was Peter Walker, a Conservative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_minister

RC


Thatcher, of all people, was the first mainstream politician to go green although she sadly later back tracked. Still she took Green issue out of the fringe which was her lasting contribution, although not far enough into the mainstream!

Just before the 1976 race relations act was passed there was a poll backed by, if I remember right, 70% of Britons who believed in repatriating black people. I think this shows how far we can progress where there is a will. What was once bleeding obvious is now bloody offensive.

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431779

Postby AsleepInYorkshire » July 31st, 2021, 10:17 pm

We have some huge issues. Not least that there is an enormous gulf between the facilities that "we" take for granted and aren't available to huge numbers elsewhere in the world. Water, power, food being the fundamental needs. Education, peaceful surroundings and access to health care.

Whilst that imbalance exists there's no real chance that we can reduce world wide ecological issues.

And that's a first world problem in my opinion. But if someone told me tomorrow all I had worked for had to be thrown away I'd rise up. But why shouldn't the rest of the world have access to the same as we enjoy in the West?

AiY

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Re: Ecological Apocalypse Damning or Madness

#431823

Postby 88V8 » August 1st, 2021, 11:30 am

AsleepInYorkshire wrote:But why shouldn't the rest of the world have access to the same as we enjoy in the West?

No reason.
But it's in their own hands.
Many countries are environmentally inhospitable and can't really support the current population level. Climate change won't help.
The situation is exacerbated with primitive tribal and religious wars, and the West has no further appetite for intervention.
And then, the black nations seem incapable of electing decent governments.
Mind you, a few hundred years ago we weren't exactly poster boys for peaceful coexistence.

Most countries could be better places to live with fewer people.
Life would be better.
The air would be cleaner.
The country would be greener.

Fewer, better, cleaner, greener.

V8


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