In this week’s newsletter: As France and Spain battle huge fires in this summer of relentless heat, will it be enough to spur us to take action?

What people are not getting is that we can’t turn this back – the CO2 to a large part remains in the air for thousands of years,” said Rahmstorf. “Some people think we can wait and, when it gets too bad, then we reduce emissions and things will get better again. People don’t realise that we can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.”

  • Jax@sh.itjust.works
    11·
    2 days ago

    Is there some reason nuclear fission can’t be leveraged as a form of energy? Or, I guess I should ask, what are the potential energy sources we might be able to leverage?

    I’m just struggling to believe we’re all just fucked and nothing can be done, I can’t accept that.

    • Tiresia@slrpnk.netEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Not enough minerals. All the uranium and thorium that has been prospected would not come close to being enough to fuel carbon capture.

      To be clear here, for carbon capture we would have to produce ten times more energy than the entirety of human civilization consumed over the past two centuries, within a handful of decades. Current green energy infrastructure - including the massive solar power boom of the past couple years - is less than 1% of the size it would need to be.

        • Tiresia@slrpnk.netEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          On a personal level: prepare a bug-out bag and practice migration; hoard enough food to last triple your household a couple weeks; get used to poverty; vote for the leftmost viable candidate in every election and primary;

          learn useful skills for a disrupted society such as first aid, de-escalation, crisis counseling, safely preparing nearly bad food, physical endurance and practical strength, mending, DIY, public speaking, herding large groups of people, recognizing “authorities” and other groups’ hostile intentions, violence, transformative justice, etc. ;

          organize with local anarchists/leftists and wean yourself off the capitalist economy; learn to take care of your own emotional state and how to cope in a healthy way with huge amounts of stress; learn languages that will prove useful in mass migration; etc.

          We are human. For millions of years our ancestors have lived through cycles of plenty and famine, surviving plagues and crop failures and massive droughts. We have evolved to handle crises such as this.

        • fake_meows@sopuli.xyz
          32·
          1 day ago

          You need to look for hope outside of the physical material realm.

          For example, people can care more, write more beautiful books and plays, invent a super cool new game that’s better than chess, come up with all kinds of wonderful creative stuff…there is no limit to human empathy, meaning, quality of experience etc.

          Like, right now in the united states around 60% of the population is semi illiterate and most people are uneducated. There is an absolute ton of progress that can be made on the human development side. There is almost an endless number of things that need someone to care about them.

          A lot of our “stuff” doesn’t make us happy, it’s just dopamine.

          Things could be so much better if we could slow down.