Britain has just approved restarting fracking. Germany wants to demolish ancient forest to mine more lignite for power stations. The US wants to save the coal mining industry. The North West passage is almost ice free in summer. Australia's coal exports are booming.<p>IPCC thinks it will need 2.5% of global GDP for 20 years to fix.<p>Act now? It still doesn't seem like any of the world's electable politicians even believe the problem yet. Just in greenwash and talking about GDP growth.<p>The next generation is fucked.<p>Edit: That's very disappointing to see. Submission goes from top 5 on front page to nowhere, yet isn't flagged.
I was reading a blog post about problems in academia which said the following in the first paragraph:<p>> There’s a narrative I find kind of troubling, but that unfortunately seems to be growing more common in science. The core idea is that the mere existence of perverse incentives is a valid and sufficient reason to knowingly behave in an antisocial way, just as long as one first acknowledges the existence of those perverse incentives.<p><a href="http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incentives-its-you/" rel="nofollow">http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-inc...</a><p>As a cyclist who's slowly switching to a mostly vegetarian diet, partly to reduce my carbon emissions, I find this quote to apply equally well to people who believe that climate change is a problem but seem to want to wait for the government to act before they do much.<p>Yes, maybe my efforts are "wasted" in some respect, but I don't think I'm missing much anything valuable anyway by cycling for example, so that eliminates the downside in my view.
It's past time to recognize that this is happening. We're going to experience the fallout of a rapidly warming planet. We need everyone to switch from prevention mode to cure mode. The political will to avoid this just isn't, and never will be there.
It’s really disappointing that the political systems we have don’t encourage long term stewardship of our resources.<p>I don’t see any kind of reform happening in the US until negative consequences are felt by a significant chunk of the population.