‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost - iPolitics
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How to say Marx was right without saying “Marx was right”.
Less people accept climate change in Canada today than 20 years ago. If we couldn’t do anything about it then, why would now be different?
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the focus on politics, economics, and law are all destined to fail because they are based around humans. They’re designed to guide humans, but we’ve left out the foundation of our existence, which is nature, clean air, pure water, rich soil, food, and sunlight. That’s the foundation of the way we live and, when we construct legal, economic and political systems, they have to be built around protecting those very things, but they’re not.
Powerful truth!
It was the climate scientists that agreed +1.5 degrees was the limit we shouldn’t cross, and yes, it’s too late.
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Let’s be clear about something; climate scientists almost universally agree that there is no such thing as “winning” or “losing” the fight against climate change (Suzuki, for the record, is a zoologist, not a climate scientist). This isn’t a game, there’s no referee, and no one gets a trophy at the end.
The battle against climate change is about mitigating harm. The worse we do, the more harm there will be. But there is never a point where it is “too late”. The car is going to crash, but the sooner you hit the brakes, the less damaging the impact will be. Everything we do to push the needle will save lives. There is never a point where we get to throw up our hands and succumb to the comforting fantasy that it’s “too late” to change anything.
I have a lot of respect for Suzuki, and I don’t blame him for feeling defeated with everything that’s happening, but spreading this kind of message is, dangerous, damaging, and flies entirely in the face of the science.
It was the climate scientists that agreed +1.5 degrees was the threshold we shouldn’t cross, and yes, it’s too late.
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How to say Marx was right without saying “Marx was right”.
I think he’s right, but he’s also a real asshole and lives in a mansion in Vancouver and likely creates more environmental damage than the average human
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If that’s what we’re meaning when we talk about “tipping points”, yes, they exist. But as you yourself said, “We don’t necessarily understand exactly how close we are.” The idea that passing some arbitrary line like “1.5 degrees” is a point of no return is unscientific nonsense, and that’s what the vast majority of people mean when they say “tipping points.”
And the point is, none of that changes the need to keep working towards improvement. Every fraction of a degree less the planet heats will make a difference. Even as monumental climate changes occur, those changes can be lessened, their impact reduced, by any amount that we decarbonise the atmosphere.
If you’re under the impression that I’m arguing against climate change being real in any way shape or form, or that I’m arguing against it being utterly catastrophic, you’ve missed my point so badly that you might as well be reading it in a different language. My point is very, very simple; there is never a point where we get to give up.
No matter what happens, every effort to reduce the damage to our climate will save lives. Things can always be worse, and because things can always be worse it ontologically follows that things can always be better, even when the definition of "better’ is “fewer people die.”
The fight isn’t lost or won. Get those concepts out of your mind. Suzuki - as brilliant as he may be - is an idiot for invoking them like this. He’s speaking about a very limited, very specific piece of the fight, but he should have understood that the public would take his words entirely out of context. The people who want to poison and destroy our planet for profit are, right now, actively pushing the propaganda that the battle against climate change is over. They are wrong, and they are lying. The battle against climate change is a battle to reduce harm, and you can always reduce harm, now matter how great the scale of the eventual harm may be.
I think it helps to look at other problems caused by fossil fuel use. Higher CO2 concentrations make breathing air worse. Ocean acidification kills fish etc.
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It was the climate scientists that agreed +1.5 degrees was the threshold we shouldn’t cross, and yes, it’s too late.
It’s not too late to make things worse by giving up! /s
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In not an appropriate analogy. We are not just the people in the car, we are the whole neighborhood.
Even if the people in the car cannot prevent a crash by braking, they can still prevent further damage to people and property by braking as much as possible while within their means.
Yeah, it’s more about the people in the car taking their foot off the gas so they don’t get going fast enough to crash through multiple houses and burn the whole neighborhood down. Still worth doing even if we’re well past the point of hitting the brakes preventing any damage.
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Less people accept climate change in Canada today than 20 years ago. If we couldn’t do anything about it then, why would now be different?
That’s how I feel, like it might not be too late to do something but people just don’t care. And if we don’t do this together its pointless.
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So, how long do we have left?
that’s a loaded and optimistic question. With the way the world is going currently being taken out by climate change and only climate change is awfully optimistic. I think that would be the best case scenario at this point.
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How to say Marx was right without saying “Marx was right”.
Fuck that. It’s never lost, it’s just that we are constantly heading towards worse outcomes.
If we as humanity start taking it seriously tomorrow, it would still be a victory over only starting in a decade.
It’s not lost, it’s just getting worse, and that should make people want to fight.
saying that the fight is lost is just creating more disengagement and hopelessness.
I like the saying “The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best is today.” Because it is almost universally true about any long term goal.
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How to say Marx was right without saying “Marx was right”.
Let climate change end humanity, we fucking deserve it
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Fuck that. It’s never lost, it’s just that we are constantly heading towards worse outcomes.
If we as humanity start taking it seriously tomorrow, it would still be a victory over only starting in a decade.
It’s not lost, it’s just getting worse, and that should make people want to fight.
saying that the fight is lost is just creating more disengagement and hopelessness.
I like the saying “The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best is today.” Because it is almost universally true about any long term goal.
But we’re not starting tomorrow. It’s not that we’re clueless, we know what to do and why, but we don’t.
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How to say Marx was right without saying “Marx was right”.
Has been for ages. It’s now question of how bad, and we are still making it worse.
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But we’re not starting tomorrow. It’s not that we’re clueless, we know what to do and why, but we don’t.
We have started to reduce how much worse we make it, and a fair bit of progress has been made there in some countries, UK carbon emissions are less than half what they were per capita several decades ago.
When I was young we had a fireplace and would often burn coal in winter. Now I have a heat pump to warm my entire house by extracting thermal energy from the atmosphere.
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I think he’s right, but he’s also a real asshole and lives in a mansion in Vancouver and likely creates more environmental damage than the average human
If I had mansion money I would buy land to live in a self built mud hut.
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Let climate change end humanity, we fucking deserve it
The problem is humanity is taking most of the other species in the world with it. Just the methane/permafrost feedback loop out of dozens of feedback loops will usher in the level of warming and ensuing extinctions experienced during the Permian/Triassic die off.
The ruling elite are incinerating all of us for profit, and they don’t give a shit.
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Fuck that. It’s never lost, it’s just that we are constantly heading towards worse outcomes.
If we as humanity start taking it seriously tomorrow, it would still be a victory over only starting in a decade.
It’s not lost, it’s just getting worse, and that should make people want to fight.
saying that the fight is lost is just creating more disengagement and hopelessness.
I like the saying “The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best is today.” Because it is almost universally true about any long term goal.
You are using the broadest possible definition of “lost.”
Lost as in no more human civilization. It doesn’t matter when you start doing stuff, that future is coming. We could maybe slow it at this point, but not much else and even that is up for debate with all the tipping points being reached. They will have a far greater effect on the climate than anything that we do now.
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The water wars will start far sooner than that
Pakistan and India, Egypt and Ethiopia. Various states in the southwest are looking to pop off when the civil war starts up. Water wars are starting NOW.
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But we’re not starting tomorrow. It’s not that we’re clueless, we know what to do and why, but we don’t.
We are light years a head of where we were a century ago. And I hope in a few decades it will be true about today.
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You are using the broadest possible definition of “lost.”
Lost as in no more human civilization. It doesn’t matter when you start doing stuff, that future is coming. We could maybe slow it at this point, but not much else and even that is up for debate with all the tipping points being reached. They will have a far greater effect on the climate than anything that we do now.
Human civilization is bound to die at some point. If we give up now it will just happen faster and with more suffering. If we fight we will still improve things, maybe not everything will be okay, but when has it ever been?
