Headline of the year contender:
I have a problem with this.
The power of youth is actually going to do fuck all against the power of the climate. But I guess this makes us feel good having a nice picture on Time. When the inevitable wordwide castastrophe occurs I’ll be sure to convince myself I did my bit by admiring the stand we all took by admiring this cover.
A year ago, she was the only one protesting CC on Fridays. Now we routinely see millions around the world protesting every week. None of these kids are old enough to vote yet. Change is coming and she represents that, cover or not.
Turns out people look out for their own self interest. Boomers don’t give a fuck because they’ll be dead before anything really terrible happens. I’m in my mid 30’s and I’m terrified… and the teenagers are (quite correctly) marching in the streets en masse.
I know how bad this sucks, but we’re bumping up against immutable laws of human nature here. If the time frame was shorter on climate change we’d have done something about it a long time ago.
Yep. Remember when the ozone layer was disappearing in the 80’s? The entire world came up with a solution b/c we HAD to. But like you said, the Boomers don’t give a fuck.
Exactly. The Ozone layer was scary so humanity did something… fast.
One of the ONLY silver linings in this whole situation is that when the rubber really does hit the road I suspect human beings will demonstrate a crazy talent for capturing carbon. There are a lot of forests we could plant, there are tree species we could genetically engineer to capture carbon at unnatural levels (possibly creating other unintended consequences of course), and that doesn’t even get into mechanical carbon capture.
Mark my words, when things get super bad humans will find a way to surprise us. We’re incredibly nasty creatures, but we’re also very inventive when cornered.
My fear is it’s too little too late. And Time covers convince those of us who want to be convinced that we still have time to make changes so lets just carry on as we are. IMHO only massive loss of life and destruction is going to make us do the things we need to do. The only question that I have about that is will some of us have a choice in how we manage the aftermath or not? I fear it will be a small number if any that will.
It’s a lot of hubris to assume we’ll be able to geoengineer our way out of this once the damages start to get more severe and immediate. Seems much more likely to me that we’ll have linked social disruption on a global scale that makes the necessary coordination for solutions impossible.
Fossil fuels are a finite supply so we will have to do something whether we like it or not. But nothing will get done until Boomers fuck off and die. Polls show that the younger you are, the more important addressing CC is. Right now, the Boomers are resisting any changes to society due to CC. Because of that, corporations/politicians are slow to act. But when they die off, people that are now in their 40’s and 50’s will be far more willing to go along w/ societal changes.
My biggest concern are bees going extinct. If they die off, WAAF. For real.
Yeah this is actually at least as scary as climate change. We need to lay off the pesticides right away. Fuck the yields. The good news on this is that we can fix the Bee problem with government without too much agricultural disruption pretty easily. Basically we just need to ban a huge swath of commonly used farming chemicals. Yields will fall, but prices will rise. Food is unnaturally cheap right now, and I honestly think it being cheaper than at any point in human history is pure evil for both the economy and the environment… Food costs probably need to go up 200-300% for agriculture to run a sustainable model.
And even then, it may not matter, depending on whose lives are being lost. Not enough will care about billions of brown people perishing in southeast Asia.
Honestly if we can’t geoengineer our way out of it WAAF… because there’s basically no chance we get to do anything large scale until the Boomers are dead. In 10-15 years we’ll have already blown our carbon budget. We can either get really inventive and tech our way out of this problem the way humanity always has or it’s great filter time and this is why no aliens have visited yet.
The rest of the world isn’t that poor anymore. A few places are, but most aren’t. They aren’t going to take this laying down. I fully expect to see people full on engineering the atmosphere if the effects get 10-25% more severe than they are right now. This right here is definitely the end of the beginning on Climate Change. Next up is the war on carbon… with that hitting full scale around 2030.
Nothing will get done when Boomers fuck and die. Your still asking those people in the future to take a huge hit to their standard of living. That can’t be sold now and it ain’t going to be sold in the future. We will be forced to deal with this by nature not by Time Covers. Hopefully some technological miracle happens because socities and their governments across the world sure as hell aren’t going to be the answer.