It’s increasingly looking like we are losing the fight against climate change. Is there even anything left we could do?
It’s not win or lose, but a gradient. Every tenth of a degree that we make it less hot, will save many lives. Fight for that. Every tenth of a degree counts
Don’t have kids
Every bit you do counts. Get solar panels, plant a tree
kill a ceo,switch your search engine to ecosia, and turn off any ai feature you can. If you have $100 to invest, you can help fund solar installation around the world (and give both of us $50 in referral money) https://www.energea.com/get-started/referral?r=auth0|69f2a7e65132d9b12ee61e3dI think the only thing we can do about this (apart from organized movements) is to not give money to these energy corporations, we should all try to get solar panels and build off-grid sustainable energy that we can freely share and transport to family and friends.
There’s always something left to do. If the world’s going to shit, start preparing for that. Not the “AnCap” individualistic kind of prepping, but an anarcist, communal kind. I’ve been where you are now. I think the most important thing I realized a while ago is that the majority of things you can do to prepare yourself and those around you, are also more sustainable globally speaking.
Start cycling to work and you are prepared for the fuel shortages, while also reducing emissions in the here and now. Start a garden (or better yet, a communal one). Lately I’ve been getting into LoRa mesh radios for unregulated, distributed communication independent of any centralized infrastructure. Capitalism will continue to decay so you might want to have your own means of communicating and coordinating remotely.
Build communal resilience and do what you can to disengage yourself and your community from the fossil capitalist leviathan. It will die, try not to go down with it.
Start growing potatoes and a few varieties of beans, learn how to ferment vodka, and how to safely run a distillation to get alcohol strong enough to sterilise bandages or run a generator (<95% or so)
Get to know your neighbours and look out for one another. Being the person with big ratchet straps, wood planks and tarps, who’s also willing to help batten down the hatches is a good way of being part of the community, learn how to make flood defences and how to not die in one.
Get on a first aid course that goes on for more than just a day. Keep your first aid kit and your skills up to date.
Learn to maintain things without killing yourself by touching something charged (physically or electrically) or damaging the thing you’re trying to fix.
Get solar panels, charge caravan batteries to run inverters for when the rolling blackouts come.
Find out how to make the chalk paint they put over shop windows for the coming months when the sunlight is unbearable, IR blocking window films also help to keep the indoors from heating up as harshly, while lowering heat loss in the winter, the paint is cheaper but can be washed off when it rains, window films are easier if you’re not on the ground floor.
Switch to a renewable energy provider and cancel your amazon/whatever food delivery things you may use (I genuinely dont get why someone would pay double to order a private taxi for a fast food slop meal in the first place let alone the environmental impact of someone taxi-ing food around a city.)
Pester the shit out of your local politicians to focus more on environmental protection, and dont fall for the “voting is pointless, every party is bad” bullshit, because the worst and dumbest people you know are voting for the worst and the dumbest candidates that are ripping the copper out of the walls as we speak.
If things don’t get to 3°C and ~2bn deaths by 2050 it’ll be through the efforts of the people in power actually being forced to give a shit.
What you’re describing is how to be resilient at a personal and community level which is well and good. It is also expensive, not accessible for many, and involves basically admitting defeat.
“Pestering” your local politicians and voting for the liberal capitalist party over the regressive capitalist party is not proving to be a sufficient formula for change. Relying on personal consumption changes like “don’t buy from Amazon” is also insufficient and essentially a capitalist myth that the onus of climate change is on the consumers.
We need revolutionary individual and mass action and to disassemble the capitalist domination systems that are baking our planet. There is no other way through where we make it out alive.
We need revolutionary individual and mass action
Ok, describe the action. Do you want me to describe how to organise a protest without the surveillance state quashing it or having the local police harass you and legally enter your home to search through your belongings to find a reason to arrest you?
Or are you thinking of more direct action like those kids who keep going around pulling down flock cameras or burgling their way into the offices of the many arms of the military industrial complex, to then be arrested and charged as domestic terrorists?
Or do you want me to fill a fire extinguisher with orange paint?
Glue myself to a main road to make the proletariat late for work and sit idling their cars?
You want to be real? Then treat this like we’re going to survive, but treat it like the only way we’re going to do so is through actual community standing up for their rights as a group,
Small acts of defiance from fringe groups that do nothing but feed into the atomisation of society through mass media hysteria and put more bodies into prisons.
Relying on personal consumption changes like “don’t buy from Amazon” is also insufficient and essentially a capitalist myth that the onus of climate change is on the consumers
I’m not doing it to sound like BP with their “Carbon footprint” bullshit, I’m saying the less people feeding money into this modern day slave labour business, the better off we are as a society. The lessened environmental impact is a bonus even if it is just a drop in the ocean.
“Pestering” your local politicians and voting for the liberal capitalist party over the regressive capitalist party is not proving to be a sufficient formula for change.
Ok, so instead of putting people in power who can enact change, we should do what exactly?
Continue to talk about it on a message board until we say something egregious enough for the clanker currently scalping our words to flag up a “person of interest” label and have someone come knocking?
If you’re going to make a post saying “nuh uh, we need to dismantle the system” then please elaborate on how you intend to do so and what comes after, how you intend to actually survive the future climate without going completely bougie isolationist and starting a homestead out in the countryside where you grow your own food, make your own power, build your own house and somehow do so with no money, bo community and without dying of preventable diseases.
What you’re describing is how to be resilient at a personal and community level which is well and good. It is also expensive, not accessible for many, and involves basically admitting defeat.
Yes it needa ressources, but so does being dependent on corporations and states for your food energy education etc. I feel like aiming for community resilience is of the ways we can do prefiguration, so I dont see it as admitting defeat.
I actually see it as one of the ways to organize and get ressources for what you are describing here:
We need revolutionary individual and mass action and to disassemble the capitalist domination systems that are baking our planet alive. There is no other way through where we make it out alive.
Solar, battery, EV, make sure your appliances are efficient and electric, pay for green energy. Encourage your neighbours to do the same.
Other than that, brace for impact. Seek out a local “climate cafe”, they likely have resources to help:
Do you want answers that show whats possible to do or more emotional answers/support? Because coming to this realization can make one feel extremely powerless and sad and many other things. Its hard to know that one of the global struggles of our century was lost despite the effort we and so many others put into it.
Sending you hugs from stranger
Id like to know whats possible. I got into anarchism trough collapseology (its a study field about the collapse of ancient civilizations). Due to their hierarchical nature, states are bad at reacting to changes in its environment. The response to climate change MUST come from the bottom, but there are just too many people who live in ignorance. I feel like giving up sometimes.
When the 2018 paper came out, I already moved to higher grounds.
Now we are trying to emigrate to even colder regions, since those are going to be the only arable places left. Petroleum capitalists fucked this planet and our future, but I still haven’t given up hope for humanity, or whatever comes reign over. I did all I could to admonish, prep, and solidify, but you can see how unsuccessful I was.
I took an environmental biology class back in 1987. It was known back then that the changes we have seen were already baked into the system - and we have been polluting quite a bit since then. So it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
That said we still have to reduce emissions or it will continue to get worse.
Sadly the left has choked out much of efforts that could have helped. The switch to natural gas from coal was hindered by opposition to pipelines.
You have to list all the airborne carbon that could have been prevented by nuclear power as put there by left wingers clinging to fundamentalist purity tests.
They are not the ones building the plants that produced the emissions, but they got in the way of picking the low hanging fruit.
If anyone reading this hasn’t yet done so, one thing I recommend to everyone is that to the extent that it’s possible you should give up everything that involves burning fossil fuels.
I’m still indirectly responsible for some diesel use for example when I ride the bus, and when I buy rice that was transported thousands of miles before it got to me. When you’ve eliminated the easy stuff from your personal life such as driving and air travel it’s those difficult problems that remain which are the ones that need will working on in order to help people prepare for the worst of the catastrophe.
So I think local politics and co-operative food production are places to look if you want to do something.
when I buy rice that was transported thousands of miles before it got to me.
People like to complain about container ships, but they’re ridiculously efficient at transporting cargo, because they transport so much in one go. If you use a container ship to transport only rice, you could probably transport something like 200 million kilograms.
Road transport produces something like 70% of emissions generated by freight transport globally. Sea is only 20%.
That means it’s often less polluting to buy something made on the other side of the world, than from a few hundred miles away, depending on how close you live to the sea/port or a railway station.
local politics and co-operative food production
Meh. The benefits of scale drive down prices, but one of the ways they do that is also by lowering fuel consumption. If you’re producing everything on small farms, it’s likely you’ll use more fuel and create more emissions, than larger farms which can produce at scale and are hyper-efficient. For example, bigger farms use drones and nutrient maps, which allow them to be very targetted in where they sow seeds and spread fertiliser, which means they use much less fertiliser, which means less fuel used.
Farming efficiently also really isn’t something for amateurs. Plenty of large scale farmers have engineering degrees for that very reason, or employ people who do.
While there are several points on which I might disagree, I’ll confine myself to pointing out that in response to the phrase “co-operative food production” you unthinkingly assumed that it implies small-scale, amateurish, and inefficient. You may wish to let your imagination get a little more exercise.
Hey maybe I misunderstood your comment, but your comment seemed to suggest it’s something we layman should look into if we wanted to do something, but if so you might as well suggest people look into car manufacturing.
The problem with farming is that it has become one of the most advanced sectors out there. It’s drones, autonomous tractors, AI, micro-targeting, lasers, ground penetrating radar, it’s three story floating factories that produce finished goods in harbour. It’s far far above the skill level of most of us here, especially if you want to produce the volumes required without high emissions, even more so as the climate changes and soil degradation continues unabated on a global scale.
We’re hurtling towards famines across the globe and all the unrest that causes. Billions are already vulnerable. It is possible we will simply not be able to produce enough food, sooner rather than later.
We’re so fucked. I need to go to sleep.
No, we already lost. But every gramm of CO2 that is emmited or not emmited counts for something.
