One of my classes for my Ecology Degree is an Environmental future planning class and it's bleak, folks. Here are some highlights of the ideas my professor has put forward for planning for the future:
Using AI to help predict all the natural disasters. Because AI is totally going to save us folks.
Floating Parks. Lol.
More bike lanes even though we live in a part of the country that is massively spread out, unbearably hot, humid and hilly. Sure mate, I'm going to bike my 2 hour by car commute on a bike in sauna conditions.
Ride share companies where you pay a subscription instead of owning a car because yeah sure private companies getting more money and the public owning less ourselves is totally the solution instead of JUST MAKING IT PUBLIC TRANSPORT FFS WE HAD TRAMS IN THE 1900s AND THEY WORKED FINE.
Asking right-wingers really nicely to take climate change seriously.
Yet another Paris agreement style thing asking countries to commit to a weak target that they'll just ignore anyway.
Really depressing shit like "Ok so climate change is inevitable so what are some ways we can adapt to constant natural disasters and food scarcity." Like not even planning to fix it or prevent it. Just accepting it as "well it's going to happen nothing we can do." when we sure as fuck should be doing whatever possible to avoid such a future (but of course we can't, because the only solution is communism and assertive resistance and liberals would rather kill the entire global ecosystem than actively fight for survival)
So basically if you want insight on how liberals are going to deal with climate change the answer is about as well as they did with COVID. So basically limp half solutions that they give up on in the spirit of comprising with reactionaries with a focus on mild damage control rather than prevention and repair.
The sad thing is that that the students themselves are putting forward actually good solutions that are communist without realising they're communist, but the lecturer just kind of smiles and nods and goes on to the next topic as if to say "Yes you're right but I can't say it because I work for capitalists."
The more I study the more apparent it becomes that there is no way a capitalist system can fight this. The west cannot fight this even though it's people know the solutions they simply can't do them due to the oppressive nature of our system. Thank god for China because it's looking bad otherwise.
Climate change, constant natural disasters and food scarcity are already happening right here, right now. There's no reason to fix or prevent that, unless you think inventing a time machine is an option. Even if we stopped all fossil fuel consumption right now at this moment, we'd still need to adapt to a fundamentally changed climate, more natural disasters and food scarcity.
It is fixable, and that narrative is just pushed to avoid taking the necessary steps to reversing the damage because it requires strict regulations of capitalist wastefulness and excess.
If you've somehow found a way to capture the millions of tons of CO2 in our atmosphere that we produced over the last two hundred years then you should share it with everybody, but unless that happens we are going to be hard-pressed to reverse the 2 degrees of global warming we are already at.
And like come on, we're communists here you could have at least come up with something more radical than "strict regulations of capitalism". Every aspect of human society in its largest form and it's smallest one would have to be completely rediscovered and redirected towards the goal of being sustainable if we want to have any chance at surviving. We need a more radical break with the state of things than ever before.
We literally reversed the hole in the ozone layer by banning CFCs. You underestimate how much of this is just due to overproduction and for profit exploitation of the environment. Once you take the unrelenting demand of infinite growth and production out of the equation you can actually get shit done.
If resources were carefully managed and carbon recapturing in the form of mass restoring of natural vegetation was undertaken you could easily coax the Earth back into stability.
The problem is capitalists do the exact opposite right now and the Earth can't keep up. They have increased land clearing, They have increased unnecessary meat overconsumption and it's all just for investor portfolios. There are multiple studies that have shown that as soon as we get our boot off of the environment even just a bit, it bounces back and starts to repair, the average person doesn't even have to give up anything. But it never lasts long because a capitalist economy is run by people that want number to go up and lobby to be able to carve into the environment as much as they want.
Just mediating here - you’re both getting at the same point - albeit from different levels of optimism - so I don’t want either of you catching strays.
Unfortunately, peppersky is correct, we’ve absolutely blown past the understood “point of no return“, and not just in a minor way like “ahhhh we eased off but didn’t quite make it to the 2c goal” but in a major way that we’re continuing to accelerate to this day - but if we stopped science at the “understood” we’d never get anywhere. So in order to survive the present moment and make it to the next we need: science, policy, and the abolition of capitalism by any means necessary. Science to inform ways to capture carbon, desalinate drinking water, adapt food systems, etc to try and halt the exacerbation of ecological destruction/protect communities. We need policy (very broadly speaking) to protect vulnerable groups- otherwise the crises of the coming years will be used to exploit them and extract wealth in unprecedented ways. Lastly, to ensure any long-term stability in the science and policy, capitalism needs to end, overconsumption needs to end, sacrificing the many for the comfort of the few needs to end - it has thrown off the natural balance of the biosystem and will be the death of us all.
At present- it’s a matter of resource allocation. Do we spend time and money in science? Policy? Overthrowing capitalism? Movements have been co-opted, capitalist government efforts are dismantled by capitalists, policy-makers and scientists have relented to funders or been silenced through other means. So at this point, I’m hammering on option number 3 as a means to support number 2, and understand both are needed to have success with 1. Science under capitalism is not going to achieve the conditions necessary for its survival, but its high priests will continue sacrifice us and our futures in the hopes that it will. Frankly there need to be actionable steps that can be taken by the international proletariat independent of their governments - at a personal level (so it can not be co-opted) but an organized, global scale (so it can not be quashed).
There are lot more people who suffer from the biosystems demise than there are who profit from it. And while those who profit will sacrifice us time and again - if we stand together …. Idk I won’t say we’ll succeed necessarily but we’ll do whatever we can for each other (regardless of setting) - and that’s life