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Oh no, they’re not just going to let it happen. They’ll actively stop us from solving it.
“Sorry kid, I need my 9% returns on these investment funds, and I don’t care where that money comes from.”
I bought this stock from a company called planter or something, it’s going crazy lately
I don’t care where that money comes from.
Unless it’s renewable energy tech, then fuck it, those shitheads can rot in hell!
Well im not having solar panels near my town. They’ll absorb all the sunlight and it’ll be dark!
Windmills slow the planet down!!!
But wouldn’t it be nice if there was more time in a day?
And they’ll put more of us on the planet too, because it’s so wonderful here.
But the windmills will kill all the birds (that there are none left of)!
Not real ones, anyway
Solving? There’s an undeniable solution that has been there as long as the problem has
Which is…?
Stop burning fossil fuels.
That would help, but definitely not stop climate change.
Sure, taking your foot off the accelerator doesn’t technically stop the car.
Either you ration things that warm the planet, or you find a way to cool it directly? Neither of these options can be done at a large enough scale.
Humans have never been good at constraining cultures that gorge on a limited buffet of resources.
Implementing climate control will be costly and is still controversial, especially proposed solutions that require polluting the stratosphere with chemicals.
I’m still optimistic about geoengineering research.
Of course, nobody will want to foot that bill until they’re staring the threat in the eyes.
There’s a pretty public list of who owns the most resources
I’m in favor of completely remove the humans. We should have the tech already.
…and oligarchy, and fascism, and income inequality, and decreasing life expectancy, and increasing infant mortality, and more wars, and huge amounts of debt, and job loss, and…
Besides that it’s smooth sailing.
Short version: unchecked capitalism.
But I was told that capitalism checks itself using something called “market forces”.
Turns out “market forces” was just the heavy metal poisoning talking, they were just hallucinating magical economics.
Lead in gasoline and household products really fucked with some generations, hard.
Hey now, those “market forces” are actually the work of the wonderful ‘Invisible Hand’! Which is of course the work of God and is definitely not being manipulated by all those billionaires behind the curtain over there…
Imagine a war against an enemy with known lead poisoning.
That would probably be an easy win
They poisoned themselves with shit from pet stores and farm supplies. They sent death threats to the guy who told them not to inject bleach.
Individually, they may be easy to beat, but as a group they are worse than a zombie apocalypse
Yeah. Those problems totally didn’t exist before capitalism.
Not all at once, no. Fascism didn’t even exist until the 1920s.
Fascism is a modern iteration of an old problem. Not even the worst version of it. Plenty of theocracies and empires in history promoted similar strong group/national identity paired with subjugation of individuals to an authoritarian state.
And fascism is not even compatible with capitalism as it requires state control over industry. It would be more compatible with socialism except that it’s not nationalizing industry for the benefit of the working class explicitly, just the benefit of the nation/state.
Capitalism is also a modern interpretation of an old problem. The idea of material wealth determining worth and power. That’s largely how “might makes right” works with a more economic flavor.
If you think you can’t have state control in capitalism you haven’t been paying attention. China is capitalist country with tons of government controls. They can throw a “communist” label on it, but that have little to no actual communist/socialist ideology.
When the state fully controls your property, it’s not private property and thus not capitalistism. It’s not socialism either, because they still give deference to the original “private” owner.
China is a perfect example of how a fascist country would operate, honestly. It’s frankly annoying that people don’t routinely call it a fascist state and instead call it communist.
We’re so close to flying cars
The decreasing life expectancy is largely related to obesity though. There are a lot of obese people who find reasons to blame other than their own self determination. If corporations have made it easy to eat yourself to death, people shouldn’t just let them get away with it by eating themselves to an early death.
I’m glad you brought up personal responsibility, however if you’re buying something from the grocery store, unless it’s raw ingredients, it has shit in it. Even then, in the US the only way to completely avoid nasty shit in food is to produce it yourself or purchase from a local farmers market. Unfortunately many people don’t have the resources to do that. But to your credit, we do seem to be developing some sort of allergy to personal responsibility, especially in regards to personal health and fitness.
If people willingly choose to shorten their life, I don’t consider it a problem.
Now, lying and manipulating people into choosing it, similar to what the cigarette industry did, is obviously a problem.
But at this point, everyone knows cigarettes and processed foods are unhealthy. People just don’t care.
People dont have the energy to care. They’re spending all of it trying to keep their families fed, clothed, and under a roof.
I’m so fucking tired of people pushing personal responsibility for systematic problems. People are kept intentionally under educated and do not have the resources to learn. No not everyone “knows” ultra processed foods are bad. Most people can’t even properly defined ultra processed foods and default to calling them processed foods which covers basically everything you find in a store besides produce.
A teacher showed us the documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the real truth I learned from that, is that the majority of adults are irresponsible crybabies.
Everyone is just faking it. And those that don’t, don’t have the attention of those that listen.
Our safety manuals are written one disaster at a time, never before.
Its because most people only care about their comfort and convenience right now and in the very near future.
Boomer: “Climate change will be your burden to suffer through”.
Gen Z: “It’s not fair. You got a full life of profligacy before the effects were even noticeable. I get none of the material wealth and I’m going to have to live my whole long life suffering increasing effects of it.”
Boomer: “Not so long.”
Also boomers: “When are you having kids? I want grandchildren.”
Told my mom I didn’t want kids and she said, “Oh you’ll change your mind”
I came out to my mom as gay and she said “well you can always adopt”
Then I started intense birth control treatments for my fucked up reproductive system and she was like, “you can still adopt”
Yeeted my uterus, cervix, and fallopian tubes just before my bday this summer and threw a fuckin party afterwards because now there is absolutely no way I can ever be a parent AND my reproductive system can’t do whatever the fuck it wants cause it doesn’t exist!
My mom finally accepted that this part of the family tree has ended after that. This while process happened over 18 years. I started telling her I didn’t wanna be a parent when I was TEN.
Edit: I should prolly say that my mom isn’t a boomer, but Gen X. She’s surrounded constantly by boomers and other members of Gen X who act like boomers so she has picked up a lot of the traits. Practically demanding grandchildren was the worst boomer thing she’s done so far, and I hope it stays that way.
Meanwhile. Most Boomers post adoption
They’re not my real grandchildren.
How my grandmother was when my sister was adopted. Never treated her the same as the rest of the grandkids. Even when my sister helped care for the bitch 24/7 while she was living in our home dying of self-inflicted lung cancer.
I was not sad when my grandmother died, if you can tell.
“well you can always adopt”
As if adoption wasn’t an extremely intensive process that goes on for who knows how many years and even then it’s not guaranteed you’ll actually get the kid. Let alone how much it differs from DIY.
Thank you for your service.
What action in my timeline are you referring to as my service lol
Lol. Not having kids is one of the most ethical choices we can make.
Ah. See, I don’t want children because I’m what you call a selfish person and want to live my life completely unbound. Kids would just kill my dreams and the vibe.
The ethical part is just a bonus to make me feel even better about my decision.
This guy’s an anti-natalist, I wouldn’t take seriously anything he fucking says.
Fuck off. Anti-natalism is eugenics and anyone who advocates for it is a Nazi in my eyes. Not to mention 90% of you all just project your major depression and misery into literal 8 year olds. Please just go to therapy.
Every conversation people have about “degrowth” and “the earth has too many people” always leads to someone advocating for eugenics OR LITERAL GENOCIDE. The Earth, right at this moment, can hold ten billion people. The problem is capitalism, consumerism and food waste.
Everything you don’t like or understand is Nazi?
Degrowth. It’s not antinatalism, nor eugenics. But simple people need simple answers. It’s ethically shrinking humanity’s population and consumption to within what the earth can sustain. That’s it.
You know what hole to shove your Nazi bullshit up.
Selfishness incarnate lol
I once saw it described as the Boomers being the “fuck around” generation and Gen Z being the “find out” generation.
Yep. And your generation will do the same, and it will go on like this until it can’t be ignored anymore, because that’s what humans do, whatever the age.
It literally cannot be ignored anymore.
“You don’t miss the water until the well runs dry” has never been a more true expression. People expect that if something is going wrong here’d be immediate and apparent consequence. It seems like a vast majority of people completely lack the skill of extended foresight, where one can look at a current situation and see how it can accumulate into a worse situation later.
A great example of this was my mom during COVID-19:
“All this pandemic talk is just nonsense. I’m not seeing people dying on the streets, now, am I?”
If the effects of climate change aren’t immediately apparent with some big global disaster happening overnight, then it’s not a big issue or simply not real.
If eating something that causes long term health risks doesn’t immediately make you sick overnight then it’s not a big issue or simply not real.
I agree with everything you’re saying.
And unfortunately as a life-long resident of white suburban america, I know how comfortable life still is for so many people, and how the culture of “ignore that problem and we’ll be fine” continues to pay off for people with a little privilege in their life.
As for your last point, that is literally how I feel because I know for a fact that I will die from water wars before it matters
If water wars start in my lifetime, it’s game over for me. I will not let myself live through that shit.
Check out Ethiopia and Egypt, Pakistan and India, China and Vietnam/Laos.
Some are more hot than others but these are all conflicts over lowering water levels and increasing demand. Even within the USA, there are conflicts between states in the southwest and with Mexico over the Colorado river kind of… Just not existing anymore.
That’s what I’m saying, people don’t deal with problems until they’re forced to.
And climate change, while having effects all over the world, doesn’t affect everyone with the same intensity, so the luckiest among us can afford to ignore the problem longer than the rest. Of course the luckiest usually are also the ones with the most power to deal with these issues.
until it can’t be ignored anymore
At which point the fascist governments people have voted into power will keep on going as they were while murdering some convenient scapegoats, until mass scale industrialised human society collapses, never to recover because we used up all our resources.
Edit: I honestly think people don’t quite understand that once all this bullshit collapses, there will probably never be another high tech civilisation on Earth again: all the easily extractable resources will have been used up, and the amount of energy required to extract more would be higher than what will be available once oil-based hydrocarbons have been more or less used up. Magic batteries that require a ton of resources won’t fix the situation, and we have no large scale replacement for oil.
The large scale replacement for oil is the original source of that energy, the sun. Sure it will take a while, but high technology (read small computers) doesn’t actually require hydrocarbons, it just requires knowledge of physics. Modern society is based on hydrocarbon fuels because they’re so convenient, but that doesn’t mean it’s required for any of our technology to function. We will likely be combusting hydrocarbons for the rest of our existence, they’re just too convenient for energy storage, but the source of those hydrocarbons could easily be specialized cyanobacteria farms or direct chemical synthesis. Both of those technologies already exist, but we have never done any significant investment in them because they would have to compete with basically picking up what’s already lying around. In the absence of significant oil deposits we will be forced to make those technologies work.
All that still requires other resources though, and I’m not convinced that something like direct synthesis would be viable considering the energy use – renewables don’t generate energy from thin air, but the systems usually require eg. rare earth materials (which need to be mined, which currently takes oil, and then the systems need to be produced which requires more energy)
You may not know this but oil comes from cyanobacteria or algae blooming, dieing, and falling to the bottom of ancient lakes. We can farm them better than they could ever grow on their own in nature, just like we do with corn, rice, wheat, and a hundred other crops. The only complex part would be the scale required. We have the technology to industrialize hydrocarbon production that way today. Life isn’t magic, so there’s no reason we couldn’t do direct synthesis with more controlled processes. And yeah it’s going to require resources. Everything does. It’s just pretty fatalistic to think we won’t be able to bootstrap ourselves up to current technologies without oil when we’ve already done it once before. Oil just makes scale possible, not the technology itself.
Keep kicking it down the street.
narrator: yes, yes they did.
Looking at this more benevolently, the teacher might be wishing that this kid’s generation will end up being more conscious and willing to act than his own.
Yah I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the message in the context it’s presented. It’s a fucking teacher. They are already doing not just the most they can, but also doing something far more effective than butting heads with a corporate-driven world at a time when environmentalism was seen as fringe and ludicrous by most people on Earth.
It would be different if it was some wealthy corporate CEO saying “I’m leaving this for the next generation to solve.”
I remember a time that even a teacher saying this to a student would be considered inappropriate activism about a controversial topic.
I remember a time that even a teacher saying this to a student would be considered inappropriate activism about a controversial topic.
…Like right now?
From my perspective (millenial) raised in a conservative area, climate change discussion went from ‘kinda iffy in the past’ to approved to expected, then suddenly lurched to more taboo than I’ve ever seen.
I can’t even discuss it with my college-educated older relatives without them ranting about it. It’s a total taboo; they think I’m nuts for even bringing it up as an existential problem.
I can only imagine what parents would say if teachers said that now.
I’m sure it varies a lot from area to area, in the US especially, but having grown up in the olden times, there was in fact a time when the idea of climate change was about as fringe as flat-earth and aliens, and even talking about it like it’s a serious issue would get most people removed from their positions or laughed at by the population broadly.
There are a lot of teachers who now encourage and promote climate science. How much of that is actually heard and accepted? That’s a whole other issue as our education system is now eroding well below whatever standards we had or should have had.
In most of the developed world climate change is now being accepted broadly by even many conservatives, but the new argument is if the change is human-caused or if it’s even harmful (literally, there is a oft-recycled argument on the right that higher carbon levels will mean healthier plants and forests.)
There is a current narrative regression going on right now simply because of Trump and entirely because of Trump, giving people the validation and support to pretend climate change isn’t real, but it’s temporary. I’ve seen how leadership influences societies and how radically the figurehead of our country changes how people think and feel. It doesn’t matter what he says or makes other people think though, the world is broadly preparing the best we can anyway, with many coastal cities and the Navy creating plans for giant infrastructure projects.
This comic is TERRORISM according to Trump’s Republican Party!
This comment is anticapitalist and therefore terrorist…
Lemmy is anticapitalist and therefore blocked by the Great American Firewall.
Dissidents will be reported.
Hopefully Trump will die of a stroke before before his third term
“WE ARE ALL DOMESTIC TERRORISTS” -CPAC 2022
They said that to me when I was a kid… and I was born in the 80s.
And now they’re in retirement.
Fuck them. They should have been in prison thirty years ago.
What?
Those ones were right. We are solving it now, and we either finish solving it or our children will have to deal with resource depletion when their time to shine comes.
Either way, it’s not Global Warming that they will be solving.
deleted by creator
Yes.
… next question?
I remember a similar comment made by one my highschool teachers. Because I was such a try-hard cringe edge lord I said something like “if my generation got rid of your generation, then we’ve solved that problem”.
Amazing that you had enough knowledge to answer like that in the first place. Looking back on my school days, I was so uninformed about so many important things: climate, politics - you name it.
It’s a global issue and America may be taking steps back, but the rest of the world is taking steps forward at least.
Even America is taking some steps forward in some odd ways.
Trump: “Alaskan refuge drilling is wide open! Drill, baby drill! Who wants first bid?”
Shell: “Ew, no. Literally no one wants that bad PR.”The videos assessment is fatally flawed and meaningless. (Admittedly, I watched the first half then skipped through the rest quickly)
It talks about the amazing growth of renewables and other unrelated things like Ozone. Climate change has nothing to do with renewables. Climate change is based almost entirely on emissions of GHGs. Building gigawatts of renewables means nothing unless you displace fossil fuels with it. Spoiler alert: we didn’t.
CO² emissions are higher now than ever. All the renewables were only added to our energy mix. No fossil fuel was displaced. In fact, today we burn more fossil fuel than ever before.
The keeling curve is steeper now than it was in the 60’s showing that unfortunate exponential growth rate curve.
We are emitting more CO² now at a faster rate than ever before.
Renewables are are only good if whatever comes online replaces fossil fuels. It didn’t. 2024 we are now at 1.5°C above, and if we magically turned off all emissions today we still have 20 years of baked in warming. All we did was find new ways to grow and consume. AI datacentres are the new gobbler of energy.
As a rule of thumb, agriculture output is anticipated to drop 10% for every degree of warming. Our propposed plan, which is no where near realistic or on track is 3.5°C. 35% less food doesn’t bode well.
Then the real fun part kicks in. If we ever manage to stop human emissions from fossil fuel use, entirely, we will still have to contend with natural warming from a planet that is not in a stable state. Tipping points are natural phenomena that behave one way at first until you tip it over then it falls into a new state. The interesting ones are arctic ice cover where sunlight that used to be reflected off polar ice caps now gets absorbed by dark oceans. Then you get the frozen methane hydrates under the arctic that melt and have the potential to release even more methane with no way to shut it off.
If you’re not a doomer, you don’t understand. Shits bad man. Real bad. No one should be feeling good about our accomplishments to date. You shouldn’t feel hopeful. You should be panicking into radical action.
We are emitting more CO² now at a faster rate than ever before.
We are not, and that graph you posted does not measure that.
CO² emissions are higher now than ever.
And they are not either. That phrase has been true for almost every year of the last 3 centuries, but not this one.
Again, your graph does not measure the thing that you said. I’d guess that you are misinterpreting the data.
"Total energy-related CO2 emissions increased by 0.8% in 2024, hitting an all-time high of 37.8 Gt CO21. This rise contributed to record atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 422.5 ppm in 2024… "
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/co2-emissions
Go akshually somewhere else.
You are again reading it wrong.
Stupid generations war. As stupid as men vs women, religion vs religion etc. It should be smart people vs stupid greedy sociopaths
And simply blaming older people also hides the problem of global inequality and exploitation of the third world. Most elderly in my country only faced food insecurity and hyperinflation when younger, and their environmental impact for all the time they’re alive is smaller than the environmental impact of a current teenager in the usa.
The problem is Capitalism.
It’s part of it, but not only that
What’s a middle school teacher supposed to do about it? There’s little to nothing we can do at the personal level beyond reducing our personal tiny footprint.
Teach kids about it, like the artist’s did
Isn’t the concept of the comic that it isn’t enough?
I think the point of the comic is that it is really depressing to hear this as a kid, in ways the teacher doesn’t understand.
I was an environmental educator for a while and part time activist in college but I gave up.
It really seems like an intractable problem. But I recommend Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future novel for a speculative fiction / near future grappling with how society might respond to a warming world.
Spoiler: it starts with a heat-wave natural disaster which radicalizes India into a rogue state, which then does geoengineering on its own, but this isn’t enough by itself.
Just based on that summary, I immediately thought of the book Termination Shock, which has a similar premise of an actor beginning to geoengineer with global reprecussions - though it’s heavier on the politics of the situation than any actionable info. If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend. I’m definitely going to pick up Ministry For The Future.
I guess he should be overthrowing the oligarchy and writing a new constitution with environmental protection as one of the main focuses.
But he’s a drawing, so he can’t. Will you?
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. No, that’s not within my capabilities
That’s exactly the point
assuming you’re American your tiny footprint is one of the biggest in the world
as to what you can do about it, tons!
but you’ll just have to do some research (on ecosia.org i assume 😀) to find out more about what you can do
I’m Asian. Don’t take my just-rising living standards away from me.
Also, we can reduce our footprint, but it’s small compared to corporate bullshit. We could ALL reduce our footprint and it wouldn’t be enough to make the environment not-the-next-generations problem.
I’m Asian. Don’t take my just-rising living standards away from me.
Nothing is being taken away. You and your countries have the biggest chance at actually making things better! Rising living standards doesn’t mean “copy the West and all its mistakes”. Don’t look at the West as if they have it all figured out.
You could have walkable, green cities and towns, with amazing public transport! It costs less than forcing everybody to have a car, keeps more people healthy as there will be less pollution of all kinds (noise, particles, chemical, industrial, …), and makes for much happier citizens.
You could invest in green technologies like solar, wind, hydrogen, heat exchangers, etc. It will mean cheaper bills for everything (transport, heating, cooling, appliances, …) and much less dependence on foreign companies (once things are set up). No more oil and gas imports would be amazing for your country’s autonomy.
Going green doesn’t mean worse living standards, it means exactly the opposite. You could leapfrog the West and raise the living standards for millions of your countrymen and countrywomen.
I’m not against any of that. But all that requires buy in and commitment from govt, and we’re no less corrupt than anybody else.
Yeah, that’s definitely a big problem in the west too. It just seemed like you were connecting high living standards to a polluting lifestyle. I hope Asia, Africa, and South America can just skip all the polluting bullshit and go straight to green. Good luck! I saw Thailand wants to have a high speed rail from its capital to the most northern city, which is great! At least that’s happening.
Kenya is an excellent example of this. 90% of its electricity is from renewable sources and its aiming for 100% by 2030.
Awesome! That sounds amazing. Does that mean less diesel and gasoline cars (or less cars in general)?
I’m Asian. Don’t take my just-rising living standards away from me.
edit: how did I forget: every time I hear someone say they can’t do anything why bother, I want to say you sound exactly like the boomer in the cartoon, it’s funny how so many people blame boomers for doing nothing but then simultaneously argue that it’s not worth doing anything
You have an opportunity unlike the rest of us to have rising living standards in addition to not contributing to the problem
Solar + Battery + EV’s will save you billions of petro-dollars not going to the likes of Russia/Saudi Arabia/Iran etc
I can already see that this is not reality:
we can reduce our footprint, but it’s small compared to corporate bullshit
Recently announced in Vietnam:
Hanoi plans to ban fossil-fuel motorcycles from its city center in July 2026, part of a national drive to cut emissions and air pollution. Its commercial capital, Ho Chi Minh City, is weighing a similar step. By 2030, Vietnam aims for a third of cars and more than a fifth of motorbikes to run on electricity.
Vietnam’s motorbike market, at about 3.5 million units a year
https://apnews.com/article/vietnam-evs-motorbikes-yamaha-vinfast-4ab76826787a806392655b843c374f3a
That’s 3.5 million small footprints that will soon be making a positive impact :)
This is not a zero sum game, every single little bit helps
Things you can do yourself. Select those that are right for you:
- Most trips are <3 miles. Use a bike or e-bike where it makes sense, or public transportation if it’s built out.
- Take steps to avoid the consumer-for-the sake-of-consuming mindset. Get things secondhand or from buy nothing groups.
- Eat less meat. Vegetarian dishes can be flavorful. Even a grilled cheese and some soup is delicious. Miso also has that essential umami kick. As a reformed “need meat with every meal” type person, it’s doable, you just have to rewire your mind and gut. It’s a thing you can do to both save you and your environment.
- Donate to climate advocacy groups and call your political representatives.
- Recycle - it’s oddly getting a bad rap these days, because we’re the downstream consumer to the folks designing and making crap, but we still also have responsibility in the chain.
- Avoid things like fast fashion - buy things with sustainability built in and leave intense shipping logistics out.
- compost and grow your own food if you have the space and time. Less transport and typically better for you. At the very least, you’ll know what you’re eating.
- purchase personal carbon offsets from reputable organizations
- consider investing in a heat pump and insulated glass windows when it’s time to switch the older ones out if you have a home.
- Avoid buying items that are simply packaged water. Try to buy concentrated items and then add water at the point of use. Soaps, detergents, bottled water, flavored drinks are easy ones.
- Use a smart thermostat and set it between recommended standards for your region. You can always wear slippers / more layers to warm up when slightly cold, or run fans, hydrate and wear light clothes when a little warm.
- Procure preventive maintenance on big ticket items and use your built in paid warranties. So many pieces of equipment fail due to some minor thing that could have been addressed earlier.
- encourage others, evangelize sustainability. Political movements need to meet certain thresholds to turn into action.
Just because its small doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an impact. I want to be able to tell the next generations I tried in ways thst made my life less convenient.
On my street alone (in thr US), half the houses have massive lighting setups and inflatables for Halloween and they’re about to switch them over for Christmas. Three months of absolutely unecessary electric usage. Sure one can argue that if they shut them off it wouldn’t have a world changing impact but it’s hard not to look at that and go wtf?
