Source is one of the few mainstream outlets (Vox being another) that is still talking about climate as a problem to be solved rather an irritating distraction from today’s shiny new crises du jour, namely superpower competition and “catastrophic” low birth rates.

Back on topic, there’s a paradox here. The aviation industry is naturally dragging its feet at every opportunity, but really that’s logical. Unlike other industries (even cars, to a point), there is literally nothing this industry can do to “succeed” except shrink. Due to basic rules of fluid dynamics, it is extremely inefficient to travel fast. Doing it by burning fossils is doubly disastrous, but solving this particular challenge with any technology is a massively tall order.

On a planet of 9 billion, air travel is just not scalable. If you can do it without frying the planet, that’s only because somebody else is not doing it.

This is the correct but boring (but correct) answer.

Have heard similar things. And it’s also true that timber farming is a (very marginal) form of carbon drawdown, assuming the wood products are not burned. But then in theory recycling could allow some of that land to return to nature, which better in all ways. It’s a systems problem.

The chemical issue is presumably bleaching for white paper. But thick brown cardboard is basically just degraded wood fiber so that at least must be pretty efficient to downcycle into toilet paper.

Update: there’s also another chemical issue in de-inking, maybe that’s what you were referring to. Personally I don’t bother recycling my tiny amounts of paper waste, for these reasons. Thick cardboard must be a win though.

Convincing detail here.

The priority is to keep used plastic out of the environment, which generally means out of waterways.

Correct. Paper (PS: or at least brown cardboard), glass and alu will always be great candidates for recycling.

Oddly hair-splitting objection.

Fair enough.

Anger at journalists is misdirection. There have never been fewer journalists, they have never been worse paid, and the line is going in one direction only. A world without journalists will be a thousand times worse than it is already. It’s a world “shithead” himself dreams of. The anger is misdirected.

Yep. Pathetic and embarrassing.

The small sacrifices you or I make are virtually meaningless, and are really just ways to make ourselves feel better.

Or simply to act to with moral coherence and avoid unnecessary cognitive dissonance. So that’s one difference between our attitudes.

If you or I really put all our eggs in the basket of individual impact then we’d be blowing up oil wells.

That would IMO be a negative impact. Ecoterrorism does not work. Wrong ethically, and counterprodutive. So that’s a second difference.

These are questions of deep philosophy, not simply judgements based on facts. You don’t see things as I see them, and vice versa. In a pluralistic society that should be manageable.

I would say that we don’t really live in a democratic society

Hence this third difference. The very fact that we can express disagreements like this and not be arrested is proof of something. The fact that our politicians are useless or malevolent is because we are those things. No societies in human history have been as free and democratic as the modern West. Things were (much) worse before, and soon they’re going to get much worse again.

Anyway. An unbridgeable gulf. Others can decide which of us, if either, is “right”.

and I am sorry but no you obviously aren’t an expert in keeping up with climate science and related topics

This is the only point I will challenge. I guarantee you that I know at least as much about this subject as you do. I choose to respond to it differently. That is all.

Not convinced that this kind of catastrophism is helpful. Certainly not round here, where people are already concerned (indeed stressed) about the subject by definition.

The fisheries thesis (or at least your strong version of it) I have not heard in those terms (and I’m pretty informed). As you surely know, there are plenty of potentially catastrophic outcomes other than fisheries - freshwater depletion, topsoil loss, plus the climate tipping points you mentioned. But nothing is certain in “10-15 years”. Talking in these apocalyptic terms is really a bit silly, not to mention counter-productive IMO. No surer way to tempt fate than to tell everyone that it’s all hopeless and they should all just go home and call it a day.

I do agree with your underlying point that climate is just one among a bunch of serious environmental threats. This is something that lots of people seem to have trouble grasping. Especially Americans IMO. Perhaps because the US lifestyle is completely incompatible with, well, basically any environmental limit, so the temptation might be to focus on one specific challenge and treat it as a problem to be solved. After all, Americans are a problem-solving people, right? They’ll just fix this one and get on with their lives. Etc. Anyway, I’ve gone offtopic so I’ll stop.

There are interesting dynamics at work here.

You may be right. You probably are right. But you’re not certainly right. In that uncertainty lie a wide range of possibilities.

Next, cynicism is corrosive and demobilizing (ask any dictator how powerful it is). By propagating cynicism, you’re making it slightly more likely that your own negative forecast will come true!

This is why, personally, although I’m tempted to agree with you, I choose to shut up about my feelings and instead focus on the upside possibilities of what we don’t know. Seems like a more productive use of my energy - and at least I’m not making things even worse than they already are.

Yes yes, I understand all that. It remains that people are using the systems argument as an excuse not to change their own lives. I’ve seen this in action and so have you. No democratic system is going to change when citizens are not lifting a finger individually.

There’s a legitimate argument to be had about the hypothesis where voters continue not to lift a finger but vote for green parties that promise to force them to. But that scenario seems to me too absurdly hypocritical and schizophrenic to be worth considering.

Of course it’s necessary to change the system, but that’s never going to happen until a critical mass of individuals put their actions where their mouths are.

Yes but that logic changes the goalposts a bit. The question of how to undo existing damage, or what we should do ethically, is not the same as the question of what is theoretically sustainable.

The gulf between your worldview and mine is so wide as to make a productive discussion impossible. Unfortunately.

But it has to be both if only because somebody has to show the way. Governments are not going to clamp down on meat ag when the whole electorate is cheerfully eating meat.

Personally I see the argument “I can’t do anything, it’s about the system!” as a extremely convenient cop-out. Any system is made up of individuals.

This has been my rule of thumb for a while. It should be clear as day that 9 billion people cannot all chow on hefty ruminant mammals. We would run out of land even before it cooked the climate.

The problem with chicken farming is the cruelty.

It’s a like watching a country committing harakiri. Almost unfathomable.

But you know nothing about how privileged or not I am.