How to say Marx was right without saying "Marx was right".

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[–] 198 points 1 year ago (16 children)

Let's be clear about something; climate scientists almost universally agree that there is no such thing as "winning" or "losing" the fight against climate change (Suzuki, for the record, is a zoologist, not a climate scientist). This isn't a game, there's no referee, and no one gets a trophy at the end.

The battle against climate change is about mitigating harm. The worse we do, the more harm there will be. But there is never a point where it is "too late". The car is going to crash, but the sooner you hit the brakes, the less damaging the impact will be. Everything we do to push the needle will save lives. There is never a point where we get to throw up our hands and succumb to the comforting fantasy that it's "too late" to change anything.

I have a lot of respect for Suzuki, and I don't blame him for feeling defeated with everything that's happening, but spreading this kind of message is, dangerous, damaging, and flies entirely in the face of the science.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Back before George W Bush directed NASA to call it climate change, it was called global warming, and you can definitely win against that - by stopping the earth from warming. That's unwinnable due to feedback loops that have now begun.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago

    Does not remotely address my point. We can always - always - work to reduce the harm caused by climate change.

    The point where the harm could be reduced to "none" is decades past us. If that's the point where you give up then fuck off. Climate change is actively causing harm as we speak, and it is still worth fighting. We can still make life better for ourselves and future generations.

    The notion that climate change is some kind of runaway engine that will continue amok without any further human input is nonsense. Yes, I'm aware of ideas like "Permafrost methane bombs" and I've also done enough research to be aware that only a small fringe of climate scientists actually support those ideas. They're flashy and exciting and get big press, but they are not widely accepted climate science.

    What climate science shows is that the climate actually responds faster to reductions in CO2 than our older models predicted. That means that debacarbonization can have real and meaningful positive impacts beyond what we previously thought possible.

    There is real damage already done, and there is damage that we cannot undo, but there is never a point where the problem goes beyond our input. The climate fight is always worth fighting.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

    Sort of? I don't think he mentioned tipping points anywhere in there, it was pretty non-specific and ranty, but if we've passed a tipping point it becomes less a matter of applying a brake and more of actively causing massive climate change in the other direction. Failing that, the warming trend and other shifts will stop when the Earth reaches a new balance and no sooner.

    Nobody really knows where those tipping points are. The Paris thresholds were our expert's best guesses for a "safe" amount of warming.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    Suzuki is and always was just a mouthpiece for corporate masters. Controlled opposition to steer public opinion. He is not and never will be a climatologist. His message is one of defeat because his backers want us to give up.

    Suzuki can kiss my white ass.

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    [–] 54 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Canada (and the world) will burn. You think migrants are a problem now? Wait until millions of people have no choice but to go north and the water wars start.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    O damn, almost forgot about the water wars. Those were brutal. Before those people genuinely believed there was nothing bigger than a World War. The fools. Like if you're still here in 2125.

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    [–] 36 points 1 year ago

    @asg101 I agree we've lost the opportunity and will have to "hunker down". But hearing it from David Suzuki is...hard.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago* (12 children)

    Fuck that. It's never lost, it's just that we are constantly heading towards worse outcomes.

    If we as humanity start taking it seriously tomorrow, it would still be a victory over only starting in a decade.

    It's not lost, it's just getting worse, and that should make people want to fight.

    saying that the fight is lost is just creating more disengagement and hopelessness.

    I like the saying "The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best is today." Because it is almost universally true about any long term goal.

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    [–] 27 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    the focus on politics, economics, and law are all destined to fail because they are based around humans. They’re designed to guide humans, but we’ve left out the foundation of our existence, which is nature, clean air, pure water, rich soil, food, and sunlight. That’s the foundation of the way we live and, when we construct legal, economic and political systems, they have to be built around protecting those very things, but they’re not.

    Powerful truth!

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    [–] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Has been for ages. It's now question of how bad, and we are still making it worse.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    I’m sick of this WE, im not a billionaire pumping more Co2 per day with my yacht fleet than a town of people do in their life. I’m sick of being blamed for this shit, when all my conservation is undone in a minute by a corporation. I refuse to take equal blame any longer

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    [–] 21 points 1 year ago

    Lol yup, trump also went all in on climate denial. Definitely fucked.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Giving up is exactly where the "too late" come from, quitter shouldn't be leading climate advocacy.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Thanks to big corporations effectively owning governments and big politicians the world over, things aren't bound to get better anytime soon, because "the economy". Fuck that shit

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  • [+] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I gave up a long time ago. The last time we really did anything about an issue like this was lead in gasoline. 50+ years of knowing we had to change. I wonder if maybe the wealthy elites know whats coming. I wonder if this new rise in facism is partially an answer to the fact that there won't be enough of anything to go around. That is why they want us having babies. for soliders. I hope they have some spark of humanity and let people self terminate but I bet you would need money for it.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Just wanted to add that maybe the last thing that we did for the environment and that really worked was for acid rain in 1991. At least where I live.

    A few years before that there was the Montreal Protocol that banned CFCs and helped to heal the hole in the ozone layer. I think.

    But yeah, I don't remember anything of the sort recently,

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    I'm pretty sure that's what the grab for Ukraine and Trump's stated intent to annex Greenland is about. Both of those have the potential to become food security sources after significant global heating. I'm also pretty sure that's why authoritarians are seizing control of govt (and by extension that govts security services) because there won't be enough to go around and they're going to need soldiers to keep the hungry people away from their billionaire breadbaskets.

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    [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    🔥🔥 This is fine 🔥🔥

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  • [+] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Because its true?

    Barely anything had been done these past decades and the result is that boat loads of people now believe conspiracy crap over the actual truth that climate change will milk us all

    I fully expect that even less will be done in the next years so yeah, were screwed

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Fight for climate change is not lost, it's still actively being fought by scientists, entrepreneurs, content creators, journalists and activists all over the planet.

    Oil companies like this narrative of lost. It was always, don't worry we still have time until now when it's leaning towards "whoopsie too late". It's not too late, we are not all going to die because of climate change.

    Right now climate change is on track to be horrible for large parts of the world but there's plenty more we can fuck up beyond that.

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  • [+] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
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    [–] 12 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    So, how long do we have left?

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  • [–] [S] 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    No one knows, many humans and other species are already dying from climate change today. Get used to hearing the phrase "It is happening much faster than expected." from now on.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Guess people better start updating their plans then. No point in starting a family and having kids when they'll just die to climate change.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    "Collapse is a process, not an event." It's very likely we'll be extinct by the end of the century. There will be all manner of hell from now until then. Our population of over 8 billion is only possible because of a highly complex global web of systems. Complex systems are fragile. Once dominos start falling, people will start starving very quickly.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago

    Its entirely possible that 99% of humanity dies but I don't really buy into us going extinct. People have an inate drive to survive and even if things are genuinely horrible I don't see them just giving up. Unless there is literally no food/potable water I think the planet is stuck with some form of humanity until the planet is uninhabitable. Remember there are still dinosaurs around today, they just look different.

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    [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    I try to stay postive but we're slowly burning and yet politics has never been so aggressively stupid about this. And the warlords dictating or culture too. I don't want this.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    All that's left is to make the rich suffer.

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  • [–] [S] 16 points 1 year ago

    “The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”

    ~Utah Phillips

    Inb4 some pedant quibbles that "the planet itself is not dying." Yeah, but we and our fellow creatures are. It should be understood that is what Mr. Phillips meant.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    How to say Marx was right without saying "Marx was right".

    Hard disagree, this is a liberal doing the usual thing. As John Bellamy Foster elaborates on in his articles and books, the fight against climate change isn't lost, it's been abandoned by the ruling class of imperial core countries. Look up some of his stuff on Monthly Review the ecological rift is a very important concept that never appears in the kind of discourse you're posting

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Less people accept climate change in Canada today than 20 years ago. If we couldn’t do anything about it then, why would now be different?

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    [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    1950's oil execs funded studies that show how they will kill the planet if they don't stop, transition to something else, hell they had enough fore warning they could have R&D'd solar and monopolize the tech, but NO! They needed to make faster money faster and stopping yourself from killing the human race isn't THAT important, and they knew they'd be dead by now.

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