Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5246 readers

282 users here now

Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

silence7

Human ‘behavioural crisis’ at root of climate breakdown, say scientists (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 10 months ago by GreyShuck@feddit.uk to c/climate

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Record heat, record emissions, record fossil fuel consumption. One month out from Cop28, the world is further than ever from reaching its collective climate goals. At the root of all these problems, according to recent research, is the human “behavioural crisis”, a term coined by an interdisciplinary team of scientists.

“We’ve socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behaviour.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Azzu@lemm.ee 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

You're really missing something here. Just because the richest 1% are responsible for more emissions than the poorest 50%, doesn't mean that the poorest 50% are somehow better people just because of that. They're just in a situation where they are literally unable to pollute as much because of their lack of resources.

I strongly believe that if you took a random sample of "poor people" and put them in the exact situation of "rich people", they'd be polluting roughly the same. Many poor people I meet would love to "be rich", and not just because they'd have their basic needs covered, but because they'd love the luxury, which is what's causing the pollution disparity.

Calling this a human behavioral crisis is exactly on point. Yes, in the current class division, if rich people changed their behavior, their impact on pollution would be much larger. But if theoretically we all had the same resources, and everyone would use these resources for luxury stuff, net pollution would likely be the same as if wealth was concentrated in a smaller amount of rich people, since the resources are still used to produce more than we need. If there are more people on Earth than Earths natural regeneration rate can sustain, we'd still be in trouble with an equal society.

Obviously there are already people that understand this and try to not consume too many resources. People are different and thus some are more/less part of the problem. I would also agree that on average, more poor people understand this than rich people. But still, in total, humans are still pretty much the same no matter the class they currently belong to.

[–] ShaunaTheDead@kbin.social 8 points 10 months ago

I do understand that, I think you're missing something here. I said "Yes, the individual should try to shift their behaviour", so yeah I agree with you. What I'm saying is that lobbyists for the ultra wealthy try to shift all of the guilt and blame onto the individual as a distraction from more important causes.