They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism.
This just doesn't correspond to reality. A lot of serious stuff is happening in this space.
https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuk...
We are now in the "hunker down" phase of global warming.
Now that we've established that, what's your decisive and ambitious action you've made towards addressing climate change, so we can learn from the example you've set?
I'm curious which lies you're referring to. "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve" reminded me of the time I had fun with my passenger's ignorance of celestial mechanics. She thought the moon really was done for, but after a few more minutes had passed it started to come back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670
> but ended up sowing distrust.
Because most people eventually caught on that they were being lied to?
The bottom 70% of the world's population would have less than $X00 in the bank, and wouldn't have much control over their lifestyle.
The reasons we haven't done this are because China and India are hungrily industrializing, and the Republican Party in the US is captured by fossil fuel companies.
The doom of climate change is mostly people to dumb to understand the most basic of models or (worse) unwilling to do so on ideological grounds. I already decided not to have children in my life because I think it is irresponsible to put them into this world. We will have enough climate migration anyways.
The truth is that there are tripping points that are extremely hard to reverse and may or may not trigger other tripping points. Reading these risks as a reason not to care is the opposite of what should happen.
And then you figure out what the real reason is to burn the world: some rich fucks trying to extract a few thousand dollars per second more f4om the r3st of us.
And yes, we do need to give up several aspects of our lifestyles. Meat consumption absolutely must come down. Air travel must come down. Disposable goods, and consumer plastics, must come down. Our lifestyles must change. Capitalism encourages status symbol goods such as beef, travel/tourism, excessive consumption goods, etc.
We need widespread consumer behavioral change before we have any hope of governments listening to people. As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done. For real change to happen people need sunk cost. Right now people have far too many excuses and denials to actually do much. There is always a China to blame, or a company to blame, or a mega rich person to blame.
What if "doomerism" is a key component to demoralize people to accept "decisive and ambitious action"?
Note that most of the environmental policy talk is on a global level...blaming living people who aren't wealthy enough to benefit from financial capital. Making everyone who doesn't make their living off of financial assets have a worse quality of life...while those who benefit from financial assets even more wealthy.
Environmental policy talk is not on a local level. Never mind the water usage of the AI centers & how it affects communities. The farmers will have to sell their land so big capital to buy it on the cheap. The money pump always leads to accumulation of Capital.
It sure seems like the rhetoric goes one way. Making the rich richer...so they have all the carbon credits to do whatever they want...transcending the "tyranny of morality" while they fly in private jets to "save the climate". Making the working/middle-class poor..."you will own nothing & be happy". Making the poor radicalized & pointing their finger at each other.
This seems like a global scale psychological experiment more than anything. At some point the true believers in climate science will be disappointed by the contradictions of their heroes...because at the end of the day...it's about money & power. There is no "we". There is only "you will have to sacrifice so I can be more wealthy & hold more leverage over you".
> As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done.
This is fairly common misconception. At this point the vast majority of people is on board, but the perception is skewed by vocal minority. Big part of the work at the moment is just communication to help closing this perception gap.
My other favorite lie was that the failed ebola drug remdesivir was helpful for COVID-19. The conspiracists think Remdesivir was used to punish people who declined the mRNA jabs.
The ‘very, very bad look' of remdesivir, the first FDA-approved COVID-19 drug - https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-r...
Washington Post: Remdesivir can help keep unvaccinated, high-risk people with covid-19 out of hospitals, study finds - https://www.ihv.org/news/2021-archives/washington-post-remde...
Why Remdesivir Failed: Preclinical Assumptions Overestimate the Clinical Efficacy of Remdesivir for COVID-19 and Ebola https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.01117-21
> It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.
I think conspiracists saw very clearly what was going on. A dissident scientist I respected said, at the very beginning, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost certainly a product of the UNC's gain-of-function research. He knew the UNC's work had been transferred to Wuhan, China.
U.S. halts funding for new risky virus studies, calls for voluntary moratorium - No grants for flu, SARS, or MERS while government pursues 1-year risk analysis - https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new... [2014]
I'd also probably agree that there is likely misguided opposition to it as a tool in the climate change arsenal as well from "climate advocates" (taboo). The same could also be said for fission nuclear power which, unlike SO2 geoengineering, would substantially address the root cause of the problem - emissions - with fewer risks and unknowns. (France, for example, being a real-world example of how many countries could almost completely decarbonize their electric generation in a proven and scalable way with nuclear fission.)
If we further broaden our scope of misguided opposition from just "climate advocates" to voting polities in countries that are positioned to meaningfully address climate change at a global scale, then we're really getting to the root of the issue. The single most impactful action the average person could take to fight climate change in the US is to vote blue. It's an effectively binary choice to give badly-needed societal support and investment to climate-relevant initiatives like your friends' and so many others.
anyway my model is: we just have to survive a few years before Wright’s Law pushes solar+batteries so cheap that fossil is priced out of the market. Thus aerosol injection to bridge the gap until drawdown