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:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
How is it possible that looks like the whole country went absurdly dumb overnight? US did so many great things in the past, other countries had a lot of respect and even admiration of the US. I'm not from the US and I can't imagine such a thing happening in my country, such a shift in thought, in priorities and in everything.
I guess one can go conservative and all, and I can respect that, but this looks like something else.
To build on what the other person wrote:
Not just the cold war Red Scare, anti-communist propaganda. Republicans have been consistently cutting funding for education for decades, many many many people in the States have a distorted understanding of actual history. I have a good friend who was taught IN SCHOOL that the reason the Confederate States tried to secede was because of "economic restrictions". He's a good guy, not racist or bigoted. He's just been lied to his entire life. There's things we all onboard growing up. Being confronted by reality is difficult. Many people just can't. They would rather keep their beliefs, their zeitgeist, and through the fiction that they have been indoctrinated into from birth be racist bigots, offended that you would claim that you would say that they live in conditions that are more common in "third world" countries, even when the "potable" water from their tap gives them cancer and is literally flammable. Why? Because it's the best country in the world! It's been 70 plus years of brainwashing. And there has been so so many people, smart, qualified people, saying that things that were/are being done will end up where they are now.
If the US doesn't make wars to come being fought on a blasted hellscape, and puts this fascist coup into the fucking shackles it should be in, there is decades of deprogramming, and rebuilding what was supposed to be a bastion of democracy, but has proven even more fragile than everyone thought.
The Cold War sowed the seeds of this self-immolation long ago. By casting the conflict between the superpowers as an ideological showdown, both the United States and CCCP began to define themselves in terms of opposition to a strawman idea of what they thought the enemy was. E.g. America was a country with a strong unionist movement, but quickly turned on itself with Communist witch-hunts and distrust of centralised planning (it didn’t help that the security apparatus of each power were genuinely infiltrating grassroots movements in the other.)
Obviously the Soviet Union was first to fall, but the poison was already in the blood by then.
First it was Communism, then critical race theory, and now it's DEI and woke. It's all a bunch of different terms for the same thing: Things they don't understand or don't like.
It’s worse than that. Those are not just things that right-wingers don’t understand or don’t like—they are all things that are focused on prioritizing people and their experiences over property and the interests of its owners. (And in that sense I think the right-wingers understand that perfectly well—they just do not want to say it out loud.)
Exactly. They understand just fine. These things threaten their privilege.
bingo. to those accustomed to a lifetime of privilege, equality feels like oppression.
I wonder if it feels like violence to them, to risk losing access to their private jet.
What an unimaginable point of view. I can only try to understand it in terms of my own privilege, like if someone said I couldn't use the internet or loan books anymore...
Is it possible to fix these people? Like, can they be shown that life is actually better if they give up a little?
Im so glad we are sticking our head in the sand to the most consequential calamity we have ever faced. It's been nice having a civilization. See yall in 10-15 years when everything goes to complete shit, and society collapses.
collapse is almost definitely coming. I for one accept it though and believe there's a low probability of a silver lining outcome for a small number of survivors to build something new after society as we know it comes crashing down.
post collapse Earth will be irrevocably different from the one we inhabit today, but it won't be all bad. i suspect not everyone will suffer the same fate from war, famine, or catastrophes. humans inhabit every corner and valley of this immense planet and not every place will be made uninhabitable for everyone, simultaneously.
those who decouple from capitalism now and work towards a different kind of society, might fare better. it will be challenging, brutal, and at times exhausting for sure. but at least the orphan crushing machine we know today will finally come to a grinding stop.
Collapse is not going to be all roses for anybody. Not a single person will get away unscathed when this system comes crashing down.
These damned fools are going to get us all killed.
And try to profit off us while they do it.
Hurricanes in NC and Appalachia are woke, droughts in the MAGA regions of California are woke, floods in Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas are woke.
Yeah, that guy holding a gun to your head? Ignore him. Anything else is woke.
Better to be sleep then