Convicted Criminal Florida Senator Rick Scott did that when he was the Convicted Criminal Governor of Florida. I believe that he was the first to pull that nonsense, and then everyone else started copying him.

Did I mention that he's a Convicted Criminal? I like to remind people that Rick Scott is a Convicted Criminal as often as possible, because Convicted Criminal Florida Senator Rick Scott HATES when anyone mentions that Rick Scott is a Convicted Criminal.

You say we, like there is anything that any amount of reusable tote bags and driving less could have done. The damage being done to our climate is primarily being done at a corporate and industrial level. People hate hearing how Capitalism is the bad guy, but profits kept being put over environmentalism. If your company wants to be competitive with companies that don't give a shit, your options are to fight the federal government to implement regulations (expensive and time consuming), or to simply also stop giving a fuck (great next quarter, very easy).

In general, yes, the western world was under the false assumption that the leaders it had were, at the very least, aligned in the interest of self preservation. Many are still living with this false belief today.

I think it's less about societal self discipline though; and more about the incompatibility of the societal hierarchy with working to solve the problem of climate change. The contradictions between the ruling and working class are in conflict when it comes to the priority of climate change. Climate change is an opportunity for further wealth concentration for the ruling class of our society; and that same ruling class has "drank their own Koolaid" in the idea of American and Western exceptionalism.

Capitalism is incapable of addressing the problems of climate change. It's like trying to put out a fire and bringing a bulldozer instead of a firetruck.

Don't worry places like the Himalayas are only warming five times faster than the global average leading to apocalyptic mudslides that killed 1000 people in Nepal.

Sure. I'm not an expert and I'm only a single person. But I am smart enough to look and see what is working.

China is reaching renewable energy power surplus. Meaning their production of solar panels, windmills, nuclear power, etc is reaching a point at which it will exceed the power consumption of their entire country.

This is in "energy potential". Meaning, it includes the production of renewable energy products, their energy production over their lifetime, and accounting for grown in demand over that time period. It's a little bit different than saying that they are running on entirely renewable energy. They are not. They are unfortunately being forced to burn more coal right now due to the Iran war. A lot of their production of renewable energy is sold outside of China. I wanted to clarify though, since this is an important distinction.

The point being. China, has gone from a preindustrial peasant society post WW2, victims of a genocide, on the level of the Holocaust, from the Japanese fascist; to, now, being the first country in the world that is capable of replacing their entire energy production with renewable energy.

Whatever China is doing. We need to learn FROM THAT and quickly. We need to be mimicking their economic planning, at the very least, around the control of natural resources and energy production. Because there is no amount of cold war 2 propaganda that should overpower the threat of mass climate based genocide.

We don't have to be "pro China", we don't have to "be exactly like China". But we are currently pretending that there is not a major world power that IS planning for and capable of running a modern and cutting edge technological society that is capable of producing energy almost entirely without greenhouse gas production.

We don't need to pretend there is some "future silicon valley tech" that will save us. There is literally already an example to follow.

If every country was producing renewable energy as China currently is, the world would have literally removed its dependence on fossil fuels.

Edit: Renewable Energy production is projected to exceed Chinas entire energy consumption by 2033 currently. Their industry is growing renewable production at 4x the rate that their domestic consumption is growing.

The news stories blew the issue way out of proportion. There were claims that anything with a computer in it would stop working at midnight. Cars would crash, planes would fall out of the sky, etc. Y2K was really just a finance and IT problem. The fact is most electronic devices of the time, even ones with a clock, didn't know what the year was and couldn't be effected by a short-sighted engineering problem.

Same with almost everything in this thread.

So about 15 years ago? Right?

Dolly was born in 1996. She died in 2003

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep)

The human race just had the brains and corporation to come together and deal with it.

Why does that sound like such an absurd and faraway fantasy nowadays

That explains so much.

True, i looked up a bit more information on it and apparently it was at its height around the 80s, so I may have misremembered time a little bit.

Really? I thought it was mostly solved by regulations that require filters at the industrial sites (and aren't those used in Diesel cars, too?). Actually, what happens with the gunked-up filter material? Can the captured sulfur and nitrogen be used? I think you can use nitrogen as a fertilizer?