Item — HN Reader

The movie "don't look up" was very prescient in a way. I can see denial and unfounded optimism everywhere, including myself.

As long as we keep falling for the illusion of continually being able to always "buy ourselves out of this" we won't impose any of the drastic changes that would actually be called for.

"we'll just set up HEPA filters everywhere in our house", "we've got good AC", "we'll move to a safer area, where x is unlikely", etc

Our consumer mindset won't solve this issue, eventually this will get even the richest and the smartest.

1 comments

Don’t Look Up is a great movie. Like, okay, I’ve never been so full of furious rage while watching a comedy before, but I studied climatology. Explaining climate to people was my life, and I’ve lived through every frustrating part of that film. It was very cathartic, because it said the things I can’t say— not if I still want to try to save this rotten world.

I sometimes take solace in that no matter what I do, if I go to the rails 10x either way in terms of my own private behavior, it's not even a drop in the bucket to what 8 billion other people are doing, and what 2,200 billionaires are doing. It wasn't me.

That said, I try to tread lightly, even though, there is really no "treading lightly" anymore. There is no sustainable modern way of life available to us. Even moving to a farm to live off the land and raise animals is not workable for 8 billion people. We are utterly hosed.

I pick up trash and litter, sometimes for hours. I put a little lipstick on this pig from time to time.

It wasn’t you. It really wasn’t. But you will be cursed all the same by the generations that follow, as part of the collective guilt we all bear. Sainthood is impossible in this world; who can do all that is asked of him?

Being a climatologist is like being a prophet, in the old Biblical sense. Wrath will be visited upon us if we do not change our avaricious and prideful ways. Some people change, but not enough. The wrath of God still comes, just like it was foretold in the holy equations and the great models. Paradise has burned, the land of flowers will fall into the intemperate sea.

The only thing we could really do is eliminate several billion people through some kind of eco terrorism. Would it be worth it, in the end?

No. Just spread anime and K-drama, and our birth rates will drop to match theirs.

It's both rotten and awesome though. I'm sure we could collectively still pull this off somehow.

Defeatist or dystopian mindsets won't get us anywhere. In a way the current trend of "let's keep everything as it was, at all costs" is its own form of utopian ideology for example.

Why can't we create other more productive and smart utopian stories instead? Something to aspire to? I'm always reminded of (old) Star Trek.

As the delivery channel for those stories, my hope lies in computer games and maybe even VR computer games. I'm probably out of the loop though, could be that watching TV / movies really is that important again / still. Whatever the channel then, actually new stories are what we need.

I absolutely believe we can do this. Humans could stop climate change and prevent the worst of the mass extinction. It’s clearly in our power.

What I do not believe is that we will choose to do so. Not in time, anyway. Not enough new stories, not enough Übermenschen writing new values on new tablets. The first wave of climate refugees from Syria found a cold welcome. How will climate refugees be received when there are 50 million of them? I want it to be like Star Trek, but in my heart I know they will fare like the ancient Egyptians treated the Sea Peoples.