Climate Is Now a US Culture War Issue
Climate Is Now a US Culture War Issue
www.nytimes.com
Opinion | Climate Is Now a Culture War Issue
44 评论
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It always fucking was. I remember the first time I heard of climate change, it was an ad suggesting that planting trees could help counter the greenhouse effect, and that’s when my dad told me that the whole thing was made up to trick people into supporting higher taxes. This was the 80’s.
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Which is just so insane because the Greenhouse Effect is a very simple, very well-understood phenomenon that anyone who actually wants to understand it (and even conduct experiments to directly test it) very easily can.
The runaway greenhouse effect leading to climate change is slightly more complex (but is it really?), but simply growing trees to counter the greenhouse effect is like such a basic, simple, scientific concept that even children understand.
Like... It's literally the reason greenhouses exist and work. I just... I don't know what to say anymore to peoples' ignorance.
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To an ignorant person, the greenhouse effect isn't simple. Not because the idea itself is complex, but because it implies we can and should do something about it.
And ignorant people would rather tell themselves it's not man-made because that would mean we can't fix it and, therefore, don't have to.
See Ian Danskin (if you haven't): https://youtu.be/dF98ii6r_gU
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It's so ironic because we even have an inferno planet next door with a runaway greenhouse effect that everyone can use as an example. With an average surface temperature of 464 degrees, Venus got through to me as a small child. But knowing the type of ignorant person we're talking about, Venus would just be held as further "proof" that Earth's climate change isn't caused by human activity.
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Two hundred years ago today, on July 17, 1819, Eunice Foote was born. Thirty-some years later, the amateur climate scientist made the remarkable discovery that when sunlight shines on carbon dioxide in a closed container—our atmosphere, for example—heat builds up inside. https://www.audubon.org/news/the-female-scientist-who-discovered-basics-climate-science-and-was-forgotten
And then there is also this:
A trove of internal documents and research papers has previously established that Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating from at least the 1970s, with other oil industry bodies knowing of the risk even earlier, from around the 1950s. They forcefully and successfully mobilized against the science to stymie any action to reduce fossil fuel use. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/exxon-climate-change-global-warming-research
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The first time i tried to talk to my parents about climate change, specifically sea level rise, my dad had us do an experiment where we filled a cup with some ice up to the very tippy top with water. Then, when the cup didn't overflow when all the ice melted, he noted that there's still the same amount of water whether it's liquid or solid (technically true, but obviously ignores some key details, like the fact that not all the ice on Earth is found in the ocean, and that there are impacts of melting ice other than just sea level rise). He concluded that we didn't have to worry about sea level rise, and it's all a hoax. I told my science teacher about it, and he simply asked me, "What about all the ice on land? Like Antarctica? That ice isn't already in the cup." This was the early '00s.
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When I saw the response to covid, a very visible threat, I knew we were going to fry.
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I was interviewed by a reporter about my family breaking apart during covid due to conspiracy fairytails. When she asked me about my view for the future I told her it's very grim: If humanity struggles with a challenge with a known solution (social distancing, vaccine, protect the elderly etc.) how are we going to fare with a challenge with an unknown solution (how to sequester enough CO2? How to produce enough sustainable energy reliably? How to store enough energy? etc.)?
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I agree there were so many screw-ups in the response, especially in the early days. China insisting upon secrecy until it spread across the globe, the WHO's confusing statements on the efficacy of masks in order to preserve supplies for the front lines, the ridiculous pro-masker vs anti-masker mentality, the Trump fiasco where he suggested doctors use lemon fresh Lysol or whatever the hell he was on about to disinfect people's lungs as if he has a goddamed clue, the alt-right losing their minds over a dangerous vaccine with Bill Gates computer chips in it, etc.
But remember CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer? Scientists were like "Hey, guys. There's a hole here. We need to stop using this crap or we dead." And everyone banded together and stopped using CFCs, and the hole in the ozone layer closed happily ever after. Sometimes we can actually do it right. I don't know, maybe it'll take a crisis like losing Florida to the ocean for Americans to collectively give a shit again and start doing things right. Or maybe we'll all die before we get a chance to see that happen.
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Acid rain is another success story for "making a giant collective change to fix a nearly invisible problem".
I think one major difference is that there are enormous companies and entire countries whose way of life truly depends on pumping fossil carbon out of the ground. It wasn't that way for CFCs or NOx. Sure, Dow/DuPont/whomever surely lost some profitable investment in freon plants, but they had other business as well, and their old customers switched to buying the new refrigerants from the same suppliers.
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The difference is that with banning CFCs, the vast majority of people weren't even mildly inconvenienced. Dealing with COVID required some temporary personal sacrifice from everyone, and it was too much for half the population. Dealing with climate change requires major, permanent sacrifices from everyone, so I don't see any way it will happen until most people are simply unable to maintain any semblance of their current lifestyles.
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And the time for that was before we hot record ocean temps killing off all of florida's coral. Things are accelerating past the point we could have done anything. Any time now the antarctic ice sheet is going to calve into the southern ocean which, on its own will lead to nearly a meter of ocean level rise - this is now a sure thing. The time to act like we did on the ozone layer was probably some time in the 90s.
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The grim irony is that a lot of the pain will be felt in red Southern and Western states.* When the power grid goes down for good in Texas in 15 years or so, nursing homes filled with a lot of these climate skeptics are not going to be fun places.
*Yes, pour one out for SoCal.
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And they'll still blame the left. These people will never admit they were wrong about this. They will go to their graves claiming climate change is a hoax, even as the world that they were meant to leave for their children and grandchildren literally burns around them.
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And the left won't lift a finger to punish them in any meaningful way, so what difference does it make?
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They'll blame it on renewables, even thought it's only like 9% of Texas' power, and they'll ironically complain there's not enough coal and gas fired generation plants.
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Is this a Mitch Hedberg joke variant?
Climate is now a US culture war issue. It has been for decades but it is now, too.
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This is soooooo bloody pointless
Does the right understand if weather becomes more volatile, swinging from extreme heat to cold, it would mean cars will breakdown, pipes will need to be replaced faster and faster, house insurance will keep on skyrocketing, electric bills will become more expensive, etc etc
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No they don't at all. To them they truly are so dense to think these are just flukes happening one after the other. I heard someone say "It was hotter in the 70s" like it's some weird boomer pride thing, like walking uphill both ways.
Oh and by the way no it fucking wasn't. It was literally not hotter in the 70s, we've broken so many records since then, it's just how you remember it.
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Well, actually, they were living in Florida in the 70s, and now they live in Michigan, so for them, it was hotter in the 70s.
Logic.
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Just in the 70s I remember sunscreen being less of a thing. My Boomer parents would just throw us outside and let us get burned.
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Mark my words: that stuff will continue to happen with more and more frequency, and instead of conceding that it has anything to do with climate change, they will blame liberals and the left.
And their base (that they've manufactured over a couple of generations now to be stupid, racist, bigoted, and extremely opinionated) will eat it up.
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Just as an example, look at insurance companies leaving Florida because of climate change associated risks, and how right-wingers are blaming this on "wokeism" instead of acknowledging climate change.
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TPTB that are pulling the strings of the right-wing puppet show are doing it deliberately, because they want genocide.
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They don't care.
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Just terraform the planet already, these troglodites are never going to change and we're out of time.
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Lol if only we had the tech to do so.
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Where there is a will, there is a way! :)
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🤔 We could build and set up a solar shade.
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44 评论
Is now? The crazies have been anti-climate change/global warming my entire life, how is now any different?
Right? Where has this article been? They've been denying it since the 80s. It's just relevant to people now because their homes are being burned and washed away.
They denied climate change when the oil companies were making "reports" that it wasn't real back then and they're denying it while the 5th record breaking heatwave in a row melts their stupid giant trucks.
Over the entire course of my life, the New York Times has never once been on the right side of an issue the first time. They only come around 5-15 years after the obvious public sea change. Same with the Washington Post.