[markfsharp]

Unfortunately, I don't feel confident humanity has the ability not to destroy the environment that sustains our life. We are simply too selfish, unable to adjust our thinking to new information sufficiently, lack compassion for others, and/or just don't care about things that don't affect us directly.

[cyanydeez]

Theability exists, what doesnt exist is a framework to amiliorate existing and future damage.

Fascism is rising precisely because its easisr to circle the wagons and allow famines and destruction to minimize the global population

[pbsladek]

I think it’s possible. There are many innovative and compassionate people in the world trying to solve a variety of crazy hard problems that touch this topic.

But maybe we land in a middle ground. Maybe we make it to another planet.

And if we don’t, we will adapt.

P.S. Watch George Carlin save the plant for a laugh.

[self_awareness]

So compassionate people should clean up after selfish people? So why should a selfish person even care, when they know that a compassionate people will clean up after them?

This is a road for compassionate people to become slaves of selfish people.

I think that the only way for "persuading" selfish people to clean up after themselves is to somehow force them to do it.

[pbsladek]

Seems an odd way to frame it imo. compassionate vs selfishness. Those are the only two kinds of people? And why is selfishness so bad? People are both.

People have and can innovate solutions for themselves, their own interests, and even for profit. Those solution can and have helped everyone.

I agree with you in a sense. Let’s take a big global human problem. Obesity. How the heck does that get solved? Force everyone to eat what we tell them? Force them to exercise? Good luck.

Ozempic is an innovation with lots of pros and cons. It isn’t a panacea. But I bring it up as an example of an out there solution never before possible that WILL change millions of lives. It maintains people agency to live how they want (selfish or not) while giving them a solution to a problem they aren’t able to tackle on their own or don’t care to other than take a pill.

Is ozempic made by compassionate people or selfish people. Prob a mix of both. I think the solution has a lot of compassion in it.

A selfishly or compassionately made company aiming to solve the problem of trash in the ocean, doesn’t require people to change their behavior. Solutions built around people NOT having to change are promising imo. Both can happen at the same time though. People changing habits, new innovations that don’t require change on their part, and a mix of both working together.

Forcing people to stop eating meat, prob not gonna happen. Creating an alternative of lab grown meat (tastes like shit for now) will change behavior over time without forcing anyone.

Also, if the compassionate people solve the problems and are happy doing so, so what. Problems solved for everyone. The compassionate people I know, would never frame themselves as being slaves to other people.

Do we have enough time, idk. 8 billion years if we manage to survive till then ;)

[self_awareness]

I mean, selfish vs compassionate is a huge philosophical problem, and we can use a shortcut and just say that the only real behavior is a selfish behavior, because even compassion ultimately fuels our own selfishness (it's about making us feel good when helping others).

I didn't want to go that road. Just wanted to highlight, that sometimes the act of ensuring that we live in a good environment forces us to make sacrifices. This is what I meant by "compassionate behavior". And a selfish person lives in this environment, but doesn't sacrifice anything -- they live like parasites. So my remark was about being a slave to the parasite, by having to sacrifice something personal (energy, resources), so that others could live in the same quality environment, without sacrificing anything. For me that doesn't seem like a good deal.

By the way,

> I agree with you in a sense. Let’s take a big global human problem. Obesity. > How the heck does that get solved? Force everyone to eat what we tell them? > Force them to exercise? Good luck.

Obesity is mostly a calorie intake problem.

Introduce sugar tax. Regulate sugar ads aimed to kids. Introduce health risk information on sugar products (like it was done on cigarettes). Increase the cost of healthcare if the obesity problem is not addressed for an extended period of time. Stop allowing promotion of "heathly at every size" agenda.

Force it, because obese people apparently aren't able to think straight in this area.

I'm not saying that it's possible to eliminate obesity down to each individual, just like it's impossible to eliminate the use of drugs by even criminalizing them, but there's certainly a lot of things that can be done.

> Ozempic is an innovation with lots of pros and cons.

I think that Ozempic treats the result, not the cause. So I don't think it shouldn't be seen as a solution to anything.

[netsharc]

It's a different kind of "denialism" when people think the magic solution will come somehow, someday soon (i.e. denying how fucked we are, or lying to ourselves that we have the resource budget to produce millions of EVs when in reality all car production needs to be ended, or denying that interplanetary salvation is just too god damn far away timewise):

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/20/...

The selfishness is now apparent, hey someone just got reelected promising it'll be better for "us" and that we're going to get rid of "them", and the fuck-the-poor-hungry-climate-catastrophe-victims rightwing populism is rising in Europe too.

[foobarkey]

Dont be so dramatic, we will keep burning fossil fuels if things get really bad we turn the sky purple and keep yoloing bitcoin :)

[pbsladek]

Lol

[alexey-salmin]

> when in reality all car production needs to be ended

It's not obvious to me that the quality-of-life loss from this measure is smaller than the anticipated loss from the climate change.

[pbsladek]

No magic needed. We invented vaccines, we made it to the moon, on the way to recovery of the ozone, created other energy alternatives, etc. big innovations!

https://www.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/ozone-layer/nasa-n...

I agree with you, evs are not the solution lol. They have many huge cons. Cobalt mining etc.

The problem maybe insurmountable. Even if they are, there is still work to do to make the best of the shit we find ourselves in.

This humans are a terrible species, selfishness reins supreme, we aren’t capable of anything else, everything is bad, there is no hope, we are doomed mentality is a load of shit.

What is your proposed solution? Don’t try? Don’t innovate?

[thejazzman]

I've certainly given up on the idea that my fellow man is going to make the collective good choice. And this now influences my own decision making going further. I doubt I'm alone.

[pbsladek]

Sorry to hear that :(. Don’t give up!