One of my classes for my Ecology Degree is an Environmental future planning class and it’s bleak, folks. Here are some highlights of the ideas my professor has put forward for planning for the future:

Using AI to help predict all the natural disasters. Because AI is totally going to save us folks.

Floating Parks. Lol.

More bike lanes even though we live in a part of the country that is massively spread out, unbearably hot, humid and hilly. Sure mate, I’m going to bike my 2 hour by car commute on a bike in sauna conditions.

Ride share companies where you pay a subscription instead of owning a car because yeah sure private companies getting more money and the public owning less ourselves is totally the solution instead of JUST MAKING IT PUBLIC TRANSPORT FFS WE HAD TRAMS IN THE 1900s AND THEY WORKED FINE.

Asking right-wingers really nicely to take climate change seriously.

Yet another Paris agreement style thing asking countries to commit to a weak target that they’ll just ignore anyway.

Really depressing shit like “Ok so climate change is inevitable so what are some ways we can adapt to constant natural disasters and food scarcity.” Like not even planning to fix it or prevent it. Just accepting it as “well it’s going to happen nothing we can do.” when we sure as fuck should be doing whatever possible to avoid such a future (but of course we can’t, because the only solution is communism and assertive resistance and liberals would rather kill the entire global ecosystem than actively fight for survival)

So basically if you want insight on how liberals are going to deal with climate change the answer is about as well as they did with COVID. So basically limp half solutions that they give up on in the spirit of comprising with reactionaries with a focus on mild damage control rather than prevention and repair.

The sad thing is that that the students themselves are putting forward actually good solutions that are communist without realising they’re communist, but the lecturer just kind of smiles and nods and goes on to the next topic as if to say “Yes you’re right but I can’t say it because I work for capitalists.”

The more I study the more apparent it becomes that there is no way a capitalist system can fight this. The west cannot fight this even though it’s people know the solutions they simply can’t do them due to the oppressive nature of our system. Thank god for China because it’s looking bad otherwise.

  • BountifulEggnog [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    Ok so climate change is inevitable so what are some ways we can adapt to constant natural disasters and food scarcity.

    A shit load of us will die. And uh, hopefully whoever is left is good at scavenging. I don’t plan to be there though.

    • nothx [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      Yeah, I don’t want to live through the collapse to be honest. For 1, im not emotionally or mentally built for it. 2, when im out of my meds i wont have very long anyway.

      So I guess my first sentence should be revised to read: I won’t be able to live through the collapse.

      However, I also don’t want to… I think there is a bit to much romanticism around this, not enough people see how brutal it’s gonna be.

  • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    At that point just become one of those delusional cult people in all the disaster movies that pray to Cthulhu for humanity’s salvation or some shit, same type of magical thinking, but more fun

    Actually, I shouldn’t be so harsh. You’re still a little lucky that your ecology department hasn’t been completely gutted to fund the multimillion dollar salaries of sportsball coaches.

  • peppersky [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    “Ok so climate change is inevitable so what are some ways we can adapt to constant natural disasters and food scarcity.” Like not even planning to fix it or prevent it. Just accepting it as "well it’s going to happen nothing we can do.

    Climate change, constant natural disasters and food scarcity are already happening right here, right now. There’s no reason to fix or prevent that, unless you think inventing a time machine is an option. Even if we stopped all fossil fuel consumption right now at this moment, we’d still need to adapt to a fundamentally changed climate, more natural disasters and food scarcity.

    • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      9 months ago

      It is fixable, and that narrative is just pushed to avoid taking the necessary steps to reversing the damage because it requires strict regulations of capitalist wastefulness and excess.

      • peppersky [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        If you’ve somehow found a way to capture the millions of tons of CO2 in our atmosphere that we produced over the last two hundred years then you should share it with everybody, but unless that happens we are going to be hard-pressed to reverse the 2 degrees of global warming we are already at.

        And like come on, we’re communists here you could have at least come up with something more radical than “strict regulations of capitalism”. Every aspect of human society in its largest form and it’s smallest one would have to be completely rediscovered and redirected towards the goal of being sustainable if we want to have any chance at surviving. We need a more radical break with the state of things than ever before.

        • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
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          9 months ago

          We literally reversed the hole in the ozone layer by banning CFCs. You underestimate how much of this is just due to overproduction and for profit exploitation of the environment. Once you take the unrelenting demand of infinite growth and production out of the equation you can actually get shit done.

          If resources were carefully managed and carbon recapturing in the form of mass restoring of natural vegetation was undertaken you could easily coax the Earth back into stability.

          The problem is capitalists do the exact opposite right now and the Earth can’t keep up. They have increased land clearing, They have increased unnecessary meat overconsumption and it’s all just for investor portfolios. There are multiple studies that have shown that as soon as we get our boot off of the environment even just a bit, it bounces back and starts to repair, the average person doesn’t even have to give up anything. But it never lasts long because a capitalist economy is run by people that want number to go up and lobby to be able to carve into the environment as much as they want.

  • studying ecology and modern issues at the intersection of society/nature was a big shove into Marxism for me too.

    lots of classes describing and articulating with terrifying accuracy about how fucked we were, how resilient natural systems could be if we stopped actively and increasingly choking them to death, etc. and witnessing the complete lack of realistic solutions within the dominant ideological frame of privatization, individualism etc.

    I was in an interdisciplinary program which had a cluster in actual social sciences (beyond the dismal science of economics in the US) so I had just enough understanding and connections to that “other” side of campus and found myself making friends with students over there and learning about their weird conferences.

    after attending one and realizing how 1) everyone was talking about real life problems and case studies the hard-science-only ecologists ignore or are uncomfortable talking about 2) everyone was using all this shorthand jargon I didn’t know and I realized it was “marx” who I had heard of, of course, but never actually read. I was in favor of socialism already, as socialist programs made sense, universal rights, common interests, etc. I just wanted to keep up with the dialogue and conversations these people were having about theories of land, ownership, workers, power, so I found David Harvey’s lecture series online and that changed everything. it was a real struggle, but once things started to click, it was like a train picking up momentum. like the thread one pulls on that keeps going until an entire fascade and constructed understanding unravels completely. the magic dispels in an instant, and all we are left with is the horror of what is and the beauty of what might be.

    now my love for the land and its peoples is as pure as my hate for capitalism, colonialism, and empire.

    • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      9 months ago

      True but the problem is tying it to a subscription service like Uber means that it will be too expensive for most people to rely on. You can’t do it with a privately owned company with a profit motive. It has to be public transport for it to work.

    • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      doubt

      If one car drives 200 miles in a day, I’d imagine that its making a similiar amount of pollution as 4 cars driving 50 miles in a day, at least as far as fuel consumption and GHG emissions go. How much of an Uber driver’s day just them driving around in a vehicle all by themselves? At least public transit has the potential to be designed to keep the bus/train transporting passengers between every stop.

      Public transit should be the backbone with carpooling and cabs being the much smaller band-aid for people in edge cases that can’t easily be served by public transit.

  • SuperNovaCouchGuy2 [any]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    if they cant bring themselves to stop funding pissrael’s genocide in Palestine in the present then these evil bastards won’t lift a finger to save millions of lives by mitigating the worst of the upcoming climate apocalypse

    they must be removed from the control panel and replaced by a working class revolutionary party