Why Climate Change Isn’t the End of the World with Dr. Hannah Ritchie - Factually! - 254

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[TheAdamConover]

Bokksu - Experience Japan Through Snacks

[Jacob-eisc]

Factually, the average american keeps their car for around 8 years. I get that most people buying electric are well off but man, every three years seems like a special kind of privilege.

[Frankoman]

It's not that people are saying fuck it and giving up or that the problems we face are unsolvable. It's that the people in power either do not want change or are afraid to enact the policies we need to survive because most people will not accept the drastic reduction in lifestyle necessary. We can't keep living like this though

[icarusswitkes]

I haven't watched much yet but my current position is that we're all fucked but I wanna fight anyway. Like that quote about fascism. You don't fight fascism because you'll win, you fight it because it's fascism

[andrewgolubiewski]

The real way we need to stop excess waste is to shift the culture away from planned obsolescence. When it's a successful business plan to build and sell something designed to break so that you must repurchase the waste is immense and entirely unnecessary. In the energy and the resources to produce the product and especially in the energy to ship those products to their markets and the actual waste from the obsolete product being discarded.

[k.c.]

Ironic how it is too expensive to fix things but money isn't an object when it comes to bailing out banks, the stock market and funding wars that have nothing to do with the US.

[huntergrant]

My fear as a person living in a coastal area is that yes its not ending, but me and my kids will get to live as climate refugees when our area is unlivable. Paying a mortgage on a house I can't live in being resented by the residents of wherever I have to relocate to.

[Luci-is-lucifer]

My main disagreement with her overall stance is the mischaracterization of degrowth as sacrifice and having less. She doesnt sufficiently aclnowledge how western society is the way it is because capitalist forces shaped it that way and degrowth is the act of us shaping our lives and desires ourself. Degrowth is realizing the desire to upgrade your car every three years just because is inherently bad and something we shouldnt want, but market forces convice us otherwise by placing themselves as the default. And that the forces that shape our desires will always shape it to there benefit and thats why new technology and economics alone will not be sufficient to save us. So shes right about incremental steps, but she doesnt acknowledge the adjacency individuals have in changing the world by changing theirs.

[ShaedeReshka]

Man, Adam asked some great questions here and was very polite and accepted what I felt were unsatisfying answers.

For instance, with electric vehicles, what about the maintenance of road systems? Parking lots? Long expansions of water, electrical, and other utility systems to feed car dependent suburbs? What about pollution from tires degrading on the roads? What about the noise and visual pollution and its effects on the health of not only surrounding people, but wildlife? There are so so so so many reasons that EVs are not a huge gain.

On the topic of degrowth, the criticism was about how well we can "sell" this idea. Yet, our extractive capacity already exceeds the potential yields of the planet. We will either choose to degrow or we will be forced by material necessity to degrow in response to crisis. This isn't an individual problem either. Most of the issues deal with production, distribution, manufacturing, etc. Not consumption. This focus on the consumer end is part of the corporate gas lighting process of shifting the blame onto regular people.

Now, my background is in environmental philosophy and I am on board with the general premise that the world isn't ending and that we need to deal with the hopelessness we are experiencing after our period of denial (both just strategies to avoid having the change anything, which is the underlying issue), but I can't help but feel that this interview is swinging too hard in the opposite direction. Adam brings up wonderful counterpoints and I would have loved a more serious response to them. I would have loved to come away from this interview with a greater sense of hope, because the situation does truly feel hopeless, but this sadly didn't do it for me.

The underlying notion that economic growth is compatible with environmentalism makes me deeply sick to my stomach and only reinforces my feelings of despair about the whole thing.

[MajorHickE]

Theres something very odd about an episode on climate change and reducing our carbon footprint having an ad for snacks shipped from half the world away. Seems like the kind of thing we should be discouraging in the grand scheme of things.

[sentientflower]

Sorry but Hannah Ritchie is deeply wrong in her book, not honest at all in her representation of the problem, and she doesn't actually advocate that any substantial changes sufficient to avoid the catastrophe that is already active on the planet.
Incidentally, the fossil fuels industry loves climate optimism.

[erindabney]

I live in an apartment complex that has relatively low rent. When I was forced to buy a car last year (big red Ford squished the car I’d had for 18 years), I had to buy a gas engine because there’s no way for me to charge an electric vehicle overnight.
It’s not financially feasible for me to move to an apartment where charging a vehicle is possible. It would increase my monthly expenses by over $1k per month between rent and EV car payment.

[unseen]

I'm currently working on an adventure game set in a climate apocalypse and literally wrote the line "The world didn't end, everything just got harder." the other day. Feels appropriate.

[obstacleman]

We are over 1.5. Waiting 10 years to call it is stupid.

Im onboard with stopping oil and rewild now even though I'm likely to be among the dead. But I don't see us doing anything to curb consumption.

[ReverendRaff]

ALMOST EVERYONE HE KNOWS BUYS A NEW CAR EVERY 3 YEARS?!

What madness is this? What kind of people behave like this?

[yogtheterrible]

Dr. Ritchie did a great job, great episode. The best part was the individually packaged junk food shipped across the world immediately followed by discussion of food impact on climate.

[BlueScreenCorp]

20:40 All the examples mentioned previously are at best a 50% reduction in emissions if fossil fuels are removed. Anyone that thinks we can get out of this crisis without cultural change, and doing things like monopoly busting, tighter emissions regulations, addressing the profit motive via individual income ceilings, ending stock buy backs, making institutions required to adopt telecommuting whenever possible, strengthening environmental agencies, etc. simply moving off of fossil fuels in the near future really only helps in places where that is even possible by regulation. Don't get me wrong I think we 100% should eliminate ICE vehicles, but acting like that is adequate is naive, and talking as if market forces alone are enough to do that is misguided.

Climate change isn't a consumer problem its a regulatory one, which has been caused by the failure of regulating our modern economies, and simply acting as if this is a problem that consumers can defeat by "voting with their wallets" is just more of the same free market propaganda that got us in this mess in the first place.

[Roy]

Idk if anyone’s brought this quote from Mark Fisher yet: “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Capitalism and shortsighted profit-seeking are to blame. We need to move away from our current approach, full stop!

[colonelweird]

Adam thinks that being anticapitalist is a sort of perfectionism that ignores smaller changes in favor of the one big change, which he thinks will take a very long time to achieve and is therefore not practical. I disagree. We live in a world where companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have quickly and radically changed the lives of every single person in this country, and most people around the world. The way we live now would have seemed impossible even twenty years ago. But because it was accomplished by giant corporations, we accept it as normal and acceptable. But why should we limit ourselves only to major changes enacted by corporations for their own profit motives? To say this is the true doomerism, because these companies are destroying the world and doing immense damage to all of us every day, even apart from climate change problems. Moving away from capitalism and towards socialism is literally the most practical thing we can do.

[LordDustnDirt]

The amount of energy we spend on removing single use/short life items once their span is over and the amount spent on making them is nuts. Capitalism incentivizes replacement instead of long lasting and maintainable. I have some clothing I've owned for over 20 years. Disposability needs to die outside of certain limited applications.