Anthropogenic Climate Change

We're just going to have to disagree. There's nothing noble in death.

I won't say that tactics like these are useless, hell, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and countless others have proven otherwise. And self-immolation can be indeed powerful.

My main point of contention in the current discussion is that such acts of protest need to have a defined aim to be effective, and bringing attention just to the importance of climate change is sadly not enough. If instead you also bring in a solution that can be implemented, then that is something that can gain traction.

Edited by raziel365 on Apr 25th 2022 at 10:18:07 AM

Those people had built up political and social capital that made their sacrifices mean something to the world at large. They were not "random crazy person" that the media could easily dismiss. They had followings and, as you note, solutions, not just grievances.

At this point, awareness of climate change is not our primary problem. Solving it is the problem, along with the political and economic will to enact the solutions. That takes money and legislation, and killing yourself in front of the White House isn't going to do squat to affect those.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 1:31:24 PM

The Tunisian revolution of the Arab spring was kickstarted by a street vendor committing self immolation. And he didn't have a lot of built up social capital like Martin Luther or Gandhi. Although I guess timing played a big role here in his self immolation (or for anyone's for that matter) in being the catalyst for change it was.

Edited by xyzt on Apr 25th 2022 at 11:07:55 PM

So this guy's mistake wasn't in killing himself but in having bad timing?

The news isn't going to cover self-immolations because they don't want to be responsible for a rash of copy-cat suicides. I'm with Fighteer on this one—if by one's death one achieves some direct objective good for someone else, then that counts as a noble act of self-sacrifice. If it's just a public message of uncertain outcome, then no. I don't want anyone else to die in this way, it's extremely painful and isn't going to change anything.

On the other hand, it also isn't true that nothing works—the world is changing, we are actively transforming to a more green, sustainable economic system, it's just that it's happening very slowly and incrementally. There isn't any other choice, it simply costs too much to make all the necessary changes at once.

However, all that said, I think it is important to note something about the context of this man's protest—the Supreme Court is deciding a case that could seriously undermine the ability of the government to regulate carbon emissions. Should the Supreme Court decides that the Federal Government has no business regulating carbon, it's going to become a whole lot harder (though not impossible) to reduce emissions in a serious way.

Edited by DeMarquis on Apr 25th 2022 at 1:42:24 PM

Look, if the conservatives on the Court are influenced enough by this one random guy immolating himself to switch their votes, I will admit that I was wrong.

Yeah no, the news does not care about copy-cats and it never has. If that were true they wouldn't hyper-focus on the identities of spree shooters or terrorists.

Furthermore, the issue with talking about "meaningful" deaths is that it's impossible to know whether a person's death will be meaningful. Did John Brown know that his sacrifice would contribute to the mutual radicalization of the Abolitionist and Slaver sides in the US? Not really, he thought it would but that's because of his religious fervor rather then anything rational. But it did all the same. We fundamentally don't know if our actions matter or not, but that doesn't stop people from trying either way.

More to the point, praising an act does not mean that we're suggesting anyone do it. I'm probably the person here who has been most unreservedly admiring of him and I sure as hell don't intend to self-immolate, nor would I advise anyone to emulate him. But factually speaking he accepted a massive price to himself for the purpose of helping everyone, even if it's ultimately meaningless the attitude it represents is courageous in the extreme. That courage has value.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Apr 25th 2022 at 10:48:20 AM

I don't know... is it more courageous to see things through or put yourself out of perceived misery to make a point? I think you're confusing the physical courage to endure brief pain with the moral courage to pursue a course of action even if it feels ineffective.

Whatever good this person could have done in the future, he's no longer able to now. I do not consider suicide to be a moral act except in cases of terminal illness or incurable pain. (A person dying through their own stupidity is a different matter.)

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 1:57:48 PM

That and doing it for a cause that the public is just as apathetic about as the govts are about it. The masses are frustrated with corruption, systemic discrimination and things that effect them in visible and direct ways which means that self sacrificial acts in relation to such things can be used as rallying cry by the masses to come around. Climate change is unfortunately not like that, and most among the public don't hold it to the same level of importance that they see other things like bad economic conditions, corruption etc, even if they should.

Edited by xyzt on Apr 25th 2022 at 11:19:33 PM

I think it's pretty clear that the news doesn't want to talk about it (beyond saying "it wasn't a weird terrorist attack") because they don't want to talk about why it happened. It's the same thing for those hunger strikes. They'll vaguely reference what happened, but refuse to talk about why.

Because talking about why means having to actually address why someone would feel so strongly about climate change to do this...and then the hunger striking scientists will come up and then the question turns into "so, why do these scientists feel so strongly about this" and it gets harder and harder to take a "centrist" position on it as the story unfolds.

And the right wing news just don't want to acknowledge climate change at all.

So who is supposed to be convinced by this act, again? If the "centrist media" has no interest in making a big deal of it, then it was pointless to begin with because the only people who care are already invested in the ideas this man was espousing.

On one hand, it is indeed a hard fact that killing yourself today to hopefully push for necessary changes on Tuesday means you won't be around to make the case for Wednesday's needed changes.

However, if climate scientists are reaching the conclusion that something as drastic as self-harm is the only way to get the ball running on reforms aimed at curbing climate changes, it's pretty clear they think that the current rate of progression on the situation isn't and will never be sufficient. One could make the case that they are in error (a tall order given the scientific consensus on climate change), but citing a lack of political expediency is side-stepping the actual issue. A lack of political will to address a problem doesn't mean the problem stops existing.

It also doesn't help that similar "not the right political climate" arguments have been used quite a bit by those opposed to past protest groups, making bringing such an argument to this topic questionable.

It was used a whole lot against the abolitionists, for example, and pretty much every iteration of the civil rights and suffrage movements. It's happening now with queer rights too. Any movement that threatens the status quo or the people in power is never "at the right time", so the point is to force it into the spotlight.

And the previous movements weren't trying to draw attention to potential human extinction.

Edited by Zendervai on Apr 25th 2022 at 2:06:37 PM

Let's be clear: civil rights is primarily a moral issue, and acts of civil disobedience and martyrdom call attention to it because they are making moral points. If the system is going to kill you anyway, then make your death meaningful and all that. Not that I advocate it, but I have a greater understanding of the motives.

Moreover, the solution to people discriminating against minorities is to, you know, stop doing that. It's not like we'd have to stop driving cars or turn off all the light bulbs to provide racial justice. Sure, people have to give up their privilege, but doing that would not lead to civilizational collapse.

Climate change is primarily an economic issue. I don't care how many people you light on fire in Times Square. You could string flaming climate scientists across all the buildings in North America, but it won't get solar panels built any faster or make it any less of a catastrophe if we turn off the oil pumps tomorrow.

Edit: And it is not a human extinction issue. That is just hyperbole. Some humans will survive even the most extreme climate change we can imagine, and it's self-limiting because the collapse of civilization will eventually allow the climate to recover. Sure, most of us will die, but that's true on any future timeline.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 2:15:55 PM

Climate change is primarly a humanitarian issue. It's not the economy that's going to suffer most from climate change, it's humans. That the economy is going to suffer along with us is just a nice bonus. And mind you, it's not developped countries' economy that are going to be hurt the most by climate change, it's poorer ones.

Edited by Resileafs on Apr 25th 2022 at 2:21:55 PM

The context is different. If the critical barrier to social progress were the public's fear of being punished for speaking out, then physical self-sacrifice can make a difference. That's why Thich Quang Duc's Self Immolation was effective: South Vietnam was a brutal dictatorship, and people needed an example to overcome their fear. This is also the case with Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia during the Arab Spring. It explains the power of that iconic scene in the comic and movie "V": "I would rather die behind the chemical sheds." Once you demonstrate that death no longer prevents you from taking action, the government has nothing left. But that's not the case in the United States: no one is being disappeared because they dare to criticize government environmental policy. Self-immolation is a grotesque over-reaction and the loss of a decent human being.

It isn't just an economic issue. There really is a significant moral component to it. It's like how slavery was both. Many abolitionist movements succeeded in part because the money was drying up and the opposition faded...but that still left centuries of untold human suffering.

With climate change, the moral question is "how much suffering are you willing to tolerate in others before you're willing to accept a hit to your quality of life in order to fix things?" What happens if, say, Chile, demands better treatment in exchange for lithium? Do you take the economic hit to help make Chile more capable of weathering the climate change at the cost of slowing your efforts and spending more money?

You can't just say "well, economically" and leave it at that because making green tech requires materials from developing and heavily exploited nations that will demand better treatment the faster North America and Europe upgrade. And that's a moral question that has to be balanced against the economic one and sometimes the economic factors have to lose out to the moral factors, but the reverse should never happen if they can be at all avoided.

And "well, some humans will survive" is an awful argument. It's like saying that the physical planet can survive anything we do to it. Like, yes, that's true, but it's entirely unhelpful and entirely useless to the problem to bring up. I think civilization collapsing and humanity being reduced to a fraction of our population is unacceptable and going into semantics about it is a waste of time and energy.

Edited by Zendervai on Apr 25th 2022 at 2:24:56 PM

No, it is an economic issue, because our economy is built up of energy flows, and where we get that energy from is what is driving climate change. It causes humanitarian crises, to be sure, but the solution people see to a humanitarian crisis is to provide aid, maybe help people rebuild. It's not to stop driving cars and stop eating meat.

The only way to meaningfully address climate change is to view it from an economic lens. And yes, sufficient environmental collapse will destroy the food security and habitability of developed nations just as much as less developed ones.

No, this is a false framing of the problem. Developed nations will not give up their comforts to fix a crisis in Africa due to climate change. We can eliminate that idea right now. Developed nations will only consider giving up their comforts if climate change threatens them directly, and by then it's far too late for Africans.

The only way this is going to work is if we rapidly create alternative sources of energy that allow lifestyles to be preserved. Moral outrage alone isn't enough.,

"Unacceptable" is carrying a lot of baggage there. It either will or it will not happen. It's an objective occurrence, not an opinion. I would like human civilization to be around in five hundred years too, but if we destroy ourselves, life will go on.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 2:27:32 PM

I said it is both economic and moral. They're not mutually exclusive. Acting like they are can easily lead to justifying atrocities.

Edited by Zendervai on Apr 25th 2022 at 2:27:20 PM

I think economic questions are ethical questions, a hard line between the two seems simplistic to me. How much of a reduction in one's standard of living are people willing to endure in order to improve the standard of living in a different population? This is an objective question with an objective answer: "If the cost of fighting climate change is only an additional $1 a month, 57 percent of Americans said they would support that. But as that fee goes up, support for it plummets. At $10 a month, 39 percent were in favor and 61 percent opposed. At $20 a month, the public is more than 2-to-1 against it. And only 1-in-5 would support $50 a month."

Yet "Dana Fisher, director of the Program for Society and the Environment at the University of Maryland, said it’s noteworthy that a majority was “willing to pay at all,” and added that the levels of support for $10 a month and $20 a month are significant." Which is either good news or bad depending upon your prior expectations.

As for developing nations demanding better treatment, I think history shows two related things: 1) People get the treatment they are able to pay for, and 2) This is inevitably going to happen, regardless of what anyone in the more developed world thinks about it.

Edited by DeMarquis on Apr 25th 2022 at 2:31:52 PM

Mentioning the developing countries leads us though to another conundrum, what happens when third world countries start to increase their demands of energy?

Because there is a correlation between energy consumption and development within a country, and I can tell you that no developing country likes to make revenue just of resource exploitation because that's always left cheap due to the way the market works.

Resolving Climate Change does mean lowering life standards in the developed world and helping improve those standards in the developing one, that's why I previously mentioned the oil subsidy in the USA, you need to get rid of that if you want to make a big step into shifting the USA's lifestyle to something more sustainable, and I say that knowing very well that even with preparations ready you are still going to have a social upheaval.

It's not like that doesn't happen too in the developing world though, I could tell you countless stories of police and the army destroying illegal and highly polluting mining operations in the Amazon rainforest but that won't stop it because for the people there it's either get involved in that or remain poor, and no one wants to stay poor in a country with lacking infrastructure and support.

The cynic in me wants to replace "coffee" in that quote with things like "food", "water" or "rent". Because he is convinced that the rich and wannabe rich are that callous.

, I feel like addressing the selfishness in that is both a tough (unless you buy into The Evils of Free Will narrative), but necessary task. Whcih means that we might have to take a long glare at consumer culture at the middle, upper and lower class levels. Getting rid of Planned Obsolescence is one thing, but dealing with merch culture, keeping up with the Joneses and such are different beasts.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Apr 25th 2022 at 3:30:11 AM

No population, so far as I know, has ever supported lowering it's own living standards. I think that's an unreasonable bar. You can convince people to support a "win-win" solution, where they benefit but in a way that benefits someone else even more so (that's basically how Civil Rights passed). I think the developed world will eventually transition to a more sustainable industrial base, and this doesn't, in theory, require everyone to experience a lowered standard of living. For example, by expanding electrical over fossil fuel consumption, and then by over-producing electricity, we could experience a net reduction in the price of energy, which would create additional economic opportunities and encourage the same process in the developing world.

It isn't a choice between self-interest and altruism, it's a choice between short term self-interest and long term.

One of the things that makes this tricky is that we kinda...can't free market our way out of climate change. The current system we have is woefully inadequate for it. I don't know how, but this is going to have to be a genuine global project which is going to have to involve a lot of social restructuring and rethinking about how we handle and think about wealth and resources.