I agree entirely, which I guess brings both of us back to the original OP in that people succumb to apathy and helplessness when dealing with climate change. The great unwashed masses will never agree to policies which curtail their economic prosperity or inconvenience them, and capitalism will never agree to anything which halts its self-serving pursuit of profits. So it’s Waterworld or bust, and I’ll end up as that old dude inside the bowels of the oil tanker.

Have you been accused of glibness before in your life by friends, family, or co-workers?

If you mean “compete” in a capitalist sense, then you’re right. But sailing ships absolutely “compete” in that they can move goods and products from one port to another using zero fossil fuels. That’s not ignoring any reality, they actually do work and sail using the wind. Open any history book for proof if you don’t believe me.

But as we’re already aware, relying in any way on capitalism or its definitions is going to do the exact opposite of saving us from climate change.

Perhaps we do. I meant “easily” in that the tech is already there, nothing needs to be invented. We could start building clipper ships again tomorrow, or design a clipper to hold TEUs. It’s a much “easier” problem than converting all commercial lorries and personal autos to electric, across all countries, even 3rd world ones.

My guess is you’re quoting this? https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions

The problem with your statement is fragmentation. Yes, “transportation” is the biggest single CO2 polluter followed by electricity, but there are billions of individual cars and lorries out there, across many different nations and laws, so the marginal effect of any single car is infinitesimal, and too difficult to go after. But things like maritime shipping, aviation, and railroads are monolithic, and transnationally regulated, so much easier to make an impact. Commercial transport also accounts for a way, way larger chunk of the 28% than residential transport.

In terms of most bang for buck, we should be targeting electricity generation and industry, as these are not nearly as fragmented, and easier to directly regulate and enforce regulation. If you immediately outlawed the top 100 corporations on the planet, you’d make a way bigger impact on CO2 than say, every residential house in America giving up their personal automobiles. Commercial lorries pollute far more than residential autos.

I dunno, maritime shipping producing more CO2 than California and Texas combined seems like a pretty big CO2 polluter to me, and we have to reduce where we can, ~4% is still a good start.

It actually is low hanging fruit. For 4000 years the human race engaged in maritime trade and commerce using solely wind powered vessels, and humanity thrived just fine without internal combustion engines. We could easily go back to clipper ships or design a wind-powered vessel based on shipping containers.

But efficiency will go down drastically! Transit times will increase massively! Yes, but these aren’t existential threats. So people have to wait a bit longer to receive their shiny new laptops or Steam Decks, big deal. Maybe Norway won’t have bananas anymore, not a big loss.

The real problem with climate change is that nobody wants to drastically inconvenience their modern lifestyle. Unfortunately, given the short window available to do something meaningful, drastic action is necessary which will result in large inconveniences and disruption for billions of people, but nobody wants that, and no politician will get elected selling that.

This figure is then misinterpreted by people who failed basic chemistry to mean that cargo ships are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. In reality, the opposite is true;

Perhaps it’s just poor word choice or phrasing, but it reads like you mean that “the opposite is true” in that they are NOT a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, when in fact they are a huge contributor, more than California and Texas combined.

Probably because people give up

As opposed to what, Soviet style revolution? People today don’t have the same mettle as their forebearers, it’s not going to happen. Occupy Wall Street and the George Floyd protests showed to the powers at be that people aren’t willing to embrace violent protest for change.

Perhaps I too failed basic chemistry, but I do believe you are grossly incorrect – maritime shipping is a massive contributor to CO2 emissions:

Ships release about 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, according to the IMO, roughly equal to Texas and California’s combined annual carbon output.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/06/06/shipping-carbon-emissions-biden-climate/

Marine transportation is one of the contributors to world climate change. The shipping industry contributes 3.9% of the world’s carbon dioxide output equivalent to 1260 million tons of CO2 and this is one of the large sources of anthropogenic carbon emitters.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352484722020261

I think there are loads of people who take it seriously but can’t do anything about it. The biggest CO2 polluters are mega corporations and things like airplanes and cargo ships. Ordinary people can’t fight that. One family living off the grid and producing zero CO2 won’t help anything.

Ergo, most people are apathetic, as they should be. You’re not going to change the minds of governments and mega corps.

Ah okay, fair enough, I understand.

I’m very keen to see what happens with the newly elected leader of Italy, as she and her party are openly very far right with real fascist ties/history. Will be interesting to see if she and her government remain in power for long.

Also curious to see what will happen with the AfD in Germany. Each election they get closer and closer to holding real power.

I enjoyed your rambling actually! Lots of good points there.

My own two pence is something that Yanis Varoufakis once said in an interview: leftists don’t win elections. This has always stayed with me because he is largely correct. The only times you had proper, true left socialist governments elected was immediately after WW2 (Attlee, Hatoyama), or during the great depression (FDR, and some extent Truman). The moment there is any prosperity of any kind, the world tilts back into greed and individualism. Only during times of existential threat does the ego of the average voter subsume enough to adopt a meaningful, collectivist attitude of actually cooperating and working together for the betterment of all. And yet, some of the most championed constructs of the 20th century came out of those leftist governments, such as social security in the US and the NHS in the UK.

But it’s just so weird to me that when times are anything but awful (literally mass starvation) everyone only focuses on themselves and their own enrichment, which is why outside of a global depression or world war, most voters elect from centre to the right, but rarely left. Even in China today, they’re hardly Bernie Sanders leftists anymore, much closer Andrew Carnegie style laizzez faire capitalists now.

I think the reason for this is because humans are fundamentally shitty creatures, right down to their chimpanzee DNA. We’re just not designed to work for a collective good and share resources equitably. And, because chimpanzee society is also based around a 1% top dog who controls 90% of the resources, so too do humans always build stratified societies where all power and wealth is held by some elite 1%. From Mesopotamia, to ancient Egypt, to Rome, to the middle ages, to today, it is always that there is some rich elite that own everything, and struggling peons who hate one another and are always looking for an excuse to fight someone and go to war.

Hence, I don’t think it’s necessarily about lack of education or propaganda or indoctrination. I think it’s more to do with biology and DNA itself. As a species, we’re sadly fucked, and setup to fail. And it will always be fascism, racism, and oligarchy which wins out, because that is who we are at an existential core.

I like everything you wrote, thank you, but perhaps disagree with your last part about not remaining in power. It seems to me that the current crop of neo-fascist (or fascist-adjacent as you call them) leaders have remained in power for a very long time, even with more or less fair elections. Erdogan in Turkey, Netenyahu in Israel, and Orban in Hungary come to mine. I guess with each of those, they don’t even have to deliver any meaningful policy just so long as they keep hurting the people their voters want hurt, they’ll keep being re-elected.

Absolutely, I’m gobsmacked nobody seems to read history.

Although, a lot of these nowadays fascist leaders are being supported by very large swathes of their own populations, as much as 48%, which is the truly shocking thing.