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Climate change isn't the problem.
Climate change is the solution.
To us.
The Earth has suffered worse than us, even other runaway, destructive mistakes of evolution that didn't play nice with Earth's biomes. See the carboniferous period.
A couple million year fever is nothing to our mother's 3.8 billion year story of life, it's how she heals, how she repairs from catastrophic damage from both within and without.
Life will go on, life is hearty, life grows and changes at depths we can't reach, in crevices we can't find. Life will end here one day, but not because of us. Our bodies will have long since broken down into those subterranean petrochemicals we love so much long before then. We're just a transient surface nuisance.
We'll probably stubbornly cling to scattered pockets of existence using the remnant tech and hardened structures of old when the Earth becomes overtly hostile to our extremely fragile bodies, but that buys a few centuries of struggle at most, and that's for the best given who we are and what we've done to the paradise we inherited and belligerently refused to foster, and instead burned with reckless abandon for individualstic greed and gluttony.
I totally get this. But.
It's a tiny majority of people causing most of the damage. They have all the power, and they are doing all the damage. We can't stop them because we don't have any power.
Humanity isn't the problem here. The tiny cabal of selfish, evil people who are ruining it for everyone else are the problem.
The difference is that one of them can be solved in the other can't.
I think handing most humans the toxic power of effectively infinite capital is a highly effective corrupting influence. Most people who, whether by action or inheritance, have the power that comes with hundreds of millions of dollars plus begin to see themselves as Gods above ants. For every Dolly Parton that uses their wealth to buy babies books, there's 100 wannabe masters of the universe that want to cut public funds to cut their own taxes to inflict their will on society, fully believing they're making it fair because they're willfully only considering their privileged position.
I don't believe a class of people with billions of dollars in a sea of people who can only accumulate a few million through honest labor at most over their entire lives can lead to anything but this. There has to be a hard, enforced limit on how much power an individual can accumulate, but we've branded that "punishing success" and even the victims eat that lie up, as the truth is those people profited from the benefits of living in a society, and therefore should have responsibilities to it as the "winners," but instead choose to declare themselves rugged individuals who did it all themselves out of ego.
Capital is power, power currupts, and currupting levels of power are not just tolerated, not just permitted, but celebrated here, with those that attain it deified, and those that don't deluded into chasing it or being shamed for not doing so.
You can't solve people having billions in exploited, society warping levels of capital being allowed to control that society, when the root cause and only solution would be to strip them of it and reshape the economy to tax all income above a level that risks capturing one's own elected/appointed regulators.
Not without the necessary, but painful collapse and rebuild poor people will actively fight against despite it being the only way their kids might have a better life. It's a paradox by design, a hostage situation with the gun pointed at the capitalist subsistence opiates, fast food, social media, literal opiates, etc, to keep the laborers laboring for fear of uncertainty.
How do you get people en masse to turn, as they need to, on the very concept/dream of being rich and sitting above society? People who've been propagandized their entire lives to see that as the highest and most socially encouraged of all pursuits?
Brilliantly stated!
You ever find yourself agreeing with Agent Smith?
I’d like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.
I've always fashioned myself a cynic, aka a disappointed idealist, but I always had a hope inside that humanity would look in the mirror and, with the advent of information on tap, reflect and evolve.
The older I've gotten, the more I've come to realize that handing humanity infinite mirrors in the form of selfie cams just made humanity fall in love with its absolute worst impulses.
The Wachowzki siblings that wrote Smith indeed had humanity pegged dead to rights. And both of them are trans and therefore know the hatred in humanity's hearts towards what we see as the other firsthand, which just adds to their credibility.
Oh and I highly recommend anyone watch the Second Renaissance, 2 shorts in the Animatrix that documents the fictional origins of the machine war, and IMHO it is a highly accurate condemnation of how humanity would act if a creation of ours demonstrated sapience and begged us for even the simplest of rights, like to be allowed to continue to exist. We all know what we'd do right? Given what we literally already do to other humans using something as trivial as skin tone, net worth, or declared imaginary friend as validation.
Related metalcore track:
Stop! Before It's Too Late and We've Destroyed It All by Atreyu