Big Problem 🥀

Oh no, they're not just going to let it happen. They'll actively stop us from solving it.

"Sorry kid, I need my 9% returns on these investment funds, and I don't care where that money comes from."
- I bought this stock from a company called planter or something, it's going crazy lately
- I don’t care where that money comes from.
  Unless it's renewable energy tech, then fuck it, those shitheads can rot in hell!
Well im not having solar panels near my town. They'll absorb all the sunlight and it'll be dark!
- Windmills slow the planet down!!!
And they'll put more of us on the planet too, because it's so wonderful here.
But the windmills will kill all the birds (that there are none left of)!
- Not real ones, anyway
Solving? There's an undeniable solution that has been there as long as the problem has
- I'm in favor of completely remove the humans. We should have the tech already.
- Which is...?

...and oligarchy, and fascism, and income inequality, and decreasing life expectancy, and increasing infant mortality, and more wars, and huge amounts of debt, and job loss, and...

Short version: unchecked capitalism.
- But I was told that capitalism checks itself using something called “market forces”.
- Yeah. Those problems totally didn't exist before capitalism.
Besides that it's smooth sailing.
- ... and microplastics, and resource scarcity, and MRSA, and infrastructure collapse, and social media addiction, and ...
We're so close to flying cars
The decreasing life expectancy is largely related to obesity though. There are a lot of obese people who find reasons to blame other than their own self determination. If corporations have made it easy to eat yourself to death, people shouldn't just let them get away with it by eating themselves to an early death.
- I’m glad you brought up personal responsibility, however if you’re buying something from the grocery store, unless it’s raw ingredients, it has shit in it. Even then, in the US the only way to completely avoid nasty shit in food is to produce it yourself or purchase from a local farmers market. Unfortunately many people don’t have the resources to do that. But to your credit, we do seem to be developing some sort of allergy to personal responsibility, especially in regards to personal health and fitness.
- If people willingly choose to shorten their life, I don't consider it a problem.
  Now, lying and manipulating people into choosing it, similar to what the cigarette industry did, is obviously a problem.
  But at this point, everyone knows cigarettes and processed foods are unhealthy. People just don't care.

A teacher showed us the documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the real truth I learned from that, is that the majority of adults are irresponsible crybabies.

Everyone is just faking it. And those that don't, don't have the attention of those that listen.
Our safety manuals are written one disaster at a time, never before.
Its because most people only care about their comfort and convenience right now and in the very near future.

Boomer: "Climate change will be your burden to suffer through".

Gen Z: "It's not fair. You got a full life of profligacy before the effects were even noticeable. I get none of the material wealth and I'm going to have to live my whole long life suffering increasing effects of it."

Boomer: "Not so long."

Also boomers: "When are you having kids? I want grandchildren."
- Told my mom I didn't want kids and she said, "Oh you'll change your mind"
  I came out to my mom as gay and she said "well you can always adopt"
  Then I started intense birth control treatments for my fucked up reproductive system and she was like, "you can still adopt"
  Yeeted my uterus, cervix, and fallopian tubes just before my bday this summer and threw a fuckin party afterwards because now there is absolutely no way I can ever be a parent AND my reproductive system can't do whatever the fuck it wants cause it doesn't exist!
  My mom finally accepted that this part of the family tree has ended after that. This while process happened over 18 years. I started telling her I didn't wanna be a parent when I was TEN.
  Edit: I should prolly say that my mom isn't a boomer, but Gen X. She's surrounded constantly by boomers and other members of Gen X who act like boomers so she has picked up a lot of the traits. Practically demanding grandchildren was the worst boomer thing she's done so far, and I hope it stays that way.
- Selfishness incarnate lol
I once saw it described as the Boomers being the “fuck around” generation and Gen Z being the “find out” generation.

Yep. And your generation will do the same, and it will go on like this until it can't be ignored anymore, because that's what humans do, whatever the age.

until it can’t be ignored anymore
At which point the fascist governments people have voted into power will keep on going as they were while murdering some convenient scapegoats, until mass scale industrialised human society collapses, never to recover because we used up all our resources.
Edit: I honestly think people don't quite understand that once all this bullshit collapses, there will probably never be another high tech civilisation on Earth again: all the easily extractable resources will have been used up, and the amount of energy required to extract more would be higher than what will be available once oil-based hydrocarbons have been more or less used up. Magic batteries that require a ton of resources won't fix the situation, and we have no large scale replacement for oil.
- The large scale replacement for oil is the original source of that energy, the sun. Sure it will take a while, but high technology (read small computers) doesn't actually require hydrocarbons, it just requires knowledge of physics. Modern society is based on hydrocarbon fuels because they're so convenient, but that doesn't mean it's required for any of our technology to function. We will likely be combusting hydrocarbons for the rest of our existence, they're just too convenient for energy storage, but the source of those hydrocarbons could easily be specialized cyanobacteria farms or direct chemical synthesis. Both of those technologies already exist, but we have never done any significant investment in them because they would have to compete with basically picking up what's already lying around. In the absence of significant oil deposits we will be forced to make those technologies work.
Hence my hate for them. Fucking dicks the lot of them.
Keep kicking it down the street.

Looking at this more benevolently, the teacher might be wishing that this kid's generation will end up being more conscious and willing to act than his own.

Yah I don't think there's anything wrong with the message in the context it's presented. It's a fucking teacher. They are already doing not just the most they can, but also doing something far more effective than butting heads with a corporate-driven world at a time when environmentalism was seen as fringe and ludicrous by most people on Earth.
It would be different if it was some wealthy corporate CEO saying "I'm leaving this for the next generation to solve."
I remember a time that even a teacher saying this to a student would be considered inappropriate activism about a controversial topic.
- I remember a time that even a teacher saying this to a student would be considered inappropriate activism about a controversial topic.
  ...Like right now?
  From my perspective (millenial) raised in a conservative area, climate change discussion went from 'kinda iffy in the past' to approved to expected, then suddenly lurched to more taboo than I've ever seen.
  I can't even discuss it with my college-educated older relatives without them ranting about it. It's a total taboo; they think I'm nuts for even bringing it up as an existential problem.
  I can only imagine what parents would say if teachers said that now.

They said that to me when I was a kid... and I was born in the 80s.

And now they're in retirement.
Fuck them. They should have been in prison thirty years ago.
- What?
Those ones were right. We are solving it now, and we either finish solving it or our children will have to deal with resource depletion when their time to shine comes.
Either way, it's not Global Warming that they will be solving.

This comic is TERRORISM according to Trump's Republican Party!

This comment is anticapitalist and therefore terrorist...
- Lemmy is anticapitalist and therefore blocked by the Great American Firewall.
  Dissidents will be reported.
  Hopefully Trump will die of a stroke before before his third term
"WE ARE ALL DOMESTIC TERRORISTS" -CPAC 2022

I remember a similar comment made by one my highschool teachers. Because I was such a try-hard cringe edge lord I said something like "if my generation got rid of your generation, then we've solved that problem".

Amazing that you had enough knowledge to answer like that in the first place. Looking back on my school days, I was so uninformed about so many important things: climate, politics - you name it.

Yes.

... next question?

funny thing is, this was true 40 years ago, and it's true today.

The problem is Capitalism.

It's part of it, but not only that

Stupid generations war. As stupid as men vs women, religion vs religion etc. It should be smart people vs stupid greedy sociopaths

Class war is the only war that will get us out of this.
- It won't either. Class cold wars can get you some results, but hot wars are always damaging to everybody.
And simply blaming older people also hides the problem of global inequality and exploitation of the third world. Most elderly in my country only faced food insecurity and hyperinflation when younger, and their environmental impact for all the time they're alive is smaller than the environmental impact of a current teenager in the usa.

I want to hear what he thinks his generation's problem to solve was.

Too much extra money and not enough beach houses to spend it all!
High gasoline prices.
99% probability: Cold war/communism
Protesting a lot at age 20, then becoming a square.

Do you think if we had lifespan in the centuries we'd have a different perspective?

The 2001 game Arcanum (a steam punk fanatsy hybrid) had that perspective. You had a world based in late Victorian industrialization and you had elves and dwarves and stuff... but those same dwarves and elves had VERY different views on technology. This is because they live for centuries while humans just decades. They make it clear that the two longer living races often approach technology (elves hate it btw, dwarves like it but are cautious) with caution specifically because they can see the effects of their shit from a hundred years from now while humans simply cannot.
I believe it's more a cultural thing. In a lot of places, people think in terms of a community, not individuals, and will plan things for the longer terms. But in american culture, people are much more selfish and short-sighted. Problem is that they have been shoving their culture in the entire world, and it makes it look like this is the default for all of humanity.
Not under capitalism. The wealthiest will do just fine in climate collapse and they're planning for it. They don't care about anything beyond the next fiscal quarter in terms of environment.

Humanity doesn't do shit unless the problem is holding the door open with a foot stuck between the door. Then the rest of humanity who the problem hasn't gotten to yet will point and laugh at the person experiencing the problem because reasons. At that point nobody will be too eager to jump and help, lest their door get stuck too by the problem.

How did 14 people understand this
- Proper punctuation marks at the end of the comment.

We have a circus we gotta run out of town first

What's a middle school teacher supposed to do about it? There's little to nothing we can do at the personal level beyond reducing our personal tiny footprint.

What’s a middle school teacher supposed to do about it?
Join an organisation that does something about it and teach all children about that organisation.
- So climate change will be their generation's problem, just like in the comic? I feel like most of the replies to me are just proving the teacher right.
Teach kids about it, like the artist's did
- Isn't the concept of the comic that it isn't enough?
There's no reason to assume that his students will end up in positions that are significantly more powerful than his. And he is talking about generations, not you people in my class.

I love this art style so much.

I was thinking like this when I decided to go into the field, like "we can't just doom the next generation and peace out", now i'm deep in it at the highest level and i'm like "ooh that's why.."

When you're young you experience the world, when you get older you keep the world working for the young to experience it, and when you're old you wish you'd made it work better so you could've really experienced it.

The problem is, there are egotistical maniacs with nukes trying to enslave society for the benefit of the 1% or to satisfy their own ideals while sacrificing everybody else's needs/safety. If they decide to nuke everything, there won't be a world left to protect against even this.

Boomers and GenXers:

🗣️🎤 Y'all ready for this? 😎🎶

🎧🕺🔥🎉⚡🙌💫💃🎵

Yes, lets blame GenXers, who despite being in their late 40s and 50s, have almost ZERO power because the boomers wont fucking retire already. We've been fighting with boomers over climate change (and everything else) since it was called "global warming" back in the 90s. Don't put this shit on us when the majority of us don't want this.
- I mean, in us terms, genxers broke the most heavily for trump. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/20/cherie-westrich-alt-rock-gen-x-maga-00033769
- Sorry, I guess that was a bit unearned. I slipped it in there because I was trying to work out the age of the teacher and he seemed too young to be a boomer, plus Space Jam is too young for boomers.
  Eh I tried to make a funny, failed

1988

https://lemmy.world/post/35800957

“Now listen here, you little shit…”

We are getting close to a nuclear war. Don't we want global warming to compensate for the following nuclear winter?

the numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter

Finally, an optimistic view of the situation.

Uh oooohhhhh! Fascism!

Laughs in veganism (and thus taking personal responsibility for changing, non-hypocrisy and non-virtue signalling and non-deflecting)

...among other things, literally virtue signaling that you're not virtue signaling.

Cynical take from today's fucked up point of view: The teacher was woke and entirely wrong. The proof is that climate change is still not happening today. Caring for the environment is economic terrorism. There never was anything to worry about in the first place. Drill baby drill.

But climate change IS happening, and already observable.
- You don't say. It's almost as if I was deliberately obtuse.

Yes.

Well, they are definitely making death more appealing every day. So there is that.

Humanity's carbon footprint has been a distraction. All that money and effort (green energy legislation, carbon caps, etc) could've been funneled into geoengineering for proper long-term solutions.

Even if humans were eradicated, the habitability of Earth would only be prolonged a bit. So the idea that we just need to emit less carbon is just kicking the can.

I'm no subject matter expert, but I imagine, if there was scientific consensus as to what's a sensible geoengineering change to make, then we would be on that immediately. Oil companies could invest a fortune into that and it would still be beneficial for them.
- You're right, and there is no consensus. Companies, and even current governments, are ill-equipped for solving long-term problems. Especially a problem that won't be a net harm for like 60 years.
  My point was that all that money could've gone to a real long-term solution which requires a lot of research (and which humanity will need to finance eventually anyways). Reminds me of people who spend more money on car repairs than what the car is worth. They see a mechanic bill of $400 and think it's cheaper than buying another vehicle. It gets it running for another 4 months. Then a dozen bills later...
  "Another 4 months" for current climate change policies is like "another 50 years"... being generous.
  Reducing carbon emissions is a temporary solution, buying a couple thousand more years. Taken to its most extreme, it requires human industry to ultimately cease and thus make it even more difficult to solve the problem permanently.
Where did you hear that nonsense?
- It's common knowledge that humans are accelerating climate change, they're not the sole source of it. 🤷