• whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Meh. I respectfully disagree. This is the system we designed. It’s working exactly as intended. What we need is a sea change. The system is broken and that’s evident everywhere. The path we are on doesn’t work. The only way to course correct is for everyone to get on the same page and as is witnessed during the yearly COP meetings clearly the rich nations don’t fully care about the poor countries. Things are changing but dreadfully slow.

      • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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        3 months ago

        We, as in the people living now, did not design it, we are stuck with the designs of forefathers upon forefathers that had a few centuries to bake in profit above people. Before the American government, the British government did it. Other governments mimic the Big Guys. Governments are designed by the rich and powerful to minimize the power of the individual, especially in America. Keep the citizens too busy, too overworked, too sick, too poor, too homeless, too much lead in the water, too many PFAS, too much fracking pollution in the air. They just pay lip service to freedom and keep education levels low enough so people are either unaware or infinitely feeling helpless.

        Look at the water shortages looming in western US. The Department of Reclamation run by a bunch of Mormons that thought it was their God-given right to terraform the US made some overly optimistic measurements at the beginning of the 20th century and ran amok building dams and changing water routes all across the west. That led to building entire cities in places that should not have cities (Phoenix, AZ; Los Angeles, CA; Las Vegas, NV, etc.) and now those cities are “too big to fail” slurping up all the water they can from places very far away. LA has an entire nuclear facility powering water pumps to push water over a mountain range to feed some of it. The agricultural West and midwest (Midwest: NE, KS, etc.) all relied on these river sources as well as giant underground aquifers. The water was always finite, but the US government sold it cheap to push farming and agriculture into the west and away from the south where water was more plentiful. Now it’s running out.

        This isn’t even getting into the problems faced by the poorer nations you mentioned above, resources will become spread so thin, looming water wars and other conflicts on the horizon that will start out so civil at their beginning. Those nations at the equator will be on their own to survive, with mass-migration towards the poles being the only real solution for those that survive.

        We (now-humans) are stuck having to mitigate the worst of the damage for humanity and many species to continue to survive, and attempt to roll back all these arrogant asinine greedy decisions in the hope that the near-future will be at least semi-habitable.

        Earth will be fine, it’ll rebuild and reset and grow some new beings. Trying to guilt people for things they didn’t do and have little control over is not a good motivator when faced with major extinction.