Climate change has been a pressing global issue for decades, often characterized by dire predictions and bleak future scenarios. Many people feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem and uncertain about the effectiveness of efforts to combat it. This sense of inevitability often sparks a debate about whether the focus should shift from prevention to adaptation.
Why the arbitrary binary? You do both, all the time. We can’t stop preventing. What, are we just going to be like, oh well, we tried for a bit but didn’t get the results we hoped for, let’s burn all the coal and gas from now on? No, that’s idiotic.
We’ve got some good results already, I’ve been seeing headlines that we’re preventing the worst climate outcomes. That will likely continue to slowly improve. Every problem that comes with every solution is being addressed. Sometimes a step is taken backwards, but two steps are eventually taken in the right direction. It’s happening in one of the dumbest ways possible, but it’s happening.
Right now we’re clearly still making more steps in the wrong direction than the right one. Militarization, abandonment of climate research and (already too lenient) climate goals, continued investments in fossil fuels, planned obsolescence, neocolonialism, etc.
With the US turning fascist and the rest of the world massively increasing military expenditure, I’m pretty sure even the ratio between steps in the right direction and steps in the wrong direction is worse this year.
What do you gain from arguing against optimism? This is a long process and it will improve. You can’t look at things now in the United States and accurately extrapolate into the future. China and Europe are stepping in the right direction.