@Thebestwaytoscareatory
the UK bears a significant responsibility for past emmisions and we can only benefit from reducing our future emmisions and developing the technologies and skills to do so.
We bear a significant responsibility for current emissons. The UK, and much of the West, are net importers of CO2e emissions. China, so often highlighted as the big bad polluter, is a net exporter by quite a significant amount. In essence, China are only the biggest source of emissons because we've offshored our production and they're the ones meeting the demand of our consumption habits.
The Global Carbon Project do huge amounts of research into embodied/embedded carbon emissons, which is widely ignored by Western media because it reveals us to be the issue, and we want to continue to pretend there's nothing we can do cause...China!
Tbh this thread has just reinforced the idea that discussion, debate, education, stats, figures, and facts are pointless. Huge chunks of the population don't believe, or just ignore, the truth.
Instead they'll close their eyes, stick their fingers in their ears, and scream "what about...X!" while they march off towards the cliff edge. Which would be fine if only they were going to be affected but, unfortunately we're all chained together and once they go over we're getting dragged over too. It's fucking depressing when you think about it, it's a genuine don't look up scenario.
All the polling suggests that actually, most people are quite concerned about it.
Protests like these actually drive a wedge, it's so counter-productive it's sad. Like a pp said it's mainly about protecting the future for the descendants of the protesters, that's the survival drive for my DNA at work even if they don't realize it.
The elephant in the room, even on this thread, is that "doing something" is a pretty meaningless thing to say. Protesters don't have any really bright ideas, and neither do the political leaders. Use less energy? Use less stuff? Switch to renewable. Lovely, but what does that actually mean?
Right now, the economy, the banking system, is based on oil. People are freaking out right now because of lack of availability of products and inflation and the real fear of food shortages. There are multiple threads with people saying there will or even ought to be riots for the government to "do something." The aftermath of dialing back consumption and energy use is not going to be different economically, that is what it will mean to a lot of people,.
Policies around energy have all kinds of other implications. Look at Germany right now. Or the dirty little secret of the environmental movement which is that renewables will not keep us in anything like the way we have become accustomed to. Probably they would keep us in a way that's just fine objectively, but not with the consumer goods, travel, transportation, big cities, choices in the supermarket, internet access, that we are used to now. People who move away from home to work will have to expect expect, as they did 70 years ago, that they will see their family rarely, or maybe never again. Accepting immigrants will become a serious burden as they create more demands on what will be very limited resources.
For at least a generation the environmental movement has been telling people that tech means we will be able to keep a lifestyle very much like the one we have now and still be light on the planet. That's bs and always has been. Protesters may well be right about the problems on the horizon but they are asking politicians to make choices that they themselves would likely freak out about, and that would crash the banks, make the leaders unelectable.
They are really offering nothing besides self-centered whining towards what is a really difficult problem without clear solutions.