Climate lockdowns

[Jbrown76]

As seen in the media recently, Europe is experiencing extreme heat, fires ect caused by climate change and global warming. It's terrifying. what sort of things can be done, will climate lockdowns help?

Do you think we'll have voluntary or mandatory climate lockdowns? Aka banned from travelling, no flights, cars ect, no red meat, encouraged to walk or cycle,15 minute cities?

When do you think it might or will happen? What will it look/be like? Will you voluntarily lockdown and reduce your carbon footprint? Or does the government habe to mandate climate lockdowns?

Is this a plop and drop thread or is it drop and plop, wind them up and see them go

Just stop oil’s funding funded by US based climate emergency fund, itself funded by, wait for it, the Getty family. You could not make this shit up. Oil barons funding the climate emergency fund. Yet the hard of thinking shout conspiracy theory at anyone who simply calls out publicly available information.

The whole climate scaremongering is embedded in a whole lot of odd stuff.

Hello scaremongering journalist 🙄

In the 1880’s it was thought not worth improving the roads. With the railways people were not going to want to travel by horse and carriage when rail travel was so much quicker. Then came the IC engine.
Ukraine can deliver explosive cargo to Moscow by electric powered drone. Bigger cargo will be possible.
Things can and do change in ways that are not obvious at the time.

Ukraine can deliver explosive cargo to Moscow by electric powered drone.

Possibly, if we are talking a few kilometers and a small payload but certainly not a large amount over the several hundred kilometers you would need to fly to get from actual Ukrainian territory to Moscow.

There’s a reason why one of the high profile figures in the eco movement is starting an airline with aircraft that will run, initially at least, on fossil fuel.

Restrictions or lockdowns are not something that will be supported. Those in Downing Street when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister put paid to that ever happening again.

Closing airports and ports is perhaps the only one that could realistically be enforceable, which would not stop wildfires in the UK (yes we have them sometimes) or anywhere else, or flooding, for example.

So this happened in Iran today

i think there will be a lot more of this in the future, and not just in Iran!
https://news.sky.com/story/iran-announces-nationwide-shutdown-due-to-soaring-heat-12931849

And watch whole industries go down the pan and millions of workers lose their jobs. You know how much tourism brings to the economy right?!

And watch whole industries go down the pan and millions of workers lose their jobs. You know how much tourism brings to the economy right?!*
There's no easy fix to stopping everything that's happening. Lockdown was a nightmare but scientists did say you could see an improvement in the atmosphere. That's all I'm saying. Plus if you're talking about eg the UK or in my case I'm in Ireland, if people started staycationing again it would help the economy. But yes I'd worry for Italy, Spain France etc

@stayathomer

if people started staycationing again it would help the economy

Only and maybe if the staycationers are going to outspend income the locked-in country normally gets from foreign tourists with enough excess of that to possibly compensate from jobs lost due to lack of foreign travel.

But yes I'd worry for Italy, Spain France etc..

Only it's on a worldwide lockdown/lock-in.

They'd would happily welcome travellers from e.g. the US who were locked out of other destinations...

It's pretty clear that if we are going to reduce climate change we will have to do two things.

One is reduce our discretionary energy "spend". This can only really be done by reducing things like pets, meat eating, car travel and air transport.

Two is up our green energy supply which means energy will cost more. A lot more, which will restrict how people can use energy according to their wealth.

At the moment the idea that climate change is "bad" and we should reduce our emissions appears to be pretty much universally accepted.

However when people are asked to pay more or reduce their usage, there doesn't seem to be much acceptance or willing to curtail stuff like cars, air travel and pets.

So reconciling those two incompatible issues is likely to be one of the great political challenges of this generation.

Unfortunately at the moment it appears we are mostly willing to talk the talk but not walk the walk.

The covid lockdowns cost hundreds of billions. We're all paying for that now in terms of inflation and interest rates and poor economic growth.

Staycations have been disastrous in UK tourist areas as people have just bought properties to let out to holidaymakers for half the year, thus reducing rental availability for people who want somewhere to live and increasing rental prices so people on relatively low incomes can't afford the few that become available.

It's not just holidaymakers it's the industries that support overseas holidays, the industries that build aeroplane parts (less flights mean less planes, which mean less parts needed), the reps, the engineers, the back office staff that you don't see, then you have the knock on effect so the companies that support tourism (advertising agencies etc) would also be affected. You can't just shut a whole industry down without affecting other industries.

Oh no why would we, a social species, need to gallivant and see friends? Wouldn’t want that.

No, most things cannot be done perfectly well from home. What the covid lockdowns proved was that there were a section of our society who were the “I’m alright, Jacks” of the world who were quite happy to sit in their homes, all comfy cosy. As they had sufficient money to do so and probably didn’t venture out much anyway. There were the other people who were watching their businesses and livelihoods go to ruin and were on the bare bones of their arses and were being called selfish for wanting lockdowns to end so they could make money to feed their families. Called selfish by the same crowd of people who weren’t truly impacted by lockdown in any meaningful way.

Wish the sunshine would come to the UK!

Then we clearly need to transition to greener industries. Things are obviously going to have to change quite significantly if we are serious about reducing our carbon output. There are much more sustainable ways of operating the tourism industry, but right now, it comes at a premium and doesn't fit in with people's hectic, capitalist driven lives. This needs to change.

If our economies aren't compatable with fighting climate change, then I would say that its our economies that need to change. That's going to cause a lot of social upheaval, but not nearly as much as making the planet increasingly uninhabitable for human life.

@SummerDuck

Lockdown showed us that the vast majority of activities can be done perfectly well from home.

No it showed nothing of the sort. Entire industries were locked down and it cost the country (i.e. us, the taxpayers) hundreds of billions of pounds to prevent a complete financial collapse due to what would have happened otherwise, i.e. millions of job losses, collapse of tax revenue, closure/collapse of multiple industries etc.

@Sozzler

That's going to cause a lot of social upheaval

It's also going to cost us ALL a hell of a lot of money, real reduction of quality of life, etc. etc. Social upheaval is the least of it!

@Kazzyhoward Like I said upthread, we need to transition to greener industries and economies that are less focused on profit and more focused on environmentalism and social well-being. Capitalist economies that put profit above all else are at the root of environmental destruction. This idea that we need to put saving our capitlaist economies above saving the planet, comes from those who benefit the most from capitalism and will be the least impacted and most shielded from climate breakdown.

What textbook did you copy that load of drivel from.

Sheesh, I'm convinced some people won't be happy until we're back living in caves.

I (and all my colleagues) would be out of a job then but as long as it fits the Green agenda that's okay. Stuff the fact I have a mortgage to pay. That I pay taxes, that the industry I work in employs millions of people. That it is an industry that is already trying to be greener. That it is an industry that was brought to its knees and almost decimated not so long ago.

People don't want two weeks in rainy Scotland, they want two weeks in the sunny med where they can get guaranteed sunshine.

@Kazzyhoward I've actually drawn it from an awful lot of textbooks, journals and other literary sources when I was studying this stuff at undergrad and postgrad level.

Transitioning to economies focused more on well-being and environmentalism is far from us all going back to living in caves. Its about changing the way we allocate resources and what we prioritise in our economies.

I'm off out now, hence the delay in responding to you, so I don't have time to go into this in any depth and prob won't comment on here again. However, if you or anyone else would like to explore alternative economies that align more with social well-being and environmentalism, then this website explains the well-being economy in very simple terms https://weall.org/ There are also lots of academic articles out there on this, and you can easily find some on google and google scholar.

A lot of governments have already started this transition, and I'm happy to say, their citizens are not living in caves. It's about improving people's living standards, but in an environmentally sustainable way. Its really not about making everyone return to primitive ways of living. The key to it is electing politicians that prioritise social well-being rather than corporate, capitalist interests. I'll leave you make you own mind up about whether you think we are currently achieving that here in the UK.

No one ever seems to be able to answer how those of us who live rurally and need cars are meant to continue to live and work? All these carbon credits, pay per mile nonsense, it’s only going to affect those who genuinely need a car to do their jobs etc, carers, I work in community nursing covering a large rural area and that’s not going to change when they want more and more hospital at home with an already inflating elderly population particularly in this rural area. Actually another area to look at is the immense healthcare waste all those people I visit with chronic leg ulcers some daily and all those bandages being chucked out, diabetic equipment libre sensors etc being changed every fortnight I could go on

Yetisrus29
I have never ever ever seen as many people fly this year (as did I!). I’m not saying that the whole world should not travel to see loved ones etc, I’m saying if we’re talking apocalyptic stuff and something definitely needed to be done then they need to look at cutting down on air travel. Which I thought we had but everyone I knew who was doing zoom instead of flying for work is back every other weekend flying and Practically everyone is having a sun holiday because it’s cheaper than a week in a bungalow here!!

@AlaskaThunderfuckHiiiiiiiii

No one ever seems to be able to answer how those of us who live rurally and need cars are meant to continue to live and work?

The standard answer is for everyone to relocate to the big cities where they have public transport systems! Of course, no thought to any reality of millions of people doing that, but that's always the case with people who don't live in the real World.