Comments by "Michael RCH" (@michaelrch) on "Channel 4 News"
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@f2m185
I don't trust AOC. I trust the scientific community that is crystal clear on the causes and threat of climate change, and has been for decades.
I don't care if you are on the right or the left. I care if you support the action that will avoid the climate crisis getting worse. What you might be failing to appreciate is that the climate crisis is not in the same ball park as people flying less or having to change their diets. It's existential. The planet could be 4C warmer by the end of the century. That will kill not millions but hundreds of millions. It will end the way we currently live. It will spark the biggest food shortages, water shortages and population migration in history. All completely irreversible and likely to get worse as the decades and centuries roll on. I didn't hear this from politicians. It's the findings of a mass of peer reviewed science.
As for not having alternatives, this is just not true is it. We have alternatives for energy. We have alternatives for ground transportation. We have alternatives for climate friendly agriculture and major industrial processes. We have ways of saving huge amounts of energy. Etc Sure we will have to fly less until we have clean forms of flight, but for gods sake, we have only been flying at anything like these levels for about 20 years. It's not exactly going back to the dark ages. We can live without flying to the other side of the world twice a year. We can't live without food, water and shelter though.
The problem with this conversation is that you are not paying attention to the massive downside risks and you assume that I am coming at this from an ideological perspective. But that is actually wrong. I am well off and run a business and I was firmly centre right until I grasped the seriousness of the climate crisis. I spent a lot of time trying to understand how it was that humanity was knowingly driving itself off a cliff. The answer turns out to be an economic system that cannot care about people and cannot care about the future. Instead, it's designed to care about profits and power right now. That is how it works. That is how it always worked and that is why, 30 years after the world was warned that we had to get off fossil fuels, governments and businesses are still implementing policy to support their use even more (despite the rampant greenwashing that is now customary). Like Exxon saying it wants to comply with the Paris accords while planning a 25% increase in emissions in the next 5 years.
I don't think that you want to f the planet. Not for a second. I think that you don't realise how serious and urgent this crisis is and I think that you have believed a lot of very forceful propaganda that supports the status quo and the economic and political forces that benefit from it. We can have a much better world if we actually put people and nature first, rather than economic growth and profit, the benefit of which accrues to a tiny number of people.
In fact, my only hope comes from believing that people are actually fundamentally considerate and want to help eachother. The problem arises because so much elite power, as wielded by the likes of Exxon and their friends in politics, is so successfully arrayed against people expressing that considerate and pro-social nature.
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