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Factually, the average american keeps their car for around 8 years. I get that most people buying electric are well off but man, every three years seems like a special kind of privilege.

It's not that people are saying fuck it and giving up or that the problems we face are unsolvable. It's that the people in power either do not want change or are afraid to enact the policies we need to survive because most people will not accept the drastic reduction in lifestyle necessary. We can't keep living like this though

I haven't watched much yet but my current position is that we're all fucked but I wanna fight anyway. Like that quote about fascism. You don't fight fascism because you'll win, you fight it because it's fascism

Ironic how it is too expensive to fix things but money isn't an object when it comes to bailing out banks, the stock market and funding wars that have nothing to do with the US.

The real way we need to stop excess waste is to shift the culture away from planned obsolescence. When it's a successful business plan to build and sell something designed to break so that you must repurchase the waste is immense and entirely unnecessary. In the energy and the resources to produce the product and especially in the energy to ship those products to their markets and the actual waste from the obsolete product being discarded.

My fear as a person living in a coastal area is that yes its not ending, but me and my kids will get to live as climate refugees when our area is unlivable. Paying a mortgage on a house I can't live in being resented by the residents of wherever I have to relocate to.

Dr. Ritchie did a great job, great episode. The best part was the individually packaged junk food shipped across the world immediately followed by discussion of food impact on climate.

I live in an apartment complex that has relatively low rent. When I was forced to buy a car last year (big red Ford squished the car I’d had for 18 years), I had to buy a gas engine because there’s no way for me to charge an electric vehicle overnight. It’s not financially feasible for me to move to an apartment where charging a vehicle is possible. It would increase my monthly expenses by over $1k per month between rent and EV car payment.

Man, Adam asked some great questions here and was very polite and accepted what I felt were unsatisfying answers. For instance, with electric vehicles, what about the maintenance of road systems? Parking lots? Long expansions of water, electrical, and other utility systems to feed car dependent suburbs? What about pollution from tires degrading on the roads? What about the noise and visual pollution and its effects on the health of not only surrounding people, but wildlife? There are so so so so many reasons that EVs are not a huge gain. On the topic of degrowth, the criticism was about how well we can "sell" this idea. Yet, our extractive capacity already exceeds the potential yields of the planet. We will either choose to degrow or we will be forced by material necessity to degrow in response to crisis. This isn't an individual problem either. Most of the issues deal with production, distribution, manufacturing, etc. Not consumption. This focus on the consumer end is part of the corporate gas lighting process of shifting the blame onto regular people. Now, my background is in environmental philosophy and I am on board with the general premise that the world isn't ending and that we need to deal with the hopelessness we are experiencing after our period of denial (both just strategies to avoid having the change anything, which is the underlying issue), but I can't help but feel that this interview is swinging too hard in the opposite direction. Adam brings up wonderful counterpoints and I would have loved a more serious response to them. I would have loved to come away from this interview with a greater sense of hope, because the situation does truly feel hopeless, but this sadly didn't do it for me. The underlying notion that economic growth is compatible with environmentalism makes me deeply sick to my stomach and only reinforces my feelings of despair about the whole thing.

I'm currently working on an adventure game set in a climate apocalypse and literally wrote the line "The world didn't end, everything just got harder." the other day. Feels appropriate.

Theres something very odd about an episode on climate change and reducing our carbon footprint having an ad for snacks shipped from half the world away. Seems like the kind of thing we should be discouraging in the grand scheme of things.

We are over 1.5. Waiting 10 years to call it is stupid. Im onboard with stopping oil and rewild now even though I'm likely to be among the dead. But I don't see us doing anything to curb consumption.

ALMOST EVERYONE HE KNOWS BUYS A NEW CAR EVERY 3 YEARS?! What madness is this? What kind of people behave like this?

20:40 All the examples mentioned previously are at best a 50% reduction in emissions if fossil fuels are removed. Anyone that thinks we can get out of this crisis without cultural change, and doing things like monopoly busting, tighter emissions regulations, addressing the profit motive via individual income ceilings, ending stock buy backs, making institutions required to adopt telecommuting whenever possible, strengthening environmental agencies, etc. simply moving off of fossil fuels in the near future really only helps in places where that is even possible by regulation. Don't get me wrong I think we 100% should eliminate ICE vehicles, but acting like that is adequate is naive, and talking as if market forces alone are enough to do that is misguided. Climate change isn't a consumer problem its a regulatory one, which has been caused by the failure of regulating our modern economies, and simply acting as if this is a problem that consumers can defeat by "voting with their wallets" is just more of the same free market propaganda that got us in this mess in the first place.

As paraphrased from Mr. Carlin; the planet's gonna be fine, it's gonna keep on spinning and recover after we're gone, we are just a bad case of fleas and one day, nothing from us will remain.

My main disagreement with her overall stance is the mischaracterization of degrowth as sacrifice and having less. She doesnt sufficiently aclnowledge how western society is the way it is because capitalist forces shaped it that way and degrowth is the act of us shaping our lives and desires ourself. Degrowth is realizing the desire to upgrade your car every three years just because is inherently bad and something we shouldnt want, but market forces convice us otherwise by placing themselves as the default. And that the forces that shape our desires will always shape it to there benefit and thats why new technology and economics alone will not be sufficient to save us. So shes right about incremental steps, but she doesnt acknowledge the adjacency individuals have in changing the world by changing theirs.

I want to see us move away from an ownership economy to a "library of everything" economy. Me and all my neighbors don't need our own lawnmower and hedge trimmer and edger. We can pull our resources and share it day to day. Same with a lot of different things. That is what degrowth is ultimately about. Less stuff, but more access to that stuff, cooperation and sharing.

The consumer behavior problem you brought up Adam is one that was created by the auto industry. If we make it more economical to keep and maintain a vehicle and stop the constant churn of the auto industry to convince everyone that they need that new version of the vehicle it will help. Car manufacturers have been going for years to make each new years model more desirable than the last with the least amount of actual improvements to keep their profits sky high. They don't want us to move to 100% electric because it is nowhere near as profitable to them.

The amount of energy we spend on removing single use/short life items once their span is over and the amount spent on making them is nuts. Capitalism incentivizes replacement instead of long lasting and maintainable. I have some clothing I've owned for over 20 years. Disposability needs to die outside of certain limited applications.

Adam thinks that being anticapitalist is a sort of perfectionism that ignores smaller changes in favor of the one big change, which he thinks will take a very long time to achieve and is therefore not practical. I disagree. We live in a world where companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have quickly and radically changed the lives of every single person in this country, and most people around the world. The way we live now would have seemed impossible even twenty years ago. But because it was accomplished by giant corporations, we accept it as normal and acceptable. But why should we limit ourselves only to major changes enacted by corporations for their own profit motives? To say this is the true doomerism, because these companies are destroying the world and doing immense damage to all of us every day, even apart from climate change problems. Moving away from capitalism and towards socialism is literally the most practical thing we can do.

My last car lasted me 13 years, and the one before that lasted me 9 years. Aside from my very first car, I've never bought another car until the previous one died on me. I've always assumed this was the normal way to extract maximum value from our car purchases.

The world won’t end, it’ll just become a living hell.

This one had me yelling in my car repeatedly (to the podcast version). There’s no meaningful “we” that can take action outside the constraints of the capitalist system that has shown it has very entrenched interests with counter-incentives to a long-term liveable planet. When Dr Ritchie mentioned the last 30 years of inaction, on her way to saying that we COULD do something going forward, I would have appreciated some pushback/questioning of the reasons for that inaction and how the next 30 years are to be any different. If the rules of the game aren’t changed away from quarterly growth targets, then there is nothing else to be done or said.

It won't happen quick until the ocean life we extract for food collapses. Japan is hedging their bets on this with the way they catch and store tuna. And who knows what climate changes like the collapse of the Gulf Stream will mean for the parts of Europe that enjoy it's protection. And the 3'-10' rise of the oceans as the polar caps melt will only really effect people on the coast. Oh, and our major ports. So yea, it might not be a sudden catastrophic collapse, but that inevitable trickle is just as dangerous.

Habitat restoration leader and climate activist here. I’m quite curious about how this video is going to go.

Reject doomerism, embrace absurdism.

"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make." 🙃 (I've gone from feeling happy whenever spring arrives to being filled with dread because the summers are getting so dangerously hot. I'm in the UK...)

It's the biggest threat humanity has ever faced, yet we constantly try to downplay it with alternatives that will end up being a splash in the ocean in comparison.

Idk if anyone’s brought this quote from Mark Fisher yet: “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Capitalism and shortsighted profit-seeking are to blame. We need to move away from our current approach, full stop!

We talk about hope vs doomerism, when we should be talking about ANGER. I don't want these platitudes, which only alleviate people's anxieties; i want the opposite: want to see people ANGRY. I rather peoole know JUST HOW BAD things are, so that maybe they can finally get ANGRY, because "where we need to be" is on the streets, every day, until goverments take action.

Make publicly traded companies illegal. Infinite growth forever is the myth that is ruining everything.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I don't feel fine

Sorry but Hannah Ritchie is deeply wrong in her book, not honest at all in her representation of the problem, and she doesn't actually advocate that any substantial changes sufficient to avoid the catastrophe that is already active on the planet. Incidentally, the fossil fuels industry loves climate optimism.

Thanks so much for this! I work hard every single day in the renewables industry (I make highly detailed survey maps of large areas in the rural US for mega wind and solar farms), and it really sucks when people insist it's too late and there's no hope and we shouldn't bother. I guess that makes me solarpunk?

"Eat local food" he sais, then advertises candy shipped from japan delivered directly to your door.

The question is not can we solve climate change, It's can we deal with the political obstacles in the way of solving it.

Isn't it strange that when arguing in favor of changes under capitalism, Adam never asks why the giant fossil fuel companies would ever be willing to allow these changes to occur? I don't believe in doomerism, but I do believe in not ignoring the elephant in the room who keeps stomping on your head.

De growth also isn’t about behavior change… it’s about redistribution. Hunger is a policy choice… food gets wasted because it is profitable to do so. We don’t need to commute to work 5 days a week… more free time and easier access to necessities is a very easy sell

11:44 in “adam ruins everything” on electric cars he totally ignores the second hand car market. Here he does it again. These cars don’t cease to exist when someone buys a new car. They get purchased by someone else. Cars stay in the roads for many years and change hands several times.

I think a bigger issue was actually raised in an older factually we as individuals have far less impact then corporations and government. Most of those who want to make positive changes also usually can't afford it. A good example of this is the aussie electric conversion kit. It allows you to convert your current petrol car or hybrid to an electric for a fraction of the price but even that fraction at 30.000$ is still far to expensive for most people. Cancelling millionaire tax breaks would allow the government to pay for any pre 2015 or 2020 car to be converted through a government rebate of 100% would make a massive difference cleaning up so many cars but they're not likely to do it. In the end I think most of us are jaded from understanding that us as individuals can't make an impact and those that can are to greedy.

I really, truly, want the guest to be right, but I'm thoroughly unconvinced. It also seems like she's simply responding to a straw man argument based on a misinterpretation of Jason Hickel's work on 'degrowth.' Agreed on the non-viability of behavior change efforts (I say this as a behavioral scientist).

Adam, I love your work, but it is difficult to overstate how much these "things will be fine if we all pitch in a little and we trust the people in charge :)" conversations drive me toward feelings of despair. I went in thinking "I should be more optimistic and protect the hope that I have even better," and left feeling more keenly than ever that I am constantly being bullshitted and we're absolutely fucked.

...on the Impossible meat and the like, I find the replacement most useful in situations where the meat is normally present but not a real focus. Meat taste and texture is a real integral part of a burger, but in something like a taco dip where you could use beef, turkey, or pork and the difference wouldn't be super noticeable, it seems to do fine. I'm also really hopeful on dairy substitutes -- plant-based cheese is still not something I feel good about but I've pretty well been able to switch to plant-based milk and cream substitutes without issue.

Regarding the hopelessness, i cant speak for others, but i know that my hopelessness is compounded by a multitude of factors, from the broken political system in the united states, to the fact that i dont have even a single vote in the system that is dragging the world with it because im canadian, to the fact that our political leadership up here is nothing but wannabes who constantly try to be their murrican counterparts. I want to see a better world, and i want to be wrong, but the seeing an active genocide being propped up my the government down there, and knowing that the opposition party would be doing the same or worse, really drives home the lack of actual power that most of us have over the things that determine the overwhelming majority of the actual damage being done. Also, im a queer disabled person staring down the barrel of a virulently anti-queer fascist movement that has been rising across the world, and knowing that the people in charge of my province are actively dedicated to making my life worse, or ultimately ending it, if they can get away with it.

There is a KZfaq channel Knowing better. When I try to go vegetarian I literally have nightmares about hamburgers so that's not an option for me since I already have insomnia. But he says, skip meat at breakfast that's 33% vegetarian. When I heard that I started not eating meat at breakfast and lunch. 67% reduction from me!

I put solar panels on the roof of my house. This lowered my consumption from the grid down to nearly zero. I don't have a battery storage system (yet) - so I do use electricity at night for AC (required to exist in South Texas where I live) and ancillary uses; we have changed our behavior to use high power systems - like the washer and dryer, and dishwasher - only during the day. This behavior change, coupled with Solar energy has driven our usage of the grid power (which itself is being moved towards solar and wind) to less than 1%: 99% less than we used 2 years ago. There is also a tax rebate that helped (slightly - the year I installed it for $63,000 - I got a $5000 rebate [based on my income unfortunately I'm not rich].) At the end of the day I traded a $300 power bill (during high usage periods) for a $300 loan payment - so largely a net zero cost change for me. But the tradeoff for me was lowering my carbon footprint from grid use down to 1% - which has to have a positive impact.

30:30, calling China a "middle income country" is a bit disingenuous to what actually happened there however the key factors to Beijing's de-carbonization and a major decarbonization strategy employed in the late 2000s and early 2010s was regulating the quantity of personal vehicles, when they can be used, limiting where they can be used. China recognized in the past decade that the move to a car centric society (for them started in the mid 80s) was going to becoming a major nightmare, and started their famous license plate policies (i.e. only certain cars with certain license plates can drive on certain days) doing this they were able to regulate a significant cap on the traffic and air pollution that was being caused by commuting in city centers. Over the last decade has poured butt loads on money to improve its public transportation infrastructure and even when they started building those (now populated) "ghost cities" the first thing they did was add a rail station to nowhere before starting any other project because their government deems that to be important. Now these new pre-planned, pre-built cities are pretty easy to get around in. The implication that Dr. Ritchie is trying push is that the climate issue is a technology thing and that every small success will build up to big successes, but the issue is that isn't really how this works the reason that China has been so successful at decarbonizing (they still have a ways to go) and have made insane advances in electric car production and solar technology isn't because that is what the market wanted or leaders of the country being invested in the pursuit of knowledge, its that the Chinese government sees climate change as an existential threat and unlike countries like the US regulate corporations and hold them accountable for their actions through company ending fines, requiring CEOs and management to step down or even face legal charges. If a company in the US poisons waterways to 100s-1000000s of people that company will face fines, but nothing happens to management (look at just all the terrible things monsanto has done) where as in China if an accident like that were to occur, the upper management C-Suite execs are taken to court and put on trial, there as a pretty controversial trial in the last 5 years where a chemical company did have a spill and killed people the CEO was tried and found guilty of murder and given a death sentence. Holding the biggest polluters accountable for the destruction they cause is an incredibly necessary step to dealing with climate change. Claiming that countries can improve but then not pointing out that the improvements are not due to technology changes but instead by policy change is pretty infuriating, especially with how flippant Dr. Ritchie's response to Adam's introduction of public transportation as a necessary change is. Calling electrification of personal transportation anything but a stop gap is naive.

I think the elephant in the room is that we need to address our ecominc system and have fundemental change. Our way of consuption of the planets resources is not sustainable. I for one am in favor of socialism being the system we change to. Where we rationally plan what our economy will look like and choose to embrace sustainablitly, rather than the way things are now with impersonal, irrational market forces and powerful undemocratic organizations running the economy.

at 11:00 the carbon debt isn't just at manufacturing there is a huge carbon at the point of disposal as well, at the end of life of any product it MUST be disposed of correctly, it needs to be broken down and the hazardous parts need to be made inert. If that means those parts can be fed back into the system to make more of that same product great, but otherwise we are causing environmental hazards if we. A: Don't correctly dispose of the product at the end of its lifecycle (which is the route all manufactures in the US takes for everything and its dispicable) which turns into enviromental non-GHG pollution that has the power to destroy eco-systems which then can lead to GHG production and reduction in sequestration B: Pretend that the correct disposal of these products doesn't create any emissions (which is what a lot of EV advocates do, even though there is a big foot print when it come to breaking down and re-refining the various precious metals contained in the product) THE COST OF DISPOSAL NEEDS TO BE FACTORED IN! EVs will always be a band aid solution, a single diesel commuter engine that can carry 100-200 passengers will always produce fewer emissions over its lifetime than 100-200 EVs driven solely by individual people. EVs are and will always be a marginal gain unless paired with social solutions like improving transit, 1 EV buss that carries an average of 20 people a day will always out perform those same 20 people requiring 20 EVs to be built. Like its crazy to think that EVs are the solution to the problem, an economic world centered around individualism is what has gotten us into this mess and it will not get us out of the this mess.

Hey Adam. Are you going to mention why you still partner with Better Help?

I'm in the camp that thinks advanced civilization is on its way out but I still encourage people to keep fighting.

What an infantilizing and condescending discussion of veganism. 100% of the efforts to get people plant-based have bent over backward to nudge-coddle stubborn people set in their ways. A better strategy is obvious: For starters, remove 100% of the subsidies for meat, dairy, eggs, and fish and divert those funds to basic, nutritious whole-food staples.

This is painful to watch. She seems utterly clueless about the scale and nature of the problems faced by humanity.

26:15 Dr. Ritchie has such a narrow focus each of these arguments that keep getting made are overly simplifying what is going on, ignoring the light pollution issue (which actually is a very big issue) using LED bulbs as an example of how the improvement of efficiency doesn't mean that the gains won't be diminished with additional use ignores two the emissions required to make them, and the emissions required to dispose of them. Yes overall even with people using them in abundance with respect to older technologies like tungsten or fluorescent in the US the year-to-year power savings through their use has been astronomical, however this ignores that there is a big cost to the manufacturing of the various electronic components, and there is a big cost to disposing of them correctly after they have been used up. There has also been a big issue industry wide where LED bulbs only last 3 or fewer years, MANY LED bulbs are made with inferior components and are wired in series making a product that contains dozens of components that can completely fail if even a single one dies meaning that most of these products die before their lifespan should dictate it should. Technically you can return bulbs if they die prematurely under their manufactures warranty but no one does. Its easy enough for the end user to repair LED bulbs, but the fact of the matter is most people don't and when you start to account for the increased manufacturing and disposal costs of LED bulbs over tungsten filament, LED still comes out a head but not by as much as being lead on here...

Cars are horrible beyond the carbon emissions.

It's not that we feel that everything is doomed, it is that we feel it is completely out of our hands. We want change, but the people who can enact that change wants only profit.

Now how do we preserve summer sea ice?!

What is required is a radical change in social values, away from consumerism and instant gratification toward minimalism, understanding what is essential and a willingness to make deep sacrifice. Sadly, I'm the pessimist who sees only a very slim chance of such a thing happening. Then again, I have seen many amazing things in my life, so who knows?

Look around you right now. How many things you see aren't made with plastic?

So, I got as far as 49:11 and I hadn’t heard anything about irreversible feedback loops or the potential changing of the AMOC. I just could listen any longer to the drivel.

This is an unpopular opinion, but I would support a gas tax of 50 cents or so a gallon, to fund decarbonization efforts.... charging infrastructure, power grid, etc. But some people absolutely lose their shit over 20 cents a gallon.

I got Hannah's book out of the library a couple of days before this podcast dropped, so I'll be interested to see if what she talks about here is borne up in more depth there. I do like that she's trying to walk the line between despair and optimism - as Leena Norms here on KZfaq talks about, Positive Panic is so much more mobilising than doom and gloom. I'm disappointed at the apparent lack of understanding about our food systems and the talking up of the Green Revolution. Yes, we're farming more food and getting higher yields, but framing biotechnology or a continuance of current Big Ag strategies as the way forward is worrying. We have the ability and the technology RIGHT NOW to change our food systems so that farmers are supported to move to practices that capture carbon in their soils, and are paid actual living wages while they do it. As always the barrier is oligopolys that benefit from the current system. And that's not even touching the fact that we already produce more enough food to feed the entire human population - it's just unevenly distributed. Because capitalism.

Adam, maybe your buds are buying a new car every couple of years, but the average age of a car on the road in the US is over 12 years. And where I live, the electricity is hydro-not great for other reasons, but carbon free. And I have 6kw of solar on my roof. So when we shuttle our kids to the three different teams we coach (with 3 teams worth of gear), in our huge EV, we’re at least not spewing carbon. Would be better if we rode the bike, but it’s WAY better than our Ford Flex was. And, we like the car. If it keeps running, we’ll never buy another car.

I think this is exactly the opposite message we need. If we actually tell people we are on course for a sixth mass extinction then at least later we can say we were honest. In 20 years young people will be furious that we bullshitted them that things might be ok if we turned down the thermostat a little.

Glad you mentioned veganism several times, but you really understated how important it is and the myriad of reasons. One, it's about the animals, but more applicable here, it's the one solution that deals with reducing carbon but doesn't reduce the aerosols, which in turn causes more warming. Reducing emissions isn't a solution in any meaningful way until we've dealt with the aerosol masking and effects on albedo. MEER Reflection Project is the only group i know of that takes this seriously. We need to build lots of mirrors if we really want to solve this. And just stop eating meat. It's not good for you, and it's even worse for the planet and for wildlife. It may seem difficult but that's only a story we tell ourselves as an excuse. It really is pretty easy. And guess what? It feels great too

There is something we can do, it's just not pretty. Every day, we get closer to the Bell Riots. It just really depends on how long it takes us to get there.

I'm 'meat as a treat' diet. Most meals for me are now plant based, with maybe 2-4 meals a month containing meat.

I would like some advice for those that are monetarily challenged, ie poor. I already buy used cars that get driven into ground, and then buy another used car. I would love to eat more fresh vegetables and fruits but the price is just getting higher. Please we need more direction on what to do to save ourselves and the planet

Can you make a video on the inflation deduction act, but focus more on congress and Senate instead of saying biden is the reason the plan isn't good enough for climate change. I get real tired of seeing people complain when we should be looking at the government as a whole and making representatives responsible for not representing our best interest and being bought out by these oil companies to turn the other way.

3 new solar farms went up in my area over the past couple years

I'm in the US. Most people I know keep new bought cars at least 5 years. Almost none of my friends lease. A map showing the average time people keep new cars could be very enlightening.

Ok, but what do we do about all the emissions we already released? Climate lag, which takes about 40 years, means the terrible effects we feel today are only from the emissions released in 1984. That's right when we started ramping up our emissions exponentially. Even if we hit net 0 emissions TODAY, we'd still be doomed if we didn't put the genie we already released 40 years ago back in the bottle. So how do we bottle up what we already released? Or is the inference here that we're somehow just going to ride them out for the next 40 years, paying no attention to all the Climate Tipping Points (these cannot be undone) which will have been triggered by that time? I'm genuinely asking.

I think along with a lot of people in this comment section, I feel a little weird about this episode. I'm a big fan of the show, but this definitely feels just like an electric car commercial. In reality, the vast majority of pollution and carbon emissions come from factories I haven't heard anything about that the changes in actual industry other than what we can personally do, because there are some kind of far possibilities for us to actually combat the industry itself, but I did not see that addressed in this episode, perhaps you could do an episode on that.

Never underestimate our capacity for self-delusion. Unfortunately the laws of physics are real and all this is pretending that simply changing where the energy is expended will matter. Oh, and selling a book, of course.

Humanity is a capable species. We can fix these problems. If you ever feel like you have no purpose in your life. Make THIS your purpose. Make fixing this problem your BUSINESS. Your JOB! Your MISSION! I am looking at jobs in this industry and moving my time to solving this. Let's be the shephards of this world. Let's fulfill the role to meet the moment.

I love that Adam is so ready to be corrected. An admirable trait.

I think Adam shows very little respect for radical thought here, on prison abolition, anticapitalism and veganism. I assume this is an interview posture and not necessarily reflective of his own thoughts. This one is gonna be about prisons. A lot of the current work of prison abolition is that people ***like*** to see the bad guys punished. They don't see the punishment of guilty people as a necessary evil to create social incentives for good behaviour. In fact, they are willing to compromise the entire detterence aspect of law enforcement by granting civil rights protection against fabrication of evidence and manufacture of conviction for innocent people, if it means innocent people are less likely to get punished. Punishment is not a necessary evil to achieve deterence, disabling and rehabilitation - Punishment IS THE GOAL - to obtain retribution on evil-doers by making them suffer. According to Christie (1981), most conducts that we understand in a vacuum to be "crimes" actually occur within the context of a significant civic relationship (friends, coworker, parent-child, teacher, etc.). In the context of those relationship, the stability of the relationship is often the most important factor in understanding the conduct to begin with. For example, we don't want to understand teenage classmates who get into a fight as assault and battery under any but the most extreme circumstances. A son who takes money from their parents without asking permission is almost never charged with theft. Even rape and incest are almost never understood as crimes by the people who are victimized by it while the relationship provides shelter or otherwise provide affective safety to the victim (see also disorganized attachment patterns - which is when an attachment figure is both a source of safety and danger to the subject). What this means is that the denouncing of an offensive conduct as a crime is implicitely a problem of lack of social capital from either the victim or the perpetrator. "Social capital" is the bonds of mutual trust that a person has which enables them to call upon favours and to get help and support from informal associations (friends, family, coworkers, etc.), to start projects and transform the environment. In environments where there is a lot of relatively evenly distributed social capital, the number of offensive conducts is lower, and crime reported are low. People trust in and protect each other, and they resolve conflicts among themselves. In environments where there is little social capital, the number of offensive conducts is low, but crime reported is high. People aren't able to trust and protect each other, so they rely on law enforcement to judiciarize and settle disputes. In environments where there is much social capital, but it is mostly controlled by an elite minority, offensive conducts are high and crime reported is low. Think Weinstein or Cozby. People work tirelessly to protect and enable the elites who own the social capital in the hopes that they will give them some amount of protection. They don't interpret offenses by the capital owning person as a crime, because the police can expect to hit against a wall of silence that protects the capital owners. The fundamental problem with police, is if you want to reduce, not just **crimes**, but all offensive conducts, whether understood as a crime or not, what you want to do is to create high-trust high-equality communities that take care of each other, and the intervention of police in a community to arrest members prevents them from taking care of community members and reinforces inequality and lack of access to support. If you arrest all the dads, people will grow up without dads. Having police and prisons is worse than having nothing. On a small scale, if you were killed by a serial killer, you might be better off if there was a police who had disabled the killer from finding and killing you. But on a large scale, you will not be killed by a serial killer, serial killers don't get found and don't get arrested, they roam freely among us and the police aren't doing anything. If you get your stuff stolen from you, you don't need a cop, you need an insurance guy. Sometimes you need a cop just because the insurance guy won't collaborate if you don't talk to the cop, which wouldn't be a problem if we had universal public crime indemnisation insurance. What? They say their car was stolen, there's no reccord of them ever having a car to begin with? Just give them a car, who cares? This might even stop them from stealing something else from someone else. If the government is easy to fraud/scam and there is little consequences, people won't fraud/scam other ordinary people. Ah, but I am getting into solutions already. I wanted to avoid that. Bottom line is crime is a social construct that reveals a lack of social trust between community members, and cops interfere with trust-building, so cops create a "crime" understanding of social offenses. And what should be done about social offenses is actually a matter of casuistics that account for all the social aspects and relationships in play, not jurisprudence and evidence and guilt and innocence.

I am a nihilist. I am convinced that global climate change is going to be humans extinction event, simply because we as a species are too amoral to manage our own intellectual development. But I still do my part because I also know I might be wrong. Why are both of you assuming that nihilist and Dick are synonyms?

What a great discussion!! I love when the guest is so on top of their area of expertise and not afraid to ruffle some feathers in this way! Too many discussions online are with people spitting numbers and facts left and right with no clear understanding of the actual impact and what those numbers mean. This podcast is truly an antidote to this which is why it’s so great to listen to it!!

I'm glad you talked about veganism with more than just a mention. It's the best and easiest way for the average person to have a huge impact. Factory farming is the single biggest contributor to global warming. It's effect gets massively downplayed because the meat and dairy industry have a lot of money invested in keeping people on their products. I will say that most vegans generally wouldn't call "vegan sometimes" or "vegan before 6" vegan. Veganism is a lifestyle and not just a diet. Generally eating less meat and dairy would be going plant based. I do appreciate people making an effort. Because like you said don't let perfect be the enemy of good. In the future when scientists can make mock meat taste just animal meat then yeah maybe we could vegan. I don't pretend that's going to happen now. Veganism's effect on the slowing of global warming shouldn't be downplayed. People are very attached to food, so it's definitely hard to change those habits and traditions. I just wish more people would try. I wish more environmentalists would be vegan. It's not that veganism is the only solution or the end all be all, but that if you really care about slowing the warming why not do it? Or at least put a solid effort trying. Veganism with everything else has a chance at changing the status quo.

Lol love how almost every comment here is calling out the bullshit platitudes

Professor Simon Michaux of the Finland geographical survey has calculated that we don't have the minerals for one 25 year generation of The Green Transition. Copper reserves are for instance only 10% of what we would need.

I'm getting the impression Dr. Ritchie believes it isn't too late to do something, but that wasn't really the issue. The issue is, WILL that something be done? I think history has shown us that no, the people with the power to make change happen will not do it, as long as it threatens their hold on their power and profits.

I really appreciate how respectful and good-faith the discussions (even the disagreements) are in this podcast. I like it when people gracefully acknowledge that they may be wrong about something.

I'm not a doomer, I just don't see how we overcome the opposition's money without resulting to violence. The billionaires can literally buy the laws they want and basically pay to not obey the ones we have. And we're not willing to have a second French Revolution about it.

It must always be remembered that, naivete is not limited to the un/undereducated.

Accessibility is definitely a huge part of food selection. I recently got diagnosed with a (cow) milk allergy and I can't have any until we find the problem we were investigating, and oh my goodness, everything has milk in it. Frigging instant ramen contains milk. And then I usually turned to cheese as a staple, and finding substitutes both nutritionally and functionally - I can't just slap a piece of cheese on toast when I forget to eat. You not only have to be able to find enough options, but you have to be able to work with them. And I'm not even fully cutting out dairy - goat milk is fine for me, but it's still been hell.

I am totally here for Adam as Simplicio. You've found your best character, buddy.

It's that bad, but someone will survive somewhere, so fuck it, I guess.

So what I got from all of this is that we are indeed doomed.

The thing that scares me most about the future is not that we don't have tools to deal with the climate crisis, however difficult it is to implement them, the problem is we're struggling in so many fronts as a society, dealing with extremism in politics and religion, fueled by rampant disinformation at unprecedented levels as a result of mismanaged social media and AI. So it would be hard to tackle the climate if we were focused on that, but it's a million times harder to do it while flat earthers in every subject are stronger than ever.

"...and we'll all have to live in it."

Just started watching but my guess will be at the end this is only partially convincing and we are probably still effed by any reasonable estimation

Sorry, but we’re doomed. We know what needs to be done to solve climate change, but we’re unwilling to do it as a whole species. We keep hoping someone’s going to invent some magic tech that’s going to make everything better, and no one wants to challenge capitalism, and its dream of unlimited growth, as the fundamental driver of climate change.

I'm glad you introduced the nuance into this conversation somewhat, but overall it still felt limited in some key ways.

I would hate to do something for living, and not even know what is the source of biggest problem in my field of "expertise". the fact that she even mentions meat, which is fraction of total food consumption of each person, which is small fraction of each person's contribution, with most of it being from energy consumption for phones and pc's, which also is a tiny fraction of total contribution, like, there's literally nothing we individuals can do to limit this, cause we're barely contributing to it to begin with. well, lamericans can do something, they can protest for their government to close all the 1000's of military bases they have around the world, and to reduce military spending, cause that's the sole contributor that no one needs and that we'd feel basically overnight if it were removed...

We have to scale back on consumption if we want to tackle this crisis. But we have to put the highest burden on those using up the most which are in fact those earnign the most. And I think if this leads to people at the lower end being able to make a living the majority woudl be absolutely fine with it.

wouldn't you say that capitalism being in crisis effectively shielding it from attempts to fix it incentivises capitalists to never allow us to truly fix problems? if all that stops us from sending them to the guillotines is a larger, more urgent crisis, where is the incentive to solve those problems?

Buying a car, new or used more often than every 7-10 years is insane to me