Some lies, if prepared correctly like squash or pumpkin, can appear delicious and irresistible, concealing a dark reality: “I can’t believe you’re not a model! For five thousand dollars I can photograph you so you have a portfolio.” The central aim of most lies is to avoid consequences. When an untruth is especially desperate and self-serving, it can be unintentionally hilarious: "Yes I tried marijuana... but I did not inhale.”
Embezzling money or murdering someone for the insurance pay-out are part of a phylum of lies that cross into serious criminality. These deceptions’ sphere of influence often stays fairly localized. But sometimes covering up the initial lie can spawn lots of other lies that spread and spread, like with Watergate or Bernie Madoff. What started as a little decorative Thanksgiving-gourd-sized lie suddenly becomes larger and quite ugly. This family of lies strives to not only avoid consequences, but to gain status and resources, another common end game of many deceptions. And then there are the large society-wide lies: hulking distortions and misrepresentations watered and tended to by leaders, mass media, culture, and industry.
...
Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. There are the lofty-sounding promises to reach “Net-zero emissions by 2050,” as if 24 years from now was soon enough. There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations. There’s the accusation that anyone who expresses urgency is a “doomer.” There are those who treat climate as an abstraction to win political campaigns, first arguing that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was a victory despite doing nowhere near enough to address the scale of climate collapse, and more recently that Democrats should just stop talking about climate and focus on more “winnable” issues. Most damaging and common of all, there are those who simply don’t mention it.
All of these distortions have robbed us of the most critical element people need to understand a threat and adjust their actions accordingly: context.
And make no mistake, when it comes to how much time we have, the data and the geological record are crystal clear.
For some badly-needed context, the last three years, likely for the first time in over 100,000 years, have averaged above the Paris Accords’ “do not cross” 1.5 degrees celsius planetary warming. Only ten years ago, that was considered catastrophic, but now mainstream news tells us it’s just a number
Well said. I just want to tack on something similar I've noticed in talking about this kind of stuff with everyday people: none of us are individually powerful enough to make any significant change and thinking about it becomes too depressing, so most people tend to retreat into themselves and their immediate lives, choosing instead to only focus on what they themselves can do, often by through nostalgic daydreams/escaping back into a time when they didn't have to think about such things (because they weren't aware of its existence yet).
Not only does this obviously contribute nothing to stopping the problem, but it just encourages even more individualistic thinking, which leads to more selfish behaviors and so on and so on. Humanity's greatest achievements have only been possible through working together with one another, but that seems to be getting more and more impossible with each passing day. The elites have always been bastards, ever since society began, but the masses were (for the most part) willing to work together when needed. Now? Nobody trusts strangers anymore, we're all tied to our phones in our own personalized echo chambers (I say, perfectly aware of the irony as I type this on my own cell phone, alone in my room), and the elites have stopped even pretending to care what the rest of the world thinks about their unbridled avarice.
In my opinion, we're completely fucked, and we have been for a long time. MAYBE at some point in the last 100-odd years there might have been a way to stop this from occuring, but with the current way Systems are in place to maintain the status quo and reach for maximum profits at all costs, there's simply nothing we can do short of a planet-wide overthrow of everything that the last few centuries have been building/reinforcing. Capitalism has murdered our planet and now, as it feasts upon the carcass, we are just left to sit and watch, powerless, idly passing the time until it is our turn to rot away with it