
As Trump Administration Downplays Warming, Agencies Chronicle Climate Impacts - headalgorithm
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-trump-administration-downplays-warming-agencies-chronicle-climate-impacts/
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Avalaxy
With all the climate change denying I see going on left and right (just open
any mainstream news website and read the comment section under an article
related to climate change) I started to feel like we truly deserve to go
exctinct. What do my contributions matter if the masses around me are all
screaming that climate change is bullshit and that people trying to fight it
are [insert insultive noun]s.

~~~
p1necone
Sometimes I do wish we could neatly separate people into groups of
consequences based on their opinions - all the climate change deniers get to
live in exactly the world that results from doing nothing. Political party A
supporters get to live in a world governed by political party A and so on. I
suspect it would rapidly result in a lot of people actually researching their
political opinions properly.

~~~
nostrademons
That was the original impetus for nation-states. In those days, the big schism
was between Catholic/Protestant, with each group feeling that the others'
opinions would damn them to hell for eternity. They worked out a system where
they could say "Okay, in your duchy, you can believe what you want and God
will only damn _you_ to hell, while in our duchy, we'll believe what we want
and go to heaven."

The issues have changed a bit and a number of national boundaries aren't
really reflective of the diversity of cultures within. Plus we now have truly
global issues like Internet access, supply chains, and global warming. But
perhaps this is indicative that we're in for a major reshuffling, and that
existing national boundaries are going to collapse. We already have a
political framework (federalism) for getting independent states to agree on
matters that impact all of them while still being able to exercise their own
discretion on local matters.

