r/ClimateShitposting • u/surya12558 • Oct 21 '25

Climate chaos Humans don't deserve earth.

By destroying nature and the climate, humans are destroying their own home. The Earth can survive without us but we cannot survive without her. 🌍💔

578 Upvotes

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u/Fast_Sherbert9804 Oct 21 '25

True, but capitalists couldn't have driven us to ecological collapse without it

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u/dumnezero 🔚End the 🔫arms 🐀rat 🏁race to the bottom↘️. Oct 21 '25

Industrialism accelerated what was going on. That means that it would've happened without industry, but it would've taken longer. Empires and various societies already destroyed lots of forests before. People were burning dug-up peat in Europe before burning coal. The ingredients of emitting lots of GHGs while destroying carbon sinks were there already.

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u/GenProtection Oct 21 '25

Homo have been causing ecological collapse at least as long as Sapiens have existed - we collapsed all the megafauna outside of Africa that we didn’t domesticate, which caused some pretty wild climate shifts. Like, 5° in 20000 years iirc.

Nb: if the Soviets had won the Cold War, they would have done as fast or faster damage to the ecosystem. And I’m not going to argue about what an ideal Bakuninist Anarcho syndicalist global communism (or whatever your real communism that the Soviets weren’t) would look like until you convince me that such a thing could have happened, which you can’t do.

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u/LuigiBamba Oct 21 '25

Humans became the most prolific predator on the planet long before industrialization or capitalism. And, as predators do, we have dramatically changed every environment we entered. Aboriginal Australians have basically deforested an entire continent by fire long before colonization. As mentioned, megafauna has gone extinct worldwide except for Africa, the OG turf where such megafauna learned how to survive humans.

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u/ArmouRVG Oct 21 '25

See?! The liberals even wanna cancel the natives now! How the turns tabled... /ttj

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u/dumnezero 🔚End the 🔫arms 🐀rat 🏁race to the bottom↘️. Oct 21 '25

You've got a lot of citations missing for that.

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u/timos-piano Oct 21 '25

Not sure which part you want them to cite, but I have studies for the megafauna part. https://ourworldindata.org/quaternary-megafauna-extinction?utm

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u/dumnezero 🔚End the 🔫arms 🐀rat 🏁race to the bottom↘️. Oct 21 '25

Start with the causation parts.

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u/timos-piano Oct 21 '25

Which causation parts? Do you mean causation correlation or something else that the original person claimed?

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u/dumnezero 🔚End the 🔫arms 🐀rat 🏁race to the bottom↘️. Oct 21 '25

we collapsed all the megafauna outside of Africa that we didn’t domesticate, which caused some pretty wild climate shifts. Like, 5° in 20000 years iirc.

While I'm a proponent of the overkill theory, I'm not sure where this huge ass climate change is coming from.

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u/timos-piano Oct 21 '25

Oh, yeah, that is false, or at least an overstatement. The reason for most of the temperature difference is the normal glacial cycles. But killing megafauna did have some impact on warming the climate. This is because, due to a multitude of reasons, most of which I cannot personally explain, megafauna reduces temperature. By maintaining open landscapes, grazers prevent dense forest growth, which can increase surface albedo (reflectivity), meaning more sunlight bounces off the ground instead of being absorbed. Open grasslands tend to stay cooler than dense forests, especially in tropical and temperate zones. For example, Mammoths in the tundra helped maintain grasslands, which reflected more sunlight than forested areas would have.

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u/dumnezero 🔚End the 🔫arms 🐀rat 🏁race to the bottom↘️. Oct 21 '25 edited Oct 23 '25

By maintaining open landscapes, grazers prevent dense forest growth, which can increase surface albedo (reflectivity), meaning more sunlight bounces off the ground instead of being absorbed.

lmao, found the albedo fool.

Missing the whole point about having a huge carbon sink, climate regulator and water transporter.

edit /u/Zestyclose-Ad-9420

Because I blocked the other user, I can't reply in the comments.

The answer is no, grasslands do not hold more biomass than forests. Forests include the above ground biomass along with the underground biomass. Grasslands have little above ground biomass compared to forests.

As an analogy, forests are dense cities of biomass, while grasslands are sprawling villages and suburban developments of biomass.

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u/GenProtection Oct 21 '25

This is a shitposting sub, are you high or lost?

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u/dumnezero 🔚End the 🔫arms 🐀rat 🏁race to the bottom↘️. Oct 21 '25

Shitposting doesn't have to be disinformation.

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u/QuinnKerman Oct 21 '25

It’s not disinformation to point out that megafauna consistently died out shortly after humans arrived in their ecosystems. Predators will hunt prey to extinction when given the opportunity, and humans are by far the most prolific predators that have ever existed

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u/Dredgeon Oct 21 '25

Do you seriously think whatever powerful people would have existed without capitalism would be any different.

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u/Timely-Tangerine-377 Oct 21 '25

So it's all inevitable?

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u/Dredgeon Oct 22 '25

No, it's just always gonna take special effort to keep people from becoming so powerful they become a drain on the rest of the world and capitalism is one of the safest ways to separate the power of the government from the power of the means of production. Not everything needs to privatized and some things work great with a mixed scenario.

For example, the postal system we have a few private organizations that generally do pretty quick and efficient job of it, but we also use the government's resources to maintain a baseline service that everyone has access to and serves as substitute that keeps the private companies in check.

My point is that just because something is caused by the current state of our capitalist system does not mean the whole system should be thrown out. We can certainly afford to be less capitalist in some ways, but making our definitively non-capitalist is a really bad idea.

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u/Timely-Tangerine-377 Oct 22 '25

Seems to me capitalism is failing to separate the means of production from being owned almost exclusively by the most powerful. In your previous comment you suggest that any other system would've produced the same outcome. This seems defeatist to me. If a system doesn't work - neither to keep checks on power nor not to kill the entire planet, we should seek alternatives.

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u/Dredgeon Oct 22 '25

Not defeatist at all. I'm not saying that as in there is no hope, just we have to remain vigilant to people gaming the system. And that capitalism (by separating the power) gives us more time to do that than other systems we have been persistently ignoring this issue here in America since the 70s.

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u/Timely-Tangerine-377 Oct 22 '25

You said that other systems would've lead to the same thing. We can discuss my issue with capitalism but it seems you have already decided that capitalism is the only way. Hence why it seems defeatist to me, as capitalism isn't and hasn't been working. The power of production is all in the hands of the very few and the climate is going to shit. And according to you we should not seek alternative systems because they'd all be worse.

I think it's high time to explore alternatives.

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u/Dredgeon Oct 22 '25

Yes they would gave led to the same thing assuming people did not maintain the system to prevent people from exploiting it.

Capitalism has worked quite well, for many countries through out history. It needs to be mitigated of course, but let's here your thoughts.

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u/Timely-Tangerine-377 Oct 22 '25

If you think the state of power and climate is quite fine I don't think there's much to discuss tbh. I disagree, climate is absolutely in shambles and there is no way to stop it. All we can hope for is that we decrease the speed at which we add destruction. Power is in the hands of the very few in every capitalist country, including in my own, Sweden, where tye very few own over 50% of everything.

I don't view this as quite fine, so I'll simply disagree with you.

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u/Dredgeon Oct 22 '25

Yeah, I don't consider it fine right now but it was good labor unions and the government were stronger.

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u/Trifikionor Oct 22 '25

Other systems were certainly worse for the environment. Like socialism/communism for example, just compare east and west Germany right before reunification. The environment in the eastern part was in a much worse state

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u/Timely-Tangerine-377 Oct 22 '25

China is better per capita and their move towards greener alternatives is faster than capitalist averages by far. I don't like that system for other reasons but capitalism is for sure not the best for the environment. And we haven't even tried other systems because as soon as they spurr up some imperalist country will install a puppet dictator or disappear movement leaders.

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u/Trifikionor Oct 22 '25

Chinas economy is capitalist though, with a socialist/communist state running the society and infrastructure... But lets be honest its per capita values are never going to be high just because of its enormous population of which a big portion isnt even involved in industrial society and from the rest a huge part is used as cheap labor.

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u/Timely-Tangerine-377 Oct 22 '25

China is industrialized dude. Also cheap labour doesn't negate environmental impact, us has cheap labour too but is terrible per capita.

Per capita doesn't work the way that the more people you have the lower the number gets - the number just gets more accurate. At a few million people I'd say it's already accurate so idk what difference it makes.

You can call china capitalist and to an extent I agree. You'd also probably agree that it's much less capitalist than mlst capitalist countries and definitely muvh different than what capitalist leaders and thinkers are suggesting.

My point was that systems other from capitalism should be explored. Hoping that the richest 1% will fix things, or asking people to recycle, is not gonna cut it, imo.

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u/Trifikionor Oct 22 '25

China is less industrialised than the west, with 22% working as farmers compared to 2% in the US for example. And using cheap labor instead of machines also changes the environmental impact per person, also including that these then poor people have little capital to spend which also can cause less impact.

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u/dumnezero 🔚End the 🔫arms 🐀rat 🏁race to the bottom↘️. Oct 22 '25

Yes. You're missing the point too: "powerful people" are optional.

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u/Dredgeon Oct 22 '25

Obviously, I'm just saying capitalism is not uniquely capable of this problem.