Agree, a headline of “Humans aren’t dominating the climate” does the damage of subtly suggesting climate change/human impacts on environment isn’t a big deal or is overblown. Even if there is legitimate disagreement about whether we can say it has definitely technically begun or not.

If that were the case it could have been communicated as “Human Interference in the biome is at an unprecedented scale but scientists aren’t clear if it dominates natural systems… Yet”

My understanding is the internal calculation is that they know the time is up and eventually the money train of fossil fuels will come to an end the only question for them is how much more money they extract before they cut their losses, hide the wealth and move on.

The calculation is that, because of the sheer scale of profits from FF any amount of delay in the transition away from them (even say six months) is worth to them billions of dollars which massively outweighs the size of any fines.

Basically they are banking on there being no real consequences or accountability and to the extent they think about the climatic consequences at all they think they’ll just be able to buy their way out of them.

Just a note on the climate science that might help here. We aren’t facing a binary outcome. Our actions now, even small ones, have tangible effects on the outcomes we face in a highly non-linear way.

The FF (and meat) industry absolutely want you to feel that you have no agency and no amount of change will not make a difference so may as well give them your last lot of money as you settle for a worse (if any) future. Its absolutely not inevitable, other futures are possible. Avoiding the very worst is the difference between all out collapse of human and earth systems and a situation where things gets dicey for a while but one we can recover from. I know it can feel bleak and trigger the reaction you are talking about but the best solution to that is to pick up a shovel and start helping. There’s so many ways to do that doing small but easy changes to your personal consumption is a good start. The best are those you do collectively with others as it multiplies your impact and gives you tangible resiliance networks for the changes that are coming.

Different actions aren’t separable in that way. Adopting one “green” behaviour will shift peoples attitudes to others and make wide top-level change easier to implement. “What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming” has a good discussion of this and there may be some more recent resources. This is especially true when both (all) changes are necessary. I can’t easily stop private jets but I can quite easily not choose the worst option for my diet (and also other things like avoiding discretionary flights). Seems really clear cut to me that we should be doing the bare minimum in our personal lives whilst we organise to make the worst offenders accountable.

I agree with you that regulation (of meat production) is vital to all this as well but that will mean costs going up which needs to have enough people on board and aware of the harms to facilitate. We need enough change in attitudes to facilitate the necessary changes in regulation and law (whilst also tackling the inequality, the powerful and structural economic system that promotes harmful behaviours for their benefit). .

Both are the problem. An activity that is less harmful but more people do can add up to more than a more harmful activity that very few people do.

No pathway where we avoid the worst of what’s coming doesn’t involve this sort of change for most people.

Net zero isn’t really well defined or meaningful at any level below the entire globe.