Asklemmy

What solution would you propose that could power the whole infrastructure humanity has built?

I'll never forget when the U.S. state of North Carolina made a policy disallowing any government official or documentation to reference or acknowledge the existence of climate change. It was their response to a state study noting the effect of rising sea levels on their coastal towns.

You missed the point. And you spent way too much effort to make it seem like a tongue-in-cheek answer.

Climate change. We all thought we were gonna have to cut back on consumption, use less fossil fuels, and change our infrastructure entirely to renewable energy.

I feel like we were expecting this because we were expecting someone to be our parent and force us to make the changes, when in fact nobody is externally enforcing that we stay on a safe climate path, and we are stuck waiting for our own societal self-discipline.

We were all panicking a bit about this one. Glad it turned out to be nonsense. Full steam ahead--er... full oil burn everything!

We may have to go back to having it for a while though to put a break on climate change. For all the bad that acid rain caused, at least it cooled the world

Good one. Although was more before the millenium afaik

That was avoided by "the green revolution" i.e. new ways of producing fertilizers. It just kicked the can down the road and made everything worse honestly.

Well, we haven't reached the peak yet, tho. Afaik global population is going to peak at around 10 billion people somewhere in the 60s. We will see how much land climate change will render unusable for farming until then as well. So a food shortage is still not completely off the table, I think. Well, at least if we continue to use most of the crops to feed livestock, and not us humans directly.

And if not food, but access to enough fresh water willl probably be a huge issue in the future.

This was averted by mass production of fertilizer through fossil fuels.

I'm sure that won't come back to bite us in the ass.

Certainly not dangerous to have massive monocultures what could easily be wiped out by disease or heat waves. I'm sure all those people will be able to keep living when we aren't making as much fertilizer with the destruction of our economies.

Similarly, legalizing gay marriage was supposed to usher in waves of people wanting to marry animals or something.

Good one

Hmm good one.

That was 1997

Dang boomer, prompt said 15 not 50

This was a problem. We just acted to ban CFCs, which solved the problem. Now the ozone hole is recovering. I wouldn’t say it turned out not to be a problem though. The human race just had the brains and corporation to come together and deal with it.

And now it's looking like all the LEO satellites they want to launch will recreate that problem. They all laughed at me when I suggested it.

It's not out of the woods just yet!

People really gloss over that there was a lot of work done to make sure y2k wouldn't be a disaster. It wasn't exactly a hoax, it was averted

There was a vast amount of work that went into mitigating it so thinking it was a whole noise about nothing is disingenuous.

Maybe it did and that's why we're in hell

Nobody I'd trust to vote or drive a car believed that.

For the opposite result... Please observe Australia.