Before the Flood - Documentary

[drewab]

This is the new documentary by Leonardo DiCaprio, about climate change.  It's very captivating and is gaining a substantial amount of momentum.  There is no charge to watch it and it's free on every conceivable platform, including Youtube which I've linked below.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90CkXVF-Q8M

 

 

[Dean Pomerleau]

Thanks Drew,

 

Leonardo does an admirable job and to his (and the writers') credit, they do address the contribution of meat-eating to the problem (unlike Al Gore's The Inconvenient Truth). But like Cowspiracy they focus too much on the "beef is bad for climate" angle, and ignore the negative impact of other industrial farming practices on the health of the planet, not to mention our health. "Just eat chicken" seems to be his mantra.

 

Overall, I came away with the impression that DiCaprio and the writers are pretty pessimistic about the prospects that humanity will address climate change in a meaningful way before it's too late. I happen to share their pessimism. Sadly, the only way we are going to address global warming is through clean energy technology and (eventually) geoengineering. As a species, we don't seem to have the foresight or the self-discipline to get our act together in time via any other means, political or otherwise. In case anyone hasn't noticed, we aren't very good as individuals or as a species at controlling our impulses or delaying gratification. As our current presidential race illustrates, sometimes a substantial fraction of our population simply says "f*ck it" and is willing to not only let atrophy the good things we've built, but actively tear it all down out of frustration and/or spite.

 

In the end I think it may take benevolent AI to solve global warming for us. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that our entire world is an ancestor simulation in the Mind of a future superintelligence trying to figure out what to do about climate change in its own timeline.

 

--Dean