Newf I was being a facetious. I get the idea of consumerism but don't view it as something new, just newly enabled. As mentioned elsewhere, the fairly new combination of unlimited choice (
562,382,292 items available on Amazon) and anonymous credit (i.e.: without the requirement of sitting across from an actual person and asking for money) makes excess consumption frictionless. Rather like being overweight, consumption is not something you can treat through abstinence. I take the criticism of useless eaters as causing all our problems as falling into the "blame the victim" category at best.
Doc, as to mitigation,
$30 million was spent by the oil industry to defeat the recent small (so small as to be inconsequential) carbon tax proposal here in Washington state.
"AOC made a proposal" is enough to bring down raging disdain from 40% of the population before the next word is uttered.
Trump has reversed or tried to overturn
70 separate Obama environmental rules & lawson everything from CAFE to coal emissions.
Here at po.com, once described as a environmental apocalypticism backwater I've seen a shift with the polarization of the US political scene. The few left here are torn between their conviction of enviro armageddon and the desire to support the party line that CO2 is good, CC is a hoax and libtards want to take away your hamburger. Or maybe it's just everyone else moved on and old white guys are all that's left.
I could go on but you get the drift. There is no throwing up of hands, merely a recognition that a dysfunctional majority of our tottering republic's representatives will fight any proposal tooth and nail that touches their sponsor's bottom line, regardless of public opinion. I'll leave the reason why to your imagination. The upshot is mitigation in the US will take a near-revolution politically.
As for adaptation, I'm not qualified to discuss the "facts", mainly because facts are now voluntary and the most subsidized set wins. Ditto projections & models. I find it hard to trust much of what I read, after all I pretty well wigged out listening to a bunch of seemingly brilliant geologists predict the EOTWAWKI. Still, I'm a treehugger from way back so I'll have to go with my gut, it says we probably won't boil in our skins in my lifetime but there are global and locally catastrophic consequences already. No doubt that my kids will live in a different world altogether even if we actually do something soon.
So, throwing up my hands? No. We live low on the hog, rarely drive, never fly, don't buy much stuff, have no credit – those were my first two rules for PO after all. I've been aware for years, I actually did quite a bit of reading on CC and the effects on the midwest and Ozarks specifically 15 years ago when we were first thinking of moving from CA. (warmer/wetter summers & warmer/widely variable winters). As I said, we'll likely move back and try for a cheap net-zeroish house. And of course I'll vote for Ds who support doing something.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)