Greg Rucka posted an article on his Tumblr a while ago, which was an interview by Dahr Jamail that dealt with climate change, and Jamail's modus operandi on that particular topic is basically to drive the reader into a fit of despair. He has a number of articles about it on Truth Out, all of which deliver the same tone of imminent doom. It's pornography for unmedicated depressives.
It turns out, upon inspection, that there's a cottage industry in this kind of thing. The subreddit for "collapse" is one-stop shopping, but a fair number of names keep popping up there, like Zero Hedge or the Economic Collapse blog: people who appear to be collecting ways in which modern economic/industrial civilization is self-destructing, with a tone anywhere from gleefully anticipatory to a sort of Zen, resigned cheerfulness.
The general thrust of the issue, vastly simplified, is that our present society has problems of such scope that it's difficult to imagine a solution for them that doesn't rely explicitly upon burning the whole thing down and starting over. Lacking that capacity, people then move on to catalog and discuss the ways in which the system might "reboot" on its own. Climate change is a good one, since it encompasses everything from the death of the oceans to toxic algae blooms to refugee migration, but the economy's at least as popular an apocalypse topic, as are odd or lethal diseases and the occasional stirrings of war.
This is the kind of thing that makes it difficult to sleep at night. On some level, if you get your news from the right sources, everything about your life is precarious and fleeting. Civilization is a remarkably thin veneer over a barbarous species, the planet is coughing blood and threatening to quit (there was a big article about how a lot of the leading climate scientists are dealing with symptoms not unlike PTSD), and if you participate at all in anything even remotely akin to modern society, you're a contributor to an imminent global catastrophe, without any real ability to influence or affect the outcome. After a few weeks of this, it began to look as if Mad Max was a predictive documentary.
It's a media bubble, though, and it's attractive to a particular kind of depressive subculture. The idea that these problems are solvable at all is dismissed as "hopium," or a stubborn adherence to optimism in the face of all evidence. The only appropriate responses, within this bubble, are to enter the "prepper" subculture at once or to party for the next few decades until one apocalypse or another wins the race and scours life off the planet.
What's interesting is that these problems, to a greater or lesser extent, are solvable, but we're in a precarious situation due to the lack of political will. Since traditional energy solutions are still somewhat profitable, most of the companies involved throw around lobbyist money to keep them going, and that results in politicians who will defend those companies' lines of work come hell or high water. At the same time, environmentalism and alternative energy are considered left-wing causes, at least in America, and that's all it takes for certain elements of the American political scene to consider them a non-starter. (If the "quiverfull" movement was somehow co-opted by the American left, the American right would be violently in favor of voluntary human extinction by the end of the following week.)
There are currently efforts in place to deal with a lot of these issues, although they're harder to find and are often restricted to science or engineering publications. Algae is potentially big business, as a CO2 sink, biofuel generator, food source, and water purifier; renewable power generation isn't just solar, but also encompasses wind, water currents, hydroelectric plants, geothermal, and biowaste (and yeah, fission reactors, and fusion if that ever gets off the ground); there are LED-lit, high-produce underground gardens being built in old WWII bomb shelters in London, pairing greenhouse farming with "aquaculture" for efficient food production per used acre of space; it turns out you can cut a lot of the CO2 emissions from current power plants with technologies like the Global Thermometer; reforestation would be an effective way to remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere; and there's a lot of work being done with soil sequestration that frankly, I only sort of understand. It looks to me like the big work of the 21st century will be attempting to clean up after the 20th, and if you employed all of the available methods at once, it's entirely possible.
Many of these are happening despite efforts to slow them down, whether it's right-wing trolls in their comments sections (and man, I hope they're paid trolls, because otherwise it's sad as hell), political obstruction by people who shouldn't be trusted to tie their own shoes (the name Jim Inhofe should go down in history as a synonym for "dangerous stupidity"), or simple change resistance. A lot of modern culture will have to go away for many of these clean-up efforts to work; we can't simply dispose of as much as we used to, and once you know what goes into something like a phone or a tablet PC, it looks almost monstrous to always be pursuing the next one. We'd need technology that's built to last, to be easily upgraded at home or heavily manipulable, rather than a unit to be used until something better comes out and then hastily abandoned. We'd need to eat less meat, grow more vegetables, drive less, live closer to our workplaces and business centers, and generally reinvent big parts of the industrial society that was built up on the back of petroleum.
(Also, I'd be surprised if asteroid mining doesn't become a thing in the next few decades, if only because a lot of idle tech billionaires appear to be working very hard to make it a thing. There was a good article in Popular Science a couple of months ago about the relative feasibility of lunar habitats given current technology, and a lot of the progress in renewable generation would be eased if we suddenly had trillions of dollars in new elements.)
It sounds hard, because it is, and there's a certain cynical relaxation in the idea that instead, you accelerate into a crash and see what's left to pick up afterwards. That's the easy solution, because it doesn't involve doing anything, and there are plenty of people who are content to pretend that it also happens to be inevitable. It's apathy as a spectator sport, bred by a couple of decades of self-assured slacker cynicism, and it's infected our society at all levels.
We're going to have to get over that, too.
