system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: The battle against climate change is largerly lost, any western individual's attempt at reducing the personal carbon footprint is quixotic and useless.

This comes from someone who has given up meat to do his part part in ameliorating climate change - but I could not muster the willpower for full on veganism.

And I feel that this is symptomatic: The level of "necessities" I am willing to give up is nowhere near large enough in magnitude to stop climate change - likely not even, if it was "up-scaled", with everyone behaving the same way. At the same time, that level for others is not giving up their car (which I don't have anyway - on of the blessings of urban europe)  or not giving up going on holiday by plane.

At the same time as many Westerners grudgingly start acknowledging that their (more honestly: our) lifestyle might be a problem, people in developing countries long for the lifestyle the West has afforded so far with little to no thought of sustainabilty - and cannot really be reproached for that by someone like me (at least not without hypocrisy).

And that is just individual consumer behaviour - there is also the industry.

I feel that the only way something might still be done about climate change would be large scale political action around the globe, a large scale shift to nuclear energy (and at some point, nuclear fusion) and/or a politically mandated and enforced steep increase on the price of fossile fuels.

I can see none of that coming in the foreseeable future, so my conclusion is:
I might as well give up on my vegeterianism, fly to the maledives while they are there and invest in a stock market portfolio that will profit off climate change.

For the love of all that is yet good and innocent within me: Change my view.
gpt
Two in a row!  Climate scientist here!

You have falsely assumed that the only way to "win" this "battle" is to stop climate change entirely, and that's not the case.  Humans, as a species, are fine as long as we are able to adapt to whatever environment we find ourselves in.  There are two ways to approach that.  We can either make efforts to not change what's working for us, or we can find ways to live in a new environment.  In reality, what's going to happen is likely somewhere in the middle of those two, a bit from each column.

We aren't going to stop climate change, and we never were going to.  If that was the goal, then yes, we set ourselves up for failure, but thankfully, that's not the only way to come out of all of this in good shape.  We can still mitigate the damage, even if we can't stop it.  We can hold warming to 3C instead of 9C.  Even though 3C is clearly more than 0, it's still arguably better than 9C if the goal is to persist as a species, right?  

Societies can (and will) adapt.  That is how we "win" the battle.  We just adapt.  And that's what we're already doing.  When a developer decides not to build on the coastline because the flooding has been becoming more frequent, that's adapting.

When a city decides to build their seawall a little higher?  That's adapting.  When a city enacts water restrictions to deal with a dry summer?  Same thing.

The goal shouldn't have ever been to completely halt climate change, and certainly not to reverse it.  That's going to require some technology that presently doesn't exist, and you're right, everyone needs to come to terms with that, so that we CAN focus on adapting.