Fifty years ago, if the right decisions had been made, today might look very different. We likely would not be talking about a "climate crisis" or a "climate emergency."
But the right decisions were not made. Instead, our capitalist rulers pushed ahead with their growth-at-any-cost mantra. And now we face certain disaster.
There are still choices to made, a struggle to be waged, in hopes of making the collapse of society slightly less costly for some people in some places. We must engage in that fight.
But suffering is inevitable, great suffering, both for humans and for the natural environment that our industries and our consumerism are in the process of destroying.
Here is an article by Indi Samarajiva that traces our history of bad decisions and that describes "What ‘Winning’ Against Climate Change Actually Looks Like." As he warns, you won't like it.
I don’t like to mention that rich guy over at #Twitter, but he’s rambling on about #ClimateChange & agriculture, which is in my wheelhouse. And he is also unabashedly & absurdly wrong.
Misinformation on climate change is irresponsible & dangerous, so let’s be clear:
25% to 30% of global emissions come from our #food system.
As UT Austin’s Michael Webber describes, agriculture is a major cause, victim and - importantly - meaningful solution to #climate change.
Not that I'm particularly against that - quite the opposite, in fact. But I'm wondering if anyone sees, or had seen a path to social and climate recovery/progress that could occur without first eradicating the class of people who most enjoy the present status quo.
Geoffrey Deihl, aka Sane Thinker (@gdeihl), carefully analyzes various economic plans to combat climate change, including the Green New Deal, and contrasts them with his preferred option: Degrowth.
This is a fully researched and superbly reasoned article. I'll post a few excerpts below, but I hope you'll read the whole thing.
Capitalism, particularly neoliberal capitalism and its resulting increased consumption, have pushed the planet to the brink. Nibbling at the edges of the problem is woefully inadequate.
Climate scientists are stunned by the melting Arctic ice sheet, for instance, which is decades ahead of original models. The Antarctic ice sheet is now melting as well. The oceans are currently experiencing an unexpected and shocking temperature rise in a matter of months, not years. Scientists are unsure if this is related to the return of El Niño, or if it could be an entirely new tipping point they were unaware of.
The truth is that without significant, perhaps profound changes to how we live in so-called advanced industrial nations, we’re going to fail to halt global warming at an adequate pace with current efforts, and failure will lead to a crash that none of our sadly popular apocalyptic movies can prepare us for.
We’re in a climate emergency now, the word crisis is no longer appropriate. The strongest possible actions need to be taken as quickly as possible. Delay is death.
We need to dismantle billionaires and accept that we commoners also need to be prepared for changes, as we adjust to living in a gentler way on the planet. We can sacrifice again, as we did during WWII, for an ultimately a better future. We will not save the planet merely by driving electric versions of SUVs that look like the solution in slick advertising spots.
Degrowth recognizes a simple truth. The planet is finite. Infinite growth is an impossibility on a finite world.
Reducing our consumption and ever-growing energy demands is key, if we are to have a future. This is one of the fundamentals the Green New Deal, Build Back Better, and IRA miss. All the batteries in the world will be insufficient if we don’t bring our consumption under control. In addition to building out renewables, we must reduce our energy use. Degrowth recognizes that economic growth without destruction of nature is impossible, and the destruction of nature guarantees our own destruction.
I keep thinking back to this Microlino at Fully Charged Live. Reusable water bottles became acceptable, being vegan is now cool, and so is wearing vintage clothes. So who is going to step up to the critical task of making small cars fashionable? The trend towards giant SUVs is ludicrous, incredibly wasteful and dangerous, and bad for our cities. If you must use a car, it should be as small as possible. Where are the micro-car visionaries/influencers? WE NEED YOU. #cars#SUV#climate
A new study has confirmed that the Gulf Stream, a crucial ocean current that helps regulate climate and sea levels, is weakening. The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades. This slowdown has significant implications for the world's climate, and scientists are concerned that it...
The annual wildfire season in Canada is coming to an end. Or, anyway, it should be by now.
But 2023 is unlike any other year. As of yesterday, there were more than 900 fires still burning, over half of them out of control.
Look at the area burned in the second graph below. The damage to wildlife is literally incalculable. Greenhouse gas emissions from all of these fires is off the charts.
Sure, some reply guy will tell you that forest fires are normal and natural and necessary. But not like this. What we’re seeing this year is an unnatural catastrophe caused by human industry — by the oil companies, their financiers, and the governments that support and subsidize them.
It’s a crime. It’s ecocide. And you know what? To them, it’s just Business As Usual.
It is completely ludicrous that anyone is still talking about hydrogen for home heating - it’s far less efficient, less safe, more expensive and less flexible than heat pumps. This report is the last nail in a coffin that is already more nail than coffin.
It can be argued that electric vehicles are an improvement when replacing ICE vehicles.
But that misses a much bigger point — which is that the very best car is not an electric car. The very best car is no car at all!
Building electric cars requires massive use of fossil fuels, including petrochemicals for the manufacture of plastics. In addition, mining of lithium for batteries as well as trawling for other minerals in the deep ocean is environmentally disastrous, killing biodiversity while polluting our water, soil, and air.
The kind of “Green Growth” championed by capitalists and politicians, which features more electric cars, a bit of solar, and a few wind farms — along with continued use of fossil fuels — is not a good answer. It does not solve any of our problems, and in fact only makes them worse.
Say NO to more cars, of any kind. Push instead for active transportation and for improved public transit.
Continued economic growth is unsustainable. Period. The only logical choice for us and for the biosphere is de-growth.
this is very encouraging. Fuel cells have always been a wild fantasy that doesn’t quite work in the real world, but it seems like a few forces in politics and industry are changing that
Absolutely stellar performance for my use cases, which are
A. hash browns
B. boiling water
C. eggs
Biggest issue:
A. cookware compatibility
Biggest benefit (aside from energy/no gas burning emissions):
A. extremely controllable temperature
Note: Getting other folks to try the induction stove did not go well; I am a technology early adopter and willing to experiment, no one else here is. They are comfortable with using what they have used, even if there are issues (lousy burner design here, for one).
I’ve spent much of this year examining car bloat, the process through which smaller vehicles are being replaced by increasingly massive SUVs and trucks.
What I’ve learned: Huge cars are terrible for society, often in ways that are hidden.
Some basic facts:
◆ >80% of US car sales are now trucks/SUVs.
◆ Models keep expanding. For example, the F-150 is now ~800 lbs heavier and 7 inches taller than in 1991.
◆ EVs can make the problem worse due to huge batteries.
European researchers said Thursday that the the start of June saw global surface air temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first time. That is the limit governments said they would try to limit global warming to at a 2015 summit in Paris.
A perfect (and perfectly scary) title from Jessica Wildfire (@jessicawildfire) —
"If a Cactus Can't Survive This, Neither Can You"
You might’ve seen recent headlines about saguaro cacti keeling over in Arizona after spending nearly a month above 110° Fahrenheit (43°C).
Not even a week later, The Washington Post ran this absurd story: “Your body can build up tolerance to heat. Here’s how.”
I’m not linking to it. That’s how bad it is.
It’s not just getting a little hotter. It’s getting so hot that saguaro cacti are deflating in the desert. They evolved roughly 20,000 years ago. They’ve spent millennia adapting to a hot desert environment. They live up to 200 years in the hottest, driest environments on the planet. These cactuses are saying, “I can’t take it anymore,” and sagging over dead.
And we’re being told we can adapt.
I got curious about what temperature the human body can actually withstand, and it’s somewhere around 108°F (42°C). That’s when your proteins start to denature. A wet bulb temperature beyond 95°F (35°C) can kill a person in about six hours. No amount of heat tolerance can save anyone from that.
It strikes me as just a little ridiculous that out here in reality, parts of the world are becoming absolutely uninhabitable, and wellness writers are just now telling us to start building up our heat tolerance.
It feels like we’re being prepared and conditioned to start blaming heat deaths on someone’s “low heat tolerance,” as if it’s just another precondition that helps them rationalize indifference in the face of mass death.
Firefighters are so overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster that the military has been deployed to help.
Entire cities have been evacuated.
14 million hectares of land has burned in Canada this year, easily dwarfing the previous record of 7.6 million hectares reported in 1989 — and the season isn't even over yet.
Severe drought and extreme heat was exacerbated by fossil fuel-induced #climate change, with dry lightening + wind = deadly.
Scientists are now saying we are “out of time” to keep global heating at under 1.5°C. It’s simply too late. We’ve delayed any action far too long.
All our talk and meetings and phony “Net Zero” pledges don’t mean anything to an overstressed climate system that is rapidly breaking down.
You can’t fool Mother Nature.
The target of keeping long-term global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) is moving out of reach, climate experts say, with nations failing to set more ambitious goals despite months of record-breaking heat on land and sea.
“We’ve run out of time because change takes time,” said Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climatologist at Australia’s University of New South Wales.
As climate envoys from the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters prepare to meet next month, temperatures broke June records in the Chinese capital Beijing, and extreme heat waves have hit the United States.
Parts of North America were some 10C (18F) above the seasonal average this month, and smoke from forest fires blanketed Canada and the US East Coast in a hazardous haze, with carbon emissions estimated at a record 160 million tons.
In India, one of the most climate-vulnerable regions, deaths spiked as a result of sustained high temperatures, and extreme heat has been recorded in Spain, Iran, and Vietnam, raising fears that last year’s deadly summer could become routine.
Countries agreed in Paris in 2015 to try to keep long-term average temperature rises within 1.5C, but there is now a 66% likelihood the annual mean will cross the 1.5C threshold for at least one whole year between now and 2027, the World Meteorological Organization predicted in May.
Too many people, even here on Mastodon, seem to be in denial about how bad things are likely to get on our current path. I suppose I can understand how they might wish the situation was different, and perhaps some of them aren't psychologically or emotionally ready to handle an honest look at the dire future we face, so they simply avoid it.
But I worry that almost everyone will be unprepared for the collapse of our fragile modern society when it comes.
In the late 1800s, when steam ships were replacing sailing cargo ships, one of the last roles for the sailing ships was to carry coal around the world to supply ports where steamships wanted to go. A clean technology was essential to enable the growth of a dirty technology. And even today, fossil fuels aren’t magically just everywhere. A gigantic *** 40% *** of global shipping is just moving fossil fuels. So eliminating fossil fuel also drastically cuts global shipping emissions. #climate#ships
Is there any more ethical solution to our current circumstances than "murder all billionaires"?
Not that I'm particularly against that - quite the opposite, in fact. But I'm wondering if anyone sees, or had seen a path to social and climate recovery/progress that could occur without first eradicating the class of people who most enjoy the present status quo.
Gulf Stream weakening now 99% certain, and ramifications will be global (www.livescience.com)
A new study has confirmed that the Gulf Stream, a crucial ocean current that helps regulate climate and sea levels, is weakening. The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades. This slowdown has significant implications for the world's climate, and scientists are concerned that it...
Global temperatures briefly spike above key climate threshold, scientists warn of more extremes (www.pbs.org)
European researchers said Thursday that the the start of June saw global surface air temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first time. That is the limit governments said they would try to limit global warming to at a 2015 summit in Paris.