I'm nearly 70 years old. Many of my followers here are seniors, like me, or are at least middle-aged. Most of us are angry and probably grief-stricken about what human industry is doing to the biosphere.
But what must it feel like to be a young person in your teens or your twenties and be looking toward a future of near-certain disaster, the collapse of society, destruction of everything you hold dear? I can't imagine the pain.
It would be understandable if they reacted by simply giving up. Or perhaps by lashing out in anger. But some of them, showing incredible courage and determination, have formed movements to change what they can and save at least a vestige of the civilization they are inheriting.
Sophia Kianni, Vanessa Nakate, and Greta Thunberg (@gretathunberg), three of these young climate activists, recently posted an opinion piece at Common Dreams. Let's hear what they have to say...
President Joe Biden’s recent approval of the Willow Project in Alaska has alarmed many young people and once again made us question his seriousness about addressing the climate crisis before it is too late. As if that were not enough, the Biden administration is also auctioning off more than 73 million acres of waters in the Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil and gas drilling — double the size of the Willow Project if it goes ahead as planned. The President faced one of the greatest tests of his commitment to addressing climate change, and he failed.
Young people and members of marginalized communities are the ones who will bear the brunt of the consequences of the escalating climate emergency. The rubber-stamping of such projects sends a message not just to our generation but humanity as a whole: The future of our planet and the present well-being of frontline communities are being sacrificed for short-term economic gain and political expediency.
Scientists warn us that crossing the threshold of 1.5°C could trigger multiple climate tipping points, leading to irreversible and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity. The Willow Project, set to produce 600 million barrels of oil and generate roughly 278 million tons of carbon emissions, goes directly against the word of climate scientists.
As young people who will inherit a burning planet, we are gravely concerned about the long-term impact of the Willow Project and the precedent it sets for future decisions on climate and energy policy. We have said it before and we say it again: We need system change, not climate change. We need people in power who show real climate leadership, who will work with young people and stand by their promises.
That means stopping the Willow project and ensuring there can be no more of its kind. It is the only way to secure a livable planet for all. It is also a chance to listen to our generation and take the first important steps away from a broken political system where leaders care more about short-term political gain than our collective future.
"We need system change, not climate change." YES! 💯
In a beautifully written blog article, environmental scientist Ono Mergen tells us about the power of stories.
Here’s a taste of it, but I encourage you to read the whole thing…
Almost every consecutive year was the hottest on record, the Arctic ice was melting at an increasingly alarming speed, and we were losing a football field worth of the Amazon daily. During my lifetime, the Pacific garbage patch grew to the size of a small continent, coral bleaching became apocalyptic, and extreme weather events became more frequent and more violent.
Surely, the policymakers and those in power must know about this? But if they do know, why is so much action leading to destruction and further exploitation? How come they aren't panicking? Why are they letting their grandchildren's planet burn, burn, and burn?
Every year, there was a new storm, earthquake, flood, and drought of the century. Hunger, disease, and climate change-induced migration and wars wreaked havoc. Meanwhile, every oil and mining company was fracking, exploring new oil fields, and opening new mines and tar sand fields. And the world's governments cheered them on and threw taxpayer money at them like there was no tomorrow.
We believe in capitalism not because it is rational or makes sense but because for centuries we have been fed stories of greatness, human victory over nature, stories of glorious exploration and exploitation, and the survival of the fittest.
Our culture spoon-fed us these stories of rugged individualism, self-made billionaires, and stories of our civilisation being the greatest humans have ever seen, all thanks to capitalism and burning fossils.
Then came the mega-companies and the ultra-powerful oil industry. They told us everyone was individually responsible for the climate crisis, which fit all nice-and-snug into our hyper-individualistic culture.
But the old narratives are over. We are uncovering the lies. Now, we desperately need new stories and people with wild, beautiful minds to imagine our future into existence.
Okay, I've posted quite a lot of stuff this week, a whole bunch of important material for you to read and absorb.
But this next item is the one that means the most to me, truly more than all the rest put together. Because this article offers an actual real-world plan for how we can start fixing things and get back on track to having a livable planet. There's no hand-waving or "net-zero" shenanigans or reliance on yet-to-be-invented new technologies.
HOWEVER — What it proposes will not be easy, not at all. But it's possible! And that's the key point. We're in a very bad place, no question, but there still is a way out... just barely.
Can we do it? Read this and let me know what you think.
"Getting Real: What would serious climate action look like?"
Prof Kevin Anderson of Manchester University summarises the action necessary if governments and societies were really committed to keeping global temperature change close to 1.5°C — and how there would be wider benefits too.
In the U.S., efforts to develop renewable energy and to shift away from coal, oil, and gas are hampered by the colossal amounts of 💵 money 💵 still waiting to be made by those willing to sacrifice the climate, the ecosphere, and the future in favor of profits.
Here's Bill McKibben, in the Rolling Stone...
If we are to meet the climate targets set by scientists, we have to leave 90% of the fossil fuels that have been discovered underground. And at current prices, that means stranding about $100 trillion worth of assets in the soil. If you want to understand why the battle over climate progress is so fierce — why the fossil-fuel industry fights so hard, with all the political influence it can buy — remember that $100 trillion. It’s a lot of incentive.
Last year, we were hit with a staggering number — $2.8 billion — that's how much profit the fossil fuel industry has earned daily for the past 50 years. Which is a problem, because the people making that money have the motive and the means to try to keep it alive.
“It’s a huge amount of money,” Aviel Verbruggen, the academic who calculated that figure, points out. “You can buy every politician, every system with all this money. It protects [producers] from political interference that may limit their activities.”
You can see this happening at the highest levels — at last year’s global climate conference in Egypt, there were 636 fossil-fuel-connected people registered in attendance, dwarfing the delegations from almost every country. This year’s climate conference, COP28, is scheduled for Abu Dhabi, and its chair is also the CEO of its national oil company.
Fossil fuel was pretty cheap from the start, but it hasn’t gotten significantly cheaper. That’s because it’s less a technology than a commodity — and you have to work harder to find that commodity now that the easy stuff has been burned. The coal is farther back in the mine; the oil is down at the bottom of the ocean now, or under a polar ice cap.
The endless payoff can’t last forever — eventually the economics of renewable energy will prevail. Any delay in shifting away from fossil fuels is profitable to Big Oil and damaging to the rest of us. So we must build movements to speed up that transition.
Greta Thunberg (@gretathunberg) with an artful bit of understatement...
"Leaving capitalist consumerism and market economics as the dominant stewards of the only known civilization in the universe will most likely seem, in retrospect, to have been a terrible idea."
"Oil Giant Shell Knew About Climate Impacts Even Earlier"
Following explosive revelations about what ExxonMobil knew about fossil fuels driving global heating, investigations in 2017 and 2018 uncovered that Shell Oil's scientists privately warned about the impact of its products in the 1980s.
However, newly unveiled records show that "Shell began collecting knowledge about climate change in the 1960s. The company not only kept well abreast of climate science, but also funded research. As a result, Shell already knew in the 1970s that burning fossil fuels could lead to alarming climate change."
Faced with a global oil crisis, rather than using its climate information to publicly sound the alarm and shift to cleaner practices, the company "focused instead on a nonsustainable profit model."
The following year, a study Shell was involved with warned that "increases in the CO2 content of the atmosphere could lead to the so-called greenhouse effect... which would be enough to induce major climatic changes." Three years later, another report warned that "the continued burning of fossil fuels will lead to a manifold increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration."
Duncan Meisel, executive director of the campaign Clean Creatives, which targets advertising and public relations firms that work for fossil fuel companies, declared Monday that "what these new documents show is incredibly disturbing."
"In the 1980s, Shell scientists laid out two pathways for the planet: one where energy companies undertook a smooth transition to clean energy and one where fossil fuel demand continued to rise, creating 'more storms, more droughts, more deluges,'" he summarized. "Since the publication of that forecast, Shell has pushed at every turn to create more fossil fuel demand, creating exactly the devastating outcomes they predicted."
The Center for Climate Integrity said the records provide the world "more damning evidence" that the company knew its business model was having disastrous impacts on the world and its people. As the group put it: "They knew. They lied. They need to pay."
The next article I'm going to suggest may be incredibly depressing to read. It contains a lot of bad news, backed up by facts, and very little hope.
But it's similar, I think, to receiving that dreaded cancer diagnosis from the doctor. If you're like me, you won't want to hear that — and yet you realize you must listen and learn as much as you can, if only to understand how to make things go a little easier as conditions gradually get worse.
Here we are...
Our ability to feed 8 billion people is completely dependent on fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas. Once we begin to run out of them, they will become much more expensive, which means everything else — especially food — will become much more expensive as well.
There are people who say we don’t have to worry about peak oil because we are switching to new technologies like solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. However, the switch isn’t happening fast enough, and we still use fossil fuels to manufacture so-called renewables (for example, the plastic in them is made from oil).
About 50% of the world’s food production depends on fertilizer that is created [using fossil fuels]. There is no substitute. This is why fertilizer prices (and thus, food prices) are getting higher and higher, because natural gas has gotten so expensive. What happens when we run out?
Humans have essentially painted themselves into a corner. We have to keep using fossil fuels to maintain the population, but if we do that, eventually we will run out of fossil fuels and the population will collapse. Sure, we could produce more renewables and try to use fewer fossil fuels, but that would only delay the inevitable.
There is no way out of this mess.
That brief excerpt is only a small part of a long and detailed article describing multiple factors that are pushing our civilization toward collapse.
It's a tough read, but I would say it's an essential one if you want be ready for what's coming.
If you take all the energy buried deep in the earth and under the oceans via photosynthesis and animal metabolism, energy from the sun that was packed away over a span of 500 million years as coal, oil, and gas… and then burn through that fuel in the brief period of about 200 years, what will happen?
Think about it.
We’re igniting all of the stored energy from half a billion years of life activity in only two centuries. That’s a ratio of 2.5 million to one — which means we are using this energy two and half million times faster than it was created and stored.
Why do I do what I do on Mastodon? Why do I post so often about the climate emergency, our environmental crises, and the rapacious, murderous impact of greedy capitalists?
Is it because I believe I can help to stimulate large-scale change that will alter the direction we’re going? No, not really, although of course that would be nice. Except I know my reach here is minuscule compared to that of Twitter “influencers,” or the corporate media, or the Hollywood dream factory. I doubt I can do anything to change the course of history.
So, why do I do what I do? Is it because I like scaring people? Do I enjoy being seen as a doom-monger? Well, not exactly. It’s no fun being called an alarmist. However, I believe an alarm MUST be raised if people are to comprehend just how dangerous our situation truly is and how vital their upcoming actions might be.
And that’s the real reason I do what I do. Not to scare you or make you depressed (though that’s an understandable and normal reaction), but to encourage everyone to take action.
Learn about and accept the reality of what’s ahead of us as the climate continues breaking down and society unravels. Think about what adequate preparation could mean for you and your loved ones. Reach out to others you can assist, or who can assist you.
Build a community. Make things better whenever and wherever you can. Because we are stronger together.
"Proposition K, known as the “climate charter,” has provoked fierce resistance and doomsday projections from business interests, spawning a bitter fight with local climate activists.
The proposition calls on the city of #ElPaso to reorganize its employees, create a new #climate department and rethink local policy at all levels to cut greenhouse gas #emissions and put the entire community on a path to an “environmentally sustainable future.” "
This is from a news article published late last year in London...
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has announced that as well as tackling her usual area of climate action and awareness-spreading, she has now thrown her weight behind defeating the West’s “oppressive” capitalist system.
Calling for a “system-wide transformation” at her book launch in London, she claimed that the world’s current “normal” — dictated by the people in power — has caused the climate breakdown.
She said: “We are never going back to normal again because ‘normal’ was already a crisis. What we refer to as normal is an extreme system built on the exploitation of people and the planet. It is a system defined by colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the so-called Global North to accumulate wealth that still shapes our current world order.”
Expressing views that seemed more radical than in the past, she added that the climate crisis “has its roots in racist, oppressive extractivism that is exploiting both people and the planet to maximise short-term profits for a few.”
People were quick to point out the political emphasis on social media, with one best-selling author saying “this is proof that Greta hates capitalism for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with climate change.”
When asked by Samira Ahmed of the BBC whether she thought it was as simple as making laws that outlaw things, she responded: “While there are many things we can do within our current system, we have to realise that we need a system-wide transformation. We need to change everything because right now our current system is on a collision course with the future of humanity and the future of our civilization.”
"We need to stop burning fossil fuels. Right now."
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports are formidably researched and profoundly important, but they mostly reinforce what we already know: human-produced greenhouse gases are disastrously changing the planet, and unless we act now to rapidly taper off burning fossil fuels, a dire future awaits.
But “act now” means taking dramatic measures to change how we do most things, especially produce energy. The people who should be treating this like the colossal emergency it is keep finding ways to delay and dilute a meaningful response. Fossil fuel is hugely profitable to some of the most powerful individuals and institutions on Earth, and they influence and even control a lot of other people.
To say that is grim, but there’s also a kind of comedy in the ways they keep trying to come up with rationales to not do the one key thing that climate organizers, policy experts, activists and scientists have long told them they must do: stop funding fossil fuels, stop their extraction, stop their burning, and speed the transition away from their use.
Among the worst of the excuses for not doing the one thing we must do is carbon capture, which has absolutely not worked at any scale that means anything and shows no sign of so doing on a meaningful scale in the near future. But while it is dangled as a possibility, it creates a justification to keep burning fossil fuel.
The decision-makers here often seem like a patient who, when told by a doctor to stop doing something, tries to bargain. But all the excuses and delays and workarounds and nonexistent solutions won’t replace what the IPCC tells us: stop burning fossil fuel.
Move fast. Step it up. Now.
Which brings us back to something climate organizers have told us for a long time and the new report brings home. We know what to do, and we have the solutions to do it, so the biggest problems are political. They’re banks, politicians, financiers, and the fossil fuel industry itself. We don’t need any magic technology to defeat them, just massive civil society willpower set in motion.
I mean, even though they are polluting the atmosphere and wrecking the climate, they're also paying for "carbon offsets" like planting trees. And that's a good thing, right?
In the UK, over half a million recently planted trees have died beside a single 21-mile stretch of new highway. A government agency points to poor soil and extreme heat as the main causes.
Many tree experts say this is symptomatic of a focus on tree planting over tree care. Only growing trees capture carbon or improve habitat.
But, you know, who cares if all those young trees die? The important thing is that Big Oil gets their subsidies and write-offs plus a ton of great publicity for "going green." Right?
"Much of the reluctance to do what #ClimateChange requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for #austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly #emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction?
What if the austerity is how we live now — and the #abundance could be what is to come?"
"How can the #silentmajority who will do really well out of these changes, have their voices heard without being twisted by those running the show?
To me at least, the rise of civil society engagement on #climate issues along with real-world technologies demonstrating what is already possible, suggest that we may be in the foothills of a social and technical #TippingPoint."
"How you reduce #emissions is innately—and rightly—a #political issue, not just a scientific one. I don't think this part of the report should even be part of the #IPCC process."