@breadandcircuses So I try to spread the correct messages to my friends and family. I have shared this same message before. But I see my audience leading an extremely carbon intensive lifestyle. Flights, cruises etc. I feel sometimes that this message gives them an excuse to say “It’s not my behavior that is the problem”…but it absolutely is a big part of the problem.
System change is essential. However, people flying off to Rhodes and complaining that the climate crisis has finally caught up with them made a choice.
Behaviour change and system change are two sides of the same coin. The "climate shadow" concept deals with this quite well. As citizens we have the ability to influence both government and corporations.
If we are privileged enough to have genuine choices, we also need to make changes in our own lifestyle, not only for their direct benefit, but to make campaigning easier. Nonetheless, some of those choices are harder than others, depending mainly on privilege.
Plenty of campaigners get flack in the media because some aspect of their life, often that they have little control over, is not perfect. As if you only have a right to demand system change if you've already changed everything in your own life, even things that are hard to influence such as the insulation on your rented flat.
Doing the right thing can't be a lifestyle choice only available to the rich. It has to be the default, cheapest, easiest choice. And for that, we need system change, degrowth, the polluters must pay, rather than controlling politicians to avoid having to pay for the costs they've dumped on everyone else.
Stephen Fry did a helpful video about accusations of hypocrisy against climate campaigners a while back. I can't immediately find it.
Paris has revealed plans for pedestrianizing the city that include creating 100 hectares of new pedestrian space by 2030 and transforming car lanes to human-friendly pathways and rain gardens.
Love this part: "walking is free, it's emission-free, it's noise-free, it's good for your health and, as we see every time we pedestrianise, it's also good for local businesses."
"Has your washing machine broken down, or is your electric kettle, laptop or mobile phone refusing to work?
Well if you live in Austria, the government will pay up to €200 ($219; £173) towards getting it repaired.
The Repair Bonus voucher scheme is aimed at trying to get people to move away from throwing away old electrical appliances - and focusing on getting things mended."
@bicmay Austrian here. Can I please mention that since this scheme was initiated (it's been around for a bit), vendors of appliances have jacked up their service rates by pretty much exactly the amount that's being refunded. So customers frequently still pay the same for out-of-warranty repairs as before the scheme was invented, while also subsidising vendors via tax euros.
This, sadly, does not discourage planned obsolescence.
Swedish authorities are threatening Greta Thunberg with a prison sentence — while the real criminals, the owners of the fossil fuel companies and the multinational corporations, are making 💵 millions of dollars 💵 every day by destroying the ecosphere that Greta Thunberg and others are trying to protect.
@breadandcircuses Anyone who thinks that this model of 'society' will ever do anything antithetical to the system that underpins it, is fooling themselves.
The world could be literally burning and the authorities will still be there beating you down.
@breadandcircuses "The protest was unauthorized and led to traffic being blocked. The young woman refused to obey police order to leave the site," prosecutor Isabel Ekberg said, [...]
Well, duh! "Authorized protest" is pretty much an oxymoron, and traffic being blocked was the primary intention of the protest.
What a bootlicker way to say "the protest was successful".
“Companies have been trying to hide the full footprint of their data centers because they know the public could turn against them if they knew the reality. In The Dalles, Oregon, Google was found to be using a quarter of the city’s water supply to cool its facilities. Tech companies have been facing pushback elsewhere in the United States, but also across the world in places like Uruguay, Chile, the Netherlands, Ireland, and New Zealand. Now opposition is growing in Spain too, where droughts are wiping out crops and people are wondering why they’d give their limited water resources to Meta for a data center. But adopting generative AI will require a lot more of those data centers to be built around the world.
The tech industry is constantly incentivized to increase the computing power we use as a society, because that works for their business models — especially when Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have massive cloud computing divisions. But we never seem to stop and ask whether that additional computing power is necessary to improve our lives. As Hugging Face climate lead Sasha Luccioni told The Guardian, “we’re seeing this shift of people using generative AI models just because they feel like they should, without sustainability being taken into account.” Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon, but it’s not clear that’s actually in anyone’s interests but those of founders and investors who are hoping to cash in on the latest AI bubble.”
It is impossible to earn a billion dollars. Take any exorbitant salary you like — let’s say $500,000 per year — and calculate how many years you would have to work, spending nothing, to earn your first billion. At $500k/year, it would take 2,000 years. Or, if you simply steal $3 from every single American, you can make a billion in a single year.
Billionaires’ wealth comes only from wage theft from workers. It is never earned. It is estimated that ~5% of deaths in the US are attributable to poverty, making every billionaire a de-facto mass murderer. No one becomes a billionaire because they are intelligent or talented; people become billionaires because they are able to rob millions of other people into poverty, destitution, and early death — and still sleep soundly at night.
These are the people determining our future. They are brain-damaged by power. [See https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/] Billionaires are, by definition, psychopaths. They believe they are chosen by the universe to live as gods. If you are counting on billionaires to save the planet because “it’s in their best interest,” you misunderstand their interests.
That's an excerpt from a long and very informative piece by Sam Hall (@SamYourEyes).
@OrionFed@breadandcircuses
None of what you mentioned is "work", the money made is not "earned". What you described is gaming an exploitative system to steal wealth generated by others. The entire stock market and the existence of "shares" is simply a mechanism for mass theft.
>Intelligence? Talent? No, the ultra-rich got to where they are through luck and brutality.
>If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy.
Hi, friends. Texas Observer is hiring for a PAID Fall Fellowship with a focus on environmental reporting. This is a position for early career journalists with an interest in the #environment, data-driven #journalism, and social justice.
For those who haven’t seen it before, here is my review of The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg…
I've read dozens of books about climate change, and this one is easily the best. It's packed with information, written to be accessible for anyone from high school (or a bright middle school student) on up, and most importantly it does NOT shy away from the true severity of our situation and the imperative need not only for individual action but for system change.
It's stunning to me that a young woman who just turned twenty years old was able to pull together such a massive project — coordinating the submissions of more than a hundred scientists, activists, and educators — while also writing a large part of the content herself. A truly amazing accomplishment.
This essential work should be in every school library and in every home. It will remain relevant for years to come, I believe, because although there certainly is plenty of data, mostly it's about ideas which will never age.
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.
@breadandcircuses Yes, couldn’t agree more, but we should have started doing something in the 1980s, but then, there were far more climate change deniers! Now we wring our hands whilst still doing very little.
@Mikal@breadandcircuses a strong President would declare a climate emergency and reallocate funds for defense and energy departments and put army corps of engineers to work rebuilding the grid and adding wind and solar generation everywhere, retrofitting buildings with insulation, and building out mass transit projects. A strong President would say no selling one-use plastics without actual recycling accountability. Where can we find one of those presidents?
@chidi_anagonye@vex@wherephysicswentwrong@breadandcircuses "what do you do with people that cause major harm to others and need to be stopped" In our current system, you reduce their taxes and give them public funds to murder millions more.
It would only reunite families, return people to their communities, and save tax payers the money it costs to maintain the police and prison systems. Can't see why anyone is against abolition, really. I start to assume folks who support the police prefer their "feeling" of safety over the actual lives and livelihoods of other people.
You’ve heard, of course, that the global average temperature has set a new record high numerous times during the past week. But we’re not breaking those old records by just a little bit. The Earth has a very bad fever and the temperature is soaring.
Last year the major oil companies pocketed four trillion dollars in profits. That’s not total sales, that’s profit!
💵 💵 💵 💵 Four TRILLION dollars in a single year. 💵 💵 💵 💵
Now just imagine how much could be done to clean up the environment, to slow climate change, to save vulnerable species from extinction, and to right the wrongs of global economic injustice if only we had four trillion dollars to spend.
THIS is why we urgently need system change. We must take that money away from those climate-wrecking fossil fuel companies and use it for good.
I am not saying we should regulate for-profit industry more I am saying things like electric and water utilities, healthcare services, etc. shouldn’t even be private, for-profit entities. And the idea that things need to be private, for-profit entities to innovate, manage resources efficiently, or provide services well is categorically false, as we are certainly seeing now.
Yes, Canada is still on fire. Even though summer has gone by and the traditional wildfire season is over, hundreds of forest fires continue burning, most of them out of control.
This is intensely sad to me, not to mention frightening, and it’s a blatantly ominous sign that we are in the midst of a climate emergency.
@breadandcircuses And here's the live view from space: PM1 particles. There have been sightings of stratospheric smoke layers from the western UK over the past few days.
@breadandcircuses and it SHOULD be a wakeup call to people who thought "oh we can just move north" that climate change is CHANGE so don't expect "north" to stay as you think of it.
James Hansen is one of the world's leading climate scientists. Back in 1988, he famously issued a warning to the US Congress that the age of climate change had arrived, and stated that urgent action was required to avoid the worst outcomes.
Since then, of course, almost nothing has happened. Well, no, that's not quite true. Since 1988, the US and other major polluters have greatly increased greenhouse gas emissions, not reduced them!
Hansen has continued over the years to study the climate, both past and present, and has regularly updated his findings, adding even more urgent warnings. Still, no one pays much attention.
Last week, Hansen and his colleagues, Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy, provided yet another message about the severity of the climate crisis. New research, they say, shows that the rate of global warming may in fact be accelerating.
This suggests that various tipping points may already have been crossed. Earth's climate system could now be entering a phase change, or, as they put it, reaching "a new climate frontier."
Here is an excerpt from their latest update...
Suspicion that we are headed into new climate territory, not seen in the past million years, is fueled by the present extraordinarily large Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI).
EEI is the proximate cause of global warming: as long as more energy is coming in than going out, we must expect global warming to continue. Given the acceleration of EEI in the past several years, we anticipate an acceleration of global warming.
The 2023-24 temperature curve is likely to fall substantially above the curve for the prior El Niño, and may set new global temperature records continually during the next 12 months. It seems that we are headed into a new frontier of global climate.
A complex feedback system will naturally amplify its overdrive. I never understood why many people assumed that temperature rise and the effect it causes will go in some sort of linear shape. I wouldn't be overly surprised if even the estimated Accelerated Warming is still too conservative. We can't even define which system parts will definitely tip, if we pass 1.5° C or any other mark, and whether the tipping of these parts will trigger more parts to tip in quick succession.
I mean, the other day you already posted the quote from Schellnhuber that the road from +2 to +4°C will be a fast one. But no one says that this rapid heating has to wait until +2+°C
@breadandcircuses "It's not accelerating, stop staying that, our donors told us to ignore it and that's what we're doing. Stop upsetting everyone...." - Western Politicians.
@tadbithuman I'm sure the energy companies would like us to all drown/burn to death quietly but if people find out they face the same jail time for protesting a pipeline as, say, blowing up a pipeline, things may not turn out as they hoped.
At least three groups — "Fridays for Future", "Fight Fossil Fuels", and "End Fossil Fuels USA" — are joining together to organize mass climate protests and strikes in September.
Here is part of their message...
Our world is in crisis. Extreme weather caused by the climate emergency is wreaking havoc in our communities and ecosystems across the globe, causing social insecurity and harm to people.
The biggest cause of this crisis is fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas.
The fossil fuel industry is driving a predatory and destructive economic system that harms people and the planet, fuelling climate break down.
Fossil fuels are bad for the climate, for ecosystems, for our people, for our health, for our democracies, and for our economies.
The science is clear: what the world needs now is a rapid and just transition to an energy and economic system that is efficient, fair, and universal. A system based on clean energy sources and produced with respect for nature and the sovereign rights of Indigenous peoples.
This September, as world leaders discuss climate action at the United Nations in New York, people on every continent will join the largest-ever globally coordinated action and together WE WILL end fossil fuels.
The climate crisis is escalating but so is the global movement for climate justice. We need all hands on deck to win this fight.
Left to themselves, the fossil fuel industry will never stop polluting the planet, killing the biosphere, and raking in immense profits.
It's what they do. It's what capitalism demands.
"Europe's Biggest Oil Company Quietly Shelves a Radical Plan to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint"
Six months after becoming the chief executive at Shell, Wael Sawan quietly ended the world’s biggest corporate plan to develop carbon offsets, the environmental projects designed to counteract the warming effects of CO2 emissions.
In an investor event in June, Sawan laid out an updated strategy for the European oil major that included cutting costs and doubling down on profit drivers like oil and gas. As important was what he omitted: any mention of the company’s prior commitment to spend up to $100 million a year to build a pipeline of carbon credits, part of the firm’s promise to zero out its emissions by 2050.
Those goals for the offsets program have been retired, the company confirmed, along with the plan to harvest a whopping 120 million carbon credits annually by the end of the decade from projects that sequester carbon with trees, grasses, or other natural resources, many of which Shell would develop itself.
That would have accounted for about 10% of the company’s emissions. It hasn’t made public any new targets for developing offsets or specified how it now plans to deliver on its future climate commitments.
The pullback reflects both Sawan’s renewed commitment to the oil-and-gas business that generates most of Shell’s profits, and an admission that the prior goals were simply unattainable.
Over the past two years, Shell barely made a dent. It spent $95 million, less than half of its initial budget, to build or invest in a portfolio of carbon projects from Western Africa to the Brazilian Amazon to Australian farmlands. They’ve generated few if any offsets.
As you might expect, this article posted at Bloomberg is "fair and balanced," giving Shell equal time to extol its virtues. But the facts are simply damning.
@breadandcircuses
If all of us humans stopped driving their cars, using gas stoves, refrained from buying stuff that requires the work of huge diesel powered mining equipment, abandoned flying across the globe for 10-day vacations, didn't approve of gigantic merchant fleets shipping trinkets around the world, then the oil industry would put out a "business closed" sign.
They are an easy culprit and it's human psychology to go looking for one when things are bad. But it's not them, it's us. Their business only survives because of us.
The game has shifted for the #FossilFuel industry; the goal now is to make as much money as possible as fast as possible before time runs out.
There’s no more time (or money) to keep up the pretence of responsibility, sustainability or other greenwashing efforts—unless they can profit from it, like in the case of defrauding taxpayers with #CarbonCapture scams. The masks are off. Their crimes are now exposed for all to see.
A teenager on Reddit recently posted this heartfelt plea...
I’m so afraid of climate change. I just turned 17 not long ago and I’m afraid I’ll never get to grow up because of the way our Earth is going.
Most of my friends and family are apathetic, such as my parents who don’t like me talking about this stuff since they feel we can’t really change anything. My mom thinks it’s completely irreversible. I hate holding it all inside all the time.
I guess what I really wanna hear is it’s all gonna be ok even though it’s probably not the truth. I’m just scared. I’d appreciate any positive news or insight from those who feel the same way and how you manage it while doing everything you can.
After seeing this, our Mastodon friend Steve Genco (@sjgenco) wrote a piece in which he offers some sound advice...
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what to say to a teenager like this young person to help them prepare for the dangerous world they are about to inherit. I concluded the best advice I could give would be to suggest some questions they need to consider.
So here are four questions I believe any young person who wants to survive the 21st century needs to ask and answer for themselves:
💠 What predictions can you rely on?
💠 What will give your life meaning?
💠 What skills and values will you need?
💠 How will you live?
Steve then suggests thoughtful and helpful answers to each of those questions, at some length, before concluding with this...
Like a long-distance runner, you must prepare yourself in mind and body to confront the challenges and dangers ahead.
The world you will be facing in the 21st century will be unlike anything humanity has faced before. Survival will require flexibility, resilience, and preparation. Preparation means engaging: learning, practicing, and sharing. Your most important immediate task is to find others who share your views and are equally committed to surviving the 21st century. Build communities of resilience and resistance to fight inertia and business-as-usual. Organize and engage in political action, even if your efforts seem at first to be achieving little.
I hope you will read Steve's whole excellent article and also perhaps recommend it to others, especially those who are young or might have contact with young people. These are words they need to hear.
Academic mastodon! Especially people with specialities/focuses in environmental politics, environmental justice, and/or environmental governance - I am the book review editor of Global Environmental Politics, one of the leading journals on the global environment. I am looking for reviewers for several very exciting looking publications on (among others) ecocriticism and environmental narratives/storytelling, plastic pollution, and environmental securitization.
If you are a potential reviewer, or interested in becoming one, please contact me. I am particularly interested in promoting the voices of women and/or BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+ and other marginalized voices, but of course, am not restricted to that.
A beautiful, sad, and justifiably angry essay from Jessica Wildfire (@jessicawildfire) about people continuing to ignore the climate crisis...
Today I watched a math professor and climate activist named Eliot Jacobson talk to CNN about global temperature records and arctic sea ice. He sums it up in the simplest terms. Climate scientists are shocked at what’s happening. None of their models predicted any of this. A mass extinction usually takes millions of years. As he said, “We’re going to do it in a hundred.”
For Jacobson, the collapse of global industrial civilization has become a certainty. A recent column in The Guardian says the same. We’re already breaking through the 1.5C limit set by the Paris Climate Agreement. Scientists are telling us to brace for 2C or even 3C of warming. All of the books I’ve read make it very clear: That kind of warming will turn the planet into something humans have never seen. Large parts of the earth will become uninhabitable for us.
Even the gloomiest climate scientists are left speechless by the disasters unfolding this summer. Climate activists who’ve been urging for an emergency declaration are saying: “I thought we had more time.”
The scenarios scientists were predicting for 2050 are happening now, and they don’t know how much worse it’s going to get. They’re starting to admit, they can’t predict anything anymore.
It’s hard to plan for a future when not even the climate scientists know what’s going to happen next.
Best not to think about it, right?
Nobody wants to talk about reality. They want to talk about Barbenheimer. They want to pretend we’ve still got time. If you face the truth of what’s happening, then suddenly the vast majority of what we’re forced to do makes no sense anymore.
Maybe that’s why people get so angry now when we talk about climate change. They know, but they want to spend however long they’ve got left chasing and consuming whatever pleasure they can. Part of them knows their time is growing short, and they don’t want to spend it angry or depressed, or even trying to stop it.
When you understand the full scope and gravity of what’s happening, most jobs don’t make any sense. It doesn’t make sense to plan a vacation when half the world is burning. It doesn’t make sense to save up money to send your kid to college in ten years.
But it’s easier to ignore it all.
It’s easier to keep working and going to movies while you wait for the wildfire, the flood, or the heat wave that kills you. It’s easier to delay the realization of your climate death as long as possible.
@breadandcircuses@jessicawildfire If enough people snapped out of denial and wishful thinking in time and stopped doing whatever they have been doing - which has become futile - and instead started to force those in power to act appropriately to this crisis, we could stop or prevent some of it. But I am not hopeful this will happen.
