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.
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.
Someone popped into my mentions yesterday and tried to argue that we can and should respond to the climate catastrophe by changing our consumption patterns—reducing, reusing, and recycling; carpooling; buying from artisans rather than big firms; etc.
Undoubtedly, many of us could improve the way we buy and use stuff and thereby nibble away at the margins of the climate problem. But no, we are not going to solve problems like “sequential heat waves that kill at least tens of thousands of people every summer” by recycling our glass bottles.
What I really want to talk about, though, is the idea that our pattern of purchases and use is somehow a neutral and organic expression of our preferences that we can just adjust on a whim. It’s not.
Right now, could you prepare a slice of toast with zero embodied carbon emissions?
Since at least the 2000s, big polluters have tried to frame carbon emissions as an issue to be solved through the purchasing choices of individual consumers.
Yet, right now, millions of people couldn't prepare a slice of toast without causing carbon emissions, even if they wanted to.
In many low-density single-use-zoned suburbs, the only realistic option for getting to the store to get a loaf of bread is to drive. The power coming out of the mains includes energy from coal or gas.
But.
Even if they invested in solar panels, and an inverter, and a battery system, and only used an electric toaster, and baked the loaf themselves in an electric oven, and walked/cycled/drove an EV to the store to get flour and yeast, there are still embodied carbon emissions in that loaf of bread.
Just think about the diesel powered trucks used to transport the grains and packaging to the flour factory, the energy used to power the milling equipment, and the diesel fuel used to transport that flour to the store.
Basically, unless you go completely off grid and grow your own organic wheat, your zero emissions toast just ain't happening.
And that's for the most basic of food products!
Unless we get the infrastructure in place to move to a 100% renewables and storage grid, and use it to power fully electric freight rail and zero emissions passenger transport, pretty much all of our decarbonisation efforts are non-starters.
This is fundamentally an infrastructure and public policy problem, not a problem of individual consumer choice.
If you say "1.5 degrees celsius" most will hear one of two things:
A: 1.5°F, which they will further reduce to "nothing," because you can't really feel it. "A degree or two" means nothing.
B: ZERO, because they hear "small number I don't understand."
USE. FAHRENHEIT. AT. AMERICANS.
For real. "2 degrees (C)" means "basically nothing" but "4 degrees (F)" is "huh." It's something Americans know they can feel. Americans know the difference between 68F and 72F.
🚨Elon Musk just lost $28bn as Tesla took a beating🚨
Toyota’s chairman Akio Toyoda, tells the EV market "I told you so", as sales slow dramatically.
Toyoda has long advised the industry to hedge its bets on EVs by continuing to invest in hybrids, hydrogen-powered cars, & other alternative eco-friendly vehicles.
UK insurers have hiked premiums to unaffordable levels because of the high cost of EV repairs.
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.
This is a common sense move by the UK government. Pumping #hydrogen into homes to replace natural gas was always a stupid idea and only gained any traction in the first place due to extensive lobbying by incumbent gas suppliers looking to secure their future. Home heating has to go 100% electric and Green Hydrogen has its place in the mix of energy storage solutions we need to smooth out lumpy renewable energy supply.
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.
Emissions from computing are apparently higher than for air travel, and that’ll only go up in the coming decades.
“As a society we need to start treating computational resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. We need frugal computing: achieving our aims with less energy and material.”
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
If you care about the planet, please make sure you sit down before you start reading this post about ExxonMobil.
So.
The CEO of ExxonMobil just said this in an interview: "We’ve waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets in terms of what we need, as a society, to start reducing emissions."
Who's the most influential voice on climate change? Who's to blame for inaction on climate change?
According to the CEO of ExxonMobil, it's environmental activists.
No, really:
"Frankly, society, and the activist—the dominant voice in this discussion—has tried to exclude the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies."
Oh, and the CEO of ExxonMobil also apparently thinks consumers are to blame for climate inaction:
"Today we have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that."
Gets better.
He thinks unnamed 'people who generate emissions' should pay for it. (Rather than, say, major transnational oil companies.)
"People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price. That’s ultimately how you solve the problem."
So, remind me again. Who knew about climate change before most of the public?
"Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue... This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation."
And just who, exactly, stood in the way reducing emissions all these years?
"ExxonMobil executives privately sought to undermine climate science even after the oil and gas giant publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change, according to previously unreported documents...
"The new revelations are based on previously unreported documents subpoenaed by New York’s attorney general as part of an investigation into the company announced in 2015. They add to a slew of documents that record a decades-long misinformation campaign waged by Exxon, which are cited in a growing number of state and municipal lawsuits against big oil."
Recycling in the US (and many Western countries, for that matter) is a sham. It always was.
In reality, most of the plastic placed in recycling bins were never turned into new products.
Now China has stopped taking that waste, the myth of near infinite consumption without the guilt of waste has been exposed for the lie that it always was.
That's not to say that we shouldn't aim for a sustainable circular economy. Of course we should.
But we'll need much bigger changes to make it happen.
"For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships... But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables... Waste-management companies are telling [municipalities] there is no longer a market for their recycling.
"These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.
"Most are choosing the latter.
"When [its kerbside recycling] program launched, Franklin [in New Hampshire] could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton. Now the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate.
"This end of recycling comes at a time when the US is creating more waste than ever. In 2015, the most recent year for which national data are available, America generated 262.4 million tons of waste, up 4.5% from 2010 and 60% from 1985."
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.
Southern US Reaches Dangerous "Wet Bulb Temperature". Here's What That Means (www.iflscience.com)
Multiple southern states and a few midwestern states are at "extreme threat" levels of "wet bulb temperature".
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.