Can somebody explain to me how any climate scientists think we will stay below 1.5C by 2100? I don’t see how we can keep below 1.5C considering the current temperature, the continued rate of high emissions, and the likely future efforts to reduce emissions (specifically, the insufficient efforts in the near future).
Fantastic. This is the kind of thing that'll directly drive reductions in fossil fuel projects.
"Zurich Insurance Group AG will no longer underwrite new oil and gas projects, and is cracking down on clients planning to expand in metallurgical coal mining."
In a credibility-destroying move, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) have decided to allow companies to count offsets towards reducing their scope 3 emissions.
One thing that irks me about firms in (capitalist) markets is that they don't share information.
Capitalism is supposedly an efficient driver of innovation, but how efficient can it be when efforts are surely duplicated far more often than would happen if firms were collaborating?
So, how do you structure companies and inter-company relationships to foster both innovation (through competition?) and collaboration? Anyone have any info on this?
@Brendanjones yeah You've hit the nail on the head. Capitalism is extremely competent at finding "local maxima", so to speak, but calamitously bad at finding global ones.
Capitalism can produce high yield for a very limited set of people. By design.
There's some reason to care about own/own company's wealth instrumentally then: it allows it to benefit society more or, imo more importantly, allows it to continue doing so for longer by allowing it to weather larger disruptions. For the same reason preserving competitive advantage seems instrumentally desirable.
This all obviously assumes that spending wealth is necessary to get dinner services the company or its employees need, but I don't see how that could not hold in any world vaguely similar to current Europe.
Obviously that creates a rationalisation-inducing trap: how much wealth is enough? How do we weigh continued survival of the company (and thus increased fraction of companies that try to benefit society) against preserving secrets? (Or do we try to e.g. share them with other similar companies only?)
I'm curious whether you have a different viewpoint on this.
I’m seeing more and more sites not working in #Firefox for iOS - the latest is LinkedIn.
It was working a few months ago, but now it’s completely messed up compared to how it displays in Safari and Chrome. I refuse to download their app.
It always seems to be companies that very much have the resources to make their website interoperable, so it’s very obviously an intentional choice. Not a great sign for the #OpenWeb.
This is not a criticism of Firefox, quite the opposite.
Wowsers. @terzibus here basically saying 'there's a problem but it's politically hard to fix so we won't fix it' is certainly an ... er ... interesting dismissal.
@noam@deshipu Yes, absolutely. But to throw out the entirety of degrowth just because solutions to it are hard is ridiculous, it's putting your head in the sand and hoping the problem will go away.
I suspect the author has a superficial understanding of the process side of degrowth without actually understanding the critique side of it. What I mean by the process and critique parts of it: https://fosstodon.org/@Brendanjones/112087277455885780
Turns out the only thing that certain Marxists hate more than #degrowth is the idea that Marx was the original degrowther.
Jacobin publishing degrowth hit pieces is nothing new, but Kohei Sotei's vision of degrowth communism obviously riles them up so much that Leigh Philips and Matt Huber felt the need to get together and co-author an article.
For the record, I couldn't give two figs if Marx was pro-degrowth or not. It has zero bearing on how we approach today's environmental, political and social problems.
I just find a certain schadenfreude in anti-degrowth Marxists having their idol adopted as the patron saint of the thing they hate. Thanks for the entertainment, Saito.
I've been meaning to read Tim Jackson's books for many years but never got around to it.
Does anybody have opinions on which to read, if I were to choose just one?
The choice is between Prosperity Without Growth (2009) and Post Growth: Life After Capitalism (2021).
I am well read on #degrowth and #postgrowth in general so don't need an intro. I'm more interested in visions of post growth systems than critique of growth. #books
@Brendanjones Everything else you've read. What is the philosophical basis for their concern with environmental pressures in the aggregate?
I want to read up on degrowth.
Wild animal welfare advocates are in favor of actively intervening in nature to improve wild animal welfare including against natural suffering that is not caused by humans. This can lead to conflict with environmentalists who seek to conserve nature as it is
@jlou Environmental pressure is the core philosophical concern of #degrowth, along with human wellbeing.
So, degrowth is both a critique and a process.
The critique is of economies that cause and are dependent on continuous (GDP) growth (eg capitalism), and the fact that growth requires resources and energy, the extraction, processing, use and waste of which is tightly linked to environmental pressure. (1/2)
@Brendanjones I don’t think most people even realize that the biggest impact of global warming has been on the oceans — like 90% of the excess heat energy goes into the water
not sure if this is open access but this paper by Melissa Bowen and Phil Sutton shows the temperature with depth for some of NZ oceans.
They also look at the depth at which the surface data stops being representative of deeper temperatures. It varies with latitude and season but sort of 50-150 m - ish.
“according to a recently published survey, lots of digital documents aren't consistently showing up in the archives that are meant to preserve it. And that puts us at risk of losing academic research—including science paid for with taxpayer money.”
Can we fulfill basic needs for 10 billion humans without destabilizing the Earth system? Can we live in the donut (economy)?
The answer is 'yes', according to this new paper:
"it is theoretically possible to satisfy the basic needs of 10.4 billion people within ecological limits. However, large-scale transformations in all sectors and dietary changes are necessary to guarantee safe climate conditions."
Gotta say, there's some absolutely bangin' reading in the references for this paper. An excellent assortment of research into all sorts of earth and human systems.