In my city there are a lot of bicycle lanes but practically no bike racks near any businesses - and the lanes themselves avoid the main commercial streets and wind through residential neighborhoods instead.
It’s painfully obvious the bicycle infrastructure is designed for rich yuppies exercising and not commuting or shopping. Because fuck the poors.
Dude’s smuggling the HFCs because they keep old refrigeration units running and keeps people from having to buy new. And new units are so shoddy and poorly made that - even with the black market markup - it makes more sense financially to buy gas and keep the old ones running. And when big corporations can buy themselves exemptions and bribe inspectors and ignore greenhouse gas regulations completely, I don’t really care about some guy making a living with small time residential violations.
Not to mention the atmosphere is global. If this person didn’t smuggle HFCs into the United States, they’d be used in Mexico or wherever just the same. Throwing the book at him doesn’t keep a single molecule of greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.
And frankly, anybody who thinks there’s no reason to reduce your personal consumption when a hundred big corporations produce 70% of all pollution, or whatever the talking point is, doesn’t have any standing to criticize this guy. You think personal consumption is not a problem? Then how can selling gas to individuals for residential use be a problem?
The solution isn’t throwing the book at random poor people trying to make a living in the hope it’ll discourage the hundreds of others the law doesn’t catch. The solution is better technology and a more equitable distribution of resources so there’s nobody who wants to use the old systems and nobody who can’t afford better.
Yep. Which is why any government that’s serious about the environment needs to provide significant subsidies so people can get rid of their old polluting technology without being financially punished for it. We can’t have climate justice without economic justice.
Is it just me, or is it vaguely racist how dismissive that article was of “ancient civilizations” and the idea that indigenous myths might be retellings of the Younger Dryas impacts? I feel like there’s always aggressive pushback from “modern scientists” whenever the idea comes up that indigenous myths speak of real historical events. It feels like, in the US and Canada particularly, Native Americans aren’t allowed to have histories - that the history of Native Americans began when white settlers arrived to write those histories down. They want to pretend the thousands of years of history passed down through tribal oral traditions never existed at all and Native peoples simply existed, like animals, without memory of past or hope of future, until civilized Europeans brought history to the Americas. When what really happened was most of the people who remembered those oral traditions died in the colonial apocalypse, and those settlers danced on the graves of history.
All that is to say, the science might be one way or another, but the dismissive attitude taken towards oral tradition and mythic history really rubs me the wrong way.
That’s the point of the 15 minute city - that is, a city where everything its people need is within a 15 minute walk. People travel less and when they travel they walk or bike. The alternative, in other words, is better city design.
Living more simply sounds good when you’re a American in your suburban house with giant car you think about how your quality of life could be just as good in a small apartment in a walkable city.
Living more simply is not as appealing if you’re in a slum in India or Indonesia or a farmer in rural China and you barely have enough to eat as it is.
We who have rich lives should consume less, just as a moral obligation. But it’s not feasible to tell the whole world to consume less, because the vast majority of the world consumes far less per capita than the developed West, and their standard of living sucks, and they want more stuff. And quite honestly they deserve it.
On an individual level I understand the appeal of simplification and using less. But it’s not an effective solution to global climate change. India and China and Nigeria and Indonesia and so on will not accept degrowth. Their choices are between sustainable development and unsustainable development. And so that’s the choice the world faces.
In the political cosmology of something that calls itself the “Democratic Party,” it is now a widespread belief that support is owed from below rather than earned from above. Instead of building popular coalitions by seeking to represent the hopes, dreams, and interests of a democratic majority, a posture of absolute,...
Have you heard of this miraculous thing called public transit? And there are things called panniers which are pretty cool too.
But frankly, if you don’t have groceries within walking distance, your neighborhood and your zoning laws are very poorly designed.
And that’s deliberate. Neighborhoods around the world are designed to require cars to live in, because of oil company lobbying, and also for “security”, in order to keep out people too poor to own cars.
Getting rid of cars requires changing the various ways our cities are designed to make cars necessary. That’s worth doing too.
Also I am tired of minor injuries compounding year over year due to the simple fact that I am using my body as both the engine and support structure to move myself, vehicle and cargo around just to live.
I’m sorry you’re getting pushback and criticism for this. As someone who physically can’t bicycle and struggles with mobility, I strongly support well designed and well maintained walkable communities, bicycle infrastructure, and effective public transit. And I recognize that, for some people, the basic right to travel and work and generally function in society requires personal car ownership.
That doesn’t mean I sympathize much with people who live in subdivisions off major highways with no grocery stories within twenty miles - there shouldn’t be any community anywhere designed to require car ownership.
But I also don’t sympathize much with people who want to ban all personal vehicle ownership from their little 15 minute utopias. Disabled people exist.
Not mine, seen on Reddit. I dropped it into this instance because I thought it was a good guide on ways climate change is breaking things - relevant to collapse - as well as basic thoughts on how to prepare for those challenges.
I’m in the United States. Conservatives are currently pivoting to their new “climate change is inevitable, and therefore we must seal our borders to protect America from climate migrants and give more subsidies to big corporations and fossil fuel companies whose technology will maintain our standard of living” talking point.
The more people panic about climate change, the more persuasive that argument becomes.
Human rights are one of the first things to vanish in disasters. When people are scared, they agree to give up their rights. When people are scared, they close their eyes as the government violates other people’s rights.
And the more frightened people are about climate change, the more they’ll turn to authoritarian demagogues who promise them safety.
Hope is vital. Because once people give up hope of saving the planet, all that’s left is an ever more vicious scramble for ever fewer resources. And once you decide that’s an inevitability, the only logical thing to do is get vicious as fast as possible.
When you call the police in the United States there is a very real chance they’ll kill whoever you call them to punish. And a smaller but nonzero chance they’ll kill you or an innocent third party.
Not because the police are all inherently evil. But because they’re heavily armed, and policing in a country that’s also heavily armed, and that makes every police encounter more dangerous for everyone than it is in a country with rational gun laws.
US cops are trained to consider their lives at risk every time they go out on a call, and they are ready and willing to shoot to protect themselves. So if they’re threatened - or they feel threatened - they may shoot instead of de-escalate.
So before you call the police in the US you have to ask yourself: is whatever just happened - theft, trespassing, vandalism, whatever - worth someone’s life to punish?
But seats every three minutes walk? That’s kinda insane :-P
… A public bench every block is insane? You sound suburban 😆
Seriously, look at the density of public benches and bus stops and seating areas in any European metropolis or dense urban center. A bench every three minutes’ walk isn’t crazy. It’s normal for any city built for the needs of people rather than the needs of cars.
Where I live, unfortunately, a lot of benches have been removed. Because unhoused people sit and lay on them and our authorities think the best way to solve the “homeless problem” is to take the benches away. Which doesn’t help unhoused people and hurts everyone else. Loathsome.
Not to discourage creativity, but I think there was a whole documentary about how bad an idea spring loaded exoskeletons are. Five Nights at Freddy’s or something like that?
healthy ethical vegan alternative (slrpnk.net)
Bike lanes are good for business, but store owners still hate them (www.businessinsider.com)
The False Dream of Cottagecore | How the problematic romanticization of Western rural life reveals our discontent with the modern world (beneaththepavement.substack.com)
He’s Accused of Smuggling, but Not Drugs or Guns: It’s Greenhouse Gases (www.nytimes.com)
The Washington Post take
This mobility firm COO says EV bikes are not fit to ferry passengers | Rest Of World (restofworld.org)
The Comet Strike Theory That Just Won’t Die | Mainstream science has done its best to debunk the notion, but a belief in a world-changing series of prehistoric impacts continues to gain momentum. (www.nytimes.com)
YSK car tires produce 78% of all microplastics on earth (www.reuters.com)
The Geoengineering Question (www.theclimatebrink.com)
Actually, Voter Shaming Doesn’t Work | Democrats like to chastise leftists for not voting party line Democrat. That's not very persuasive. (jacobin.com)
In the political cosmology of something that calls itself the “Democratic Party,” it is now a widespread belief that support is owed from below rather than earned from above. Instead of building popular coalitions by seeking to represent the hopes, dreams, and interests of a democratic majority, a posture of absolute,...
Golf Courses ARE Being Converted | former golf courses across the US are being turned into habitat and hiking trails (www.tumblr.com)
I would have linked the NYT article direct but it’s paywalled. Thanks, Obama.
Energy efficiency of active travel (walking, cycling, ebike) compared to an electric car (www.itf-oecd.org)
Source
As states slash rooftop solar incentives, Puerto Rico extends them (grist.org)
so generous (slrpnk.net)
Why I Don't Read Reddit | a deep dive into the ins and outs of Reddit's public offering and business model (www.honest-broker.com)
Not exactly solarpunk technology, but technology relevant to solarpunks - ones that use Lemmy anyway.
Climate Resilience Guide - extreme conditions to be aware of relating to climate change, and how to prepare for them (www.reddit.com)
Not mine, seen on Reddit. I dropped it into this instance because I thought it was a good guide on ways climate change is breaking things - relevant to collapse - as well as basic thoughts on how to prepare for those challenges.
hope is a radical act (slrpnk.net)
Who ya gonna call? (slrpnk.net)
My homies. Because they got my back, and I theirs....
walkable cities mean sittable cities (slrpnk.net)