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.
Capitalism is not a synonym for liberty, and under capitalism the vast majority of people have no effective right to own the means of production that they build and operate.
I don’t know how “capitalism will always exist at some scale” when capitalism is at most only a few centuries old and did not, in fact, exist for most of human history at any scale.
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.
@Syulang@gdeihl@pixelpusher220@breadandcircuses What do you have against grid lithium? For short term storage there are relatively few options; iron-air is probably mainly for long term (and is immature), and pumped hydro is almost certainly dirtier than lithium. Using lithium-ion for long term storage probably doesn't make sense, of course.
EV batteries can be reused as grid storage. There is some of this now, because the batteries can be reused for far more cycles on the gird than they can in a car.
And yes, I know we need to reduce the number of cars, but apart from the modest gains we can make (cheaply) via improving bus services, the bulk of that particular degrowth agenda will take time.
It is vital to reduce overall energy usage. But in the short run that probably means using more electricity, because of shifting e.g. domestic heating to (cleaner and vastly more efficient) heat pumps. For managing intermittency you have a bunch of options but all of them (hydrogen, nuclear, interconnectors, lithium, iron, liquid air, compressed air, pumped storage, overbuilding renewables, etc) have some ecological impact. With the possible exception of dynamic demand, but I doubt that can achieve enough on its own. All of them are preferable to burning fossil fuels though!
Degrowth is going to happen. Either humans embrace it as a spiral economy, and actually benefit from the process, or nature does the job for us. It's one of the few situaitons where the choice is purely binary. There is no other options on the table. We can pretend otherwise all we want, but we're just delaying the decision.
For anyone with a vague degree of compassion for humans, or concern about body counts and suffering, the first option is better. A lot better.
@CelloMomOnCars@breadandcircuses And then you have relatively efficient e-cars like the Citroen Ami. It weighs just 485 kg and has a far smaller battery and far smaller energy consumption than most e-cars. It has a range and load capacity which are far more than adequate to cover almost all drivers' daily use, but the styling and 'power' are perhaps not adequate for the average driver's ego. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_Ami_%28electric_vehicle%29
@CelloMomOnCars@breadandcircuses Let's go back a bit: the Citroen 2CV could carry 4 adults but weighed 600kg. The current electric Citroen Ami two-seater weighs 500kg: you could expand it to a 2CV-like 4 seater without much weight penalty.
It's not that EVs have to be heavy by definition—it's that the ones we're being sold are ridiculously high performance luxury cars that are mostly hugely profitable for their manufacturers.
@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.
@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.
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?
Too many people, even here on Mastodon, seem to be in denial about how bad things are likely to get on our current path. I suppose I can understand how they might wish the situation was different, and perhaps some of them aren't psychologically or emotionally ready to handle an honest look at the dire future we face, so they simply avoid it.
But I worry that almost everyone will be unprepared for the collapse of our fragile modern society when it comes.
@breadandcircuses
I’ll say this as a former intel analyst at the NSA. If I was seeing the extent of civil unrest, monetary inequality, increasing national debt, uncontrolled damage to the land and air, in any other country, I’d be expecting to see a coup or people’s revolution soon. The current situation is unsustainable.
There is nothing more critical. If we could really treat the emergency with the attention that it demands we could at least produce some less-bad outcomes.
We’re literally headed towards a mass-extinction event and calling it by its name is considered “alarmism.”
The US government is pouring billions into this concept, not because they think it will ever work — they know it won't — but because it allows them to pretend they're doing something positive about the climate crisis, while in reality they're telling their fossil fuel buddies that Business As Usual is here to stay.
And it's working. Corporate news outlets are on board promoting the plan, and everyone is happy. 😃
Especially the oil industry!
Here's a quote from Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum:
“We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time. This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”
For once, an oil executive is NOT lying. She's telling the truth, and that truth is going to kill us all.
@cowvin plants do capture carbon, but they don't really store it. Most plants have a very short lifetime and, when they die, the captured carbon is returned to the environment. Even during their lifetime, plants release some of that carbon as fallen leaves or branches. That's the short term carbon cycle.
Real carbon storage is only viable deep underground in deposits of fossilised organic matter that take millenia to form. That's the (very) long term carbon cycle.
Even if we could grow huge forests to capture some of the excess carbon we have been extracting from the long term carbon cycle, we would only be postponing the inevitable until we run out of space to grow trees and overload the short term carbon cycle.
The only sensible response to the emergency situation we are living is to completely and immediately stop extracting carbon from long term reserves.
In case you didn't already know, Net Zero is a scam promoted by the fossil fuel industry and their financiers to perpetuate Business As Usual for as long as possible...
"Why Net Zero is not enough"
More than 4,000 governments and companies around the world have pledged to go Net Zero. This includes more than one-third of the world’s largest publicly traded companies.
That sounds like a step in the right direction, right? If every organisation “stops emitting”, our world will be great again.
Well, not exactly…
If we continue to be in a collective delusion that Net Zero is the solution, we will be proved terribly wrong.
In "Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough", Holly Jean Buck discusses the implications of chasing Net Zero from various frames — looking at it not only through an environmental lens but a social justice perspective as well.
Instead of telling us to do better, this book provides different stakeholders concrete steps for planned phase-out on top of sound arguments and justification for it.
Simply put, the framework of Net Zero and its concentration on emissions diverts public and policy attention away from the fundamental task of ensuring effective and lasting climate change mitigation, which requires an unwavering end to the fossil fuel sector.
@breadandcircuses "Net Zero" in the real world means "We emit as usual and also pay a company 32 dollars and 57 cents to give us a certificate saying all our emissions are offset by some magical jungle somewhere. It's a win-win!".
@wherephysicswentwrong@504DR@mike805@breadandcircuses
Humans have been around for 100000 yrs (and then some) the last 400, only amount to 0.4% While it may seem that society is stuck in this exploitative mode of thinking, evidence shows that we're pretty good at trying many different social arrangement, & therefore many different relationships with the natural world. Graeber and Wengrow pulled lots of that evidence together in their book "The Dawn of Everything".
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".
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.
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.
@andycarolan maybe but that could still hurt profits as people stop, personally I’d like to see more refill type stores that aren’t just aimed at the middle class. These could also be given tax breaks increasing the divide between those products using single use plastics and forced businesses to have to do something.
@andycarolan Agreed. Same for milk alternatives. I understand there are, in the EU, large milk subsidies; but if you're claiming to be an alternative that's better for the environment, and made mostly of water and oats, does it really have to be sold for twice the price if cow's milk? You're not going to get a lot of people changing to the more sustainable alternative that way.