@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.
@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?
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.