US Conservatives are gearing up to provide their best to gear up for battle against climate catastrophe - that is, the catastrophe of anyone doing fuck all about it. Their nearly 1000 page plan is a complete shift from the federal government regulating polluters and encouraging clean energy to capitulating to polluters and doing nothing to encourage development of clean energy. In this respect they are even behind many big energy companies mainly known for fossil fuel, who are changing their portfolios to include clean energies.
Not only does their numbskull plan retreat from action at the federal level, but it also attempts to stop states from making progress on their own. On the longer political scale, this further separates Republicans from young people. Even young conservatives tend to acknowledge anthropomorphic climate change. Republicans will not easily be forgiven for sabotaging climate action as forests burn, rivers run dry, hurricanes become more frequent, glaciers retreat, and the world swelters under an increase in heat waves.
And this time around, they’re trying to be more organized in smashing things. Trump term 1 was disorganized. By all accounts, Trump himself was pretty surprised at having won. Now the party has been largely purified and they’re lining up Trump sycophants at the pig trough for jobs to carry out P. J. O’Rourke’s summary of Republicans: “The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”
This is if course bad and all that but there is the silver lining that you can now get rid of those stubborn dandelions just by having a wank in the garden.
Let’s still not ban it though. I mean, it IS banned now, but also not. And the fact that massive insect populations started wholesale disappearing and never coming back - something even poison like DDT couldn’t pull off- after introduction of glyphosate is surely wholly irrelevant in this discourse anyway.
The decline of insects is the scariest thing I’ve seen in life, and I mean that. We kicked the bottom out of the food chain. It’s hard to state what I experienced as a child 40-50 years ago vs. now.
In just 3 years I’ve seen the insect population tank at my camp. My camp in the swamp. Banana spiders were legion, there’s still a few. The ground spiders are half what they were. Used to get a hummingbird now and again. Nothing has touched my feeders in 2 years. Further up the food chain, I see very little “higher” organisms. Nothing but squirrels, no other mammals. And that’s only 3 years.
Hell, my front porch is turning into a wasteland, and that’s on the bleeding edge of town, surrounded by country. Used to get as many a 5 tree frogs at a time, 0 now. 4-5 hummingbirds every year, now I rarely see 1. My porch lights used to be covered in dead bugs, pretty clean now and I haven’t touched them since last summer.
Young people have been robbed of a world they don’t know existed. Robbed in ways that don’t make headlines.
I’m pretty sure I’m literally among the last few people alive who have seen live fireflies in our own country. That was some 40 years ago and I still miss them.
Fireflies are especially susceptible to pesticides (which includes herbicides). When I moved here 18 years ago, I’d see one or two occasionally, zero now. Read an article about them disappearing worldwide, over 10 years ago.
We didn’t have them when I was a kid in OK, but when I’d visit my great grandparents in Indianapolis, you could snatch as many as you liked out of the air, and that was smack in the middle of the city.
Growing up (90s), in the middle of a dense suburban/semi-urban area, my mom would melt holes into the top of peanut butter jars with an awl, and we’d put some grass and shit in them and fill them with dozens of fireflies to make fairy lanterns. She would let them out when we fell asleep and said the fairies only stay until dawn, which I was never up for.
I saw a firefly the other day and was absolutely thrilled. It’s been so so long since I’ve seen them. Then again it was during the day so it might have been something else…
I actually saw firefly last summer and the year before flying around my neighborhood. I will say though, that I saw way less of the last year than the year before. It’s made me wonder if I’ll even see them at all this summer.
Its a great idea. I think it would be challenging to implement and would need quite a lot of domain expertise to really unpick. Need to have enough teeth to be able to assess whether level of action and emission mitigation is: above and beyond; in line with paris agreement needs; below needed but active work due to constraints; actively harmful company . E.g. some companies might be intrinsically high emitting because of their sector (e.g. steel manufacture) but doing all they can to decarbonise whilst some might instead be “decarbonising” largely through accounting tricks like offsets and others still just bankrolling delay and denial. Assessing what a Paris Agreement compliant pathways for sub- and multi-national organisations is actually really tricky. Similarly tricky to assess what “as fast as possible” really is for the same organisations.
For finance sector I know this: bank.green which might help some.
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