Premier Ford just raised your energy bills far more than the carbon tax.
#Ontario families will be paying $600 more annually (with no carbon rebate) to subsidize Enbridge after #DougFord overruled the Ontario Energy Board.
"Eliminating the carbon "tax" benefits the corporations while taxpayers pay the price. The Ford govt is ignoring all the experts and keeping Ontarians hooked on fossil gas even as cheaper, cleaner options become available."
A new study has confirmed that the Gulf Stream, a crucial ocean current that helps regulate climate and sea levels, is weakening. The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades. This slowdown has significant implications for the world's climate, and scientists are concerned that it...
The annual wildfire season in Canada is coming to an end. Or, anyway, it should be by now.
But 2023 is unlike any other year. As of yesterday, there were more than 900 fires still burning, over half of them out of control.
Look at the area burned in the second graph below. The damage to wildlife is literally incalculable. Greenhouse gas emissions from all of these fires is off the charts.
Sure, some reply guy will tell you that forest fires are normal and natural and necessary. But not like this. What we’re seeing this year is an unnatural catastrophe caused by human industry — by the oil companies, their financiers, and the governments that support and subsidize them.
It’s a crime. It’s ecocide. And you know what? To them, it’s just Business As Usual.
It can be argued that electric vehicles are an improvement when replacing ICE vehicles.
But that misses a much bigger point — which is that the very best car is not an electric car. The very best car is no car at all!
Building electric cars requires massive use of fossil fuels, including petrochemicals for the manufacture of plastics. In addition, mining of lithium for batteries as well as trawling for other minerals in the deep ocean is environmentally disastrous, killing biodiversity while polluting our water, soil, and air.
The kind of “Green Growth” championed by capitalists and politicians, which features more electric cars, a bit of solar, and a few wind farms — along with continued use of fossil fuels — is not a good answer. It does not solve any of our problems, and in fact only makes them worse.
Say NO to more cars, of any kind. Push instead for active transportation and for improved public transit.
Continued economic growth is unsustainable. Period. The only logical choice for us and for the biosphere is de-growth.
Salad is cool. Salad saves time. Salad saves you money. Salad is good for footprint. Ready prepped in the fridge is awesome for health, exec function, good choices & quick meals. Salad is good rebellion, in lots of ways.
Consider just how many nudges you get in shows, on social, endless ads, pushing towards unhealthy, high profit, low nutrition, high cost, highly processed, high environmental impact, food.
If you care about the planet, please make sure you sit down before you start reading this post about ExxonMobil.
So.
The CEO of ExxonMobil just said this in an interview: "We’ve waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets in terms of what we need, as a society, to start reducing emissions."
Who's the most influential voice on climate change? Who's to blame for inaction on climate change?
According to the CEO of ExxonMobil, it's environmental activists.
No, really:
"Frankly, society, and the activist—the dominant voice in this discussion—has tried to exclude the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies."
Oh, and the CEO of ExxonMobil also apparently thinks consumers are to blame for climate inaction:
"Today we have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that."
Gets better.
He thinks unnamed 'people who generate emissions' should pay for it. (Rather than, say, major transnational oil companies.)
"People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price. That’s ultimately how you solve the problem."
So, remind me again. Who knew about climate change before most of the public?
"Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue... This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation."
And just who, exactly, stood in the way reducing emissions all these years?
"ExxonMobil executives privately sought to undermine climate science even after the oil and gas giant publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change, according to previously unreported documents...
"The new revelations are based on previously unreported documents subpoenaed by New York’s attorney general as part of an investigation into the company announced in 2015. They add to a slew of documents that record a decades-long misinformation campaign waged by Exxon, which are cited in a growing number of state and municipal lawsuits against big oil."
Recycling in the US (and many Western countries, for that matter) is a sham. It always was.
In reality, most of the plastic placed in recycling bins were never turned into new products.
Now China has stopped taking that waste, the myth of near infinite consumption without the guilt of waste has been exposed for the lie that it always was.
That's not to say that we shouldn't aim for a sustainable circular economy. Of course we should.
But we'll need much bigger changes to make it happen.
"For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships... But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables... Waste-management companies are telling [municipalities] there is no longer a market for their recycling.
"These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.
"Most are choosing the latter.
"When [its kerbside recycling] program launched, Franklin [in New Hampshire] could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton. Now the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate.
"This end of recycling comes at a time when the US is creating more waste than ever. In 2015, the most recent year for which national data are available, America generated 262.4 million tons of waste, up 4.5% from 2010 and 60% from 1985."
A perfect (and perfectly scary) title from Jessica Wildfire (@jessicawildfire) —
"If a Cactus Can't Survive This, Neither Can You"
You might’ve seen recent headlines about saguaro cacti keeling over in Arizona after spending nearly a month above 110° Fahrenheit (43°C).
Not even a week later, The Washington Post ran this absurd story: “Your body can build up tolerance to heat. Here’s how.”
I’m not linking to it. That’s how bad it is.
It’s not just getting a little hotter. It’s getting so hot that saguaro cacti are deflating in the desert. They evolved roughly 20,000 years ago. They’ve spent millennia adapting to a hot desert environment. They live up to 200 years in the hottest, driest environments on the planet. These cactuses are saying, “I can’t take it anymore,” and sagging over dead.
And we’re being told we can adapt.
I got curious about what temperature the human body can actually withstand, and it’s somewhere around 108°F (42°C). That’s when your proteins start to denature. A wet bulb temperature beyond 95°F (35°C) can kill a person in about six hours. No amount of heat tolerance can save anyone from that.
It strikes me as just a little ridiculous that out here in reality, parts of the world are becoming absolutely uninhabitable, and wellness writers are just now telling us to start building up our heat tolerance.
It feels like we’re being prepared and conditioned to start blaming heat deaths on someone’s “low heat tolerance,” as if it’s just another precondition that helps them rationalize indifference in the face of mass death.
Concerned about microplastics? Research shows one of the biggest sources is car tyres
A lot of the emphasis on reducing microplastics has focussed on things like plastic bags, clothing, and food packaging.
But there's a growing body of research that shows one of the biggest culprits by far is car tyres.
It's increasingly clear that we simply cannot solve the issue of microplastics in the environment while still using tyres — even with electric-powered cars.
"Tyre wear stands out as a major source of microplastic pollution. Globally, each person is responsible for around 1kg of microplastic pollution from tyre wear released into the environment on average each year – with even higher rates observed in developed nations.
"It is estimated that between 8% and 40% of these particles find their way into surface waters such as the sea, rivers and lakes through runoff from road surfaces, wastewater discharge or even through airborne transport.
"However, tyre wear microplastics have been largely overlooked as a microplastic pollutant. Their dark colour makes them difficult to detect, so these particles can’t be identified using the traditional spectroscopy methods used to identify other more colourful plastic polymers."
"Microplastic pollution has polluted the entire planet, from Arctic snow and Alpine soils to the deepest oceans. The particles can harbour toxic chemicals and harmful microbes and are known to harm some marine creatures. People are also known to consume them via food and water, and to breathe them, But the impact on human health is not yet known.
"“Roads are a very significant source of microplastics to remote areas, including the oceans,” said Andreas Stohl, from the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, who led the research. He said an average tyre loses 4kg during its lifetime. “It’s such a huge amount of plastic compared to, say, clothes,” whose fibres are commonly found in rivers, Stohl said. “You will not lose kilograms of plastic from your clothing.”"
"Microplastics are of increasing concern in the environment [1, 2]. Tire wear is estimated to be one of the largest sources of microplastics entering the aquatic environment [3,4,5,6,7]. The mechanical abrasion of car tires by the road surface forms tire wear particles (TWP) [8] and/or tire and road wear particles (TRWP), consisting of a complex mixture of rubber, with both embedded asphalt and minerals from the pavement [9]."
I’ll be blunt. We have no hope of averting climate chaos or preventing the catastrophic collapse of our modern society without SYSTEM CHANGE.
Keeping capitalism in charge means a death sentence for billions of humans — most of them poor and in the Global South — along with complete extinction for uncounted plant and animal species.
The fake “democracy” we have in the Global North is nothing but a game show owned and produced by oligarchs. As long as they remain in control of the system, nothing meaningful will change. How you vote doesn’t matter, because every important candidate is approved in advance, vetted and managed by those men behind the curtain.
Either capitalism dies or we die. It’s that simple.
EDIT: After numerous comments, I realized that I should have been more specific about that. Because plenty of people DO care, but it seems our governments and the US corporate media do not.
Is it possible that our super-advanced modern global civilization actually could collapse? Or is this just hyperbolic clickbait, intended for doom-scrolling?
Michael T. Klare is professor emeritus of peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. Most recently, he is the author of "All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change."
In an essay published today, Professor Klare has a warning for us --
"We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilization’s Collapse"
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
(a thread of threads, quotes, and links)
This is a collection of writings and research concerned with how we got where we are today, which is in fact the story of what has been done to us, and what has been taken from us.
By "us" we're talking about "the 99%", "workers", "wage slaves", all non-owners of private property, "the poor", unhoused people, indigenous people, even plenty of people who swear by capitalism and identify as "capitalist" yet have no capital of their own and no serious hope of ever having any worth speaking of. In other words almost everyone except for the very few who have had the power to exploit us and shape our lives to serve their agenda. We're going to examine institutions and concepts that have deeply altered our world at all levels, both our external and internal realities.
By "here" we are talking about climate crisis and myriad other environmental catastrophes resulting from hyper-excessive extraction, consumption and waste; a world of rampant inequality and exploitation, hunger and starvation; a world of fences, walls, tollbooths, prisons, police, bullshit jobs and criminalized poverty; a world overrun with cars and preventable diseases; a world of vanishing biodiversity and blooming fascism; a world where "democracy" results in being led by some of the worst of humanity; a world ruled by an imaginary but all-powerful and single-minded god: Capital.
Our inspiration and structural framework for this survey is this quote from "The Prehistory of Private Property", an important work from political philosopher Karl Widerquist and anthropologist Grant S. McCall:
"After hundreds of millennia in which all humans had direct access to the commons, it took only a few centuries for enclosure, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization to cut off the vast majority of people on Earth from direct access to the means of economic production and therefore to rob them of the power to say no. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned."
Today is the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
It is not over. Chernobyl spread radioactive particles across Europe and beyond. The fire in reactor #4 burned for over a month, releasing massive amounts of radionuclides which then would fallout and embed into the #ecosystem.
37 years later we still find food contaminated with Chernobyl fallout every year. Often with cesium-137 which is very adept at transporting in an ecosystem once the particle has deposited from the fallout cloud.
1/34 This started out as a much shorter thread about a related topic, but Something Happened and now it's a #LifeHack#instructional thread on keeping your house comfortable and saving #money and the #environment, through the magic of air movement. It's also timely, what with it being the start of the northern-hemisphere summer and southern-hemisphere winter.
There aren't enough swear words to express how angry this makes me!!
"Industrial Farming Has Killed Billions of Birds"
🤬 🤬 🤬 🤬
Worldwide, 49% of all wild bird species are in steep decline.
BirdLife International’s authoritative report, State of the World’s Birds 2022, estimates that there are now nearly three billion fewer wild birds in Canada and the U.S. than a few decades ago, and about 600 million fewer in the European Union.
The single biggest cause of bird declines is chemical-intensive farming. Some birds are killed by pesticides or herbicides, but the most important impacts are loss of food, especially insects and other invertebrates that most bird species depend on, and the spread of fertilizer-intensive monocultures that eliminate shelter and nesting areas. Insect-eating populations declined more than any others.
In short, the collapse of farmland bird populations is closely related to the Insect Apocalypse in the Anthropocene. The mass slaughter of insects is killing masses of birds.
Our capitalist rulers, and the politicians they own, are playing the long game. Since the 1950s they have been working steadily to shift the Overton window, to reduce the influence of labor unions, to boost consumerism, and to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few.
A large part of that strategy involves privatizing services that used to be (and should be) public.
They're playing the long game, and they are winning — much to the detriment of you and me and the environment we live in.
Global warming is shutting down nuclear, not the other way around:
"High river temperatures to limit French nuclear power production"
This is the second summer in a row that French nukes are being taken offline because higher water temperatures make it impossible to cool the reactors and the spent fuel.
I wish I didn't have to tell you about this again, but I do. It's not being reported much in the news — and you know why?
Because it's not 'new' (the origin of the word 'news'), it's old. This has been going on for months now, and corporate news outlets are simply tired of reporting it. But it is still happening.
Canada's boreal forests are burning up.
At least 1100 fires are active, more than 700 out of control. Over 13 million hectares have been burned so far, with no end in sight. It's an unprecedented climate and environmental disaster.
Gulf Stream weakening now 99% certain, and ramifications will be global (www.livescience.com)
A new study has confirmed that the Gulf Stream, a crucial ocean current that helps regulate climate and sea levels, is weakening. The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades. This slowdown has significant implications for the world's climate, and scientists are concerned that it...
UK weather: hottest June since records began - Met Office (www.bbc.co.uk)
We seem to be breaking new records constantly at the moment....