"Millions of illegals!"
"Actually, the people you're referring to are legally in the United States with temporary protected status..."
"They're still here illegally because I say so, illegal illegal lalala"
"Climate change isn't real, but if it was, we would need to pump more oil and natural gas in the United States to make our energy sector strong for the oncoming crisis."
"Oh, and don't buy solar panels from China, because they're dirty foreigners."
And Walz, who spent the whole debate staring at the podium scowling like a rotten jack-o'-lantern, was so out of it he couldn't effectively call out Vance's bogus definition of clean energy and bring up the Build Back Better plan and Biden's investments into the US energy economy.
What the fuck.
Vance literally claimed solar panels made in China are dirty energy but natural gas and oil pumped in the United States are clean energy.
Isn't that just, you know, "dirty foreigner" racism?
Sufficiency is a new approach to solving humanity’s consumption problems. It’s about using less, ensuring wellbeing for all humans, and staying within planetary boundaries.
You're doing Gaia's work
Yep. I think it's Roundup. Used to be people used chemical herbicides with more discretion to avoid harming crops, so bugs could live on weeds in patches or at the edges of fields.
Nowadays you just plant a strain of corn or soybeans that's immune to Roundup and soak your entire field in glyphosate multiple times a year. So the only insects that have food or shelter anywhere near you are ones that can live on your crop - and then you spray pesticides to kill those.
Result: millions and millions of acres of essentially sterile agricultural monocrop.
And more and more land is being turned into agricultural monocrop - not because a growing population needs more food, but because of bad laws and subsidies. Almost 100 million acres in the US - 40% of the American corn crop - is used to produce fucking ethanol, which burns more fossil fuel to produce than it replaces and is only profitable because of massive government subsidies procured by energy and agricultural lobbyists.
We are wiping hundreds of square miles of land clean of life in order to turn one fossil fuel into another less efficient fossil fuel. It's species wide insanity.
And that being said: even though agriculture is a much bigger contributor to the ongoing insect omnicide than suburban pest spraying, when you keep the chemicals off your lawn and allow native plants and flowers to grow, it does help your local bugs, and you are making an impact.
where did all the bugs go? (sprays pesticides on lawn) why are there fewer birds than there used to be? (cuts down weeds and bushes and tall grass) what a mystery
Since people are reading this, let me rant a bit:
One of the things you can do, as an individual, to help your local environment, is grow flowers. Even if you live in an apartment, just a flower pot on a windowsill helps - even tiny urban gardens have an outside impact on pollinators.
If you have a yard, you can replace invasive grasses with native species and nectar-rich flowers. Don't use herbicides or pesticides. Leave leaf litter alone over the winter to provide habitat for insects. Set aside a section to "go wild". Just like with flower pots, leaving even a small section of lawn without chemicals and frequent mowing can have an outsized impact on pollinators and native insects.
Lawns and gardens are a space where individual effort and individual care for the environment really does matter. You might not be able to reverse climate change, but you can make a migratory monarch butterfly's day just a little better.
And tell people! Tell people how you are gardening and how you're managing your lawn, and why. Because the most important thing you can do for the climate is talk about it.
Preach.
Housing is a human right.
Private land ownership violates that human right.
All land should be held in trust for the people as a whole and managed by the government for the benefit of the people. Including the houses and apartments on that land.
We should not have private homeowners. We should not have private landlords. We should have socialized housing, just like we should have socialized medicine. Apartment buildings and neighborhoods should be managed by tenant associations, with strict legal limits on their authority over individual tenants, and government facilitators to provide expert advice on building management and keep meetings running smoothly.
But we are a long way from implementing that.
It boggles my mind how people still insist there's a "free market" in rent when we have proof of giant property management corporations colluding nationwide to raise rents.
This shit is why we need rent control.
Because during bad times the ones that make bad decisions don't survive or at very least are removed from positions of power.
It's more common for bad leaders to make the bad decisions that cause the bad times, and then either be deposed by violence or cling to power with violence, making everything worse. See Stalin, Mao, and also the entire history of sub-Saharan Africa after colonialism.
I'm certainly not a fan of American electoral democracy, but one can say that at least it's mostly peaceful and allows in theory the people to make a choice between qualified and vetted candidates. In "hard times" the mechanisms created by civil society to select competent leaders tend to break down. So rather than removing bad leaders from power in hard times, it becomes even harder to remove such leaders, and even harder to determine whether a leader is good or bad until after he's in charge of the army's salary.
Seitan is the first that comes to mind.
one small correction: selfish men create hard times
And no generation in American history has been as selfish as the boomers.
On the one hand, yes, I can see your point.
On the other hand, let's not minimize American prison slavery by saying "we're all slaves". If you strain the definition you can argue all workers under capitalism are enslaved, but even then, some forms of slavery are far more brutal and dehumanizing (and racist. Let's not forget racist) than others.
Why millions of Americans give up control of their thermostats | by automatically rerouting power at need, "virtual power plants" can smooth the unpredictability of wind and solar
Utilities are tapping into customers’ solar panels, home batteries and smart thermostats to avoid blackouts in a program establishing “virtual power plants.”
Why not try to do both?
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
>I saw a fascinating tweet by BloomTech CEO Austen Allred the other day that stirred up a lot of thoughts here.
>“Of the Silicon Valley founders I know who went on some of the psychedelic self-discovery trips, almost 100% quit their jobs as CEO within a year,” Allred said, adding, “Could be random anecdotes, but be careful with that stuff.”
>Allred tweeted this in response to writer Ashlee Vance sharing that he’d been told by a venture capitalist, “We’ve lost several really good founders to ayahuasca. They came back and just didn’t care about much anymore.”
>There’s some very useful information in those words. They reveal a lot about the insane mess our species finds itself in in today’s world, and provide insight into how we might find our way out.
Okay, let me write in "Climate for President" and see how that goes.
Meet balkonkraftwerk, the simple technology putting solar power in the hands of renters and nudging Germany toward its clean energy goals.
I'm going to tell you something you really don't want to hear.
You always have a choice.
You could move somewhere electricity comes from renewables instead of fossil fuels. Or somewhere that doesn't freeze in the winter. You could wear heavier clothes and run the furnace less, or in the summer, wear lighter clothes and run the air conditioner less. You could install solar panels - and if your house is in a climate where solar panels are profoundly inefficient, again, you can move.
You could reasonably say it's too difficult for you to move. You prioritize other needs over reducing your own consumption. And that's understandable. That's fair. That's reasonable. I'm not criticizing you for making that choice.
However. If your house burned down or a hurricane took it out, you would have to move. You wouldn't have a choice. And you and your family would, most likely, rise to that challenge and find another home. It would not be impossible for you to move. It would simply be extremely difficult.
And that shows your agency. It's not impossible for you to reduce your consumption. It's simply difficult. I don't know your full situation, it may very well be extremely difficult, and I won't judge you for living where you are and sourcing energy from fossil fuels and so on.
But you have agency over your own life. And you have responsibility for your own actions.
(And please stop sharing that "100 companies are responsible for..." meme. If you do nothing else to limit your impact on the climate, stop sharing that meme. It misinterprets the original study so badly that it can't be called anything else but a lie.)
That factoid is vastly misinterpreted. In particular, the term "responsible for" does not mean "emitted".
The study it's referencing studied only fossil fuel producers. And it credited all emissions from anyone who burned fuel from that producer to that producer. So if I buy a tank of gas from Chevron and burn it, my emissions are credited to Chevron for purposes of that study.
The study is not saying that 100 companies emit 71% of global emissions. It's saying that 100 companies produce 71% of the fossil fuels used globally.
Why not vote and protest and consume less?
A whole lot of people hate this notion because it essentially frames it as the consumer's fault, but at the end of the day it kind of is.
Absolutely. Producers and consumers have joint responsibility for getting us where we are. Climate action requires joint action by consumers and by (or, more likely, against) producers.
Because politicians follow the money. And they understand voters follow the money. So polls may show that legislation against fossil fuel companies is popular. But politicians look at all the gas consumers buy and ask themselves "what will voters do if we pass fossil fuel legislation and gas gets more expensive"? And then they decide not to pass fossil fuel legislation, because even if voters say they want fossil fuel legislation they know how the voters will respond if that legislation makes their consumption habits more expensive.
It's a lot easier to pass higher gas taxes in cities where 90% of residents take public transit to work than in cities where 5% do.
I was ranting in a different thread about the "discourses of delay" that corporate and right-wing propagandists use to delay climate action. And the fascinating thing is, the idea that only individual consumption matters (the BP carbon footprint ad campaign) and the idea that only the actions of corporations matter (a typical American activist attitude) are both industry propaganda. The former is meant to discourage political action. The latter is meant to discourage individual action. And by framing it as one against the other, propagandists discourage us from taking effective action on either.
We can do both. We have to do both.
Sure. The Google term you're looking for is called "discourses of delay".
Tldr: The propagandists recognize the global consensus, that climate change is real and must be addressed, is too strong to attack directly. Instead, they work to discredit potential solutions and discourage people from acting. The hope is to delay action on climate change until fossil fuel companies run out of oil to sell.
The four ways corporate propaganda encourages climate delay are by redirecting responsibility ("someone else should act on climate change before or instead of you"), pushing non-transformative solutions ("fossil fuels are part of the solution"), emphasizing the downsides ("requiring electric vehicles will hurt the poor worst"), and promoting doomerism ("climate change is inevitable so we may as well accept it instead of trying to fight it").
And here's the thing. We need both individual and collective action to mitigate climate change.
Arguing that only individual action can stop climate change is delayist propaganda used to discourage climate action.
Arguing that only collective action can stop climate change and individual action is useless is also delayist propaganda used to discourage climate action.
The propaganda takes an extreme position on both sides and encourages people to fight with another instead of unifying and acting - much like how foreign propagandists in the United States take aggressive, controversial positions on the far left and far right to worsen dissent and discourage unity.
European scientists last month catalogued what they call the “Four Discourses of Climate Delay”—arguments that facilitate continued inaction.
1 Redirecting Responsibility
U.S. politicians blaming India and China, Irish farmers blaming motorists, organizations blaming individuals—these common techniques evade responsibility and delay action.
“Policy statements can become discourses of delay if they purposefully evade responsibility for mitigating climate change,” the scientists say.
The scientists label as “individualism” the claim that individuals should take responsibility through personal action. I asked if it weren’t also a discourse of delay when activists insist that individual climate action is pointless, that only systemic action can address the problem.
That too is a discourse of delay, replied Giulio Mattioli, a professor of transport at Dortmund University. The team considered including it under the label “structuralism,” but decided it’s not common enough to include.
(Depends on where you are. I'd argue that's very, very common among high consumption American activists.)
A fascinating study about how much people have internalized these discourses of delay is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378024000797#:~:text=Consisting of four overarching narratives,with its own emotional resonance)%2C
Yes, Actually, Individual Responsibility Is Essential to Solving the Climate Crisis
>A fixation on system change alone opens the door to a kind of cynical self-absolution that divorces personal commitment from political belief. This is its own kind of false consciousness, one that threatens to create a cheapened climate politics incommensurate with this urgent moment.
[...]
>Because here’s the thing: When you choose to eat less meat or take the bus instead of driving or have fewer children, you are making a statement that your actions matter, that it’s not too late to avert climate catastrophe, that you have power. To take a measure of personal responsibility for climate change doesn’t have to distract from your political activism—if anything, it amplifies it.
My 10-point plan for creating an eco-socialist educational system
How do you expect to change those few dozen companies?
Especially if the majority of us really wouldn't be able to survive without them?
We're actually to the point where wanting people to consume fewer fossil fuels makes me a fossil fuel shill.
Wow.
The absolute state of rhetoric today.
Two recent books, “The Quickening” and “The Parenthood Dilemma,” consider the ethics of procreation in the age of man-made climate change.
Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis? | in The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos, ecologist Mark Easter looks at how food creates emissions and how we can do better
Curbing the carbon footprint of what we eat won’t require an agricultural revolution. It's already happening in farms and ranches across the country.
The most impactful climate actions you can take | The number one question about climate change that I’m asked nearly every day is, “What can I do?”
Out-of-the-box climate solutions, global temperature hits record high, and the most impactful climate actions you can take
>With every solution, and even in the title of this newsletter itself, I emphasize the number one thing individuals can do that most of us are still not doing: talk about it! Use your voice to explain why climate change matters and to advocate for climate action.
Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse | Hot baths at home "are a textbook example of an unsustainable lifestyle based on fossil fuels." Can bathhouses do better?
Throughout history, people have bathed in public rather than in private. Should we bring back the public bathhouse for the sake of sustainability?
