So, really it is up to us to force them to do what’s right…
If we can get the latter, maybe we can do the former later on!
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I think it’s why politics lurched to the Right so far and so fast; politicians are scared and they fell for the power trip solution of authoritarianism.
How far apart are capitalism and fascism really?
What needs to change is hope.
Things are grim, for sure. All over.
But hope is the most powerful thought we have. Everybody has it.
What a concept - it took us down from the trees and across the world, and even to the moon.
Fuck sitting down and waiting for the end.
Hope for better and fucking DO SOMETHING to make the world better, because people will join in. That’s what humanity does.
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Oh for sure. Centrist Democrats, especially, always waffle on this stuff. They tend to be, “Ok, we agree this is a problem, but we can’t wreck the economy over it,” and I want to grab them by the ears and scream at them.
Yeah too many in the US still think those things are luxuries instead of rights.
Too many people view every transaction and negotiation as a zero sum game. It’s not enough that I win, you have to lose. Trump especially views everything this way.
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Imagine thinking the only option is for billions of people to die, because the ideology of short-term profit driven capitalism is somehow that impossible to question. 
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wow! everything you just said! 
YES!
being active in the coral reef resoration efforts here at home, limiting travel and even driving less, we are trying to make our hyperlocal efforts grow - and have reached many like-minded Floridians (go figure).
the effect of a genuine grassroots effort that catches some hold and ignites like passion in others is a giant first step. a first step that must be taken in order to challenge and ultimately change the opinions of those fence-straddling do-nothings to effect a change of consciousness to get on board to save the goddamn planet and you and me*!
(*let me edit to add - everyone else, too)
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I wish people would stop saying “the planet” or “the world” or even life! Because YES the planet will be just fine. THRIVE even!! Even cockroaches – fine – all good for life. It is only comfortably supporting HUMAN life that we are fucking with. It’s our ability to live in peace and comfort while feeding, clothing and sheltering 7 billion of us that is in jeopardy. Nature has a beautiful friend karma that will gladly fuck with us and just us. We are only hurting ourselves.
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I dunno. We’re doing a bang up job at eliminating several species already.
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That’s so Pratchett!
I often think about how Neil Gaiman talks about how angry Terry was about so many things, but especially this kind of thing… I wish he were here, still writing Discworld books.
How awful a way to live…
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chicxulub didn’t fill the oceans with plastic, or seed the ground with forever chemicals.
i do get that life on earth seems resilient, but: we’re only able to notice because we’re here. when we look around elsewhere, we have yet to find any other examples. that indicates a level of fragility we should treat with great respect and care.
eta:
what we are destroying right now is unique. never to occur again. in my view, that should matter deeply.
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We know, in general and sometimes specifically, the people who are holding us back and preventing change. We know the reasons they’re doing it, whether it’s a religious death cult, denialism, or just plain greed and shortsightedness. Solutions exist but those in power are preventing us from implementing them. So how do we move forward? How can we progress and survive without doing something about the rich, powerful or simply numerous people who would rather die than acknowledge or correct the Earth’s environmental problems?
I don’t think we should just give up, but I don’t see any way out of this that doesn’t involve violence. Nobody wants to talk about it, but not all of these people can be voted out because not all of them were elected, and those that were elected have rigged the system to ensure they stay in place as persistently as possible. Unless there’s a magical button we can press that will suddenly make a whole bunch of powerful humans and their supporters cease to be assholes, they’re going to very deliberately remain an obstacle that is immune to reason, evidence and argument. I want to hear from everyone preaching rah-rah optimism: How. Do. We. Deal. With. Them? Because until we address that elephant in the room, we’re going nowhere.
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It’s going to be tough. Big oil and gas, just like big tobacco once did, have infected every branch of our government, our public and private education systems, our nightly entertainment, our water, our food, and the list goes on. By the time many more scientists and everyone else understand our family and friends are infected, we’re screwed.
Not only that, but apparently our historical pumping of water from the ground, coupled with melting ice caps, have knocked our earth off its axis, and, as a result, our planet is now wobbling!
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It’s not just American politics - the US only has something like 4% of the world’s population (and consumes something like 20% of the energy, but that’s a whole other issue). The problem of ‘conservatism’ and creeping fascism is worldwide. The average people in so many countries don’t see that a tough leader isn’t going to keep their lifestyle going and hold back the flood of climate-induced change overtaking all nations. Britain is developing a local vinyard and wine industry, France and Italy have failed grape harvests in so many regions that their winemaking industries are collapsing and much of the Southern US is baking under heat levels that have never been experinced while rivers necessary for irrigation are drying up.
I’m trying to do my little bit by using public transit (only put 1,100km on my car last year) and minimizing electronics and other similar purchases. I see my province on fire every year recently and don’t see any hope except to loudly call out the various ‘deniers’ and promote voting against the Capitalist conservatism anywhere and everywhere.
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45 million years ago, Antarctica was covered in forests, with all the diversity of plant and animal life that implies. But it was drifting further south, and eventually a circumpolar current formed and it froze over. Did life find a way? Well sure, some of it did, various prokaryotes and protists and mosses and lichens.
But none of the larger plants survived, and for animals there is apparently a single genus of entognathous bug they think is descended from the original inhabitants. The rest is gone, and of course any lineage that did not exist on luckier continents is permanently so. And while a handful of new insects and shore animals have moved in, Antarctica remains no place for most of them to this day. Even the cockroaches.
Just to put how resilient life is in perspective. No, I don’t think we have it in us to annihilate it entirely…and no, that doesn’t mean that nothing at risk except our one species.
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It always struck me that those words came from a former 5-star general.
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I have family and friends in the U.S. military.
They are people just like all other people are people.
I bet ol’ Dwight D saw some shit though.
Nowadays he’d have been regarded as an unacceptably left-wing dude with too much compassion and inclusion-makin’ and foresight:
On the domestic front, Eisenhower governed as a moderate conservative who continued New Deal agencies and expanded Social Security. He covertly opposed Joseph McCarthy and contributed to the end of McCarthyism by openly invoking executive privilege. He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent Army troops to enforce federal court orders which integrated schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. His administration undertook the development and construction of the Interstate Highway System, which remains the largest construction of roadways in American history. In 1957, following the Soviet launch of Sputnik, Eisenhower led the American response which included the creation of NASA and the establishment of a stronger, science-based education via the National Defense Education Act. Following the establishment of NASA, the Soviet Union began to reinforce their own space program, escalating the Space Race. His two terms saw unprecedented economic prosperity except for a minor recession in 1958. In his farewell address to the nation, he expressed his concerns about the dangers of massive military spending, particularly deficit spending and government contracts to private military manufacturers, which he dubbed “the military–industrial complex”. Historical evaluations of his presidency place him among the upper tier of American presidents.
ETA: clarifier
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Agreed.
As an example of why the combination of his words and profession were so striking to me:
I’ve worked in power generation, and the more one’s paycheque depends on oil and gas, the less one believes in climate change. There’s a strong drive to believe that the things we work at are meaningful and helpful.
I’ve not served in the military, but I imagine I’d feel inclined to err on the side of believing that what I was doing was essential and good and worthy of the funding.
To my eyes, Eisenhower’s words are a strong departure from that very human tendency, and show an incredible degree of perspective and maturity - the kind of maturity it’s easy to miss in an entire lifetime.
Indeed. That kind of perspective doesn’t Just Happen.
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… billions of people dying (at once) would be very bad for business
sounds like a major contraction in the economy
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And if there were 50% unemployment and all the remaining workers had to take subsistence wages, companies sure would have a tough time finding customers. But that’s next quarter’s problem.
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I hadn’t heard of the earlier study. It’s good to see this new study getting huge coverage across a range of media. It’ll be hard to miss, except of course by the people who have a financial incentive to ignore it. (Subsequent thought: Maybe I couldn’t find references to the earlier study because my search engine is biased toward more recent results, so in the search results the new study is pushing out out the earlier study.)
Provided they’re maintained, yes. Not sure if it’s still prevalent, but an old greenwashing strategy in countries with carbon credit schemes was to buy some land, plant trees on it choosing a species that wasn’t really suited for the climate, claim the carbon credits, then make no effort to sustain the trees. A year later, all the trees are dead, so the company doesn’t need to buy new land. They just plant new trees on the same block of land, and claim the carbon credits for those. Rinse and repeat. (I see what I accidentally did there.)
So, agree with what you’re saying. Just minor quibbling on the phrasing. The slogan shouldn’t be “plant trees”, but rather “return cleared land to mature forest.”
Had not heard of that one. Cool - I’m learning lots of new stuff today.
One important feature of this one is that the axis has always wobbled and always will, and the change in movement caused by climate change is small. Though it’s pretty impressive that things like melting glaciers have a detectable effect on the axis. If you’re doing something that needs extreme accuracy, like calibrating the GPS satellite system, you do need to know about the change in the wobble, but it seems to be too small to make things worse for the climate. Which is some good news given that so many other factors are making the climate worse.
What I’m trying to say here with absolutely no success at being succinct is: If you’ve only got time to read about the most important issues affecting climate change, the axis wobble seems to be a safe one to ignore. Anyway, here’s a couple of the better links I found.
OK. I won’t repeat the image with the Dwight quote, but just wanted to say: That’s a great quote. If a politician today said something like that I’d be thinking: “'Struth! That politician has a good scriptwriter.” But given Dwight’s background, I can easily believe he wrote it himself.
Edited to fix duplicated link.
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