Wanted: honesty. Love love love that Greta Thunberg is in this interview and is a fan of The Juice Media:
… dunno if you got a chance to hear the interview.
Neal Stephenson’s latest book (which dropped this week) is about climate change and he spoke about his source materials:
I saw and enjoyed Greta’s interview, but I had not seen the Neal Stephenson video. I started reading the book yesterday… pretty interesting so far.
Miami, Florida, setting the New Normal baseline for capitalism-driven, hyperdeveloped coastline in our Climate Change present.
Makes no sense.
Then again, development of Las Vegas as a frolicsome live-work-play area doesn’t make much sense to me either.
Makes as much sense as placing megacities in parched deserts and then draining whole watersheds to feed them. None of this is sustainable, and none will end well. What is surprising is how optimistic the most aggressive projections turned out to be. 2050 will be here by the end of the decade!
1985.
If ever anyone needed proof that the oil companies of the world have a stranglehold on national governments, I think this is pretty much Exhibit A.
R. Crumb’s “Short History of America” (sorry for poor image quality, it’s hard to find a large reso of this), 1992:
Available for purchase here fwiw:
https://www.crumbproducts.com/-15-Panel-Short-History-of-America-Giclee_p_389.html
Was always working for this solution, depicted by Crumb here. In many ways, getting to grips with “the ecotopian solution” (better image quality than below) has occupied my working and private lives for decades.
Oh well.
I just will have to keep on keeping on, I suppose, because we ain’t there yet.
… and won’t [at least some of these] folks be surprised!
Yeah… moving somewhere to avoid stuff always reminds me of that British couple who left the UK after Reagan was elected, because now WW III seemed only a matter of when, not if. So they moved somewhere very, very remote. The Falkland Islands.
A better segue into sad trombone may exist
Not all deaths are created equal. In February 2020, the world began to panic about the novel coronavirus, which killed 2714 people that month. This made the news. In the same month, around 800,000 people died from the effects of air pollution. That didn’t. Novelty counts for a lot. At the start of the pandemic, it was considered unseemly to make comparisons like these. But comparing the value of human lives is one thing the machine of modern civilisation does relentlessly, almost invariably to prioritise and absolve the rich – when, for example, the global supply of Covid vaccines is apportioned primarily to the highest-income countries, or when the cost of natural disasters in Bangladesh is measured against the impact of sea-level rise on Miami Beach real estate, or when Joe Biden’s onetime economic adviser Lawrence Summers proposed that Africa, as a whole, was ‘vastly underpolluted’, and suggested that ‘the economic logic behind dumping a whole load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable.’
In its first year, the pandemic did damage according to the opposite logic, with the world’s wealthiest countries the worst hit. When people in those countries tried to diminish the threat of the virus by comparing it to the flu, the disease made a joke of them. But air pollution kills more than ten times as many as the flu every single year, and we hear even less about it. In 2017, a Lancet study put the figure at almost seven million a year, about two-thirds from outside air pollution and one-third from indoor, household pollution. More recent estimates run higher, with as many as 8.7 million deaths every year attributable just to the outdoor particulate matter produced from burning fossil fuels. Add on indoor pollution, and you get an annual toll of more than ten million. That’s more than four times the official worldwide death toll from Covid last year. It’s about twenty times as many as the current annual deaths from war, murder and terrorism combined. Put another way, air pollution kills twenty thousand on an average day, more than have died in the aftermath of all the meltdowns in the history of nuclear power: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima and all the others put together. If the pandemic so terrified us that billions of us retreated into panicked cocoons for months, what can explain or justify our blindness and indifference towards the ten million lives ended each year by the repeated inhalation of smog? […]
No climate change. But certainly about the environment.
Native bilbies fitted with poisonous implants to combat feral cats
Furthermore, cats that roam around the block are susceptible to injuries from fights or terrible illnesses such as sporotrichosis.
Now that is effective control… though it can’t be doing good things to the environment either…
