Climate Emergency
- Companies have not actually reduced emissions.
- Companies pretend to reduce emissions by purchasing carbon offsets.
- Carbon offsets are shown to not be effective in actually reducing emissions.
- Companies say, well, we won’t even pretend anymore and continue making no effort to reduce emissions and also stop purchasing the offsets that weren’t actually working.
A reminder: Do not assume that the technology and building methods of the Global North are “better” or the ideal.
Thesolarpunkgardener on Tumblr
Another video from the original creator on TikTok.
To summarize:
Capitalism cannot fix the climate emergency.
Reuters reports that there were more than 47,000 heat caused deaths in Europe in 2023. It was 60,000 in 2022. Deaths would have been significantly higher but were mitigated by a variety of adaptive measures put in place over the past 20 years.
Last year was the world’s hottest on record. As climate change continues to increase temperatures, Europeans live in the world’s fastest-warming continent, facing growing health risks stemming from intense heat.
We’re deliberately burning down our world. Insanity.
Greek officials advise staying in with windows shut due to fires near Athens | Athens | The Guardian
Greek authorities have warned people to stay indoors with their “windows closed” as more than 400 firefighters battled to contain blazes on the outskirts of Athens that were forcing the evacuation of entire communities, including at the historic site of Marathon.
Unprecedented temperatures – June and July were the hottest on record – after the warmest winter ever have turned Greece’s terrain into a tinderbox, environmentalists have said.
I recently discovered David Rogers of The Nice Marmot website via The Blogroll Club. In particular it was his post The price of Risk that I landed on. I emailed him about the post which led to his mentioning the climate and energy site Do the Math. I’ve added both sites to my blog roll and RSS. Good stuff.
Warning, a bit of Sunday morning ramble ahead but it sort of goes somewhere. It begins with Robert Birming’s post Lost in the Everyday. He writes:
One of the houses I visited at work today had an absolutely stunning view of the sea. I could have easily stayed there all day.
When I mentioned how amazing the location was, the owner of the house replied, “Yeah, but you don’t think about it after a while.”
And concludes:
A tiny bit of awareness is all it takes to start observing and appreciating our surroundings. Let’s remind ourselves of the beauty of the mundane.
It reminds me of a few other recent blog posts like this on from JC Probably that have a similar theme of being in a daily life rut of sorts, of doing the same routine day after day.
And, well, it’s curious because it’s something that can be thought of in so many ways. It can be viewed as a good thing or a bad. The routine might seem boring. The routine can lead to viewing life as mundane. But isn’t this just the nature of life, of living? For most animals this isn’t a problem. But we humans, more specifically, we modern humans, have created lives rooted in increasingly complex and overlapping cultures. Especially those of us in the “Global North” who have cultures that run on regimented, scheduled industrial capitalism, we seem to forget that we are living in an ongoing experiment. Human civilizations are experiments. We’re making it all up as we go along.
The nuclear family? An experiment. Suburbia? Experiment. Industrial agriculture? Experiment. Cities densely packed with millions of people? Experiment. Mass media, the internet? Experiments. The whole of “modern” civilization is just a constantly evolving experiment of social organization and technology and the rate of change seems to increase year by year.
I’ve only ever lived in the US. My life experience, though somewhat out of the norm, is still rooted in this time and place. But it seems to me that many of the social, ecological and psycological problems of the Global North find their roots in this grand experiment. We’ve built a machine we don’t know how to control. This is to say nothing of the myriad global crises that this uncontrolled machine is also causing as it rumbles along.
When I look around I see people who no longer know how to just be. We swing wildly from being bored to being over-stimulated. When we have moments of calm, of peace, we become unsettled or agitated. We simultaneously crave and fear disruption to the mundane. There seems to be this vague, dream-like idyllic life that many long for, it’s always out there, on the edge, not quite visible or definable. We’ve seen glimpses of it in a movie or on a curated social media feed.
What is it we’re searching for?
Bringing this back around to the initial inspiration for this post, variations of a theme of people posting about feeling stuck in a rut or routine, of daily life experiences being mundane, the contradictions are fascinating. Many are living in the constant hurry of trying to “get ahead”. In the context of the regimentation of 9 to 5 industrial capitalism we are left exhausted but, also, bored. We alternate from describing it as the American Dream to the pursuit of happiness to the “rat race” which would indicate that we are indeed confused about the point of our lives.
Lost in our individual pursuits of atomized happiness and our almost desperate attempts to “succeed”, is that we are ignoring the very challenges that could give our lives renewed purpose. The most obvious, most pressing of these is our climate emergency which, taken alone, is a monumental task but also an opportunity.
The opportunity is that the humans of the Global North will have to make a sharp turn from what they have come to assume to be normal human lives. Our experiment with global, extractive industrial capitalism needs to come to a close and with it our way of life will need to be deeply transformed. Such a transformation will be the work of many generations. Every human alive today and most especially those of the Global North, have much to do to change course. There’s nothing boring or mundane about what lies in front of us.
Thirty years ago I chose to not have kids for these reasons. I’m not sure why governments would want to reverse this trend.
Birthrates are plummeting world wide. Can governments turn the tide? | The Guardian
“Sophia and her partner have been thinking about having children for about five years. They are concerned about humanity’s impact on biodiversity loss and climate change and worried about what the future holds.
“Our conversation has two parts,” says Sophia. “One is: what’s the contribution of a child to the global climate crisis? The second one is about what would their life be like.”
What kind of democracy is this?
A 63-year-old climate activist and professional cellist faces up to seven years in prison after being arrested on Thursday while performing a Bach solo outside the headquarters of one of the world’s largest fossil fuel financier Citibank in downtown New York…
…arrested for criminal contempt in the public park at the bank’s global headquarters as the crackdown against nonviolent climate protesters escalates.
More of this should be done in the US:
Aline Sousa: The unsung heroes putting climate solutions into practice | TED Talk
The improper handling of waste is the third largest source of methane emissions in the world, says Aline Sousa, but waste pickers like her help reduce this environmental impact. She dives into the monumental effort of the often-overlooked people making sure recyclables, compostables and trash end up in the right places — and calls for better recognition of these key players on the frontline of fighting climate change.
Humans of the future will ask why we refused to act and we will rightly be condemned for our failure.
Antarctic temperatures rise 10C above average in near record heatwave | The Guardian
Ground temperatures across great swathes of the ice sheets of Antarctica have soared an average of 10C above normal over the past month, in what has been described as a near record heatwave…
The globe has experienced 12 months of record warmth, with temperatures consistently exceeding the 1.5C rise above preindustrial levels that has been touted as the limit to avoiding the worst of climate breakdown.
Pete Brown shared a post on his blog Exploding Comma, “Individual choices may not change the world, but they still matter” and I’d sent a fairly long reply, longer than his original post (😂), so I’m sharing it here as a proper post. A topic I’ve written about before and will again, I’m sure.
I can’t help but think that these folks who speak against or otherwise demean personal action don’t get basic concepts of math, collective effort and ethics. It’s not about the efforts of one person, it’s about understanding that we all add up to a collective whole. In the US, a nation with one of the worst records on climate, there are 330 million people most of whom make no effort. If the majority of those people made a real effort there would be measurable results.
What we do day-to-day matters. Our life choices matter. The flip side is that some say only systemic changes matter. That only government regulations and programs can drive change. I get, 100%, that those are important. But in the face of those actions being delayed and too little, it falls upon us to make the best choices today, voluntarily without being forced by an outside entity.
It’s convenient to put off action and claiming that we can do nothing. But imagine the emissions reduction if millions of people stopped taking flights for vacations every year. If millions stopped heating/cooling their homes to the maximum level of comfort. If millions stopped consumption of goods that were not needed. If millions switched to a vegetarian diet. If millions reduced driving to the bare minimum. We are in control of our daily lives and many of our choices are continuing the problem. No one forces us to make these choices. Our lives don’t end if we change our diet, cut our consumption, stop taking flights for vacation. WE are responsible.
Most seem not to grasp the magnitude of the problem. That this is the survival of humans and/or civilization that is on the line. As just one example, if we truly grasped what was at stake I think we’d see more of a shift in social media from the trivial pursuits that currently dominate to people discussing climate solutions and choices.
But the solution to our problem is a completely different life. The truth is that people don’t want to give up the way of life they know. The people of the Global North don’t want to give up comfort, consumption and the easy life based on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are the foundation of modern capitalist societies. The continued future of human civilization requires that we make a difficult transition to a very different life.
Another summer of uncontrollable wildfires, another year towards a run-away climate emergency.
Large-scale and intense wildfires carrying smoke across northern hemisphere | The Guardian
The northern hemisphere has had a large number of intense wildfires in the first half of summer, carrying vast amounts of smoke across Eurasia and North America…
Emissions from Russian wildfires in June and July were higher than for the preceding two years, and fires in the region of Amur Oblast led to the estimated release of 17.2 megatonnes of carbon for the two-month period, the highest in 22 years.
Earth just set its hottest days on record in thousands of years
“We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said.
The records, which exceeded the old milestone set last July, very likely stands as the hottest day in thousands of years, based on tree ring records, ice cores and other so-called paleoclimate data.
How Kamala Harris and Donald Trump compare on climate change » Yale Climate Connections
Harris has made clear throughout her career that she views climate change as a significant threat…
If elected president, Harris is “widely expected to try to protect the climate achievements of the Biden administration,” according to the New York Times.
In contrast, Trump has falsely called climate change a hoax
CrimethInc. : Ahead of Another Summer of Climate Disasters, Let’s Talk about Real Solutions
In cooperation with Freedom, we present a short text from Peter Gelderloos exploring why the strategies that mainstream environmental movements are currently employing to halt industrially-produced climate change are failing—and what we could be doing instead…
The mainstream climate movement begins from a premise that guarantees failure.
Not just failure. Catastrophe. And the more effective it is, the more harm it will cause.
Let’s explore why.
Yes, they knew. And most US law makers also knew but denied it. And not long after the public knew. You know who still isn’t acting? MOST OF THE AMERICAN PUBLIC.
We don’t get a pass. The 10% of the Global North, especially in the US, continue to live lifestyles of over-consumption, air travel, maximum heating/cooling comfort, oversized houses, oversized vehicles. TODAY. WE KNOW.
US oil company ran 1977 article predicting climate crisis could cause starvation | The Guardian
Marathon Petroleum predecessor warned of potential for ‘social and economic calamities’ in decades-old publication
The sooner the better.
When is the global population expected to peak? And how will we adapt? - Vox
The headline was clear: We are well past the days of worrying about having more people than the Earth can handle. The UN’s demographers now expect the number of people on the planet to peak at a bit under 10.3 billion in 2084.
That’s two years earlier than the UN was predicting peak population as recently as 2022, and considerably earlier than forecasts from just a few years before, when population wasn’t expected to peak until the 22nd century.
“The scope of the problem is vast.”
Even that is an understatement. We cannot be ready because this is now an existential crisis for civilization as we know it. It’s that simple.
The U.S. is nowhere near ready for climate change » Yale Climate Connections
The situation has now reached the point where the government can’t possibly make whole all those wiped out by a disaster, let alone buy out all of the properties that have flooded repeatedly or finance all the beach nourishment projects that could defend coastal property against sea level rise and stronger storms.
Brutal truth.
Listen to this conversation with Saul Williams about the historical and ongoing colonialism by the Global North of the Global South. It’s white supremacy in service of resource extraction, plain and simple.
“I think people just really have no idea what is coming, because we have no way of visualizing that through our own personal experiences, or that of the last 250 years,” said Randall Parkinson, a coastal geologist at Florida International University. “It’s not something where you go, ‘I know what that might look like because I’ve seen that.’ Because we haven’t.