Link Blog
- Oil is not the problem - the exponential monetary system is
- We need SYSTEMIC, not piecemeal, solutions to climate (eg EVS)
- Reduced oil availability will cause a financial/economic cascade
- The Maximum Power Principle applies to our energy behavior/choices
- Solving for: a) climate, b) equity and c) growth have different solutions
- Climate change is an emergent cultural phenomenon - not the fault of fossil fuel companies
- Oil is the master resource and will leave us before we leave it. The UK is unlikely to ‘stop oil’
- Democracies will never vote for austerity
- We are in a new ‘biophysical world. Old rules and expectations no longer apply
- Currently there is no “choice” to slow our metabolism. (But there are other choices)
As climate debates remain polarized and politicized, Huckabee’s guide is part of a small but determined contingency of climate disinformation materials marketed to children and families…
This sort of deliberate disinformation is largely to blame for the public’s lack of science literacy, particularly in regards to climate science. I’m both disgusted and fascinated by the way that conservative Christian politicians in the US have manipulated their base. But also, how that base now seems to have more control.
Mike Huckabee Is Now Peddling Climate Misinformation to Children – Mother Jones
To understand this moment, we have to recognise that there is an existential struggle on both sides. While environmental scientists and activists fight for the very survival of the habitable planet, the fossil fuel, meat and internal combustion industries are fighting for their economic survival. Either they are regulated out of existence or human society across much of the world will fail. We cannot all win: either these industries survive or we do.
Seven states and 30 Native American tribes lying in the Colorado River Basin prepare to make hard choices as water levels plummet due to a 23-year drought.
I fail to understand how using a desert for agriculture, golf courses and large cities makes any sense. Even less so as intensifying climate change is now making it worse. And it will only get worse.
Nate Hagens discusses energy, specifics oil as the foundation of the modern economic system.
There are ecological and energetic laws that apply to all life, including humans and our economies. By accessing a huge surplus of dense carbon energy in the form of fossil sunlight, we’ve effectively turbo-boosted our economies, populations, and material wealth - but what happens if this fossil abundance were to go away? What are the systemic implications of an economy tethered to growth, tethered to carbon?
He ends the video with “10 Systemic Inferences” which I would simplify as: The primary problem is global capitalism.
It’s interesting and insightful to view the planet as an organism in which increasingly complex human social organization (dominated currently by capitalism) based on intensely concentrated fossil fuel energy has resulted in a machinery that is, by it’s own logic, not capable of a solution.
10 Systemic Inferences
Just Stop Oil !? Part 2 - Oil is the Economy | Frankly #39 - YouTube
Nate Hagens, the director of the Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future, ran the numbers: “One barrel of oil has the same amount of energy of up to 25,000 hours of hard human labor, which is 12.5 years of work. At $20 per hour, this is $500,000 of labor per barrel.” A barrel of oil costs about seventy dollars at this week’s market price.
What do our lives and our world look like without fossil fuels? For example, imagine the full process and energy that goes into the flour used in a simple loaf of bread.
To Save the Planet, Should We Really Be Moving Slower? | The New Yorker
Early days of the climate emergency:
Northern India has been experiencing severe rains which have caused deadly flash floods and landslides, killing at least 22 people. On Sunday, Delhi had its wettest day in more than four decades…
In the US, intense rain and flash flooding left at least one person dead in southeastern New York.
While heavy rainfall events will always happen, scientists say that climate change means they are becoming more severe.
Japan: Floods and mudslides kill six as scientists warn extreme rainfall events will get worse | CNN
Climate disasters, fueled by large-scale, human-driven changes in the global climate, are becoming more frequent. In the past few weeks in Vermont, we’ve had wildfire smoke from Canada forcing people to stay inside, a heat wave, and now this flooding. And Vermont is a place that is supposedly safer for climate refugees to go. But that’s the thing about a global climate crisis: it’s going to affect absolutely everyone absolutely everywhere.
This is just the very beginning, the first days of the long climate emergency that won’t have an end in our lifetimes.
…when I look at Threads what I see is an influencer-infested, brand-driven, algorithmically-jammed-up crapfest. A lot like, well, modern Instagram…
My point is that Threads and Mastodon are already really different culturally. … At the end of the day, I’m a Mastodon partisan. But I don’t love its collective tendency toward self-important dogmatism.
I think this is the most thoughtful take on Mastodon and Threads I’ve read yet. So much better than the reactive hot takes flying around.
Coyote Cartography - You’re So Vain, You Probably Think This App Is About You: On Meta and Mastodon
This week unprecedented temperatures driven by climate change shattered heat records around the world. “We can’t stop global warming at this point. All we can do is try to stop it short of the place where it cuts civilizations off at the knees.”
“This is the last of these moments we’re going to have when the world is summoned to action by events and when there’s still time to make at least some difference in the question of how hot it ultimately gets.”
Bill McKibben: Climate Crisis Needs Urgent Action as Earth Records Hottest Temps Ever - YouTube
June 2023 may be remembered as the start of a big change in the climate system, with many key global indicators flashing red warning lights amid signs that some systems are tipping toward a new state from which they may not recover.
“These extraordinary extremes could be an early warning of tipping points towards different weather or sea ice or fire regimes… We call it ‘flickering’ when a complex system starts to briefly sample a new regime before tipping into it. Let’s hope I’m wrong on that.”
June extremes suggest parts of climate system are reaching tipping points | Ars Technica
What’s difficult about living through history is you often don’t know the magnitude of it all until it’s over. But at this rate, things being “over” might mean us not being around to look back at it at all.
In this particular case of living through history, Earth just logged the hottest global temperature ever recorded three days in a row—and perhaps the hottest it’s been in some 125,000 years. The earliest known human use of symbols dates to around the same time.
You Just Lived Through the Three Hottest Days on Earth—And More Is Coming | The New Republic
A question for the people who have children and who say that they love their children, how is it that you spend so much of your time talking and being frustrated about subjects like technology, and so little time expressing concern and frustration about the fact that our world is burning and we’re doing nothing to stop it?
A growing number of people believe that humanity is doomed because of climate change, while some are even full-blown preparing for a world post-collapse. Like Ben Green, who calls himself a “happy doomer”. Join me as I visit the old army barracks he calls home, to figure out if he’s right to be preparing for such an eventuality.
A brief but good start to a much larger conversation that should be front and center everyday. Ignoring the crisis or pretending it will be magically solved is not an answer.
Climate scientist Johan Rockström explains the urgency of operating within “planetary boundaries“ - the planetary life-support systems essential for maintaining human life on Earth. By following the recommendations of science, Rockström believes we can avert an ecological and climate collapse and create a healthier, more prosperous future. But we have to act decisively now - or we will completely fail.
A True Paradise: AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT - Johan Rockström - YouTube
We are heading towards 3 to 4°C of warming across this century, an absolute climate catastrophe… And all we are doing so far is giving rhetoric and optimism and greenwash. … It is a choice to fail, and it’s a choice to succeed. If we sit back and wait for the great and good to deliver this change, then we will fail. It comes down to all of us to play our role as best as we can… Hope arises from civility society.
Essential viewing.
A True Paradise: WHERE WE ARE HEADING - Kevin Anderson - YouTube
No dog walk today. The upside: The more degraded our lives get today the more seriously we’ll take the problem. We should stop pretending that the climate emergencey is a far off future problem. It’s here today.
First, the record Canadian wildfire season exposed residents of the biggest cities in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic to hazardous air quality. Now low-level smoke is taking aim at the Midwest and Ohio Valley.
Canada wildfires break records and darken skies in the Midwest
Half of the world’s 10,000-odd bird species are in decline. One in eight faces the threat of extinction. This problem has been worsening for decades, which means scientists have been able to estimate roughly how many fewer birds are around today than, say, half a century ago. The numbers are startling.
Around the world, rainforests are becoming savanna or farmland, savanna is drying out and turning into desert, and icy tundra is thawing. Indeed, scientific studies have now recorded “regime shifts” like these in more than 20 different types of ecosystem where tipping points have been passed. Around the world, more than 20% of ecosystems are in danger of shifting or collapsing into something different.
Ecological doom-loops: Why ecosystem collapses may occur much sooner than expected
On the injustice of flying:
Just one flight can emit as much CO2 equivalent emissions as many people do in a year. While one return flight from Paris to New York accounts for a climate impact equivalent to 3.2 tonnes of CO2, an average person in Uganda emits just 1.1 tonnes greenhouse gasses.
If the wealthiest 10% continue living as they have they should own up to the their crime against the future as well as their contribution to climate injustice today. Don’t just point fingers at the top 1%. Own your contribution to the problem.
A record-breaking heat wave is entering its third week in Texas, as temperatures reach triple digits in the broader US south and tens of thousands of people in affected states are without power and lack air conditioning. … Texas cities have reached an unprecedented heat index – which combines temperature and humidity. Corpus Christi has hit 125F (51C), while Rio Grande Village notched 118F (47C) and Del Rio marked 115F (46C).
But hey, let’s keep flying, driving, consuming and pretending there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re special and exempt from any responsibilty.