Beardy Guy Musings

To summarize:

1. Companies have not actually reduced emissions.
2. Companies pretend to reduce emissions by purchasing carbon offsets.
3. Carbon offsets are shown to not be effective in actually reducing emissions.
4. 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.

Capitalism cannot fix the climate emergency.

Stalled efforts to expand companies' use of carbon credits to offset greenhouse-gas emissions are raising the prospect that some will backtrack or abandon targets…

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.

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.