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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
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This climate denialism has been going on much longer than that. For as long as there's been profit in damaging the environment, there's denialism about that damage. In many ways our whole capitalistic western culture is and has always been environmental denialism ... it's the cultural air we've been breathing since we were all born.
And yes ... completely agree with you ... our, and our parents' generation are going to age like fine milk ... we're going to look toddlers that had technology and the ability to great things right in our hands but instead shat our pants and broke everything we touched because of stupidity we had not yet grown out of, because a better parent should not have given us this technology yet until we'd grown up more.
My personal take on this is that all the generations of modernity will be lumped together in this way as the period in which humanity's reach truly exceeded its grasp. Modern warfare, Fascism, Nuclear weapons, modern capitalism, the internet and mass-(dis-)information. Collectively, we'll look pretty foolish and dumb when looking back, like a people that didn't know how to actually think about what we were doing collectively.
It'll also be interesting to think about our cultural thinking process struggled to keep up with our technological progress. The comical image I have in my mind is a toddler quickly going from grabbing a swallowable piece of Lego, to a knife, to an electric saw to a lightsaber before the babysitter realises that they really need to intervene. And so that toddler will grow up without a left foot always wondering how in the hell the world let them have a lightsaber as a 2 year old.
To a capitalist, a forest has no value until it’s cut down.
A lake in a remote location provides pristine, clean water to a local village, for free. Someone buys the lake, builds fences around it, begins packing the water in bottles and selling them. Thanks to this valiant entrepreneur, the GDP has grown.
Holy damn, stealing this.
Direct climate change has been a past couple of decades issue, but damaging nature for profit has existed for as long as we have had the tools to do so.