Thank a conservative. They have fought very hard to stop normal people from fighting climate change.
At this point, if you aren’t fighting conservatism, you aren’t fighting climate change. Conservatives will kill everyone on the planet if we do not aggressively stop them.
And they like to play it as if its over the top but its really fighting fascism. Conservatives 50 years ago are different from the nutters now who want dictatorial powers.
They’re not really that different. Nationalists, racists, homophobes, misogynists, xenophobes, anti-semites… It’s the same people. Conservatives. They have always been trash. They just had better PR for a while.
They are further along their trajectory now. They were always heading this direction, that much should have been obvious to a lot of people all along. I believe it was, but that the endless propaganda of the US media machine kept most of its population from realizing it. There are all sorts of (arguably) respectable political issues conservatives of the past focussed their words on, while their actions spoke different.
Some of them might even have believed they wanted ‘small government’ or ‘fiscal responsibility’. But their actions were clear in intent, from racial segregation, to the Red Scare, to suppressing social movements, to implementing a politic of austerity. I only fail to mention war because their liberal ‘opposition’ carries roughly equal blame for the US war machine.
The people today may be different in body, action, word, but this is a continuation of a long political project that ended up in facism.
oh there is definitely a trajectory. Pre/post nixon, reagan, and now trump it just gets worse and worse. At one time though they did have a level of reasonableness and could effectively work with others and share power
At this point I think we just need to face the fact that we’re going to have to darken the skies with particulates in order to combat global warming.
There’s just no way we’re ever going to get corporations to stop killing us with greenhouse gasses.
It’s not out of the question that we’ll see that as a means of managing overshoot. It’s a very high-risk approach: it means killing everything in the oceans with calcium-based hard body parts, and it means maintaining technical infrastructure for longer than civilizations last, which humans don’t have a track record of doing.
It also creates the possibility of industries lobbying to turn a temporary solution into a permanent one.
“No need to do anything about the environment anymore, we can just keep darkening the skies”. Like that Futurama episode.
I don’t see how we can avoid it. Did you see the paper the other day about how new evidence shows that were headed towards a 10⁰ C rise?
Can you point me to that paper? Google only turns up results stating that if we burned all fossil fuels on the planet we’d hit 10°C
Sure.
Might want to make yourself a stiff drink before you read this one.
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/Documents/PipelinePaper.2023.07.05.pdf
Saw it when it came out. It’s well outside the consensus from people who study the topic.
Better to go to our extinction with at least a shred of decency than to last a bit longer and mess things up even more like that.
I think sciencing our way out of the mess our grandparents made for us is fair play.
They don’t know about my tendie stash in the freezer 😏
And on top of this we have Russia attacking grain supplies at Ukrainian ports, which will no doubt exacerbate the problem. Anybody have any good Soylent Green recipes?