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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:It's very funny that you compared it to voting for Republicans, because the whole "if you care so much about climate change why are you still doing X yourself?" is an argument commonly fielded by them in "gotcha" attempts. It's like when they say people who call for increased tax rates should start by voluntarily paying more taxes than they owe. It's an idiotic argument. how weird that all your solutions involve passing cost onto consumers. If western society is going to survive it has to get over this stupid belief that government isn't allowed to actually do anything. The coming ecological catastrophe means the idea of 'weak/small government' is just not going to work. People are going to have to be told how it's going to be because there really isn't any choice. It can't and shouldn't be done through the lense of capitalism with your dumb 'sin taxes'. This isn't about money, it's big boy adult stuff like 'survival'. If the west cannot get over this childish neoliberal phase then it, and maybe the entire planet, is doomed.
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Jun 11, 2023 13:20
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It's important to remember that "Carbon Footprint" was promoted by BP as a way of deflecting responsibility onto consumers.
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Jun 11, 2023 16:25
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:The issue of our values is ultimately a religious concept. The problem isn't necessarily "greed" either, although people can be greedy. Or even individual capitalists necessarily. But to get philosophical for a minute, the problem is that people aren't really in control. This capitalist system is what's pushing buttons, not the other way around. It's like a ship without the captain that becomes "self-aware" (to use an analogy) and then makes the crew rearrange themselves to serve it, rather than the other way around, the only driver being to self-reproduce capital forever by every means necessary. We're just units in the system or like the batteries in The Matrix, an instrument, a tool to help "the machine" realize itself, and that machine is controlling us, who are trapped in a collective hallucination which is reflected in various ideologies and religions and other projections from our minds. You are right that the problem is controls of multiple interconnect complex systems by humans rather than by the interconnected feed back loops of the systems.
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Jun 11, 2023 17:03
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Regarde Aduck posted:how weird that all your solutions involve passing cost onto consumers. If western society is going to survive it has to get over this stupid belief that government isn't allowed to actually do anything. The coming ecological catastrophe means the idea of 'weak/small government' is just not going to work. People are going to have to be told how it's going to be because there really isn't any choice. It can't and shouldn't be done through the lens of capitalism with your dumb 'sin taxes'. This isn't about money, it's big boy adult stuff like 'survival'. If the west cannot get over this childish neoliberal phase then it, and maybe the entire planet, is doomed. Your attack is a strawman argument but it's not like it could ever happen politically anyway; good luck convincing people that they can't have something and that's how its going to be. You are proposing a command economy. Economics applies to every society and form of government, it's just more transparent in a capitalist economy vs a command economy. One of the most fundamental tenants of economics is that if you want more of something to happen you make that product or service cheaper, if you want less of something you make it more expensive. Where I do agree with you is the current action with regard to climate is a failure. But I think that its because the costs of our current methods of production don't take into account the real costs, companies are dumping their pollution into the sky for free but those costs are felt in the costs of floods, fires, heatwaves, diseases, etc. T.W.T. is essentially proposing a carbon tax. Call it that, call it a sin tax, whatever, it is the same thing. If you want less beef, make it more expensive. If you want more people to live near public transit, make more of it and make it cheaper. But what will probably happen is people will still want to eat beef. We already know that feeding cows kelp significantly reduces the amount of methane they produce, farmers who feed kelp would be subject to less tax or receive a rebate. Other people will figure out even better ways of producing beef that cause less environmental impact. End result is we will still have beef and we won't be destroying the environment to get it. We can have our beef and eat it too  I agree that BP's "carbon footprint" is a way of deflecting blame to consumers, while at the same time making it impossible for most of us to meaningfully do anything even if we wanted to, since all the things we need are produced in the same dirty ways. What is needed is for all the products and services we need and want to be produced in a way that they don't destroy the earth so that all options available to us as consumers all do right by the planet.
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Jun 11, 2023 17:54
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Bar Ran Dun posted:You are right that the problem is controls of multiple interconnect complex systems by humans rather than by the interconnected feed back loops of the systems. I lost the thrust of the post you quoted by the time I got to the end, can you elaborate on your response? Maybe that will help me understand both better. Zeta Taskforce posted:Your attack is a strawman argument but it's not like it could ever happen politically anyway; good luck convincing people that they can't have something and that's how its going to be. You are proposing a command economy. Economics applies to every society and form of government, it's just more transparent in a capitalist economy vs a command economy. One of the most fundamental tenants of economics is that if you want more of something to happen you make that product or service cheaper, if you want less of something you make it more expensive. Where I do agree with you is the current action with regard to climate is a failure. But I think that its because the costs of our current methods of production don't take into account the real costs, companies are dumping their pollution into the sky for free but those costs are felt in the costs of floods, fires, heatwaves, diseases, etc. T.W.T. is essentially proposing a carbon tax. Call it that, call it a sin tax, whatever, it is the same thing. If you want less beef, make it more expensive. If you want more people to live near public transit, make more of it and make it cheaper. When will "preserve our planet" be a more powerful interest than "make money now"? Current powers seem to lack both the desire and ability to meaningfully turn the dial from "extract consume profit" towards "preserve and sustain". And yeah, were they to earnestly undertake those actions their power would be diminished because supply and consumers wouldn't accept less.
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Jun 11, 2023 18:07
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BRJurgis posted:When will "preserve our planet" be a more powerful interest than "make money now"? Current powers seem to lack both the desire and ability to meaningfully turn the dial from "extract consume profit" towards "preserve and sustain". And yeah, were they to earnestly undertake those actions their power would be diminished because supply and consumers wouldn't accept less. Where did you get the impression that I support this laissez faire capitalism that is happening now? Rather what I am saying is that forcing every current capitalist economy into a command one as a necessary precondition to "preserve our planet" can never happen. It just won't happen. But even if it did, who would get to make those commands? History teaches us command economies have if anything been worse than fully capitalist ones. Please give examples of a successful command economy that has both focused on the environment and provided an acceptable standard of living.
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Jun 11, 2023 18:28
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Zeta Taskforce posted:Where did you get the impression that I support this laissez faire capitalism that is happening now? Rather what I am saying is that forcing every current capitalist economy into a command one as a necessary precondition to "preserve our planet" can never happen. It just won't happen. But even if it did, who would get to make those commands? History teaches us command economies have if anything been worse than fully capitalist ones. Please give examples of a successful command economy that has both focused on the environment and provided an acceptable standard of living. Personally I think we can no longer be productive or constructive (in a climate change sense) while the world as we've built it still stands. I feel we've already failed, it just hasn't collapsed yet. Every explanation of why a solution isn't realistic serves only to reinforce this grim conclusion. I don't see how this can we tweaked or reformed, it will collapse because of the very limitations you outlined wrt meaningfully correcting ourselves. We cannot realistically accept or even imagine another outcome.
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Jun 11, 2023 18:44
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:The issue of our values is ultimately a religious concept. The problem isn't necessarily "greed" either, although people can be greedy. Or even individual capitalists necessarily. But to get philosophical for a minute, the problem is that people aren't really in control. This capitalist system is what's pushing buttons, not the other way around. It's like a ship without the captain that becomes "self-aware" (to use an analogy) and then makes the crew rearrange themselves to serve it, rather than the other way around, the only driver being to self-reproduce capital forever by every means necessary. We're just units in the system or like the batteries in The Matrix, an instrument, a tool to help "the machine" realize itself, and that machine is controlling us, who are trapped in a collective hallucination which is reflected in various ideologies and religions and other projections from our minds. do fewer/more drugs (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 11, 2023 19:02
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BRJurgis posted:I lost the thrust of the post you quoted by the time I got to the end, can you elaborate on your response? Maybe that will help me understand both better. So climate. That’s a complex system where we were in a nice meta-stable state before carbon emissions started up with industrialization. Right now it’s transitioning to another state. Our economies are another complex system. In capitalism we have uncontrolled exponential growth. Eventually that growth will encounter feedback loops that control it but for the moment it’s still just chugging along growing exponentially. Then we have the political systems, What and how we decide to collectively do things or not do things. All the social interactions that put pressures on governments to act, or lead to revolutions, or determine elections. These are all really complicated systems that we won’t ever solve completely but can describe with models. These models are not perfect, they are especially far from it in economy and politics. The systems also interact with each other. One cannot merely address one of the systems. Brutalist McDonald’s is adding some emergent characteristics to the economic system of capitalism. Giving it some agency that emerges from it’s complexity. I to some extent agree with this, but don’t consider it necessary to the thinking here. Some folks have done the same (not in this thread) to other the other relevant complex systems (climate included!) The important bit is, we need to control these complex unsolved systems. I would expand that to: we need to control multiple complex unsolved interconnected systems. This need for control of complex systems (especially economy) is why one sees a lot of folks taking an authoritarian turn, particularly to the Chinese model of society. But that has its problems too. Way way back earlier in the thread I posted about Stability. The thesis of that post basically amounts to: It is possible to control complex unsolved systems. We have solved systems (vessel stability) that have unsolved instances, and that were an unsolved system in the past that we generated controls for prior to solving.
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Jun 11, 2023 19:15
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Zeta Taskforce posted:I agree that BP's "carbon footprint" is a way of deflecting blame to consumers, while at the same time making it impossible for most of us to meaningfully do anything even if we wanted to, since all the things we need are produced in the same dirty ways. What is needed is for all the products and services we need and want to be produced in a way that they don't destroy the earth so that all options available to us as consumers all do right by the planet. It is not possible to provide all the products and services that people are accustomed to in a sustainable or net-zero way. Corporations are not buying barrels of oil to burn in a field, people are benefiting from the cheap energy and will notice its absence. For example, lets take driving and gasoline consumption. The US consumes 134 billion gallons of gas per year, so at 33kWh /gal this is 4.4 trillion kWh/year. For comparison, last year the US electrical grid provided 4 trillion kWh/year. Of that, 60% is natural gas and coal, so only 1.6 T kWh/year is renewable or nuclear. A painless transition to a net zero electric car world will require quintupling the renewable+nuclear electricity production. To say nothing of the changes in transmission and storage required, nor that the charging times for electric cars are unlikely to be perfectly even throughout the day, also you have to make the cars, etc. And the goal is net zero in 25 years. And while yeah, probably thats theoretically possible under a command economy, I don't think we get changes of that magnitude through taxing people slightly differently and giving rebates. Or, the taxing and rebate system will have to be capable of impelling serious changes of behavior, which people will notice, and resent. This is not going to be painless, this is going to require massive shifts in the way society is organized and huge changes in what people can expect to have available to them.
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Jun 11, 2023 19:37
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celadon posted:And while yeah, probably thats theoretically possible under a command economy, I don't think we get changes of that magnitude through taxing people slightly differently and giving rebates. Or, the taxing and rebate system will have to be capable of impelling serious changes of behavior, which people will notice, and resent.
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Jun 11, 2023 19:56
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BRJurgis posted:Where did you get the impression I expect us to preserve the planet or provide an "acceptable standard of living"? I wasn't disagreeing with what you wrote, just highlighting the seemingly inevitable failure this scenario promises. We both agree that command economies are unable to provide an acceptable standard of living. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we both agree what an "acceptable standard of living" is, i.e. a broad range of products and services that are affordable for most of us, abundant and diverse types of foods that includes meat , and where transport and trade continue to be possible and happen. If you have something else in mind let me know. I think where we are disagreeing is I think that this "acceptable standard of living" is possible and you don't. I think that the right combination of public policy that wields carrots and sticks, taxes and incentives and that invests in better technologies and sustainable development is possible, you don't. As an example, I know that the current way we make lithium ion batteries is problematic, there probably isn't enough lithium to do everything that we need to do and the human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo associated with cobalt mining are well documented. Its just that I think its both possible to have a mining industry in the Congo that adds to the well being of the citizenry and to develop different battery chemistries that use more abundant materials. Perhaps you don't? If you are coming from the perspective that we are all doomed, everything is lost, its all hopeless then I do follow your logic. We might as well blow up our economy and intentionally pursue a policy of destructive degrowth and an authoritarian command economy is realistically the only way to get there. This would have the benefit of being intentional and there would be still be a system of allocating a much diminished level of resources, and this is preferable to uncontrolled collapse and chaos. I'm not with you on this. I don't support destructive growth nor do I support destructive degrowth and I see a path that is better than both of these.
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Jun 11, 2023 19:59
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I'll be honest I don't care about the standard of living of the wealthiest being maintained when it is coming at the cost of the standard of living of the people producing the raw materials and most of the labor. A child slave producing cocoa who has never even tasted chocolate is not having their standard of living improved by capitalism, but that's why we have cheap chocolate.
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Jun 11, 2023 20:28
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Adenoid Dan posted:I'll be honest I don't care about the standard of living of the wealthiest being maintained when it is coming at the cost of the standard of living of the people producing the raw materials and most of the labor. Exactly, a means of fighting climate change that continues with largely the status quo of what spoiled American babies want will simply lead to the status quo of the world's poorest suffering under our boot. How noble of us to find a way to keep producing pointless wasteful garbage while the world burns around us and we take the rest of the world with us.
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Jun 11, 2023 21:07
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Professor Beetus posted:Exactly, a means of fighting climate change that continues with largely the status quo of what spoiled American babies want will simply lead to the status quo of the world's poorest suffering under our boot. How noble of us to find a way to keep producing pointless wasteful garbage while the world burns around us and we take the rest of the world with us. You don't have to care about the standard of living of spoiled Americans but realize that the vast majority of Americans do care and you can't reduce their standard of living without some popular support regardless of the economic or political system you envision.
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Jun 11, 2023 21:26
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It sounds like we need to teach a lot of people that other people are humans with feelings and rights. I think that is fundamentally possible, call me an optimist.
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Jun 11, 2023 21:43
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Adenoid Dan posted:It sounds like we need to teach a lot of people that other people are humans with feelings and rights. When that has been accomplished I'm sure things will work out. Looking forward to it.
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Jun 11, 2023 22:08
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Are there estimates of what consumption would look like in a globally equitable society? Like the sort of lives that would be available to people? Did a couple maths based on current world production and population. Taking chocolate for instance, which will probably decrease in production once its not using slaves, you'd get about an ounce of milk chocolate per week if it was evenly distributed. Half a gallon of crude oil per day so thatd be a dozen miles of driving a personal car or so? This includes all the oil used for transporting all your goods and services though. Beef, about 1/3 of a pound per week. Coffee, maybe a hundred cups per year. So daily use will likely be more difficult. Naturally people have their own unique tastes and wouldn't all be consuming equal shares of everything, but this should give a rough target of where we'd be at. For these examples you'll also probably need to significantly reduce production of for sustainability purposes so the actual amounts an equitable population would receive could be quite a bit lower. Theres so much I couldn't imagine how to calculate, like housing and clothing and medical care, but it'd be good to know what the destination is, though calculating based on current production will likely overshoot whats possible in a net zero sustainable world economy.
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Jun 11, 2023 22:14
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NM there is no point
Adenoid Dan fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Jun 11, 2023 |
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Jun 11, 2023 22:25
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I am willing to and actually do buy Cacao that is farmed by people who get a fair wage. Yeah it costs more.
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Jun 11, 2023 22:48
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celadon posted:Are there estimates of what consumption would look like in a globally equitable society? Like the sort of lives that would be available to people? Did a couple maths based on current world production and population. Depends on how many people there are in this society, but it would be a very low level of consumption relative to the current level in the west, and one with local supply chains.
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Jun 11, 2023 22:53
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Adenoid Dan posted:I'll be honest I don't care about the standard of living of the wealthiest being maintained when it is coming at the cost of the standard of living of the people producing the raw materials and most of the labor. No one in this thread is going to, or should defend literal child slavery, nor can anyone deny that this is happening. The status quo is we have centi-billionaires on the same planet as child slaves. I don't know what it would look like to have perfectly equitable consumption, I don't know if its possible or the political processes that would get us there in any reasonable amount of time would even be desirable. For the last 10,000 years anytime any society has advanced beyond hunter gatherer has also produced elites. But that cannot justify the richest person controlling a billion or ten billion times as many resources as the poorest. What I do know is I don't blame the average chocoholic in a rich or middle income country for child slavery. There are plenty of people to blame however. How about the actual slave owners on the ground where it is being grown, the local traders who buy and concentrate the raw product and sell to the multi national food companies, or those multi national food companies who know exactly what is happening on the fields and plantations but pretend its not as along as they can buy it for pennies per pound. Just like it should not be up to the average person to calculate their carbon footprint and for all of us to make individual choices to reduce it, it should not be up to the average person to research every product they buy and investigate how well it conforms to fair trade principals. It should be possible for everything to be produced fairly and sustainably and people at every level deserve to make money. This is as true of chocolate as it is of t-shirts, i phones or cobalt. It shouldn't be that hard. I know it is, but it shouldn't be. If 2% of the profits at the top instead all went to the grower, no consumer would even notice, but suddenly the farmer could send his kids to school and be able to taste chocolate too.
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Jun 11, 2023 22:59
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Brendan Rodgers posted:one with local supply chains. This is… complicated though. Supply chains don’t have to be local to be sustainable. And in many cases some relatively local transportation is less sustainable than some international transportation. I hit on it much earlier in the thread but think an order of magnitude (or more) in fuel efficiency with each model shift between ocean - rail - truck - plane. A Pacific crossing in a container by vessel can possibly beat even a few hundred miles by truck. Local supply chains also means decentralization, the loss of manufacturing economies of scale and those economies can be huge. So we need sustainable supply chains, but those might or might not be local depending on the specifics.
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Jun 11, 2023 23:08
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VideoGameVet posted:It's important to remember that "Carbon Footprint" was promoted by BP as a way of deflecting responsibility onto consumers. This is true but I think there is some room for a bit of nuance here. I don't think it's a stretch to say that it's unlikely we will get rid of personal passenger automobiles but there is really no reason in 2023 that anyone should be driving something like a Hummer. Or even eating red meat like a hamburger several times a week. Hell, red meat consumption is already going down and if it's replaced with chicken or fish so be it. That's still way better. If we as a society regulate this things a bit or if you maybe occasionally bring up to friend they don't really need a BMW X1234 that gets 16mpg that's a fair target.
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Jun 11, 2023 23:21
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Bar Ran Dun posted:This is… complicated though. You're describing a society where we do what we do now but with marginally lower emissions. If you think that's enough then ok, I don't think we'll be able to agree on that. But I'm describing one where we have drastically lower emissions. It's a new equilibrium we will have to reach.
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Jun 11, 2023 23:34
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Brendan Rodgers posted:You're describing a society where we do what we do now but with marginally lower emissions. If you think that's enough then ok, I don't think we'll be able to agree on that. But I'm describing one where we have drastically lower emissions. It's a new equilibrium we will have to reach. Some of the things we do now, we do because they are extremely efficient, not doing them in a centralized way can take far far more energy and resources. Economies of scale are real and pretending they aren’t isn’t going to work.
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Jun 11, 2023 23:42
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Some of the things we do now, we do because they are extremely efficient, not doing them in a centralized way can take far far more energy and resources. Are those economies of scale still cost effective and efficient when you factor in the externalities of the GHG output? Because that always seems to get lost in the bottom line.
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Jun 11, 2023 23:48
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I think there is an idea going around that the process of reducing inequality in the west and weakening the power of corporations will be the lions share of the work required to fight climate change. You see this with those posts about how 44 companies are doing 95% of the emissions or what have you. I do not think that this is an accurate depiction of what will be necessary. Billionaires are obviously wealthy far beyond what they deserve, but they are not consuming proportionately to their wealth. Musk has 230B in wealth, average household is 700k, median household 120k. So Elon is between 300,000x and 2 million times the wealth of a household. I do not think he is consuming 300,000x the amount of beef, or gasoline, or clothing, or any commodity or service. If the average person had 1 hour of medical care per year, Musk would need 40 to 200 full time medical staff working 24/7 for that to be proportional. At a gallon of gas per day per capita, he would need a hundred private jets going around the clock. To put another way, if Elon Musk equals 300k to 2M households in wealth, lets say 1M people, does he or the city of Austin, Texas (population ~1M) consume more resources? Basically a ton of the wealth of the ultra rich is not real wealth, and the idea that by normalizing that wealth we can normalize consumption is incorrect. There is not a way through this catastrophe that avoids significant reductions in consumption across the board.
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Jun 11, 2023 23:56
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Brendan Rodgers posted:Are those economies of scale still cost effective and efficient when you factor in the externalities of the GHG output? Because that always seems to get lost in the bottom line. But a thing to keep in mind is that there are externalities of doing things locally too. You can't grow a tomato here in the winter without a heated greenhouse, light, or whatever else they need. So you either do that, or tell your population that there are no fresh vegetables in the winter. celadon posted:I think there is an idea going around that the process of reducing inequality in the west and weakening the power of corporations will be the lions share of the work required to fight climate change. You see this with those posts about how 44 companies are doing 95% of the emissions or what have you. I do not think that this is an accurate depiction of what will be necessary. I got into a discussion about this when France announced banning of some domestic flight routes. "Oh but what about private jets  "? Well maybe it's unfair but there aren't enough to make a difference, while millions of people taking the train instead would. Just a little though, as aviation is a pretty small sector.
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Jun 12, 2023 00:05
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Brendan Rodgers posted:Are those economies of scale still cost effective and efficient when you factor in the externalities of the GHG output? Because that always seems to get lost in the bottom line. Yes. Here’s an example: This ship: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:425308/mmsi:366364000/imo:7802718/vessel:KAUAI Burns more fuel underway per mile than. This ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMA_CGM_Benjamin_Franklin The Ben Franklin is 10X larger. 1624 for the Kauai teu vs 18,000 teu for the Franklin. I know this because I’ve looked at the consumption logs in each engine room. This is what need you to understand. Centralized industrial production (and transportation!) in very large facilities can be orders of magnitude more efficient including externalities than decentralized production in small facilities.
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Jun 12, 2023 00:07
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Bar Ran Dun's point is related to one of the reasons why pushes toward local or "unprocessed" foods are often harmful- they're undoing actual, enormous structural efficiencies for the surface appearance of merit.
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Jun 12, 2023 00:28
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celadon posted:I think there is an idea going around that the process of reducing inequality in the west and weakening the power of corporations will be the lions share of the work required to fight climate change. You see this with those posts about how 44 companies are doing 95% of the emissions or what have you. I do not think that this is an accurate depiction of what will be necessary. This is a very fair point. There is a consensus in this thread that the mega rich and the companies that they own and control are too powerful. This creates a conflation between two of the greatest challenges affecting societies everywhere, economic justice and climate justice. You can view these challenges through a lens were these problems are entirely unrelated and another lens where they are one and the same. The exact accuracy of 44 companies doing 95% of the emissions not withstanding, you can imagine a world where we have transitioned to a post carbon net zero world and where 44 companies still have 95% of the influence and where wealth inequality is as bad as ever. Or looking back at history, going back to the end of the 19th century during the robber barron days, the rate of resource extraction was much, much less than today and everyone took trains everywhere, but wealth inequality within countries and among countries was at its apex, this was when a majority of the world lived under domination of European powers. That is not our world and the problems are related. It is the poor and marginalized who will suffer and who are currently suffering from the erratic weather. People who largely are not benefiting from the current system and who are not responsible for the problem. Both are caused by greed and short sightedness which results in exploitation, both of people and the environment. Where there is absolutely not consensus in the tread is if the solution should resemble something like the progressive era in the early 20th century America where reforms were passed that put guardrails on the system, eliminated the worst excesses, and produced a more regulated version of capitalism, or rather something like the Bolshevik revolution in the USSR that was a complete break from the earlier system. quote:Billionaires are obviously wealthy far beyond what they deserve, but they are not consuming proportionately to their wealth. Musk has 230B in wealth, average household is 700k, median household 120k. So Elon is between 300,000x and 2 million times the wealth of a household. I do not think he is consuming 300,000x the amount of beef, or gasoline, or clothing, or any commodity or service. If the average person had 1 hour of medical care per year, Musk would need 40 to 200 full time medical staff working 24/7 for that to be proportional. At a gallon of gas per day per capita, he would need a hundred private jets going around the clock. Elon Musk is not consuming a million times as many resources, beef, fuel, air travel as an ordinary American, or for that matter an ordinary African. But what he does have, as well as any number of billionaires have is a million times the power and influence as an ordinary person. It is up to that billionaire if they want to use that influence for good or evil. In Elon's case its complicated because more than just about anyone else he has advanced electrification of the economy, especially through transport but also solar. He is also a thin skinned baby with a warped version of free speech. With the fellow PayPal Mafia member Peter Theil, the Koch brothers, or when he was alive Sheldon Adelson, by financing truly horrible monsters, the evil each one does in one hour is greater than whatever good any one of us could accomplish in a lifetime. Because the system has worked so well for these billionaires, their tendency is to keep things the way they are, so they will be an opposition force against change. So while any individual billionaire is not producing a million times the pollution as an average person directly, if they manage to forestall the energy transition and delay or prevent net zero from happening, then in a way they actually did cause a million times as much pollution as the average one of us.
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Jun 12, 2023 02:53
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Seems like there's an interesting and notionally very broad ("we are children-to-undergrads who are sad about the future and would like Montana to stop violating our rights by supporting a fossil fuel economy") climate lawsuit in Montana that's been allowed to proceed. nyt article that can't be assed to provide a single link or the name of the suit (it's held v montana) but otherwise seems to be a fairly solid summary of the background: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/12/us/montana-youth-climate-trial.html organization leading the lawsuit, with an actually pretty nicely done website and specifically a court case timeline: https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/montana actual filing: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/571d109b04426270152febe0/t/6210037f5cbf9b34dc9abb84/1645216660046/Held+v+Montana+Complaint.pdf Tldr, the less... optimistic... parts of the proposed remedies center on "Montana has an environmental protection clause in their constitution, laws that specifically exclude climate change from consideration in policy etc are therefore facially unconstitutional, please make these laws go away", which doesn't actually strike me as a doomed argument. Especially since apparently the state pulled one of their (anti-?)regulations to try and make the lawsuit go away because it would become closer to moot. I'm curious to see where this one goes.
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Jun 13, 2023 07:35
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The wildfire smoke is here. It's awful. This is all atomized living things
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Jun 15, 2023 01:19
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Arglebargle III posted:The wildfire smoke is here. It's awful. This is all atomized living things
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Jun 15, 2023 01:28
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[Nuking all of this out of concerns it might complicate things for subsequent trials]
rivetz fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Jun 16, 2023 |
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Jun 15, 2023 05:23
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That rules, gj
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Jun 15, 2023 08:22
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That's incredible. It's so easy to get depressed about the power corporations, millionaires and billionaires have, but you showed that regular people who care can still do good.
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Jun 16, 2023 02:17
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Zeta Taskforce posted:That's incredible. It's so easy to get depressed about the power corporations, millionaires and billionaires have, but you showed that regular people who care can still do good.
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Jun 16, 2023 02:24
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I would watch this as a movie.
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Jun 16, 2023 02:47
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