Cold on a Cob posted:

idk what you mean, are you saying i shouldn't have feelings about the people who largely agree with people like me about climate change but openly judge people like me anyway because we're not suitably optimistic about our chances?

Cold on a Cob posted:

not exactly the same but makes me think about how i've been told about we need to go 100% electric cars instead of prioritizing mass transit

"we've already invested in the roads" which are crumbling now anyway in a lot of cities but let's not think about that

quote:

The Biden administration on Wednesday finalized one of the most significant pieces of its ambitious climate agenda: the strongest new tailpipe rules for passenger cars and trucks that will decisively push the US auto market toward electric vehicles and hybrids.

But in a concession to automakers and labor unions, the rules will be phased in more slowly than originally proposed and will give automakers more choices for how to comply.

TeenageArchipelago posted:

chart had been looking like the trump graph for a second but nah

bedpan posted:

the rules will be phased in more slowly than originally proposed and will give automakers more choices for how to comply.

quote:

Today is a reminder that organizing works. We have to keep going. We have to keep advocating for policy change, for a formal declaration of a climate emergency, and we have to mobilize and vote in this election. The stakes are too high to allow all of our hard work to be eradicated by extremist politicians. I know we can win more if we keep showing up the way we did for this historic moment.

The Oldest Man posted:

That was in January, it was only a pause on issuing new export permits to non-FTA countries, and they're already saying it's going to be unpaused by next year

bedpan posted:

I know lmao. Sunrise hasn't published a more recent statement though. I wonder if this will be claimed as one of the "movement wins"

quote:

Deep drought conditions are forecast to persist across much of British Columbia, prompting the provincial government to warn of a “prolonged fire season.”

As of March 1, B.C.’s average snowpack was 66 per cent of normal, the second lowest over the past half century, according to the B.C. River Forecast Centre. Low snowpack means less meltwater is available to slow the drying out of forests and temper the risk of wildfire.

“We should be preparing for a prolonged fire season, even if it doesn't occur,” McLoughlin said at a press briefing Monday.

“It used to be the case that we would talk about climate change as though it was something that happened in a far off distant future, something that our children or our grandchildren, or our great grandchildren would have to grapple with. The reality is we are grappling with it right now,” Ma said.

bedpan posted:

my prediction is that as climate change worsens and become more obvious, continued and greater fossil fuel use will be publicly justified on the grounds of "well climate change has already happened. no reason to stop now."

kyojin posted:

it's also going to kill everyone I hate

Peteyfoot posted:

I don't see the problem. Seems good, actually.

Erghh posted:

proceeding apace https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/amid-louisiana-s-crawfish-shortage-governor-issues-disaster-declaration/ar-BB1jrRGs

Peteyfoot posted:

I don't see the problem. Seems good, actually.

Dog Case posted:

Hey look another one

Scarabrae posted:

[Biosphere Collapse] climate change popped my cherry?!

bedpan posted:

my prediction is that as climate change worsens and become more obvious, continued and greater fossil fuel use will be publicly justified on the grounds of "well climate change has already happened. no reason to stop now."

quote:

In brief, the idea is that once we enter a decline phase in fossil fuel availability—first in petroleum—our growth-based economic system will struggle to cope with a contraction of its very lifeblood. Fuel prices will skyrocket, some individuals and exporting nations will react by hoarding, and energy scarcity will quickly become the new norm. The invisible hand of the market will slap us silly demanding a new energy infrastructure based on non-fossil solutions. But here’s the rub. The construction of that shiny new infrastructure requires not just money, but…energy. And that’s the very commodity in short supply. Will we really be willing to sacrifice additional energy in the short term—effectively steepening the decline—for a long-term energy plan? It’s a trap!

Cup Runneth Over posted:

We integer overflowed it, good job everybody

uguu posted:

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/the-energy-trap/

Re re repost

Dog Case posted:

Hey look another one

MightyBigMinus posted:

tuyop posted:

No, I'm saying that your feelings are your responsibility and someone's internal state is fundamentally unknowable, even if they seem snooty or whatever to you.

It doesn't matter one bit to the climate how someone feels about what they do, or how you feel about how they feel, or even how other people feel about what you do! Namaste.

4d3d3d posted:

https://twitter.com/dwallacewells/status/1770479432764977275

4d3d3d posted:

https://twitter.com/dwallacewells/status/1770479432764977275

Cold on a Cob posted:

someone tell them it’s always in the last place you look

TeenageArchipelago posted:

to be fair you do stop looking when you see the icebergs

Dog Case posted:

Hey look another one

Gravid Topiary posted:

any got that accelerationism gif with all the different skeletons in the car?

Scarabrae posted:

helicopters?

Scarabrae posted:

helicopters?

BRJurgis posted:

I work in landscaping. Just tonight my father was espousing how much I must have learned about gardening and farming, soil and cycles.

No, dad, I don't really care about the ideal time to prune hydrangeas or pot dahlias in the interest of beautifying wealthy folks gardens, and I don't care how invested they are in planting natives or putting little budhas in their yard!

Also endless and sure to intensify LOL at the "why" of your garden this year.

Rectal Death Alert posted:

"You must be really good with plants"
"I know that Japanese maples are a panty dropper. Everyone loves them. Throw in a butterfly bush or 12."

silicone thrills posted:

Im not surprised. Usually peak cherry season you see them get down to like a few bucks a lb and everywhere - like stands all over the place. Last year i barely saw any and the prices never dropped below like 8 bucks a pound. It was pretty obvious poo poo got hosed.

Last year's heatwave also caused the state to actually pass some laws around farm workers safe working conditions - having water / shade / rest time.

Heatdome 2021 also murdered a fuckload of the younger tree plantings. At the time i saw farmers reporting they lost 25%+ trees. So that's like 2 seasons in 3 years getting completely hosed. Berry crops also ate poo poo.

Harold Fjord posted:

I think you'll find that society is not about to collapse, because it would be quite inconvenient for me if that happened.

Arthur Koestler, New York Times Magazine, 1944 posted:

On Disbelieving Atrocities

There is a dream which keeps coming back to me at almost regular intervals; it is dark, and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood; there is a busy road at no more than ten yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me, the crowd walks past laughing and chatting.

I know that a great many people share, with individual variations, the same type of dream. I have quarreled about it with analysts and I believe it to be an archetype in the Jungian sense; an expression of the individual’s ultimate loneliness when faced with death and cosmic violence, and his inability to communicate the unique horror of his experience. I further believe that it is the root of the ineffectiveness of our atrocity propaganda.

For, after all, you are the crowd who walk past laughing on the road; and there are a few of us, escaped victims or eyewitnesses of the things which happen in the thicket and who, haunted by our memories, go on screaming on the wireless, yelling at you in newspapers and in public meetings, theatres and cinemas. Now and then we succeed in reaching your ear for a minute. I know it each time it happens by a certain dumb wonder on your faces, a faint glassy stare entering your eye; and I tell myself: Now you have got them, now hold them, bold them, so that they will remain awake; but it only lasts a minute. You shake yourself like puppies who have got their fur wet; then the transparent screen descends again and you walk on, protected by the dream-barrier which stifles all sound.

We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night when the epileptic Van der Lubbe set fire to the German Parliament; we said that if you don’t quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch.

I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn’t believe a word of it.

As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops, and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defense begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.

Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a fantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened fantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming eyes would still be alive. I said “perhaps,” because obviously the above can only be half the truth.

There have been screamers at all times—prophets, preachers, teachers and cranks—cursing the obtuseness of their contemporaries, and the situation-pattern remained very much the same. There are always the screamers screaming from the thicket and the people who pass by on the road. They have ears but hear not, they have eyes but see not. So the roots of this must lie deeper than mere obtuseness.

Is it perhaps the fault of the screamers? Sometimes, no doubt, but I do not believe this to be the core of the matter. Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah were pretty good propagandists and yet they failed to shake their people and to warn them. Cassandra’s voice was said to have pierced walls, and yet the Trojan war took place. And at our end of the chain—in due proportion—I believe that on the whole the M.O.I. and B.B.C. are quite competent at their job. For almost three years they had to keep this country going on nothing but defeats, and they succeeded.

But at the same time they lamentably failed to imbue the people with anything approaching a full awareness of what it was all about, of the grandeur and horror of the time into which they were born. They carried on, business-as-usual style, with the only difference that the routine of this business included killing and being killed. Matter-of-fact unimaginativeness has become a kind of Anglo-Saxon racial myth; it is usually opposed to Latin hysterics and praised for its high value in an emergency. But the myth does not say what happens between emergencies and that the same quality is responsible for the failure to prevent their recurrence. Now this limitation of awareness is not an Anglo-Saxon privilege, though they are probably the only race which claims as an asset what others regard as a deficiency. Nor is it a matter of temperament; stoics have wider horizons than fanatics.

It is a psychological fact, inherent in our mental frame, which I believe has not been given sufficient attention in social psychology or political theory.

We say, “I believe this,” or, “I don’t believe that,” “I know it,” or “I don’t know it”; and regard these as black-and-white alternatives. Now in reality both “knowing” and “believing” have varying degrees of intensity. I know that there was a man called Spartacus who led the Roman slaves into revolt; but my belief in his one-time existence is much paler than that of, say, Lenin. I believe in spiral nebulae, can see them in a telescope and express their distance in figures; but they have a lower degree of reality for me than the inkpot on my table.

Distance in space and time degrades intensity of awareness. So does magnitude. Seventeen is a figure which I know intimately like a friend; fifty billions is just a sound. A dog run over by a car upsets our emotional balance and digestion; three million Jews killed in Poland cause but a moderate uneasiness. Statistics don’t bleed; it is the detail which counts. We are unable to embrace the total process with our awareness; we can only focus on little lumps of reality. So far all this is a matter of degrees; of gradations in the intensity of knowing and believing. But when we pass the realm of the finite and are faced with words like eternity in time, infinity of space, that is, when we approach the sphere of the Absolute, our reaction ceases to be a matter of degrees and becomes different in quality. Faced with the Absolute, understanding breaks down, and our “knowing” and “believing” become pure lip-service.

Death, for instance, belongs to the category of the Absolute and our belief in it is merely a lip-service belief. “I know” that, the average statistical age being about 65, I may reasonably expect to live no more than another 27 years, but if I knew for certain that I should die on November 30, 1970, at 5 A.M., I would be poisoned by this knowledge, count and recount the remaining days and hours, grudge myself every wasted minute, in other words develop a neurosis. This has nothing to do with hopes to live longer than the average; if the date were fixed ten years later, the neurosis-forming process would remain the same.

Thus we all live in a state of split consciousness. There is a tragic plane and a trivial plane, which contain two mutually incompatible kinds of experienced knowledge. Their climate and language are as different as Church Latin from business slang.

These limitations of awareness account for the limitations of enlightenment by propaganda. People go to cinemas, they see films of Nazi tortures, of mass-shootings, of underground conspiracy and self-sacrifice. They sigh, they shake their heads, some have a good cry. But they do not connect it with the realities of their normal plane of existence. It is Romance, it is Art, it is Those Higher Things, it is Church Latin. It does not click with reality. We live in a society of the Jekyll and Hyde pattern, magnified into gigantic proportions.

This was, however, not always the case to the same extent. There were periods and movements in history—in Athens, in the early Renaissance, during the first years of the Russian Revolution—when at least certain representative layers of society had attained a relatively high level of mental integration; times, when people seemed to rub their eyes and come awake, when their cosmic awareness seemed to expand, when they were “contemporaries” in a much broader and fuller sense; when the trivial and the cosmic planes seemed on the point of fusing.

And there were periods of disintegration and dissociation. But never before, not even during the spectacular decay of Rome and Byzantium, was split thinking so palpably evident, such a uniform mass-disease; never did human psychology reach such a height of phoneyness. Our awareness seems to shrink in direct ratio as communications expand; the world is open to us as never before, and we walk about as prisoners, each in his private portable cage. And meanwhile the watch goes on ticking. What can the screamers do but go on screaming, until they get blue in the face?

I know one who used to tour this country addressing meetings, at an average of ten a week. He is a well-known London publisher. Before each meeting he used to lock himself up in a room, close his eyes, and imagine in detail, for twenty minutes, that he was one of the people in Poland who were being killed. One day he tried to feel what it was like to be suffocated by chloride gas in a death-train; the other he had to dig his grave with two hundred others and then face a machine gun, which, of course, is rather unprecise and capricious in its aiming. Then he walked out to the platform and talked. He kept going for a full year before he collapsed with a nervous breakdown. He had a great command of his audience and perhaps he has done some good; perhaps he brought the two planes, divided by miles of distance, an inch closer to each other.

I think one should imitate this example. Two minutes of this kind of exercise per day, with closed eyes, after reading the morning paper, are at present more necessary to us than physical jerks and breathing the Yogi way. It might even be a substitute for going to church. For as long as there are people on the road and victims in the thicket, divided by dream barriers, this will remain a phoney civilisation.