stabby_cicada

I get the benefits of that, and, that sort of megastructure power generation requires massive investment in power plants and a grid to carry the power. One of the great things about solar is you don’t need megastructures or thousands of miles of cables, because you can generate power directly where it’s needed - need more power, add more panels. One of the great things about batteries is they work the same way. That’s a boon for industry in rural areas with poor infrastructure, like, say, rural India. You don’t need to rely on a power plant hundreds of miles away to power your factory. You plop down your solar panels and battery bank and get to work. (That’s a disappointment from the article. India’s building an enormous solar megastructure way out in a rural area without the power transmission infrastructure to get the power where it’s needed. Smells like graft.)

And in 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Adani executives of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain lucrative supply contracts for its solar energy and hiding this from potential investors. The case was dropped this month after Adani made offers to invest in the U.S., though U.S. officials denied any link. Lol. I’m sure they did.

That’s one reason why I think the boom in cheaper, better, safer battery tech is one of the greatest innovations of the 21st century. Yeah, the sun doesn’t always shine. Yeah, you need 24/7 power for a lot of things (eg lifesaving medical equipment in hospitals). That’s what battery storage centers are for. Solar wasn’t practical for a lot of uses until batteries got good enough to support it. But batteries are getting better every day. (On a related note, e-bikes and scooters are everywhere where I live. Personal solar powered transportation at a fraction of the cost and impact of cars. As soon as batteries got small and light and cheap enough to make them practical the market exploded. It’s amazing.)

Lasting change takes collective action, not one rich guy throwing money around. People like to toss out the factoid that Elon Musk could end world hunger with a tiny fraction of his hoarded fortune, and that’s true, as far as it goes. He could pay to feed everyone on earth. But if the structural, political, and economic factors that made those people hungry in the first place aren’t fixed, then weeks or months or years later they’ll all be hungry again. I mean, take California’s high speed rail. Newsom and his predecessors have thrown something like thirty billion dollars at building a line from San Francisco to LA or wherever the hell it’s supposed to go, which doesn’t really matter, because they haven’t built shit. But the reason they haven’t built shit isn’t a lack of money - it’s because of landowners not wanting to give up their land for train tracks, it’s because of the glacial pace of environmental review and permitting, it’s because of sabotage by the richest man in the world who owns a car company and hates public transit on principle, it’s because of a hundred other things that a billionaire can’t fix by throwing money at it. I don’t like Steyer, but he’s not wrong to believe that reforming California’s government is the only way to actually fix what’s wrong with California. He’s just wrong to think he can do it through the Democratic Party.

And I saw this on the same day I saw this article about conspiracy theories around the increasing number and range of ticks - because ticks are getting more common and more widespread because of climate change, but if you’re a loyal conservative, and you believe climate change is a hoax because all the people you trust are telling you it’s a hoax, there must be some evil conspiracy spreading those ticks, right? And I’m thinking about how the fucking capitalists (because the TVA is a federally owned utility company) are telling people that coal and oil are safe and healthy and aren’t hurting anybody or anything. And how, when we go back to '60s level of smog and yellow domes over our cities, and cancer rates skyrocket from the coal ash blanketing towns, people aren’t going to believe the TVA lied to them - they’re going to believe some evil left wing conspiracy is poisoning them. Probably fluoride and vaccines. Not clean coal and renewable natural gas, no sir, I’m a loyal American, and I love my coal burning power plant! Create a crisis, blame your enemies for the crisis, convince the people to support your policies to fix the crisis, your policies cause more crises, repeat. I cannot believe how long that strategy has been working. The American people are not fit to govern themselves.

“If the forests are doomed anyway, let’s log them all now and at least make some profit from it.” Trump, probably.

don't be afraid of impossible dreams. a tree will never reach the sun but it grows towards it anyway

You're correct, but your analysis is incomplete. It took global, coordinated, governmental action to ban CFCs worldwide. But governments were *motivated* to ban CFCs because so many individual people, ordinary citizens and voters, learned that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. Those individuals called on their governments to act. They funded the NGOs that studied and lobbied and suggested alternatives to CFCs. And they bought those alternatives instead of using CFCs themselves, which helped build the consensus to eliminate CFCs. And individual action was part of building that consensus. Individual people, spreading awareness about the damage CFCs did, and choosing alternatives to CFCs in their own individual purchases, helped build consensus for system-level change. Here's a couple thought experiments. A new train or bus line is a system-level solution to improving public transit. So is a bike lane. But what individuals are more likely to vote for a new train line? People who drive to work, or people who rely on public transit? Who's more likely to support a new bike lane, people who drive or people who bicycle? Factory farming of animals is one of the greatest atrocities in modern society. But it provides cheap meat. Who's more likely to support the system-level change necessary to ban factory farming? Someone who eats meat or someone who doesn't? Someone who eats meat everyday or someone who eats meat once a week? Someone who knows how to cook without meat, or someone who doesn't know how to cook without it? And who's going to be more passionate about banning factory farming - someone who consumes the products of factory farming daily and is necessarily going to feel conflicted about it? Or someone who has already rejected those products, in their own life, through individual action, and who will not lose anything in their own life if every feedlot and slaughterhouse is shut down? Systemic change transforms the individual actions of entire communities. But it also works the other way around. Individual action builds consensus for systemic change. And we need to encourage and celebrate both.

I hope you find your way back, because it's true. Millions of others will.

I'd argue that the concept of a carbon footprint is not, inherently, a scam. You do have an impact on the world. Your carbon footprint is a real and genuine measure of that impact. And taking actions to reduce your carbon footprint is a way to mindfully track, measure, and reduce that impact. Oil company propagandists may have used this real thing - your carbon footprint - to shift blame away from the oil companies and redirect people's efforts to reducing individual consumption *instead of* working for political change. Which is bad. But the carbon footprint, itself, is not a scam - just the uses to which big oil put it. Plastic recycling, on the other hand, is fake industry propaganda from start to finish. And honestly, if I'm on my soapbox, I'll remind everybody that "reduce, reuse, recycle" is in order of preference. Recyclable paper bags may be better for the environment than single use plastic bags, but bringing your own reusable cloth bag to the grocery store is even better. Just because a single-use product is recyclable doesn't make it environmentally friendly.

You and I are both part of the same slrpnk community, and I'm doing my part, so that's at least one person you can believe in. Why not try believing in more of us? Doomerism is capitalist propaganda. They couldn't convince us that climate change was a hoax, so now they're trying to convince us that climate change is inevitable. And the point of both propaganda campaigns is the same: protect the status quo. Because if we really were doomed and climate change was really inevitable, they wouldn't be fighting so hard to convince you that it was. They want you to believe what you do is meaningless. But it's not.

I love that analogy. No, you’re not going to personally save the world by reducing your carbon footprint. But you know what you are going to be? One leaf on a tree in a forest, making that little bit more oxygen that helps collectively make the world a better place.

And that’s worth doing. Especially if you can encourage other people to be leaves too.

I strongly suspect our technocrat overlords - the ones telling us global warming is a hoax - know very well that climate change is real, and are manipulating and positioning the United States to come out ahead in the new 3° world. The United States damning the Bering Strait would give the United States control over that shipping lane. And recent events have proved how vital the control of shipping lanes can be.

It’s not hysterics. It’s fact. Ethanol burns more fossil fuel than it replaces. It turns more fuel into less fuel and pisses away irreplaceable topsoil in the process. Facts don’t care about your feelings, liberal.

As strange as it seems given the whole, you know, this, the United States is only a small part of the world. Little Donald ordering closed coal plants to reopen like a Captain Planet villain is only going to impact a relatively small number of power plants - and those coal plants are going to close back down as soon as they’re legally allowed to, for the same reason they closed in the first place, because they don’t make economic sense anymore. Meanwhile, the people buying solar because they can’t trust oil and gas supplies, and the governments investing in renewables because they don’t want to be held hostage the next time the United States gets a bug up its ass about Iran, will still have those solar and renewables once Little Donald has retired to his private massage parlor in Mar-A-Lago.

not intended for direct human consumption Certainly. But it’s still edible. Dent corn, for instance, can be and is used for cornmeal, masa, tortillas, and so on. The industrial monoculture varieties of dent corn are optimized for animal feed, ethanol, or whatever, but nothing’s stopping us from eating them (except, in theory, the ridiculous amount of herbicide and pesticide that gets dumped on them). The reason why we’re growing so much corn that’s not intended for direct human consumption is because of a whole shitload of broken incentives and megacorporation subsidies and America’s meat addiction and the nagging worry that if we don’t keep the land in use we can’t justify stealing it from the natives however many generations ago. Which is part of what the article goes into. And it’s why the idea that ethanol opposes Big Oil is so ridiculous. Ethanol and Big Oil go hand in hand. Their interests are aligned and Trump loves them both.

If that was true (it’s not) why are we wasting so much land growing inedible corn?

Field corn is edible for humans. It makes perfectly fine cornmeal, grits, hominy, etc. And of course it’s processed into corn syrup, which is technically edible for humans. It just doesn’t have as much sugar as sweet corn does, so it doesn’t taste good when eaten as a vegetable.

You don't need to feel ashamed. The system is so broken that just surviving each day is a victory on its own. If that's all you can do - if every day is a recovery day from the last day - it's still worth celebrating because you're still fucking alive.

Sharing economy! That's pretty cool. And pretty straightforward to open source if your community doesn't speak German 😆

Sltldr: “They’re just throwing away money, planting trees in the desert for them to die.” The Great Green Wall is a top down, big government intervention that has little to no local buy-in and isn’t sustainable without continued big government funding. Not surprisingly, the funding has mostly dried up, and so has the land.