The Boats is a classic.
Tiresia
joined 1 year ago
Nothing is going to beat high speed rail for convenience, price, and comfort. Just like cars, overland personal airplanes aren't about convenience or "having a point", they're a hobby. Though in case of cars the hobby got forced on everyone by a literal conspiracy of xenophobes and the ultra-rich.
Many buildings in Africa have their own fossil fuel electric generators. Reliable electricity removes the need for those, which does reduce emissions immediately.
Furthermore, improving people's lives empowers them to help reduce emissions (or increase them). Reliable electricity frees up labor for things like washing clothes or cooking, which they can then use to work on, for example, regenerative agriculture like the Great Green Wall, which captures CO2 and further reduces the production of CO2 and chemical pollution from extensive farming practices.
Nukes won't destroy the planet. All their yields combined don't measure up to a 1 km asteroid or an average supervolcano, and their radiation and dust is gone in 0.00005% of the remaining time Earth will exist.
The chemical pollution of all our industry washing out to sea will have a bigger impact. All ocean-based animals with shells will die out as oceanic acidity reaches critical levels, though in 0.01% of the remaining time earth will exist shell-based life from freshwater habitats would probablu repopulate them if non-shell-based life doesn't evolve to fill the same niches first.
There will be trees, flowers, mammals, shellfish, algae, fungi, birds, reptiles, and insects. The Earth from above will look like ocean, forest, desert, and glacier, though the forests may cover less of it for the first 0.01% of the remainder of its existence. We will produce a mass extinction event comparable to the other five, but Earth will still look the same at the scale of a simple drawing.
Ah yes, the C bugs in the kernel libraries. We've all seen them.
Nuclear war would actually cool the oceans. All nuclear bombs combined contain about the same energy as Hurricane Katrina or a small supervolcano eruption. There would be a small fraction of a degree of temporary increase in global atmospheric temperatures, quickly overwhelmed by the nuclear winter as ash and dust in the upper atmosphere reduce global temperatures by several degrees for several years.
The only way I see humanity boiling the oceans is by deliberately releasing global-industrial quantities of super-effective greenhouse gases, actively designed to make the Earth as well-insulated as possible.
If the EU won't consider themselves to be at war when the part of the EU defensive pact zone that is called Greenland is invaded, they're losing all credibility both internally and externally. Why would the EU defend Finland or the Baltics or Cyprus? Why would the EU organize against foreign powers funding violent rebellions inside EU territory (similar to how Russia funded Transnistria or the US funded the contras in Nicaragua)?
There is no better red line for France to launch their nukes than the invasion of Greenland. As seen with Russia, any grace given to cult of personality dictators only emboldens them and their worshipers. The only fair response to madman theory is to call the 'insane' administration's bluff and let the people who don't want them and their families to become radioactive piles of ash take the responsibility of defying insane orders.
Run where? An even less hospitable planet?
Buy up primary resources that are unlikely to devalue from climate change (such as indoor farming, solar panel factories, and housing in walkable areas that are less vulnerable to climate disaster like Dublin).
Buy up the tools by which the powerful will desperately cling to power (such as the military industrial complex, media/propaganda channels, and privatized human rights like health care).
Bribe politicians, fund authoritarian-capitalist propaganda, and organize coups to put fragile dictatorships in charge of valuable strategic/industrial resources (like lithium, rare earths, fossil fuel, uranium, etc.).
edit: Thank you for taking my comment to heart!
Original comment:
With all due respect, I think you're being racist.
This is an active religious practice described objectively and with voice being given to those observing it. To dismiss it as "eastern mysticism narrative" is to deny Shinto itself a place in media on par with western religions.
A couple years back there was a similar bunch of articles about German Hunger Stones - stones expressing pity for the next people that would see the river level go low enough for them to be visible, because the drought would mean disastrous crop failure.
They're long-lasting traditional climate disaster markers, expressed through the worldview of the culture that discovered the marker, with a news article focused on the unhinged fact that they are now constantly warning that disaster is incoming.
Thanks for your perspective, I'm glad there are people like you who feel free to openly articulate in support of it. It's sad people are downvoting as disagreement, because I can't imagine them downvoting out of a good faith belief you're not contributing.
A) When the state owns the company, being "non-profit" is just a matter of accounting. And Uber wasn't a public service back when they were operating at a loss. The power structure is far more important, and when "the benefit of the Chinese people" is decided top-down through nonrepresentative means, that's not socialism even if you trust the dictator/oligarchy/overlord/etc. to play nice.
I am genuinely glad your government has given you ample housing, but that doesn't make your relation less one of being owned and managed. (not to say the west is better, just that China isn't good enough either).
B&D) The USSR is one nation, and a centrally industrialized dictatorship at that. As a point of scientific process, how are they supposed to have definitively proven wasteful capitalism is necessary as you claim? Even if they genuinely attempted degrowth, that's just one data point or approach. Different systems that fall under the same bucket can fail or succeed depending on more fine-grained specifics.
Also, the USSR slaughtered millions of small-scale farmers (so-called Kulaks, who happened to largely be Ukrainian) to make way for their industrial megafarms. They were not an example of trying degrowth, they were an example of an industrial centralized dictatorship being embargoed by most of the world.
Your point of not being crushed by the US is well-taken, and maybe Nixon did make an offer China could not refuse at the time. But I think that time has been over for the past 10-20 years. China can defend itself, and even if the military-industrial complex needs mass production to stay on par with the west that does not need to apply to the rest of the economy.
C) Take it from someone who lives in a mature and "prosperous" nation. The fruits of capitalist-style growth suck balls. You're not giving people a better life by building their industrial/living infastructure wrong initially, you're taking them away from family and craft and friendship. All things that threaten those in power, by the way
If you have time, look up Marx' description of societal alienation. He puts it better than I could. And feel free to ask me to look stuff up to.
A juice company-sponsored scientific article finds that juice company waste is good for the environment?
How could this be?
Historically, peer review has not been enough to weed out positive publication bias and outright fraud even when there was no profit motive. With a United Fruit Company/Dole-tier juice company breathing down your neck? Science... finds a way.