Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Omg I just asked a white man at a bar what he thought of jack antonoff and he said “Actually I’m voting for Bernie”

— Vrinda Jagota (@vrindajagota) August 24, 2019

(commune mag editor)

lol er sorry, that should have been

I read Bernie's GND platform. Some thoughts:

— Jasper Bernes (@outsidadgitator) August 24, 2019

Any process of proletarian self-organization will involve the formation of new class fractions organized around fundamental points of shared interest and solidarity. It will also involve divisions and rifts within the proletariat...

When does jasper project this proletarian self-organization will happen? Because climate change isn't going to bide its time so the proletariat can figure out how to get organized and make a more class-struggle-based set of demands.

I do not think proletarians should be accepting the terms under which they are convoked and organized by the state.

— Jasper Bernes (@outsidadgitator) August 24, 2019

If there's one thing I expect from a US politician running for president, it's to not offer dictates on change as defined and implemented by the state.

meanwhile...

The Democratic Party's centrist caucus -- which has openly criticized the Green New Deal for being unrealistic and unaffordable --is now tweeting out proposals "for an iceberg-making submarine that could produce 82-foot-wide, 16-foot-thick chunks of ice" to combat climate change. pic.twitter.com/BEbKOiZQU3

— Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) August 24, 2019

lol i just posted that on the 2020 dem primary thread

truly extraordinary stuff

Wtf

that is satire right?

the idea may be bad, but that looks like a really cool board game. they need to rethink the vision

Can we have just a moment to applaud Danish MP Ida Auken?

Mr President - Greenland is not for sale. But Denmark has a much better deal for you! Watch this. #dkgreen #dkpol pic.twitter.com/mlRwAVzVFg

— Ida Auken (@IdaAuken) August 20, 2019

"Grab... your pen" had me laughing out loud.

The climate debate thing seems like a classic case of activism-ism — making up a controversy for the sake of having something to organize around.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 24, 2019

People keep telling me this guy is supposed to be smart?

he is such a clueless dipshit

I wouldn’t say he’s dumb but he’s definitely someone who views politics through the myopic filter of duopolistic competition for government institutions, so it would never occur to him that it might be a good idea to pressure the people closer to your side more than the people on the other side

you can put side in scare quotes

i'm trying to guess at what sense he argues that this controversy is "made up."

Deforestation has been the case way before him, it was just at lower levels.

thanks to Trump's trade wars, China is now leaning more heavily on Brazil for both beef and soy.

Presumably Yglesias/Perez/DNC think the debate will be over whether CC is real.

The reality is its going to take a huge amount of debate, effort and public buy-in to determine which policies should be used to respond. Hiding that debate in DC conference rooms won't help with the buy-in.

my guess is that the the DNC fears that a debate on climate change would get too "real", and talk too much about solutions and what those solutions might entail. climate change works as a campaign issue for democrats when things are fuzzy and vague. people want to hear about "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." not everyone likes to hear about how serious the problem is and how it will almost certainly get worse and worse for the rest of our lives, even as try harder and harder to do something about it.

a climate debate would be an hour + of bernie talking about a $16 trillion plan and how it requires a revolution - "a political revolution" - to accomplish, warren talking about her Green Apollo Plan, Green Marshall Plan, and Green Industrial Mobilization Plan. there would be questions about whether or not they support the Green New Deal, which, now that the AOC plan has been joined by sanders' plan of the same name, is about as messy a thing to define as "medicare for all". none of this is what the DNC wants.

this is speculation within speculation, but i think the more centrist leaning democrats would look like fools during this debate (again, not what the DNC wants). their environmental plans sound like bold proposals from 15 years ago. they're just not enough, too little, too late. on stage, they'd have to choose between acknowledging the vast scale of the problem (and the solutions) vs talking vaguely about how big of a problem it is but holding back from supporting the kinds of enormous bold policies that would actually help to counteract it.

tl;dr the DNC didn't like how the democratic field was pulled toward supporting medicare for all. now, they're trying to avoid letting the field get pulled toward vocally supporting gigantic environmental spending plans.

it’s like they want human civilisation to end

OK, I'm going to repeat myself again: Corporate media is not your friend.

Repeat that as many times as you have to.

The Earth's on fire, every year's hotter, we're seeing unprecedented storms and WaPo is comparing Bernie's bold climate plan to a border wall.

This is madness. pic.twitter.com/zksxmQFXtN

— beth, an alien (@bourgeoisalien) August 24, 2019

it's also child's play compared to... defeating the nazis? building the Internet? implementing a usable dollar coin? HAAAAATE CLICKS GONNA CLIIIIIICK

i haven't seen a dollar coin in 2 years

i had a couple and was shocked that they were worked in the vending machine

my point. it's difficult

BREAKING: G-7 countries have agreed to an immediate $20 million fund to help Amazon countries fight wildfires. https://t.co/iXyXg99W68

— The Associated Press (@AP) August 26, 2019

wow....20 million...

i wonder what the total cost of holding the G7 summit was this year

Meanwhile Netflix just spent $100 million on Friends

bc unlike the amazon rainforest, they’ll be there for you

Xps - about $40m (and this one was done on the cheap apparently).

https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ani/g7-summit-in-biarritz-to-cost-france-around-36-4-million-euros-119082101592_1.html

that's what i figured. thanks for looking it up! welp

We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn...

Amazon rainforest fires: Brazil to reject $20m pledged by G7

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/27/amazon-fires-brazil-to-reject-20m-pledged-by-g7?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

“Macron cannot even avoid a foreseeable fire in a church that is a world heritage site,” Lorenzoni said in a reference to the blaze that devastated the Notre Dame cathedral in April. “What does he intend to teach our country?

Macron is really pathetic.

People keep saying "we're about to reach a tipping point" but every time they do, it's a different tipping point. Twenty years ago it was "we need to prevent this impending climate catastrophe". Five years ago it was "we need to mitigate this impending climate catastrophe". Last year it was "we need to try at least see if we can make it so that the human race can survive for another hundred years". Today it's "Well if we work really hard perhaps we can forestall the inevitable collapse of human civilization for a couple decades". It's the Maxwell Smart approach to human extinction.

Human civilization will survive tho might be scaled back significantly

The more fundamental and adaptive parts of civilization will survive. Like cooperation toward common goals. And some elements of technology. Agriculture in some form, surely. Weaponry, too. Writing is a cinch to survive. Same for arithmetic and geometry. Exactly where the level will recede to is any one's guess, but some hard-won concepts are too rugged to disappear.

Human civilization will survive

― Vape Store (crüt)

OK, persuade me of this. For humanity to survive, we need to live on an earth-like planet, right? Isn't there some point where the changes become so catastrophic that earth, for some period of time, ceases to be an "earth-like planet" in terms of climate? Is this level of change impossible for humans to cause, and if it's not, what can possibly stop us, as a species, from causing that level of change?

i will stop you all

those who can afford to be fine will be fine, and in the meantime ought to prefer that people think of what's happening in terms of an indiscriminate doom coming for a whole guilty species

earth, for some period of time, ceases to be an "earth-like planet" in terms of climate?

During the 350 million years or so that the Earth has had relatively complex terrestrial vertebrates, Earth has experienced some pretty wide extremes of climate and I can't think of one reason why these should not be called "earth-like", since they spontaneously occurred on earth. And complex vertebrate life persisted through it all.

In the past 50,000 years humans have adapted to every climate from the equatorial tropics to Tierra del Fuego and the shores of the Arctic Ocean, so we seem to be one of the most adaptable large life forms around and no type of climate has stopped us yet.

That doesn't mean there couldn't be a human die-off of massive proportions and the complete disintegration of 'high' civilization to the point where human existence in the year 2500 has retreated to subsistence living in scattered villages and life expectancy has halved or worse.

But everyone gets to have their own ideas of the future and if your version includes human extinction, no one can prove you're wrong.

that’s true we’re all gonna die before we find out what really happens

Still, it was all worth it, hedge funds will live forever

those who can afford to be fine will be fine, and in the meantime ought to prefer that people think of what's happening in terms of an indiscriminate doom coming for a whole guilty species

― difficult listening hour

do you see it in terms of individual guilt? obviously some people are more guilty than others but imo we as a species do suffer a collective guilt. i'm not a good or moral person and i have more than my share of responsibility for what's happening, but i also have a hard time seeing anybody around me as a good or moral person. it doesn't matter what we believe, it doesn't matter what we've done, none of it has been enough. we've all failed, and those of us with more power have, in general, failed harder.

can i afford to be "fine"? right now, yeah, sure, i'm "fine", i get to see the people around me committing genocide in the course of the holy pursuit of "i got mine". at the same time i don't expect the people they're/we're killing to go quietly, i don't expect a number in a bank account to protect me. if people start coming for the ones most responsible, i support that; i don't think anybody deserves to be safe or that, in the long run, safety is something they/we can really buy.

aimless you do make a pretty good argument thank you that helps. i guess it's maybe a matter of my wondering if our will to be live can be broken as a species the way my will to live has been broken as an individual, if the self-destructive tendencies i've seen in myself do exist on a phylogenic level or if that's just me projecting, ontogeny i well know doesn't recapitulate phylogeny

History is a graveyard of once prosperous civilizations. Most were felled by smaller stressors than 3-4 °C.

I'm not in the human extinction camp: we're more adaptable than rats or cockroaches. There's no question that knowledge can be preserved if there's a will. What's more in question is whether the complex chains of production embodied in my computer, my phone, etc can be maintained should global human carrying capacity fall markedly (wouldn't be surprised if the bottleneck was around 2 billion), most occupied with subsistence, and the raw materials are exhausted or only accessible in uninhabitable parts of the globe.

I don't think we are more adaptable than rats (50-odd million years and counting) or cockroaches (300-odd million years), actually. Our sheer mass and energy requirements as individuals are against us there.

Think of the ecological range. Humans have lived in places that were inhospitable to either rats or cockroaches (whether tundra or desert).

Or, y’know, in orbit

Greta Thunberg is such an amazing orator.

History is a graveyard of once prosperous civilizations. Most were felled by smaller stressors than 3-4 °C.

Is this true? Honest question cos I'm certainly no expert, but weren't most civilizations bought down after coming up against other civilizations. I know some smaller ones might have been felled by calamitous ecological events.

Or, like, a combination of those things?

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is set to announce on Thursday that it intends to sharply curtail the regulation of methane emissions, a major contributor to climate change, according to an industry official with knowledge of the plan.

The Environmental Protection Agency, in a proposed rule, will aim to eliminate federal requirements that oil and gas companies install technology to inspect for and fix methane leaks from wells, pipelines and storage facilities.

The proposed rollback is particularly notable because several major energy companies have, in fact, opposed it — just as other industrial giants have opposed previous administration initiatives to dismantle climate-change and environmental rules. Some of the world’s largest auto companies have opposed Mr. Trump’s plans to let vehicles pollute more, and a number of electric utilities have opposed the relaxation of restrictions on toxic mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants.

...Over all, carbon dioxide is the most significant greenhouse gas, but methane is a close second. It lingers in the atmosphere for a shorter period of time but packs a bigger punch while it lasts. By some estimates, methane has 80 times the heating-trapping power of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years in the atmosphere.

Methane currently makes up nearly 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. A significant portion of that comes from the oil and gas sector.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/climate/epa-methane-greenhouse-gas.html