A question about climate change/global warming.

also, this show is sponsored by a car company, w/c is trying to sell cars, a transportation system which is unsustainable. "driving is fine, actually," is a really good slogan for the fossil fuel industry which would love to sell you more gas.

— N I C 🌨 L E (@nicoleamurray) December 17, 2020

also, not a criticism of big don or good ol' @nicole for posting that, but pulling up an old episode of queer eye which includes a person that's affiliated with an environmental org doesn't really...mean anything? who is that girl? is she the leader of the philly chapter? or is she assistant vice-treasurer? are activists expected to be greta thunberg in all contexts and always get the messaging perfect for nicole?

eh, it's a good conversation to have (one i've had a million times), but i can't get worked up over a rando activist not speaking perfectly on a tv show that isn't about the environment. if the goal is to capture a moment of hypocrisy in the environmental movement (she's on a show that is sponsored by a car company, telling people it's ok to drive!) then great, i have a new idea for a massively popular social media account where i will capture moments of hypocrisy in the environmental movement. each day will start out with an examination of how i myself am hypocritical. then i will get up and walk into my kitchen and capture the hypocrisy in my purchasing decisions. then i'll get on ilx and say something that wasn't perfect, and i'll call that out. then i'll walk outside and capture all the hypocrisy, everywhere, all around us, on every single hectare in the country. even the squirrels in the deepest woods will be interrogated, and they are far from innocent

i just hope there aren't any other environmental activists who haven't said the right thing according to everyone else

It’s indicative of how way too broadly and readily people still will reference that “100 corporations are responsible for it all” talking point from an article a few years back. Even putting aside the fact that some of those companies are state owned it’s probably bad to eliminate consumers from the dynamic.

yeah, i don't know. it still seems ridiculous to me. don't get me wrong, i'm not crying too much for this rando that got picked on by another rando named nicole, but i'm imagining having that same level of scrutiny from some internet rando named @nicole, honed in on me, and then spread across the world to conversations like this, and how angry i would be. like, i think if nicole picked on me for not being perfect in my messaging i'd be tempted to tell her to fuck off for life.

and all of ^that^ x10000000 when the "criticism" is actually very subjective and not at all clearly correct

has nicole ever spoken imperfectly? maybe she should be the focus of a viral tweet

since every week i must bring up my parents in an unrelated context, i think:

- when i repeatedly called out my dad for being a wannabe neo-eugenicist, a bigot, a homophobe and an active promoter of hatred against LGBT+, as well as dangerously dumb, hypocritical evangelo-fascist (a term carefully applied, as my dad believes that bernie sanders is an "islamofascist", his only defense was "you should think about not being so hard on me". i did think about that, and decided yes, i should be very hard on him. incredibly hard.
- later, it made me think about who i should NOT be hard on. i should not be hard on people whose hearts are in the right place, who are trying to do the right thing, who are still trying to learn.

that doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize language or messaging or tactics or whatever, but the whole twitter call-out thing gets especially gross when applied against true randos who are on the right side. i mean, go for it, but make sure you spend the other 99.5% of the time calling out the people and organizations and systemic infrastructure that are actually the problem

i think a version of this has probably already played out on the sanders/biden threads, re: the value of intra-left squabbling, so i guess i'm not saying anything useful. it would just be cool if @nicole would go take a shit on exxon instead

Yeah I see what you’re saying, I think that’s fair. Especially since the follow up posts go into the show’s corporate sponsorship. The producers role and editing decisions is probably where the initial focus should probably be if we’re criticizing the highlighting of a message to a broad audience like that.

yeah, definitely. who knows what the activist said before or after that clip that was edited out. if you hung out with me all day, you'd get 100 different "of course if there was better investment in public transport and smart city planning, we wouldn't have to be so reliant on cars still" and "yeah, they should hold a 'top 70 companies' party and then send that party to the bottom of the ocean lol" soundbites which would never be aired on whatever network owns queer eye. but you might also catch a couple sentences where i say something like @nicole's tweet above, something that feels good and comforting to the everyday person watching the show who isn't anti-environment, exactly, while also allowing the activist to get a "message" across that is vague enough to make it through network censors looking to scrub anti-corporate messages.

Just to clarify that I think the queer eye person was right and Nicole is wrong.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't think about consumer choices, but tbf, it seems pretty absurd and cruel to blame people who are just trying to survive for their own sad fates that will be the result of catastrophic climate change.

No Nicole is right in the sense that the “100 corporations are entirely responsible for it” talking point is dumb.

God you're such a tiresome waste of fucking space.

"objective reality is dumb because I want to shift blame from corporations onto consumers" gtfoh with that absolute bullshit

"X corporations" is the 99% vs 1% of climate change iow it's not totally true but it's a slogan not an analysis. it's at least better than calling for more ethical consumerism. of course the real problem is capitalism but people turn off as soon as you say that

what is the point about some of the companies being state owned supposed to mean?

we did it!

"The rate of ice loss is now in line with the worst-case scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on the climate." https://t.co/lq1IqMdW0e

— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) January 25, 2021

lol 👏 we're 👏 all 👏 gonna 👏 die

The seven hottest years on record are the last seven years.

This is a really powerful article about two of my college singing friends:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-climate-crisis-is-worse-than-you-can-imagine-heres-what-happens-if-you-try

Good article - also apparently your college friends live a couple miles away from me.

And me!

The price of solar electricity has dropped 89% in 10 years

In 2009, building a new solar farm was 223% more expensive than building a new coal plant. Now, it’s flipped.

then again

CHEVRON OIL SPILL: State emergency officials say a pipeline containing a mixture of oil and gasoline is leaking 5 gallons a minute into the San Francisco Bay. #oilspill https://t.co/B3osX1POEN pic.twitter.com/pkJ5W90dzM

— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) February 10, 2021

not good, of course. was just looking up BP Horizon, and i believe it came out to around 1000 gallons per second, for the 5 months before the leak was first sealed.

sorry 1000 gallons/minute, i meant, not per second. but yeah, it's crazy to look at what 5 gallons/minute does and imagine the scale of BP Deep Horizon

love 2 be in the little poo-colored river that is "normal temps"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuXj0cYXcAYwAaI?format=jpg&name=small

A gas tanker & icebreaker made it from China to Yamal in the 1st transit of the Northern Sea Route in February, "confirming that year-round safe navigation is possible," Russia says. There's no multi-year ice left there. @BarentsNews https://t.co/57fCekHYZL pic.twitter.com/PgO45fjN9V

— Alec Luhn (@ASLuhn) February 21, 2021

Reminder that oil companies have been preparing for this moment, redesigning tankers, drilling equipment, and offshore platforms for a melting Arctic since the 1970s. A quick thread of their patents: https://t.co/qMX2Vls7BI

— Amy Westervelt (@amywestervelt) February 21, 2021

finding a lot of stuff about a "new cold war" with china and maybe russia over these resources... all expansion / extraction already being justified because the other guys are doing it anyway and we can't be outcompeted (i can imagine environmental or human rights arguments being brought in for audiences less receptive to that cynicism)

not as much stuff about this as colonialism although some pro-exploitaion types are explicitly calling it a frontier

so when is that massive wave of ecoterrorism they were fearmongering about for decades going to kick in, because it will but it's very late

Australia has adjusted emissions records to reflect (some of) the greater warming impact of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. It added the equivalent of an extra six months' worth of national CO2 emissions to the accounts overnight. https://t.co/lsCSG8GSc5

— Adam Morton (@adamlmorton) February 26, 2021

https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3

lol we're all going to die

The gulf stream might.... be in trouble. One of those very cool+snazzy web articles from the NYTimes here:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/02/climate/atlantic-ocean-climate-change.html

You know that free-floating sense that multinational corporations are above the law, able to buy their way out of consequences for even the most blatant, heinous crimes?

There's a (nearly) unbelievable, highly concrete example of it underway right at this moment.

1/ pic.twitter.com/KnIhSsTuwc

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 19, 2021

that story deserves to be told loudly and repeatedly to the entire country

the judge (appointed by Bill Clinton in 1994) should be removed

season 5 of Drilled gets into Ecuador vs. Chevron. Worth a listen if you've been reading this thread.
https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled

September 2019 - March 2020: much of the east coast of Australia is on fire, including the worst bushfire in NSW's history

March 20, 2021: The east coast is hit with heavy rains, NSW experiences the worst floods in 50 years.

March 21, 2021: The east coast is hit with heavy rains, NSW experiences the worst floods in 60 years.

A warmer atmosphere can hold approx 7% more water for every degree of warming, so maybe if the government appoints coal and gas CEOs to manage the recovery efforts again, we can stop having to wait around so long between these records.

To be fair the coal and gas CEOs are pretty busy right now lobbying the EU to accept nuclear, CCS and gas as sustainable options. There’s only so much they can do.

season 5 of Drilled gets into Ecuador vs. Chevron. Worth a listen if you've been reading this thread.
https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled

The recommendation is appreciated, any other seasons or episodes you could highlight?

Australian billionaires doubled their wealth during Covid-19

Andrew Forrest, chair of Fortescue Metals Group, came in second. He also more than doubled his wealth, from $13.06 billion to $29.61 billion.

Yerman here acknowledged in 2011 that his company had never paid tax, while successfully campaigning to have a mining-specific Minerals Resource Rent Tax struck down on the grounds that it was "a mad dog's breakfast."

Then came Clive Palmer, whose company Mineralogy is big in iron ore. The miner’s net worth increased in similar proportion to that of Rinehart and Forrest, from $4.5 billion to $9.76 billion.

That’s about 60 times what Palmer spent on the 2019 election. After that election Palmer claimed – credibly – that his intervention ensured the return of the Morrison government, and he pronounced his $83 million investment in the political process money well spent. It was, after all, less than a week’s income for him.

This dude previously got himself elected as an MP for one term (by 53 votes, after accusing the entire electoral system of being corrupt, calling a recount when he'd lost by 7, and filing legal challenges against votes received by his opponent). He only attended Parliament about 25 days a year, went seven months without visiting the electorate he claimed to live in, and largely spent his term tweeting his own improvised poems and complaints about being on a diet.

A new report highlights that even if the world’s governments meet their current Paris pledges on time, Earth is likely to reach average global surface temperatures of 3°C above the pre-industrial period during this century, with catastrophic consequences.

The Great Barrier Reef is all but doomed, with between 70 and 99 per cent of corals set for destruction unless immediate “transformative action” is taken to reverse global warming..

The Australian Academy of Science says the more ambitious target of the Paris Climate Agreement of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees has now slipped out of reach and is “virtually impossible”.

.@VP Kamala Harris: "For years and generations, wars have been fought over oil. In a short matter of time, they will be fought over water." pic.twitter.com/88pWzvbmeA

— The Hill (@thehill) April 7, 2021

But jobs!

https://newrepublic.com/article/161575/climate-change-effects-hurtling-toward-global-suicide?fbclid=IwAR0ULhY8TOIU5yaiLS8qM1XIOoyCK_YgFwHeK9oF0EffOEuU_1Evz1vI5iE

Sorry, sic

luv 2 link to news stories about how climate change is going to kill us all by monetising the link on behalf of the most pervasive publisher of climate change denial

luv 2 'overhaul' the Climate Change Authority to reassess the country's emissions reduction policy, by appointing as leader a coal and gas executive so aggressive about fossil fuels that four years ago, investors in the largest mining company in the world had him removed from the board six months after his appointment

The first two parts of a four-part series from a nightly Australian current affairs programme, viewable online and transcript embedded:

https://www.abc.net.au/7.30/climate-change-part-1:-how-climate-change-is/13309038

For generations, Indigenous Australians have thrived on the islands in the Torres Strait but rising sea levels, more extreme weather and coastal erosion are devouring some of the 17 inhabited islands in the region and threatening their way of life

https://www.abc.net.au/7.30/climate-change-part-2:-how-climate-change-will/13310690

The Black Summer bushfires gave us a taste of what we can expect if the world warms 1.5 degrees. The science tells us that every fraction of a degree that global temperatures rise will make future cyclones, floods and bushfires more severe.

Former defence chief Chris Barrie says the black summer bushfires exposed weaknesses in how we prepare for climate-related disasters: “It would seem to me a surprise that it took so long for the ADF to be out there helping our communities who are clearly in need.”

“On many occasions we were instructed ‘don’t call it climate change’ because that’s politically unacceptable, which to me was one of the most abhorrent things I encountered in the public service.” – Cheryl Durrant from the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group

“You’re much more likely to be kneecapped by your own party before you even have a chance to go out and argue your climate change credentials to the electorate.” – Rebecca Huntley, social researcher

The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere

New research shows that California’s climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits (one-third of the entire program) that aren’t achieving real carbon savings. But companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway.

May 17th:

Australian government commit commit $2.3 billion in subsidies.3 billion in subsidies to two petrol companies to keep their oil refineries open.