I mean you literally used quotation marks to write words I didn’t say, but fine. I assume from your comments that you’re progressive and anti-Trump, so keep on pushing for those values!

I think you might have misread my initial comment in that I didn’t say, and don’t agree with branding Biden as the “foundations of facism”.

I’m not saying Biden, Obama, Bush etc are some kind of proto-facists like that implies. I said “the foundations that allowed America to become a new facist state”. I think unless you disagree with me calling Trump’s government facist, that the previous governments created an environment in which he could rise to power seems more or less a statement of fact.

If you’re interested in understanding where I’m coming from (who knows, we’re on the internet after all!) I’d say I mostly agree with Naomi Klein’s take that global politics have become too subservient to mega-corportations and that that’s creating a decline in equality which is driving far right ideology worldwide.[0]

I’m pretty far into stuff that I wasn’t initially trying to comment on though. My point is that the US political system is broken, and blaming people who are disenfranchised at that isn’t an effective strategy for changing things.

[0] https://www.noisnotenough.org/

I’m 100% not equating Biden with Trump. I’m not trying to deny the comolete horror Trump is afflicting of US and non-US citizens right now.

I’m just saying, he’s a symptom of a broken system. America will only come out of this situation if it recognises that it needs to make real and lasting change.

The non voters might not help, but they’re at least acknowledging this reality. And putting them in the same camp as literal facists is not helping anyone.

I totally feel this frustration, and I’m not US so it’s kinda not my business, but I don’t buy this argument.

Trump America is a horror show, for sure. But the status quo before Trump is also the foundations that allowed America to become a new facist state. Any real solutions need to be bigger than what middle of the road Democrats are offering.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vote against Trump. But the system is clearly broken, stop blaming victims of it, and start blaming its perpetrators.

Shame the action this is promoting has ended now- this is hilarious and surprisingly professional.

Serious people have some other cool stuff too if anyone’s interested: https://www.seriouspeople.co/

The majority of European countries are still moving in the right direction, albeit far too slowly. It’s mainly just the US that’s abandoning any attempt towards sustainability.

I’d disagree. Even from a pretty neoliberal kind of economics, fast fasion doesn’t factor environmental “externalities” (i.e. the cost doesn’t include environmental destruction) so it’s massively undepriced, which artificially punps up demand for fast fashion.

In other words, the issue is caused by the way the system is set up. I.e. it’s a systemic issue.

I guess what I mean is, renewable doesn’t need tibe 100% all the time to lead to that case. The UK is about 50% renewable overall, but if it’s sunny and windy (or windy and nobody is using electricity) then that ratio jumps over 90% fast.

I think I’m just geeking out on electricity though, not making a meaningful point.

I guess the pitch is that stuff like making concrete and steel generate crazy loads of carbon, so capturing it at source in theory sounds viable and pretty effective?

That “in theory” is doing a bunch of heavy lifting though, because so far climate capture hasn’t achieved anything other than being an excuse not to actually do anything about CO2 emmisions because “maybe some magic technology in 5 years will solve everything for us”

Agree! I don’t know why other people don’t get how convenient it is to have a distinct character for every single number imaginable.

Okay, so you switch to solar/wind/nuclear or some other semi CO2 free source. Now you take CO2 free energy away from someone that now will have to use co2 generating energy instead.

Not sure if this makes climate capture any less baloney, but energy, especially renewables isn’t a 0 sum thing. A country with good renewables often generates more elecricity then it can handle and there’s a negative price for electricity at those times.

If you can choose when you use elecricity, you definitely aren’t forcing someone else to use CO2 intensive energy.

I don’t think that makes a big change to your overall point, but it’s an interesting feature of renewable energy so I figured it was worth saying.

Yeah I can’t help but think this. I’m in the UK and 5 years-ish ago I bought an ICE, I couldn’t really afford an EV at the rime, but a big part of my thinking was that I didn’t expect the conservative government to do much to support the transition.

EVs require new infrastructure, and people need to trust that’s gonna be built.

Based on me reading wikipedia, in Hoover’s fairness, Smoot-Hawley was mainly a congress led thing and he mainly rubber stamped it. He also introduced stimulus to help industries that he wanted to up their output.

Trump isn’t doing anything stimulus-wise (if anything the opposite by introducing huge government cuts) to aid the new manufacturing processes he’s assuming will spring up overnight, and he also seems to be the mastermind behind rebranding the US as tariff-land.

I don’t know what my point is, that Trump’s policies are a lot worse than Hoover’s? I doubt anyone needed me to reach that conclusion to be fair.

Trump crashes the US economy and deters consimer goods, especially oil. Alternative conspiracy that he’s really an environmentalist? /s

Many observers see the law as the last hope for preventing climate change

I get what this is saying, but I really dislike so much about this kind of framing, which makes up the whole article.

There is no “preventing climate change” - the climate has already changed. Whenever we talk of it in win/lose terms it quickly becomes a “we’re fucked, give up” narrative that only benefits polluters. Like almost everyone, I value human life, and the life of and in the ecosytem we inhabit. Anything that progresses that is a win for me, even if it’s the small win of “thanks to x, less deforestation happened that would have otherwise happened”.

Which is a long way of saying, climate change is a scale, and we should be trying to minimise it as much as possible.

I also really don’t like the idea of thinking of law as “the last hope” because other options haven’t been a silver bullet. No one thing achieved abolition, or civil right, or the woman’s lib movement, just a whole bunch of motivated people doing what they could, when they saw opportunity too.

If there is a silver bullet, it’s just this: value the climate. Do whatever you can to protect it wheb you get a chance. Maybe that’s law, maybe that’s protest. Every person who does something moves the needle further towards what they value.

As a rule of thumb, I feel like replacing things as I normally would, but making sure I replace them with the most environmentally friendly option is the only thing that’s financially sustainable.

Change needs to happen at scale, not from one person suddenly buying a new car, cooker, heater, fireplace all in one go. That said, if your replacing a cooker, choosing an induction hob is an absolute no brainer.

As an aside:

If your dryer runs on gas, consider air-drying your clothes.

What? I’m in the UK and a gas fuel clothes dryer sounds absolutely mental. Have I missed something?

Yes!

1. You can obviously get rid of it and board it up, but even with no fire, you can make a feature of it if you tile it nicely.

2. Other fireplaces exist such as artificial electric ones, log fires and biofuel ones. Those all have their own emissions and benefits.

I live in the UK and did 1 a while back, we have candles in the space and a nice wooden mantelpiece. One thing I didn’t expect is how much warmer the house now is. We obviously can’t turn a fire on for heat, but when it’s not on, not having heat pouring out the chimney makes a big difference.

I think a nuclear future is definitely greener than our gas, oil and coal based present. But wouldn’t a renewable energy future be much, much better than either?

I’ve heard the argument that nuclear can provide a consistent base, which I suppose is true. But you need a way to flex the remaining renewables you have still, since nuclear can’t turn up and down as easily as fossil fuels. Which to me says, nuclear + renewables requires the energy-flexing mechanisms that would also make pure renewable possible.

So my take is, I think it might help reduce warming somewhat, but really we should be aiming for 100% renewables.

I definitely get where you’re coming from, but I think population reduction comes naturally from things like abortion rights, good family planning provisions, and a lack of poverty. Countries with those things are seeing a decline in population without making having children into a moral issue.

Extra point is that, although the population is up, the amount of meat eaten is waaay up. Just looking at that one issue, we can solve over fishing pretty easily without requiring any change to the current population numbers.

Labor have banned new north sea oil projects[1], combined with inland fracking being a non-starter this means no new oil projects in the UK.

If you’re looking for good labour climate policy, clean power 2030 is probably their flagship, they also announced a new national forest the other day, plus upped our international climate commitments at COP. Far from perfect, but easily a step up from the conservatives.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gd1q9ejqdo