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pilgrim76

@pilgrim76@toot.io

Physician, lover of books, aspirational eater of the rich and supporter of those who do. My dreams are of monkey wrenches formidable enough to sabotage the global industrial machine. Born at CO2 332 ppm.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

breadandcircuses , to random
@breadandcircuses@climatejustice.social avatar

As I said, capitalism must go.

Individual actions such as driving less or buying less are good and necessary, but they are not sufficient.

The real change we need to make is SYSTEM CHANGE.

The head of the world's largest energy company on Monday urged the world to accept the "hard realities" that oil and natural gas will be around for a long time to come, and consumption of both sources of energy is likely to grow for at least the next decade or two.

In a speech at a Houston energy conference, Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser described the ambitious timetables of environmental groups as failing because the world continues to consume record amounts of fossil fuels every year.

"We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately reflecting realistic demand assumptions," he said.

Oil consumption will reach a new record of 104 million barrels per day this year, Nasser said, and could keep growing through 2045.

FULL STORY -- https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/bakx-ceraweek-saudi-aramco-exxon-1.7147290

pilgrim76 ,
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@breadandcircuses there's that old dorothy parker quote: "If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."

a good corollary is, if you want to know what kind of system capitalism is, just look at the sociopaths it elevates to power. is there any other system of human self-organization that so reliably seats absolute ghouls at the top of its hierarchy?

breadandcircuses , to random
@breadandcircuses@climatejustice.social avatar

I think you might enjoy this angry and sometimes funny rant from Geoffrey Deihl (aka Sane Thinker, @gdeihl).

Here is how it concludes...

As we race forward in panic with 'renewable' energy whose creation depends on copious amounts of fossil fuels and trillions of gallons of water use in an increasingly drought-stricken world, why aren’t we addressing the fundamentals?

Why do we need thousands of server farms AND to drive to the office?

Why isn’t planned obsolescence outlawed? Why aren’t manufacturers required to take back and refurbish their worn-out products?

Why don’t we go back to a six-day business week? That was standard when I was a kid. Everything closed. Almost everyone took the day off. We went to church, had picnics, and hung out together. It was good for us and good for the planet. High technology not needed.

Apparently, we can’t see the forest for those monoculture trees.

We met our basic needs long ago. Food, water, heat, shelter. We may not remember that now, but we will soon. We’re heading for a world with less energy available, not more, and renewables mean further destruction to the environment and species loss akin to what oil has done, just differently.

We must acknowledge the planet is finite and change our values and expectations. We can either do that with a realistic plan, or the planet has a plan for us.

The more appealing plan is called Degrowth.

FULL ESSAY -- https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/its-not-a-nice-day

pilgrim76 ,
@pilgrim76@toot.io avatar

@Alexlee @breadandcircuses @gdeihl it's troubling how "sustainability" has come to mean "improbable or impossible discovery of limitless sources of energy or resources in order to meet humanity's escalating, physically impossible, increasingly frivolous demands." supply should be the variable on which demand depends. the other way around is just magical thinking.

breadandcircuses , to random
@breadandcircuses@climatejustice.social avatar

It's all around us, everywhere we go, everywhere we look. Many people might assume that it's always been like this. But it hasn't.

Plastic is truly everywhere. In just a few decades, it’s become an inescapable part of modern life, permeating nearly every aspect of our lives, from the food we eat (usually wrapped and bagged in plastic and often containing it) to the clothes we wear (60% of which are made from plastic) to the microplastics hiding just about everywhere, from clouds to human placentas to the Earth’s most remote corners.

“Plastic packaging is definitely a major source of plastic pollution, and it can seem totally overwhelming to folks when they go out to get food, especially since the great majority of our food is wrapped in plastic,” says Erica Cirino of the Plastic Pollution Coalition. “It’s estimated that more than 40% of all plastic produced is single-use plastic packaging, which is an astounding amount.”

Before the advent of plastic packaging, food was packed in a variety of materials, from natural substances such as gourds and leaves to, most recently, glass bottles and jars, metal cans and paper products. Today, plastic encases a large and growing percentage of our food: A recent survey of Canadian grocery stores found that 71% of all produce was packaged in plastic, and that baby food had the highest share of plastic packaging at 76%.

There are a few reasons why so much of our food is packaged in plastic. Perhaps most importantly, it’s cheaper to manufacture and transport than alternatives. And as the world grapples with an urgent energy transition, fossil fuel companies jittery about the prospect of decreasing demand for oil are looking to plastics as their next major profit driver — and are on track to triple global plastic production by 2060.

Read the rest of the article to get the whole story, including the huge amounts of plastic waste we're producing, and the myth of plastic recycling.

FULL ARTICLE -- https://modernfarmer.com/2024/03/foods-big-plastic-problem/

pilgrim76 ,
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@breadandcircuses "Many people might assume that it's always been like this. But it hasn't."

this is the story of our era. things - mostly petroleum and petroleum products, but not entirely - we lived without for eons becoming almost foundational to our way of life within the span of a human generation or two, such that we've forgotten it was ever any other way. it's no wonder we've blundered our way into the disasterous cul-de-sac in which we now find ourselves. we had no time to think.

breadandcircuses , to random
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Today I want to take an extended four-part look at a compelling article published in 2021 titled “What Might an Ecosocialist Society Look Like?” The issues raised then are clearly still relevant today, probably even more now than they were three years ago.

We’ll begin with a statement about the magnitude of the problems we face…

The threat to life on Earth posed by the climate and ecological crises can hardly be overstated. A 2019 Nature article warned that up to a million species of plants and animals are on the verge of extinction, and a United Nations study the same year identified global warming as a major driver of wildlife decline. Much of the devastation to date was catalogued in the 2020 WWF Living Planet report, which recorded a 68% decline in the population of vertebrates around the world in just the past five decades. More succinctly, scientists report that Earth is currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction.

The scale of the environmental crisis is unprecedented in human history. At stake are human civilization and billions of lives. An article last year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicted that for every additional 1°C rise beyond the 2019 global average, a billion people will be forced to abandon their locations or endure insufferable heat. The paper warns that under a scenario of increasing emissions, within 50 years areas now home to a third of the world’s population could experience the same temperatures as the hottest parts of the Sahara.

Summing up the findings of some 150 scientific studies, a 2021 paper authored by 17 scientists warned that the “scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its life forms – including humanity – is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp even for well-informed experts.” Adding further urgency, 101 Nobel laureates released an open letter in April 2021 in which they wrote, “We are seized by the great moral issue of our time: the climate crisis and commensurate destruction of nature.” The laureates called for a worldwide fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty.

We'll have more soon from this important article.

READ THE WHOLE THING -- https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-09-29/what-might-an-ecosocialist-society-look-like/

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #Degrowth

pilgrim76 ,
@pilgrim76@toot.io avatar

@breadandcircuses thanks for sharing... the amount of human energy directed towards activities that are either useless or destructive is perhaps the greatest tragedy of our time. it's not just that we're living in hell, we're actively creating it. it's not and has never been necessary! i still (naively, probably) hold out hope that we will awaken to this absurdity and find creative and restorative uses for all that energy in time.

breadandcircuses , to random
@breadandcircuses@climatejustice.social avatar

Imagine a world where you work three or four days a week. In your free time, you play sports, spend time with loved ones, garden, and engage with local politics.

Overnight shipping, advertising, and private jets no longer exist, but health care, education, and clean electricity are free and available to all.

“The Growing Popularity of Degrowth”

See -- https://grist.org/looking-forward/the-growing-popularity-of-degrowth/

pilgrim76 ,
@pilgrim76@toot.io avatar

@breadandcircuses one of the greatest perversions of our time is the extent to which people have been convinced that things that are meaningless, or trivial, or utterly unimportant, are in fact things we simply cannot do without, while all that is vital to robust, thriving life, both human and non-human, is inconsequential and disposable. The cognitive dissonance is too much to bear sometimes

breadandcircuses , to random
@breadandcircuses@climatejustice.social avatar

This is from the chapter by Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) in "The Climate Book" --

Degrowth calls for a planned reduction of excess resource and energy use in high-income nations to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a just and equitable way.

What does this look like in practice? Instead of assuming that every sector of the economy must grow all the time, regardless of whether or not we actually need it, we should decide which sectors of the economy we actually need to improve (for example renewable energy, public transportation, and healthcare) and which sectors are clearly destructive and should be scaled down (SUVs, air travel, fast fashion, industrial beef, advertising, finance, the practice of planned obsolescence, the military industrial complex, and so on).

There are huge chunks of the economy that are organized mostly around corporate power and elite consumption, and we would all be better off without them.

Jason Hickel video -- https://inv.n8pjl.ca/watch?v=HckWP75yk9g

Get "The Climate Book" by Greta Thunberg -- https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/709837/the-climate-book-by-greta-thunberg/

Get "Less is More" by Jason Hickel -- https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more

pilgrim76 ,
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@breadandcircuses @jasonhickel the economy would look radically different if we just bothered to earnestly ask of it, "What is this for?" I don't imagine that most people would say that the economy's purpose is to destroy the planet in service of shoveling money into the maws of the already super-wealthy, but that seems to be its primary function

pilgrim76 ,
@pilgrim76@toot.io avatar

@breadandcircuses indeed, with capitalism the question cannot be asked because the whole thing falls apart as the malign fantasy it is with the merest scrutiny. it's so agonizing that our dystopia is built on a foundation of something so absurd and unnecessary. it doesn't have to be this way

breadandcircuses , to random
@breadandcircuses@climatejustice.social avatar

Despite what apologists for capitalism (some even here on Mastodon!) would have you believe, it is possible for humans to live comfortably and sustainably within a system that does not rely on deception, oppression, and exploitation.

It’s so important to remember that capitalism is an extremely recent invention. For almost all of humanity's 200,000+ years of existence, we got along just fine without it, living mostly in harmony with our surroundings.

Our only hope at this point is to get rid of the system that is literally killing us. It’s a matter of survival not only for humans but for countless other animal and plant species being sacrificed on the altar of maximum profits and infinite growth.

Here is an article that suggests a better way forward — https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-10-03/til-sustainability-do-you-part-arranging-a-marriage-between-degrowth-and-the-circular-economy/

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateJustice #Capitalism #Socialism #Degrowth

pilgrim76 ,
@pilgrim76@toot.io avatar

@breadandcircuses that capitalism has managed to convince a substantial portion of the population that it is The Only Way despite it being the most damaging, degrading system within which humans have ever lived is one of the most dispiriting propaganda feats of all time

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