feel free to share the truth...

The media reports on a fire as an isolated incident. They will never say this is one of many fires that will burn all summer long because climate has changed, and our health will be affected from now on.

Putting the blame on capitalism and capitalists is very tough for media owned by billionaire capitalists.

Twilight fans: Haha the cast HATES twilight that's hilarious

POC (especially Natives): we hate it too

Twilight fans: hey :(

Granted, I never read Twilight but...is this referencing some racism in Twilight or is there something I'm missing here?

Twilight literally caused so many myths & misconceptions about Native & Quileute people that the Quileute tribe had to put up an entire site dispelling the shit Stephanie Meyer caused. I literally cannot begin to explain how insanely racist twilight is as a series with the number of bullshit that happens to not just the Native characters, but other characters of color (but Stephanie Meyer targeted Native Americans specifically)

Here's the site so you can research the specific ways Twilight has harmed Native Americans & specifically the Quileute tribe.

Or you can look at my #Twilight anger on main tag to see me talk about how bad it is.

The Quileute tribe is currently attempting to relocate their community outside of the active tsunami zone they currently reside in and have an ongoing fundraiser. First thing they are trying to move is their school, which teaches kids from multiple tribes in the area. They have had no support from anyone involved in Twilight, not even the funny cast who hates it. I know times are tough, but anything helps.

Hey. Americans. Easterners.

https://acf.org/resources-deregulation-darling58/

Go ask for Darling 58 to be deregulated so it can be sold and grown freely across the east

We can finally save the American Chestnut tree and revitalize the eastern woodland ecosystem

For context, the American Chestnut used to be a giant in the woods; 25% of eastern woodland trees were chestnuts. Then the blight arrived and killed them all; only the roots survived, and the sprouts the pop up can't grow big enough to produce new trees. The species has been dying ever since.

But we can bring it back! Finally!

This is not a Chinese chestnut crossbreed. This is a 100% pure American Chestnut with the tiny little addition of a gene from wheat which makes the chestnut blight harmless to them! An incredible feat!

If the chestnut is deregulated, we can plant it in yards, landscapes, etc. and it can be cross-pollinated with any surviving trees in the wild. We can return them to the forests. We've been missing them for decades.

This page contains some information as well as a link to a page where the USDA is accepting PUBLIC FEEDBACK. There aren't even 4000 comments. It's for PUBLIC FEEDBACK. THEY WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU. We can do better than four thousand measly comments.

It would mean so much to the world to return this tree to the woods. They were an extraordinary source of food for wildlife and humans, they cast shade over the woods and varied the canopy, their timber was naturally rot-resistant and led to long-lasting buildings. They provided shelter from storms. They were absolutely gigantic. And now, we could have that be present tense instead of past.

Science can bring this marvel back. Go write a comment and ask for Darling 58 to be deregulated. You don't need to know fancy terminology; just say that.

Thank you.

"These trees are the Pacific Northwest’s iconic western redcedars (Thuja plicata). 

To many Indigenous peoples, who used the trees for houses, clothes, weapons, tools, medicines, art and canoes, they’re known as the Tree of Life."

"The government report cites previous research showing that by the end of this century the western redcedar’s range is likely to disappear at lower elevations west of the Cascades and will disappear almost entirely from eastern Washington, shifting north and eastward into the Rockies in Montana and Canada."

"Western redcedars, which aren’t as good as many other trees at slowing water loss during warm and dry conditions, seem to be especially vulnerable to droughts, and the researchers’ findings point in that direction. 

The major climate event impacting the trees, say the researchers, has been the drought. 

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, which is cited in the report, both Oregon and Washington have been in some form of drought since the start of this century.

To be sure, the two-decade period included both wet and dry periods.

But lack of precipitation alone doesn’t define a drought. Which is why the monitor, and scientists generally, use more complicated metrics that track factors such as soil moisture as well as heat and drought stress on plants, all of which are affected by warm temperatures.

Temperatures over the two-decade period were warm, trending higher than previous decades—leading to dry soils and stressed plants. Buhl says this longer trend helps explain what’s happening to western redcedars."

Source:

these ones

oh we can get even more specific than just a list of billionaires:

here are all of the scum who control oil, coal, and natural gas

here are the ones who run the factories

and here are the ones who extract the raw resources that the others need to make it all work

23,000 people are reblogging a hit list

Good.

355,296 people are reblogging a hit list

<3

being aware of the impact of things we can often not think about (like straws) is important if we’re to make strides on environmental preservation 

that does not eclipse the importance of being aware of how it impacts disabled people. they’re both conversations we need to have

and on top of this ableism, banning plastic straws won’t do shit for the environment because straws aren’t even close to being the main cause of plastics pollution. Calling for a ban on straws is the same bs of shifting the blame of pollution onto the general public when its massive corporations, businesses and governments as a result of capitalism that is to blame. Disabled people shouldn’t have to be thrown under the bus so you can feel better about the environment without having to do actually do anything of worth.

"... “I’m taking action because I feel desperate,” said U.S. climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who along with several others locked himself to the front door of a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles. A recent report found that the financial giant is the biggest private funder of oil and gas initiatives in the world.

“It’s the 11th hour in terms of Earth breakdown, and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity,” Kalmus continued. “World leaders are still expanding the fossil fuel industry as fast as they can, but this is insane. The science clearly indicates that everything we hold dear is at risk, including even civilization itself and the wonderful, beautiful, cosmically precious life on this planet. I actually don’t get how any scientist who understands this could possibly stay on the sidelines at this point.” ..."

i mean it, USAmericans don’t get it. climate change activism there is always “in 30 years, things will be so bad”. you don’t get it. you do not get it. it’s already bad. the sea levels rising has already affected islands and coastal regions, it’s just not affecting you. it’s already an issue. farms are already being flooded by salt water. land is already becoming smaller. sea walls are already being built. in arid places, droughts are already threatening supplies. water resources are being reserved. fires are destroying biodiversity and wreaking absolute havoc on the ecosystem, the land, the air…

it is already a crisis.

this is why i get so mad at climate change activists from the americas and from europe who only talk about their own countries. it’s not like its hard on my country either: but i’m seeing it. i’m seeing the people who are moving countries because there’s not enough land anymore - not enough farming so not enough resources. i’m seeing how kids have been taught how to use water wisely for the last decade or two. i’m seeing the devastation, the loss, the beaches slowly shrinking even where i live.

it is already a crisis.

Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?

Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?

So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.

So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.

There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.

Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.

See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:

So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.

Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.

Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.

Graphics cards! 

Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.

Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.

So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage. 

OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.

Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.

But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.

Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.

Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to  (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.

What a waste.

was anyone gonna tell me that some nerds peepee poopoo “currency” is the reason why graphics cards are sold out everywhere or was i supposed to find that out from comments under a screenshot from twitter user whoreganic cop puncher explaining how bitcoin is just an artificially complicated math problem

Also I’ve read be very wary about buying used graphic cards cause there’s a chance it’s one that’s mostly heavily used from one of these bastards. These thing are very heavily used so a used one sold by one of these guys would be on its last leg of life from being on 24/7

Make sure there’s a return policy just be very careful if you’re buying used.

To be more fair than Crypto miners deserve, they’re only one of the factors driving the current chip shortage.

The other issues are both related to the pandemic. The first one is that manufacturing of a many things, especially cars, slowed down quite a bit until recently when the factories reopened. But so many reopened at the same time and went full blast that the demand far outstripped the supply, a supply already reduced by the shutdown of those factories.

The other bottleneck is literal mining. Computer chips rely on silicon and various metals, especially gold and copper to conduct electricity to do their work. In normal times this means that crypto’s environmental impact is even higher than just the energy requirements. But in the meantime the mines and refineries that provide the raw materials were also shut down in many cases due to the pandemic, squeezing the supply further.

Mining shutdowns have also caused a huge shortage of ammunition in the US (brass bullet casings need copper). Which means for anybody wanting to buy consumer electronics of a reasonable complexity you’re competing against both ends of the libertarian spectrum, the crypto techies and the gun nuts.

Really glad someone brought this home to actual mining, and I want to show you what the mines look like:

These are silica mines, necessary for making ALL things requiring silicon, among other things.

These are rare-earth mineral mines.

Both are required for the manufacture of computer technologies. Both requre excavating huge amounts of earth, decimating all life in that area and more often than not, ruining land that is supposed to be stewarded by indigenous people.

They’re very, very bad for the environment.

This is where the ‘online’ world comes from. It’s not another place. Every transaction, every pixel comes from the ground.

So yeah, crypto mining is definitely deceptive. That ‘value’ isn’t coming from nowhere. It’s ripped from the earth.

Just picture it. Imagine what all this computing power could be used for. The energy expense of a 45 million inhabitants country spent on chip board heat. Imagine the scientific calculations. Picture a world where all this computing power goes into solving poverty and resource allocation. Imagine a world where profit doesn’t come first.

Listen. Listen. Most of you have likely never tasted genuine soy sauce as it has historically been made. The vast majority of the entire world population has never actually tasted soy sauce. Because soy sauce takes years of fermentation in a giant custom made squeezable barrel and there's only a very few remaining people who make traditional soy sauce. Only one single company atm afaik makes the special barrels anymore that are required to do it. They make them by order.

Like, can you fucking imagine what a loss it would be if just a single person stopped doing this? If that singular company simply no longer makes the barrel. If those sporadic soy makers moved on or lost their business. Can you even begin to imagine? You can't. There is an entire taste that you have never experienced for yourself because it is dying. And one day it will die and you will never taste it and neither will anyone else ever again.

Saffron crocuses are dying because of climate change. Because of the rising temperatures and drier climates in Iran, the crocuses aren't growing as well, and of course by harvesting the saffron stamens, that prevents the crocuses from being able to go to seed. The balance of this incredibly important historic ingredient is being undone out of circumstances beyond the crocus farmers' control. One day there is a very real chance that a staple ingredient in food across the entirety of the Middle East will no longer exist. No more shirini keshmeshi; no more yakhni pulao; no more mandi djaj. An entire taste will be erased from the world, and all these foods, all these proofs of humanity, of the connections we have with our past and our ancestors, it will be severed as simply as if by a cutting knife.

How can I even begin to cope with the depths of that grief? How do you live with the knowledge that these things could very likely die in your lifetime? That you could witness the atrophying of entire swathes of history and culture happen in realtime, because of greed, because of callous uncaring for others?

How can I explain to anyone why every time I cook with saffron it feels as if I am saying goodbye to someone I love, for the ones who will come after me? Where do I begin to describe to the children who come next the food that our ancestors have eaten for countless generations will never exist for them in the way they were intended to be?

How do I understand my grief when it is based in the knowledge that eventually, it would be impossible to understand?