An important read, I think, to start really thinking about aesthetics vs practicality in politics

Assorted excerpts, semi out of context

a handful of my own summary thoughts:

This author / journo is relatively unusual in that he is an environmentalist who is also a techno optimist, or a futurist, rather than the much more common Retvrn To TradLife sort of environmentalist.

He does have a book, Regenesis, which is pretty widely hated among a lot of "sustainable local farming" enviro-types for this specific reason:

huh.

data up until 2016; it might've gotten worse since then

huh!

just learned about something incredibly wonderful

Overseas folks can sign this! Please consider sharing and/or signing!

If they keep this shit up they're gonna have to scrape "the garden of England" off of all the signs

Ok so genuinely this is a problem in the modern world.

I work at a university as classroom technology support, and this past semester there was a debate in a business class about the oil industry and climate change. Several of the students simply said “Well, I don’t care about all that ‘nature’ stuff. We don’t live there. It doesn’t serve mankind. I have a fiduciary duty to my shareholders, my customers, and my employees, not to some endangered owl or whatever.”

And as the semester went on I realized that this was a common attitude. These people think of Humanity as wholely separate from the environment. There is Nature and Man. They literally do not understand that we are dependent upon the environment, and seem to think that climate change is a “nature” problem. That even if every wild thing goes extinct that humans will somehow be fine, that agriculture will just keep trucking on. Sure maybe some “primitive” people will die but whatever.

Thankfully there were other students who were as appalled and confused by this assertation as I was. But it still seemed to be a *majority* opinion. People *do not understand* that we live *in* the environment. That we depend on it just as much as “some endangered owl or whatever.” And what hurts that owl *eventually hurts us*.

One of the worst parts about unprincipled Western "environmentalism" is how it often dovetails with outright anti-intellectual and Luddite fearmongering about technology and development, which is how you get shit like people freaking out about GMOs mutating them or "unpronouncable ingredients" or treating "buying local" as some sort of talismanically good way of consumption. It's actually cool we have electricity and centralized production and drought-resistant crops and shit, what's not cool is the commodification and unsustainable growth of those things under capitalism and their unequal division between the imperial core and periphery.

This is also how you end up with purely vibes-based understandings of what a sustainable future could look like like degrowth solarpunk communes where people cook homegrown insulin in their bathtubs or whatever.

Production could stand to be a little more decentralized but mostly in the sense that the majority of the things a community needs shouldnt have to be manufactured on the other side of the planet. That reliance on the global market economy of international logistics and shipping on heavily polluting wasteful cargoships could stand to scale back quite a bit. Not in the sense of amateurs with limited resources attempting to make everything on their own while likely not having sufficient experience to do it properly and likely not following product safety standards. Making insulin in your bathtub is an act of desperation in terrible times it certainly isnt something to aspire towards. Every town being able to fully meet its needs as an entirely self sufficient autarky would actually be so enviornmentally destructive from all the redundant small scale industry neighboring eachother that you could just amalgamate together into less harmful more efficient medium sized factories with access to pooled regional resources. DIY backyard production mostly makes sense in the context of the now rather than a hypothetical future moment you absolutely cant depend on the existing social order to always be there for you. In light of the possibility of war taking action to accumulate as much resources as possible and build strong networks of communities which can provide for their members is a smart course of action at a time when centralized production could represent an easy target.

I will say that said ideology OP describes is basically one of my major beefs with the Degrowth Movement as a movement.

And like, it probably doesn't help that my introduction to degrowth was resilience.org, which loves the shit out of the sort of degrowth that produces problems like infectedwithnyanites brought up.

Energy company has got some sass

Duke Energy Fined $102 million for Polluting Rivers with Coal Ash

This is the best summary of the corporate deflection of blame for environmental destruction onto the consumer to save face I’ve ever seen

I mean we still shouldn’t litter, because it breaks down and ends up everywhere. And it choaks wildlife.

But we sure as hell should be going after big companies who do this. And make them pay for the environmental clean up costs, and then fined on top. Which should also be for cleaning up our nature.

Try "in a blow to people who breathe air" next time.

i need y'all to get that headlines about climate change are supposed to spur people to action, and scientists sound the alarm because humanity still CAN do something, not because it's inevitable and Literally Everyone Will Die

Do NOT let people let you forget that our world is still as habitable as it is today because of the work of scientists and activists of the past, that things would be MUCH WORSE now if people hadn't acted.

Remember the ozone hole? Remember that? You haven't heard about that in a little bit huh? THAT'S BECAUSE WE FIXED THE PROBLEM. If no one had done anything, there would be holes in the ozone layer all over the place and we would be slowly irradiated by the sun. THE EARTH WOULD HAVE BEEN UNINHABITABLE BY MIDCENTURY.

Every time you repeat the line that "Unless we end capitalism worldwide, there's literally nothing we can do to help climate change!" the people that devoted their lives to saving species that would be gone now, preserving habitat that would be obliterated now, and fixing problems that would have been well along the way to making us extinct by now beam psychic rays of contempt in your direction

There are REAL REASONS to have hope!

New species are being discovered all the time. Scientists and conservationists and volunteers all over the world are making real differences in saving endangered species. Within the last decade of my life, I have seen native bird species return to urban areas where they haven’t been sighted for half a century. There is so much worth saving, so much worth fighting for, and we CAN save it!

absolutely hate when people say bonfires are bad for the environment. people have been burning shit forever. what we haven’t been doing forever is hyperconsumerism and flying in planes and having billionaires own 500 yachts

There’s this insidious propaganda that is pushed to us that all resource use is equivalent and we all have an equal share of the blame

This only helps those who are actually to blame

Not to be part of the microwave energy fandom (SBSA) but a huge reason photovoltaic cells are like THE form of green energy given the most attention is down to their marketability to the layperson. Getting people to buy inefficient options to bolt to their roof instead of investing in more serious forms of green energy production. (Such as solar towers, and SBSA) 

And this doesn’t just apply to solar. Hydroelectric dams have become unfashionable to discuss due to waterway disruption, but almost no attention is given to modern alternatives such as tidal or (in my opinion the much better) wave based power systems.

When was the last time you heard about carbon neutral biomass generators or developments in hydrogen power?     

Don’t even get me started on how nuclear STILL exists in the public mind a some sort of ultra-polluting catastrophe when it literally produces less radioactive waste than coal* (proportional to megawatt production) and has had massive improvements in safety.

*I bring this up because many people don’t know that coal ash is radioactive. 

tl;dr the amount of positive press green energy solutions are given is directly related to their consumer market potential - starting with PV and with wind trailing behind only due to bulk. 

So it doesn't derail the climate change post, it is important to understand that the loss of fireflies is also due to fertilizers and other agricultural changes to soil chemistry, including the collective effect of lawn treatments.

This is in turn because all of those things affect snail populations, and most firefly species people are familiar with feed on snails almost exclusively.

it frustrates me how much climate change is sort of treated as the main or even only reason for environmental problems

development, pollution, mismanagement, stuff like that all cause serious environmental devastation separate from climate change (as well as contributing to it but anyway) but are also much easier for everyday people to meaningfully address than climate change

There is a stunningly large amount of research finding that indigenous land management techniques are more environmentally efficient than colonial techniques, even across a wide variety of circumstances and among different indigenous societies. Returning Native land is a policy that can be assumed to almost automatically benefit the environment

Man remember acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer?

I think about this a lot in the context of the current environmental moment and I guess the distinction between those issues and climate change is the lag – if you start doing the stuff that leads to acid rain or holes in the ozone layer, the problem arises pretty quickly, and if you stop, it stops pretty quickly, and the tight feedback loop makes it a little easier to handle as seen in the recent case where the ozone hole reopened due to China’s use of CFCs. Global warming is harder because it takes, like, 150 years of Doing the Thing before it has a noticeable effect, and so it may take 150 years of not doing it in order to return to normal, which makes the political problem tougher to handle. You can compare it I guess to stuff like heavy metal poisoning vs. poisoning with something that just straight up kills people immediately.

Re: acid rain and ozone layer, I find myself asking if these were real crises that we solved, or fake crises that mostly took care of themselves.

Compare urban air quality (a real problem, mostly solved) to the stuff in *Silent Spring* (mostly fake, “solved” by banning a bunch of useful stuff).

Both acid rain and the ozone layer were fixed by regulation (filtration of air pollution on the one hand, banning CFCs on the other), and without those factors they would have gotten worse, so they definitely didn’t take care of themselves; it was essentially the same outcome as the Silent Spring case. If the question is “were these crises severe enough to warrant this level of intervention”, I’d say “definitely yes” but I guess there’s always grounds to disagree. The Silent Spring crisis also seemed warranted, to me.

But part of this means recognizing that “banning useful stuff” is not, like, an abnormal outcome of a sustainability initiative, in that lots of useful stuff actually does cause severe health or environmental problems. In many cases, like with plastics and CFCs, the property that makes the thing useful is the same one that causes the crisis! Weighing those tradeoffs is the basic task of environmental and technological management. Sometimes the present use outweighs the future cost, but certainly not always; if we didn’t engage in this sort of process at all we’d all still be using lead pigments for everything.

PFOA and related chemicals are a good example of an ongoing issue that is tiny compared with carbon dioxide emissions but still very significant if it’s in your water supply or whatever.

Part of Nature by Stuart McMillen

People really do use that “100 companies cause 71% of emissions” and think that that apparently means that 71% of emissions could be eliminated without changing naything about our habits of consumption and how we engage with the world around us on a material basis.

the whole point of that argument is to highlight how large companies, who are by are far responsible for this crisis (need i remind you these oil companies knew about the climate impact they would have and chose to bury the evidence so they could go ahead) have shifted the blame onto the individual. while i do get the point that you’re trying to make this has the uncomfortable tone of victim blaming, because you haven’t acknowledged the socioeconomic factors behind this.

firstly, that our society is designed around necessary consumption. if you want to go anywhere in the majority of america then you absolutely have to drive, cities are spaced out and stores and job sites are sectioned off from housing. most of the country basically has no intercity public transportation. it was the big companies who made it that way, not consumers. it was big companies who chose the least safe environmental processes possible to save money, not the consumer. most importantly, if you think the consumer can vastly shape the market through targeted consumption than that’s a capitalist propaganda my dude!!

when the majority of americans cannot afford a $400 dollar emergency how they hell are they supposed to shift into expensive, often impractical, clean energy solutions? it’s not a market shift that will fix this, it’s a systematic one, and it won’t happen overnight. nobody is seriously arguing that climate change will be fixed by getting rid of those companies, they’re arguing that hey maybe we should stop those environmentally harmful processes and undergo fundamental change so that we can save our future. yes, that means charges to the way we live. yes, that may mean giving up a number of modern luxuries for the time being, and for reasons that i already mentioned the process must be deliberate. it won’t happen overnight. the problem with your argument is that it’s disingenuous in making a valid point, you’re arguing against a straw man that doesn’t exist to make a snarky point to people that already agree with you. that being said i fundamentally agree with your conclusion just not the argument. keep fighting the good fight comrade.

(btw i chose america for this example because it’s one of the biggest climate offenders, i’m familiar with it, and it has somewhat unique strategic challenges that point to the wider problem)

There’s also the fact that demand-side economics hasn’t been a thing for a very, very long time (roughly since the 70s). As soon as it became feasible for companies to overproduce without suffering noticeable losses, that’s exactly what they started doing.

Again, as others have noted, individual action is beneficial, but let’s not pretend like 1) everyone can afford to do it on the same level, 2) everyone’s individual habits impact the environment the same way (the fact that the poor, ie the vast majority of people on earth, are masters at not wasting anything, reusing everything, and plastic items in particular, and budgeting the use of such things as fuel or air conditioning, is meaningless compared to the fact that the rich have a habit of doing such things as taking a plane from one airport to another airport to avoid riad traffic), and 3) that it would change things faster than regulating the actual sources of pollution.

I know there are people who use the fact that there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism as an excuse to do nothing, but statistics show that they are, in fact, in the minority, and that most of us are juat trying to fucking survive with what resources we have access to, and don’t deserve this victim-blaming moralising bullshit.