No, but it will increase the fraction of total global capital that is owned by the shareholders, and isn’t that what really matters?

So what you want is that all a fossil fuel company needs to do to sabotage a climate movement is to endorse someone in it?

Wasting money on bad solutions is not the same as fucking it up completely.

Also, I don’t know if you’re being unrealistically optimistic or unrealistically pessimistic, but there are still deeper depths to sink to than just fucking up the climate. That still has a whole range from reducing the carrying capacity of the earth to 5 billion or to 5 million or 5 thousand or zero, and there are more or less horrifying ways to handle that drop too.

Damn, this one of the big pushes of Extinction Rebellion Netherlands. Glad to see that unauthorized disruptive protest works.

before riots

- the post title

Glad to see their talking points focus on food security rather than agricultural companies’ interests like the EU. Though I wonder if they’ll come to the sensible conclusion and cut down on the meat industry.

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It’s not even a particularly bad one, compared to Dole coups, Coca Cola assassination, and Uniroyal napalming civilians.

Hope and positivity are two different things. Hope dissociates from the present and the future, externalizing your care into an imagined future you can not affect. Empirically, people with hope fare worse psychologically than those without hope, because those with hope have no coping mechanisms when their hopes get dashed.

What we need is not positive news, but a positive life. Sit in a meadow, share meals with friends, be kind and generous, work at things that mean something to you, make art with passion, and rage during political protests.

When so much of the world’s news and media are pushing a narrative of unending consumerism and growth, it is good to keep reminding ourselves with factual news that this world will collapse sooner rather than later.

If it helps, all life ends in misery, be it decreptitude, disease, ecosystems collapse, or all of the above. Life has never been about how it ends, it is about what we do while delaying the end. Everything we do for the future, we do for the future that will actually be, not for the future that gives us comfort to imagine.

We can’t stop all terrorist attacks. Preparation is good, but it’s going to suck having loved ones die.

If capitalists can’t take legally, they will take illegally.

Yes, and liberalism helps justify that by focusing so heavily on individualist worth and wellbeing. Hence “opiate of the people”.

I do think liberalism carries the blame for being an opiate of the people more powerful and more closely bonded with capitalism than religion ever was. The focus on individual worth and individual freedom has made people way more amicable to being pitted against each other in a capitalist race to the bottom than even 19th/early 20th century conservatism.

Also local capitalism is awful too. Even just one town can have landlords and serfs, merchants and beggars, guildmasters and abused interns.

If that is the choice you make, I believe you that you feel like it is the best you can do right now. But if ‘we’ refers to people in general, then that is simply false. There are many people who gleefully make things worse and there are also many who fight with heart and soul for a better world. It is not a given that those who see clearly are depressed and too overwhelmed to act.

If you have any energy to spare, search out people irl who take climate change as seriously as you do. Communal mass action is both the most effective strategically and the most invigorating emotionally.

On that we agree.

I’m acting under the assumption that they would have died anyway. As they do. When they decompose naturally, they release their carbon.

Okay, glad to understand that the issue is that you didn’t understand my first comment or any comment that came after it.

One last time: what I’m saying is that you bury the wood to prevent it from decomposing and releasing its carbon, as an alternative to burning it. And that as an alternate source of electricity you use something that doesn’t produce as much emissions, like solar, wind, or nuclear. And if you think burying wood is bad for any reason, then setting it on fire is bad for the same reason.

insurance crisis That’s like calling a pandemic a funeral home crisis.

The insurance rates are accurate. Florida is just becoming uninhabitable. (At least, for standard postcolonial architecture).

How about no? A saved life is just as valuable whether there are 70 million dead or 7 billion. And even if it’s just delaying the sterilization of the earth by a month that gives billions of people and quintillions of animals a bit more time.

Work-life balance is important and improves productivity, so you should be spending time with your loved ones regardless of how productive labor is. But giving up is just a waste.

If we go extinct, we had better make the last decades of humanity worth living.

If we thread the needle as a species, bottlenecking down to millions or thousands until we can weather the storm, we had better make sure that the culture that makes it through is not the capitalists that built the hardest bunkers or the fascists who massacred enough people until the survivors made it through with no skill of their own or even the liberals who adopted post-hoc constitutional principles that leave them unprepared for the next catastrophe.

And if billions survive, then every person counts. And that means every tonne of CO2 or microplastics, every species, every micrometer of ocean rise, every acre of robust circular agriculture.

There is no scenario in which we just get to lie down and take it.

I don’t see how you’re not getting this.

Yes, when you burn the trees you get electricity, but you also release as much carbon dioxide per kWh into the atmosphere as if you were to burn coal instead.

The climate does not care about where your carbon emissions come from. All carbon emissions are getting us further away from the holocene climate.

Maybe you’re acting under the assumption that the trees wouldn’t have grown or that they wouldn’t have been cut down to make place for new trees if they hadn’t been planned to be burned. Maybe that is even true under our fucked up capitalist economy. But that is just capitalism being stupid. If it is worth it to cut down trees to capture carbon, then we should fund that without also requiring the trees to be burned so all that progress is undone.

And sure, once the fossil fuel industry lies dead and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are back below 280 ppm, then you can start burning biomass to keep the concentration stable. But that’s a century from now. Before then, either bury the trees or don’t cut them down in the first place.

Do you mean Canada, which is increasingly on fire? Or do you mean Scandinavia, which will become a glacier once the atlantic current shuts down next decade? Or do you mean Siberia, which currently has a record high temperature of 38C and everything is turning into a molten swamp? Or do you mean Arkhangelsk where the ecosystem will collapse because everything expects permafrost?

Do you mean any coastal city, which will flood? Do you mean places supplied by the international trade network? Do you mean places that expect the sea to contain living creatures? Do you mean places that are dependent on crops that expect temperatures to swing less than 25C back and forth in a week? Do you mean places that are open to the sky and aren’t prepared for hurricane winds?

And if there is a place you’ve found that can weather the storm - do you mean the places where 8 billion people will try to get to but that only have room for less than 200 million total?

But once you put the trees underground, they’re not going to get out without human intervention either…

When you’ve cut down the trees, they’ve “left the system”. What does it matter whether the carbon you add to the system from the outside comes from trees that left the system 6 months ago or ones that left the system 400 million years ago?