I’m not understanding your math. What would we need enough battery storage to cover annual use? The sun isn’t going to stop shining for an entire year, is it?

And in 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Adani executives of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain lucrative supply contracts for its solar energy and hiding this from potential investors. The case was dropped this month after Adani made offers to invest in the U.S., though U.S. officials denied any link.

Lol. I’m sure they did.

That’s one reason why I think the boom in cheaper, better, safer battery tech is one of the greatest innovations of the 21st century.

Yeah, the sun doesn’t always shine. Yeah, you need 24/7 power for a lot of things (eg lifesaving medical equipment in hospitals). Solar isn’t practical for a lot of uses unless you can effectively store the power. But battery storage centers are getting better every day.

(On a related note, e-bikes and scooters are everywhere where I live. Personal solar powered transportation at a fraction of the cost and impact of cars. As soon as batteries got small and light and cheap enough to make them practical the market exploded. It’s amazing.)

You’re correct, but your analysis is incomplete.

It took global, coordinated, governmental action to ban CFCs worldwide.

But governments were motivated to ban CFCs because so many individual people, ordinary citizens and voters, learned that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. Those individuals called on their governments to act. They funded the NGOs that studied and lobbied and suggested alternatives to CFCs. And they bought those alternatives instead of using CFCs themselves, which helped build the consensus to eliminate CFCs.

And individual action was part of building that consensus. Individual people, spreading awareness about the damage CFCs did, and choosing alternatives to CFCs in their own individual purchases, helped build consensus for system-level change.

Here’s a couple thought experiments. A new train or bus line is a system-level solution to improving public transit. So is a bike lane. But what individuals are more likely to vote for a new train line? People who drive to work, or people who rely on public transit? Who’s more likely to support a new bike lane, people who drive or people who bicycle?

Factory farming of animals is one of the greatest atrocities in modern society. But it provides cheap meat. Who’s more likely to support the system-level change necessary to ban factory farming? Someone who eats meat or someone who doesn’t? Someone who eats meat everyday or someone who eats meat once a week? Someone who knows how to cook without meat, or someone who doesn’t know how to cook without it?

And who’s going to be more passionate about banning factory farming - someone who consumes the products of factory farming daily and is necessarily going to feel conflicted about it? Or someone who has already rejected those products, in their own life, through individual action, and who will not lose anything in their own life if every feedlot and slaughterhouse is shut down?

Systemic change transforms the individual actions of entire communities. But it also works the other way around. Individual action builds consensus for systemic change. And we need to encourage and celebrate both.

I hope you find your way back, because it’s true. Millions of others will.

I’d argue that the concept of a carbon footprint is not, inherently, a scam. You do have an impact on the world. Your carbon footprint is a real and genuine measure of that impact. And taking actions to reduce your carbon footprint is a way to mindfully track, measure, and reduce that impact.

Oil company propagandists may have used this real thing - your carbon footprint - to shift blame away from the oil companies and redirect people’s efforts to reducing individual consumption instead of working for political change. Which is bad. But the carbon footprint, itself, is not a scam - just the uses to which big oil put it.

Plastic recycling, on the other hand, is fake industry propaganda from start to finish.

And honestly, if I’m on my soapbox, I’ll remind everybody that “reduce, reuse, recycle” is in order of preference. Recyclable paper bags may be better for the environment than single use plastic bags, but bringing your own reusable cloth bag to the grocery store is even better. Just because a single-use product is recyclable doesn’t make it environmentally friendly.

You and I are both part of the same slrpnk community, and I’m doing my part, so that’s at least one person you can believe in. Why not try believing in more of us?

Doomerism is capitalist propaganda. They couldn’t convince us that climate change was a hoax, so now they’re trying to convince us that climate change is inevitable. And the point of both propaganda campaigns is the same: protect the status quo.

Because if we really were doomed and climate change was really inevitable, they wouldn’t be fighting so hard to convince you that it was.

They want you to believe what you do is meaningless. But it’s not.

I strongly suspect our technocrat overlords - the ones telling us global warming is a hoax - know very well that climate change is real, and are manipulating and positioning the United States to come out ahead in the new 3° world.

Not because they care about Americans, of course. But they’ll need somewhere to live when the rest of the world collapses, and most of their stuff is here.

The United States damning the Bering Strait would give the United States control over that shipping lane. And recent events have proved how vital the control of shipping lanes can be.

It’s not hysterics. It’s fact.

Ethanol burns more fossil fuel than it replaces. It turns more fuel into less fuel and pisses away irreplaceable topsoil in the process.

Facts don’t care about your feelings.

As strange as it seems given the whole, you know, this, the United States is only a small part of the world.

Little Donald ordering closed coal plants to reopen like a Captain Planet villain is only going to impact a relatively small number of power plants - and those coal plants are going to close back down as soon as they’re legally allowed to, for the same reason they closed in the first place, because they don’t make economic sense anymore.

Meanwhile, the people buying solar because they can’t trust oil and gas supplies, and the governments investing in renewables because they don’t want to be held hostage the next time the United States gets a bug up its ass about Iran, will still have those solar and renewables long after Little Donald has retired to his private massage parlor in Mar-A-Lago.

When the 10% who have savings and stock market investments and 401Ks are getting richer and richer, seeing their personal net worth rise, and feeling pretty good about it.

And the 90% who don’t have savings and investments and are working paycheck to paycheck are seeing mass unemployment and salary cuts and hyperinflated rents and grocery prices and are struggling harder and harder and just getting further and further behind.

And then the 10% tell the 90% “I don’t see any problem, the economy is great”.

I don’t think we’re there yet. Hopefully the American economy pulls back from the brink. I don’t want to live in a country where being upper middle class means living in walled compounds and having armed bodyguards escort your kids to private schools to keep them from being kidnapped for ransom. But frankly, I think that’s where we’re going - a United States where the people lucky enough to own stock see those stock prices go up, and up, and up, while the wealth of the people goes down, and down, and down, enjoying their enclaves of wealth while surrounded by more and more of the desperate poor.

Because, I mean, you may not have helped the hyperbillionaires screw over 90% of America to pad their stock prices, you may not have orchestrated the biggest wealth transfer in history from the poor to the rich, but you sure as fuck didn’t try to stop them.

What, I wondered, did people do on these islands? The answer was surprisingly banal. These were partly debate societies, where members could gather and talk about local issues, such as a factory that was polluting the countryside, or whether the village medical center was well stocked. The groups also organized litter pickups and painted bus benches. There was talk of movie nights.

Under one subreddit query from nine months ago that asked, “What are the Tisza islands doing?” the responses mostly showed people coming together and being neighborly. “Things we’ve done,” began one post: “Water distribution in the heat, we collected school supplies and clothes for the family support center.” Also, “we organized a cooking competition.” This was a perfect illustration of Robert Putnam’s idea in Bowling Alone, his book about growing atomization in America—that civil society depends on people simply doing things together.

Mutual aid groups. Prefigurative politics. Starting local with boots on the ground, finding little ways to make your community better, actually pays off.

(Nobody tell the MLs.)

The K-shaped economy in action.

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

And when young Americans finally lose their fucking temper - when we get “Occupy the Suburbs” instead of “Occupy Wall Street”, when the rhetoric is turned against the 10%, whose stocks and bonds and 401Ks ballooned in value as a side effect of the hyperbillionaires looting and pillaging the American working class in the greatest wealth transfer in history - those old fucks aren’t going to have the slightest idea why most of America hates them.

And the hyperbillionaires who maintain their power by dividing Americans against one another are going to laugh all the way to the bank.

Lol. Let’s call it a “positive” externality. Pretty much everybody who’s employed, or who wants to be employed, or who wants to stay in contact with friends or family, needs to have a cell phone and Internet access. And if you have to pay for that stuff anyway, you may as well doomscroll on it.

Pretty much, yeah.

Fascism, at its core, is Us versus Them. Under all the complexities and layers is one simple idea: Our problems are because They have Our resources, and we need a strong leader to go to war (figuratively or literally) against Them and take Our stuff.

And I think this is incredibly seductive because it triggers our old hominid instincts, from back when we lived in small tribes on the African savannah, and when our territory was hit by drought, or fire, or natural disaster, and we didn’t have enough resources, the solution really was to go into another tribe’s territory, drive them out, and take their stuff.

Lebensraum is as old as stone knives and bearskins.

And the more desperate people are, the more frightened and hungry and angry they are, the stronger those old animal instincts become.

But, you know, a good leader can simplify complicated issues. A good leader can identify problems, articulate actual solutions, and direct people’s angry monkey brains towards fighting for those solutions instead of persecuting scapegoats. Not Us versus Them, but All of Us, together, fighting poverty and climate change and economic hardship and building a better future.

Unfortunately, in the United States and the “free world” as a whole, we have a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people who benefit from all the economic and social failures that are causing the problems we suffer from. And they want people to believe in a simple violent solution that blames the wrong people and doesn’t actually fix anything, because they don’t want the problems fixed.

And you don’t get elected unless these extraordinarily wealthy people give you enough money to win an election.

So we don’t get any good leaders. We get a choice between fascism and the status quo, which is also fascism.

Yay, democracy.

Bypassing the question of whether sugars and oils are edible (?), field corn is perfectly edible for humans. Field corn isn’t sweet corn, and doesn’t taste good as a vegetable. But we can eat it the same way most people throughout history have eaten corn - as a staple crop, as a grain like wheat, as corn flour, cornmeal, grits, parched corn, hominy, maza, etc, etc. We just choose not to.

And calling opposition to ethanol “oil and gas propaganda” is ridiculous. Like the comment you responded to point it out, ethanol is sold mixed with gasoline. The industries are synergistic, not competitive. They have a common interest in promoting internal combustion engine vehicles and opposing EVs.

I mean, if saving seeds wasn’t dangerous to the powers that shouldn’t be, Monsanto wouldn’t have made it illegal.

God, fuck ethanol. Last I checked it literally took 1.5 gallons of oil/gas to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. It turns more fuel into less fuel and pisses away soil fertility doing it.

I read an article some time ago arguing the purpose of ethanol (and ag subsidies in general) is, consciously or unconsciously, manifest destiny - we have to have a “use” for all the land we stole, we have to do something with it even if that something is a complete waste, because otherwise, people might start asking why we don’t give it back. Seems more likely to me all the time.

messy and expensive.

Expensive for whom, though?

The American people will pay the cost, in blood and tax money, for occupying Venezuela.

Big Oil, weapons manufacturers, and the Trump crime family, will reap the profits from it.

(Edit: and yes of fucking course the Venezuelan people will suffer far more than Americans safe in the imperial core. I thought that was so obvious it didn’t need to be fucking said.)

Every American invasion and occupation is another massive wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

Socialism for the rich, rugged capitalism for the poor, isn’t that the saying?

That’s actually a part I don’t disagree with. Local short-term problems still do need to be solved. They are the symptoms of the underlying disease that is the global capitalist economy, and we have to fight the disease instead of just fighting the symptoms - but if you don’t treat the symptoms, you might end up dying before you can treat the disease.

And, also, the personal is political. People will see the impacts of climate change on their communities, and people will commit the time and effort to adapt to those impacts locally, and that will make people more willing to vote for the national and global collective action we need even more badly.

Credibility and popularity are necessary. Getting people involved and committed on the local level is the first step to getting people involved and committed on the global level.

If climate leaders lead people in that transition instead of stopping at the local level and saying “hey, we rented some solar panels from this fossil fuel megacorp that branched out into solar power, everything’s good now, go back to consuming as usual”.