How would you feel about purely secular “mumbo jumbo” ceremonies meant to encourage care for the environment? Like, for example, an organized moment of silence before or after a cleanup (to stop and think about the natural area you’re cleaning up, listen to the birds/bugs/water, whatever)?
Thank you for reading it!
As usual when it comes to climate impact, the US will be fine. Three out of every four calories of corn is used to make ethanol or feed animals, both of which are ridiculously inefficient uses. Hell, corn syrup is in everything because the US grows so much more corn than it needs that we practically give away the corn syrup.
Soybeans are even less efficient - less than 3% of the American soybean crop is actually eaten by human beings, despite soybeans being a complete vegetable protein and one of the healthiest foods out there.
In other words, the United States could lose 9/10ths of the land growing corn and soybeans and still feed itself with plenty to spare.
All that land is only under cultivation at all because the United States can’t stand the idea of giving up one foot of the land it stole in the name of manifest destiny. Because if we weren’t using land for corn and beans in the Midwest or grazing cattle in the Great Plains, people might start asking why not give it back to the indigenous peoples we stole it from.
So yeah, America will be fine.
It’s the rest of the world that’s going to suffer for America’s climate crimes.
I agree. Biden’s presidency was the biggest lost opportunity of my lifetime for exactly that reason.
FDR responded to a similar global challenge - the Great Depression - by transforming the American government to serve the needs of struggling Americans - and the American people rewarded his courage and vision with overwhelming support when he ran for his second term.
Biden? Barely tried to improve America. And everything he tried failed. He couldn’t even reduce student loan payments. And when Harris had the opportunity to break with him and fight for her own vision of what America could be, she either had no vision of her own or was too afraid to fight for it.
The American “left” is terrified to promote anything more than a return to the Obama-era status quo. But if they don’t find their vision and courage the United States is guaranteed one party Republican rule for another generation.
I cannot say I agree, and I think I recall that some indicators currently suggest we’d need about 3 planets to keep going at the same pace.
The back of the envelope calculation says if everybody on Earth lived like an average American we’d need the resources of about four Earths to cover it:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712
That being said, from the same source, if everyone on Earth lived like an average Indian we’d only use half the Earth’s resources and could support twice as many people.
So it’s not about the number of people - it’s about the standard of living those people have and the resources they use.
I think the most effective way forward is more efficient and sustainable lifeways - if the richest countries learn to consume less, if people around the world get access to better technology and better institutions to raise their standard of living without raising their resource consumption.
And it’s interesting to note, the better off people are, the fewer children they tend to have. If we improve people’s lives worldwide, a steadily declining population will be a natural side effect.
An incredibly difficult goal, of course, but worth pursuing.
In addition, I find it rather hilarious that someone seriously thinks humans procreate because of long term thinking 😅
I mean, kids are a lifetime investment. Most people think about whether they can afford to feed and educate their kids over the next few decades, and what kind of life the kids will have after that. In countries without social safety nets, children are often the only retirement plan. I think the decision to have kids (or not) is the longest term planning the average person will ever do.
I’m not saying it’s necessarily good planning, but it’s certainly thinking long term.
With that being said, I think this article isn’t claiming not having kids is a problem in itself. It’s a symptom of the real problem - despair for the future.
People choosing not to have kids for positive reasons? Because they have a vision of the future with a lower population and choose to live their values? Great! No problem there.
But when people choose not to have kids because they think the world is collapsing around them, that they can’t give children a good life, that there’s no hope for the future and it would be immoral to expose a child to the coming tribulations - those decisions are made because people give up on the future.
The despair is the problem - the decisions made out of despair are just the symptoms.
And it’s hard to motivate people to work for a better world now when they have no hope for a better world in the future. If we’re all doomed anyway, why not burn all the oil you want and let the fascists take over?
It’s like the Hobbit taught us: traveling is good, but coming home is better.
This is Trump’s strategy too. Make a brutal enough example of a few universities, or law firms, or immigrants, or other countries’ economies, and the rest will comply in advance. Like Trump said in his West Point commencement speech recently: "As much as you wanna fight, I’d rather do it without having to fight. I just wanna look at them and have them fold.”
Reminder: Ender Wiggin is not a fucking hero.
I imagine dead trees were flammable, even back then. And oxygen levels were 15% higher. Can you imagine the forest fires?
I’ll take wildfires over wet bulb temperatures any day.
The early 2000s Republicans are the same people as 2025 Republicans.
Some of them changed their beliefs. They moved right - or were moved right by an incredibly effective decades-long propaganda campaign.
And some of them didn’t change their beliefs at all - they’re simply more emboldened to express beliefs that weren’t acceptable twenty years ago.
Give it twenty more years and Democrats will be where Republicans are now.
Do you have a source for that #1 impact claim? I want to read and share it.
Trouble is, the US already has a ton of plant agriculture subsidies. But they go to major commodity crops (corn, soybeans) that provide feed for livestock or, worse, ethanol.
Transfer those subsidies to plants that people eat and I’m with you.
Trump thinks he can trade a few weeks of bad headlines and market hit, for some magically reappearing domestic manufacturing. It doesnt work that way. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t create positive economic conditions on any kind of timeline sufficient to offset the negative effects real consumers are already experiencing.
A few weeks? Try a few months. Or years. I think Trump is fine with bad headlines for months on end.
The positive interpretation is: Trump’s confident that he’s right. He’s confident America will be better off under his tariff plan. OR he’s confident he can use tariffs to force trade deals that benefit America and exploit the rest of the world. And he knows voters have short memories. As long as the economy is strong in fall 2026 he can take credit for it and give Republicans overwhelming electoral victories at the federal and state level.
The negative interpretation is: Trump doesn’t care about public opinion because he doesn’t think elections are going to matter anymore.
Either way, what the media and the voters think about tariffs now doesn’t matter to Trump. Trump does what Trump wants and the rest of the world submits to him. It’s everything he’s always wanted.
Right. Now is the right time to start.
But it’s too soon to tell if that effort will accomplish anything, because the effort has to be sustained through 2026 and 2028.
And the people showing up waving signs have to become politically active - not just showing up and going home, but writing their congresspeople and boycotting companies and knocking on doors to get out the vote and so on and so forth. Bernie and AOC can stump all they want. If they don’t inspire people to act it means nothing.
The Democrats need a grassroots movement - as angry and passionate and hopeful as the Tea Party was - not just speeches by celebrity pols. It’s too early to tell if liberal citizen voters will accept their responsibility to build that movement.
On an individual level, doing the right thing for the environment generally saves you money.
On a collective level, policies that are good for the environment generally save everyone money.
This should have been a no brainer for Democrat pols, but they couldn’t resist the temptation to give green-colored pork giveaways to big business and the 1% instead.