Tag: collapse
Needed: Either Degrowth or Two Earths
In a May 30 essay for the New York Times titled “The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring,” one of the architects of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Brian Deese, wrote, “Nine months since that law was passed in Congress, the private sector has mobilized well beyond our initial expectations to generate clean energy, build battery factories and develop other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
There’s just one problem. Those technologies aren’t going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to reduce emissions fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe is to phase out the burning of oil, gas, and coal by law, directly and deliberately. If, against all odds, the United States does that, we certainly will need wind- and solar-power installations, batteries, and new technologies to compensate for the decline of energy from fossil fuels. There is no reason, however, to expect that the process would work in reverse; a “clean-energy” mobilization alone won’t cause a steep reduction in use of fossil fuels.
I think top leaders in Washington are using green-energy pipe dreams to distract us from the reality that they have given up altogether on reducing US fossil fuel use. They’ve caved. This month’s bipartisan deal on the debt limit included a provision that would ease the permitting of energy infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines like the ecologically destructive Mountain Valley fossil-gas pipeline so dear to the heart of West Virginia’s Democratic senator Joe Manchin. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has issued new rules allowing old coal and fossil gas power plants to continue operating if they capture their carbon dioxide emissions and inject them into old oil wells. And under the IRA, those plants that capture emissions will receive federal climate subsidies, even if they use the carbon dioxide that’s pumped into the old wells to push out residual oil that has evaded conventional methods of extraction. And the IRA did not even end federal subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, which could have saved somewhere between $10 and $50 billion annually. Taken together, these policies could extend the operation of existing coal and gas power plants much further into the future.
Melting Himalayan glaciers pose serious dangers to humans, report finds
The world’s tallest mountains are losing ice — which could pose a serious danger to humanity. That’s according to a new report from the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, an agency that oversees the Hindu Kush Himalayas. Izabella Koziell, deputy director general of the agency, joins CBS News to break down the findings.
RIP: ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski dies in prison.
Bystander video from the mass stabbing at a playground in France that wounded 4 children. (CENSORED)
Bystander video from the mass stabbing at a playground in France that wounded 4 children. (CENSORED)
by u/theykilledk3nny in masskillers
Bystander footage showing the arrest of the perpetrator of the mass stabbing at a park in Annecy, France. 4 children and two adults were injured in the attack. The perpetrator was apparently shot in the legs during the arrest.
Bystander footage showing the arrest of the perpetrator of the mass stabbing at a park in Annecy, France. 4 children and two adults were injured in the attack. The perpetrator was apparently shot in the legs during the arrest.
by u/theykilledk3nny in masskillers
Special Pre-Release Discount for Statio Numero Illustrated
Chapter 3 of the Liminal Cycle
Knowledge of Liminal and Xen, which make up the first two parts of the trilogy, will be necessary for understanding this work.
A product plan left behind documents the creator’s descent into a parallel world or maybe simply madness. A story about persona, identity, liminality, and voice.
KunstlerCast 377 — John Michael Greer on Magic and the Reenchantment of Daily Life
#377 — John Michael Greer blogs at Ecosophia, subtitle, Toward an Ecological Spirituality. JMG has been an astute observer of Western Civ’s arduous economic and cultural descent, and is the author of many books, both novels and non-fiction, including Green Wizardry, After Oil, The Wealth of Nature, and Not the Future We Ordered. Star’s Reach, is a novel set 400 years ahead in America’s neo-medieval future, The King in Orange, a meditation on the relationship between archetype psychology and the occult as acted out in politics and culture. Things are getting weird in America, wouldn’t you agree? Even a bit supernatural. To help us navigate through this wilderness of the weird, JMG and I talk about magic and the re-enchantment of daily life in these turbulent times.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.
Out in the wild: how Ken Layne created an alternative to clickbait in the desert
LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/07/ken-layne-desert-oracle-magazine-desert-gawker
He Told Followers to Starve to Meet Jesus. Why Did So Many Do It?
Hundreds were drawn to a remote wilderness in southeastern Kenya by the End Times preaching of pastor Paul Mackenzie. Relatives and ex-members tried to intervene, but some did not want to be rescued.
LINK:https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/world/africa/kenya-christian-cult-deaths.html
The far north is burning—and turning up the heat on the planet
The Arctic and surroundings are being transformed from carbon sink to carbon emitter.
The far north is both a massive carbon sink and a potent environmental time bomb. The region stores a huge amount of CO2 in boreal forests and underlying soils. Organic peat soil, for instance, covers just 3 percent of the Earth’s land area (there’s some in tropical regions, too), yet it contains a third of its terrestrial carbon. And Arctic permafrost has locked away thousands of years’ worth of plant matter, preventing rot that would release clouds of planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane.
But in a pair of recent papers, scientists have found that wildfires and human meddling are reducing northern ecosystems’ ability to sequester carbon, threatening to turn them into carbon sources. That will in turn accelerate climate change, which is already warming the Arctic four and a half times faster than the rest of the world, triggering the release of still more carbon—a gnarly feedback loop.