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What should be done... about climate change


Rippounet

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1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

And much of that could go into processed products. No one cares if a carrot looks like a corkscrew once it's been diced. Skanky strawberries can become jam / jelly.

Lots of UK supermarkets now sell so-called “wonky” fruit and veg

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I wonder if fruit and veg waste has increased since the home economic tradition of making preserves, sauces and jams / jellies has fallen away. My mum used to make a mountain of preserves, and tomato sauce (not ketchup, because hers still had the seeds). None of us kids do. I don't think we had store bought tomato sauce / ketchup for several years. She's continued making preserves from her own home grown fruit and veg, mostly plums, her plum tree is freakishly fecund. Though all that is about to end because she's moving to a retirement community at the end of the year (her choice, to the quite vocal protest of one of my siblings who didn't want to see her current home sold off, but none of us could afford to buy it off her).

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11 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Given the most recent hurricane and the visuals of its aftermath, are we just going to have to give up on island life and living in certain coastal areas? It doesn’t seem prudent to live in areas that will constantly need to be rebuilt as storms continue to become more powerful.

It certainly seems like a lot of low ground will get ceded to nature's forces. Also arridness may render areas uninhabitable without enough water resources. People may migrate but it could be a choppy, at times brutal and episodic transition as most natural disasters are.

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2. Shop locally.

You've heard it before; you'll hear it again. Shopping locally, when possible, is one of the best ways to support a more transparent and equitable food system around the world. It cuts out supply chains, brings you closer to your food, and provides a lesson in seasonality.

As before, I have a beef with this sort of thing, especially in an article that purports to not be promoting simplistic solutions. Eating local certainly doesn't support the livelihoods of developing country farmers so if you want to support a globally equitable food system then sustainable production from developing countries should be something people look for rather than avoid unless necessary. 2 and 3 should simply be a single item: shop sustainably. Buy goods that have been produced sustainably, including things like fair trade products, regardless of where they have been produced. Just assuming that buying stuff that's been produced locally is more sustainable than products from further afield can be erroneous. Taking account of things like water resources, soil health, and energy use you may find that locally produced stuff is less sustainable. If electricity in your area is currently generated from fossil fuel burning, then local production could have a higher carbon footprint that products made in places where electricity is generated using non-emitting methods, even taking into account transport.

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7 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Just assuming that buying stuff that's been produced locally is more sustainable than products from further afield can be erroneous.

That's going to be exceptional.
And even assuming it happens it's still easy and far better to make local production more sustainable.
It's absolutely not simplistic to advice to shop locally. Even if we're not just thinking in terms of carbon footprint, local production and distribution will obviously always have a lower environmental footprint. In the long-run there's zero reason to buy stuff produced halfway 'round the globe.

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On 9/1/2019 at 7:55 AM, drawkcabi said:

 

Deny. Deny. Deny. Defeated. Avoid responsibility at all costs, and praise yourself for being a practical thinker and not a sheep.

 

 

I was on the bus last month and the driver was playing Rush Limbaugh on his iphone. Rush was going on and on about if climate change is real, how is he as just one man able to change nature? If a tornado comes he gets out of the way, if a blizzard comes he bundles up and stays inside, if a rainstorm comes he uses an umbrella. If the weather gets hot, he turns on the AC, uses a freezer/refrigerator. Humans don't change the climate, they just adapt. So basically he excuses himself and everybody listening because just one person can't do anything about it. "Whew, that's a relief! No need to change my lifestyle, and no guilt!"

Totally neglecting that when humans work together they can do things that affect nature, for good or for bad...big industry, the atom bomb, landing on the moon, A.I., curing diseases, biological warfare, preserving/destroying natural habitats, saving from or causing the extinction of other species, etc.

The whole time the bus driver was nodding along and saying "Yep!" "That's right!" "True!"

I just wanted to bang my head against the window.  

What’s most infuriating here is Limbaugh’s apparent attempt to cast himself as some regular joe. He’s a radio legend with a massive platform that has given him tens of millions of dollars. He could urge his followers to change their ways of living or voting habits to accomplish at least some level of real systemic change. Like, this idea that he’s just “one guy” who can’t cause change is laughable. 

Reminds me of an old Simpson where Homer has one of the best opportunities  to help stop a great evil onto the world yet still acts as if he’s helpless. : 

 

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What "Climate Change" means, as described by someone who grew up in the location that we know as Qatar before it became the richest little ole country in the world, thanks to oil.

https://lithub.com/faster-than-we-thought-what-stories-will-survive-climate-change/

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....The axis along which almost all climate change anxiety orients is, by necessity, pointed toward the future. It is a space that will never arrive, and because of this we are all prone to afford it endless possibility. Never mind that even if we were to impose a total prohibition on fossil fuels tomorrow the atmosphere would continue to warm for another century at least, never mind the glaciers already disappeared, the coral already dead, never mind all the damage we’ve done—the future is and always will be thought salvageable. We have framed climate change as a crisis of the future because its worst ramifications are still to come, and because the future is something we feel we can still control.

But we should also spend more time thinking about how climate change will upend our past....

 

 

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1 hour ago, Zorral said:

What "Climate Change" means, as described by someone who grew up in the location that we know as Qatar before it became the richest little ole country in the world, thanks to oil.

https://lithub.com/faster-than-we-thought-what-stories-will-survive-climate-change/

That bit is common to every article about climate change now, and yet some people still don't believe it:

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It may be the case that we’re past the point of fixing this. Perhaps we might still be able to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, but maintaining our current ease of life into the next century and beyond is optimistic to the point of hallucination. To accept this outcome is difficult, because it entails accepting that the future is no longer a space of infinite possibility—rather a house mortgaged to the hilt, a foreclosure in waiting.

 

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31 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

That bit is common to every article about climate change now, and yet some people still don't believe it:

 

I am not parsing what you are saying there.

As an historian I have been thinking about the loss of the past to climate change for decades, and particularly so since 2005 and what happened in New Orleans.  All the places that mean personally just about everything to me personally are also places where humanity's civilization was created and continued: on the banks of rivers and coasts of seas and ocean.  Where I have lived most of my life is one of them.

But beyond that I also was thinking of this as a young child, in a place that while on the prairie and the interior of the country -- I saw places in the 'town' lost forever to spring flooding of the Red River of the North.  I experienced our farm's home place lose items forever to spring flooding of the crick that dried up all together in summer.  I could see as a child the past being displaced by the present -- and the idea of the future.  Which I did understand in many ways was unavoidable for the good of the present, and maybe the future.

But when there is no better future to be had? When we've lost the majority of resources due to previous extraction and poison -- such as the oceans and rivers, streams and cricks themselves -- as on the prairies due to the run off from factory pig farming and so much else?

The more people who say these things in more places maybe more people will be persuaded to get outside and demand some change? 

Or -- maybe --let's accept there can be no change, it's too late, so continue to party like it's 1999.  All my life I've been living with the idea that a 'real end' was more than possible, due to nuclear holocaust. So, well, whatever -- it's happening, gonna happen. So what.

 

 

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9 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

Disturbingly, I am running across more and more objections to Climate Change as a concept on religious grounds.  The posters, (commenting on climate change articles) appear to be completely dead serious about this.   

Religion tends to be the last refuge of the incompetent. 

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18 hours ago, Zorral said:

I am not parsing what you are saying there.

I was alluding to this kind of thing:

13 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

Disturbingly, I am running across more and more objections to Climate Change as a concept on religious grounds.  The posters, (commenting on climate change articles) appear to be completely dead serious about this.   

Yup, same here. Lots of people don't believe climate change could be the end of civilization because "God wouldn't allow it" or "the end times will only happen when God wills it" or variations thereof.

Too many people are in denial.

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They seem to have forgotten entirely about The Flood, and the promise of the rainbow sign, "Not water but the fire next time."

Anyway don't all these types believe in the end times and the rapture, so wot the eff does it matter to them?

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2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Anyway don't all these types believe in the end times and the rapture, so wot the eff does it matter to them?

They believe the left is using climate change to push its agenda...
They're not entirely wrong but then, it's not like the right is proposing much to address the issue.

And speaking of which, Time has a special climate issue this month... I guess the editors were shooting for something uplifting, but that's hardly the result imho. Some highlights:
- Bill McKibben's "2050: How Earth Survived" article in which not only a Democratic president is elected in 2020 thanks to a series of disasters in Louisiana and Mississippi in the months before the election, but public pressure somehow convinces Congress to act and thus America "cease blocking progress" and investment in fossil-fuel stocks peters out on Wall Street. Then China and India follow the lead... etc. It's all quite optimistic to say the least - and yet the article is careful to say even that is barely enough to prevent catastrophe.
- Former Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo defending her initiatives (converting a few Parisian highways into promenades, restricting the use of the oldest vehicles, pushing for more bicycles... ). Except when you're on the ground you know that these measures have had a rather limited impact and are still highly controversial. Dat's really a political piece. Mercifully short though.
- An article by the managing director of Japan's "Government Pension Investment Fund" saying that "we could divest from certain carbon-intensive industries" but other investors would just step in so they prefer "encourag[ing] companies with a large carbon-intensive footprint to adopt a more sustainable business model."

That last bit is especially galling because what it says is that instead of just stopping to invest in the worst industries what is done is "encouragement." Supposedly this leads to "many companies [...] making a dramatic push to improve their ESG (environmental, social and governance) profile."
And those were some of the more uplifting articles, basically describing baby steps in the right direction. I'll let you imagine what the other articles (on the Amazon rainforest or the "hottest city on Earth") say.
The overall message, although probably not the one intended, is that we're screwed. We're getting +3°C or +4°C whatever we do, and the initiatives described do not even begin to compensate for the harm done by the likes of Bolsonaro and Trump. I'm comforted in my idea that humanity will only start acting once we've already reached somewhere around +2°C, which means we'll get +5°C at the very least.

 

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2 hours ago, Triskele said:

Debatable whether these people are most contemptible or the people who have issues with birth control for any reason.  

Of course, sometimes it's the same people holding both views.  

given that something on the order of 1/5th of the US populace is a fundamentalist christian of one stripe or another, it's likely both. fundamentalist Christianity is a self contained bubble universe.

 

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