We’re not friends

Stop posting bullshit pls

And no I do not work for the Democrats or any PAC or political organization

So every so often, I have seen a story from inthesetimes.com and sort of surmised that it’s propaganda bullshit based purely on the URL, but I never really knew. This article seems like a good time to dive into it a little bit. TL;DR yes, it’s bullshit. It’s actually extremely cunning in how it assembles some true facts into a shape that doesn’t exist.

While the Act made unprecedented investments in renewable energy, it also faced criticism for being too little, too late and for compromising on fossil fuel extraction.

This part is 100% accurate. IDK why the headline focuses on Biden, instead of on every president before him and on Manchin for their role in causing it to be too late and too little respectively, when it’s making this accurate point, but let’s continue.

What if, on the contrary, all the tools only make a dire crisis even worse? Because that’s exactly what’s happening: Two years and close to $300 billion later, what we’re seeing is that increased renewable energy investment goes hand in hand with increased fossil fuel production.

Okay so this is where we dive into the real dishonesty.

Two things I want you to notice:

• The word “global” just kind of inconspicuously there
• The scale on these charts is laughably different. I sort of got lost in the math, so I don’t know exactly how different, but I know that holding up a chart of “our emissions are going up and up as our energy is going up” alongside a chart of “the laughably small scale of that that comes from renewable energy is going up and up” and then implying that there’s a causal relationship there is a bunch of bullshit.

So… without the word “global,” trying to analyze only the US’s contribution, what does it look like? Something like this:

OH LOOK IT’S FUCKIN GOING DOWN. It’s now below the 1990 levels, after a big drop this past year.

Why is this person going to so much trouble to lie about what’s happened to “emissions” by holding up US policy, next to global emissions? And holding up other charts next to each other and pretending that they relate to each other? And identifying (correctly) that all of this is too little too late, as a way of levying specific criticism at the most effective thing we’ve been doing, in service of depressing support for more solutions like that and consequently making it more like that we’ll go back to the days when the line actually is going up and up?

As HST says, to ask the question is to answer the question.

This sub is so wonderful

The whole site is bonkers, like Geocities level

Guy just say what you want to say, my attention span isn’t that bad

Well, it depends on what is meant by “average.” There could, maybe within our lifetime after an earth shattering reprioritization of climate change mitigation brought on by widespread death, potentially be another year which is colder than the average of the preceding ten years. Maybe. I won’t say that is impossible although I consider it unlikely.

But there will never again, on any human timescale, be a year that is colder than any “average” as in like the average temperature for the planet starting in the year 1900 or something, or even the year 2000 when it was already measurably above a long term normal level. I am confident that with any level of action on any timeframe that is within the realm of possibility, we will never again see a year that is “average” by that kind of definition.

There will still be colder-than-average summers in the future

No there won’t

My guy, 13,000 people dying in a single acute event localized to one city that can be mitigated with some careful foresighted thinking is not what keeps climate scientists up at night.

It’s starting. We’re not even into summer yet. And next year will be worse, and the year after that will be worse than that, with no particular safety measure or merciful limit.

And even when it reaches a protein-denaturing threshold and people start dying for real, by the thousands or more, we’ll still be burning gasoline, setting new records for “production.”

If water temperatures do not cool, more coral will die, Lalita said.

The fuck do you mean “if”

We could stop all our carbon emissions today — all of them — and the feedback loops that are already underway would play out and keep everything getting hotter for at least a decade, whether or not that’s survivable for the coral or the fish or the crops we eat or the human body itself.

As it is, though, we’re still pouring more gasoline on the fire. Don’t say “if” like it’s not defined what’s in store for them.

Pete Seeger FTW, go man

Six times and 12% is a massive understatement of what’s going to happen

Absolutely massive

Strong communities are good for a ton of different reasons, resisting fascism (or remaining relatively safe even if fascism comes) being a big one

TV killed American communities, and they haven’t really recovered. Everyone just sits in their house or goes in their car.

I’ll only speak for myself. I don’t think anything “romantic” about the medium-scale farming operations that in the modern day grow most of the food; I think that a lot of them probably fuck over the actual farmworkers, and I don’t imagine them as a little 10-acre farm operated by a happy rosy-cheeked couple.

At the same time, I do think that the people who run those operations deserve justice and protection against the behemoths who actually keep all the money and ruin the food supply, and that we should change the system so that small farming operations can exist in the modern day without having to become industrialized whether they want to or not. The food has to come from somewhere.

The modern system of Big Food makes it more or less impossible for any other type of farming operation to exist. There are about 2 million farms in the US with an average size around 500 acres. For the most part, they are money-losing enterprises run by suffering families from which one of a tiny handful of food conglomerates is attempting to wring every possible abusive penny, with a good deal of success. John Oliver did a show about it, and Joel Salatin has written quite a few excellent books about the tragicomic experience of trying to run a non-industrialized farming operation in the modern United States and what an inevitably difficult clusterfuck it is on several different levels.

The oil industry has entered into a new economic regime. It used to be how can I maximize how many dollars can I make this quarter, whereas in the last couple years, it’s turned into how can I most efficiently make the most amount of dollars from all the oil that’s still left. That’s why they’re making record profits, ironically enough – they used to reinvest some amount of income as refineries, new drilling operations, capital outlays that would accelerate the extraction. Now there’s no point to that, so instead they just keep the cash (EE I think described it pretty aptly as “the party at the end of the world.”)

I wouldn’t automatically assume that a sharp drop in their willingness to spend money accelerating extraction, means a sharp collapse in the amount of oil or the difficulty getting it from the ground. They’re just abruptly adjusting their incentives, without necessarily a sharp jump in the physical-oil reality (just a continuation of the steady downward slide.)

It’s actually substantially worse than that.

“But in addition to that, I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there,” he said. “I think that’s a better option, so you can go in and finish the job.”