But … there’s one side in the conversation that is refuting basic facts. This unshared reality is making it impossible to depoliticize the debate. The country can either take a hiatus from democracy entirely, or finds a way to force right-wing politicians to deal with reality again.

And it’s not all about academic debates either, as someone needs to define desired outcomes, e.g., who to prioritize, today’s seniors, tomorrow’s refugees, today’s rich people, etc.

It requires political action, but this could happen without politicizing it.

Irresponsible actors have politicized the facts themselves. Trump didn’t run on “climate change exists and I am going to make it worse”. Instead, he ran on “climate change is a Marxist China hoax, now eat my beautiful clean coal!”

In the past, when it wasn’t quite as urgent that we act, there was a relatively broad societal consensus that it made sense to protect the environment. But now that some people actually feel extremely threatened in their wealth by climate action, we are experiencing an this frenzied attack on our collective intelligence from the right.

Blaming liberal/left-wing/green political actors for “politicizing” climate change is just victim-blaming. The ones who have given up on a shared, science-based reality are the fascists and the gonservatives.

If politicians recognize the need to do something, they might do it even if they do not center their campaign around it.

Sure but you’ll still have to explain to people what the hell you’re doing there.

Canada’s carbon dividend system appears to be a good idea fucked up through a mix of suboptimal implementation (including being hampered by state-level gonservatives), bad own PR, and successful negative campaigns from bad actors.

You do need political action on it, which makes climate change an inherently political topic. The issues are elsewhere:

• the majority [of] people would have been temporarily inconvenienced by climate action
• a small group of very powerful people would lose their existing business model

The latter group thus decided to tell the former group that reality is not what it is and that their minor inconveniences should be absolute dealbreakers.

A bit idealized in part. Germany has a similar system, and there are just a lot of people who ignore or misunderstand the rules, and a lot of packaging uses deceptive designs, e.g. plastics looking like paper. Facilities sometimes burn because some people discard vapes among their regular trash. And finally, most of the content of the yellow recycling bags is still burned anyhow because nobody can commercially recycle chips bag or tetrapaks. (Paper, glass, and organics recycling usually works pretty well though.)

I imagine Italy is maybe better in some areas but overall not too different.

The one thing that really works in Germany though is the bottle deposit system.

But a pivot to fossil fuels could show that USTDA is a valuable tool for an administration looking for a more transactional approach to international development. Its small team, which has staff in D.C. and in U.S. embassies across the world, can have a mighty impact: For every dollar it spends on programming, it generates on average $231 in U.S. exports.

As if 231:1 is somehow not transactional enough.

how scary AI is,

Given that AI allows spreading propaganda tricking us into this mass-suicidal behavior more effectively, there is another link between this and the crisis of nature and humanity. It would be quite possible to regulate AI though, as at this point creating models is a very expensive endeavor that’s easily noticed.

You’re not avantgarde. Veganism is a thing.

There could have been less disruptive ways of doing that though.

Obviously, it would have been better if these farmers had never started growing alfalfa rather than plants more adapted to dryness.

Which appears to be the dominant philosophy worldwide at this point, at least among those in power.

The mental Olympics await!

While I agree, this could be considered off-topic here.

You may need to find the correct numbers if you want the maths to check out.

I fully expect US kitchen appliances to come with Roll Coal buttons in the near future though. /s(?)

Project KILLALLHUMANS is well underway, it appears.

Somewhat related: I recently took a tour through the now-defunct local coal plant. Before 1990, there were 4 teams of 20 people each running this single coal plant.

Right now, just 4×5 people run power generation for the entire city (mostly fossil gas, but also some solar, wind and a large battery), although actually the plants are designed to work safely for 72h without manual intervention.

Plastics recycling absolutely could work better, but you’d actually need some firm regulation around it: Only monomaterials, standardized types of plastic for per use case, labels that are either laser-etched or that fall off on their own, caps made of same material as the body, and no random surprises that ruin recycling.

The scientists found inspiration in unlikely places. By examining “bulky” fragments in everyday chemical systems like fats and fuels, they crafted modified substances that maintained fluorine’s beneficial characteristics without harmful consequences.

That’s not such an unlikely place to look actually. People burn in their castiron pans with cooking oils all the time, which creates a natural polymer that functions similar to Teflon.

Anyhow, I am very happy about this.

But the imaginary gold bars they threw off their imaginary Titanic! How could it be?

Brb killing the neighbor couple, they also seem like a source of delicious meals. /s

Why Kemi Badenoch is wrong

Could’ve left it at that.

So, that’s 16 GW less. Maybe 32 GW less if we’re generous.

If they need to build 10 TW, those 32 GW hardly carry any weight.