The Ec ology of Economics (economics that assume that ecology has budgets/costs)
A huge problem is that we have a large amount of energy being required from existing ecologically sensitive and aware people who are finding themselves pulled toward protecting and supporting their brothers and sisters, “who they HAVE SEEN”* (see note below) . The result of this is that we expend all this energy for this “fake crisis” (I call Continue Reading
I take issue with one thing in this quote: “Agree with Ocasio-Cortez’s solutions or not, it’s to her credit that, in such a short time, she has helped change the terms of the debate. “Radicalism pushes the bonds of what liberals will jump on board with,” Saikat Chakrabarti, the representative’s chief of staff, said. “Every major social movement has worked Continue Reading
I think there is more brokenness in focusing on sexual identity differences rather than on trying to confront and heal the broken systems which harm people and planet.
“To care about a changing climate, we don’t have to be a scientist or an environmentalist or a liberal political activist. We just have to be a human who wants this planet, the only one we have, to be a safe home for all of us.” — Katharine Hayhoe
David Wallace-Wells’ own description of the subject of his new book, at the end of the opening from which I have been quoting: “What follows is a kaleidoscopic accounting of the human costs of human life continuing as it has for a generation, which will fill up the planet with only more humans—what ongoing global warming spells for public health, Continue Reading
Just one more of those things that infuriates me about we as a people of the earth: “Slow-walking action on climate, another paper found, will cost the world $26 trillion by just 2030.” Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 33). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. And we have people saying “It costs too much! That’ll wreck the economy! ” Bigtime, deadly B.S.
So, in a paragraph soon to follow the pieces I just challenged, regarding how they seem to be unaware of the “baked in” effects of 1 or 2 decades ago, he writes this: “Carbon hangs in the air for decades, with some of the most terrifying feedbacks unspooling over even longer time horizons—which gives warming the eerie shimmer of an Continue Reading
Wallace-Wells follows that notion I just “cautioned” about, with another not so helpful notion: “We found a way to engineer devastation, and we can find a way to engineer our way out of it—or, rather, engineer our way toward a degraded muddle, but one that nevertheless extends forward the promise of new generations finding their own way forward, perhaps toward Continue Reading
(Forgive the length of this, but this began as a reply to a comment elsewhere, and turned into a much longer train of thought) A movie called “The Book of Eli” was about a man, in a post apocalyptic world protecting the Bible he obtained/salvaged from an evil despot who sought the book in order to use it to solidify Continue Reading
“The United Nations established its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988, signaling to all the world a scientific consensus about the problem. Since then, we have done more damage, knowingly, than we did over preceding centuries, in ignorance.” This needs to be realized, so we can get a grasp on the recognition that causes us to ask: “What the Continue Reading
This guy writes very well. And sees very well. And processes very well. “climate change is .. an “existential crisis”—a drama we are now haphazardly improvising between two hellish poles, in which our best-case outcome is death and suffering at the scale of twenty-five Holocausts, and the worst-case outcome puts us on the brink of extinction. Rhetoric often fails us Continue Reading
I’m gonna have to stop reading soon. I need to go to bed, and I will need to be able to sleep then. “Every degree of warming, it’s been estimated, costs a temperate country like the United States about one percentage point of GDP, and according to one recent paper, at 1.5 degrees the world would be $20 trillion richer Continue Reading
This is horrific:“In just the last forty years, according to the World Wildlife Fund, more than half of the world’s vertebrate animals have died; in just the last twenty-five, one study of German nature preserves found, the flying insect population declined by three-quarters.” Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (pp. 25-26). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. This just in from a phone call Continue Reading