MacA Part II-Trajectory Changes. McK thru David Quammen
MacA Part II-Trajectory Changes Christina Guest
McK thru David Quammen - Audrey Lewis
... - Eli Miller
MacA
Who are some classical and Enlightenment philosophers who accepted slavery? What 18th century activist does MacAskill credit with challenging it most effectively? What else did he oppose? 49-50
What is the dead-hand problem? What's an example? 54
What evolutionary biologist famously denied the likelihood that a re-wound "tape of life" would support the emergence of human-level intelligence? What is the current consensus among biologists concerning evolutionary contingency? What principles govern cultural evolution? What happens to cultures that don't entrench themselves? 55-60
What does 20th century history show about moral progress? 65 What do we need, to drive it forward? 72
Who were the Mohists? What did they have in common with the British utilitarians? 76 What did the rise and millennial lock-in of Confucianism illustrate? 78
What technology of our time is key to the prospects of future lock-in? 79 What will we have created, if research in this area proceeds to its ultimate achievement? 80
What have tech moguls like Bezos, Thiel, and Altman invested in and/or patronized? 85
What is the alignment problem? It it's solved, what might continue for billions of years to come? 87
What countries does MacAskill expect to grow in power in the future? 93 What kind of world does he say we should want to build? 99-101
McK
Annie Dillard compared Richard Nelson to who? 860
What do the Koyukon elders teach? 873
What is David Quammen's main subject? What is it good to remember about feathers (and paleontologists)? 874-5
How many species will be lost, if current trends continue? 881
What does anyone interested in biodivdersity need to think about? 884
A nice moment between Joel (Cicely Alaska's imported Columbia-trained physician) and Ed, the local Shaman-in-training and aspiring filmmaker, from the great TV series Northern Exposure:
ZIllow
just debuted a climate risk map. This East Tennessee town shows up as having a
long-term air pollution risk
ZIllow's new climate risk maps show an East
Tennessee city has an extreme air pollution risk.
In September 2024, the online real estate site
partnered with First Street, a company specializing in climate risk mapping, to
make climate data accessible to potential homeowners.
The First Street maps existed before the
Zillow partnership. But now, the data is meant to be a tool for potential home
buyers as they assess climate risk, insurance costs and long-term affordability
of properties before putting in an offer.
The maps help buyers understand five major
risks: Flood, fire, wind, heat and air.
“Climate risks are now a critical factor in
home-buying decisions,” said Skylar Olsen, chief economist at Zillow in a
recent press release. “Healthy markets are ones where buyers and sellers have
access to all relevant data for their decisions."
We need more timely updates in response to the rapid changes to the climate.
The earth has been exceptionally warm of late, with every month from June 2023 until this past September breaking records. It has been considerably hotter even than climate scientists expected. Average temperatures during the past 12 months have also been above the goal set by the Paris climate agreement: to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels.
We know human activities are largely responsible for the long-term temperature increases, as well as sea level rise, increases in extreme rainfall and other consequences of a rapidly changing climate. Yet the unusual jump in global temperatures starting in mid-2023 appears to be higher than our models predicted (even as they generally remain within the expected range)...
"Our unanimity about Orbitalrecognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey's extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share".
...Harvey has said that while writing the novel she continually watched streaming video from the International Space Station showing Earth from space.
“To look at the Earth from space was a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself,” she said during her acceptance speech. nyt
"“With each sunrise nothing is diminished or lost and every single one staggers them. Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute, every time the earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day, day after day after day from the depth of space, a day every ninety minutes, every day brand new and of infinite supply, it staggers them.” Samantha Harvey, Orbital
William MacAskill, What Do We Owe the Future? (MacA) Part I-The Long View - Aidan Haines
McK thru Jack Turner - Gray Fogo
McK
Abandoned houses tell us what, says Linda Horgan? 812
What does David Abram want us to honor and value? 815
What renders a healer worthless? 820 What do western anthropologists overlook in the shaman's craft? 821
What is magic in its most primordial sense? 822 What experience led Abrams to rethink his conception of "spirits"? 826
What emerging ecological perspective is similar to the animism of traditional cultures? 829 What power or presence did Abrams learn to perceive? What form of wisdom did he begin to appreciate? 833-4
What's another translation of the Japanese word for Enlightenment? 838
What do we fail to appreciate about our descriptions and explanations of human behavior? 846
MacA
What is MacAskill's book's worldview, and what is his preferred definition of it? ix What does he want us to be? xiii
What was MacAskill's initial response to longtermism? What metaphors illustrate his current view? 5-6 What tyranny does he say we should abandon? 9 What is his aim in this book? 21-2
COMMENT?" Do you see a connection between l'ism and John Dewey's continuous human community? (*below) Or Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation?
COMMENT:? "A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain." --William James
COMMENT:? "Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present." --Albert Camus
How is humanity like a teenager? 19 What reckless behavior did MacAskill indulge in, as a teen? 34, 39
Climate change highlights what? How is decarbonization a win-win-win...? 24-5 What's our outsized opportunity? 28
What killed off the megafauna? 30
What do Frank Capra and Bill McKibben have in common? What lesson about "plasticity" did McKibben learn? 42-3
Longtermism
https://www.williammacaskill.com/longtermism
Longtermism is the view that we should be doing much more to protect future generations.
Longtermism is based on the ideas that future people have moral worth, there could be very large numbers of future people, and that what we do today can affect how well or poorly their lives go. Let’s take these points one at a time.
First, future people have moral worth. Just because people are born in the future does not make their experiences any less real or important. To illustrate this, we can put ourselves in our ancestors’ shoes and ask whether they would have been right to consider people today morally irrelevant by mere fact of not having yet been born. Another way to look at this is through considering our ability to harm future people. For instance, consider how we store nuclear waste. We do not simply set it out in the desert without further precautions, because it will start to leak in several centuries. Instead, we carefully store it and mark it for future generations, because we recognize that it would be wrong to cause future people foreseeable harm.
Second, there could be very large numbers of future people. Humanity might last for a very long time. If we last as long as the typical mammalian species, it would mean there are hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us. If history were a novel, we may be living on its very first page. Barring catastrophe, the vast majority of people who will ever live have not been born yet. These people could have stunningly good lives, or incredibly bad ones.
Third, what we do today can affect the lives of future people in the long run. Some might argue that it is hard or impossible to predict the future, so that even if future people are morally important and even if there will be many of them, we cannot predictably benefit them beyond a hundred years time. However, while it is difficult to foresee the long-run effects of many actions, there are some things that we can predict. For example, if humanity suffered some catastrophe that caused it to go extinct we can predict how that would affect future people: there wouldn’t be any. This is why a particular focus of longtermism has been on existential risks: risks that threaten the destruction of humanity’s long-term potential. Risks that have been highlighted by longtermist researchers include those from advanced artificial intelligence, engineered pathogens, nuclear war, extreme climate change, and global totalitarianism. Besides mitigating existential risks, we can also predictably shape the longterm future by changing the trajectory of humanity in a persistent way, like through changing what it values.
William has a book on longtermism called What We Owe The Future which was published in August and September 2022.
Learn more about longtermism in an excerpt of What We Owe The Future in The New York Times, an introductory article in BBC, and a long-form piece in Foreign Affairs. The links below are also helpful:
A professor of philosophy at Oxford University and the author of “What We Owe the Future,” from which this essay has been adapted
Imagine living the life of every human being who has ever existed — in order of birth.
Your first life begins about 300,000 years ago in Africa. After living that life and dying, you travel back in time to be reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first, then the third-ever person, and so on.
One hundred billion (or so) lives later, you are the youngest person alive today. Your life has lasted somewhere in the ballpark of four trillion years. You have spent approximately 10 percent of it as a hunter-gatherer and 60 percent as a farmer, a full 20 percent raising children, and over 1 percent suffering from malaria or smallpox. You spent 1.5 billion years having sex and 250 million giving birth.
That’s your life so far — from the birth of Homo sapiens until the present.
But now imagine that you live all future lives, too. Your life, we hope, would be just beginning. Even if humanity lasts only as long as the typical mammal species (about one million years), and even if the world population falls to a tenth of its current size, 99.5 percent of your life would still be ahead of you. On the scale of a typical human life, you in the present would be just a few months old. The future is big.
I offer this thought experiment because morality, at its core, is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes and treating their interests as we do our own. When we do this at the full scale of human history, the future — where almost everyone lives and where almost all potential for joy and misery lies — comes to the fore... (continues)
==
* "The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of humanity. It remains to make it explicit and militant." —From A Common Faith by John Dewey
David Wallace-Wells wrote the intro to this feature edition. (It doesn't appear to be online, I'll bring in the physical magazine if anybody wants to see it.)
"… Bill McKibben, an environmental activist who has spent decades advocating collective action, applauded Mr. Spodek's use of solar panels, pointing to a movement in Germany in whichmore than 500,000 people added solar panels to their balconiesin the first half of 2024.
"More power to him," Mr. McKibben said of Mr. Spodek. "It's a really good illustration of how effective solar power is, even in small doses. And there's going to be an endless amount more of just this kind of experimentation."
But he added that private lifestyle choices were limited in their impact. "The most important thing an individual can do is be a little less of an individual," he said, "and join together with others in movements big enough to enact some change."
Mr. Spodek acknowledged that his own exercise in living off the grid had a negligible effect on climate change. He was vague about how his personal example — even his modest workshops and podcast, "This Sustainable Life" — could spread beyond the circle of people already trying to live more sustainably.
But even small, individual gestures can have a ripple effect, said Sarah Lazarovic, vice president of communications and creative strategy at the nonprofitRewiring America, which promotes conversion to electricity, including solar.
"When someone puts up solar panels on their place, it's catalytic because people see it done," she said. "Then they'll do it, and other people will see that. So I never underestimate the power of individual action."
Mr. Spodek pointed — perhaps immodestly — to other social movements that began with a few individuals.
"I have no intent to just do one-on-one for the rest of my life," he said. "What I'm doing is creating leaders so that they can create yet more leaders. And that means creating organizations, institutions."
Culture change had to start somewhere, he said. Why not with him?"
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..." ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
This year will almost certainly be the hottest year on record, beating the high set in 2023, researchers announced on Wednesday.
The assessment, by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union agency that monitors global warming, also forecast that 2024 would be the first calendar year in which global temperatures consistently rose 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That's the temperature threshold that countries agreed, in the Paris Agreement, that the planet should avoid crossing. Beyond that amount of warming, scientists say, the Earth will face irreversible damage.
Greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are dangerously heating up the planet, imperiling biodiversity, increasing sea level rise and making extreme weather events more common and more destructive...
As American civic life has become increasingly shaped by algorithms, trust in government has plummeted. Is there any turning back?
"...The building of the artificial state came at the expense of the natural world. “The modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen,” Rachel Carson warned in the preface to a 1964 book called “Animal Machines,” the “Silent Spring” of factory farming, which involved the raising of animals from birth to death in cages hardly bigger than themselves. “Yet the evils go long unrecognised,” Carson wrote. “Even those who create them manage by some devious rationalising to blind themselves to the harm they have done society.” The artificial state is the factory farming of public life, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, the destruction of human community. Meanwhile, the immense energy and water consumption required to build, expand, and maintain the coming A.I. infrastructure threatens to roll back gains made by environmental regulation in the past half century.
This election season, even as hurricanes battered North Carolina and Florida, the natural world has been notably absent from both the Trump and the Harris campaigns. Trump, who used to describe climate change as a hoax, has not substantially altered that position. (“You know, they have no idea what’s going to happen,” he said this summer. “It’s weather.”) Harris, despite having been part of an Administration that produced perhaps the most important environmental law in a generation, has seemed to distance herself from environmentalism as she attempts to take back the language of freedom from her opponent. But, as the historian Sunil Amrith writes in his essential new book, “The Burning Earth: A History,” the rhetoric of freedom has become bound up with the triumph of the artificial over the natural: “Into the pursuit of freedom there crept, over time, a notion previously unthinkable: that true human autonomy entailed a liberation from the binding constraints of nature.” ...
GT 5.22 (Hope... What Next?). McK thru Ellen Meloy
Take a look at Katherine Modine's latest posts on Interconnected Planet (in the sidebar)
Final report presentation: Alex Wiseman
GT
Greta says hope is what? And what's its greatest source?421
It'll never be too late to what? Why won't she conclude with "inspirational words"? 422 What does she assume about her readers? 424
How much "recycled" plastic actually gets recycled (in Sweden, and presumably elsewhere)? 425
The world won't end if we exceed 1.5 degrees C global average temperature rise, but what probably will? 426 What will still be here if we do change to a sustainable way of life? 427
COMMENT?: What we can do together 430-32... What you can do individually 433-4... What some can do more 435-6.
McK
What most defines wolves? 763 What are the respective agendas of those who are for and against them? 761
What did Rick Durning document in How Much is Enough? 770 What are the main determinants of happiness? 774-5
Whence arises loyalty to place, according to Scott Russell Sanders? What are the roots of nostalgia? 788-9
What did George Schaller learn from studying gorillas? 790
What's the Las Vegas survival strategy, according to Ellen Meloy? 797
The FDR era comes to an end And so we will need to build the next new thing under the sun
Bill McKibben:
I am, of course, sad.
I had hoped, almost more than I let myself really feel, that American was about to elect a smart black woman president of the United States, moving us further down the path that we have haltingly followed throughout my life. Instead, quite knowingly, we elected someone who stood for the worst impulses in our history. I think the next four years—and perhaps longer—will be very hard on many fronts. One is the concern of this newsletter, climate and energy, where we can expect the oil industry to have carte blanche.
But I actually think the message and the moment is much deeper than that. What happened last night was that the cord that stretched back to FDR snapped. It had been badly frayed, especially in the Reagan years, but the Depression and World War II had been such deep and defining events that the formula that got us through them—a kind of solidarity at home and abroad—more or less held. No more.
Everything is up for grabs now, including the basic entitlement programs that defined the New Deal. (If you haven’t read Project 2025 this would be a good day to start). In foreign policy terms it’s all far more complicated, and has been from Vietnam through Gaza—but today is a bad day to be Ukrainian, Taiwanese, or a Palestinian on the West Bank. Can things get worse? I think they can, and I think we will find out, here and around the world. But I don’t think it will last either, because the promises on which this new MAGA order are built are mostly nonsense.
And I also think the sun rose this morning—there was a leaden sky in the Green Mountains of Vermont when I went out to walk the dog, but I could sense the sun behind it.
And in that sunrise there is for me the hint of where that next huge realigning New Deal-sized thing will come from. The reshaping of our energy system—to cope with climate change, and to reflect the rock-solid fact that we live on an earth where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun—may offer, if we are clever and good-hearted, a new basis on which to remake the world.
More local, more peaceful, less controllable by oligarchs and plutocrats. I don’t know if we can make it—the headwinds are stronger than they were yesterday—but I know we can try. And I know that only this project is big enough in scale to give us a real chance at a fresh start.
That’s what this community will continue to focus on, and I’m glad you’re a part of it.. (continues)
We'll do two or three presentations per class. I've tentatively filled out the schedule, most of you haven't indicated a preference. You can swap with someone else if they're agreeable, just put that in the comments space and give me a heads-up. There were no volunteers to go first on November 5 so we'll have to do three presentations in a couple of classes.
Presentation to be complemented with a final report blog post due Dec.6. Everyone will need to sign up as an AUTHOR on this site, in order to post, before then. Post an early draft for constructive feedback or to use in your presentation. The blog post should summarize your presentation, and elaborate on it. Include relevant links (instead of footnotes/bibliography) to sources.
NOV 5 [Don't forget to vote!]
Greta Thumberg, The Climate Book (GT) 5.15--5.21 (thru Mending...Earth)
Bill McKibben, American Earth (McK) thru Terry Tempest Williams
NOV 7
GT 5.22 (Hope... What Next?) - Eli Miller
McK thru Ellen Meloy - Alex Wiseman
NOV 12
William MacAskill, What Do We Owe the Future? (MacA) Part I-The Long View - Aidan Haines
McK thru Jack Turner - Gray Fogo
NOV 14
MacA Part II-Trajectory Changes Christina Guest
McK thru David Quammen - Audrey Lewis
... - Eli Miller
NOV 19
MacA Part III-Safeguarding Civilisation - Eli Kersey
McK thru Sandra Steingraber - Nathan Ruppel
Quammen, "Earth's biological limits" - Chelsie Gordon
NOV 21
MacA Part IV-Assessing the End of the World - Katherine Welch
McK Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan - Jonathan Keith
Nashville voters have cast their ballots in favor of a new transit plan designed to improve buses, upgrade traffic lights, build sidewalks and more. Speaking at co-working space The Malin in the Gulch, O'Connell declared victory after early-voting results showed overwhelming support for the measure.
"There have been people carrying the torch for this conversation for such a long time," O'Connell told his supporters. "We all came together for the past couple months to do something good, big, important and popular."
The plan calls for $3.1 billion in spending over the next 15 years. Funds would go to improvements to the public WeGo bus system, constructing sidewalks, upgrading traffic lights and more. The "Choose How You Move" plan will be funded by a half-cent increase to the sales tax. The mayor and transit advocates say having a dedicated funding source will help Nashville apply for and receive federal grants for transportation improvements in the future....
President-elect Donald J. Trump promised to delete climate policy. He could face pushback from Republicans benefiting from a boom in clean energy.
The fight against climate change has taken a body blow with the election of Donald J. Trump, who calls global warming a "scam" and has promised to erase federal efforts to reduce the pollution that is heating the planet.
Mr. Trump told a jubilant crowd Wednesday that the United States, which signed a global agreement last year to transition away from fossil fuels, will instead amp up oil production even beyond current record levels. "We have more liquid gold than any country in the world," said the president-elect, who won with substantial financial support from the oil and gas industry. "More than Saudi Arabia. We have more than Russia."
But Mr. Trump's zeal to repeal the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law that is pouring more than $390 billion into electric vehicles, batteries and other clean energy technology, will quickly face a political test.
Roughly 80 percent of the money spent so far has flowed to Republican congressional districts, where lawmakers and business leaders want to protect that investment and the jobs they bring...
Warren Washington, Groundbreaking Climate Scientist, Dies at 88
He invented a computer model that made it possible to measure human-induced climate change. He also helped break a color barrier in science.
Warren M. Washington, a scientist who helped invent one of the first computer models of the earth’s atmosphere, paving the way to accurately measure human-induced climate change, died on Oct. 18 at his home in Denver. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where Dr. Washington was a senior scientist and had worked for more than 50 years.
Dr. Washington was a pioneer in two senses.
The son of a Pullman-car porter in Portland, Ore., he became the second Black student in the United States to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology.
He was also one of the country’s first and most influential climate scientists, advising five presidents on climate change and serving as a mentor to generations of researchers who followed him... (continues)
"In thinking about climate change, I often feel desperate, but in talking with others I try not to lead with despair. Like all human emotions, despair is contagious. Worse, it leads to immobility, and we have run out of time for hand-wringing. If ever we must resist the temptation to fall into despair, surely it is now, with the election polls so close and the future of the planet hanging on what happens Tuesday.
A lot of other things hang on what happens Tuesday, too, as The Times has deeply reported over the last weeks in a series called "What's at Stake in the 2024 Election." As president, Donald Trump could destroy the stability of our institutions, including American democracy itself. He could further trample women's reproductive safety and autonomy, terrorize immigrant Americans, roll back hard-won rights for L.G.B.T.Q. people, imperil what's left of the impartiality of the courts and weaponize government to prosecute anyone he perceives as an enemy, end all hopes for curtailing gun violence, close off access to affordable health care, threaten the free press, and fray the social safety net in all its forms. And that's just the beginning of an almost limitless list of dangers he poses.
Of them all, the one that most often keeps me up at night is the way a second Trump presidency would imperil the planet. Climate change, which Mr. Trump calls "a scam," is a threat multiplier: Every existing global conflict, every human vulnerability and every form of social instability is already being exacerbated by climate calamities. There is no issue on the political table that will not be made exponentially worse if we allow the living earth to enter its death throes, and yet climate has rarely been part of the political discourse during this election year..."
In low moments, I sincerely doubt that anyone ever changes their mind, and I especially doubt that anyone ever changes their mind in response to an op-ed. But our planet, our home, is in mortal danger, and words are all I've got. So I'm taking my very best shot here.
Experts uncover
'game-changer' side effects of solar farms: 'The benefits are numerous'
Jeremiah Budin11 3 2024
The solar energy industry has long been portrayed as being at
odds with traditional farming, as both require lots of land and are presumably
in competition with one another.
However, a new
approach called "agrivoltaics" is integrating the two industries together
and showing that they can coexist while benefiting one another, the Washington Post reported.
Agrivoltaics
essentially allows farmers to lease parts of their land to solar companies,
providing the farmers with steady, guaranteed incomes. Best of all, the land
underneath the solar panels is
still theirs to use for things like grazing or for plants that require lots of
shade. Even if sellable crops aren't plantable under the solar panels, farmers
can still install native plants and flowers that support local pollinators,
in turn supporting their other crops.
"If they are
managed well, [agrivoltaic farms] are increasing biodiversity, sequestering
carbon and increasing soil organic matter. The benefits are
numerous," said Loran
Shallenberger, senior director of regenerative energy operations for Silicon
Ranch, a Nashville, Tennessee-based solar energy company.
The farmers that have
bought into this business opportunity
— at least the ones the Post spoke to — seem very happy with their decision.
One was using a portion of his family farm for "solar grazing,"
in which sheep graze under the solar arrays.
"You're getting
paid to graze your sheep," he said.
If cattle farmers were
to also embrace agrivoltaics en masse, that could make a huge difference for
the solar industry and for our planet, as cattle farming is much more prevalent
than sheep farming in the U.S. (although with its own environmental
drawbacks).
As our planet
continues to overheat largely as a result of the air pollution created by dirty energy companies,
it is clear that we need to switch away from energy sources like gas and oil
and toward clean, renewable sources like wind and solar as quickly as humanly
possible.
Whistleblowers
make alarming claims about decades-long efforts to mislead public: 'Uniquely
dangerous and underregulated' "They could be lethal."
by Mike TaylorNovember 3, 2024The Cool Down Company, TCD Newlsetter
Oil and gas companies' disinformation
campaigns about the effects of dirty fuels on the climate have been ongoing for
years — and despite statements to the contrary discussed in a new
investigation, the industry is not part of the solution to rebalance our
rapidly warming planet.
What's happening?
Oil and gas corporations are touting their
role in fixing the climate crisis, but a federal investigation and
whistleblowers indicate it's all for show, Vox reported with Drilled.
Issues include misleading information
surrounding the overarching benefits of carbon capture and storage, as well as
enhanced oil recovery — which are being marketed as solutions and even ways to
lead the United States' efforts to cut heat-trapping pollution.
"For my January 2021 piece on America's path to sustained climate progress, I noted that early overreach by Joe Biden wasn't the way, and that a key would be to build legislation stimulating community resilience, innovation and clean-energy expansion. I also said it'd take one Biden term and two Kamala Harris terms. And here we are, after the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and IRA, poised for Harris term one if blue voters surge. That indeed makes this the biggest climate election ever…"1/2
"It must be recognized that staying alive though suicidal is an act of radiant generosity, a way in which we can save each other.
...
None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience. History and philosophy ask us to remember these mysteries, to look around at friends, family, humanity, at the surprises life brings — the endless possibilities that living offers — and to persevere. There is love and insight to live for, bright moments to cherish, and even the possibility of happiness, and the chance of helping someone else through his or her own troubles. Know that people, through history and today, understand how much courage it takes to stay. Bear witness to the night side of being human and the bravery it entails, and wait for the sun. If we meditate on the record of human wisdom we may find there reason enough to persist and find our way back to happiness. The first step is to consider the arguments and evidence and choose to stay. After that, anything may happen. First, choose to stay.” --Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It
==
Stay: The Social Contagion of Suicide and How to Preempt It By Maria Popova
"If you’ve ever known someone who committed suicide, or have contemplated it yourself, or have admired a personal hero who died by his or her own hand, please oh please read this. Because, as Jennifer Michael Hecht so stirringly argues in Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It (public library), numerous social science studies indicate that one of the best predictors of committing suicide is knowing suicide — a fact especially chilling given more people die of suicide than murder every year, and have been for centuries. Suicide kills more people than AIDS, cancer, heart disease, or liver disease, more men and women between the ages of 15 and 44 than war, more young people than anything but accident. And beneath all these impersonal statistics lie exponential human tragedies — of those who died, and of those who were left to live with their haunting void.
To be sure, Hecht’s interest in the subject is far from the detached preachiness such narratives tend to exude — after two of her dear friends, both fellow writers, committed suicide in close succession, she was left devastated and desperate to make sense of this deceptively personal act, which cuts so deep into surrounding souls and scars the heart of a community. So she immersed herself in the science, philosophy, and history of suicide searching for answers, emerging with an eye-opening sense of everything we’ve gotten wrong about suicide and its prevention..." (continues)
