19 Comments

If you are pinning your optimism on 'green/clean' energy, then you are badly un/misinformed of the ecological-destructiveness and unsustainability of these options. Not only do they significantly rely upon fossil fuels from the mining and processing of the mineral inputs to their production, distribution, and maintenance once established, but they rely upon finite materials themselves, have limited lifespans, and then add toxic materials to the landfills once decommissioned.

There is nothing zero- or neutral-carbon about the various plans being marketed to the world. I have come to believe such a narrative is primarily a vast marketing scheme to shift capital from one unsustainable, ecologically-destructive industry to another equally unsustainable and ecologically-destructive one. Scratch the surface even gently of these schemes and you will discover humanity is being sold, as it often is, a misleading narrative to sell stuff while leading it to believe it is making 'progress' on the environmental front. Watch Jeff Gibbs Planet of the Humans or Julia Barnes Bright Green Lies for more on this.

There is so much more to humanity's dilemmas than carbon and greenhouse gas emissions--particularly the consequences of overshoot. If we aren't talking seriously about significant degrowth, particularly in so-called 'advanced' economies, and the relocalisation of pretty well everything, then we are just weaving a story to reduce our cognitive dissonance and avoiding the necessary pain that is going to accompany our energy descent.

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Where is your data?

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Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is already doomed. So are coral reefs. As soon as next summer's El Niño, a blue Arctic will attain temperatures that (like present atmospherics and ocean acidity) have not occured here since prior mass-extinctions.

Methane eruptions are already unprecedented in the Holocene from ocean clathrates and arctic permafrost, with the still-unpredictable potential to tip the ecosphere into a rapid mass-extinction with only simple-organism survivors.

Our civilization is even more vulnerable to dire tipping-points than the ecosystem. We are a species of ever-more-horrific wars in scarcity and inequality. Even the best-case climate-emergency scenarios will be utterly unprecedented in terms of scarcity and inequality, much sooner than our governments will be appreciably reformed.

Neither personal mortality nor mass-extinction should tip us into despairing resignation. Everything respectful that we do in consideration for all Earthlings henceforth is ever more meaningful and defining. Engineering our testament, discoverable across deep space-time, will also be worthwhile in our remaining decades. It would have been very different, had we discovered such a thing a century ago here. Even if The Anthropocene is a geological instant, it is still possible to extend and improve our twilight- maybe even improve by our testament the rather depressing Fermi Paradox.

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We can switch from burning fossil fuels in our cars tomorrow. All cars right now can run on 50% ethanol. A download into the CPU can make it run on !00% ethanol. Every community can make its own ethanol from food waste. Eliminate the fragile fossil fuel infrastructure that has just been experienced with the Colonial pipeline failure.

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There is huge inertia but it can be reversed very quickly by switching from industrial agriculture to regenerative agriculture. It can be done by eating and growing regeneratively produced food. See the Netflix films "Kiss the Ground" and "The Biggest Little Farm" Soil can hold 3 time the carbon as the air and above ground plants combined.

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