>>452580

Just hope they aren't registered to do postal votes from the skin cancer ward.

Humanity faces ‘collective suicide’ over climate crisis, warns UN chief.
António Guterres tells governments ‘half of humanity is in danger zone’, as countries battle extreme heat
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/18/humanity-faces-collective-suicide-over-climate-crisis-warns-un-chief

Pictured is ~50 headlines from around the globe. Mainly about France and Spain but of course the good British papers have headlines about how hot it is here, with pictures of the beach, or Boris.

https://goodlawproject.org/news/we-won-net-zero
The Good Law Project sued the government for their Net Zero plan being a load of shite and won. I didn't mean to keep bumping this thread all day but there's a lot of relevant stuff.

>>452631

I don't know how many lads are posting, but please don't stop bumping this thread. It's been genuinely informative for me.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62225696
Article from today covering how the oil industry set out to sow doubt in the public about climate change.

>>452727
Sounds like an XR plot to paint useful industry as the bad guys.

>>452733 >>452736 >>452738

It takes a special kind of mental gymnastics to defend the oil industry when multiple corporations independently came up with their own climate models that predicted exactly what they've done to the planet.

>>452743

Cigarette companies had known internally for a long time about the damage that smoking does to a person.

The MO always seems to be, right, now that we know our product is harmful, let's pay PR agencies millions to let the public believe otherwise.

Capitalism at its finest.

Reminds me also of the Ford Pinto scandal in the early 70s where Ford calculated that it was cheaper to pay out compensation to people who got injured by their car bursting into flames from even a gentle rear-end collision, instead of recalling all Pintos and spending $20 per car (in early 70s money) to weld in a crash guard to keep the petrol tank from rupturing.

>>452751

They knew leaded petrol was toxic for years, if not since the very beginning, but lobbied heavily to keep it out of the public eye. The bloke who invented it became seriously ill, as did most of the workers in the early refineries, but too much money was on the table to let a little thing like that stop it. Money is always at the root of these things. The profit motive is blind, so it just as often (more often, arguably) leads to psychotic harm as it does to social good.

Philosophically, it's hard to truly call it evil, but I would say it's worse than evil. It's the insidious kind of undirected, headless harm that rises purely as a consequence of the system in place. It's not like with Nazi death camps where you can ask "were the guys pulling the levers on the gas chambers truly culpable or were they just following orders", it's just that there was no ethical oversight here to begin with. The people responsible were driven not by any desire to do harm but simply by profit motive, and the harm they caused was just collateral damage they had no incentive to care about.

>>452752
>Philosophically, it's hard to truly call it evil, but I would say it's worse than evil.
You seem to be echoing the same sentiments as Noam Chomsky does here.

>>452752

>where you can ask "were the guys pulling the levers on the gas chambers truly culpable or were they just following orders"

Most staff at the concentration camps were specially recruited and selected because of their likelihood of being willing culprits. Often, they were young and ruthless, career-minded SS officers with aspirations of being somebody important after the Endsieg.

So to answer your question, yes, they were culpable because almost without exception, they were the kind of person who lived, breathed and shat Third Reich ideology.

>but too much money was on the table to let a little thing like that stop it. Money is always at the root of these things. The profit motive is blind

I saw something a while ago about the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. George Soros almost single-handedly exacerbated it by betting heavily against East Asian currencies, which, if you could move the kind of money that's available to somebody like him, made the situation much worse and further devalued their currencies against the U.S. Dollar, when most foreign private and public loans were kept in Dollars.

George Soros at one point during that crisis said to reporters in front of rolling cameras that his obligation was toward his investors who were expecting him to turn a profit, and that he couldn't afford to consider the effects his currency speculation had on small business owners and regular people in Asia who could no longer pay back their loans.

Never doubt that people like Soros are absolute fucking evil.

>>452754

Soros only won that bet because he was right - those currencies were overvalued, those economies were overburdened with debt and the market didn't realise it. He might have hastened the emergence of the crisis, but he didn't cause the underlying factors that created the conditions for an inevitable crisis.

Soros is an easy target for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, he's an easy scapegoat for the leaders of mismanaged economies, but it's just not possible to make sustained profits from artificially creating economic crises. The market is far from perfectly rational, but it isn't that dumb. I can try to convince the world that Facebook is actually worthless, I can leverage massive amounts of money to short their stock, but I'm going to lose every time because Facebook obviously isn't worthless.

>>452759

It's still the mindset that counts.

If you almost literally say fuck it, making my investors who are already well to do another few million is more important than a small business employing twenty people in South Korea which goes tits up because it can no longer serve its loans, then you're a pretty shit human being.

It's true that one person even commanding the biggest hedge fund on the planet usually cannot bring an entire country to its knees. Although I think that has happened somewhere as well with some smaller country. But to say that betting on currency devaluation is fair game because the currency was overvalued to begin with offers a non-solution to a problem that was created in the first place by the global financial sector.

It seems to be an inherent trait of capitalism to create bubbles and then see those bubbles burst again in periodic cycles. But to just shrug it off like that is a bit cynical.

>>452760

>It seems to be an inherent trait of capitalism to create bubbles and then see those bubbles burst again in periodic cycles.

It's a trait of political leaders to create the appearance of economic growth when they can't create actual economic growth. Fiddle the exchange rate, load up on debt, inflate an asset bubble. Sure, the house of cards will eventually come crashing down, but you'll probably have retired by then. Boom-and-bust is a political phenomenon, not an economic law.

Economies that aren't built on lies are practically unexploitable by speculators. There's no hidden information, the pricing is accurate, so there's no speculative opportunity. The problem is that most politicians are happy to lie to the electorate and most electorates are happy to be lied to. Financial institutions are often complicit in that lying, but it's a two-way street between government and the markets. Governments aren't powerless in the face of an omnipotent financial system, they just choose to make a pact with the devil for short-term political gain.

Nobody forced the Greek government to borrow all that money, nobody forced them to fraudulently misreport economic data, nobody forced them to run massive deficits and be massively corrupt. They blame the Troika, they blame bankers, but they brought it all on themselves. Maybe it was wrong for Germany to lend them all that money, but if you lie about your income on your mortgage application you can hardly complain when you fall behind on your repayments and your house gets repossessed. Maybe the terms of the bailout were punitive, but they would never have needed that bailout if they hadn't built the appearance of an economic boom on a very wobbly tower of lies. The Greeks voted in successive buy-now-pay-later governments over several decades and acted like the victims of a global conspiracy when it came time to pay later.

>>452762

>Governments aren't powerless in the face of an omnipotent financial system, they just choose to make a pact with the devil for short-term political gain.

The two go hand in hand, lad, don't try and pretend it's just the evil politicos leading the saintly good natured financiers down a path of lies and corruption. Financial actors are up to their eyeballs in dodgy deals and bribery with politicians in order to ensure the government allows the exploitable conditions to perpetuate. They both profit off it and are happy to continue the symbiosis through spirals of boom and bust, because it never comes back on either of them, only the average working people and taxpayers.

>Economies that aren't built on lies

lol

>>452762

>Nobody forced the Greek government to borrow all that money, nobody forced them to fraudulently misreport economic data,

Not quite true. Deutsche Bank were instrumental in bringing Greece into the Eurozone, because they had large loans out to both the Greek state and to private companies that were all valued in German Marks. A Euro without Greece would have put Deutsche Bank's loans in jeopardy because the Drachma probably would have dropped considerably against the Euro within days. It was Deutsche Bank themselves who helped the Greek government cook the books on all the criteria they had to meet, but realistically couldn't, especially in terms of sovereign debt and deficit.


As far as economic growth in general, I still remember one of my first-semester economics lectures. The professor said, any economy can only generate so much yield in a given time period. If you expect to get more, then at some point you'll just be robbing Peter to pay Paul. Or in other words, if your personal yield (read: return on investment) is far greater than that, then somebody else must be losing money. And even if you are in a growth industry that far outpaces your country's GDP, it will not do so forever, as growth markets, too, have a tendency to see diminishing returns in the long run. You could even see losses at some point when your product is replaced by someone else's competing product.

Another thing is that there's a school of thought that politicians are political entrepreneurs, and that they offer a product in a not dissimilar way to a company or manufacturer. Where a manufacturer wants to maximise profit, they seek to maximise votes, and the way to do that is to have a platform or stance that wins those votes.

Where I'm trying to go with that tangent is that politicians promising you jobs, opportunity and growth don't necessarily do so because they will put all their effort into it, but because it's something a critical mass of people want to hear. And then when they're up for reelection and things didn'turn out that way, then it's just Politics 101 to blame it on this, that, and the other.

Regarding Starmer's position on it, here's a thread about economic growth
https://twitter.com/ClimateBen/status/1551666111837605888
I'm far too tired to summarise it for you beyond "degrowth is essential to our survival". This is a separate problem to emissions and whether or not they'll make the planet uninhabitable - different asteroid, same root causes.

>>452762
>Nobody forced the Greek government to borrow all that money, nobody forced them to fraudulently misreport economic data, nobody forced them to run massive deficits and be massively corrupt.
None of these things would be anywhere near as big a problem as they would've been if the Euro wasn't fundamentally the worst designed currency since Burma decided to demonetise everything that didn't have an '8' in it on the advice of a numerologist. A monetary union without a fiscal union, like a gun designed such that it can only be held in the roof of your own mouth and which is motion activated by human breathing.

>>452772
>The critique of capitalism is thin however with a ghastly focus on pop______n

He actually censored the word 'population'? Has it escaped his notice that the population of the 'developing' world has exploded over the past half a century while the white population has remained stable? Some people really are capable of filtering out any truth they don't like hearing.

https://www.ft.com/content/44a3f8de-1e1f-4cae-a1fd-b197452c2ec9
Review of the BBC's Big Oil Vs The World, which is worth watching for more context on the propaganda/media manipulation that's been going on.

Here's a map of recent major fires in Europe. It could do with some dates (I think it's safe to assume they're all this summer) and previous years to compare to.

>>452811
Sounds like we need to cut the forests down for our own safety.

Some good news for a change.

https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/first-100000-kg-removed-from-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch/

>First 100,000 KG Removed From the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

>Since deployment in August 2021, System 002 (or “Jenny”) has now collected 101,353 kg of plastic over 45 extractions, sweeping an area of ocean of over 3000km2 – comparable to the size of Luxembourg or Rhode Island.

>>452823
>3000km2 – comparable to the size of Luxembourg or Rhode Island
Or, in proper British units, about 1/6 of a Wales.

>>452823

I liked the video where one of them tried to help you visualise how much 100,000 Kg of plastic is by showing you how much 10KG weighs then telling you to picture 10,000x that.

Not helpful.

>>452825
>448 posts and 321 images omitted
100,000 kg is about the weight of two fatties threads.

Three if they've been sticking to the diet.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/27/leaked-us-leaked-power-companies-spending-profits-stop-clean-energy

A Democratic state senator was proposing a law that could cut into Florida Power & Light’s (FPL) profits. Landlords would be able to sell cheap rooftop solar power directly to their tenants – bypassing FPL and its monopoly on electricity.

“I want you to make his life a living hell … seriously,” FPL’s CEO Eric Silagy wrote in a 2019 email to two of his vice-presidents about state Senator José Javier Rodríguez, who proposed the legislation.

Rodríguez was ousted from office in the next election. Matrix employees spent heavily on political advertisements for a candidate with the same last name as Rodríguez, who split the vote. That candidate later admitted he was bribed to run.

>capitalism

This year Earth Overshoot Day is two days earlier than last year and several weeks sooner than 2020, when it was marked on August 22.

"From January 1 to July 28, humanity has used as much from nature as the planet can renew in the entire year,"
https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/2022/07/28/earth-overshoot-day-weve-already-used-up-this-years-resources/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/27/big-falls-in-crop-yields-across-europe-feared-due-to-heatwaves

From Spain to Hungary, output of staples such as corn forecast to fall by up to 9%, adding to impact of Ukraine war on food security

More positively, the Americans seem to have wavered in their policies for whatever reason.

Manchin has agreed to some sort of wealth tax for investing in renewables:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/manchin-schumer-climate-deal_n_62e1a677e4b07f83766bafbb
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/27/manchin-schumer-deal-climate-change-00048371

Biden announces a plan to plant a billion trees (not much of a solution to anything but better than nothing, I guess)
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/3573711-biden-administration-announces-plans-to-plant-one-billion-trees/

and this report seems a bit over-optimistic about limiting warming to 1.5 if we keep building renewables.
https://fastsolarpermitservices.com/solar-news/new-report-shows-that-solar-and-wind-power-can-reduce-global-warming-to-1-5c/

>>452832

>Biden announces a plan to plant a billion trees (not much of a solution to anything but better than nothing, I guess)

A billion trees isn't, but it's a start.

We would probably need several trillion trees to make an impact on the global climate that way, which is indeed easier said than done, because even one trillion trees means over 125,000 trees for every human on the planet.

Isn't something like moss, algae or seaweed meant to be better than trees anyway?

>>452834

Algae is, yes, but it's harder to explain that you're making an effort to prevent ocean acidification as part of a snappy, attention getting press-conference.
Organisations do a lot of tree planting because it's good PR, then they don't bother watering or taking care of them in any way, so they just die in the first summer.

>>452835

>Organisations do a lot of tree planting because it's good PR, then they don't bother watering or taking care of them in any way, so they just die in the first summer

That is a problem when you are reforesting dry areas. Fully grown old forests have the capacity to store water and moisture all on their own, but to convert barren or stripped land back into a self-sustaining moist ecosystem which retains its own water means you'll first have to spend years, possibly decades irrigating the area artificially. That water needs to come from somewhere.

That makes it an approach which is feasible in countries with enough water and precipitation like Britain, where you probably won't even have to irrigate artificially, but it's very difficult to reclaim polars that way, where freshwater is a scarce resource in the first place and where human populations depend on it for their own sustinance. Which is why polarification is such a serious environmental problem.

>>452843

>polarification

Right. Well then.

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/ireland-2030-51-percent-climate
Ireland, which has historically lagged behind other European nations in tackling climate change, has set a course to slash emissions by 51 percent by 2030.

https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/us-green-hydrogen-would-become-worlds-cheapest-form-of-h2-under-tax-credit-plan-in-new-manchin-approved-bill/2-1-1268259
US green hydrogen would become world's cheapest form of H2 under tax-credit plan in new Manchin-approved bill

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/29/ships-must-slow-down-to-save-endangered-whales-us-govt-says
Ships must slow down to save endangered whales, US gov’t says
Proposed rules would force more ships to slow down off US east coast to avoid striking North Atlantic right whales.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/31/drought-water-queues-uk-hosepipe-ban-compulsory-metering Act now on water or face emergency queues on the streets, UK warned
Hosepipe ban and compulsory water metering needed, say advisers, as nation braces for drought

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/us-regulators-will-certify-first-small-nuclear-reactor-design/
US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design
NuScale will get the final approval nearly six years after starting the process.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/las-vegas-declares-emergency-50-days-clean-water/story?id=87623219
Las Vegas, NM declares emergency, with less than 50 days of clean water supply left

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3539703-no-miracle-tech-needed-how-to-switch-to-renewables-now-and-lower-costs-doing-it/ No miracle tech needed: How to switch to renewables now and lower costs doing it

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gas-boilers-to-be-banned-in-new-homes-by-2024-8r0r5glxv
Gas boilers will be banned from new-build homes in Scotland by 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/07/29/onions-carrots-will-smaller-heatwave-shoppers-told/
Onions and carrots will be smaller after heatwave, shoppers told
Farmers warn extremely dry and hot weather in the UK will add to food price inflation

https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/hosepipe-ban-millions-of-brits-face-hefty-fine/
Almost a million households across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight will be subject to a hosepipe ban by Southern Water - who was the first to impose the ban.
The water company said the crackdown, which will come into effect on Friday, is required after dangerously low river levels.

https://theintercept.com/2022/07/30/blue-hydrogen-climate-oil-and-gas/ The oil and gas industry’s plan to convince the world to switch from natural gas to hydrogen made from natural gas is being upended by an unexpected cause: economics.
In Europe, green hydrogen is now cheaper than liquefied natural gas. And oil and gas companies, in turn, are increasingly investing in green hydrogen instead of using methane to produce blue hydrogen.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-08-10/climate-change-lawsuits-oil-companies-state-courts
Oil and gas companies are desperate to stop the wave of lawsuits seeking to hold them financially responsible for their role in climate change. Should these suits get to trial, their executives would have to testify about whether they knowingly misled the public about the climate threat posed by their products going back to the 1970s.

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/england-people-met-office-defra-nfu-b2131545.html People urged to reduce unnecessary water use as England faces drought
Officials held a meeting on Tuesday to discuss the situation as forecasters say several more dry weeks are expected.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-62381000
Plans to extend the runway at an airport will go ahead as an attempt to appeal a court's decision has failed.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27072022/wildfire-pollution-may-play-a-surprising-role-in-the-fate-of-arctic-sea-ice/
Smoke brightens Arctic clouds, perhaps slowing ice loss, but the ice is still dwindling, which can further intensify wildfires in an unexpected feedback loop.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62380728
Warning winter energy bills to rise by more than expected
"However, while the rise in forecasts for October and January is a pressing concern, it is not only the level - but the duration - of the rises that makes these new forecasts so devastating," he said. "Given the current level of the wholesale price, this level of household energy bills currently shows little sign of abating into 2024.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62382624
BP reports huge profits as energy bills soar

Celebrity corner:
https://novaramedia.com/2022/07/22/private-jet-use-shows-why-we-must-abolish-billionaires/ Private Jet Use Shows Why We Must Abolish Billionaires
1% of people cause 50% of aviation emissions. It has to stop.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/kylies-17-minute-flight-has-nothing-on-the-170-trips-taylor-swifts-private-jets-took-this-year-1390083/
Kylie’s 17-Minute Flight Has Nothing on the 170 Trips Taylor Swift’s Private Jets Took This Year

>>452964

>Kylie’s 17-Minute Flight Has Nothing on the 170 Trips Taylor Swift’s Private Jets Took This Year


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfWlot6h_JM


Also though, please stop referring to Kylie Jenner as just "Kylie". That gets confusing for us oldlads, who will always only associate that name with Kylie Minogue.

>>452964
>Las Vegas, NM
Phew. For a second there I thought all these horror stories were true.

Talk that is currently live (started at 1900).
Speakers:
Jeremy Corbyn is Jeremy Corbyn.
Chantelle Lunt is a prominent anti-racist, fisherperson and human rights activist and educator, and co-founder of the Kill the Bill Coalition and Merseyside Black Lives Matter Alliance.
Lee Jasper is a London politician and race relations activist, co-founder of Operation Black Vote / BARAC UK / Blaksox, and former senior policy advisor to the Mayor of London.
Bill McGuire is a Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards, University College London. He is a broadcaster, writer, and activist.
Zoe Cohen is a climate activist, educator and spokesperson, and has worked with Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, and now Just Stop Oil.
Kerry Abel has worked in the trade union movement for twenty years and works on the Future of Rail project as an Organiser for TSSA to make the case for skilled workers for a well-funded, green future of public transport.
Chris Packham is a renowned naturalist, television presenter, writer, photographer, conservationist, campaigner and filmmaker, perhaps most famous for his presentation of BBC's Springwatch, Autumnwatch and Winterwatch series. Please share this event with your contacts and any followings you have. The Climate Crisis will have unimaginably severe impacts on everyone, and therefore we need everybody on board.

Kicked off with "We're going to blockade Westminster every day from October 1st. They can't arrest all of us." so a bold start.

>>452976

Didn't trim the text properly, sorry. Rushing.

>>452977
This place is so fast paced I could see why you'd want to rush.

>>452976

Two politicos, two idpol ghouls, one grifter, and two people who actually know what they're on about regarding the climate and nature and that.

Also we're not allowed to like Corbyn any more, he's a Russian asset.

>>452982

"I will admit that nihilism and despair are very attractive—sexy, even, considering also they’re the affects that all too easily signify “intellectual sophistication” in the Anthropocene. Embracing cynicism and hopelessness allows you both to look tough, as if you have the backbone to face devastating truths about global warming, and to take yourself off the hook of the duty to work toward resolving the crisis."
https://kenyonreview.org/journal/july-aug-2022/selections/genevieve-guenther/

>>452983

Piss off. I'd bet good money I've got a smaller carbon dick length than you.

'Our fields shouldn't be full of solar panels': Truss vows to crackdown on renewables development.
https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4054209/fields-shouldnt-solar-panels-truss-vows-crackdown-renewables-development

>>453032

God, she really is thick as pork mince.

>>453040
I have to assume there's a 'get Truss to say the daftest thing' game going on here among her team. First one to get her to reference spacewombles wins.
She just gives the impression that whe was dropped on her hrad a lot as a kid.

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>>453237

In twenty years time, this post will be on display in a museum, juxtaposed with a video of Vladimir Putin saying that the sanctions aren't harming Russia.

Thread continues >>453189