I love that analogy. No, you're not going to personally save the world by reducing your carbon footprint. But you know what you are going to be? One leaf on a tree in a forest, making that little bit more oxygen that helps collectively make the world a better place.
And that's worth doing. Especially if you can encourage other people to be leaves too.
You should definitely read (or listen to) the NYT podcast I linked.
I mean, yes? That's literally what crypto is for?
What did you think the "government can't control your money" part of Bitcoin propaganda meant?
It's not hysterics. It's fact.
Ethanol burns more fossil fuel than it replaces. It turns more fuel into less fuel and pisses away irreplaceable topsoil in the process.
Facts don't care about your feelings.
As strange as it seems given the whole, you know, this, the United States is only a small part of the world.
Little Donald ordering closed coal plants to reopen like a Captain Planet villain is only going to impact a relatively small number of power plants - and those coal plants are going to close back down as soon as they're legally allowed to, for the same reason they closed in the first place, because they don't make economic sense anymore.
Meanwhile, the people buying solar because they can't trust oil and gas supplies, and the governments investing in renewables because they don't want to be held hostage the next time the United States gets a bug up its ass about Iran, will still have those solar and renewables long after Little Donald has retired to his private massage parlor in Mar-A-Lago.
Only a fraction has a balanced, protein-rich vegetarian diet as the norm.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not because of bad dietary choices, but because of poverty? I mean, the problem isn't the vegetarian diet, but that people can't afford enough food in general?
Sure. And fair. There are tons of people out there practicing anarchism-style community organization and mutual aid who get mightily offended at being called anarchists - e.g. the Zapatistas.
That's the cool thing about anarchism. It's focused on building community, so its ideas work to build community, whether you're an anarchist or not.
When the 10% who have savings and stock market investments and 401Ks are getting richer and richer, seeing their personal net worth rise, and feeling pretty good about it.
And the 90% who don't have savings and investments and are working paycheck to paycheck are seeing mass unemployment and salary cuts and hyperinflated rents and grocery prices and are struggling harder and harder and just getting further and further behind.
And then the 10% tell the 90% "I don't see any problem, the economy is great".
I don't think we're there yet. Hopefully the American economy pulls back from the brink. I don't want to live in a country where being upper middle class means living in walled compounds and having armed bodyguards escort your kids to private schools to keep them from being kidnapped for ransom. But frankly, I think that's where we're going - a United States where the people lucky enough to own stock see those stock prices go up, and up, and up, while the wealth of the people goes down, and down, and down, enjoying their enclaves of wealth while surrounded by more and more of the desperate poor.
Because, I mean, you may not have helped the hyperbillionaires screw over 90% of America to pad their stock prices, you may not have orchestrated the biggest wealth transfer in history from the poor to the rich, but you sure as fuck didn't try to stop them.
What, I wondered, did people do on these islands? The answer was surprisingly banal. These were partly debate societies, where members could gather and talk about local issues, such as a factory that was polluting the countryside, or whether the village medical center was well stocked. The groups also organized litter pickups and painted bus benches. There was talk of movie nights.
Under one subreddit query from nine months ago that asked, “What are the Tisza islands doing?” the responses mostly showed people coming together and being neighborly. “Things we’ve done,” began one post: “Water distribution in the heat, we collected school supplies and clothes for the family support center.” Also, “we organized a cooking competition.” This was a perfect illustration of Robert Putnam’s idea in Bowling Alone, his book about growing atomization in America—that civil society depends on people simply doing things together.
Mutual aid groups. Prefigurative politics. Starting local with boots on the ground, finding little ways to make your community better, actually pays off.
(Nobody tell the MLs.)
The K-shaped economy in action.
The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
And when young Americans finally lose their fucking temper - when we get "Occupy the Suburbs" instead of "Occupy Wall Street", when the rhetoric is turned against the 10%, whose stocks and bonds and 401Ks ballooned in value as a side effect of the hyperbillionaires looting and pillaging the American working class in the greatest wealth transfer in history - those old fucks aren't going to have the slightest idea why most of America hates them.
And the hyperbillionaires who maintain their power by dividing Americans against one another are going to laugh all the way to the bank.
Lol. Let's call it a "positive" externality. Pretty much everybody who's employed, or who wants to be employed, or who wants to stay in contact with friends or family, needs to have a cell phone and Internet access. And if you have to pay for that stuff anyway, you may as well doomscroll on it.
Pretty much, yeah.
Fascism, at its core, is Us versus Them. Under all the complexities and layers is one simple idea: Our problems are because They have Our resources, and we need a strong leader to go to war (figuratively or literally) against Them and take Our stuff.
And I think this is incredibly seductive because it triggers our old hominid instincts, from back when we lived in small tribes on the African savannah, and when our territory was hit by drought, or fire, or natural disaster, and we didn't have enough resources, the solution really was to go into another tribe's territory, drive them out, and take their stuff.
Lebensraum is as old as stone knives and bearskins.
And the more desperate people are, the more frightened and hungry and angry they are, the stronger those old animal instincts become.
But, you know, a good leader can simplify complicated issues. A good leader can identify problems, articulate actual solutions, and direct people's angry monkey brains towards fighting for those solutions instead of persecuting scapegoats. Not Us versus Them, but All of Us, together, fighting poverty and climate change and economic hardship and building a better future.
Unfortunately, in the United States and the "free world" as a whole, we have a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people who benefit from all the economic and social failures that are causing the problems we suffer from. And they want people to believe in a simple violent solution that blames the wrong people and doesn't actually fix anything, because they don't want the problems fixed.
And you don't get elected unless these extraordinarily wealthy people give you enough money to win an election.
So we don't get any good leaders. We get a choice between fascism and the status quo, which is also fascism.
Yay, democracy.
I am being absolutely serious here with the Weimar Republic comparison. Because people are fucking miserable and it's fucking terrifying.
A hundred years ago, broke people in big cities would go to fascist rallies because they were free, and because sometimes the organizers gave out free food and beer, and because people had nothing better to do.
And they stayed because hate feels good when you're hurting and simple violent solutions appeal to the angry monkey parts of our brains.
And the fewer community connections you have - the more the economy strips your life down to work and sleep, or to job hunting and sleep, or to scrounging in the gutter to survive and sleep, and the less you go out and socialize with actual human beings - the more appealing the fascist illusion of unity, of being part of a powerful group, becomes.
And the only difference today is that the fascist rallies are beamed directly into your home.
I strongly suspect our technocrat overlords - the ones telling us global warming is a hoax - know very well that climate change is real, and are manipulating and positioning the United States to come out ahead in the new 3° world.
Not because they care about Americans, of course. But they'll need somewhere to live when the rest of the world collapses, and most of their stuff is here.
The United States damning the Bering Strait would give the United States control over that shipping lane. And recent events have proved how vital the control of shipping lanes can be.