Good catch!

What do you mean?

I’ve been watching Landman clips on YouTube and I have mixed feelings on it.

I think it does a good job of capturing the futility of this situation, in the sense that every stage of fossil fuel production (and consumption) is populated with folks “just doing their job,” providing for their families, following orders, etc. I watch this show and see the banality of evil, oil CEOs who genuinely believe they’re doing right by the world rather than burning it down.

But I’m also acutely aware that this is not the take most viewers will be walking away with. We’re talking about a general public that idolizes the likes of Tony Montana, Gordon Gekko, Patrick Bateman, Tony Soprano, and Jordan Belfort, despite their films/shows explicitly depicting their downfall as a result of their moral failings.

The vast majority of viewers are going walk away from these films feeling less guilty for their own fossil fuel consumption.

I debated adding the F, but SLRPNK does this weird thing where it adds a huge space after the degree symbol and it just looked weird. When writing for American audiences I prefer using °F as °C seems to unintentionally downplay the severity of warming, but either way it’s real bad.

I love this angle! That makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate your detailed breakdown.

My main criticism of this piece is, as implemented, it still relies on a larger governing body of some sort to police inter-local conflict. If we just do away with federal government entirely, there’s nothing stopping a warlike locality from invading and conquering another to increase its territory and resources, and if that continues unchecked you just get another federal government. (Other examples abound, such as a locality upstream dumping toxic waste into a river that serves as drinking water for a locality downstream.)

If you don’t have a federal body those issues go unresolved, but if you do, the struggle becomes checking the power of said body and preventing it from taking away local sovereignty. And I don’t have any easy answers to that.

I’m personally focused on climate change, but where did you post that? And is there any way to archive that information? (Archive.org most likely saved a snapshot of the page.) The vast majority of the stuff I post gets single-digit upvotes, I think part of it is just a userbase issue. Even main page posts only get a few comments, I don’t think we’ll see real traction and engagement until the number of total users goes up by 10x.

Amidst all the horrible news about data purges and erasures, this is a glimmer of hope. The real losers (as usual) are the American people, who stood to benefit massively from clear, understandable data on climate risk at a local level. I’ve been pre-emptively archiving federal climate resources for the past 6 months, as it all seems to be on the chopping block.

2x on local hard drives, 2x in the cloud. Not taking any chances with this.

I think about this a lot when we’re talking about animal, bird, and insect populations, because all those massive declines we’re hearing about are measured from 1970 onwards. By that point industrial civilization had been chugging away for a full century, and ecosystems were already severely degraded. Then I think about how settlers clear-cut the Eastern US with just hand-powered axes and saws, and that was a hundred years before that.

In most areas we’d have to go back over 10 generations to encounter a truly healthy ecosystem. Shifting baseline is absolutely a real thing.

This is whataboutism.

Agreed. I’m getting tired of these pencil-pusher reports implying that “the economy” is going to keep chugging along at a reduced rate, as if we can just shuffle around our stock portfolios and weather the storm.

The “Planetary Solvency” report by IFoA is one of the first mainstream papers that’s taking a sober look at the climate crisis. If we hit 2°C by 2050, they’re seeing a significant likelihood of:

• 2 billion deaths
• High number of climate tipping points triggered, partial tipping cascade.
• Breakdown of some critical ecosystem services and Earth systems.
• Major extinction events in multiple geographies.
• Ocean circulation severely impacted.
• Severe socio-political fragmentation in many regions, low lying regions lost.
• Heat and water stress drive involuntary mass migration of billions.
• Catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict.

I don’t even want to think about 3°C and 4°C scenarios.

Jesuits are real ones. The Nazis considered them to be one of their “most dangerous enemies” due to their principled opposition. Glad to see they’re keeping the flame alive.

Banks trying to take profits buying air conditioner stocks while society and the biosphere is crumbling around them is a perfect encapsulation of this crisis. I’m doing my best to laugh at the absurdity of it all, because the alternative is paralyzing depression.

If you’re interested in the more fundamental dynamics at play here, I’d highly recommend giving these a watch:

• William Rees: The Enigma of Climate Inaction
• Daniel Schmachtenberger: Modeling the Drivers of the Metacrisis

It is the stock brokerage division of banks giving their boiler room reps a “hot tip” lead.

“When it gets hot, people will use more air conditioning.” Thanks Morgan Stanley, that’s some real insider knowledge.

Thank you for sharing! I’m a big proponent of the planetary boundaries framework, it’s a great way to visualize overshoot. While climate change is a big (perhaps the biggest) issue facing global civilization right now, it’s extremely important that we don’t get tunnel vision and try to solve for one variable without looking at our biosphere holistically. (That’s how we get carbon capture and geoengineering.)

A few more links/resources for those interested:

• This is the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s home page for planetary boundaries, showing the change in overshoot from 2009 (when the framework was established) to 2023.
• Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries is the corresponding paper for their 2023 update, which goes more in depth into each boundary and what constitutes a transgression.

The difficulty in regulating mining in international waters are precisely why companies are rushing into this market. It’s much harder to stop something that’s already been started, and regulatory agencies are notoriously slow.

What we do know of seabed mining is that it’s incredibly destructive to marine ecosystems. As Peter Watts writes,

Very little research has been done on the environmental impacts of deep-sea mining. The only real study was undertaken thirty years ago, led by a dude called Hjalmar Thielon. It was a pretty simple experiment. They basically dragged a giant rake across 2.5 km2 of seabed, a physical disturbance which— while devastating enough— was certainly less disruptive than commercial mining operations are likely to be. Today, thirty years later, the seabed still hasn’t recovered.

But what’s more concerning is what we don’t know, as very little research has been conducted on its impact. Moreover, many of these ecosystems are largely uncharted. We could very well destroy something before we have the chance to understand it.

On a higher level, this is what happens when you attempt to solve for one variable (climate change, in this case the transition to renewables and its associated mineral demand) instead of looking at an issue holistically (i.e. the total integrity of our biosphere).

Ignorance, petulance, and a willful dismissal of the truth are the new norms for this “administration.” But information wants to be free, and this is a good example of how the internet can be a force for good.

Thank you to Fulton Ring for making the raw data publicly available on their Github. I’ll be downloading this data and hosting the risk maps on my website as well; the more copies of this information out there, the better.

Right, but it’s the same part of the year that you’re able to hike, bike, and garden.

That might depend on where you call home. I used to live in VT where you couldn’t step outside without something (blackflies, mosquitos, midges, deerflies, horseflies) trying to take a bite out of you. But now I live in CO, and generally speaking most of the American West is an absolute joy to be outside in. You can just sit down on the ground in a forest and be at peace.

I think it’s important to spend time in wild spaces (backpacking is great for this), but since home is where we spend most of our time, bringing nature into the backyard is huge for daily exposure. I work from home, so whenever I feel like I’ve been staring at screens for too long, I head out to the pollinator garden for a reset.