before riots

- the post title

Glad to see their talking points focus on food security rather than agricultural companies’ interests like the EU. Though I wonder if they’ll come to the sensible conclusion and cut down on the meat industry.

Latest*

It’s not even a particularly bad one, compared to Dole coups, Coca Cola assassination, and Uniroyal napalming civilians.

If capitalists can’t take legally, they will take illegally.

On that we agree.

I’m acting under the assumption that they would have died anyway. As they do. When they decompose naturally, they release their carbon.

Okay, glad to understand that the issue is that you didn’t understand my first comment or any comment that came after it.

One last time: what I’m saying is that you bury the wood to prevent it from decomposing and releasing its carbon, as an alternative to burning it. And that as an alternate source of electricity you use something that doesn’t produce as much emissions, like solar, wind, or nuclear. And if you think burying wood is bad for any reason, then setting it on fire is bad for the same reason.

I don’t see how you’re not getting this.

Yes, when you burn the trees you get electricity, but you also release as much carbon dioxide per kWh into the atmosphere as if you were to burn coal instead.

The climate does not care about where your carbon emissions come from. All carbon emissions are getting us further away from the holocene climate.

Maybe you’re acting under the assumption that the trees wouldn’t have grown or that they wouldn’t have been cut down to make place for new trees if they hadn’t been planned to be burned. Maybe that is even true under our fucked up capitalist economy. But that is just capitalism being stupid. If it is worth it to cut down trees to capture carbon, then we should fund that without also requiring the trees to be burned so all that progress is undone.

And sure, once the fossil fuel industry lies dead and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are back below 280 ppm, then you can start burning biomass to keep the concentration stable. But that’s a century from now. Before then, either bury the trees or don’t cut them down in the first place.

Do you mean Canada, which is increasingly on fire? Or do you mean Scandinavia, which will become a glacier once the atlantic current shuts down next decade? Or do you mean Siberia, which currently has a record high temperature of 38C and everything is turning into a molten swamp? Or do you mean Arkhangelsk where the ecosystem will collapse because everything expects permafrost?

Do you mean any coastal city, which will flood? Do you mean places supplied by the international trade network? Do you mean places that expect the sea to contain living creatures? Do you mean places that are dependent on crops that expect temperatures to swing less than 25C back and forth in a week? Do you mean places that are open to the sky and aren’t prepared for hurricane winds?

And if there is a place you’ve found that can weather the storm - do you mean the places where 8 billion people will try to get to but that only have room for less than 200 million total?

But once you put the trees underground, they’re not going to get out without human intervention either…

When you’ve cut down the trees, they’ve “left the system”. What does it matter whether the carbon you add to the system from the outside comes from trees that left the system 6 months ago or ones that left the system 400 million years ago?

That justification holds for coal just as much as it does for the act of throwing the biofuel into the power plant. Why is it irresponsible to burn trees that died 400 million years ago but okay to burn trees that died 6 months ago?

Whether you’ve “offset the emissions” of burning the trees by growing them yourself doesn’t matter for the decision of burning the biofuel. You might as well call coal burning carbon neutral if you bury some trees underground in the place you mined the coal.

So don’t build your nuclear reactors in a place that doesn’t have shit tons of water?

Solar and wind can’t handle peak consumption without obscene amounts of heavily polluting storage. They should definitely get the majority of the attention and budget, but nuclear is still important and will still be faster to scale up faster in many specific locations. Get as much solar in the subtropics and tropics as possible, get wind in windy locations, get geothermal and tidal where that is viable, but get nuclear in places with plenty of water that are further than 45 degrees/5000 km from the equator in areas with little wind, and for peak consumption in places without hydroelectric or other power that isn’t best to keep at the max 24/7, and for quick response to fluctuations in wind and solar in places where other regulators aren’t available.

The articles you link are about experimental or niche tech, expensive or inefficient or both. Rare earths are still used in pretty much all solar panels that are actually being built. They’re also not the only form of pollution from solar panel manufacturing, transportation, installation, and recycling/disposal.

Fissile nuclear is clean enough. It has been smeared and misregulated through lobbying, propaganda, and donations to genuine believers among environmentalists by the fossil fuel industry. But even today uranium fuel cycle power plants produce less lifetime pollution per kWh than solar panels. Solar panel technology will improve, but so would nuclear with thorium or more technical improvements in reactor design.

Once solar panels don’t require rare earths anymore and once some new technology is developed to store electricity between peak production and peak consumption without massive pollution in quantities sufficient to meet everyone’s needs, it makes sense to phase out fission. But we’re still pretty far from that.

If you’re okay with using forests for carbon capture, then you can just bury the wood underground. There is no justification for setting the wood on fire to generate electricity.

I mean, where can you move that isn’t a future disaster zone?

With thunderous applause?

“Telephone operators being fired didn’t stop us from switching to digital phones. Why coddle farmers more?”

or a bit longer:

"People aren’t entitled to doing a job that harms everyone else. If a plumber only knows how to work with lead pipes, we don’t have to poison people just to prevent the guy from having to learn something new.

It’s our job as a society to take care of people who become unemployed because they only know how to do harmful jobs. To help them retrain if they can, and ensure they have a comfortable lifestyle. Farmers that would face bankruptcy deserve a bailout, and like everyone, all farmers deserve a universal basic income/universal basic services".

It is not wrong that farmers would be screwed financially if a government goes as hard as it needs to on sustainability without shielding farmers.

In terms of assets, pretty much all the industrial equipment and many of the buildings of a 20th century industrial farm would be useless in a sustainable farming setup. Obviously all the animal torture factories would have to go, but what use is a combine harvester in a food forest? Also, between the 4-fold reduction in crop production because you no longer need to feed farm animals, the reduction of food waste, and the higher yield per acre from sustainable farming, the price of agricultural land itself would also plummet.

This means that pretty much every industrial farm that has leveraged its assets for a loan would be financially screwed, and so would every bank and investor that gave out those loans without accounting for this possibility. A capitalist stock market would be shocked by your government choosing a healthy country over private profits, and this could cause a financial crisis and economic depression without either a slow ease-in by the government or seizing investor assets in a coup or revolution.

Furthermore, in terms of labor, the current skillset of industrial farmers has remarkably little in common with sustainable agriculture. All they know is torture animal, drive combine harvester, exploit they workers, be conservative, poison land, and lie. So while we may even need more farmers for sustainable agriculture than for industrial agriculture, many people who are farmers right now would probably need to start at ground level, knowing less relevant information than a gardener.

I don’t think they were prioritizing one group over the other

And you don’t think it’s weird that they don’t prioritize ongoing race riots, arson and assaults over planned pacifist protestors?

Each single cop can’t be in two places at once. Every cop occupied with arresting a pacifist is a cop not occupied with preventing arsonists from burning down a building.

As for disruptive protest not helping, have you looked at politics the past two decades? The general public loves disruptive protest.

Sounds like an set-up to ensure long-term dependency on natural gas mining, then.

Sorry, we built our infrastructure assuming 80% natural gas, so we just have to mine more natural gas to prevent people from losing their ability to cook food. You wouldn’t want poor families to go hungry, would you?

Police have discretion on which crimes to prioritize. They’re not honor-bound to ticket someone who is double-parked in the middle of a car chase. They can opt not to arrest people for trespassing if it gets them to cooperate with a murder investigation.

Going to arrest pacifists engaging in criminal conspiracy to temporarily block nonessential industry and infrastructure at one location while ignoring ongoing racially motivated assault, looting, and arson is a choice.

but the vast majority of us aren’t doing anything at all that depletes resources at a too-fast rate.

Sure, but only because the vast majority of us aren’t European or North American.

Rich people and companies are the winners of a game that hundreds of millions actively support through purchasing patterns, voting, peer pressure, and political activism. Populists winning elections on platforms of ignoring climate change are responsible, yes, but so is everyone who voted for them.

Every example you name for how you could reduce consumption involve you remaining an individual consumer, continuing to work within their system. But there are co-ops, library economies, unionization, political groups, collective activism - many ways to work together to far greater effect. They want us to see ourselves as snowflakes in an avalanche, none of us strong enough to fight the system, but we can fuse our economic power and become a boulder or a barricade, digging into the ground and taking energy out of the system rather than adding to it.

This is something we have always been able to do, and we, as western consumers in relative privilege, are responsible for every second that we do not do so, and let ourselves vote with our wallets instead.