I mean, if you’re driving that everywhere, there’s some problems, but I imagine you probably have a second car for practical stuff, which can be electric…

Go Australia

I certainly don’t think of it like that. A creek to me is mostly defined as “a fairly small river where you want to go splash around in for awhile, but it doesn’t have to be a big thing and also you float down it in inner tubes.” I definitely don’t see them as mutually exclusive, but its all great stuff either way.

Awesome!

Excellent. I biked 10 miles through mostly forested trails to go get a really good gas station burrito yesterday.

Just so we all remember, Mass Extinctions usually don’t mean anything like all species on earth dying. Like, even the big ones killed max like 75% of genera. We won’t end life on earth unless we do a very impressive nuclear war or hit a runaway heating threshold that turns Earth basically into Venus, neither of which is even remotely likely. Possibly more sadly, all signs appear to be pointing towards most stuff staying alive and just suffering.

Yeah, all of this, its a lot cheaper if you cook the majority of your meals from scratch, but the vast majority of people aren’t cooking the majority of their meals from scratch.

Only four Republican Senators need to vote no in order to kill the bill. With two—Tillis and Paul—already saying they will oppose it, that leaves just two more Senators. Murkowski and Curtis are considered the most likely to oppose the anti-renewable provisions, according to one Senate staffer we spoke to.

They had better not pass this…

Probably less important when dealing with animals, where it’s usually more cut and dry, but I’ve got some hangups about our ability to make objective decisions about what is “in something/one’s best interests.”

I see the point. I won’t say I necessarily agree with it. I think the ethical considerations are much stronger in the “in favor of” column for this development than in the “against.” Which TBH, I don’t know if that’s a statement Jim East was disagreeing with. I do think that in the future we could probably improve the ethics of this kind of process by applying more rigorous standards, but in the near term its probably better to focus on stopping killing animals for food in general.

Either way, it doesn’t really matter for my actions, as I don’t have access to lab-grown meat anyway.

I mean that essentially all human interactions with animals seem like they’d be unethical under that standard. Like obviously no pets, but I assume that’s way further up the chain of thoughts (and while I don’t agree, I think that’s a reasonable stance to have). But also it seems like we wouldn’t be able to do things like tagging certain species for tracking purposes, something we do primarily for conservation. Or like moving animals out of spaces made for humans (I.E. buildings.) My problem is that an animal cannot consent to anything, so informed consent as a standard means that all human-animal interactions seem to be exploitative. IDK, maybe I’m thinking about this wrong, or maybe I’ve interpreted it as more extreme than it is.

I should state that I’m trying (and possibly failing) to examine it as an idea on its own terms, not argue that you shouldn’t believe it.

Are you serious about this? If so that standard seems pretty insane to me.

Like, we essentially can’t do anything with animals with that…

No?

I’m sorry, but if that’s the only route you can imagine, I’m sorry to say that if collapse is the answer, we’re gonna get into the runaway heating zone first and take everyone else out with us.

I don’t think that’s what’s gonna happen. I think we might get close, but I think that at the rate we’re going, we avoid that. Not that we don’t have some civilization collapse, but not total.

I assume you don’t know what the original joke is? The original is, in fact, a graph, this is a joke from a movie called Crocodile Dundee, where a guy pulls a knife on the main character, who proceeds to go “that’s not a knife” and pull out the largest bladed weapon that could still be considered a knife and says “this, is a knife.”

Hope this was helpful and that I’m not explaining something you already know.

Not quite a full 20%, but yeah, in your situation, that’s a big longevity problem. This data is obviously better for people not living in very hot climates. It looks like the first graph (which the 1.8% average is pulled from) is keeping climate constant (and probably temperate.)

That’s insane. No company should be allowed to produce that much waste. Yes, I mean that they should be responsible for the fact that all their clothes get thrown away.

This is great

I attended my local no kings protest as well. Glad to be part of it, somewhat disturbed by the amount of pro military messaging I saw though.

Thanks for catching that!

This is the big thing, monocropping is the big problem with lawns (outside of the literal desert.)

This looked like a pretty reasonable report to me. Not exactly hopeful, but maybe slightly better than my hope was before. My takeaways are the same as they were:

1. The US isn’t going to lead the fight, we need China (and India) to make progress (faster than it is, though this report was somewhat hopeful to me on that front.)
2. Solar and batteries is gonna be the main source, governments need to build that.
3. Individuals help by A. Being active in the political processes of democratic countries. B. Switching to EVs or preferably off cars altogether. C. Limiting or preferably eliminating meat consumption. D. Switching heating devices off of gas. But individual actions won’t be the primary driving force behind any change.
4. General societal shifts towards a reduction in consumption are going to be required.