Climate Change

[Phoebe]

The Paris accords were the minimum plan. Now apparently if we waste even a few years fucking around, we won't meet those modest, inadequate goals. This is not ok. What'shisname Tesla guy is apparently trying to get us to Mars, having given up on earth already. Is there something else we can do instead? What if we pushed a movement to all buy solar panels? What if we all just stopped driving or flying as much as humanly possible? I mean, isn't that the point of videoconferencing? Why do we still have to move the people around so much? What if we pushed a movement to eat meat only 1 or 2 days a week, tops? These are changes humans here in the US could decide to make right now regardless of what their government is doing and that might have some actual impact. What are others?

[bralbovsky]

The actual cost of electric cars vs traditional will eventually be public, and then they won't be able to keep up with demand. The solar battle will go to China FTW, but we'll get the benefit of buying their stuff. Will this be enough to save Fiji? I fear not, but eventually I think there will be enough cataclysm that our activity will be sufficiently tamped down to return to equilibrium. Will we still resemble ourselves? That, I think, is the question.

[Phoebe]

Did y'all hear the one about the methane bubbles in Russia? Apparently as the permafrost melts it releases methane that remains buried under a layer of soil, but it has to go somewhere so it displaces the dirt upward to make a mound. Eventually these bubbles will burst! Honestly feels like around 500 or maybe closer to 1500 days ago I woke up in the wrong multiverse and have stayed there. Surely none of this is actually happening.

[Cazmonster]

The other Russian thaw is anthrax victims. I'm waiting to hear that bubonic plague got loose in Murmansk.

[Phoebe]

I don't even want to read the news about whether T does this or that with the Paris accords. Somehow this whole "I'm going to decide... soon" dithering, and all this "we're really conflicted about it" drama, it offends me much more than if he would have just said, we're pulling out. I'm not saying Hillary would have done the things we really needed to do to affect our global environment for the better, but at least it wouldn't have been this. Thank God for California being, despite all that annoys about it, a more advanced civilization capable of taking action on its own in this matter. Thankfully there are local things one can focus on to try to help, even as we appear to be well locked into our collective march toward doom.