WTF Climate Change News

Beebo Brink

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People can't wait to go back to business as usual.
Reminds me of horses who run back into the burning barn, because overwhelmed by fear and panic, they react emotionally and they emotionally equate the barn with safety.

The human reaction to COVID-19 is like reacting to climate change on a very small scale. The virus can't be seen, just as CO2 accumulation can't be seen. And the effects of engaging in contagious behavior are delayed, just as they are with carbon emission. You go to a party, you shake hands with strangers, you hug friends, and you go home feeling just fine. You don't feel bad until 5-10 days later, when the association with what you did and what happened as a result is too late to make any difference. It's like punishing a dog for the hamburger he ate two hours ago -- the association is long gone so he's just bewildered by the punishment.
 

Jopsy Pendragon

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they react emotionally and they emotionally equate the barn with safety.
If that barn is the 'intellectually lazy cover of ignorant group-think' that results from being socialized by self-serving xenophobes... sure.

People are afraid, of a lot of things. Especially those things that threaten their prospects and basic necessities. Attack their reputation and you might torpedo their career, and since they're already in debt up to their upstairs neighbor's eyeballs... it's game over.

Any attack on their character, things they say, or do... becomes an attack on them. Unless they can show it's not them, they're just "acting rightly" according to their fucked up notion of christianity/citizenship. They've gotten so good at it that while claiming to be proudly both they're acting like neither.

So.. whether it's climate denial, covid-19, tolerance for minorities, gun-safety legislation, affordable healthcare.... they're so used to being made to feel bad about being WRONG that they now do it as a display of solidarity and loyalty to those who've rejected -any- kind of inconvenience for their own selfish ends.

And they've got a quorum. Allies that will absolve them of being pigheaded and wrong because they too benefit from it. Herd mentality. "We may all be going towards a cliff, but we're doing it together and it's our right and we'll stampede over you if you try to try to stop us!"

Only short-term obvious self-interest will get them to change course, and there isn't enough leverage in the world to offer it. They're too numerous and as a group they have too much momentum.

And as the rest of us get trampled, there's fewer and fewer of the rest of us to try to balance their destructive force.

Our society has developed a crippling addiction to aggressive ignorance. It won't turn around until it hits rock bottom and takes the rest of us down with it.
 

Innula Zenovka

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We simply can't.
Six weeks into lock down Ikea opened again in NL:



As if in a waiting row for a ride in a theme park, waiting to get in.
We so need to go out and keep ourselves entertained.
People can't wait to go back to business as usual.

and


One of the great movies!
 

Innula Zenovka

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So will his six kids, at least when all of them are old enough to read.
If you're a Brit, the joke is that he notoriously has at least six kids; that is, the six we know about and, it is rumoured, a seventh, supposedly the result of yet another extramarital affair while he was still married to Marina Wheeler.

This may or may not be true, but he notoriously refuses to answer reporters' questions about how many children he has.
 

Innula Zenovka

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Another review here


Planet of the Humans also claims that you can’t reduce fossil fuel use through renewable energy: coal is instead being replaced by gas. Well, in the third quarter of 2019, renewables in the UK generated more electricity than coal, oil and gas plants put together. As a result of the switch to renewables in this country, the amount of fossil fuel used for power generation has halved since 2010. By 2025, the government forecasts, roughly half our electricity will come from renewables, while gas burning will drop by a further 40%. To hammer home its point, the film shows footage of a “large terminal to import natural gas from the United States” that “Germany just built”. Germany has no such terminal. The footage was shot in Turkey.
 

Innula Zenovka

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Rockefeller heirs to Big Oil find dumping fossil fuels improved bottom line

Five years ago, members of the Rockefeller family walked away from the fossil fuels that made them rich, alarmed that burning oil and gas was causing climate change. Now it also seems like a smart financial move. The $1.1 billion Rockefeller Brothers Fund — largely free of oil and gas — has outpaced financial benchmarks, defying predictions of money managers.

This is what my cousin, who advises businesses and governments on energy policy and also brokers energy deals, has been telling his clients for years, and it's why he can afford live in a big old converted country vicarage in an Oxfordshire village, just outside the Cotswolds.
 

Govi

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Rockefeller heirs to Big Oil find dumping fossil fuels improved bottom line




This is what my cousin, who advises businesses and governments on energy policy and also brokers energy deals, has been telling his clients for years, and it's why he can afford live in a big old converted country vicarage in an Oxfordshire village, just outside the Cotswolds.
It takes a Koch brother not to see the handwriting on that wall.
 

Innula Zenovka

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The Energy 202: GOP lawmakers accuse Wall Street of 'discriminating' against fossil fuels during coronavirus pandemic


Republican members of Congress are coming to the defense of oil, gas and coal companies they say face “discriminatory” lending practices from Wall Street banks that have caved to pressure from environmentalists.

They are worried that oil and gas companies, suffering from the economic shockwaves of the coronavirus pandemic, are not getting their fair share of $2 trillion in stimulus funding because many of the big banks playing a part in distributing the funds have policies against lending to certain fossil fuel projects.

[....]

In making their climate pledges, big banks may be motivated not only by a desire to generate goodwill among shareholders concerned about the environment.
They also likely want to protect their bottom lines.

Many investors are increasingly concerned that many of the crude reserves on the books of oil and gas companies may end up “stranded” — that is, that they will never be tapped because of political and technological changes over the next several decades.
which is why central banks in most major economies are warning lenders that fossil fuels are a sunshine sunset industry, and that has to be priced into the risk of lending to them


ETA: Oh look... this is what the very stable genius' alma mater's magazine has to say about it

 
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danielravennest

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which is why central banks in most major economies are warning lenders that fossil fuels are a sunshine industry, and that has to be priced into the risk of lending to them
"Sunshine industry" makes no sense to me in this context, as solar energy is the obvious sunshine industry. Is this a britishism with which I am unfamiliar?
 
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Innula Zenovka

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