Apr 09 2021
(And although she soft-pedals this, surely the persistent failure to consider women is evidence of what they think of us: we’re unimportant, we’re not worth consideration. Or perhaps it’s simply evidence of their persistent failure to consider anyone but themselves. Either way …)
Feb 19 2021
Reason to stop eating meat (well, would’ve been that back in the 70s … now, well, it’s reason to accept the blame, to feel the guilt for our demise … ):
“Globally, humans use 59 percent of all the land capable of growing crops to grow food for livestock.” (p79)
“One-third of all the fresh water that humans use goes to livestock, while only about one-thirtieth is used in homes.” (p79)
“Seventy percent of the antibiotics produced globally are used for livestock, weakening the effectiveness of antibiotics to treat human diseases.” (p79)
“Trees are 50 percent carbon. Like coal, they release their stores of CO2 when burned.” (p92)
“Forests contain more carbon than do all exploitable fossil-fuel reserves.” (p92)
“The cutting and burning of forests is responsible for at least 15 percent of global GHGs per year. According to Scientific American, ‘By most accounts, deforestation in tropical rainforests adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the sum total of cars and trucks on the world’s roads.'” (p92)
“About 80 percent of deforestation occurs to clear land for corps for livestock and grazing.” (p92)
“in 2018, Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro as president.” (p93)
“Bolsonaro campaigned on a plan to develop previously protected swaths of the Amazon (i.e., deforestation).” (p93)
“It has been estimated that Bolsonaro’s policy would release 13.2 gigatons of carbon—more than two times the annual emissions o the entire United States.” (p.93)
“Animal agriculture is responsible for 91 percent of Amazonian deforestation.” (p93)
*
Another interesting bit:
“Every day, 360,000 people—roughly equal to the population of Florence, Italy—are born.”
(p80)
*
And another:
“Just one hundred companies are responsible for 71 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.” (p150)
Feb 05 2021
by Lee Camp – read the whole article here.
Jan 26 2021
“In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries—all the millennia—that came before. … this means we have now engineered as much ruin knowingly as we ever managed in ignorance. (4) emphasis mine
What the fuck is wrong with us?
“… two degrees Celsius of global warming was considered the threshold of catastrophe: flooded cities, crippling droughts and heat waves … There is almost no chance we will avoid that scenario. The Kyoto Protocol achieved, practically, nothing; in the twenty years since, despite all of our climate advocacy and legislation and progress on green energy, we have produced more emissions than in the twenty years before. (9) emphasis mine
What the fuck is wrong with us?
“Since 1980, the planet has experienced a fiftyfold increase in the number of dangerous heat waves … ” (40)
“… most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally.” (56)
All because men cannot keep their penises out of women’s vaginas.
“Much of the infrastructure of the internet, one study showed, could be drowned by sea-level rise in less than two decades … “(61)
[During the California fires of 2017] “On local golf courses, the West Coast’s wealthy still showed up for their tee times, swinging their clubs just yards from blazing fires in photographs that could not have been more perfectly staged to skewer the country’s indifferent plutocracy.” (73)
” … the effect of wildfires on emissions is among the most feared climate feedback loops—that the world’s forests, which have typically been carbon sinks, would become carbon sources, unleashing all that stored gas. … In California, a single wildfire can entirely eliminate the emissions gains made that year by all of the state’s aggressive environmental policies. … At present, the trees of the Amazon take in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet’s forests each year. But in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elicted president of Brazil promising to open the rain forest to development—which is to say, deforestation. How much damage can one person do to the planet? (76) emphasis mine
“Every round-trip plane ticket from New York to London … costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.” (120)
So why aren’t such trips illegal? Why didn’t Trudeau approve the construction of a water pipeline from the melting glaciers in the north instead of an oil pipeline? (We’re going to have droughts worldwide, affecting agriculture, worldwide, and we’re just letting all that fresh water go to waste, do damage, in fact, by warming the oceans …)
What the fuck is wrong with us?
“It took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line; the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world’s infrastructure in considerably less time.” (169)
“According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them [carbon emissions] in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, … we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today [2019], when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year.” (179-180)
“In 2003, Ken Caldeira, now of the Carnegie Institution for Science, found that the world would need to add clean power sources equivalent to the full capacity of a nuclear plant every single day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change.” (181)
“If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent [the U.S. accounts for 15%; China, for 28% — https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions], reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent.” (187)
In other words, it would have been no hardship. To save the planet. To save ourselves.
Jan 15 2021
Read the whole piece here:
http://www.pinecone.on.ca/MAGAZINE/stories/the-well-groomed-trail.html
Jan 01 2021
So I watched Star Trek: Picard, wherein he saves the day, and the future, for the creation of synthetic life. A surprising move for someone so … intelligent.
With respect to the creation of organic life …
So, Jean-Luc, what is it that makes you think ‘we’ will be any more responsible when creating synthetic life?
Dec 18 2020
“By 2050 at the latest, and ideally before 2040, we must have stopped emitting more greenhouse gases [typically caused by the burning of fossil fuels] into the atmosphere than Earth can naturally absorb through its ecosystems (a balance known as net-zero emissions or carbon neutrality). In order to get to this scientifically established goal, our global greenhouse gas emissions must be clearly on the decline by the early 2020s and reduced by at least 50 percent by 2030.” The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, (architects of the Paris Agreement), pxxii
Snowmobiles and ATVs “emit 25 percent as many hydrocarbons as all the nation’s cars and trucks put together, according to an EPA study.”
https://products.kitsapsun.com/archive/1999/02-19/0062_environment__snowmobiles__atvs_du.html
“In one hour, a typical snowmobile emits as much hydrocarbon as a 2001 model auto emits in about two years (24,300 miles) of driving. ”
https://mymuskoka.blogspot.com/2010/01/snowmobile-pollution.html
“Two-stroke PWC engines dump 25 – 40% of uncombusted fuel in the lake, the air, or on the land.”
https://mymuskoka.blogspot.com/2010/01/snowmobile-pollution.html
“In a single hour of run time, a 2000-model PWC will dump about 4 gallons (15 liters) of unburned oil and gas into the water [source: CO Parks].”
https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/watercraft-destroy-planet.htm
Snowmobiles and ATVs “emit 25 percent as many hydrocarbons as all the nation’s cars and trucks put together, according to an EPA study.” https://products.kitsapsun.com/archive/1999/02-19/0062_environment__snowmobiles__atvs_du.html
And yet ATVs, jetskis, and snowmobiles are still legally allowed. That is, we allow fossil fuel emissions — a lot of fossil fuel emissions — just for fun. Through our precious climate-controlling forests and on our struggling fresh water lakes, no less.
What the hell is Canada thinking?
(And yes, this is another reason to hate men. After all, over 95% of those who drive ATVs, jetskis, and snowmobiles are men.)
(And that’s quite apart from “”Snowmobiles create a noise corridor five miles wide” and “PWC produce noise levels in the range of 85-102 decibels (dB) per unit — levels at which the American Hospital Association recommends hearing protection (above 85 dB).” https://www.stopthrillcraft.org/statistics.htm)
Dec 15 2020
Let’s say we are born with a gender identity. Either
(1) it isn’t a binary, in which case there’s no need to change your sex to attain some sort of ‘fit’
(2) it is binary, but it doesn’t necessarily or always align with sex, in which case again there’s no need to change your sex, or
(3) it is binary and it does align with sex, in which case one couldn’t possibly feel a mismatch—feeling a mismatch would just prove that (2) is the case.
I suppose one could say that for 99%, it is aligned, and those who feel a mismatch are anomalies, but look around at all the women who are not feminine. Are we all anomalies? If so, then we’re not really anomalies, are we. (And even if we are, so what? How does that necessitate chemical or surgical transformation?)
fiction
