Skip to main content

A cause for some optimism

My close friends know I'm terribly pessimistic and cynical. So much so that I often revel in news that seems to herald the demise of civilization. But today, I read that CO2 emissions from energy-related sources were down 7% in 2009, on top of a 3% drop in 2008, and only one-third of that decline is from the recession. See here for more.I do still believe that humankind is basically incapable of dealing with climate change in a rational way, and in the next few hundred years between 50-90% of people will die. Moreover, the damage we've already done to existing ecosystems puts human civilization up there with asteroid impacts and gamma-ray bursts in the gallery of mass extinctions.

However, this graph shows us how CO2 emissions are within our grasp as a species. We're already more than halfway to the 17% reduction from 2005 emissions in the current Senate bill, for example. We could lick this problem easily. The necessary sacrifice and work would be a tiny fraction of that required for WWII. On balance, I still don't think we'll get our shit together until it's too late--in fact, it might be already--but at least it will be trivial bonehead squabbling that hastened our demise. Sure hope I'm wrong about that.

But what a time to be alive! Our generation will be the one close enough to the drainhole to get snarled in the nasty hair clot of God Almighty.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that

The Conversational Downsides of Twitter's Structure

Over the past couple years, as I've had a steady writing job and ascended from "utter nobody" to "D-list pundit," I find it harder and harder to have discussions online. Twitter is the only social network I like and where I talk to people the most, but as your number of followers increases, the user experience becomes steadily more hostile to conversation. Here's my theory as to why this happens. First is Twitter's powerful tendency to create cliques and groupthink. Back in forum and blog comment section days, people would more often hang out in places where a certain interest or baseline understanding could be assumed. (Now, there were often epic fights, cliques, and gratuitous cruelty on forums too, particularly the joke or insult variety, but in my experience it was also much easier to just have a reasonable conversation.) On Twitter, people rather naturally form those same communities of like interest, but are trapped in the same space with differe