REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

' The truth - We will go extinct, very soon.'

POSTED BY: REAVERFAN
UPDATED: Sunday, May 30, 2021 13:14
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Thursday, May 9, 2019 8:44 AM

REAVERFAN


Pyro storms: a new danger in the era of wildfires
With tornado-like winds that can cast flaming embers across a five-kilometre radius and volcanic levels of energy, fire-induced thunderstorms are an emerging part of our new wildfire reality that scientists are scrambling to understand
https://thenarwhal.ca/pyro-storms-a-new-danger-era-wildfires/

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Thursday, May 9, 2019 8:52 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Sigh.....

Come on Marcos. Cheer up buddy. There's got to be something more constructive you could be doing with your time to take your mind off of it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, May 9, 2019 9:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Sigh.....

Come on Marcos. Cheer up buddy. There's got to be something more constructive you could be doing with your time to take your mind off of it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

This will take your mind off it, but you need to pay attention to the lesson that a world-wide disaster was avoided by a conscience effort to avoid disaster. Un-conscience and tiny-effort better describes today, at least with Trump voters.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/how-to-predict-the-future
/588040
/

The bet was on, and it was over the fate of humanity. On one side was the Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse resulting from overpopulation. Resource shortages would cause hundreds of millions of starvation deaths within a decade. It was cold, hard math: The human population was growing exponentially; the food supply was not. Ehrlich was an accomplished butterfly specialist. He knew that nature did not regulate animal populations delicately. Populations exploded, blowing past the available resources, and then crashed.

In his book, Ehrlich played out hypothetical scenarios that represented “the kinds of disasters that will occur.” In the worst-case scenario, famine rages across the planet. Russia, China, and the United States are dragged into nuclear war, and the resulting environmental degradation soon extinguishes the human race. In the “cheerful” scenario, population controls begin. Famine spreads, and countries teeter, but the major death wave ends in the mid-1980s. Only half a billion or so people die of starvation. “I challenge you to create one more optimistic,” Ehrlich wrote, adding that he would not count scenarios involving benevolent aliens bearing care packages.

The economist Julian Simon took up Ehrlich’s challenge. Technology — water-control techniques, hybridized seeds, management strategies — had revolutionized agriculture, and global crop yields were increasing. To Simon, more people meant more good ideas about how to achieve a sustainable future. So he proposed a wager. Ehrlich could choose five metals that he expected to become more expensive as resources were depleted and chaos ensued over the next decade. Both men agreed that commodity prices were a fine proxy for the effects of population growth, and they set the stakes at $1,000 worth of Ehrlich’s five metals. If, 10 years hence, prices had gone down, Ehrlich would have to pay the difference in value to Simon. If prices went up, Simon would be on the hook for the difference. The bet was made official in 1980.

In October 1990, Simon found a check for $576.07 in his mailbox. Ehrlich got smoked. The price of every one of the metals had declined. In the 1960s, 50 out of every 100,000 global citizens died annually from famine; by the 1990s, that number was 2.6.

More at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/how-to-predict-the-future
/588040
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, May 9, 2019 8:35 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


My mind is never on it, bud.

Ain't a goddamned thing I can do about it besides recycle what little I consume, and nobody gives a shit about my opinion about it even enough to have ever pretended via even a meaningless phone call survey.

If these are our final days, I'm not going to live the rest of them dwelling in misery about them.

Between my house, my job situation, and figuring out just what the hell I'm going to do about my teeth, I've got plenty to keep my mind occupied. And I'm not even 1/10th as depressed as Marcos is.

I'll let him save the world. Ya know... the one it's already too late to save.

Maybe you can help out too. You certainly have a lot more resources and clout at your disposal to make a change.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, May 12, 2019 6:23 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I'll let him save the world. Ya know... the one it's already too late to save.

Maybe you can help out too. You certainly have a lot more resources and clout at your disposal to make a change.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Not too late. It’s less than 50/50 chance of a collapse in the whole world’s civilizations. But in one particular civilization I am familiar with, the likelihood is much higher because of local conditions:

Jared Diamond: There’s a 49 Percent Chance the World As We Know It Will End by 2050
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/jared-diamond-on-his-new-book-u
pheaval.html


Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: I think the story that I saw in 2005, it’s still true today. It still is the case that there are many past societies that destroyed themselves by environmental damage. Since I wrote the book, more cases have come out. There have been studies of the environmental collapse of Cahokia, outside St. Louis. Cahokia was the most populous Native American society in North America. And I when I wrote Collapse it wasn’t known why Cahokia had collapsed, but subsequently we’ve learned that there was a very good study about the role of climate changes and flooding on the Mississippi River in ruining Cahokia. So that book, yes, it was related to what was going on. But the story today, nothing has changed. Past societies have destroyed themselves. In the past 14 years it has not been undone that past societies destroyed themselves.

Today, the risk that we’re facing is not of societies collapsing one by one, but because of globalization, the risk we are facing is of the collapse of the whole world.

Q: How likely do you think that is? That the whole network of civilization would collapse?

Diamond: I would estimate the chances are about 49 percent that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050. I’ll be dead by then but my kids will be, what? Sixty-three years old in 2050. So this is a subject of much practical interest to me. At the rate we’re going now, resources that are essential for complex societies are being managed unsustainably. Fisheries around the world, most fisheries are being managed unsustainably, and they’re getting depleted. Farms around the world, most farms are being managed unsustainably. Soil, topsoil around the world. Fresh water around the world is being managed unsustainably. With all these things, at the rate we’re going now, we can carry on with our present unsustainable use for a few decades, and by around 2050 we won’t be able to continue it any longer. Which means that by 2050 either we’ve figured out a sustainable course, or it’ll be too late.

Q: So let’s talk about that sustainable course. What are the lessons in the new book that might help us adjust our course in that way?

Diamond: As far as national crises are concerned, the first step is acknowledge — the country has to acknowledge that it’s in a crisis. If the country denies that it’s in a crisis, of course if you deny you’re in a crisis, you’re not going to solve the crisis, number one. In the United States today, lots of Americans don’t acknowledge that we’re in a crisis.

Number two, once you acknowledge that you’re in a crisis, you have to acknowledge that there’s something you can do about it. You have responsibility. If instead you say that the crisis is the fault of somebody else, then you’re not going to make any progress towards solving it. An example today are those, including our political leaders, who say that the problems of the United States are not caused by the United States, but they’re caused by China and Canada and Mexico. But if we say that our problems are caused by other countries, that implies that it’s not up to us to solve our problems. We’re not causing them. So, that’s an obvious second step.

More at http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/jared-diamond-on-his-new-book-u
pheaval.html


The book "Upheaval" by Jared Diamond is here:

https://pirateproxy.lat/search/Jared%20Diamond/0/99/0

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, May 12, 2019 7:54 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I've already been doing step 1 for a few decades now, bud.

We are absolutely in a crisis. It's not just fisheries and farms. EVERYTHING is managed poorly by those at the top of the food chain. Food. Energy. Taxes. Insurance. Money in general. I'm 50/50 that we're destroying the atmosphere, but even not taking that into consideration, there is zero way that we can keep going on like this much longer, let alone forever.

Personally, I don't really think it's a bad thing if life as we know it ends by 2050. You and I both know that is the only way things will ever change.

I'm not rooting for a mass extinction event or anything. Just something that would curb the population of the human race to about 10% of what it is today.

Collectively, we are the only problem.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, May 12, 2019 8:40 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I'm not rooting for a mass extinction event or anything. Just something that would curb the population of the human race to about 10% of what it is today.

Collectively, we are the only problem.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Only 10% ? I was born back when the population was 1/3 of today's. In theory, that additional 2/3rds should have been an advantage: more brains and hands to solve problems. In fact, about half that additional 2/3rds haven't lived up to even 10% of their potential, especially in the United States.

Have you seen the TV show "My 600-lb Life"? Even Americans who aren't fat are like those patients. You tell them something important and they still ignore it to watch more TV until they are almost dead. Then some of them pay attention and live. In every episode of My 600-lb Life, the doctor tells the obese patient to lose weight before he can operate on their stomach. It's psychological -- the doctor needs to know before operating if the patient will make an effort or is operating pointless. About half of the patients lose weight after being told more than once that if they don't they will die. Those patients get surgery and than they really start to lose weight and get back to normal. As for the other half? They get offended. They would rather die than listen to the doctor. At that point, the doctor cannot stop their fatal choice and the TV episode ends. The entire country of America is facing a choice much like that. It sure ain't entertaining to watch half of them die, one by one, for their stupid choices. But that TV doctor can only tell them. He can't make 'em do what needs to be done.

www.infoplease.com/world/population-statistics/total-population-world-
decade-1950-2050


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, May 12, 2019 12:32 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


I'm probably the only one here who's ever read both "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse". I have referenced both of them from time to time, and I urge you all to read his chapter on what happened to Easter Island. It is horific enough to put our whole civilizational model in a new light.

He also points to civilizations that have somehow saved themselves ecologically, and in both cases (I believe there were ony two) it required a strongman-type leader to "save the forests" (our earliest source of fuel) once in Japan and once on the Dominican Republic side of Hispaniola (which it shares with Haiti).

How Japan Saved its Forests
http://ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/japan-community-forest
-management-silviculture.html


You will note in the above article that the main drivers of deforestation were population growth and especially the need for large old growth timber for WAR and CASTLES and RELIGIOUS MONUMENTS.


People forget that the Dominican Republic shares an island with Haiti. In fact, people forget about the Dominican Republic almost entirely because it is not a scene of unending horrific human misery, corruption, and disaster even tho it shares the same island and has the same natural resources and population. Policy makes a difference in how natural resources are managed. The Dominican Republic is on the right.




According to Diamond, the Easter Islanders despoiled their island to erect the moai ... those giant stone heads that various tribes used to compete against each other. He makes the point that Easter Island is SMALL, that it is possible to walk from one end to the other in less than a day. And it's far away from any place else. It is impossible NOT to know the state of the island's environment, there is no fiction that one can get resources from some further frontier or neighboring island, and yet these islanders chopped down their palm trees one by one... palm trees which fed them, palm trees which sheltered their topsoil and kept it from being blown away, palm trees which provided wood for their canoes and gave them access to deeper-water fish... or even a desperate last-ditch means of escape.

Once the trees were gone the topsoild blew away, society devolved into a cannabalistic mass. "Your mothers flesh is stuck between my teeth" was a common insult.

"What was that man thinking when he chopped down the last tree?"

Unlike other societies which failed to successfully adapt to long-term environmental changes, the Easter Island disaster, according to Diamond, was entirely self-generated.

What does this tell me? It shows for me the power of BELIEF OVER REALITY. Catastrophe can be literally right before peoples' eyes, but they fail to see. BELIEF can be about a lot of things ... God(s). The superiority of one's tribe over another. Dems versus repubs. War. Money. Ownership. Profit. RUSSIA!! Trump. Obama.

Beliefs cloud perception of what is. The societally-fatal beliefs seem to be mostly about war and about (short term) technological fixes solving long-term problems (Anasazi).

what would we see if we removed the beliefs which cloud our perception? Would we be horrified?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Monday, May 13, 2019 7:55 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I'm not rooting for a mass extinction event or anything. Just something that would curb the population of the human race to about 10% of what it is today.

Collectively, we are the only problem.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Only 10% ? I was born back when the population was 1/3 of today's. In theory, that additional 2/3rds should have been an advantage: more brains and hands to solve problems. In fact, about half that additional 2/3rds haven't lived up to even 10% of their potential, especially in the United States.

Have you seen the TV show "My 600-lb Life"? Even Americans who aren't fat are like those patients. You tell them something important and they still ignore it to watch more TV until they are almost dead. Then some of them pay attention and live. In every episode of My 600-lb Life, the doctor tells the obese patient to lose weight before he can operate on their stomach. It's psychological -- the doctor needs to know before operating if the patient will make an effort or is operating pointless. About half of the patients lose weight after being told more than once that if they don't they will die. Those patients get surgery and than they really start to lose weight and get back to normal. As for the other half? They get offended. They would rather die than listen to the doctor. At that point, the doctor cannot stop their fatal choice and the TV episode ends. The entire country of America is facing a choice much like that. It sure ain't entertaining to watch half of them die, one by one, for their stupid choices. But that TV doctor can only tell them. He can't make 'em do what needs to be done.

www.infoplease.com/world/population-statistics/total-population-world-
decade-1950-2050


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly



Maybe I wrote that wrong...

I didn't mean only curb the human population by 10%. I meant those surviving at the end would be far better off if there were only 10% of the human population left.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, May 13, 2019 11:25 AM

JONGSSTRAW


I'm so worried about this extinction thing that I won't even buy un-ripened fruit. Not gonna take THAT kind of chance, no siree bob!

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Monday, May 13, 2019 11:31 AM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:


I didn't mean only curb the human population by 10%. I meant those surviving at the end would be far better off if there were only 10% of the human population left.




Maybe thats the plan?

Get the monkeyz to bild paradise, then kill them off.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .

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Monday, May 13, 2019 12:23 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by JO753:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:


I didn't mean only curb the human population by 10%. I meant those surviving at the end would be far better off if there were only 10% of the human population left.




Maybe thats the plan?

Get the monkeyz to bild paradise, then kill them off.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .



Well... I would hardly call what we have today paradise, even if there were a lot less of us to eat up all the food and drink up all the water. There will be a lot of empty real estate.

But yeah... I'm sure the big brains on top have a scheme.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, May 13, 2019 6:59 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Once the trees were gone the top soil blew away, society devolved into a cannabalistic mass. "Your mothers flesh is stuck between my teeth" was a common insult.

"What was that man thinking when he chopped down the last tree?"

Unlike other societies which failed to successfully adapt to long-term environmental changes, the Easter Island disaster, according to Diamond, was entirely self-generated.

What does this tell me? It shows for me the power of BELIEF OVER REALITY. Catastrophe can be literally right before peoples' eyes, but they fail to see. BELIEF can be about a lot of things ... God(s). The superiority of one's tribe over another. Dems versus repubs. War. Money. Ownership. Profit. RUSSIA!! Trump. Obama.

Beliefs cloud perception of what is. The societally-fatal beliefs seem to be mostly about war and about (short term) technological fixes solving long-term problems (Anasazi).

what would we see if we removed the beliefs which cloud our perception? Would we be horrified?

Diamond wrote about forests in the EPILOGUE to Guns, Germs, and Steel

THE FUTURE OF HUMAN HISTORY AS A SCIENCE:

In ancient times, however, much of the Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean region, including Greece, was covered with forest. The region’s transformation from fertile woodland to eroded scrub or desert has been elucidated by paleobotanists and archaeologists. Its woodlands were cleared for agriculture, or cut to obtain construction timber, or burned as firewood or for manufacturing plaster. Because of low rainfall and hence low primary productivity (proportional to rainfall), regrowth of vegetation could not keep pace with its destruction, especially in the presence of overgrazing by abundant goats. With the tree and grass cover removed, erosion proceeded and valleys silted up, while irrigation agriculture in the low-rainfall environment led to salt accumulation. These processes, which began in the Neolithic era, continued into modern times. For instance, the last forests near the ancient Nabataean capital of Petra, in modern Jordan, were felled by the Ottoman Turks during construction of the Hejaz railroad just before World War I.

Thus, Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment. They committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base. Power shifted westward as each eastern Mediterranean society in turn undermined itself, beginning with the oldest societies, those in the east (the Fertile Crescent). Northern and western Europe has been spared this fate, not because its inhabitants have been wiser but because they have had the good luck to live in a more robust environment with higher rainfall, in which vegetation regrows quickly. Much of northern and western Europe is still able to support productive intensive agriculture today, 7,000 years after the arrival of food production. In effect, Europe received its crops, livestock, technology, and writing systems from the Fertile Crescent, which then gradually eliminated itself as a major center of power and innovation.

That is how the Fertile Crescent lost its huge early lead over Europe.

The books by Jared Diamond are here:
https://pirateproxy.lat/search/Jared%20Diamond/0/99/0

Other pirate bay proxies are https://unblocked-pw.github.io or https://unblocked.win

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, May 16, 2019 8:56 AM

REAVERFAN


‘Extraordinary thinning’ of ice sheets revealed deep inside Antarctica

New research shows affected areas are losing ice five times faster than in the 1990s, with more than 100m of thickness gone in some places
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/16/thinning-of-antarc
tic-ice-sheets-spreading-inland-rapidly-study




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Thursday, May 16, 2019 9:28 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I propose everybody leave their fridge and freezer doors open for one week straight while cranking up their A/C to max even if it's not hot yet.

That ought to cool everything down to levels that are acceptable to Marcos.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, May 16, 2019 9:35 AM

REAVERFAN

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Thursday, May 16, 2019 9:36 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by reaverfan:
It was 84 degrees near the Arctic Ocean this weekend as carbon dioxide hit its highest level in human history
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/05/14/it-was-degrees-near-
arctic-ocean-this-weekend-carbon-dioxide-hit-its-highest-level-human-history/?utm_term=.f1cb45207d82



Quit breathing. Problem solved.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, May 16, 2019 1:05 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Quit breathing. Problem solved.

When asked on Monday whether Trump is seeking war with or regime change in Iran, he replied, “We’ll see what happens with Iran. If they do anything, it would be a very bad mistake. If they do anything. I’m hearing little stories about Iran. If they do anything, they will suffer greatly. We’ll see what happens with Iran.”

I wonder how many times Trump needs to say "If they do anything" and "We’ll see what happens with Iran"? Despite the unnecessary repetition, I am super-confidence he can handle the CO2 problem with a brain like his working at full speed. It is good to know that Donald "I am a very stable genius" Trump is working on the problem. Oh, then I realize too late he is the only guy in the world who pulled his country out of the Paris Climate Agreement to control CO2. Suddenly I'm not so confident.

https://thinkprogress.org/tom-cotton-war-with-iran-b4a546589fbc/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, May 17, 2019 4:44 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


REAVERBOT, I may agree with you about global climate change, but I find it impossible to care about it when YOU say it.

Why?

Because you're a fucking jackass, and a stupid bot to boot.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Tuesday, May 21, 2019 7:08 PM

REAVERFAN


Chris Martenson, predominantly a financial critic, is now talking openly about the inevitability of collapse: "...the unthinkable is forcing its way into our collective consciousness. The ecosystems of the world that have gently held civilizations over the past 10,000 years are collapsing."
https://www.peakprosperity.com/theyve-stolen-our-future-2/

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Tuesday, May 21, 2019 7:09 PM

REAVERFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
REAVERBOT, I may agree with you about global climate change, but I find it impossible to care about it when YOU say it.

Why?

Because you're a fucking jackass, and a stupid bot to boot.


There, there, comrade.

You're truly useless, and talking to yourself. Everyone knows what you are.

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Thursday, May 23, 2019 2:03 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:

Scientists Expose World-Killer: Where Ozone-Destroying Chemicals Are Coming From
Profile picture for user Tyler Durden

It's been exactly one year since US scientists reported a mysterious surge in ozone-destroying chemicals, known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

Banned in 1987 under the globally signed Montreal Protocol, there was only one explanation: somewhere out there, in an unknown location, someone must have gone rogue, setting back progress on the ozone hole by a decade or more.

After much speculation, the whereabouts and magnitude of these harmful emissions has been confirmed in scientific research. As earlier reporting in The New York Times had already suggested, they seem to be coming from the northeast coast of mainland China.

Since the Montreal Protocol was declared a success in 2013, this highly industrial region has continued to emit, whether accidentally or not, CFC-11: the second most abundant chlorofluorocarbon in the atmosphere. Between the periods of 2008-2012 and 2014-2017, in fact, CFC-11 emissions increased here by roughly 110 percent.

"This increase accounts for a substantial fraction (at least 40 to 60 per cent) of the global rise in CFC-11 emissions," an international team of researchers writes in a new report.

"We find no evidence for a significant increase in CFC-11 emissions from any other eastern Asian countries or other regions of the world where there are available data for the detection of regional emissions."

These violations are likely going unreported because even though CFC-11 is illegal, it is also one of the cheapest ways to produce new foam insulation in refrigerators and buildings.

After tracking down documents and international sources, journalists at The New York Times and independent investigators discovered that in some factories in China, illegal CFC use has been slipping through the cracks for years.

The examples given are based in Xingfu, a rural industrial town in China's Shandong province, and incidentally, that is the very same province that the scientists landed on too.

Gathering atmospheric observations from locations in South Korea and Japan, the researchers compared global monitoring data and atmospheric chemical movements to figure out whether these emissions came from eastern Asia - the area most suspected as the source of CFC-11.

Along with Shandong, the nearby province of Hebei was also implicated. Both regions are big industrial producers heavily involved in the nation's manufacturing, and while the chemical may not actually be produced here, it's certainly being emitted at alarming rates somewhere nearby.

"To bring about such an increase ... would require new emissions from the disposal and destruction of refrigerators more than 10 times higher than recently estimated for the whole of China between 2014 and 2017," the authors write, "or a larger and more rapid increase in emissions from the demolition of old buildings than was previously predicted for the entire world over a 20-year period (2020–2040)."

Whether these factories know what they're doing or not (and the NYT report certainly suggests they understand), their actions pose a serious threat not only to the ozone layer, but also to the climate crisis. CFC-11 has a powerful heat-trapping effect in the atmosphere, so if emissions continue as they are, experts say it would be equivalent to the amount of CO2 produced by 16 coal-fired power stations every year.

China currently produces about one-third of the world's polyurethane foam, and the emissions so far may only represent a fraction of what has already been manufactured. The rest of the CFC-11 may still be trapped inside a slowly-emitting foam bank, and the only way to know for sure is to find the ones responsible.

Unfortunately, the new research is unable to zoom in any closer on the culprit, so it is still unclear whether these emissions are widespread across both these Chinese regions, or scattered among just a few sources. For now, the hunt continues.

This study has been published in Nature.


https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-22/scientists-expose-world-kill
er-where-ozone-destroying-chemicals-are-coming




-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Thursday, May 23, 2019 3:41 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by reaverfan:
Chris Martenson, predominantly a financial critic, is now talking openly about the inevitability of collapse: "...the unthinkable is forcing its way into our collective consciousness. The ecosystems of the world that have gently held civilizations over the past 10,000 years are collapsing."
https://www.peakprosperity.com/theyve-stolen-our-future-2/]



Little late to the party arentcha ya, sweetcheeks?

I already linked Martenson. http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=62566 And, no, he's not "predominantly" a financial critic. His background is in biology .. pathology and neurotoxicology, specifically. He just applies the lessons he learned from biology to capitalism ie. infinite growth in a finite system isn't possible.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Thursday, May 23, 2019 12:27 PM

REAVERFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:

Originally posted by reaverfan:
Chris Martenson, predominantly a financial critic, is now talking openly about the inevitability of collapse: "...the unthinkable is forcing its way into our collective consciousness. The ecosystems of the world that have gently held civilizations over the past 10,000 years are collapsing."
https://www.peakprosperity.com/theyve-stolen-our-future-2/]



Little late to the party arentcha ya, sweetcheeks?

I already linked Martenson. http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=62566 And, no, he's not "predominantly" a financial critic. His background is in biology .. pathology and neurotoxicology, specifically. He just applies the lessons he learned from biology to capitalism ie. infinite growth in a finite system isn't possible.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

Eat shit and die, Russian troll.

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Thursday, May 23, 2019 12:27 PM

REAVERFAN

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Thursday, May 23, 2019 5:47 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:


Chris Martenson, predominantly a financial critic, is now talking openly about the inevitability of collapse: "...the unthinkable is forcing its way into our collective consciousness. The ecosystems of the world that have gently held civilizations over the past 10,000 years are collapsing."
https://www.peakprosperity.com/theyve-stolen-our-future-2/
REAVERBOT

Little late to the party arentcha ya, sweetcheeks?

I already linked Martenson. http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=62566 And, no, he's not "predominantly" a financial critic. His background is in biology .. pathology and neurotoxicology, specifically. He just applies the lessons he learned from biology to capitalism ie. infinite growth in a finite system isn't possible.- SIGNY

Eat shit and die, Russian troll.- REAVERBOT

Now REAVERBOT is a guy who would carry on a duel to the death on the deck of the Titanic as it was sinking.

Hello??? Is there a rational human being in there somewhere???



-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Thursday, May 23, 2019 7:32 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Why carbon credits and carbon trading doesn't work:

It it a scheme to make pollution control palatable to corporations by "monetizing" pollution control. However, there is a huge incentive to cheat, and unless the program is run with strict attention and accountability it is doomed to fail. There are two problems with this kind of program

1) There are a lot of moving parts which makes cheating easy. Rather than just limiting carbon dioxide emissions from a source directly it depends on many other players ... often players far away in India or Brazil or Indonesia or Gabon ... to do their part. Time and distance make compliance impossible to verify. All real audits which go beyond advertising slogans and which actually track down the forests being managed or the coal-fired power plants being converted have shown that nearly all carbon "trading" schemes are just greenwashing.

2) Also, many of the carbon capture schemes depend on complex ecologies, the net effect on carbon dioxide it often impossible to measure, even if everyone is operating with the best of intentions.

If you want someone to "do" something, you need to reward it. If you want someone to "stop" something, you need to punish it. The best plan for reducing carbon emissions is a carbon tax. You can immediately turn that tax back to "the people" but what it does is make the RELATIVE cost of carbon higher.

This article says the same thing as an article that I read fifteen years ago. Nothing has been learned in that time.

*****

Quote:

Why Carbon Credits For Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing
By Lisa Song, with additional reporting by Paula Moura Photography by Fernando Martinho, for ProPublica
May 22, 2019

RIO BRANCO, Brazil — The state of Acre, on the western edge of Brazil, is so remote, there’s a national joke that it doesn’t exist. But for geochemist Foster Brown, it’s the center of the universe, a place that could help save the world.

“This is an example of hope,” he said, as we stood behind his office at the Federal University of Acre, a tropical campus carved into the Amazon rainforest. Brown placed his hand on a spindly trunk, ordering me to follow his lead. “There is a flow of water going up that stem, and there is a flow of sap coming down, and when it comes down it has carbon compounds,” he said. “Do you feel that?”

I couldn’t feel a thing. But that invisible process holds the key to a massive flow of cash into Brazil and an equally pivotal opportunity for countries trying to head off climate change without throwing their economies into turmoil. If the carbon in these trees could be quantified, then Acre could sell credits to polluters emitting clouds of CO2. Whatever they release theoretically would be offset, or canceled out, by the rainforest.

Five thousand miles away in California, politicians, scientists, oil tycoons and tree huggers are bursting with excitement over the idea. The state is the second-largest carbon polluter in America, and its oil and gas industry emits about 50 million metric tons of CO2 a year. What if Chevron or Shell or Phillips 66 could offset some of their damage by paying Brazil not to cut down trees?

The appetite is global. For the airline industry and industrialized nations in the Paris climate accord, offsets could be a cheap alternative to actually reducing fossil fuel use.

But the desperate hunger for these carbon credit plans appears to have blinded many of their advocates to the mounting pile of evidence that they haven’t — and won’t — deliver the climate benefit they promise.

I looked at projects going back two decades and spanning the globe and pulled together findings from academic researchers in far-flung forest villages, studies published in obscure journals, foreign government reports and dense technical documents.

I enlisted a satellite imagery analysis firm to see how much of the forest remained in a preservation project that started selling credits in 2013. Four years later, only half the project areas were forested.

In case after case, I found that carbon credits hadn’t offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with. Ultimately, the polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO2, but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance the ledger either never came or didn’t last.

“Offsets themselves are doing damage,” said Larry Lohmann, who has spent 20 years studying carbon credits. While we’re sitting here counting carbon and moving it around, more CO2 keeps accumulating in the atmosphere, he said.

It’s “the worst possible idea — except for everything else,” said Timothy Searchinger, a Princeton researcher who studies land use and climate change. “If we had enough money, it could probably help a lot.”

He echoed an idea I heard again and again from proponents of this concept: Even hundreds of attempts across the world had not given forest preservation offsets a meaningful chance to work. Many projects sold credits on a voluntary market, to corporations seeking green public relations or well-meaning consumers. That didn’t allow them to generate enough money to succeed. If California and other giants joined the market, that could finally inject real resources into the effort.


California’s cap-and-trade program allows companies to offset a small percentage of their carbon output with forest preservation projects in North America. But this year, the state’s Air Resources Board could approve its proposed Tropical Forest Standard — a blueprint for how carbon offsets could be awarded for intercontinental programs. Experts say the standard could and likely will be adopted by other countries.

Everyone is looking to Acre as the prime testing ground. “Acre’s program is the most advanced,” a board spokesman said in an email. Supporters kept sending me brochures that used words like “pioneer,” “innovative” and “new business models” and showed smiling residents harvesting Brazil nuts instead of cutting down the rainforest.

So I traveled to Acre to see how its program was working. I found swaths of cow pasture where locals once tapped rubber from trees; there’s no way to make a living from sustainable alternatives, they told me, so the trees have to go. Government workers spoke of conservation, but political leaders have cut funding for it and plan to expand agribusiness. Several Acre officials readily acknowledged that their priority is getting foreign aid to protect forests; the validity of the offsets is an afterthought.

Those eager to see the Acre program succeed told me it was OK if the offsets didn’t really cancel out all of the carbon emissions they were supposed to, as long as some trees were saved and smaller gains were made.

“Perfection can be the enemy of delivery,” Brown said. “There are a whole bunch of problems with it. … What is the alternative?”

If the world were graded on the historic reliability of carbon offsets, the result would be a solid F.

The largest program, the Clean Development Mechanism, came out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, when dozens of nations made a pact to cut greenhouse gases. European leaders wanted to force industry to emit less. Americans wanted flexibility. Developing nations like Brazil wanted money to deal with climate change. One approach they could agree to was carbon offsets.

The idea worked marvelously on paper. If a power plant in Canada needed to shave 10% off of its emissions but didn’t want to pay for technology upgrades, it could buy offsets from projects in the developing world. Investors planning to build a coal plant in India could instead decide to build a solar plant, using the money from the anticipated sale of carbon credits to cover the higher costs of developing solar power. The gap in emissions between the hypothetical coal plant and the actual solar farm would be converted to offsets. (Each credit is equal to the global warming caused by a metric ton of CO2.)

The program subsidized thousands of projects, including hydropower, wind and, infamously, coal plants that claimed credits for being more efficient than they would have been. CDM became mired in technical and human rights scandals, and the European Union stopped accepting most credits.

A 2016 report found that 85% of offsets had a “low likelihood” of creating real impacts.

Another global program, Joint Implementation, has a similar track record. A 2015 paper found that 75% of the credits issued were unlikely to represent real reductions, and that if countries had cut pollution on-site instead of relying on offsets, global CO2 emissions would have been 600 million tons lower.


Almost all of the projects failed to meet a standard required for any true carbon offset called additionality. What it means is that the environmental gains are only real if the solar farms or windmills would never have been built without the credits.

The programs largely avoided credits for forest preservation, in which a polluter pays a landowner to reduce deforestation. The science was too complicated. How are we to know which trees were saved because of such projects, and which would have survived without them?

The uncertainty didn’t stop delegates at the United Nations from entertaining the idea during climate talks starting in 2007.

The UN formalized the concept as REDD, or Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation. Proponents expected the carbon incentives would create billions of dollars to transform conservation as countries or corporations used it to meet mandated climate goals. But the world didn’t get a deal strong enough to create demand, so the anticipated funding never emerged.

Instead, the UN supported pilot programs, as did the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Nongovernmental organizations and private companies funded hundreds of small-scale offset projects, and a few countries launched “results-based” programs, which reward preservation without generating offsets.

There is no central authority to deal with the varieties of REDD that now exist. No one has done a comprehensive assessment of how effective these programs actually are.

I found a few that came close. In 2015, a French research center examined 120 projects and found that 37% overlapped with existing protected lands like national parks. Though offsets require an added benefit, the authors concluded REDD was simply layered onto existing conservation plans, reducing it to a “logo to attract financing.”

Then, there are the findings out of Norway, a major exporter of oil and natural gas and the world’s largest supporter of REDD, representing about half of all funding.

Tucked into a little-noticed report published last year by Norway’s Office of the Auditor General was the revelation that the country’s efforts had failed virtually every test:

Despite a decade’s work and $3 billion, results were “delayed and uncertain,” the science of measuring carbon was only “partially in place” and there was “considerable” risk of what’s called “leakage” — when protecting one patch of land leads to deforestation somewhere else. That problem alone creates “considerable uncertainty over the climatic impact,” the report concluded.

I landed in Acre at midnight on March 11, and even then, the humidity felt unbelievable. The Amazon rainforest spans the entire state, an area slightly larger than Illinois with a population more the size of North Dakota’s. My first morning there, I met Brown at Capybara Kiosk, a gazebo on campus next to a lake where the world’s largest rodents munch on grass. The geochemist drove me to his office, which required a short journey through the Amazon’s famed red mud that could best be described as whitewater rafting in a pickup truck. The dirt roads are so precarious, Brown keeps a tow rope handy; I watched him use it later that day to help another driver.

It was a fitting metaphor for what I knew coming into Acre: Trying to preserve trees in any developing country is a slog, a tumultuous push against political volatility, lacking infrastructure and poverty, which drives people to violate whatever protections are in place to plant crops or mine for gold or just have enough lumber to build their homes.

Layer on top of that the most pressing requirement of making carbon offsets work, and the challenge can seem insurmountable.

When trees take in CO2, the gas doesn’t magically disappear: The trees simply store the carbon, incorporating it into in their living tissue as they grow. When trees are destroyed, the accumulated carbon goes back into the atmosphere as CO2.

Think of trees as “hiding the carbon for awhile,” said Abigail Swann, an ecology professor at the University of Washington. Carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for about 100 years. So forest offsets only work if the trees remain intact for a century.

In that sense, offsets are like the world’s most forgiving credit card: The buyer gets all the benefit upfront, while it takes a century for the full debt to be repaid.

Proponents told me that even a half-century or a few decades could make a big difference. To them, forest offsets are about buying time for society to figure out how to power the world without fossil fuels.

But I’d read about projects that sold credits, only to have trees cut down soon after.
When a tree is destroyed, all the carbon accumulated over its lifetime is released back into the atmosphere.

In 2014, FIFA bought a batch of credits to help fulfill a sustainability pledge it made before the World Cup in Brazil. The offsets came from a project launched in 2009, after Almir Narayamoga Suruí, a leader among the Paiter-Suruí tribe in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, struck up conversations with Google and carbon market consultants.

The project aimed to cut deforestation in highly logged areas along the territory’s borders, and it received funding from USAID. But some members of the tribe, disillusioned by the amount of money going to international groups for logistics management, colluded with loggers and anti-REDD activists to sabotage the project.

The project sold 250,000 credits as the tribal leader documented destruction. “Every day, 300 trucks leave our territory filled with wood,” he wrote in a public letter in 2016. The project was suspended last year, after the loggers destroyed more trees than all the credits sold.

Then, there was the project launched in 2008 to help Cambodian monks protect the forest where they lived. The project attracted powerful allies, including funding from the Clinton Foundation and support from the Cambodian government.

Meanwhile, the forest was being overrun — by violent border disputes between the Cambodian and Thai militaries, by logging sanctioned by the same government that supported the project, and by an influx of refugees and former Khmer Rouge soldiers who settled in the forest to farm. The project’s hurdles should have been obvious; the area was riddled with land mines.

The project was designed to protect 13 forested sites covering a total of 246 square miles. It’s sold 48,000 credits and remains on the market, even though military bases and villages were built within the protected areas, according to Timothy Frewer, an Australian researcher who spent months on the ground. After an environmental group cited Frewer’s findings in a 2017 report, the airline Virgin Atlantic said it would stop buying offsets from the project.

ProPublica enlisted Descartes Labs, a satellite imagery analysis firm, to review radar data for the 13 sites to determine how much forest remained. Project documents said these areas were 88% covered in forest, on average, in 2008. Our commissioned analysis found that as of 2017, they were only 46% forest. One of the protected areas, Angdoung Bor, started out as 90% forest; it is now 0%.

ProPublica contacted Verra, a nonprofit that set the quality assurance standards for the credits generated. A spokeswoman said the organization couldn’t comment until it had done its own research. The consultants who are supposed to provide regular on-the-ground updates to Verra haven’t issued a report in more than five years. Verra said the credits sold have already been used to offset pollution.

Leslie Durschinger, CEO of project developer Terra Global Capital, said in an email that the lack of carbon market buyers and donors have left the project “without the financial support it needs to succeed.”

On average, the 13 protected sites in this REDD project in Cambodia were 46% forest as of 2017, according to an analysis of radar data done for ProPublica by Descartes Labs. These five show a range of outcomes within the project. While some areas, like Phaav, gained forest, most lost a significant number of trees, and one lost all of its forest.

Sorng Roka Vorn
86% forest, 2017: 63% forest

Phaav (Thmorda O Toekkhiev)
2008: 97%, 2017: 99%

O Sophy Kiri Prey Sruorng
2008: 90%, 2017: 18%

Ratanak Rukha
2008: 86%, 2017: 33%

Angdoung Bor
2008: 90%, 2017: 0%

Brown moved to Acre 26 years ago as a visiting professor and never left. He said the Amazon makes him feel “useful.” He tracks the impact of droughts and wildfires, estimates the carbon contained in the forest and has represented the Acre government in international climate talks. Everyone knows him here. He bikes around campus in a fluorescent reflective vest and tries to reach people however he can, including climate change workshops with rural workers and a regular column for the local paper; he wrote one about why he became a vegetarian (to save trees, of course).

He argues that concerns about the science behind initiatives like REDD are outweighed by the catastrophic potential of not moving to block deforestation.

“Trying to guarantee something for 100 years is impossible at this moment,” he told me. “If we don’t move quickly, now, this [science] discussion will tend to be theoretical.”

The scientists and forest experts I spoke with put it this way: If the Amazon loses enough trees, it will reach a tipping point, transforming from lush ecosystem into a semiarid savanna. The implications would be global. And rich nations aren’t generous enough to fund the preservation of tropical forests without getting something in return.

Everyone agrees forests are a vital buffer against climate change. The question is whether their preservation should be linked to offsets that allow others to keep polluting. For this to work, ecologists told me “rock solid” accounting is necessary.

The math starts with an estimated baseline, a guess at what deforestation would look like without offsets. The more deforestation you anticipate, the more credits you generate, the more money you stand to make. It’s easy to game the system by nudging the numbers toward the bleakest alternative reality.

French researchers raised questions about two sites in Africa, which calculated their baselines using other, supposedly comparable areas. In Congo, the chosen reference area had many more roads and was next to shipping ports, so the logging potential was higher than in the project area. In Madagascar, deforestation in the reference area was already twice as high as in the project forest, so the project could claim to cut deforestation in half without doing a thing.

Brazil, which has a third of the world’s rainforests, has received more REDD funding than any other nation, and it’s used different baselines to justify vastly different results.

For the Amazon Fund, a Norwegian-supported program that doesn’t create offsets, Brazil claimed credit for 4 billion tons of avoided CO2 over a decade starting in 2006 and said its progress was worth $22 billion. Brazil came up with a higher estimate for separate funding from the United Nations: $36 billion, by relying more on older deforestation numbers that added an extra 3 billion tons of avoided CO2 to its tab. Since Norway and the UN have limited budgets, Brazil has gotten less than $2 billion.

Deforestation in Brazil is actually up; it was rising even under a forest-friendly government and reached a decade high last year. Then, last fall, the country elected far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who declared support for agribusiness over what he called fanatical environmental activism. He dismantled two climate change divisions and cut 24% of the budget for the country’s top environmental enforcement agency.

Acre’s new state government is aligned with him and says it wants to increase soy and cattle production. “Acre’s economic salvation is agribusiness,” Gov. Gladson Cameli declared during a meeting with the governor of Rondônia, one of the most heavily deforested states in the Amazon.

Keeping track of trees is essential. For the REDD programs, Brazil has relied on a satellite program that tracks large-scale tree loss, starting at chunks the size of about 10 city blocks. But there’s emerging evidence that landowners are clear-cutting smaller areas to escape detection. It doesn’t account for degradation, the thinning of trees from wildfires and logging; a major study found this cut the Amazon’s carbon content by an average of 55%. Luiz Aragão, who heads the remote sensing division at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, said wildfires alone can change the numbers by 30%, and scientists are just beginning to understand how they create lasting damage.
Forests can lose carbon through clearcutting, wildfires or selective logging.

I spoke to government workers in Acre about how they could guarantee that their credits were scientifically valid.

Vera Reis, executive director of Acre’s state environmental agency (and Brown’s wife), said the credibility is “paramount.” Brazil’s satellite programs can detect smaller areas of deforestation, she said; the lower resolution is used for bureaucratic purposes, to keep data consistent with historical records. Brazil uses much more detailed data for federal climate change reports.

She said it’s too early to tell what kind of data Acre will use if it links with California. The details will be ironed out, she said, and we “want confidence” in the numbers.

In the same meeting, Acre’s politically appointed secretary of the environment, Israel Milani, steered the conversation to agribusiness opportunities that wouldn’t damage the environment. “We are a relatively poor state,” he said. “Everyone who lives in the forest, who lives from the forest, needs a livelihood.”

Later, I met with Fluvio Mascarenhas, an analyst at a Brazilian federal agency that oversees the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, a conservation area with more than 11,000 residents. He warned against looking too closely at the quality of the credits being sold. “You are going to create a non-incentive to preserve,” he said.

Like Brown, Mascarenhas will take any help he can get to save trees. His team has dwindled by half in the past decade, leaving 15 staffers to oversee 11 protected areas in Acre that cover up to 12,000 square miles — in addition to handling basic government functions on the reserve, including education, public health and infrastructure.

From his office in the state capital of Rio Branco, Mascarenhas tracks cleared land through Google Earth. He showed me how he uses a yellow pushpin icon to tag landowners who’ve cut more than they’re allowed to; the map was covered with yellow, far more offenders than they can reasonably process.

To collect fines, there’s no mail service, no credit card invoice. Mascarenhas’ team spends weeks trekking through the forest, sleeping in hammocks and confronting loggers in person. Some can pay the fine, which amounts to about $2,400. Many are too poor.

Mascarenhas told me about an attempt to create a cacao industry in the reserve so that locals could live sustainably. His agency spent two years researching how to do it. But they didn’t get the funding for the second half of the project, to create a market. Those who cultivated the beans have nowhere to sell them, he said. “The animals are the only ones eating the cacao.” They’re applying for additional funding to implement it.

The government is trying to get people to value forest products like Brazil nuts and rubber, but the market isn’t following. “The world is telling us we have to conserve,” he said, “but nobody’s showing us how.”

A few weeks after I visited, the president of Mascarenhas’ agency resigned. It happened after Bolsonaro’s federal environment minister threatened to investigate employees who didn’t attend an agribusiness conference, in which farmers fought to strip protections from land important to wildlife. Three additional directors at his agency resigned, and the government replaced them with members of the military.

The day after meeting with Acre officials, I woke up early to start the drive to the Chico Mendes reserve, a few hours outside Rio Branco. It is a place of legend in Acre, central to its reputation far outside of Brazil.

Chico Mendes was one of the first activists to get global attention for defending the Amazon when deforestation threatened the livelihood of residents who tapped rubber from trees. In the 1980s, he organized nonviolent protests that involved confrontations with logging trucks. He was gunned down in 1988, but his legacy lives on in conservation areas that cover 18% of Brazil. One of them, the reserve named after him in Acre, is home to the descendants of rubber tappers who protested alongside him.

I expected to see rainforest. But on the way there, all I saw were cow pastures. They usually had a few trees — Brazil nut, which are a protected species, and palm trees, which are hard to cut with chainsaw blades.

Dercy Teles, a former president of the rubber tappers’ union, lives just outside the reserve. She told me she had defended the forest with Chico Mendes because her livelihood depended on it; now, only those deep in the conservation area, without access to markets, roads or better options, still tapped trees. Corporations and developed nations created most of the damage leading to climate change, she said, yet “people want us to starve to reduce carbon emissions.”

In 2010, while Acre was run by a progressive party that dubbed itself the “government of the forest,” the state launched a set of sustainability policies, to steer residents toward activities like harvesting Brazil nuts and digging fish ponds, which do not require cutting down trees. The initiative gained Acre funding from Germany, which has given $33 million so far for deforestation cuts. It is a results-based program that isn’t claiming to offset German pollution.

Brazil takes great pride in a sharp drop in Amazon deforestation since 2004. But it’s impossible to tell how much of an additional benefit its funders have created. The drop coincided with a massive federal conservation program. Once the country loosened restrictions and enforcement in 2012, deforestation began to increase. Recent research on Norway’s contributions to the Amazon Fund noted that “a causal link to decreasing Brazilian deforestation rates is yet to be proven with analytical rigour.”

Officials said the Acre program has benefited 7,000 indigenous people and about 14,000 other families, and they’re working on a report with more detailed results.

The 2.3 million acres of the Chico Mendes reserve have retained 94% of their forest cover, but even so, deforestation rose 60% between 2000 to 2016, according to Mascarenhas’ research. In and around the reserve, I saw evidence of the program at work — an ecolodge for tourists, a warehouse piled with Brazil nuts. But it wasn’t hard to find people frustrated with Acre’s sustainability programs.

Teles took me to visit her brother Pedro Teles de Carvalho, a former rubber tapper who became a teacher. The state sent him hundreds of saplings to plant fruit trees, he said, but didn’t provide machinery to prepare the land — a necessity for farming the poor Amazon soil. The saplings sat untouched in his yard, still wrapped in plastic.
Pedro Teles de Carvalho holds seedlings he received from the government. Left: A rubber tree plantation in the Chico Mendes reserve. Top: A swan boat at an ecolodge within the reserve. The lodge was closed for the rainy season.

Next, I met Carvalho’s neighbor, Francisco Maurício Rios, a retiree who gets by on a small pension. Thinking he might be able to buy a motorcycle, he tried to participate in a sustainable logging program. It didn’t earn him enough for an electric bike. He said the government also paid to dig two fish ponds. One dries up every summer; the other provides enough fish to eat, but not to sell. The government also sent rubber-tapping trees. He said he can’t afford fertilizer to help them grow.

These kinds of frustrations have undone forest offset projects across the world. They target rural residents who would otherwise cut down trees for fuel or to clear pastures for agriculture, but that only works if carbon sales provide a reliable alternative. They rarely do. Rubber from the reserve sells for about 2 reais per kilogram, barely enough for a cup of coffee, while a single cow is worth 800 reais, about $200.

José Romário Gomes da Silva and Elizete Carneiro de Brito live with their 5-year-old daughter, Thaíssa, in a home filled with things their parents never had: a cellphone, a sofa, a pink shag rug. In part, that’s because of the small herd of cows they keep on land in the reserve that used to be covered with trees.

“Cattle is a secure market. You can get a good income selling a calf, an ox,” Silva said.

“Who is willing to rubber tap nowadays?” Brito said. “Nobody, practically nobody. We want an easier way to live.”

My visit to Acre suggested that even the best REDD program in the world was running into practical, political and scientific obstacles that couldn’t be fixed with funding alone — another warning sign on top of the reports concluding earlier programs hadn’t worked.

Yet when I explained what I’d found to 20 scientists and carbon credit researchers — including several who have spent much of their careers working to implement, improve or study forest offsets — they sometimes responded angrily.

They agreed with the underlying facts. But when I asked if this indicated REDD was failing, they objected. Vehemently.

Amy Duchelle, a senior scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research, co-edited a book published last year that said REDD “has not yet delivered the expected overall impact of reducing [greenhouse gas] emissions” and tropical deforestation hasn’t slowed.

She repeated these facts in an interview, emphasizing that these initiatives had been useful in other ways, helping countries improve their ability to monitor deforestation and understand its causes, and secure land rights for indigenous communities. She even found “moderately encouraging” scientific results out of some projects.
The hunger for these offsets is blinding us to the mounting pile of evidence that they haven't — and won't — deliver the climate benefit they promise.

When we spoke again after my trip to Acre, however, she became heated. She’d spent years in Brazil, she said. What did I know after one brief trip? “You’re not quoting me,” she said. “I don’t like the direction of this story.”

Searchinger, the Princeton researcher, said people trying to make REDD work know its limitations. He helped me understand the resistance when it is criticized by outsiders, half-joking: “So the question is, ‘OK, smartass, what’s your solution?’”

Several researchers and scientists told me that forest preservation offsets had not gotten a real chance to succeed — that we won’t really know until the world implements programs on a large scale, with billions more in funding. “The truth is, REDD remains a great idea that’s hardly been tried,” said Frances Seymour, a distinguished senior fellow at the World Resources Institute.

That means staking the future on government-run programs like the one in Acre.

At a contentious, six-hour public hearing last fall, the California Air Resources Board considered whether to adopt the Tropical Forest Standard, which would open the door for California and other governments to link with Acre or similar programs.

Officials from Brazil testified in support of the standard while global human rights groups urged the opposite. Indigenous and environmental activists spoke for both sides, and two competing letters, each signed by more than 100 scientists and researchers, argued for and against the proposal.

Supporters summed up what I’d heard, that it will help solve an urgent deforestation problem with global implications. Critics questioned the science. The uncertainties of carbon accounting, which get magnified by large-scale programs, are so nebulous, scientists don’t even know how much they don’t know.

Stanley Young, a spokesman for the board, told me California’s standard has built-in safeguards to avoid repeating mistakes. “We’re as aware as you are of how it has not worked in the past,” he said.

The standard requires programs to exceed protections in existing policies and to show a drastic reduction in deforestation. It requires that trees stay standing for 100 years. But its guidance on leakage is just four sentences long, and it doesn’t make countries report degradation, potentially leaving out a huge chunk of the emissions.

Jason Gray, chief of the board’s cap-and-trade program, said degradation is hard to measure, but the standard will incentivize better monitoring so countries can add the data later. “If we wait to have the perfect information,” he said, it might be too late.

In April, six members of the European Parliament urged California to reject the Tropical Forest Standard, citing concerns about Brazil’s shifting politics and noting that the European Union hasn’t allowed forestry credits in its cap-and-trade program “due to concerns about their environmental integrity.”

The standard is under review by a climate change committee within the California Legislature, which may give recommendations during this spring’s session. The Air Resources Board will decide whether to approve the standard this year. Any potential purchase of tropical offsets would require additional board action.

Barbara Haya, a University of California, Berkeley, research fellow who studies the carbon market, said we’re deluding ourselves if we think these forestry programs will be able to accurately quantify — and therefore, cancel out — the amount of pollution claimed in an offset, even under the new standard.

The best we can hope for is a program that helps the climate in some unmeasurable way, she said. “That’s what offsets are. And I think that’s the best of what offsets can be.”


https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconvenient-tru
th-carbon-credits-dont-work-deforestation-redd-acre-cambodia/?utm_source=pocket-newtab






-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Friday, May 24, 2019 8:40 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The failure of the Egyptian Old Kingdom towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE was accompanied by riots, tomb-raids and even cannibalism. ‘The whole of Upper Egypt died of hunger and each individual had reached such a state of hunger that he ate his own children,’ runs an account from 2120 BCE about the life of Ankhtifi, a southern provincial governor of Ancient Egypt.

Many of us are familiar with this historical narrative of how cultures can rapidly – and violently – decline and fall. Recent history appears to bear it out, too. Post-invasion Iraq witnessed 100,000 deaths in the first year and a half, followed by the emergence of ISIS. And the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011 produced a power vacuum, leading to the re-emergence of the slave trade.

However, there’s a more complicated reality behind this view of collapse. In fact, the end of civilisations rarely involved a sudden cataclysm or apocalypse. Often the process is protracted, mild, and leaves people and culture continuing for many years.

More at https://aeon.co/ideas/civilisational-collapse-has-a-bright-past-but-a-
dark-future


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, May 24, 2019 11:16 AM

REAVERFAN


This isn't temporary. This extinction is permanent. No one will survive. The planet will be unable to sustain human life.


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Friday, May 24, 2019 11:17 AM

REAVERFAN


Bill Nye on climate change: ‘It’s not 50 to 75 years away — it’s 10 or 15’

http://www.msnbc.com/velshi-ruhle/bill-nye-climate-change-its-not-50-7
5-years-away-its-10-or-15

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Friday, May 24, 2019 11:17 AM

REAVERFAN


Bill Nye on climate change: ‘It’s not 50 to 75 years away — it’s 10 or 15’

http://www.msnbc.com/velshi-ruhle/bill-nye-climate-change-its-not-50-7
5-years-away-its-10-or-15

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Friday, May 24, 2019 12:59 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


It's not 10-15 years away, it's now.

That's why I don't understand all of this misdirected focus on Stormy Daniels and RUSSIA!!RUSSIA!RUSSIA!! and Trump's tax returns ... or even all of this focus on Trump himself. CLIMATE CHANGE is one problem we can say for sure that both Democrats AND Republicans had a hand in creating. Has EITHER party slowed just the increase in CO2 emissions, or is this just virtue signalling by partisan Dems?

Let's get our priorities straight: Our military is the largest single user of energy in the entire world. As long as we're warring with everybody, not only will we (and they) have to keep pumping energy into moving our military around, we (and they) will also continue to expend energy making all of that military equipment and arms ... ships, fighter jets, tanks, armored vehicles. Just think: We could save roughly 3% (or more) of our CO2 emissions, and Russia could save about 5%, just by throttling back our military spending.

Transportation and electricity generation are the largest categories of energy use. Transporation can be reduced by localizing production and with better landuse planning, and electricity can be saved by power grid improvements (eg DC instead of AC transmission) but the reality is that as long as our financial system relies on endless growth in order just to survive, we will be doomed to horrible death.



-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Saturday, May 25, 2019 3:19 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


DC woud be drasticly less efficient az far az I no. Iz there sum resent development that chanjed the situation?

The Edison vs Tesla war ended with AC winning. DC woud hav required a power plant for every square mile due to the line loss inherent in DC.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .

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Saturday, May 25, 2019 3:55 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Long distance DC transmission has always been more efficient than AC. My phone doesn't support copying urls so I'll have to do that later. The AC lines are cheaper, but they act like giant transmission antennae and radiate energy at the frequency of transmission. You can actually pick that up by holding up a florescent light under the high voltage lines, the energy loss will light the tube.

The high voltage line from the northwest to the southwest, the Pacific Intertie, is DC.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Saturday, May 25, 2019 4:45 PM

WISHIMAY


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:


That's why I don't understand all of this misdirected focus on Stormy Daniels and RUSSIA!!RUSSIA!RUSSIA!! and Trump's tax returns ... or even all of this focus on Trump himself.




This just in: 10 out of 10 Russian Trolls "Don't Understand" Why All The Russian Trolls Trying To Destabilize Another Country IS BAD.

Well, at least she's consistent....

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Saturday, May 25, 2019 5:27 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by WISHIMAY:
Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:


That's why I don't understand all of this misdirected focus on Stormy Daniels and RUSSIA!!RUSSIA!RUSSIA!! and Trump's tax returns ... or even all of this focus on Trump himself.




This just in: 10 out of 10 Russian Trolls "Don't Understand" Why All The Russian Trolls Trying To Destabilize Another Country IS BAD.

Well, at least she's consistent....

Both REAVERBOT and you are total fools. REAVERBOT cited the most ridiculous article claiming that very thing, which said that "their" plan was to recruit disaffected black Americans and train them - in Africa, of all places- so that they could wage urban warfare on Americans.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=63078

That's only slightly more ridiculous than claiming that Trump paid hookers to pee on him in a Moscow hotel.

Jeez. I mean, really ... how gullible ARE the two of you??? Don't you recognize disinformation when you read it?

If I were Russian (which I'm not) I'd be laughing my ass off at the lot of you. The only way that America can be destabilized is exactly the way YOU'RE doing it: By getting people to stop thinking of themselves as "Americans" and stop trying to find common interest. By disputing the idea that "American citizen" does - or even should- mean anything. By harping on race and gender and political party until people think of themselves as "women" or "Democrats" or "blacks" or "Hispanics" or "Christians" or "whites" first. By attacking and defaming anyone who doesn't agree with you. By polarizing everyone with your rabid slavering attacks.

Yeah, THAT'LL solve our problems! [/snark]

Jeez. If you and people like you weren't such gorram tools then there wouldn't be any way to "destabilize" America in the first place.

You don't need Russian "help" to destabilize America, you're doing a great job, all on your own.

Good job!



****

Now, do you suppose that we can get back to the topic at-hand (human extinction) and stop wasting time on your stupid delusion?


-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Thursday, May 30, 2019 1:49 PM

REAVERFAN


Why Hundreds of Puffins Washed Up Dead on an Alaskan Beach
This latest mass-mortality event is another sign of the Arctic’s rapidly changing climate.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/05/hundreds-puffins-w
ashed-dead-alaskan-beach/590356
/

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Thursday, May 30, 2019 9:49 PM

REAVERFAN

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Friday, May 31, 2019 12:30 PM

REAVERFAN


Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems
Abnormally high temperatures have led to unsafe travel conditions, uncertain ecological futures and even multiple deaths
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/record-breaking-heat-ala
ska-wreaks-havoc-communities-and-ecosystems-180972317
/

Record heat taking a toll on air conditioning units
Jacksonville-area AC repair companies overwhelmed with service calls
https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/jacksonville/record-heat-taking-a-
toll-on-air-conditioning-units


It's not wet everywhere: Record-shattering hot, dry weather sparks drought and wildfires in Southeast
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/30/heat-wave-drough
t-wildfires-bake-southeast/1286350001
/

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Friday, May 31, 2019 12:31 PM

REAVERFAN



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Friday, May 31, 2019 1:22 PM

REAVERFAN



r/collapse
•Posted byu/GreatFilterPodcast
2 hours ago
Realizations in the Midwest
Coping
My wife and I are trying. We stopped using plastic bottles for water, we are down to one fuel efficient car, and we don't buy shit we don't need. Even opting out on using a fridge (no more dairy and meat). We also do numerous other things like keep power use to an absolute minimum. It saves energy and us some money.

The realization. It's not enough and no one will be prepared. The Midwest storms have generated so much moisture with humidity topping 100% relentlessly WITH THE NEXT 7 DAYS OF POTENTIALLY CONSTANT RAIN PREDICTED... Mold overtook our house right under our noses. We spent the week airing out and cleaning. Ended up throwing a lot away. So much waste with no way to recycle in our area and we all know recycling is a sham anyway.

An air conditioner has to run constantly, assisted by dehumidifiers with good air flow. Silica packets in every storage bin, moisture collectors in cabinents - All luxury we won't always have available. What if there is no power for extended periods of time in extremely humid locations? I'm sure tornado and flood stricken towns are dealing with domino rows worth of problems falling down in their lives right now. Or what if you are simply poor and can't afford to run air all the time? I never thought I'd have to deal with mold in a home without a basement (yes in the Midwest we are fucked if a tornado hits our house). All of this shit is taken for granted by everyone until they have to actually deal with the problem head on.

We plan to move back to our home state with family in a year, where we can help each other cope. I suggest others do the same.

Collapse is happening now and no one is prepared for the amount of problems that will and are currently piling up.

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Friday, May 31, 2019 2:44 PM

THG


Keeping and making people aware is a noble pursuit reaver.

T



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Friday, May 31, 2019 4:03 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


Opportunity noks! Dizaster proof housez!

I coud do it.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .

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Saturday, June 1, 2019 12:15 AM

REAVERFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by JO753:
Opportunity noks! Dizaster proof housez!

I coud do it.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .

I don't care if you could live underground for 1000 years.

The coming atmosphere will be unlivable to humans and 99% of the species that exist now.

There will be no biome in which you could go outside and breathe anywhere. It'll be extremely hot and have little oxygen, and will probably be really radioactive.

'This species has amused itself to death' -Roger Waters

https://genius.com/Roger-waters-amused-to-death-lyrics

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Saturday, June 1, 2019 8:14 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by REAVERFAN:

'This species has amused itself to death' -Roger Waters

https://genius.com/Roger-waters-amused-to-death-lyrics

The first two lines of that song diagnoses the problem: "Doctor doctor, what is wrong with me? This supermarket life, is getting long" Going for the cheapest price is killing us. The difference between paying 9.5¢ per kilowatt-hour for 100% Renewable versus 9.3¢ for totally not renewable. That 0.2¢ difference in price causes people to select planet destroying CO2 electricity. They won’t pay even a penny more to save the world. They think it is the smart move to pay less. Let somebody richer or dumber save the Earth.
www.powertochoose.org/en-us Enter zipcode 77520 to see my results.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, June 1, 2019 11:15 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


They need to get rid of their cancellation fees.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, June 1, 2019 1:35 PM

REAVERFAN


The oil industry has known about this for 40 years.
https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/AQ-9%20Tas
k%20Force%20Meeting%20%281980%29.pdf


What did they do? They spent a fortune denying it and buying themselves welfare.

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Saturday, June 1, 2019 1:58 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by reaverfan:
The oil industry has known about this for 40 years.
https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/AQ-9%20Tas
k%20Force%20Meeting%20%281980%29.pdf


What did they do? They spent a fortune denying it and buying themselves welfare.

Of course. Because we live in a system where "money talks" our policies and media will be geared towards feeding the wealthy (corporations, individual elites) not towards any rational policy of betterment for all (including future generations who literally have no voice at all.) Heck, our currency is entirely backed by oil (petrodollar) and at least a third of our military actions are aimed at supporting the petrodollar!

How can we fix it? How can we bring our collective interests to be reflected in local, state, national and international policies without them constantly being derailed, co-opted and monetized by the elites' interests?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Saturday, June 1, 2019 2:14 PM

REAVERFAN


U.S. biologists probe deaths of 70 emaciated gray whales:Many have little body fat, leading experts to suspect the die-off is caused by declining food sources in the dramatically warming waters of the northern Bering Sea and Chukchi Sea off Alaska.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-whales/u-s-biologists-probe-dea
ths-of-70-emaciated-gray-whales-idUSKCN1T22WY?utm_source=reddit.com

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Saturday, June 1, 2019 3:46 PM

REAVERFAN


Two die and nearly 600 taken to hospitals as heat wave roasts much of Japan
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/26/national/hokkaido-city-te
mperature-hits-may-record-heat-wave-envelops-japan/#.XOtYRbiHh_m


The mercury hit 39.5 degrees in the northeastern coastal Hokkaido town at 2:07 p.m. Sunday — the hottest at any observation point in Japan for the month, according to the Meteorological Agency. The previous record, set on May 13, 1993, was 37.2 degrees in Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture.

Temperatures had never before reached 35 C in Hokkaido in May or 38 C at any time of the year in the prefecture. The previous record high temperature recorded there was 37.8 degrees in the town of Otofuke on June 3, 2014, and in the city of Obihiro on July 12, 1924.

Temperatures climbed to 38.8 degrees in Obihiro and in the town of Ikeda on Sunday. The agency issued high temperature warnings across wide areas, from Hokkaido to the Kinki region, and called for caution against heatstroke.

Hokkaido Railway Co., or JR Hokkaido, canceled the operation of a number of trains, mainly those departing from and arriving at stations in the eastern part of Hokkaido, due to fears of rail distortion by the strong heat wave.


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