@gjohnsit I have a real hard time believing that Armageddonists really give a shit. If they did, we would have had molten salt cooled reactors by now.

I did a post on that here about a year ago and the response was ho-hum.

People are not going to give up washing their clothes in a washing machine, and 5 billion people, who don't have one yet, want to wash that way. And that is just a smidgen of the things most of the world wants and has never had. WE can't keep the rest of the world from getting what they want.

Renewables will not get us there. It is fossil fuels until they run out, or it is nuclear. Or maybe future generations will figure something else out.

I certainly think it's the ultimate expression of a desire to avoid doing the hard work of reducing emissions, and I think that's the appeal of it. I think we will see this trajectory the more and more climate change becomes impossible to deny. A lot of people will skip right to geoengineering. The appeal of geoengineering is that it doesn't threaten our worldview. It leaves us in a dominant position. It says that there is an escape hatch. So all the stories that got us to this point, that flatter ourselves for our power, will just be scaled up.

[There is a]willingness to sacrifice large numbers of people in the way we respond to climate change – we are already showing a brutality in the face of climate change that I find really chilling. I don't think we have the language to even describe [geoengineering], because we are with full knowledge deciding to allow cultures to die, to allow peoples to disappear. We have the ability to stop and we're choosing not to. So I think the profound immorality and violence of that decision is not reflected in the language that we have. You see that we have these climate conventions where the African delegates are using words like "genocide," and the European and North American delegates get very upset and defensive about this. The truth is that the UN definition of genocide is that it is the deliberate act to disappear and displace people. What the delegates representing the North are saying is that we are not doing this because we want you to disappear; we are doing this because we don't care essentially. We don't care if you disappear if we continue business-as-usual. That's a side effect of collateral damage. Well, to the people that are actually facing the disappearance it doesn't make a difference whether there is malice to it because it still could be prevented. And we're choosing not to prevent it. I feel one of the crises that we're facing is a crisis of language. We are not speaking about this with the language of urgency or mortality that the issue deserves.

This is where capitalism is leading us.
This is capitalism Red in tooth and claw.
This is the real history of capitalism, where the Free State of Congo made severed hands a currency. Where the Dutch East Indies company committed genocide for the crime of trading outside of the monopoly. Where the Atlantic Slave Trade ran on free market profits.

@snoopydawg

"But there's that one thing that most climate change groups never discuss and that's how much the world's military excursions contributes to it."

do any except the US greens?

While wealthy white liberals are discussing climate change as something that will hurt their children’s children, low-income communities are already living with the consequences: a largely unseen nightmare of pollution, water contamination, and natural disasters that affects everything from their health to their housing security.

Think that the Koch brothers could have built their petcho trailings dump on the north side of Chicago? Or chevron building a refinery in the middle of Berkeley or any landfills in an affluent white neighborhood? Not a chance and that's why they are built in poor neighborhoods.

A lot of people like to point out how much the environmental agenda costs. None of these people point out how much environmental destruction is costing us.
Like just about every political issue today, the problem is class.

Another great point. When the Richmond chevron refinery has a safety issue and releases lots of toxic crap into the air the poor don't have money to go to hospitals and get checked out. Chevron might say that they will reimburse people who do, but how long will they fight it or the amount before they do?

But there's that one thing that most climate change groups never discuss and that's how much the world's military excursions contributes to it.

@The Liberal Moonbat Ecotage.

What the hell ever happened to eco-terrorism???

Why, just for example, is the Koch family still alive? They believe themselves to be more valuable than 8 million plant and animal species...and we're implicitly validating that conceit.

Oh, the cruel and gruesome fantasies I compulsively cleanse myself with every time I'm shown one of their photos....

@sixthmassextinction

with elaborate plans including how to deal with hired security in case the help (who will have guns) rebel against their masters in the dystopian future

The elites are worried that the hired help will turn on them when they go to bug out to their hidey holes so they are hiring security goons to protect them from the help. But who's going to stop the security goons from turning on the elites? I really don't think they have thought that through unless they plan on taking the goon's family with them. Stay tuned this could get interesting...

Meanwhile there are reports that the wealthy elites are buying land in New Zealand and building bunkers in hopes of weathering the coming "storm", with elaborate plans including how to deal with hired security in case the help (who will have guns) rebel against their masters in the dystopian future. We're at a stage where all of this argument may become moot. First there will be such things as global food shortages due to widespread crop failures, which will be mild in the beginning, but worsening over time. If abrupt climate change (due to reinforcing feedback loops) kicks in with a vengeance as some scientists predict, the changes will occur too quickly for us to adapt. At this point, those guilty of inaction may one day face something akin to Nuremberg trials if people are still in the mood for due process. We all should be out in the streets.

@sixthmassextinction

Meanwhile there are reports that the wealthy elites are buying land in New Zealand and building bunkers in hopes of weathering the coming "storm", with elaborate plans including how to deal with hired security in case the help (who will have guns) rebel against their masters in the dystopian future. We're at a stage where all of this argument may become moot. First there will be such things as global food shortages due to widespread crop failures, which will be mild in the beginning, but worsening over time. If abrupt climate change (due to reinforcing feedback loops) kicks in with a vengeance as some scientists predict, the changes will occur too quickly for us to adapt. At this point, those guilty of inaction may one day face something akin to Nuremberg trials if people are still in the mood for due process. We all should be out in the streets.

@The Aspie Corner "We're fucked". Yes, it appears we are fucked, barring some sweeping new ideas. It doesn't look good.

Nothing we do matters. Nothing we say matters. As long as the pigs control every aspect of the conversation and activism, we're fucked.

@wendy davis I have this picture in my head of Nancy Pelosi standing next to the police as we rabble come down the road. We're yelling "save the earth" and Pelosi is yelling "OMG what are you waiting for? Shoot them! They're destroying the environmental movement!"

While wealthy white liberals are discussing climate change as something that will hurt their children’s children, low-income communities are already living with the consequences: a largely unseen nightmare of pollution, water contamination, and natural disasters that affects everything from their health to their housing security.

and that's globally true. a commenter at the Café had offered this: 'An open letter to Extinction Rebellion' redpepper.org.UK, may 3

This letter was collaboratively written with dozens of aligned groups (ses the list below). As the weeks of action called by Extinction Rebellion were coming to an end, our groups came together to reflect on the narrative, strategies, tactics and demands of a reinvigorated climate movement in the UK. In this letter we articulate a foundational set of principles and demands that are rooted in justice and which we feel are crucial for the whole movement to consider as we continue constructing a response to the ‘climate emergency’.

"Another truth is that for many, the bleakness is not something of “the future”. For those of us who are indigenous, working class, black, brown, queer, trans or disabled, the experience of structural violence became part of our birthright. Greta Thunberg calls world leaders to act by reminding them that “Our house is on fire”. For many of us, the house has been on fire for a long time: whenever the tide of ecological violence rises, our communities, especially in the Global South are always first hit. We are the first to face poor air quality, hunger, public health crises, drought, floods and displacement.

XR says that “The science is clear: It is understood we are facing an unprecedented global emergency. We are in a life or death situation of our own making. We must act now.” You may not realize that when you focus on the science you often look past the fire and us – you look past our histories of struggle, dignity, victory and resilience. And you look past the vast intergenerational knowledge of unity with nature that our peoples have. Indigenous communities remind us that we are not separate from nature, and that protecting the environment is also protecting ourselves. In order to survive, communities in the Global South continue to lead the visioning and building of new worlds free of the violence of capitalism. We must both centre those experiences and recognise those knowledges here.

Our communities have been on fire for a long time and these flames are fanned by our exclusion and silencing. Without incorporating our experiences, any response to this disaster will fail to change the complex ways in which social, economic and political systems shape our lives – offering some an easy pass in life and making others pay the cost. In order to envision a future in which we will all be liberated from the root causes of the climate crisis – capitalism, extractivism, racism, sexism, classism, ableism and other systems of oppression – the climate movement must reflect the complex realities of everyone’s lives in their narrative.
*
As XR draws this period of actions to a close, we hope our letter presents some useful reflections for what can come next. The list of demands that we present below are not meant to be exhaustive, but to offer a starting point that supports the conversations that are urgently needed.