It is to turn a fascist society into one that does not need them, one where it is effective to engage in social works and to collaborate with public institutions.
And we don't actually live in that society yet, and therefore protesting, feeding people, helping drug addicts, and doing odd jobs for your neighbors all remain punk af.
JFC. Selling food without a permit is illegal. Doing most home repairs without a license and permit is illegal. If I install a set of solar panels for my neighbor and she pays me in raw milk and eggs we could both be arrested. Don't tell me helping your community isn't punk.
Nothing is more punk than food not bombs. It’s just feeding everyone who shows up whether the government likes it or not.
Yes, and, Food Not Bombs is a great example to bring up, because they don't only feed everyone, they also share literature and talk politics and organize community action. From FNB's how to guide:
Your meal is not a Food Not Bombs meal if you don't provide literature and display a banner. Otherwise the public will think you are a church and have the impression your group believes that our political and economic system is fine and that all we need to do is care for those who are not able to make it. We are not a charity, we are seeking to build a movemnet to end the exploitation of the economic and political system.
I think very few orgs do "the personal is political" better than FNB.
Human beings deliberately introducing species to foreign environments has been a long history of ecological disaster.
Ecosystems are so immeasurably complex that no one can guarantee what introducing a non-native species will do. Look at the Bradford pear, which was supposed to be a sterile hybrid.
And finally, the whole point of this program is to introduce species that are better adapted to surviving climate change than native species. Do you know what we call species that come into an area and survive and thrive better than the native species? Invasives. This project is literally creating invasive species - replacing native species with species that will supposedly survive better, on the argument that the native species will die out anyway with climate change so we may as well remake the ecosystem and see what happens.
Blind, stupid, arrogance. I'm embarrassed for humanity.
You know who says changing beef consumption is impossible so it’s meaningless to even try? Beef industry spokespeople.
I mean, what’s more impossible - changing Western dietary habits or changing the entire structure of capitalism and representative democracy that allows rich people to own private jets?
The majority of children born today are born in densely populated - and highly polluted - cities where they can’t see the stars, and are unlikely to ever have enough disposable income to travel for pleasure. The thesis holds.
Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence....
Cryptocurrency is the online equivalent of the neo-Nazi bar.
You know how the story goes, with the bartender who tells the customer “you have to throw out neo-Nazis as soon as you see the uniforms or the tattoos, no matter how polite and well-behaved they are. Because if you let Nazis stay and get comfortable they’ll invite their friends, and word gets around that Nazis can drink comfortably at your bar, and customers who don’t want to drink with Nazis leave, and suddenly you have a Nazi bar”. You all remember that story?
Well, cryptocurrency in online spaces - especially futurist spaces and technological spaces - it’s a lot like that. Cryptocurrency supporters are constantly looking for opportunities to promote cryptocurrency. And they obviously see a movement like solarpunk, which talks a lot about decentralization, and mistrusts the global financial system, and so on, as fertile ground for shilling cryptocurrency.
And if you let cryptocurrency supporters hang out and talk about how awesome cryptocurrency is, they will inevitably start shilling their particular flavor of cryptocurrency. And that’s inevitably a capitalist scam and will inevitably harm anyone stupid enough to fall for it.
And the problem is not just that cryptocurrency is a capitalist scam. It’s that, if you don’t shut down cryptocurrency talk aggressively, you get more cryptocurrency supporters. Because the crypto bros see that cryptocurrency discussion is allowed, and they join in, and they invite their friends, and they start shilling their scams. And then you get crypto spammers and scam bots and the personal messages inviting you to elite investment opportunities and all the other scummy garbage that infests cryptocurrency websites. You either block cryptocurrency talk or you get a website full of crypto garbage.
In other words, cryptocurrency supporters need to be shut down as quickly and ruthlessly as any other bots and spammers. Because if you don’t you inevitably get a website full of bots and spammers.
Humans do not do climate change.
Some activities do climate change.
Is this the climate denier version of “the Civil War was about state’s rights”? An intellectually dishonest linguistic distinction used mainly for propaganda?
I mean, if some activities do climate change who the fuck do you think is doing those activities?
Collapse related because when the rich tell the poor “the solution to inflation is tighten your belts” it means your country is fucked. Austerity, y’all.
“State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money,” he said. “Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted.”
Some of us told you Biden’s climate bills were performance and pork and wouldn’t make any difference. Some of us told you the goal was to funnel money to political allies, not save the environment.
You told us to vote harder and donate more money to Democrats in the midterms and it would work out somehow.
Yeah. How’s that “most environmentally friendly president in history” talking point working out?
In the early 20th century, people (notably in the United States) could conceivably have stopped the proliferation of automobiles by focusing on improving public transit, thereby saving enormous amounts of energy, avoiding billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, and preventing the loss of more than 40,000 lives in car...
Land is hard to get now because of overpopulation.
Once your neighbors start dying off in the mass famines of the next few years you’ll have plenty of opportunity to expand.
And if you make the best of the land you have now, you’ll have more calories than your neighbors and be better suited to take their land. So it’s win-win.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
The myth of the humble farmer or small holder living in harmony with his land is as bullshit as the myth of the noble savage. The vast majority of farmers see the planet as a resource to make money from. If they take any heed to local conditions, they think of it in tragedy of the commons style. For instance, in many places around the world, the aquifers irrigating farmland have less than 20 years before they’re emptied. Local farmers are aware. They take it as a warning to pump as much water as possible as fast as they can, because if they don’t take the water and turn it into profit, someone else will, and the water will still be gone.
And that’s not even getting into how these brutal exploitative farming methods are what allowed the Earth’s population to balloon to a unsustainable 8 billion and ravage the land and devour resources of every sort.
The vast majority of farmers are the enemy of the planet. In my more green authoritarian moments, I envision nationalizing every acre and setting up eco villages of subsistence farmers populated by the poor of our cities and worked by former corporate middle management reduced to serfdom. No one should own whole square miles of farmland. Not even farmers.
Some of you might be interested to know that wearing raw denim and babying it for fades by never washing it is actually the most ecologically sustainable thing you can do 😆
It’s often told how the Nazis banned and burned “degenerate” art - art with messages they didn’t want people to hear.
It’s less often told how the Nazis set up art galleries to celebrate art they found useful - art that supported their ideology or the cultural and social messages they wanted the German people to believe, and so was valuable to them.
If art serves the desires of the wealthy and powerful instead of the needs of the people, that art is fascist. Disrupting it is not an attack on free speech; It is a blow for liberty.
The message given by climate activists disrupting a play is far more important than the message given by the play itself. I expect the audience will remember the disruption for far longer than they would have remembered the play - particularly given the irony of the message of the activists paired with the original message of the play itself. And I hope they think deeply about that message.
I mean to say, anyone can already start a website and call it a wiki, set whatever policies they want, synchronize with other websites via RSS feed or whatever, and open it to editing by anyone and everyone (or no one) they choose.
And anyone does. There are hundreds of thousands of wikis out there.
The point of decentralization and federation was to merge the benefits of personal websites - privacy and personal control of your data - with the communication and collaboration powers of centralized social media. So your account is hosted on your instance and under your control and then you can go post on a thousand other instances with that same account. And I don’t think it’s failed in that.
But wikis are already personal websites. And if somebody wants to federate a wiki they can host it on the same server they have their Lemmy instance on and put a link on the Lemmy homepage.
And the idea that a bunch of people hosting their own wikis with no correction or accountability mechanisms will be less corrupt and have less disinformation then those same people working together to build consensus on the same website? Not persuasive, is all I’m saying.
I will never be convinced by arguments claiming that, at a given level of social and economic collapse, it’s better to not prepare for it and just die.
Nobody actually rolls over and dies. That’s where you get looters and gangs, because when things get bad enough unprepared people compromise their morals for the sake of survival and start stealing from other people.
And frankly, when you look at recent events, the “MREs and ammo” crew have more of a point every day.
Community relationships, community-based preparation for disaster and economic hardship, sustainable communities of every sort, are all very good things.
But in March 2020 when everything locked down and people literally could not leave their houses to get food or toilet paper, having some MREs or a deep pantry or some other form of individual food prep helped a lot of people until we were allowed to leave our houses and get food deliveries and so on. And frankly, if the next pandemic is more lethal and more dangerous and a 100% quarantine becomes necessary, that kind of individual food prep will be even more vital.
Because as wonderful as community is, just a few years ago the world went through an event where community members could not help one another because everybody was quarantined. Individual and household prep was what helped there.
And if you were a Palestinian living in Gaza on October 7, 2023, having a sustainable community wouldn’t mean shit.
What would have protected you and your family was food, water, a plan to get to the border with Egypt, cash or gold to bribe your way through, and weapons to protect yourself and your family on the way there.
Which is exactly what the right wing “collapse of America” doomsday preppers are prepping for - a collapse so violent and so extensive that your community will not survive and your only hope is to flee far from the chaos and hole up in the hope things get better.
And I really can’t criticize anybody who plans for that anymore.
Committing atrocities and then using your neighbors as human shields isn’t exactly good prepper etiquette.
But that aside, Hamas is not a community. It’s an armed group. It is parasitic on the Palestinian people. Its tunnels and supplies can only support a tiny fraction of the community and are funded by extorting the community and making the community less safe. What Hamas does is neither individual prepping nor community prepping - in prepper terms, Hamas are quite literally the people who stockpile ammo in order to rob their neighbors after law and order collapses, and it has, and they are.
I deeply dislike the line of argument that goes “we shouldn’t bother reducing our personal energy consumption because 100 corporations produce 70% of greenhouse gases” or similar arguments. Of course we should. Because it’s the right thing to do.
But it’s also true: those 100 corporations and their ilk absolutely promote a false narrative that personal responsibility is the solution to climate change, in order to prevent climate regulation that might harm their bottom line.
And frankly, I think that’s what’s going on here with panic over AI power consumption. Corporate lobbyists and PR creating yet another distraction to slow the course of climate regulation and guilting ordinary people for doing ordinary things in the process.
This site says a single ChatGPT query consumes 0.00396 KWh.
Assume an average LED light bulb is 10 watts, or 0.01 kwh/hr. So if I did the math right, no guarantees there, a single ChatGPT query is roughly equivalent to leaving a light bulb on for 20 minutes.
So if you assume the average light bulb in your house is on a little more than 3 hours a day, if you make 10 ChatGPT queries per day it’s the equivalent of adding a new light bulb to your house.
Which is definitely not nothing. But isn’t the end of the world either.
Degrowth is a popular concept among solarpunks. This Jacobin article discusses some of its flaws from a Marxist standpoint. In particular, Jacobin reminds us an interpretation of Marxism which blames the Western working class for exploiting the Global South, and lectures the ever-more-exploited Western worker on the need to...
The future of power in America is obvious. State governments will make corrupt deals with data centers and factories to keep their electricity costs low, and raise prices on residential users to compensate until poor families are priced out....
Dude’s smuggling the HFCs because they keep old refrigeration units running and keeps people from having to buy new. And new units are so shoddy and poorly made that - even with the black market markup - it makes more sense financially to buy gas and keep the old ones running. And when big corporations can buy themselves exemptions and bribe inspectors and ignore greenhouse gas regulations completely, I don’t really care about some guy making a living with small time residential violations.
Not to mention the atmosphere is global. If this person didn’t smuggle HFCs into the United States, they’d be used in Mexico or wherever just the same. Throwing the book at him doesn’t keep a single molecule of greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.
And frankly, anybody who thinks there’s no reason to reduce your personal consumption when a hundred big corporations produce 70% of all pollution, or whatever the talking point is, doesn’t have any standing to criticize this guy. You think personal consumption is not a problem? Then how can selling gas to individuals for residential use be a problem?
The solution isn’t throwing the book at random poor people trying to make a living in the hope it’ll discourage the hundreds of others the law doesn’t catch. The solution is better technology and a more equitable distribution of resources so there’s nobody who wants to use the old systems and nobody who can’t afford better.
Yep. Which is why any government that’s serious about the environment needs to provide significant subsidies so people can get rid of their old polluting technology without being financially punished for it. We can’t have climate justice without economic justice.
Is it just me, or is it vaguely racist how dismissive that article was of “ancient civilizations” and the idea that indigenous myths might be retellings of the Younger Dryas impacts? I feel like there’s always aggressive pushback from “modern scientists” whenever the idea comes up that indigenous myths speak of real historical events. It feels like, in the US and Canada particularly, Native Americans aren’t allowed to have histories - that the history of Native Americans began when white settlers arrived to write those histories down. They want to pretend the thousands of years of history passed down through tribal oral traditions never existed at all and Native peoples simply existed, like animals, without memory of past or hope of future, until civilized Europeans brought history to the Americas. When what really happened was most of the people who remembered those oral traditions died in the colonial apocalypse, and those settlers danced on the graves of history.
All that is to say, the science might be one way or another, but the dismissive attitude taken towards oral tradition and mythic history really rubs me the wrong way.
Living more simply sounds good when you’re a American in your suburban house with giant car you think about how your quality of life could be just as good in a small apartment in a walkable city.
Living more simply is not as appealing if you’re in a slum in India or Indonesia or a farmer in rural China and you barely have enough to eat as it is.
We who have rich lives should consume less, just as a moral obligation. But it’s not feasible to tell the whole world to consume less, because the vast majority of the world consumes far less per capita than the developed West, and their standard of living sucks, and they want more stuff. And quite honestly they deserve it.
On an individual level I understand the appeal of simplification and using less. But it’s not an effective solution to global climate change. India and China and Nigeria and Indonesia and so on will not accept degrowth. Their choices are between sustainable development and unsustainable development. And so that’s the choice the world faces.
community is punk ( slrpnk.net )
no wait he has a point ( slrpnk.net )
As the climate changes, cities scramble to find trees that will survive: “Everybody is looking for the magic tree.” ( grist.org )
Beef produces 85 kg CO2e per kg of food. Tofu produces 2.9 kg CO2e per kg of food. ( ourworldindata.org )
"The majority of children born today will never see the Milky Way" ( www.noemamag.com )
TIL cows are fed “poultry litter” – "a mix of poultry excreta, spilled feed, feathers, and other waste scraped from the floors of industrial chicken and turkey production plants." ( www.telegraph.co.uk )
And it gives them bird flu....
seize the means of production ( slrpnk.net )
consider the implications for a post scarcity future ( slrpnk.net )
Reminder: crypto isn’t solarpunk. It’s cyberpunk.
Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence....
the american dream is killing me ( slrpnk.net )
row row fight the power ( slrpnk.net )
A disabled man is being PROSECUTED for blocking parliament with his MOBILITY SCOOTER ( www.thecanary.co )
Disabled activist Neil Goodwin was arrested under the controversial Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act outside parliament...
Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees? | (Probably, and it's bad news - farmers get tax benefits for beehives, and all the invasive honeybees are starving out native bees) | WaPo ( www.washingtonpost.com )
I try very hard to stay hopeful for the future. But it’s hard to stay optimistic when even the good news is actually bad news.
suffer for our profits, peon ( slrpnk.net )
Collapse related because when the rich tell the poor “the solution to inflation is tighten your belts” it means your country is fucked. Austerity, y’all.
Biden promised to install thousands of EV charging stations. Only 7 have been built [so far] ( wapo.st )
“State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money,” he said. “Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted.”
Why Artificial Intelligence Must Be Stopped Now | Humanity has a narrow chance to stop a technological revolution whose unintended negative consequences will vastly outweigh any short-term benefits ( www.resilience.org )
In the early 20th century, people (notably in the United States) could conceivably have stopped the proliferation of automobiles by focusing on improving public transit, thereby saving enormous amounts of energy, avoiding billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, and preventing the loss of more than 40,000 lives in car...
self sufficiency and community sufficiency - both are necessary, neither are sufficient ( slrpnk.net )
In surprise vote, European climate protection plan shelved following farmer protests ( abcnews.go.com )
you don't need consumerism or mass media to be happy ( slrpnk.net )
The remaking of the American jean | what makes a pair of jeans more or less sustainable ( www.washingtonpost.com )
Some of you might be interested to know that wearing raw denim and babying it for fades by never washing it is actually the most ecologically sustainable thing you can do 😆
Apple waste, spider silk, enhanced cotton: How bio-based textiles could replace plastic in our clothing ( grist.org )
‘No theatre on a dead planet’: climate activists disrupt Jeremy Strong Broadway show ( www.theguardian.com )
Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative ( ibis.wiki )
maybe we could use this to collect guerilla gardening strategies or something?
or "how to prepare for when rolling blackouts become routine". because the us power grid is fucked, everyone knows it and nobody's doing anything ( slrpnk.net )
U.S. ‘prepper’ culture diversifies amid fear of disaster and political unrest ( www.nbcnews.com )
Archive link...
The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I. | How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy? ( www.newyorker.com )
Kohei Saito’s “Start From Scratch” Degrowth Communism | if taken seriously, it would lead to political disaster for both the socialist left and the environmental movement | Jacobin ( jacobin.com )
Degrowth is a popular concept among solarpunks. This Jacobin article discusses some of its flaws from a Marxist standpoint. In particular, Jacobin reminds us an interpretation of Marxism which blames the Western working class for exploiting the Global South, and lectures the ever-more-exploited Western worker on the need to...
Solarpunk and web3
Note: I might just be uneducated on the subject....
Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power | AI and manufacturing booms are pushing the US power grid to the brink and utilities can't keep up ( www.washingtonpost.com )
The future of power in America is obvious. State governments will make corrupt deals with data centers and factories to keep their electricity costs low, and raise prices on residential users to compensate until poor families are priced out....
The False Dream of Cottagecore | How the problematic romanticization of Western rural life reveals our discontent with the modern world ( beneaththepavement.substack.com )
He’s Accused of Smuggling, but Not Drugs or Guns: It’s Greenhouse Gases ( www.nytimes.com )
The Washington Post take
This mobility firm COO says EV bikes are not fit to ferry passengers | Rest Of World ( restofworld.org )
The Comet Strike Theory That Just Won’t Die | Mainstream science has done its best to debunk the notion, but a belief in a world-changing series of prehistoric impacts continues to gain momentum. ( www.nytimes.com )
YSK car tires produce 78% of all microplastics on earth ( www.reuters.com )
Rising microplastics in seas puts pressure on tyre industry | tires produce 78% of all microplastics on Earth by weight ( www.reuters.com )
The Geoengineering Question ( www.theclimatebrink.com )