…damn it…I had such high hopes…I was going to try to redeem myself for the effort the other day that got nominated as the definition of a doom scroll…but…at the risk of presupposing a link between correlation & causation

…there’s just a frightful amount of frightful shit out there filling up the headlines…& the extent to which most of it appears to involve some combination of whatever the opposite of joined up thinking might be with the heady thrills of tortured logic is…while arguably no more surprising than it is new…howlingly insane…so…deep breath…here’s one

The number of countries announcing pledges to achieve net zero emissions over the coming decades continues to grow. But the pledges by governments to date – even if fully achieved – fall well short of what is required to bring global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050 and give the world an even chance of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 °C. This special report is the world’s first comprehensive study of how to transition to a net zero energy system by 2050 while ensuring stable and affordable energy supplies, providing universal energy access, and enabling robust economic growth. It sets out a cost-effective and economically productive pathway, resulting in a clean, dynamic and resilient energy economy dominated by renewables like solar and wind instead of fossil fuels. The report also examines key uncertainties, such as the roles of bioenergy, carbon capture and behavioural changes in reaching net zero.

https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050

…that’s just the abstract…not the full report…but let’s assume that if you happened to be…I dunno…”the leader of the free world” you might have managed to find the time to at least read the abstract…& who knows…maybe “ensuring stable and affordable energy supplies, providing universal energy access, and enabling robust economic growth” might sound like something you might be interested in…especially if someone had helpfully come up with “a cost-effective and economically productive pathway, resulting in a clean, dynamic and resilient energy economy“…so maybe you could get an intern to read the report for you or something…I mean…it sounds like the sort of thing people might even vote for?

World’s first comprehensive energy roadmap shows government actions to rapidly boost clean energy and reduce fossil fuel use can create millions of jobs, lift economic growth and keep net zero in reach

…kind of a natural pitch, too…much like the democrats you’re pretty much pointing out that there’s a choice between something on the one hand that sounds about as good as it does implausible…but there’s no doubting the preponderance of data that clearly shows the alternative just outright fucking sucks…so…just for fun…what do you suppose the first thing is they bring up about how to identify that pathway?

Building on the IEA’s unrivalled energy modelling tools and expertise, the Roadmap sets out more than 400 milestones to guide the global journey to net zero by 2050. These include, from today, no investment in new fossil fuel supply projects, and no further final investment decisions for new unabated coal plants. By 2035, there are no sales of new internal combustion engine passenger cars, and by 2040, the global electricity sector has already reached net-zero emissions.

https://www.iea.org/news/pathway-to-critical-and-formidable-goal-of-net-zero-emissions-by-2050-is-narrow-but-brings-huge-benefits

…so…milestone #1 out of 400 would be no investment in new fossil fuel supply…sounds easy enough…at least at a conceptual level, right?

…this is of course a trick question…although the trick might not be quite the one you think

As pressure increases on the Biden administration to lower the price of fuel, the Interior Department announced on Friday plans to hold its first onshore oil and gas lease sales since President Biden took office.

…see…even actual grown ups capable of understanding the concept of deferred gratification just plain lose their shit if the price of gas ticks up…& I’m not even really suggesting that the impact that has isn’t something many have legitimate grounds to be alarmed by…but humor me…I’m sort of trying to go somewhere with this…anyway

The Biden administration’s willingness to move forward with oil and gas leasing angered climate activists, who called the department’s plans a betrayal of the president’s pledge to ban new drilling on public lands.

…because apparently even “climate activists” aren’t really expecting that even the actual president of the united states (even one with some actual grasp of what that means & how to actually do the job) can prevent new drilling on private lands…which…as far as the IEA (& potentially our hypothetical intern who read that whole report & maybe had a takeaway or two) might be concerned kind of sucks to begin with since

Drilling on federal land and offshore is responsible for almost a quarter of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions.

…so that’s a best case scenario that only addresses 25% of the potential contribution the numbers suggest we’d be better off not adding to the mix…what you might call baby steps…still…as they seem keen to point out…it could have been worse

Interior officials portrayed the pending lease sales as a significantly scaled-back version of what might have been, describing it as a pragmatic approach. In a news release, they noted that the acreage offered for auction is 80 percent less than the 733,000 acres of land in nine states that oil and gas companies had nominated.

…& if you get the right person to make your case it can help a bunch, too

“For too long, the federal oil and gas leasing programs have prioritized the wants of extractive industries above local communities, the natural environment, the impact on our air and water, the needs of Tribal Nations, and, moreover, other uses of our shared public lands,” said Secretary Deb Haaland. “Today, we begin to reset how and what we consider to be the highest and best use of Americans’ resources for the benefit of all current and future generations.”

…the thing is…well…one of the things, anyway…that “benefit of all current and future generations” part…some might call that a little disingenuous…you know…on account of the part where greenlighting new extraction of stuff that needs to stay in the ground if the world those future generations get to inherit isn’t going to be radically different to the one the current ones are familiar with does sort of suggest that “what we consider to be the highest and best use of […] resources for […] benefit” remains straightforwardly in opposition to anything resembling toeing the line that’s actually required not to make everything better but just to slow down how swiftly it’s going to get worse to a manageable pace that might allow things to survive the process of adjustment…which, with all due respect to the current administration is at least as fine a tightrope to walk as anything they’re attempting…but with a much bigger upside if we were to pull it off

The department’s plans are the latest example of the political tightrope the president is trying to walk. Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring, Biden has faced pressure to alleviate the pain Americans feel at the pump. He has urged U.S. oil companies to boost production and has released millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to compensate for the loss of Russian oil from global markets.

…ah, yes…reserves…let’s maybe come back to those, too…but first, let’s hear from someone who’s definitely invested in this outcome, shall we?

“While we’re glad to see [the Bureau of Land Management] is finally going to announce sales,” [Kathleen] Sgamma [president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas trade group] wrote, “the extreme reduction of acreage by 80%, after a year and a quarter without a single sale, is unwarranted and does nothing to show that the administration takes high gasoline prices seriously.” [she was also of the opinion that “forcing companies to pay higher fees for drilling would result in lower production, negating the administration’s efforts to bring prices down.”]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/04/15/interior-department-biden-oil-gas-lease/

…so…checks notes…for political reasons it’s apparently imperative that the price of gas not go up…& in order to achieve that regretfully joe’s going to go ahead & line up some of that new extraction the IEA said we really need to leave the fuck alone…&…a dissatisfied industry would like to make it clear that they won’t be able to get enough out of the ground fast enough to prevent that price ticking up anyhow…which…you know…begins to sound like the worst of all possible worlds…so I should stress at this point that things could be worse

…a nuclear power that has been happily denying outright that its provocatively unprovoked invasion of another country (that had assurances from several nations that in exchange for giving up a pile of nukes it would be protected from exactly that kind of thing) could be so upset that its favorite boat that totally didn’t get sunk by the country they totally haven’t invaded is more than enough of a reason for them to just now actually go to war with the country that totally didn’t sink the boat along with the whole alliance they’re notably not a member of on account of they’re just an unacceptably aggressive threat…with a side-order of “& we’ll totally start firing nukes if you let any of the places currently very keen to be under the mutual-defense umbrella of NATO actually join the list of places whose borders we won’t send thousands of troops across when we feel like it“…because that sort of thing would probably not remain an isolated incident…& might reasonably be described as worse than gas prices going up in the states…hmmm…maybe I ought to have said things are in fact worse…but I was trying to just deal with one thing at a time…which it turns out is trickier than it sounds…anyway…where was I?

…oh, yeah…I remember…reserves…those are kind of a big deal…& not just that strategic one…because there’s the whole part where in a sense we have a dwindling reserve of leeway for what we can burn without…you know…burning out our chances of limiting that global temperature increase getting too high too fast to be compatible with really quite a bit of what makes the globe compatible with supporting the vast numbers of people that inhabit the thing

…so…how do you suppose those reserves stack up against that budget…given how important it is to get at that new stuff that apparently can’t get out of the ground fast enough to stop that all important gas price metric from heading upwards?

To meet even a 2°C target, anthropogenic activities could only emit 986 GtCO2 between 2011 and 2100. This number is our global emissions budget. Earth’s coal, oil, and gas reserves are key to this budget. The potential CO2 emissions from reserves currently held by the largest 200 public companies (by reserve size) is at least 1,541 GtCO2, easily exceeding the budget. The degree to which these reserves are exploited will therefore help shape the severity of climate change.

…surely not…that wouldn’t add up at all…except in the inevitable sense of adding up to entirely unaffordable levels of emissions, obviously…I mean…what would that even look like?

…wait…that image is based on 2013 data…so…maybe we’ve got a better handle on the situation nearly a decade later?

Despite the importance of the potential CO2 emissions from fossil fuel companies’ reserves, they are not currently disclosed by any company. Financial reporting and industry management standards focus on reserve size and do not include methods for calculating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. At the same time, corporate GHG reporting standards focus on historical emissions and thus neglect the most material portion of fossil fuel companies’ climate impact.

https://ghgprotocol.org/sites/default/files/standards/WRI16_WorkingPaper_FF.pdf

…well, that working paper was from three years later & in that it suggests that mostly the companies don’t like to talk about the amount of reserves they’re holding…still…even taking those figures with the proverbial pinch of salt…it sure does seem like the folks saying “let’s not dig up more of this stuff” might not be talking crazy…but then…life apparently imitates art

I hadn’t seen the 2021 satirical film Don’t Look Up when I went on Good Morning Britain on Tuesday. I was there on behalf of Just Stop Oil – a group that has been engaging in direct action by blockading oil terminals. We’re demanding that the UK government ends all new oil licences, exploration and consent in the North Sea. It’s a simple message that’s in line with science.

But the simplicity of our demands seemed to annoy my interviewer, Richard Madeley. “But you’d accept, wouldn’t you, that it’s a very complicated discussion to be had, it’s a very complicated thing,” he said. “And this ‘Just Stop Oil’ slogan is very playground-ish isn’t it? It’s very Vicky Pollard, quite childish.” I then proceeded to talk about the recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which confirmed that it is “now or never” to avoid climate catastrophe. But they didn’t seem to care.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/13/just-stop-oil-climate-crisis-good-morning-britain

…for those of you who aren’t familiar with that reference by the way…the degree of obtuse irony on display here is kinda staggering…so I feel bound to point out that it’s a character where a middle-aged bloke dresses up like a teenage girl who is…let’s just say not an example of a successful educational experience…& who is known for saying stuff like this

…&…from time to time…the phrase “am I bovvered?”…although…mostly because I’m feeling guilty about what a massive downer this post reads like…on special occasions they get catherine tate to cover that part (iirc she coined that catchphrase with a different character early in the run the other one appears in but didn’t stick around so it got co-opted)

…anyhow

The climate breakdown is already threatening many of our favorite foods. In Asia, rice fields are being flooded with saltwater; cyclones have wiped out vanilla crops in Madagascar; in Central America higher temperatures ripen coffee too quickly; drought in sub–Saharan Africa is withering chickpea crops; and rising ocean acidity is killing oysters and scallops in American waters.

All our food systems – agriculture, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture – are buckling under the stress of rising temperatures, wildfires, droughts, and floods.

Even in the best-case scenario, global heating is expected to make the earth less suitable for the crops that provide most of our calories. If no action is taken to curtail the climate crisis, crop losses will be devastating.

Nature has a simple way to adapt to different climates: genetic diversity.
[…]
But the powerful food industry had other ideas and over the past century, humans have increasingly relied on fewer and fewer crop varieties that can be mass produced and shipped around the world. “The line between abundance and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner and the public is unaware and unconcerned,” writes Dan Saladino in his book Eating to Extinction.

https://www.theguardian.com/food/ng-interactive/2022/apr/14/climate-crisis-food-systems-not-ready-biodiversity

…now that guardian piece has a bunch of fancy graphics & various examples about the perils of things like monoculture & shifts in diet in various parts of the world & it’s reasonably enlightening…but it’s still not about to brighten anyone’s day unless you find it a good deal more encouraging than I do to contemplate these

Seed banks: the last line of defense against a threatening global food crisis [Guardian]

…but all the same…I ask you…does that sound like the sort of stuff that might be important around about now…& if so…would you say perhaps more so than whatever the most recent piece of self-serving bullshit elon fucking musk decided might co-opt a few headlines & maybe give his net worth a bit of a bump?

It wasn’t enough to loudly criticize the platform — on the platform — for not adhering to his personal standards.

It wasn’t enough to secretively buy a 9.2 percent stake in the social media company, becoming its largest individual shareholder. It wasn’t enough to accept an offer to join the company’s board (which provoked huge internal outcry from the company’s employees). It wasn’t even enough of a power trip for him to then reject that offer five days later.
[…]
Musk’s latest gambit — the news of which Twitter’s users, and investors, woke up to on Thursday morning — is a hostile takeover bid for the company, at the meme-worthy price of $54.20 a share. (Musk famously delights in 4/20 references, a jokey tip of the hat to marijuana smoking.) His bid, coming in at a valuation of $43 billion, represents a 54 percent premium over the share price as it stood on the day before he began quietly building up his ownership in January.

…which…as far as it seems…twitter isn’t inclined to take lying down…but all the same…does seem to be getting conspicuously more coverage than the part about how entirely short-sighted it might be to go adding to those fossil fuel reserves…most likely because once people start calling you the richest man in the world for a while hijacking the headlines is kind of the least of it

Musk’s offer to buy Twitter was accompanied by a veiled threat that if his offer was not accepted, he might completely divest his nearly 10 percent holding from the company, potentially tanking its value. “If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” Musk said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing stating his takeover intentions. “This is not a threat,” he added.
[…]
What we have here is a perfect example of “peak billionaire” — the ability of one fantastically rich person to, without accountability, make decisions with potentially life-changing ramifications for many, many people — based on nothing more than their mood and their ridiculously deep pockets. […]

It’s also a perfect example of why allowing this much money to pool under a single individual is a mistake. With wealth comes power. And when seemingly inexhaustible wealth is concentrated in the hands of a wildly ambitious loose cannon like Musk, it can only lead to severe social consequences.

…&…to briefly hark back to something I was banging on about the other day…it’s not like that one individual is an isolated incident any more than the next catastrophic symptom of climate change will be

By the end of 2018, the 25 were worth $1.1 trillion.

For comparison, it would take 14.3 million ordinary American wage earners put together to equal that same amount of wealth.

The personal federal tax bill for the top 25 in 2018: $1.9 billion.

The bill for the wage earners: $143 billion.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax

…anyway…to get back to the one particular oh-so-rich-but-oh-so-fucking-worthless asshole

Even the most intelligent, sober-minded, responsible individual is too fallible to unilaterally decide the fates of millions. And Musk doesn’t even fit that description. […]


Dictatorships and autocracies, tied as they are to the fluctuating moods of one individual (who, by very dint of such power, often becomes more and more irrational), tend to melt down. Unilateral redefinitions of things such as “free speech” (one of Musk’s stated reasons for his interest in Twitter) tend to serve the individual doing the defining more than anyone else.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/14/elon-musk-twitter-bid-peak-billionaire/

Ah yes, the guy that’s concerned about free speech. pic.twitter.com/188dncny9J

— David Doel (@daviddoel) April 14, 2022

…not to mention mixing their metaphors with apparently zero self-awareness

“As for media sort of ownership, I mean, you’ve got Mark Zuckerberg owning Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, and with a share ownership structure that will have Mark Zuckerberg XIV still controlling those entities,” said Musk, seemingly referring to King Louis XIV, the “Sun King” whose wealth and power were legendarily vast.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/15/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-sun-king-louis-xiv

…so…yeah…here’s an interesting thought about some other isolated cases

A while ago, I started what I thought would be a quick exercise to confirm the narrative of J6 defendants as “ordinary” people with few links to extremists, extremist groups/movements. I began work on a network visualization and now I no longer find this narrative convincing. 1/ pic.twitter.com/TE3XsAThrT

— Michael Jensen (@MikeAJensen) April 14, 2022

That’s approximately 30% of all defendants. While that’s not a majority, a 30% rate of affiliation with extremism/extremist beliefs among a collective of apparently “ordinary” individuals is an astounding number. 3/

— Michael Jensen (@MikeAJensen) April 14, 2022

Moreover, the “ordinary people” argument misses what the visualization shows–that J6 involved a number of influential defendants who acted as bridges in a larger network, facilitating the flow harmful ideas from one movement to another. 6/

— Michael Jensen (@MikeAJensen) April 14, 2022

It depicts aligning with extremist groups, even if indirectly, and/or adopting their beliefs and attempting to violently end democracy as something “ordinary” people do. It’s not. 9/

— Michael Jensen (@MikeAJensen) April 14, 2022

…so…that might be some sort of personal best on the definition-of-a-doom-scroll thing…but I’m just an innocent vector…& I’m pretty sure it’s not my reading habits that are the problem?