Nuclear safety standards in most western countries are legally defined as whatever was high enough to make the reactors unprofitable (with language such as “the highest reasonably attainable level of safety”). This results in ridiculous scenarios like nuclear reactors being expected to store their waste perfectly for 100,000 years even if nobody attends to it while fossil fuel plants kill millions with polluted air and agriculture just pisses pollution into the environment. We build monuments to nuclear waste so that future civilizations may know to fear it properly even if all contact is lost because oh no what if like ten of these hypothetical post-post-apocalyptic people die, while hundreds of millions are set to die right now because of the climate change that waste could have mitigated.

Nuclear reactors are safe enough that grad students can operate them. If the entire world electrical supply ran on electricity you could put the nuclear waste in a couple hundred oil drums and drop those in an olympic swimming pool and people nearby would be under less risk than from a steel mill.

And yes, without the nuclear arms industry it would have made more sense to develop cheaper and safer fuels like thorium. But nuclear disasters are like train crashes - terrible, of course, but vastly overblown by the media in a way that somehow coincides perfectly with fossil fuel/car industry interests.

So I went into a bit of a deep dive.

Observatory.wiki is curated by members of the Independent Media Institute. The Independent Media Institute has, as one of its major donors the New World Foundation.

The New World Foundation was founded by a billionaire heiress, had Hillary Clinton as one of its board members in the 80s, is New Left (rejecting ties with labor to focus on personal liberties), and has investments in tobacco companies, fast fashion companies, and logging companies. Joan Roelofs, a professor in political science, used it as a case study of how donations (and the threat of withholding them) are used to push left-wing charities towards compliance with neoliberal ideas in her book Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism.

It is unsurprising, then, that this story credits neoliberal globalists initiatives without skepticism or broader contextualization. Maybe it really is that simple and the US helped Kazachstan out of the goodness of its heart. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Though… why does it credit Kazachstan for preserving ‘their part’ of the Aral Sea by creating a massive dam? Don’t dams keep water out of places? Why is Uzbekistan given the blame here, when the article says that the US helped Kazachstan first and Uzbekistan second? Did the US just work together with Kazachstan to monopolize the Kazach part of the water flowing into the Aral sea and then blame Uzbekistan for the shared lake continuing to dry up?

Is the US holding the Aral Sea hostage to pressure Uzbekistan into compliance?

(disclaimer: this is less than an hour’s work. I could truly be mistaken. Please do more thorough research before using this as evidence).

Oh, sure. It’s actually a pretty broad category of stories and statements people can make, but the common denominator is that it’s perceived as funny. Why do you ask?

Ah yes, because the recent explosion of tick population is surely because of our biodiversity and healthy ecosystems.

Do you know what the natural predators of ticks are? Do you know what sort of environments they like to sleep and rest and hunt? Do you know what the average American’s response is to finding a burrow on their property? Or their cats’ and dogs’ response?

We truly haven’t learned from medieval cityfolk killing cats because of the black death.

Until they repeal the law that prisons must have windows…

Most people don’t work on anything that technology and medicine depend on. There are so many jobs that only exist because capitalism is inefficient and gives rich people the right to get other people to do useless things.

Imagine how many people would be unemployed (freed up for rural living) if we got rid of the meat industry, replaced cars with public transit and bicycles, replaces airplanes with high speed rail and ships and not going, had built cities to be walkable from the start, gave people a comfortable life regardless of whether they worked, banned advertisements, made clothes and other products designed to last a lifetime, had a library economy to vastly reduce the number of tools necessary, got rid of intellectual property law so people didn’t need to design new drugs to repatent things and corporate megaprojects would collapse, redistributed wealth so people wouldn’t buy useless toys or mansions, and put everyone in comfortable rural spaces with lots of greenery and spaces where they could hang out for free so mental health is better and people get plenty of exercise.

Most people could work in agriculture without decreasing the amount that work on maintaining and improving our level of technology.

That’s called an attic. And yes, attics do help the floors below get less warm.

When you have an attic, you can go further by insulating the roof - this keeps the warm day air out, and during the night you can open windows to let the cool night air in. Historically roof insulation was done with thick layers of thatch, though light-weight synthetic alternatives are more common in modern construction. A well-insulated roof won’t let through any appreciable amount of heat.

Then as things get hotter, build the roof taller, allow for natural air flow to dissipate the heat, and finally put the building on stilts so air can flow under it.

Retrofitting existing buildings to have space for good insulation is expensive, especially with the atrocities the US has been building in suburbs for the past 80 years.

Completely different world, yes. Preventing irreversible climate impacts, no.

Of course the most important thing we can do from now on is always action now rather than looking back on what could have been, but IMO it’s critical to the credibility of climate scientists to be honest about the damage that has already been done. Articles like these make it sound like it’s all made up because the window has been “rapidly closing” since 1960.

The average life expectancy will drop by a decade compared to where it is now in 2025. It is too late to prevent that. Over a billion people will die from famine, climate disaster, or the disease and war that result from people trying to escape hunger and climate disaster. We have to make peace with that and make clear that these deaths are the result of people’s inaction.

If we continue the current course for even just the next decade, life expectancy will drop by another two decades. Billions more will die. That is worth fighting to prevent with every fiber of our being.

Labor-based production is such 20th century thinking. Modern companies don’t try to make products, they try to acquire capital. Intellectual property, industrial capacity, housing, utilities access, etc. Cornering a market is so much more profitable than trying to compete in it.

Why do you think there’s so much money going into AI? They can’t wait to rid themselves of their human workforce so that humans starving to death won’t affect their production targets.

If capitalists get their way, capitalism will outlive humanity. Inefficient humans and their annoying ecosystem dependency will be left to boil to death or something while Von Neumann probes owned by AI-managed corporations spread across the universe. Just imagine, one share in SpaceX would be worth several galaxies. You won’t find a better ROI anywhere in the universe!

I feel like this post is going to be interpreted very differently depending on what the audience is.

For left-of-centrists, this seems like a decent wake-up call. Stop being depressed about there being no solutions in your narrow overton window, and embrace the necessity that society adapts to reality.

For conservatives, “pessimism” is an odd phrase, but they’ll be glad to hear you’re warming up to signing up for lifeboat defense duty - maybe if you work hard you can get to be in it.

For realists, “abandon” is an worrisome phrase. It has always obviously been about both. Is this another excuse to keep consumption high?

Right now we’re clearly still making more steps in the wrong direction than the right one. Militarization, abandonment of climate research and (already too lenient) climate goals, continued investments in fossil fuels, planned obsolescence, neocolonialism, etc.

With the US turning fascist and the rest of the world massively increasing military expenditure, I’m pretty sure even the ratio between steps in the right direction and steps in the wrong direction is worse this year.

I briefly stayed at a multi-millionaire’s place. They did have a herb garden. Nice planters and automated watering systems. All provided and maintained by the groundskeeping company, of course. I sincerely doubt they ever planted anything, they just grabbed herbs when they needed them and instructed people what herbs they wanted.

I imagine richer people might similarly have food gardens maintained by waitstaff. Maybe not around their primary residence, but what if the desire to cosplay as or claim to be a farmer or plantation owner strikes them?

Unauthorized government cheese.

That literally is the opposite of a comedy.

The movement is stronger than ever. The coverage has disappeared, but there are more and more people willing to seek out every right answer and give up every privilege.

Centrists and right-wingers keep pretending that solidarity and radicalism makes movements weak, when it has always made them stronger. The moment Labor parties abandoned radicalism and chose the Third Way, their voter share dropped off a cliff. The moment movements abandon their most radical left-wing contributors to appeal to the lowest common denominator they collapse from in-fighting and the hardest workers moving off.

There is no Schelling point for less-than-complete justice. Nations, religions, ethnicities, even capital is just one of countless different ways to slice the pie and pretend that the hurt you suffer is more urgent and in-scope than someone else’s. If you morally accept rallying to one subgroup, then you have no defense against others you depend on from rallying to another subgroup and coming into opposition with you. There is no way around it:

None of us are free until all of us are free.

Getting enough food supplies to last a season. Having plans for what to do if the power goes out for a week. Having a bug-out bag ready to go. Connecting with a community to prep for potential self-sufficiency. Learning skills that would be useful in a post-global trade scenario. Getting money out of banks and into tools and goods you can give away or sell. etc.

How do horizontal power structures handle problems of global scale? The COVID pandemic and how people behaved and created consequences for others comes to mind.

Horizontal power structures can only be stable if people have a healthy culture of proactively fighting selfish actions. Any teenager will have experienced students firing their teachers, the village taking children away from abusive parents, women going on a sex strike to get men to take allegations of catcalling seriously, etc.

So when COVID rolls around and some people act selfishly, people already know from experience how to act with it. People are already familiar with shunning friends because they refuse to grow out of hurting others, they’re already familiar with boycotting specific businesses and finding alternatives. And most importantly, people already know that all of this is waiting for them if they do choose to be selfish, so they are way more likely to choose the right thing from the start.

Ideally, horizontal power structures also come with Restorative Justice. For every crime that people have ever heard of, they’ll have seen the process of someone being kept at a safe distance until they learn why they were wrong and make amends to those they wronged, and receiving help with learning.

But sure, suppose somehow that 40% of the population doesn’t really care much about keeping each other healthy and is not going to budge without consequences. In that case: Making people sick is an act of violence, so people would be in their rights to use the threat of reciprocal violence to keep people that refuse to wear masks at 2m distance.

This would be a problem that needs discussion. My fifteen minute answer would be that those of the 60% that feel comfortable with it could be given consent by the community to walk around with 2m long halberds (shaped to be blunt when poking and sharp when slicing) and keep the 40% out of spaces where they would cause harm with the threat of force. They could share a digital zine on how to make these halberds from common household materials, and have the normal justice system for people that misuse those weapons.

can’t exile them without a power structure that can use force on them

If you can’t find twenty people to work together to overpower and exile one person, that’s a good sign that you’re wrong about wanting to exile them.

Another idea on that scale might be best exemplified by climate change (or pfas etc). Do horizontal power structures mean most people could ignore how they’re impacting others negatively? If not, how would that be handled on a global scale?

In a horizontal power structure, a nation disregarding the agreed-on CO2 output norms is the same thing as a person disagreeing the agreed-on “no catcalling” norms. Talking to them, boycotting them, using violence if necessary. If the USA and EU didn’t have a position of power over the rest of the world, their excess CO2 production would be answered with a boycott from the rest of the world.

The willfully negligent poisoning of others is also an act of violence. People who do not understand that reckless scientific experimentation or deployment of untested chemicals is murder can be stopped by any means up to and including violence. In a horizontal power structure, every Chemours factory would be carefully decontaminated rubble.

Though more realistically, Chemours would never have existed. There would not be a patent on PFAS. People would treat those that deploy PFAS without prior study on its health effects as violent. People would discover its toxicity and environmental harm within years of its discovery and before any large-scale roll-out, and the cleanup of contaminated sites would be manageable by volunteers.

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Get in the van, no using pronouns here >:(

No true Scotsman would ever lie about Chinese spy technology.

Reuters is citing “two people familiar with the matter” and people in the US federal government not even speaking through an official announcement. While I trust Reuters not to have made up those people’s words, this does mean that so far the only source is semi-random US government employees.

So it literally is just the word of people working for Trump we’re going on.

And for context, it is quite common for reputable news agencies to misreport things, or to take the word of a government employee as final when they really shouldn’t. I personally saw a video of a car running into a climate action protest¹, only for the ‘reputable’ Dutch state news agency (NOS) simply going by the police spokesperson’s statement that the climate activists had scratched the car before it hit them². But the NOS just said the spokesperson said it, so reputation-wise they were in the clear.

Now I’m not saying the genocidal dictatorship known as the People’s Republic of China is not putting spyware on devices shipped to the west. I’m just saying that we need more than an unofficial statement by an employee working under Trump, even if that statement is being signal boosted by Reuters. Skepticism is warranted.

¹: At 48:50 in this livestream, in the left part of the splitscreen. Luckily it was at walking pace so nobody was injured as far as I know.

²: This article, in Dutch.

I’m not American, and no.