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Low-Hanging Fruit

A lot of the time, I'll have something original for y'all on here, but this one I'm sure is on a lot of Swedish people's minds if they saw the same documentary on peatlands.

It sounds weird but a wet peatland sequesters carbon while a dry one releases it.

Turns out that 20% of Swedish CO₂ emissions are from our diked-out peatlands, and we’ve been promising to fix this since 1971. That’s the same amount as private cars (which we also need to fix). Other countries have similar issues with their own peatlands.

They’re asking for 120 000 kkr, and the gov’t has been promising and reneging and promising and reneging this over and over again.

The documentary was a bit weird about the idea of expropriating this land. Now, no matter what long time readers might think, I actually do think expropriation is a bad thing, and I'm glad that it seemed like there was a solution that didn't require it. But the documentary seemed to treat the idea as utterly unthinkable even as we're on the brink of collapse. "Whoops, everyone needs to die because you happened to 'own' this land."

The documentary contrasted this with a 6 000 000 kkr deal for complete pie-in-the-sky, will-hopefully-become-invented, pave-the-earth style “solutions” to climate change. And I don’t oppose that deal in-and-of-itself; if those solutions are needed, they’re needed, but we have some pretty darn low-hanging fruit right here that we need to get to right now, too.

Today I was reminded of the money spent to support business afflicted by the pandemic, money that disproportionately went to propping up fossil-fueled industries, and it was ten times more than even the pie-in-the-sky concrete-steel hypothetical rescue plan, and 500 times what the peatland undiking project would cost.

The bikeshed nickel-and-diming of our budget is aimed squarely at our own feet.

The audacious obliviousness of the right wing putting their hopes in the life-changing magic of radiation and other supposedly quick fixes is staggering. Busch wants to lower our already-too-low emission reduction targets (as in, she wants us to pollute more and renege our promises). Let’s please not.