💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 9-16.gmi captured on 2024-09-29 at 00:39:04. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Climeworks captures double the CO2 for half the energy
It's getting cheaper to filter carbon dioxide out of the air
Devastating Brazil floods made twice as likely by burning of fossil fuels and trees
In a warmer world, tornado behaviour is changing – this is how we can prepare
I've seen a lot of noise the last little while about improvements in carbon capture technology. And no wonder. With the effects of climate change becoming not just more devastating, but more frequent, the world is seeing the consequences of our species' long term choices. It's said that it doesn't matter if you don't believe in climate change, because your insurance company does. I'm not an actuary, but I did used to do work for an insurance company, and I can tell you this is true. Climate change had a direct impact on policyholders in that there would be new policy blackouts placed on particular zip codes. In the cases I witnessed, this was certain regions of California as fires devastated parts of the state in the mid to late 2010s. Meanwhile, I did what I could myself. Made sure I had enough insurance on my house, selected Overland Water coverage in addition to Sewer Backup. Trust me on this: in a world where rains are seemingly both less and more frequent, having a coverage that'll cover you if water penetrates the house from the outside is a must. I'll take that till I can't.
And I'm writing this because my group chat the last couple of months has been puntuated with tornado warnings and gale-force winds across the American south-west, my friends talking about gathering in hallways (in both cases, the people not having basements), about the difficulty of doing so with one's cats, about going out and surveying the damage afterward.
COVID both gave me hope and didn't: in what felt like a miracle, we got a vaccine that was effective in reducing the severity of infections in what, less than a year? And then we had competing options? But then people decided they were collectively done with all of it, and stopped masking, and stopped caring, and so an epidemic that could've been made shorter and less severe became devastating in the face of a particular segment of the population wielding the levers of powers to benefit themselves, and the economy, rather than, you know, everyone.
Five Takeaways: How a ‘Greenlash’ Could Transform Europe’s Vote
I have hope based on articles like the ones I linked at the top of this post. But I despair, because every time a right-wing government is elected, the first thing they do is claw back whatever miniscule gains have been made. Here in Canada, there has very little progress made under Trudeau and the Liberals, but there have at least been promises, at least an understanding that what we're doing now isn't sustainable for hundreds of years down the line.
And I'm upset because I know under Poilievre - and unless he fucks up the next year or so magnificently, he'll be the next prime minister - it's only going to get worse. The Right has been characterized by many things, but one of them is clearly an obsessive belief in fossil fuels as the only legitimate form of energy.
I keep wondering at what point reality will kick in for them, and during elections, do my part to vote the most-progressive-option. Canada is a first-past-the-post system, and the progressive vote in certain ridings tilts in different ways, mostly based on where you live. In the past, further west, that's meant I've voted NDP. Now, that means I vote Liberal. And every time I do so I feel the futility of it, because Alberta and Saskatchewan go almost completely Conservative, and once Ontario and Quebec (and to a lesser extent, the Maritimes) are figured out, the rest of the western vote doesn't mean shit. It's deeply disheartening. If Trudeau had kept his promise about proportional representation, things might be better. But he didn't, and so here we are, again and again and again.
Like the States, which faces its own problem (the Democrats have to keep winning, but the Republicans only have to win once to install all the power structures they need), Canada, and the rest of the world, is facing a crisis: all the wilful delusion in the world doesn't matter when nature sets the rules of the game. Progressives have to keep winning to make the most marginal improvements towards a better planet, and then right-wing governments get elected, and those gains are undone. Maybe this is a short-lived thing. Maybe at some point, the Right starts taking its place in the world seriously, and realizes that if a parasite kills the host, the parasite necessarily dies.
But I doubt it. And so every year I see the weather get worse - hotter, heavier rains, simultaneously wetter and drier - and I despair. Because at some point there'll be a feeling of collective helplessness across the world. And history has shown that these feelings escalate quickly, into violence and revolution. Democracy is seen as permanent. Revolution is seen as an other-countries problem. But that's the thing with change: no matter how hard power tries, it can never be suppressed forever. And I suspect that one day, the people killing the planet to get theirs will indeed get theirs, in a very different way.