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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • I haven’t read the author’s book, but I think her position in the article still misses the mark and is naively dangerous, having us all just look at the flowers and embrace market solutions while we collapse the biosphere at stunning pace.

    Honestly I’m not seeing any ‘solutions’ that are on a timeline relevant to the crisis. But I think any first step will have us coming to terms with climate change not being the problem, but a symptom of our economic system and our relationship to the environment. We’re going to have to reorient away from growth, because that growth is literally consuming the biophysical basis of our own existence.

    Large-scale solutions aside, I think we’re going to start seeing a growing desire in people to somehow ‘exit’ this system. I know I feel it in myself, deep in my bones, and it pisses me off to no end that I’m forced into destructive behavior because of the system I’m trapped in. All this waste, plastic and destruction just to exist each day, and I’m not even having a good time! If anyone has made some progress in this area I would love to hear about it. I imagine it must start with some rejection of what the market ‘values’, choosing not to participate in this whole game that is making us miserable, and somehow trade material wealth for greater awareness and connection to our humanity. If Elon and Jeff want it all, they can fucking have it, I just want out of this nightmare and to find peace with nature somehow.








  • Just an aside, but has anyone had the misfortune to have a quick look at the comments over on r/canada or cbc.ca around these articles? The amount of dumb (i.e. simplistic, low information), seething hatred for basically everything, is overwhelming. I can’t tell if this is all bots, or if something weird is coming out of the woodwork, but it seems like we’ve passed some tipping point and I’m starting to feel alarmed at where we are headed. I get this is super embarrassing, but no serious person could think there was malicious intent in this Parliament incident. Fuck-ups and carelessness happen, the guy resigned, time to move on and focus on real issues.


  • Okay, but this money basically IS going to people that need it, by way of affordable fuel prices. Ever wonder why fuel is so cheap in places like Egypt? It’s because the government is subsidizing the cost and picking up a lot of the tab. What happens when people can no longer afford to get around, and food prices skyrocket because transportation is so expensive? Leaders are mostly concerned with keeping their heads attached to their bodies and they’ll do anything to keep the economy growing, even if it destroys the environment and explodes the public debt. It’s why climate change is such a gnarly problem, it’s not just that there’s a bunch of corrupt evil people preventing progress, our whole economic system needs to be overturned.

    For a livable future, we’re going to have to massively reduce our energy usage (like, yesterday) and figure out how to survive in a degrowth scenario, while we try to replace the entirety of our infrastructure and build out resilient systems, all without access to credit. Fun times ahead.



  • In my experience it’s okay, but not amazing and slowly getting worse year after year for various reasons. Generally speaking if you have a life-threatening issue (heart failure, cancer, etc), you are taken care of as well as anyone could reasonably expect. But for anything else it can take forever to see a specialist and it’s easy to get lost in the system that always seems to be running in capacity crisis mode. There are other countries that do a better job with the single-payer model, mostly those without provincial fiefdoms that insist on doing everything themselves and reinventing all the wheels for political reasons.



  • We will all need to come to terms with the scope and scale of our predicament - climate change is not ‘the’ problem, it is one facet of the overall collapse of the biosphere that we are causing (see: planetary boundaries). Guaranteeing some livable future for our children will require revolutionary change in our economic systems and our relationship with the environment. Real mitigation will involve: reserving our remaining carbon budget for critical activities (heating our houses, food transport, etc), significant build-out of resilient systems (local sustainable/regenerative agriculture), and preparing for a less complex economy with much lower energy use. We can do this in a controlled way over the next few decades, or in a chaotic way when we are left with no other options. It doesn’t seem like the public is ready or willing to have these conversations yet.