“Is it possible to turn things around by 2050? The answer is absolutely yes,” says Kai Chan, a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.
Many scientists have been telling us how the world will look like, if we don’t act now. However, others, like Chan, are tracking what success might look like.
They are not simply day-dreamers either. They aren’t being too optimistic. They are putting together road maps for how to safely get to the planet envisioned in the 2015 Paris Agreement, where temperatures hold at 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than before we started burning fossil fuels, this article from July states.
“Three decades is enough to do a lot of important things. In the next few years—if we get started on them—they will pay dividends in the coming decades,” says Chan, the lead author of the chapter on achieving a sustainable future in a recent UN report that predicted the possible extinction of a million species.
Making these changes won’t mean years of being poor, cold and hungry before things get comfortable again, the scientists insist. They say that if we start acting seriously NOW, we stand a decent chance of transforming society without huge disruption.
No doubt, it will take a massive switch in society’s energy use. But without us noticing, that’s already happening. Not fast enough, maybe, but it is. Solar panels and offshore wind power plummet in price.
Iceland and Paraguay have stripped the carbon from their grids, according to a new energy outlook report from Bloomberg. Europe is on track to be 90 per cent carbon-free by 2040. And Ottawa says that Canada is already at 81 per cent, thanks to hydro, nuclear, wind and solar.
Decarbonizing the whole economy is within grasp. We can do this.
“If we have five years of really sustained efforts, making sure we reorient our businesses and our governments toward sustainability, then from that point on, this transition will seem quite seamless. Because it will just be this gradual reshaping of options,” Chan says, adding: “All these things seem very natural when the system is changing around you.”
Hoping people with more relevant knowledge and science parsing skills than I do might comment on this …
I think it is absolutely vital that people be able to picture The Healed World. Honestly I think it’s one of the most important things we can do.
Look at how many different apocalypses people can visualise. Our brains can freely feast on unlimited scenes of scarcity, competition and fear. Everywhere we turn we can consume endless content about killing our neighbors for scraps, about hurting children, about bleak planets and extinction, and lots and lots of guns. It is easy, accessible and cheap. Our minds gobble up as much of this content as the market generates and the market gleefully generates more. We feed and feed upon a future of suffering and loss. We feast on images of brown children being hurt, unnecessarily, and say smugly that “that’s just what humanity is like.” Our brains are programmed away from the natural human responses to crises (fix it, help each other, rebuild and hope) and TOWARDS the mindsets of fictional apocalypse (cause it, turn on each other [it’s just what humans do! We’ve all seen the same stories!], collapse, fight each other for crumbs, the world is doomed anyway.)
It’s pretty unnecessary. And frankly pretty cringe. Imagine being part of some of the most prosperous, empowered, educated, connected group of humans to ever exist, and having a brain that can only picture the future as apocalypse-movie.
And where is the food of abundance, equality, beauty, hope, diversity? Where is the actual food of the future? Oh. It’s in, like, three solarpunk anthologies, huh?
Huh.
Anyway not to get all Amitav Ghosh on main but we have GOT to address this unnecessary and EMBARRASSING failure of imagination. Because we are the generation currently failing in our responsibilities as caretakers of the earth, because of this deranged inability to picture the world as being a real place, and the future being a place where people will live.
So, basically, yes, let’s just say it and start saying it regularly. The work is now and we have to do it. It isn’t impossible. Yes there is hope. Yes it can all be done. Yes there is a future for fucksake. It’s within our grasp. that is what futures are.
👆 Not sure if I’ve already reblogged this, but @elodieunderglass is 100% right here. We find it so easy to picture doom, but we find it so hard to picture healing.
Also, giving up on a future that is still possible means not only giving up on your own life, but the lives of your loved ones, on the poor and disadvantaged people who will face the worst impacts of the climate crisis, and giving up on nature itself.
For some people, climate disaster is already here. There are millions of people already fighting for survival. They don’t have the privilege of sitting back, giving up, and waiting for the apocalypse to come.
They don’t have the privilege of saying “Oh well, the world’s doomed anyway so why should we bother?” And neither should anyone else.
You know the parable about how the foolish man built his house upon sand and the wise man built his house upon rock and it’s always about having a sturdy foundation well there is also the fact of location which is that the sand probably used to be rock except it’s been eroded to sediment because it’s a FUCKING FLOODPLAIN
I feel like a dumbass, but @rapidashmascot just revolutionised my understanding of that parable.
My family quotes that parable loudly every time another planned housing community on a former floodplain gets inundated with water.
Nothing former about a floodplain unless it has dikes around it
People are fretting about the “sexuality” of people riding bikes naked at pride and as someone who was once at the Farmer’s Market with family without realizing it was World Naked Bike Ride day I have to say: who the fuck sees that and gets horny instead of thinking about how awful it’d be if they crashed. I know I’m ace but if you look at a dicks out bicycle rider and think sex thoughts instead of FRETTING for that dick, being CONCERNED about the lack of safety precautions for that dick, thinking with horror about the pavement beneath, I don’t know what to say
“…..According to sources who worked on the show, some of whom used their first or full names, Beharie showed a trepidation about the role, a massive and potentially multiyear undertaking. (Ryan likens this to James Gandolfini on the set of The Sopranos, as detailed in Difficult Men.) But both she and Mison showed difficulty adjusting to being the leads of the show, with co-star Jones telling Ryan that both were “out of their depths” and “no one was helping them.”
Amid that, “there was a lot of creative floundering” from the show’s leadership team from the very beginning, one person who worked on the show told Ryan, noting early “red flags” early over the way “problems were handled and the way blame was assigned — or reassigned.” As both Mison and Beharie went “through steep learning curves that sometimes involved friction with colleagues” wrote Ryan, Beharie’s growing pains were treated differently.
“When a bunch of white guys say a person of color is difficult, I tend to assume that there’s a lot more to that story,” one source said. “I found her to be pleasant, extremely talented, and an actor who was adjusting to being a lead. There are growing pains with that. In the time I was there, where the discrepancy came in was how their growing pains were viewed and handled.”
Where my Shady Hollow denizens at? T'is time to gather once more.
I intend to buy the book these quote come from because it reveals so much of what we fans suspected was going on behind the scenes based on what happened with the show. GRR. Justice for Nicole.
The difference in reaction when you tell abled people that you got a diagnosis vs telling disabled people is so funny to me.
Abled people: Oh nooo :( I’m so sorry that’s awful
Disabled people: FUCK YEAH congrats dude!!
Thanks, mods, for running this blog and helping folks stay informed and sort through a lot of misinformation/confusion about how to support the strikes.
One thing that I think is confusing a lot of people: the guidelines on what “influencers” should and should not do are for *influencers who are in SAG* and operating under the SAG Influencer Agreement contract, or have the kind of career where they know they may be eligible to join SAG soon. This is a very small group of people (you have to have an LLC or be incorporated to sign the contract) who are professional influencers as their primary career. It’s not just like, anyone who has a bunch of Twitter followers.
It’s also my understanding that the “no promotions” rule is *for SAG members* (some of whom may be influencers) and specifically involves PAID work. Fan activity like fic, fanart, cosplaying for fun, reblogging/retweeting things about your favorite show/movie (even if those things come from official studio marketing departments) is not what they’re talking about. That’s all fine as long as you’re not being paid by an AMPTP company to do it.
Signed, a non-union sometimes film worker who wants everyone to support the strike but not lose sleep over whether it’s okay to reblog a gifset of your blorbos
Absolutely, and thank you for bringing this up again—it’s causing a lot of unnecessary headaches among fans who just aren’t the target for those influencer guidelines!
Where it can get confusing is that it’s not necessarily paid work, it could also be unpaid work to promote studios, because unfortunately a lot of big cosplay/fan accounts wind up doing unpaid promo work just for the exposure. So SAG-AFTRA is also asking those influencer accounts not to do any promo work, paid or unpaid. But absolutely this doesn’t apply to fans doing art and fic.
It was helpful for us to thoroughly read the SAG-AFTRA Influencer Agreement Fact Sheet here. It defines the SAG-AFTRA understanding of an “influencer”. Once most fans read that they’ll understand that they are not nor will ever count as influencers!
We’re really hoping that the vast majority of actual influencers will support the strikes and not scab—and not only because it’s the right thing to do to support current SAG-AFTRA members, but also because it’s obvious that it will affect their future careers (and potential future membership of SAG-AFTRA!)
i once made up a song for the cat in a time of trial (no dinner till 5pm) and i just remembered that i did it. Cat of Constant Sorrow. wish i remembered the full verse.
Friendly reminder that unions are more effective at reducing workplace inequality than any corporate sensitivity training program.
The inability to distinguish an imperfect ally from an actual enemy will be the death of any progressive movement if we don’t discard ridiculous perfectionist thinking.
You’re going to have to work with people you don’t agree with. That’s just a fact of life. But if you’re working toward a common goal and actually have a chance of getting there, don’t hamstring yourself and your organization by nitpicking.
Dragons are extraordinarily good mimics, escaping human predation by disguising themselves as common airliners, some even going so far as to sport crude copies of carrier logos. This makes them difficult to track, though most sources agree that the dragon population is critically endangered.
While there has been some success with halting large-scale dragon hunting, conservationists are still concerned about a recent spate of crashes in otherwise healthy adults.
Given that dragons communicate via radio signals and that most crashes occur near military radar stations, it is theorized that the radar may be disorienting the dragons. Investigations are still ongoing.
I fixed it
You fixed it!!
Good job!
[Caption: the post contains various drawings of dragons looking like planes, crashing on beaches and being rescued, transported and healed until they can fly again.]
One of the things we find in ‘Revenge of the Sith’ is that the dark side is not tempting Anakin to anything… that Anakin is looking at the dark side and saying, ‘That’s what I want.’
Matthew Stover (author), Revenge of the Sith novelization.
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