9-11 works because the tragedy was 'massive' (the biggest attack since pearl harbour and most civilian deaths ever).
Any name applied to 9-11 would have 'stuck'.
Moreover, 9-11 caught on at least in part because 911 is 'emergency' number in North America.
Hurricane Katrina comes nowhere near that threshold. Now - it may have been giving a populist name, such as 'The Orleans Breach' or something instead of an official name.
But the names really do help us remember and contextualize.
The government and government-adjacent institutions classify and quantify these things are competing with each other for relevance, reach, budget, etc. so there's a huge incentive to scream "tonight at 11: DOOOOOOM". The media (weather included) is competing for eyeball*hours so of course they do stuff like this too.
A lot of people are gonna look real stupid in 10-20yr when it becomes clear in hindsight that the solution to societal alarm fatigue was not to just increase the volume. (And I'm gonna head off the inevitable snarky comments by reminding everyone that alarm fatigue caused by alarms rightfully going off is still alarm fatigue.)
People have no problem remembering the Hurricane of '38. This naming stuff is all theater. Playing PR games so you can have .05% more "resonates with the public" or whatever dumb KPI you're chasing this quarter isn't gonna slow or mitigate global warming. But it will help you be seen "doing something" which appears to matter a lot to a lot of people.
We already use names for tropical storms and hurricanes. It’s easier to talk about “Zoe” than to talk about “the third heatwave” or “the 23rd of October heatwave”. I am fine with it.
I'll take the named heatwaves if they would just stop doing APOCALYPSE TORNADO EMERGENCY BREAKING NEWS every time there's a mild thunderstorm here in Chicago
Anecdotally, in the US we name tropical storms and hurricanes. There have been cases in the past where storms that were just as severe that did not originate in the Atlantic were never named and caused significant damage.
There was a push several years ago by popular weather broadcast channels (that effectively re-package and re-sell National Weather Service data and forecasts) to begin naming winter storms in the same fashion as hurricanes. The NWS put out a strong warning to their own forecasters to NOT use those names in official materials.
Then there is the trend by news media to replace “hurricane” with “Superstorm” when a storm causes a particularly high dollar amount of damage but may not have maintained hurricane force winds or simply because it hit a densely populated area.
The definition of superstorm precludes any other named meteorological event such as a hurricane. But superstorm sounds better than hurricane.
It facilitates communication which is specially important when discussing wheater events that can cause harm.
Example:
"The Zoe heatwave is comming"
"The Zoe heatwave has increased in severity"
"Local Officials decided to restrict forest activies due to Zoe heatwave"
By glance, or just reading titles, an average person knows about the danger and it's incomming. It's harder to get that information on unnamed weather phenomems. Example:
"A heatwave is comming"
"A heatwave is worse than expected"
"Local Officials decided to restrict forest activies due to incoming heatwave"
Why do we want to blame the oil companies? So the bad guy isn’t consumers? We need 100 million barrels of oil a day! Bottled war, plastic containers for takeout food, SUVs, …
40% of global electricity is from coal. That’s much worse than oil.
Responsibility should be placed where it can actually change something.
Yes, when dealing with things in our own lives it's usually best to go with "at your own feet", not mater who the actors are, since the only person whose actions you can change are your own.
But as far as climate goes, we, the individuals (who happen to not be rich at the moment) have no power to change anything. So taking personal responsibility will change nothing.
Well, actually, people taking personal responsibility for the climate have possibly made it worse by redirecting the attention to themselves.
The obvious contrapositive to this is what happened during the pandemic: everyone stopped driving for a couple months and it had... Almost no impact. The curtain is pulled back now: the call for "individual responsibility" is exposed as cynical the PR tactic it is... Much like "plastic recycling". The fact is 1) Big corporations 2) Big corporations and 3) Big corporations in concert with the legislators they've captured are responsible for climate change. As an individual the most effective behavior you can exhibit to limit climate change is to vote with 1) Your Democracy while you still have it and more importantly 2) Your wallet.
I'm down. Let's start by making the oil companies take "personal" responsibility for the externalities they create, including the amount of warming they have caused (and that they know they have caused). Perhaps with a carbon tax.
Whether it's fair or not, personal responsibility has been very clearly pointed out and it's not changed anything. People are shitty and selfish, or sometimes just naive, and at their best, when they do everything they should, they are impotent.
Consumers are not just going to pull on their big boy pants and stop consuming, and we'll all live happily in a recovered ecosystem eating organic corn by candlelight. It has to be regulation on industry, and improvements to production (eg ditch coal power generation). Stop it where it matters, where impacts have the scale to actually matter.
I've been riding my bike to work this whole damn time! I think we're going to have to be a bit more ambitious.
Governments in the West make it a matter of explicit policy to increase consumption. That is what immigration rates are for, to prop up GDP, then every newcomer from the 3rd-world gets a larger carbon footprint overnight. It makes no sense to blame consumers for that.
If the serious consideration for those posturing starts and ends with consumption, then the consistent approach would be to oppose immigration. They do not, because it was never the point. Self-righteously indignation and signaling is.
Saying this with the awareness that both right-wing detractors and far-leftists like to target consumers/consumption, as for the latter it dovetails with their anti-Capitalism. Just look at the fusion energy thread from the other day, people are voicing concern that carbon-neutral and cheaper energy would lead to people buying more things. Westerners are struggling to get by, with purchasing power stagnating for years, and yet it's being projected they're practically drowning in useless stuff compared to their grandparents.
I’ll bite. Regardless of how you feel about this, oil companies deserve extra blame because their scientists predicted climate change due to oil consumption, and were hushed up and the research never shared.
I had an initial negative reaction to this comment and tried to figure out why - I think the main reason is that you're putting the blame on individuals for systemic problems. I don't think any amount of individual people trying to be better is going to counteract the damage being done at scale by our large companies. There's definitely a bunch of issues where collective action can work great, but everyone at BP recycling isn't going to fix the next time they set the ocean on fire or get them to stop drilling for oil.
This feels kinda like other arguments I see for systemic problems where we blame individuals in the US - we have the most people in jail because they make bad decisions, we have the most shootings because those people are bad, we have so much obesity because people don't have self control, etc - but all these are happening across the population and not in other countries so the cause can't be the individual people, it has to be caused by the environment we're in.
As another argument that ignores the blame question altogether - it's just about how we can make the biggest impact the fastest. It's much easier to pass a law saying that makes it prohibitively expensive to be an oil company than it is to say people need to limit their driving more, and the downstream effect will be the same with less people using oil
> It's much easier to pass a law saying that makes it prohibitively expensive to be an oil company than it is to say people need to limit their driving more, and the downstream effect will be the same with less people using oil
I do not see why this would be the case. Politician who is advertising that they will vote against proposals to increase gas taxes would also advertise that they will vote against proposals to make being an oil company prohibitively expensive so that gas prices can go lower or stay low.
In the US, we still have a whole political party that removes drilling restrictions and is eager to install pipelines and do whatever is necessary to enable fossil fuel consumption, and they are a very popular party.
The great sin of neoliberal "environmental" politics is blaming individuals who basically follow the incentives laid our for them by the structure of the economy and not, say, corporate executives and private equity managers who suppressed research results and lobbied legislators to prevent public investments in transit, efficient housing and clean electricity.
It has been decades since the research has been publicly advertised. My whole life actually. There has been nothing stopping the US from implementing fossil fuel taxes to curb consumption, except it would sink any politician’s election, because people want cheap fuel. People want tropical vacations, big cars, and big houses with yards. People want to consume.
Even right now, the single biggest political issue for voters is gas prices, and having to consume less. And who they can vote for so they do not have to consume less.
It has been decades since the research has been publicly advertised.
Yes, there's plenty of blame to go around, but Ford has much better advertising and many more lobbying dollars than researchers.
Hell, fewer and fewer compact cars are being made for the US market. By the time I need to buy a new car, all that's going to be available will be vehicles that are probably way heavier than what I want, let alone need. I don't want a vehicle like an F150 or a Bronco, I want a Fiesta (which has been discontinued).
So while I can reuse bags, avoid plastic straws, raise my thermostat in the summer, etc. I can't buy a responsible car that isn't for sale. I can't move into a densely zoned neighborhood that doesn't exist. I can't take public transportation that doesn't exist. I don't get to pick how the food for sale in my super market was grown/transported to the store.
So buy a Prius. They have been around for 20 years. The point is, clearly, the vast majority of the other 330M US residents want a bigger, heavier, higher car. As evidenced by the sales numbers of cars.
Solution has always been dead simple. Increase fossil fuel taxes to whatever levels necessary to curb consumption. But again, that is not what the people want. ExxonMobile themselves come out and campaign for $20/gallon gas tax, and they would get vilified.
Yes, when what's for sale is a handful of pick ups, a ton of SUVs and maybe one sedan, the sales will undoubtedly favor bigger vehicles. When the only new homes that are being built are sprawled out, that's where you'll live. If you can only get factory farmed food at the store, that's what you'll eat. People want what is marketed to them & what is found for sale. I'm not saying individuals aren't blame free here, but that they have less and less choice.
> when you're increasingly only being given a choice between a pick up and an SUV, the sales will undoubtedly favor bigger cars.
Source? As far as I can tell, Prius, Corolla, Camry, Civic, Accord, and a plethora of small vehicles have been easily available for purchase for decades. And continue to still be available.
Have you tried to buy a car recently? It's one thing to say Toyota still makes a Carolla. That doesn't mean they're producing them as much as Tundras. That doesn't mean you can go to your car dealer and just buy one. My girlfriend had to get a car 2 weeks ago. No one at the automall had regular sedans. She had to settle for a gas guzzling SUV because that's all that's available.
Again, consumers don't have the choice you seem to think they do.
Sales from the last 20+ years without supply chain disruptions is more representative of people’s preferences than sales during a unique 2 year period with industry wide supply issues.
Which way is the causation? Unless there is collusion amongst all automakers to make more bigger vehicles, I would assume carmakers are making what people want. Outside of Covid supply chain, I have never heard of people being unable to buy cars and having to settle for SUV/pickup trucks.
It was originally automakers desire to exploit regulatory loopholes in a series of safety, economy, and tax regulations by exploiting exceptions meant for commercial-uss light trucks but crafted in exploitable manners. (Different exploits, across the industry, drove minivans and then SUVs to popularity, then also large SUVs in particular.)
But the advertising campaigns designed to get people on board with what it was most convenient for manufacturers to deliver had a lasting impact on demand even after most of the regulations the classes of vehicle were meant to exploit were closed. (Also, the presence of lots of large vehicles on the road caused by that makes it worse for smaller vehicles, so it becomes self-reinforcing once in place.)
There are things you can't do in small cars or cars in general.
Hauling gravel to fix your drive, lumber and such.
Children require seats too. When you commute with other people it requires more space also.
(I'm not in a city and required to do several things myself.)
The existing regulations are a lot looser if you can classify it as a light truck. In Australia people drive very small "pickup cars" (there's another word for it) because it's not necessary to exploit a bad law. Perverse incentives killed the station wagon.
According to the study opinion of 90% of Americans has no impact on goverment (https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba/). Adding to it that the popular opinion itself is shaped by corporations I think focusing on individuals is mostly FUD.
Suppose all corporations got together and decided to support raising the gas tax to $10 or $20 per gallon. I would bet voters would mobilize in record time to vote out any politicians supporting it.
If 90% of Americans sufficiently cared about reducing carbon emissions, car sales would look different.
If society wasn't as car-dependent as it is for basic survival, car sales would look different. It's not reflective of how much Americans sufficiently care about reducing emissions.
That Gilens and Page study has been debunked time and time again by various followup studies. Overwhelmingly the American people get their way. If not that, just look at direct polls from sources like Gallup. Even amongst climate-conscious progressives, the will to pay extra for gas or beef to negate climate change just isn't there.
Edit: as a test question for anyone who believes this 90% nonsense - can you name a single piece of high-priority, salient legislation (i.e. not an executive order or Supreme Court decision) that a vast majority of Americans didn't want, but that went through anyway because the government did the bidding of the corporations?
Overwhelmingly, the reason why we don't get policies like climate change mitigation, universal healthcare, housing, etc. is because Americans are just fundamentally divided on these topics. And where they are somewhat "united" (say, a public option for healthcare), they don't want to increase taxes to pay for it.
(High-priority and salient because things like dairy trade policy are probably influenced more by lobbying, but that's because most Americans obviously don't care about dairy trade policy)
The National Defense Authorization Act? Obviously that answer has nuance and is not saying that the US should go without the spirit of what the NDAA is supposed to do, but in practice...
Are regressive. And nobody is actually offering a plan to manage the pain applied to the working class. You, of course, are rich enough to be mostly unaffected.
Utilities are privatized, transit is just enough to say it's there, housing prices are through the roof. The corporate media tells people to be afraid of social programs and you blame them for listening. Of course, you also swallow the propaganda yourself, and expect a "market-oriented" approach to be accepted by the people who the market left behind.
> And nobody is actually offering a plan to manage the pain applied to the working class
Increasing taxes on higher income/wealthy and redistributing the cash to the poor. It is always the plan when a solution to a different problem is regressive.
I am a physicist with a 2009 Prius and a shitty apartment in an old house in Providence. I've been advocating for better policy for more than a decade. You've got the wrong guy.
The problem is that you don't understand that politics is mostly about the choices of people who are not like you, and your puffed-up bourgeois elitism doesn't help anyone.
This is why climate change is impossible to deal with - everything contributes 'just a tiny fraction' when broken down by industry and by country.
Private jets may be a miniscule percentage of the total, but they're one of the most glaringly wasteful, and they're also setting a very bad example for the rest of us. Why should hundreds of millions of working class people accept that they're going to have to lose their cars (and therefore their jobs), their meat, and their ability to heat/cool their small homes while our leaders still use private jets even when travelling to discuss climate change policy?
We need proposed solutions to climate change that don't look like a giant boot stomping on the face of the poor forever.
The vast majority will never be able to afford Teslas or other neat-but-very-expensive green tech.
So if somebody blows oh I dunno 6 tons of carbon flying to a climate conference, but they make deals at that conference that save 60 tons of carbon, are they an a-hole?
Even if they save 60 million tons of carbon, they're sure to do it by making people less well-off than themselves even poorer - while flaunting the fact that the wealthy don't need to make any lifestyle changes to 'save the planet', it's another burden that'll be passed on to 'the poors'.
What’s the evidence this comes from climate change? Like how was that proven? (I’m just curious, I didn’t mean to sin. I have my full faith in climate change.)
If you live in western or northern Europe it is already obvious that the climate is getting warmer. Summers we previously thought were heat waves are now normal and winters with -5C to -10C days which were previously normal are now extremely cold. The change in the last 15 years has been very notable.
But evidence? How can you prove that a smoker's lung cancer was caused by them smoking their entire life?
Yeah, I was thinking we need something like Climate Heat Bomb Zoe not something that sounds innocuous like Heat Wave Zoe. There have always been "heat waves" but the severity and frequency of extreme weather events is all us and our consumption lifestyle.
> proMETEO Seville is a collaboration between the City of Seville; Arsht-Rock’s Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance (EHRA) Science Advisory Panel—comprising leading climatologists, social and behavioral scientists, and public health and disaster relief experts—AEMET; the University of Sevilla; Pablo de Olavide University; the Carlos III Institute; the Spanish Office for Climate Change; and El Día Después.
I thought we were moving away from naming storms and so on because people take their prejudices about people and apply them to the weather events. E.g. people take hurricanes named after women less seriously and are less prepared.
> I thought we were moving away from naming storms
The UK is moving towards naming winter storms.
A reason for this is this, is that the storm that hit Scotland in December 2011
was not referred to by a name, so the Scots come up with an "unofficial" name for it anyway: "Hurricane Bawbag". (1)
You can find out for yourself what "Bawbag" is Scottish for, but using official names was seen as preferable.
Reading the paper [1] they used the period 1950-2012. All Atlantic hurricanes had female names until 1979, however, which means that if older hurricanes were more deadly then it will look like female-named hurricanes were more deadly.
And it does look likely that older hurricanes were more deadly. Looking at the deadliest 1950-2012 North Atlantic hurricanes in decreasing order of (international) death toll [2], we have Orlene (1974), Flora (1963), David (1979), Gordon (1994), and Janet (1955). You can also look at the paper's dataset [3] and see that three hurricanes killed >100 Americans before 1979, and only one after. Restricting their dataset to 1979+ (the period when both male and female names were used) I count 420 female-hurricane deaths and 452 male-hurricane deaths.
While this decrease in deaths may be related to their naming, I would guess it has more to do with worse forecasting and lower building standards. And will likely reverse over time as storms become more intense and more people live in hurricane-prone areas.
I actually think the Ubuntu naming scheme would be perfect for weather events. You get a date-based numbering scheme for official/catalog use, and a cute name for the media.
The problem is clearly overpopulation. If there were 70M people worldwide, then pollution would largely be under control, and there would be enough space, natural resources and places with comfortable weather for people to not do wars and to not have to worry about climate so much.
Engineering solution: generate a system of valid commonly-pronounceable phonotactics (rules like consonant-vowel-consonant is an allowed syllable). Banlist any name with >N people bearing that name (there's always gonna be outliers/collisions/future names).
With Toki Pona's inventory (mnptkswljaeiou), limited phonotactics (CV), and 3 syllables you get about 45 unique syllables, or 91,125 words. Add more syllables or phonotactics as needed. Affix the year - "Kalada-22". Add filters (profanity, too close to certain names, etc) as needed, you have overhead. Regenerate/reuse yearly unless retired.
That should be easily enough to name every hurricane, heat wave, flash flood, tornado, pandemic, rat infestation, and mercury retrograde, while being pronounceable, and memorable enough if it becomes newsworthy.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadComing up next, names for cold snaps, tide surges, landslides and solar flares.
Followed by name diversity arguments for them all.
I'm not dismissing the severity of these events, but this just reeks of headline clickbait marketing material.
I assume that heat waves are now named by the mass media to give undeserved importance to the topic of global warming.
Remember Hurricane Katrina? Names help.
Specifically now that we have a material climate change problem, it helps to give a name to the problem.
Snarkily, I vote for the first one to be 'Chevy Suburban'.
we remember it because of the destruction, not because of the name. you could’ve called it august 05 hurricane and it would be the same thing.
e.g. 9-11
9-11 works because the tragedy was 'massive' (the biggest attack since pearl harbour and most civilian deaths ever).
Any name applied to 9-11 would have 'stuck'.
Moreover, 9-11 caught on at least in part because 911 is 'emergency' number in North America.
Hurricane Katrina comes nowhere near that threshold. Now - it may have been giving a populist name, such as 'The Orleans Breach' or something instead of an official name.
But the names really do help us remember and contextualize.
A lot of people are gonna look real stupid in 10-20yr when it becomes clear in hindsight that the solution to societal alarm fatigue was not to just increase the volume. (And I'm gonna head off the inevitable snarky comments by reminding everyone that alarm fatigue caused by alarms rightfully going off is still alarm fatigue.)
People have no problem remembering the Hurricane of '38. This naming stuff is all theater. Playing PR games so you can have .05% more "resonates with the public" or whatever dumb KPI you're chasing this quarter isn't gonna slow or mitigate global warming. But it will help you be seen "doing something" which appears to matter a lot to a lot of people.
There was a push several years ago by popular weather broadcast channels (that effectively re-package and re-sell National Weather Service data and forecasts) to begin naming winter storms in the same fashion as hurricanes. The NWS put out a strong warning to their own forecasters to NOT use those names in official materials.
Then there is the trend by news media to replace “hurricane” with “Superstorm” when a storm causes a particularly high dollar amount of damage but may not have maintained hurricane force winds or simply because it hit a densely populated area.
The definition of superstorm precludes any other named meteorological event such as a hurricane. But superstorm sounds better than hurricane.
Example: "The Zoe heatwave is comming" "The Zoe heatwave has increased in severity" "Local Officials decided to restrict forest activies due to Zoe heatwave"
By glance, or just reading titles, an average person knows about the danger and it's incomming. It's harder to get that information on unnamed weather phenomems. Example:
"A heatwave is comming" "A heatwave is worse than expected" "Local Officials decided to restrict forest activies due to incoming heatwave"
NOAA info on related subject https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/storm-names.html
40% of global electricity is from coal. That’s much worse than oil.
We burn more coal than ever.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265507/global-coal-consu...
Let’s all watch Carl Sagan from 1985 and figure out how to solve this multi-generational problem.
https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI
He warned us not to use coal. Did we listen?
At the very least, we can buy ourselves a couple extra decades.
Update:
Got immediately downvoted so clearly I can’t respond.
Now I’m going to optimize my website so it uses less electricity then blog about which computer language uses less electricity.
Climate change is a form of bike shedding. We talk about a bunch of irrelevant ideas rather than addressing the real issues.
But hey, oil companies knew and didn’t tell us what we already knew. We’re off the hook!
Let’s keep sending climate change deniers to Washington:
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/climate-deniers-117...
Yes, when dealing with things in our own lives it's usually best to go with "at your own feet", not mater who the actors are, since the only person whose actions you can change are your own.
But as far as climate goes, we, the individuals (who happen to not be rich at the moment) have no power to change anything. So taking personal responsibility will change nothing.
Well, actually, people taking personal responsibility for the climate have possibly made it worse by redirecting the attention to themselves.
Consumers are not just going to pull on their big boy pants and stop consuming, and we'll all live happily in a recovered ecosystem eating organic corn by candlelight. It has to be regulation on industry, and improvements to production (eg ditch coal power generation). Stop it where it matters, where impacts have the scale to actually matter.
I've been riding my bike to work this whole damn time! I think we're going to have to be a bit more ambitious.
If the serious consideration for those posturing starts and ends with consumption, then the consistent approach would be to oppose immigration. They do not, because it was never the point. Self-righteously indignation and signaling is.
Saying this with the awareness that both right-wing detractors and far-leftists like to target consumers/consumption, as for the latter it dovetails with their anti-Capitalism. Just look at the fusion energy thread from the other day, people are voicing concern that carbon-neutral and cheaper energy would lead to people buying more things. Westerners are struggling to get by, with purchasing power stagnating for years, and yet it's being projected they're practically drowning in useless stuff compared to their grandparents.
More than that, they used the time to prepare propaganda.
This feels kinda like other arguments I see for systemic problems where we blame individuals in the US - we have the most people in jail because they make bad decisions, we have the most shootings because those people are bad, we have so much obesity because people don't have self control, etc - but all these are happening across the population and not in other countries so the cause can't be the individual people, it has to be caused by the environment we're in.
As another argument that ignores the blame question altogether - it's just about how we can make the biggest impact the fastest. It's much easier to pass a law saying that makes it prohibitively expensive to be an oil company than it is to say people need to limit their driving more, and the downstream effect will be the same with less people using oil
I do not see why this would be the case. Politician who is advertising that they will vote against proposals to increase gas taxes would also advertise that they will vote against proposals to make being an oil company prohibitively expensive so that gas prices can go lower or stay low.
In the US, we still have a whole political party that removes drilling restrictions and is eager to install pipelines and do whatever is necessary to enable fossil fuel consumption, and they are a very popular party.
Even right now, the single biggest political issue for voters is gas prices, and having to consume less. And who they can vote for so they do not have to consume less.
Yes, there's plenty of blame to go around, but Ford has much better advertising and many more lobbying dollars than researchers.
Hell, fewer and fewer compact cars are being made for the US market. By the time I need to buy a new car, all that's going to be available will be vehicles that are probably way heavier than what I want, let alone need. I don't want a vehicle like an F150 or a Bronco, I want a Fiesta (which has been discontinued).
So while I can reuse bags, avoid plastic straws, raise my thermostat in the summer, etc. I can't buy a responsible car that isn't for sale. I can't move into a densely zoned neighborhood that doesn't exist. I can't take public transportation that doesn't exist. I don't get to pick how the food for sale in my super market was grown/transported to the store.
Solution has always been dead simple. Increase fossil fuel taxes to whatever levels necessary to curb consumption. But again, that is not what the people want. ExxonMobile themselves come out and campaign for $20/gallon gas tax, and they would get vilified.
Source? As far as I can tell, Prius, Corolla, Camry, Civic, Accord, and a plethora of small vehicles have been easily available for purchase for decades. And continue to still be available.
Again, consumers don't have the choice you seem to think they do.
Go back far enough and you'll see that people bought more cars (because more cars were for sale).
But the advertising campaigns designed to get people on board with what it was most convenient for manufacturers to deliver had a lasting impact on demand even after most of the regulations the classes of vehicle were meant to exploit were closed. (Also, the presence of lots of large vehicles on the road caused by that makes it worse for smaller vehicles, so it becomes self-reinforcing once in place.)
If 90% of Americans sufficiently cared about reducing carbon emissions, car sales would look different.
Edit: as a test question for anyone who believes this 90% nonsense - can you name a single piece of high-priority, salient legislation (i.e. not an executive order or Supreme Court decision) that a vast majority of Americans didn't want, but that went through anyway because the government did the bidding of the corporations?
Overwhelmingly, the reason why we don't get policies like climate change mitigation, universal healthcare, housing, etc. is because Americans are just fundamentally divided on these topics. And where they are somewhat "united" (say, a public option for healthcare), they don't want to increase taxes to pay for it.
(High-priority and salient because things like dairy trade policy are probably influenced more by lobbying, but that's because most Americans obviously don't care about dairy trade policy)
Are regressive. And nobody is actually offering a plan to manage the pain applied to the working class. You, of course, are rich enough to be mostly unaffected.
Utilities are privatized, transit is just enough to say it's there, housing prices are through the roof. The corporate media tells people to be afraid of social programs and you blame them for listening. Of course, you also swallow the propaganda yourself, and expect a "market-oriented" approach to be accepted by the people who the market left behind.
But there's always enough money for another war.
Increasing taxes on higher income/wealthy and redistributing the cash to the poor. It is always the plan when a solution to a different problem is regressive.
Both sides of this argument can be passing the buck whilst benefiting from participating.
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/17/newly-drawn-...
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/fairvote/pages/2412/at...
https://www.uniteamerica.org/sections/partisan-primaries-dis...
It’s pretty clear today what you can buy or not but to lesson your climate impact.
If you choose to blame your poor choices on “incentives” well, that’s on you.
Own it.
I am a physicist with a 2009 Prius and a shitty apartment in an old house in Providence. I've been advocating for better policy for more than a decade. You've got the wrong guy.
The problem is that you don't understand that politics is mostly about the choices of people who are not like you, and your puffed-up bourgeois elitism doesn't help anyone.
Sufficiently tax the emissions if the boat wants to unload in the country so that cleaner boats are used or production moves on shore.
Private jets may be a miniscule percentage of the total, but they're one of the most glaringly wasteful, and they're also setting a very bad example for the rest of us. Why should hundreds of millions of working class people accept that they're going to have to lose their cars (and therefore their jobs), their meat, and their ability to heat/cool their small homes while our leaders still use private jets even when travelling to discuss climate change policy?
We need proposed solutions to climate change that don't look like a giant boot stomping on the face of the poor forever.
The vast majority will never be able to afford Teslas or other neat-but-very-expensive green tech.
Well, we can determine globally that heating and electricity generation are responsible for 25% of greenhouse emissions.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
Out of curiosity, how is 40% of global electricity generated?
Out of curiosity, what’s the worst possible fossil fuel one could use?
But evidence? How can you prove that a smoker's lung cancer was caused by them smoking their entire life?
> proMETEO Seville is a collaboration between the City of Seville; Arsht-Rock’s Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance (EHRA) Science Advisory Panel—comprising leading climatologists, social and behavioral scientists, and public health and disaster relief experts—AEMET; the University of Sevilla; Pablo de Olavide University; the Carlos III Institute; the Spanish Office for Climate Change; and El Día Después.
[1] https://onebillionresilient.org/2022/07/25/heat-wave-zoe-sev...
[2] https://prometeosevilla.com/en/inicio-english/
Seriously, they should use this mechanism to call out legislators that refuse to act on client, or, even worse, block client action.
They should also include international figures - "Heat Wave Bolsonaro" has a nice ring to it.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-have-...
The UK is moving towards naming winter storms.
A reason for this is this, is that the storm that hit Scotland in December 2011 was not referred to by a name, so the Scots come up with an "unofficial" name for it anyway: "Hurricane Bawbag". (1)
You can find out for yourself what "Bawbag" is Scottish for, but using official names was seen as preferable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Bawbag
[0]: http://howmanyofme.com/search/
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
This turned out to be nonsense.
And it does look likely that older hurricanes were more deadly. Looking at the deadliest 1950-2012 North Atlantic hurricanes in decreasing order of (international) death toll [2], we have Orlene (1974), Flora (1963), David (1979), Gordon (1994), and Janet (1955). You can also look at the paper's dataset [3] and see that three hurricanes killed >100 Americans before 1979, and only one after. Restricting their dataset to 1979+ (the period when both male and female names were used) I count 420 female-hurricane deaths and 452 male-hurricane deaths.
While this decrease in deaths may be related to their naming, I would guess it has more to do with worse forecasting and lower building standards. And will likely reverse over time as storms become more intense and more people live in hurricane-prone areas.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1402786111
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_deadliest_tropical...
[3] https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.1402786111/suppl...
22.07 Zesty Zoe.
With Toki Pona's inventory (mnptkswljaeiou), limited phonotactics (CV), and 3 syllables you get about 45 unique syllables, or 91,125 words. Add more syllables or phonotactics as needed. Affix the year - "Kalada-22". Add filters (profanity, too close to certain names, etc) as needed, you have overhead. Regenerate/reuse yearly unless retired.
That should be easily enough to name every hurricane, heat wave, flash flood, tornado, pandemic, rat infestation, and mercury retrograde, while being pronounceable, and memorable enough if it becomes newsworthy.