Let's get a climate change / environment thread going.
What's Zig Forums's solution to the ecological crisis? How would a modern socialist society deal with things like pollution, plastics, land degradation, deforestation, and so on? How do we ensure every is conscious of environmental needs?
gritpost.com
The basically suggests that to halt this would require capitlaism to be destroyed.
I think an important topic for leftists to explain is how capitalism doesn't offer any kind of solution or plan to tackle climate change.
Often the liberal parties operate under the belief that "We need to take climate change serious, but we can not abandon the market economy in doing so, the innovation and competition of a market economy will be most effective at tackling climate change coupled with consumer choice"
This is obviously bullshit for two reasons:
1) Consumers are just going to keep consuming under a capitalist economic model, that's the most important role we have become propagandized to fulfill and our existential character under capitalism is one that is defined by what it consumes.
2) The technology needed to reverse or help climate change are at an infant stage at best. There is no ETA on when any technological advancements are going to arrive.
Since it is not in the benefit of the ruling class to abolish capitalism under any circumstances, even pending cataclysmic collapse of the climate, the proposed solutions to help combat climate change in a short term are completely ridiculous, things like building giant walls costing trillions of dollars and problematic geoengineering.
What socialisms offers is an actual answer, through public ownership of the means of production, an economic model that doesn't necessitate endless growth and massive consumption and hopefully a world unified in struggling against the biggest social, political, scientific, technological and economical challenge that humanity has ever faced.
In conclusion; Humanity is in desperate need of getting rid of capitalism, socialism is the best action to combat climate change, but once we get there we still have a long road ahead of us.
Turn Yellowstone into a geothermal power plant.
define what you mean
as of right now, it's too late to seriously prevent techno-industrial civilizational collapse this century
Post-capitalism, duh. Environmentalism is one of the left's strongest talking points, often to such a degree that right wing politicians are forced to take blatantly anti-scientific positions for the sake of ideology.
No that's wrong. We do have the technology. The problem is that social system that this technology is subsumed under, capitalism, is incapable of utilizing that technology to solve the problem. The problem isn't technological, it's social.
The problem with capitalism isn't its pursuit of economic growth but that this growth comes at the expense of the earth and the people on it. The ecological excuse for dismissing the need for growth is conservative, and not progressive. It is only through the organization of the technical forces of economy can we solve the ills that plague mother earth. Again, the problem isn't technology, it is society.
To quote Lenin when dealing with an impending catastrophe that the Provisional Government had proved impotent to solve "Control Measures Are Known To All and Easy To Take". The impotence of the ruling order is the impotence of the capitalist class. We know there is a problem, we know the solutions, but we are unwilling to commit. Why? Because those solution would undercut the superprofits of the corporate overlords that control the industries destroying the earth.
Eco-Stalinism
We don't, though. We have fictional tech solutions that haven't been proven to work at scale. This type of tech fetishism influenced by the regularity of industrial society and the notion that humanity exists outside of nature or is always capable of besting it are going to get us all killed. The best proposed tech solution for carbon capture is BECCS, which is what the IPCC factors into it's climate models, is only being used in isolated instances that even if it was able to capture carbon emissions completely it would only render the plants carbon neutral. We needed to go carbon negative a decade ago just to stay under 2 degrees. In a hypothetical situation where BECCS can produce negative carbon outcomes the biomass needed to fuel those BECCS plants would cover an area about twice the size of India. The truth is that the window of opportunity to address/reverse climate change has passed. We're now in a situation where the best we can do is to develop mitigation strategies to deal with the worst effects of the climate catastrophe on the horizon and hope we haven't triggered enough positve feedback loops that could send the climate into a runaway situation where we're eventually living on a planet with a climate that hasn't been seen here for almost 55 million years.
It is possible to start combating climate change with current technology but the solution will have it's own risks. Massive buildup of traditional fission power plants to power carbon capture and create carbon neutral fuel, boom carbon negative. The risk of course is nuclear accidents but that is a risk worth taking if the alternative is large scale deaths. I don't expect the capitalists to take such action, or any action. Eco-Stalinism can't come quick enough.
Anyone else worried about climate change turning the Americans into full on facists?
this tbh
Esoteric Eco-Stalinism?
Also real talk. The reason for them allowing climate change is so that they will have fresh proles from the Global South as it will become a hellhole and people from there will be willing to work slave labor in the Global North.
Why the fuck would you need a massive war machine to fix ecological issues?
Does this exist in a manner workable to replace oil? I know of hydrogen fuel cells, but I'm not sure what their downsides are.
Nuclear war between China and USA.
Synthetic fuel has been a thing since WWII. It was produced using coal in the past which is obviously not carbon neutral. The carbon neutral way would be capture free carbon and hydrogen and recombine them into gas, diesel, kerosene etc. The US navy has the capability of converting sea water to jet fuel (requires electricity) on aircraft carriers in case of emergency. As expected, it is very inefficient which is why carbon neutral fuel will never be viable in a profit driven economic system.
Personally I think hydrogen fuel cells are a shitty meme since storing hydrogen is difficult, require different engines. Much better to just produce gasoline or diesel since we already know how to store that and we already have machine that use those things as fuel. Either way producing hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuel in a carbon neutral way will require a non carbon producing source of electricity.
Bio-fuels are another possibility, I don't mean using farmland to grow fuel, but rather converting waste oil from cooking or waste industrial greases into burnable fuel. This would also be carbon neutral. Biofuel/recycled fuel is actually profitable under capitalism in some circumstances but I don't think it can be scaled up enough to meet all transportation needs.
However, it is probably not necessary to fully replace current fossil fuel consumption with carbon neutral fuels. Ground transport can be done with electric trucks/buses/trains, greatly reducing personal automobile use will probably be necessary for any attempt at fixing the environment regardless of what kind of power source the cars use. Sea transport can be done by sail and would not be much slower. The only transportation method that really needs carbon neutral fuel is air since there is no way to make a battery powered aircraft that can haul any useful load.
Soviet power + electrification of the country side = eco stalinism? The only question is how to get the electricity is vast enough quantities. Fission for base load augmented by solar wherever possible seems to be the only current option.
To stop those who will continue to pollute(China), to build massive levies and other civil engineering projects (Army Corp of Engineers), to seize farmland, to kill porkies.
thanks
saved
Blow up Yellowstone and hope it causes an Ice Age. Hopefully it gets rid of Ameriburgers while we're at it.
Are you high? China is not a major polluter by any serious metric.
But Varg Vikernes said that global warming isn't real, and Europe's going into a second ice age.
This must be bait but I'll give you the benefit of doubt. The country is the manufacturer of damn near everything nowdays and the government cares little about enforcing environmental protections. China has lots of coal burning power plants and they are building more. Have you seen pictures of smog in Chinese cities? They causes it themselves. Per capita maybe they aren't much of a polluter but as a country they certainly are.
epa.gov
they've ruined the environment of their land well enough theyre going to have to be one of the first nations to tackle climate change issues. or they'll have to develop better gas masks. but i feel their pollution is a deliberate risk taken to get to where they are now economically, and that they will actually start to take some initiative as their government seems well-suited to do so. at least i hope they do. before they have to start wearing hazmat suits.
The world is going to hell. Nothing to do about it.
I love this multi-pronged attack this shit radlib board keeps launching at China. China is to blame for everything! China china china!
Eventually the UN/NATO will blame china for global warming and seek to destroy them to "save the planet".
Yes, let all developing nations regress into feudalism and pre-industry again! Let us petty-booj western leftists live in peace and avarice!
