I think that the everyday material concerns are indeed key, and there might be some fairly “easy” victories in the fields of affordable energy, housing and public transport. However, I think there is a real clash between the current desire of the working classes to accelerate their consumerist lifestyles, and the ecological boundaries. For all their sins, the predicament is not just the fossil fuel industry being evil, it’s bigger than that. Getting the obvious things sorted out is a beginning in the right direction, but actual sustainability requires a deeper change of orientation.

I don’t believe we’ll get very far in this transition in the next decades unless we begin to break capital’s control on all the essential aspects of our lives. The accumulation of capital would continue to drive the resource allocation, the political system and the meaning we grant our own existence, to the detriment of life upholding earth systems and the majorities of the world. And there will be no political consciousness to break the control of capital in a consumerist society where people are estranged from how life is recreated and upheld, where democracy means just voting in an election and where work is done just in exchange for a paycheck.

How can this begin to change? Heron, Millburn and Russel have one pretty convincing proposal and example in their book Radical Abundance. An intentionally designed institution that brings workers, local communities and the public sector together to deliberate on and control matters of production and consumption that are directly relevant to the participants.

The best part? It does not require prior legislative or electoral victories to start building these kind of institutions. It would directly counter some growth dependencies. Ideological motivations are not assumed to be the driver of participation. The hardest part? To get people involved and organized of course. But it starts from seeing the promise in this kind of action.

While there are so many different tracks of action required, this is one with great promise, that I’ve seen too little discussion and action on.

https://fojournal.org/interview/radical-abundance/

It has some interesting stuff in it, even though it’s of course very USA-focused. I remember Ajay Singh Chaudhary destroying Matt Huber for the productivist ideas in his book, which do not respect the material reality of the ecocrisis. The above piece takes no position on questions of reducing consumption and production either. But this bit I’ll try to memorize:

One of the most frustrating aspects of climate politics today is that it is arguably the Right that mobilizes class politics most effectively on this issue. Right-wing politicians consistently argue climate action is a plot of the liberal elite to harm the lives of average working-class families with rising energy costs and lost jobs. On the other hand, liberal activists often make climate change about everything but class — “Believe Science” — and sometimes advocating policies like carbon taxes that would raise the price of energy (affirming precisely what the Right warns against).

I agree on the point of not ignoring these feelings. It’s a tough question, how to change the culture to be more welcoming to immigration in the time of looming climate refugee crises. Just wanted to point out that Sweden has a lower population density (26 ppl/km2) than the US (38 ppl/km2). Density is probably not the issue, although how all that land is put to use might be one of them.

I’d love to like Tuta but man was using their service a constant pain. The search is incredibly slow for any messages not downloaded and keyword matching is somehow weird, the spam filter fails terribly (my spam folder was always full of legitimate messages), assigning rules is clumsy, and you can’t even bulk export mail to switch services:((

The tweet that seemed to be bootlicking Trump was worrying and troubling in my opinion as well. However, reading this deeper analysis alleviated at least some of my fears https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e

Also the foundation model decisively limits the influence of the founder. There seems to be no other European email service that’s quite on par with Proton. Therefore I still think they are the top alternative.

While a tempting logic, in my understanding of the dairy market this is not correct. To my knowledge, here in Finland the big retail chains initiate auctions for the milk contracts, which are highly competed. If a producer tries to raise the price, they will likely not sell any milk at all. On top of that, milk is an important loss leader for the retail chains. The price is kept as low as possible, and it might even be sold at a loss, to tempt customers who will then compensate for this loss with the rest of their shopping basket. Against this, it would be very incorrect to assume that nobody bats an eye if the price of milk increases ten cents.

For anyone wondering whether to click: yes, the article is very critical of this and gives a lot of space to experts who think that this is an absolutely terrible idea. I think the value here is in knowing what the oil industry tries to do and how they try to lie to justify their crimes.