And in 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Adani executives of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain lucrative supply contracts for its solar energy and hiding this from potential investors. The case was dropped this month after Adani made offers to invest in the U.S., though U.S. officials denied any link.

Lol. I’m sure they did.

Lasting change takes collective action, not one rich guy throwing money around.

People like to toss out the factoid that Elon Musk could end world hunger with a tiny fraction of his hoarded fortune, and that’s true, as far as it goes. He could pay to feed everyone on earth. But if the structural, political, and economic factors that made those people hungry in the first place aren’t fixed, then weeks or months or years later they’ll all be hungry again.

I mean, take California’s high speed rail. Newsom and his predecessors have thrown something like thirty billion dollars at building a line from San Francisco to LA or wherever the hell it’s supposed to go, and it doesn’t really matter where it’s supposed to go, because they haven’t built shit. But the reason they haven’t built shit isn’t a lack of money - it’s because of landowners not wanting to give up their land for train tracks, it’s because of the glacial pace of environmental review and permitting, it’s because of sabotage by the richest man in the world who owns a car company and hates public transit on principle, it’s because of a hundred other things that a billionaire can’t fix by throwing money at it.

I don’t like Steyer, but he’s not wrong to believe that reforming California’s government is the only way to actually fix what’s wrong with California. He’s just wrong to think he can do it through the Democratic Party.

Things that are solarpunk: building tall, building dense, building multi-use. The more you limit your building footprint, the more space you have for farms and gardens and wild green spaces. A single 100-unit apartment complex, with a shuttle bus to the local train station, is roughly a hundred times more efficient than a subdivision with 100 single family homes and probably 200 cars.

People hate to hear it, but the American style of private home ownership ain’t solarpunk, or socialist, or any other brand of leftist. It’s pretty much the most capitalist thing a member of the working class will ever do.

Or pick the sprouts, cook them, and eat them. They’re like hardier asparagus 😆

“If the forests are doomed anyway, let’s log them all now and at least make some profit from it.” Trump, probably.

I don’t know. I stole it from Tumblr. Share at your own risk.

I wonder if Malcolm X ever considered that alienating white liberals decreased their ability to help his cause.

Did you look up the context of this quote? Because here, read the whole thing:

The White liberal is the worst enemy to America and the worst enemy to the Black man.

Let me first explain what I mean by this White liberal. In America there’s no such thing as Democrats and Republicans anymore. That’s antiquated. In America you have liberals and conservatives. This is what the American political structure boils down to among Whites. The only people who are still living in the past and thinks in terms of “I’m a Democrat” or “I’m a Republican” is the American Negro. He’s the one who runs around bragging about party affiliation and he’s the one who sticks to the Democrat or sticks to the Republican, but White people in America are divided into two groups, liberals and Republicans…or rather, liberals and conservatives.

And when you find White people vote in the political picture, they’re not divided in terms of Democrats and Republicans, they’re divided consistently as conservatives and as liberal. The Democrats who are conservative vote with Republicans who are conservative. Democrats who are liberals vote with Republicans who are liberals. You find this in Washington, DC.

Now the White liberals aren’t White people who are for independence, who are liberal, who are moral, who are ethical in their thinking, they are just a faction of White people who are jockeying for power the same as the White conservatives are a faction of White people who are jockeying for power. Now they are fighting each other for booty, for power, for prestige and the one who is the football in the game is the Negro. Twenty million Black people in this country are a political football, a political pawn an economic football, an economic pawn, a social football, a social pawn…

Politics have changed a lot since then, of course, but I think his message is pretty clear, and still valid. If you’re the kind of “white liberal” who doesn’t give a shit about Black rights except when you need Black votes to get your candidates elected - and there are tons of those holding office in the Democratic Party today - then you are an enemy of the Black man and America as a whole.

You’re correct, but your analysis is incomplete.

It took global, coordinated, governmental action to ban CFCs worldwide.

But governments were motivated to ban CFCs because so many individual people, ordinary citizens and voters, learned that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. Those individuals called on their governments to act. They funded the NGOs that studied and lobbied and suggested alternatives to CFCs. And they bought those alternatives instead of using CFCs themselves, which helped build the consensus to eliminate CFCs.

And individual action was part of building that consensus. Individual people, spreading awareness about the damage CFCs did, and choosing alternatives to CFCs in their own individual purchases, helped build consensus for system-level change.

Here’s a couple thought experiments. A new train or bus line is a system-level solution to improving public transit. So is a bike lane. But what individuals are more likely to vote for a new train line? People who drive to work, or people who rely on public transit? Who’s more likely to support a new bike lane, people who drive or people who bicycle?

Factory farming of animals is one of the greatest atrocities in modern society. But it provides cheap meat. Who’s more likely to support the system-level change necessary to ban factory farming? Someone who eats meat or someone who doesn’t? Someone who eats meat everyday or someone who eats meat once a week? Someone who knows how to cook without meat, or someone who doesn’t know how to cook without it?

And who’s going to be more passionate about banning factory farming - someone who consumes the products of factory farming daily and is necessarily going to feel conflicted about it? Or someone who has already rejected those products, in their own life, through individual action, and who will not lose anything in their own life if every feedlot and slaughterhouse is shut down?

Systemic change transforms the individual actions of entire communities. But it also works the other way around. Individual action builds consensus for systemic change. And we need to encourage and celebrate both.

I’d argue that the concept of a carbon footprint is not, inherently, a scam. You do have an impact on the world. Your carbon footprint is a real and genuine measure of that impact. And taking actions to reduce your carbon footprint is a way to mindfully track, measure, and reduce that impact.

Oil company propagandists may have used this real thing - your carbon footprint - to shift blame away from the oil companies and redirect people’s efforts to reducing individual consumption instead of working for political change. Which is bad. But the carbon footprint, itself, is not a scam - just the uses to which big oil put it.

Plastic recycling, on the other hand, is fake industry propaganda from start to finish.

And honestly, if I’m on my soapbox, I’ll remind everybody that “reduce, reuse, recycle” is in order of preference. Recyclable paper bags may be better for the environment than single use plastic bags, but bringing your own reusable cloth bag to the grocery store is even better. Just because a single-use product is recyclable doesn’t make it environmentally friendly.

I strongly suspect our technocrat overlords - the ones telling us global warming is a hoax - know very well that climate change is real, and are manipulating and positioning the United States to come out ahead in the new 3° world.

Not because they care about Americans, of course. But they’ll need somewhere to live when the rest of the world collapses, and most of their stuff is here.

The United States damning the Bering Strait would give the United States control over that shipping lane. And recent events have proved how vital the control of shipping lanes can be.

It’s not hysterics. It’s fact.

Ethanol burns more fossil fuel than it replaces. It turns more fuel into less fuel and pisses away irreplaceable topsoil in the process.

Facts don’t care about your feelings.

If that was true (it’s not) why are we wasting so much land growing inedible corn? Maybe we could, you know, like the article says, use the land for better purposes?

You don’t need to feel ashamed. The system is so broken that just surviving each day is a victory on its own. If that’s all you can do - if every day is a recovery day from the last day - it’s still worth celebrating because you’re still fucking alive.

Sharing economy! That’s pretty cool. And pretty straightforward to open source if your community doesn’t speak German 😆

Oh fucking please. Fidesz got hammered by corruption scandals in 2024, Magyar dramatically breaks from the party over corruption, and somehow builds a massive nationwide coalition in a matter of months? The Hungarian opposition somehow abandons all its beliefs and rallies around a politician who holds all Orban’s political views?

The term for this is “planned opposition”.

Magyar isn’t Orban’s rival. He’s Orban’s chosen successor.

It’s easy to win an election if you own all the candidates.

And y’all fell for it.

That’s correct. I don’t.

As long as a single person on Earth is without food, or shelter, or hope for the future, it is a fucking crime to piss away our finite resources on a barren chunk of space rock.

The Artemis mission cost four billion dollars. If that money had been used to refund USAID it would have saved, literally, based on the estimates of casualties that will be caused by USAID’s defunding, two million lives. Two million of the world’s poorest people, now dead or dying of starvation and disease and exposure to the elements, that we could have saved for the cost of sending a handful of the most privileged people in the world on a fucking tour of the Moon.

And it’s happening now as a fucking distraction from the casualties of the war on Iran, and I don’t even have words for how monstrous that is, or how angry I am at the people embracing this propaganda campaign as an “apolitical triumph of the human species”.

All manned spaceflight is a waste of precious resources, but Artemis is the most repugnant, cynical, brazenly and dishonestly political waste of precious resources in my lifetime, and I am fucking older than manned spaceflight.

So, yeah, fuck this mission, fuck the entire idea of colonizing the Moon, and fuck everybody who thinks it’s more important to colonize the Moon then heal the sick on Earth.

One more Winstanley quote that goes hard:

And that this Civil Propriety is the Curse, is manifest thus, Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thous shalt not steal, nor kill”

It’s the opposite. More aerodynamic modern cars are more likely to hit insects on the road than the older blockier ones. They’re not hitting insects because there aren’t any insects to hit.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-splatometer-tests-reveal-huge-decline-number-insects

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon

Have you ever lived in a HOA?