relianceschool

The level of obstinacy and stupidity in this administration never ceases to amaze me.

Each year the WEF publishes a Global Risk Report, surveying over 300 global experts and leaders from business, government, and academia on what they believe are the most pressing threats facing the world. For the past 3 years, climate change and its associated impacts have consistently ranked #1, #2, and #3 among all quantified threats.

To not only downrank this threat, but pretend that it presents no risk entirely implies that the US doesn't even have object permanence at this point.

Dishwashers, fridges, laundry machines, vacuums and other basic home appliances are mostly mature technologies; their basic design & function solidified over 70 years ago and there's not much left to improve on now (other than efficiency).

This isn't an issue for consumers or private companies, but public companies need to deliver increasing profits (not just steady profits) year over year. One solution to this is planned obsolescence, but adding a bunch of unnecessary tech "features" kills two birds with one stone by allowing manufacturers to justify higher prices while also building in additional points of failure. It's also a means of harvesting consumer data which can then be sold for additional profit.

Good for shareholders, bad for everyone else.

I'm on my 4th year with my pollinator garden (Colorado), and the goal from here is filling in every square inch of uncovered earth with ground cover and spreading plants. I love Western Sunflower for that purpose, and I've been trying unsuccessfully to get Violets established (I know, right? They're considered a weed in most places) so I'm going to give that another go.

Trying out Blue Flax, Wild Strawberry, Lanceleaf Coreopsis, Wild Garlic, Wild Geranium, and Wild Phlox this year as well. Learned about Figwort's amazing pollinator benefits last year, so going to plant out more of that in the side yard!

Right, but it's the same part of the year that you're able to hike, bike, and garden.

That might depend on where you call home. I used to live in VT where you couldn't step outside without something (blackflies, mosquitos, midges, deerflies, horseflies) trying to take a bite out of you. But now I live in CO, and generally speaking most of the American West is an absolute joy to be outside in. You can just sit down on the ground in a forest and be at peace.

I think it's important to spend time in wild spaces (backpacking is great for this), but since home is where we spend most of our time, bringing nature into the backyard is huge for daily exposure. I work from home, so whenever I feel like I've been staring at screens for too long, I head out to the pollinator garden for a reset.

For me, this is the key paragraph:

Few outsiders have gotten a glimpse of Stardust’s plans, and the company has not publicly released details about its technology, its business model, or exactly who works at its company. But the company appears to be positioning itself to develop and sell a proprietary geoengineering technology to governments that are considering making modifications to the global climate—acting like a kind of defense contractor for climate alteration.

If the past year has taught us anything, it's that we don't want to become more beholden to private capital for critical societal needs, and a stable atmosphere is at the absolute bottom of the pyramid. Dave Karpf has a great take on the geoengineering situation, so I'll let his words take it from here:

First, we have to believe that the science of geoengineering is rock-solid. Second, we have to believe the science of real-time climate modeling and forecasting has been basically perfected. You need your climate models to be extremely good in order to forecast what the effects of geoengineering will be. And you need the geoengineering not to have any surprising downstream consequences that the engineers couldn’t predict. You particularly need this because “termination shock” is itself a warning – once you start this process at scale, you cannot end it without disastrous consequences. You had better be right.

Geoengineering would absolutely be a minefield of unintended consequences. It has never been attempted before. We are incapable of testing it at scale without, y’know, actually pulling the trigger and trying. The degree to which we just don’t fucking know what the unintended impacts of geoengineering would be is off the charts here. The models are based on two major volcanic eruptions, with limited contemporaneous data collection. We’re starting from an N of TWO! Model it all you want, but those models will be based on assumptions that can only be refined once we’ve pulled the trigger on the giant silver bullets.

For those who are coming straight to the comments, essentially the Fish & Wildlife Service is proposing culling tens of thousands of Barred Owls in order to prevent them from displacing Spotted Owls. The issue is that landowners can also apply for a culling permit, and the two species are close enough in appearance as to be indistinguishable from each other (especially at night), which means Spotted Owls are just as likely to be killed as Barred Owls.

In short: a good intention, a very bad idea.