Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kurt Cobb The question of consciousness continues to devil us. If consciousness is distributed throughout the universe, then its appearance in humans is just one manifestation. Does it matter one way or the other how we think about this question? I think it does profoundly.
A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (video) //
Could a GND Make Us Happier People? //
Meet Rhiana Gunn-Wright, An (African-American) Architect Behind the GND //
Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance
The strange truth about one of the world’s largest oil exporters is that it has been planning for a post-oil society since the discovery of its oil resources. Norway’s move to protect sensitive arctic areas is just the latest example of how Norwegians think about our energy future.
The task of addressing climate change is so large that the only way in which it can be addressed with any success is if everyone is involved. As long as so many people are focused every day on just getting what they need to live, such broad involvement will be impossible. Are there ways to build the solidarity and involvement we need to fight climate change?
The novel has essentially the same premise as the hit disaster movie from five years earlier, The Day After Tomorrow. The Gulf Stream ocean current, which has long played a crucial role in our planet’s climate system, undergoes a sudden collapse driven primarily by human-caused global warming. Ice caps rapidly spread across the northern hemisphere, rendering places like New York City and western and northern Europe uninhabitable to all but the most rugged survivalists.
Supporters of America’s new get-tough foreign policy are touting the country’s emerging “oil weapon” wrought from increasing production in the shale oil fields of Texas and other states. The rise of oil imports from Russia is just one sign that those supporters have the situation completely wrong.
A new paper by a long-time sustainability academic and consultant says that minor tweaks in our current system won’t help us. We are likely headed for societal collapse and need a radical new way of thinking about the future. The first necessary casualty is hope–hope that we can keep things largely the way they are.
The main problems with tech mirages: 1) They destroy or undermine existing businesses, weakening them to the point where they collapse and then those tech mirages collapse themselves leaving society without the service supplied by the businesses they destroyed and/or 2) they distract from what we really need to do to adapt to the twin crises of climate change and resource depletion.
A few weeks ago I wrote about black-and-white movies like Stagecoach, and how they often dealt with our modern, 21st-century problems in a way that modern media does not. Someone might ask: So What? If a movie made nine decades ago had a timely message, how does that affect my problems now? The question motivated me to write about the stories we tell each other about *class*.
What is most important, to live with as small a carbon footprint as possible or to prioritize collective action to change laws, rules, and incentives? For me, this is not the right question to ask.
With the dawn of industrialization, democracy in work went into reverse. What’s important here is that most people know little or nothing of this history or cannot conceive of it in terms of loss of liberty. They simply accept the arrangements in their jobs as somehow ordained in a nominally democratic society, as how work must necessarily be organized.
I just finished reading David Wallace-Wells’ book,”The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.” When asked whether focusing on predictions of doom is productive or just numbing, Wallace-Wells responded: complacency poses a greater risk to our species than panic. A little panic can be a good thing, especially if you have become complacent.
