Category: Environment
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Plastic
Corporate evil has a fairly predictable playbook that was developed by the tobacco industry starting in the 1940’s. The oil industry picked it up in the 1970’s and birthed the climate change denial that now infects both of the dominant political parties in the US. Oil industry lies have stymied effective action on climate change,…
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The American Death Cult
The Atlantic just published a gem of an essay by Elizabeth Bruenig entitled A Culture That Kills Its Children Has No Future which rails against Americans, generally, for being nihilistic trash. It really resonated with me after spending the last 5 years working against fascism and trying (mostly without success) to get liberals to help…
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The Man Who Accidentally Killed the Most People in History | Veritasium
When you think of the person that killed the most people in history, you probably assume it is going to be a dictator — probably a Hitler or a Stalin — but no, the person that killed the most people in history is Midgley. He was an aspiring capitalist who cared more about making a…
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Population Size and Post-apocalyptic Fantasies
There’s a persistent narrative in America about collapse involving a small band of heroic individuals surviving through a relatively short hard time to rebuild the human species. Sometimes, “relatively short” means only a few days, while sometimes it is as long as a generation, but the band of people is never bigger than perhaps a…
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Bidenism and the End of the World
The latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report has been out for a while (August 2021), and scientists are continuing to comment on it (the working group portion came out in February). In summary, limiting warming to 1.5C (probably the threshold for keeping advanced civilization from collapsing) requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak…
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Gas Prices
The government can do very little about gas prices. If you don’t believe me, please believe this pro-capitalism financial journalist’s opinion: Related: What Democrats don’t get about gas prices by Rick Newman Please note that when he says “the left” he means Democrats, who are not the left. Here are a few facts: Yes, the…
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Poverty, Homelessness, and the American Love of Automobiles
Other nations didn’t make the same decisions regarding city design and transportation as the US, and there’s evidence that the US model contributes significantly to poverty and homelessness. Yes, there is less poverty and homelessness in European cities. An article by Walter Jaegerhaus in Common Edge explores the question of what went wrong with American…
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Who caused the pandemic?
Since the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been a lot of people trying to find someone to blame. Republicans want to blame China as well as anyone who looks Asian, Democrats want to blame Donald Trump due to his bad pandemic policies and promotion of wacky, counter-productive ideas (like chloroquine and “it…