sweetpotato

My “attitude” in no way excuses the very offensive remarks on your part, but I guess that’s what happens when you try to defend undefendable claims. You jump from claim to claim, when you are proven wrong, like how you edited out the part where you claim the European trend can be extrapolated to the entire world and you personally attack me with the excuse that I was taken aback by the ignorance on a straightforward Google search.

From what you remember (from where? That’s a good question I guess no one will ever answer us apparently)that does not make up for the overall downwards trend of consumption and emissions. Ok let’s deconstruct that quickly. Consumption has not been decreasing, it has been increasing, proven by the ever rising GDP, which measures exactly that, the total output of goods and services and considering the imports and exports are roughly equal for Europe and that material consumption is coupled to gdp, that’s the consumption.

When I say that Europe has outsourced its heavy industry to third world countries, I wasn’t talking just about “importing goods”. I was talking about their entire production. And the fact that fossil fuel consumption is still ever growing in Europe as well as in the entire West, coupled to the GDP growth is proven in Hickel(2019) “Is green growth possible”, where the domestic material consumption index is proven not to be accounting for the outsourced fossil fuels and materials consumed in third world countries to produce the goods imported, vital for Europe. The actual material footprint(which is the fossil fuel consumption and materials combined) is growing along with the GDP. And when you understand this, you realize it is all an illusion of accounting.

These are your two tragically false claims. For the third paragraph I don’t have much to say besides that third world countries need to increase their GDP to be living comfortably since they are destitute and the first world countries need to degrow like we said. Scientists have been saying this for so many years. There is a space between planetary boundaries and the decent living conditions that all people can and should be living in. The west exceeds the planetary limits(per capita), the economic south is below decent living conditions. That’s what degrowth preaches. It refers to the west, not the world in general.

Why would you assume I am talking about Europe which accounts for 1/10 of the global energy consumption and why would I be talking the continent that has mostly outsourced its heavy industry to third world countries? Why would you assume this?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy?time=2000..latest

Here’s your source. Here’s your total energy consumption. It couldn’t have been that hard to look at our world in data right? How can you be so absolutely wrong about data in plain sight while being confident about it? Do you have an agenda?

Wasn’t expecting this under a random unrelated post. A very welcome comment nonetheless.

Never forget that the exponential boom of renewable energy tech the last 20 years has entirely served as additional energy, not as replacement of fossil fuels.

These mfs will use literally anything except for open source, decentralised social meda

What in the world do you mean “you expect our energy demands to stay the same or decrease?”. What does expect mean??? I don’t expect anything, I’m stating what needs to be done if we want our planet to remain habitable…have you heard about climate change or…? Also how do you keep ignoring the fact that our wealth has increased by 500% in the last 30 years and the 1% gets all the profit? We don’t need to increase our economic activities for all the people to be able to live comfortably, we need distribute wealth fairly and when we get to a point where everyone can live well, (in the West we are way past that point) then we need to scale down unnecessary economic activities, if we want to meet the scientific guidelines to avoid the 3 degrees by the end of the century, which would spell absolute irreversible disaster.

I never said it’s a US problem, and I didn’t make it sound like so, I was only using some data from the US for convenience. It’s a worldwide problem, but the US dictates the trajectory and policies of a very big part of the world including Europe, Canada, Australia and the gulf countries, all of which are essentially controlled by them. Also the US has by far the most CO2 emissions historically, making that country the single biggest contributor to climate change, again, by far. So it bears the biggest responsibility of any country. But you are right, it’s a worldwide problem.

You have to understand that GDP and energy demands are intrinsically tied. That’s a fact, both theoretically and empirically verified with historical data. When the GDP rises, energy demands rise. And the reason why energy demands rise is not to meet people’s needs but because the 1% seek to increase GDP (through individual corporation stock values) which in turn increases their profits, since like I said they absorb all of it. That is why it is relevant, because it’s a matter of wealth accumulation by the 1%, not because people need more energy. That is backed both by the fact that the common people don’t get anything out of the increase in economic production(the bottom 80% like I’ve said have had a stagnant wealth since the 1990s in the US, although the global GDP has risen 5-fold, even though the population has risen and hence the people in that 80% has risen as well) and by the fact that the population increase has been just 50% and the increase in wealth ten times that.

It’s almost like you have no clue what you are talking about lol. The global population growth for the last 30 years is 50%, while the global GDP growth is 500%. Not only that but the wealth inequality in the world has been steadily rising for the last 60 years. In the US alone (that we have data on) the wealth of the bottom 80% has been roughly stagnant since the 1990s while that of the top 1% has skyrocketed - it’s basically them that have absorbed this economic growth profit.

So yeah, you got a lot of confidence in things you clearly don’t know about.

Yes it’s obviously better than using fossil fuels, nobody’s arguing that. What I’m talking about is the direction the global economy and the people making the decisions are taking.

No matter how much nuclear energy you use, you are still putting a lot of additional strain on the environment. It’s not just the CO2 emissions that matter, that’s just one of the problems. It’s the increase in extracted materials for data centers, reactors and nuclear fuel, which causes the destruction of multiple ecosystems and the contamination of waters and soil from the pollutants produced(even radioactive waste in the uranium case).

It’s also that Google could have been taxed more(I’m sure they can take it) and the money the government gained could be directed to investments on nuclear plants that would actually replace fossil fuels instead of adding energy demands on top of them. Because the fact of the matter is that in 2024 we categorically cannot be talking about not increasing fossil fuel consumption, we have to be talking about how to reduce emissions drastically every single year and why we are already tragically behind on that regard.

So not replacing current energy, but adding onto it. Just like how we didn’t replace fossil fuels with the solar and wind unprecedented advancements the last 30 years but only added more energy consumption on top of that…cool

On one hand I think it’s very positive that everyone starts using decentralised platforms that don’t run on profit, that work for their users and not their shareholders, but on the other hand having a space mostly without conservatives is great.

It’s almost as if oligopolies can manipulate prices regardless of availability

I don’t get why you purposefully obfuscate what ruling class I am referring to. What kind of example are managers and drivers when I am clearly talking about the people comprising the decision making body or Communist party under communism? I think that’s simple enough and also the fact that any communist government that survived long enough gradually became more and more authoritarian, more detached from the people - never in the other direction. The evidence is there and we both know it. The burden of proof that this isn’t the case is on you, not me…

You simply dismissed my claims without any evidence on that. Although you seem to like to meticulously answer every sentence separately, you dismiss the core of the argument. I understand most communism movements start off with noble and admirable intentions and I’m not ignoring this, but the fundamental issue here is that in the longterm, by design, in order to preserve state power, for whatever reason, you’d be heading to the opposite direction of a stateless society.

I’ve read enough Lenin to understand this from his descriptions of the ideal Party. I don’t need reading recommendations, thank you. I am not saying anything profound here, this is like mainstream critique of marxism.

What does it mean to have a misreading in this context (last point)? You are just reiterating what they said but reassuring us that the most “advanced” among them are not going to turn into a ruling class because…?

Any form of political power is poison. You don’t get to a state-less, egalitarian society by going in the exact opposite direction, by enforcing a ruling class and an hierarchy like any else.

And you can see this practically not in any massacre, genocide, famine or war communist countries have inflicted, these are up for discussion. The actual evidence that this is not the right path is in the lack of accountability of the governing Party under communism, the lack of freedom of speech inside that party and the decision making body, the absolute discipline required to be in it or you get kicked out for having a different opinion for any topic, the gradual increase in authoritarianism by it and the Party’s gradual alienation from the people. These all are fundamental structural problems that stem from the fact that you set out to solve a problem by endorsing it and practising it.

People are never going to free themselves from hierarchy and the state if they don’t learn to live without it in practise, take decisions for themselves, develop the skills, knowledge and tactics to abolish it etc. You are/become what you practise in your life, not what you preach.

This is really cute, but the first thing you should’ve said to her is the cheesy pick up line from the day you met her.

Google and apple you can let us worry about our security ourselves, thank you, though I’m sure you have our best interests in mind and only that

Yeah, it happens to Spotify mods as well. This isn’t good

So should we be fearing a new crash?

I’m sorry I assumed that, people’s goal when making comments on semantics is usually to obfuscate the point

As far as I’m concerned, the 92-01 war had the support of the US along with Russia. But that’s way besides the point I’m making.

I didn’t mean that it’s 30 years strictly against the US, I am only saying that these people have been tortured by war for 30 years and all people care about is to call the Talibans terrorists, not the people’s suffering by the world powers’ interventions.

Instead of playing with numbers, we could just focus on the issue of portraying every enemy of the US as a terrorist and mocking anything these people go through just because someone the west doesn’t like prevailed. Of course they are religious fundamentalists and oppressing, especially to women, but they are a legitimate government as much as you don’t like it and the people have the right to sort their society morals on their own just like the west did - it feels stupid to articulate such obvious statements, but people don’t get it.

It’s funny cause they legit have a terrorism problem with the once US funded IS. If you people had ever cared to see what has happened to Afghanistan after the Talibans took over you’d know that the terrorists are constantly bombing public spaces, public infrastructure etc.

The Talibans may be extremists and fundamentalists but terrorists? That’s a CIA talking point - any violence against us, the west, is terrorism.

The US abandoned Afghanistan in ruins after 30 years of war, bombing people and infrastructure and now they have to rebuild their country on their own, forgotten by the world. They are starving, they are extremely poor and because they are so vulnerable, the IS was able to establish itself there and terrorise the people. So I don’t get the irony here, you people are just hypocrites and don’t remember who caused all this in the first place.