Love to hear how you think digital currencies aren't digital currencies.

Not all digital currencies are cryptocurrencies. CBDCs are digital implementations of government-backed fiat currencies. If you don't understand the difference I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.

by your flawed metrics, solar power is "hype".

Solar power produces energy. Cryptocurrency produces nothing and wastes energy doing it.

at least 130 countries are working on developing national cryptocurrencies.

CBDCs aren't cryptocurrencies.

As for the rest, "It's good because it's making lots of money" isn't as persuasive an argument as you think it is.

Unfortunately, I think the United States will take exactly the wrong message from its internal climate refugees.

Lifeboat ethics.

"We have to close our borders and deport refugees from other countries so we can help our own climate refugees."

"Millions of illegals!"

"Actually, the people you're referring to are legally in the United States with temporary protected status..."

"They're still here illegally because I say so, illegal illegal lalala"

"Climate change isn't real, but if it was, we would need to pump more oil and natural gas in the United States to make our energy sector strong for the oncoming crisis."

"Oh, and don't buy solar panels from China, because they're dirty foreigners."

And Walz, who spent the whole debate staring at the podium scowling like a rotten jack-o'-lantern, was so out of it he couldn't effectively call out Vance's bogus definition of clean energy and bring up the Build Back Better plan and Biden's investments into the US energy economy.

What the fuck.

You're doing Gaia's work

Love it!

Yep. I think it's Roundup. Used to be people used chemical herbicides with more discretion to avoid harming crops, so bugs could live on weeds in patches or at the edges of fields.

Nowadays you just plant a strain of corn or soybeans that's immune to Roundup and soak your entire field in glyphosate multiple times a year. So the only insects that have food or shelter anywhere near you are ones that can live on your crop - and then you spray pesticides to kill those.

Result: millions and millions of acres of essentially sterile agricultural monocrop.

And more and more land is being turned into agricultural monocrop - not because a growing population needs more food, but because of bad laws and subsidies. Almost 100 million acres in the US - 40% of the American corn crop - is used to produce fucking ethanol, which burns more fossil fuel to produce than it replaces and is only profitable because of massive government subsidies procured by energy and agricultural lobbyists.

We are wiping hundreds of square miles of land clean of life in order to turn one fossil fuel into another less efficient fossil fuel. It's species wide insanity.

And that being said: even though agriculture is a much bigger contributor to the ongoing insect omnicide than suburban pest spraying, when you keep the chemicals off your lawn and allow native plants and flowers to grow, it does help your local bugs, and you are making an impact.

Preach.

Housing is a human right.

Private land ownership violates that human right.

All land should be held in trust for the people as a whole and managed by the government for the benefit of the people. Including the houses and apartments on that land.

We should not have private homeowners. We should not have private landlords. We should have socialized housing, just like we should have socialized medicine. Apartment buildings and neighborhoods should be managed by tenant associations, with strict legal limits on their authority over individual tenants, and government facilitators to provide expert advice on building management and keep meetings running smoothly.

But we are a long way from implementing that.

It boggles my mind how people still insist there's a "free market" in rent when we have proof of giant property management corporations colluding nationwide to raise rents.

This shit is why we need rent control.

Because during bad times the ones that make bad decisions don't survive or at very least are removed from positions of power.

It's more common for bad leaders to make the bad decisions that cause the bad times, and then either be deposed by violence or cling to power with violence, making everything worse. See Stalin, Mao, and also the entire history of sub-Saharan Africa after colonialism.

I'm certainly not a fan of American electoral democracy, but one can say that at least it's mostly peaceful and allows in theory the people to make a choice between qualified and vetted candidates. In "hard times" the mechanisms created by civil society to select competent leaders tend to break down. So rather than removing bad leaders from power in hard times, it becomes even harder to remove such leaders, and even harder to determine whether a leader is good or bad until after he's in charge of the army's salary.

Seitan is the first that comes to mind.

On the one hand, yes, I can see your point.

On the other hand, let's not minimize American prison slavery by saying "we're all slaves". If you strain the definition you can argue all workers under capitalism are enslaved, but even then, some forms of slavery are far more brutal and dehumanizing (and racist. Let's not forget racist) than others.

Here's the beginning of the "fascist sounding video" you mention:

The west is a dystopian wasteland of moral degeneracy.

Usually when you hear a white person talk about moral degeneracy it’s some wingnut denouncing LGBTQ rights or women’s reproductive rights or whatever, but that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about real things here.

The real moral decay of our society is illustrated in the way all mainstream political candidates can openly support war crimes currently being inflicted on people in the global south without being immediately removed from power. The way monstrous war criminals of past administrations can endorse a liberal candidate without causing self-proclaimed progressives to recoil from that candidate in horror. The way you can have the two viable candidates for the world’s most powerful elected position both pledge to continue an active genocide without instantly sparking a revolution.

The moral degeneracy of this civilization looks like living lives of relative comfort built on the backs of workers in the global south whose labor and resources are extracted from their nations at profoundly exploitative rates, while raining military explosives on impoverished populations who dare to disobey the dictates of our government, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, and acting like this is all fine and normal.

Sounds just like Hitler, don't it?

Why not try to do both?

Okay, let me write in "Climate for President" and see how that goes.

That factoid is vastly misinterpreted. In particular, the term "responsible for" does not mean "emitted".

The study it's referencing studied only fossil fuel producers. And it credited all emissions from anyone who burned fuel from that producer to that producer. So if I buy a tank of gas from Chevron and burn it, my emissions are credited to Chevron for purposes of that study.

The study is not saying that 100 companies emit 71% of global emissions. It's saying that 100 companies produce 71% of the fossil fuels used globally.