Climate Change

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This is a no agenda less moderated variation of !climate@slrpnk.net. Moderation power is not abused and mods do not suppress ideas in order to control the narrative.

Obvious spam, uncivil posts and misinfo are not immune to intervention, but on-topic civil posts are certain to not be subject to censorship (unlike the excessive interventalism we see in the other climate community).

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I always figured if a protest is destructive, the display of extreme outrage must in some slight way benefit the protesters, if it makes any difference at all. Research shows the violence and destruction do have an impact, but it’s actually the complete opposite of my intuition -- to the protester’s disadvantage. From the article:

“Before the [MLK] assassination, there was no link between rainfall and voting — this was a control. But in the week after the assassination, places with less rainfall experienced more violent protests. Wasow linked this to a 1.5–7.9% shift in white votes towards the Republican party (seen as being tough on crime). According to Wasow, violent protests “likely tipped the election” to the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, over the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey.”

This means protesters of liberal causes like climate are at a disadvantage. It’s critical for the protest to be civil & peaceful so as to not encourage votes for that shitty “law and order” party. So protests like that of setting new SUVs on fire can actually work strongly against their cause.

Protests by right wing nutters tend to be uncivil, destructive, and violent. But they enjoy a double benefit: a swing voter’s reaction to the violence is to vote right wing anyway.

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A drought in Africa had a substantial impact on cocoa farming. Maybe it’s a good thing.. maybe more people will start to give a shit about climate when they can’t afford chocolate.

Had this impact come to something like celery, no one would probably give a shit. But chocolate? That has to get some attention.

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From Mother Jones:

In 2012—after writers for National Review and a prominent conservative think tank accused him of fraud and compared him to serial child molester Jerry Sandusky—climate scientist Michael Mann took the bold step of filing a defamation suit. The defendants moved to have the case thrown out, citing a Washington, DC, law that shields journalists from frivolous litigation. But on Wednesday, DC Superior Court Judge Frederick Weisberg rejected the motion, opening the way for a trial.


According to Guardian, Mann’s lawsuit was tossed out:

The litigation targets two writers: Rand Simberg, analyst at the rightwing thinktank Competitive Enterprise Institute, who published a piece comparing Mann to a convicted serial child molester, and the National Review blogger Mark Steyn, who in a blogpost favorably quoted Simberg and called Mann’s research “fraudulent”. (Mann originally went after both publishers as well, but in 2021 a court ruled that neither the Competitive Enterprise Institute nor National Review could be held responsible for the attacks.)


Seems a bit fucked up that Competitive Enterprise Institute (an extremist right-wing lobby that pushes climate denial propaganda) was let off the hook for defamation. But yet a person working for CEI (Rand Simberg) can still be accountable for defamation. Is this a perverse side-effect of #CitizensUnited, I wonder?

Glad Michael Mann got justice but CEI should have taken the hit AFAICT.

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#Chevron (an ALEC member), #Delta Airlines, and #ExxonMobil are obvious and expected. But ~58% of ~300 should yield a bigger boycott list than just those.

If someone could please unjail the PDF of this research and post it somewhere, it’d be much appreciated. The linked article leads to:

https://influencemap.org/briefing/The-State-of-Net-Zero-Greenwash-24402

which leads to:

https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/high-level-expert-group

but the UN site is access restricted, apparently blocking Tor. And worse, the UN is also blocking archive.org!

https://web.archive.org/web/20240205080224/https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/high-level_expert_group_n7b.pdf

^ that’s a 403 error.

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Originally posted here but was locked without explanation. Cross-posted in !climate_lm@slrpnk.net to escape narrative-control-driven muzzling, in case anyone wants to comment further.


Most people are unwilling to change their lifestyle significantly in the face of climate catastrophe. In particular:

  • refusal to alter their diet
  • refusal to ditch their car

Even the idea of simply stopping livestock subsidies is fiercely fought because people would still consider an absence of intervention to be lifestyle intereference. People are hostile toward the idea of changing their commuting and teleworking habits. In the democratic stronghold in California, even democrats voted out a democrat who tried to impose a fuel tax because they are resistant to giving up their car. Examples are endless.

the dominant excuse→ “carbon footprint is a BP invention”

The high-level abstract principle that underpins resistance to taking individual actions is the idea that because the “carbon footprint” was coined by BP in an effort to shift blame, people think (irrationally) that the wise counter move is to not take individual action. Of course this broken logic gives the oil companies exactly what they want: inaction. This has become the dominant excuse people use for not changing their lifestyle.

psilocybin

The deep psychology surrounding the problem is cognitive rigidity-- unwillingness of people to adjust their lifestyles. So how do you make people more open-minded and increase their psychological flexibility? One mechanism is psilocybin, which has been shown induce neuroplasticity and free people from stubborn thinking. It’s a long article but the relevant bit is this:

(click to expand)The effects of mindfulness training and psychedelic intervention on psychological flexibility

Mindfulness practices encourage individuals to respond to all kinds of experiences, whether positive or negative, without judgment and with openness which fosters psychological flexibility [90]. This acceptance aligns with psychological flexibility's core components, enabling individuals to act by their values even in the presence of challenging emotions [79, [91]. Psychedelics, on the other hand, can lead to profound insights into personal values, and in this way enhance psychological flexibility [92].

Both methods encourage individuals to embrace uncertainty and change, a fundamental aspect of psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility involves moving beyond limitations imposed by thoughts and emotions. Mindfulness training teaches individuals to observe their thoughts without attachment, reducing cognitive rigidity. Psychedelics often induce experiences that challenge pre-existing beliefs, allowing individuals to transcend the constraining influence of self-concepts and through this way promote adaptability and open-mindedness [3, 38]. Both offer avenues to increased psychological flexibility by fostering acceptance, values alignment, embracing uncertainty, and challenging ego boundaries. Integrating mindfulness skills and psychedelic insights holds promise for sustained psychological flexibility by facilitating a balanced response to internal and external stimuli, and adaptive responses to life's challenges [93].


Other studies have shown increased neuroplasticity through meditation. In any case, we could use a less stubborn population.

Not just for climate, but consider the pandemic where conservatives (by definition the champions of stubbornness) refused to make even the slightest lifestyle change and fought every act of remediation. A population with a higher degree of psychological flexibility would be better to react to changes of any kind.