Climate Change

I know it’s unacceptibly high, whatever the figure is. I would like to have a credible accurate CO₂ cost of a Google reCAPTCHA for comparison purposes and also to add weight to my complaint when condemning a CAPTCHA pusher for their anti-human tech.

Email

The convenience¹ of email inspires a huge bias in favor of email (and likely confirmation bias to a large extent). But if you can detach from the tyranny of convenience and look at email critically, it does not look like such an obvious best choice ecologically. Consider these inconvenient facts:

• Advertising → people needlessly buy more stuff as a result of ads that are fed by email content
• Google sells machine learning to fossil fuel corporations (see also YT videov3n8txX3144)
• Google finances climate deniers
• Apple, Amazon, Google & Microsoft have teamed up to block Right-To-Repair laws.
• Google’s Android phones (and other smart devices) are only updated for a few yrs
• Google got caught excluding climate effects except CO₂ from Google Flights search results
• Google accepted money from Bayer Monsanto to bury unfavorable news (and Bayer-Monsanto is environmentally harmful)
• War is bad for the environment and Google supports Russia’s war (but says they are scaling back)

Google’s support for fossil fuels is probably the most notable problem. Microsoft is even worse than Google (see item 11). Even if you are the rare netizen who uses an ethical email provider, probably over 95% of your email traffic is with a gmail or outlook user. Nearly all corporations and gov agencies are using Microsoft for email service but it’s masked by their vanity addresses. Of course PGP is not an option for ~95+% of your email traffic, so MS and Google profit from your traffic in both directions because it all feeds their advertising networks. From there, the ads fuel consumerism, leading to more purchases of shit that takes a toll on the environment.

So how good is email for the environment when you take all factors into account?

I restricted the dirt above to ecocide as this is a climate forum, but once you also account for non-environmental factors like privacy abuses, MS and Google are a clear non-starter.

¹ I use “convenience” more loosely than justified because email is very inconvenient for some of us, like people who run their own mail servers in order to not needlessly feed extra 3rd parties. The anti-spammers have really ruined the convenience and availability of email by going to extremes that impose colatteral damage on legit email. So it’s not really fair to call email convenient any longer.

Fax

A fax can be sent without printing. Your letter just needs to be formatted for US letter or A4 and in a raster graphic. More often than not, the receiving side is a service that attaches the letter to an email and sends it to the recipient, who likely uses Microsoft.

The pros:

• You can withhold your email address from the letter, thus preventing an email reply (which would then feed the MS ad network and lead to more purchases).
• MS must work harder to snoop and OCR the raster image. But do they? Idk. If they do, it would expend more energy. But if they don’t, the msg avoids feeding the ad network.

The cons:

• The electronic payload is more bulky, thus uses more energy per msg.

Paper letters

Paper must be used, but the paper industry has trended toward sustainabilty and some regions have a mandate on recycling paper (yes, it is illegal to toss recyclable paper in with other waste in wise parts of the world). Unprinting has made progress, which would enable you to erase toner from a page to reuse it.

When a recipient in my city uses Google or Microsoft for email and they have no fax number, I print my correspondence on paper and cycle to their mailbox. It’s a way of saying fuck you to the giant surveillance advertisers. And because all kinds of tech rights and ethics are being pissed on by Google and MS in addition to their environmental abuses, this approach is the clear winner for me.

It’s not exactly obvious which choice is the least harmful for the environment without research that really dissects it and looks at the nuts and bolts of it. But I conjecture that if enough people were to switch back to fax and paper letters and cause inconvenience for Microsoft & Google recipients, it would drive them to choose more ethical email providers in order to esacape the burden of scanning paper and then the cost of paying the postal service to carry their reply. This ultimately favors a more sustainable path even if it’s taking a step backwards in order to take more steps forwards.

The raw figures

• email (excl. indirect impacts): 0.3—50g CO₂/msg, depending on msg size
• paper (non-recycled, excl. ink): 4.29—4.74g CO₂/sheet
• envelope: 24g according to a source I don’t trust. That figure does not specify whether it refers to a windowed envelope. I have recently started saving and reusing inbound windowed envelopes by separating the side seam. LaTeX’s KOMAscript pkg has presets for standard envelopes and also gives a way to enter geometry so the address aligns with a nonstandard window.

The email figure is raw energy consumption assuming the email provider is ethical. It does not account for Google and MS’s involvement in the fossil fuel business, the extra consumption of unnecessary goods due to ads, and all the other factors mentioned. If you send a pure text email and the response comes from an org that attaches an image to every response (cosmetic stationary), it’s comparable to the footprint of a sheet of paper + envelope (still without accounting for the Google/MS factor).

It would be interesting to do for Google and Microsoft what the “Banking on Climate Chaos” paper did for banks, which was to rightfully factor all their harmful activity into their footprint.

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.

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.

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.

#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.

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.