Notices by Bread and Circuses (breadandcircuses@climatejustice.social)

Billionaires should not exist.
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It is impossible to *earn* a billion dollars. Take any exorbitant salary you like — let’s say $500,000 per year — and calculate how many years you would have to work, spending nothing, to earn your first billion. At $500k/year, it would take 2,000 years. Or, if you simply steal $3 from every single American, you can make a billion in a single year.

Billionaires’ wealth comes only from wage theft from workers. It is never earned. It is estimated that ~5% of deaths in the US are attributable to poverty, making every billionaire a de-facto mass murderer. No one becomes a billionaire because they are intelligent or talented; people become billionaires because they are able to rob millions of other people into poverty, destitution, and early death — and still sleep soundly at night.

These are the people determining our future. They are brain-damaged by power. [See https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/] Billionaires are, by definition, psychopaths. They believe they are chosen by the universe to live as gods. If you are counting on billionaires to save the planet because “it’s in their best interest,” you misunderstand their interests.
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That's an excerpt from a long and very informative piece by Sam Hall (@SamYourEyes).

FULL ARTICLE -- https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to-the-apocalypse-7790666afde7

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateJustice #Capitalism

The only good capitalism is no capitalism at all.

For those who haven’t seen it before, here is my review of The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg…
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I've read dozens of books about climate change, and this one is easily the best. It's packed with information, written to be accessible for anyone from high school (or a bright middle school student) on up, and most importantly it does NOT shy away from the true severity of our situation and the imperative need not only for individual action but for system change.

It's stunning to me that a young woman who just turned twenty years old was able to pull together such a massive project — coordinating the submissions of more than a hundred scientists, activists, and educators — while also writing a large part of the content herself. A truly amazing accomplishment.

This essential work should be in every school library and in every home. It will remain relevant for years to come, I believe, because although there certainly is plenty of data, mostly it's about *ideas* which will never age.
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https://bookwyrm.social/user/BreadAndCircuses/review/1196642/s/essential-reading#anchor-1196642

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #CO2 #Emissions #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice

Rebecca Solnit (@RebeccaSolnit) suggests we need a large-scale change in perspective...
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"What if climate change meant not doom — but abundance?"

Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience.

But what if it meant giving up things that we are well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom, and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live NOW — and the abundance could be what is to come?

Look closely, and you can see that by measures other than goods and money, we are impoverished. Even the affluent live in a world where confidence in the future, and in the society and institutions around us, is fading — and where a sense of security, social connectedness, mental and physical health, and other measures of well-being are often dismal.

This is the world we live in *with* fossil fuels — the burning of which makes us poorer in many ways. We know that the fossil fuel industry corrodes our politics. We know that worldwide, breathing air contaminated by fossil fuel kills more than 8 million people a year and damages many more, particularly babies and children. And we know that as fossil fuel fills the upper atmosphere with carbon dioxide that destabilizes temperature and weather, it increases despair and anxiety.

What if we imagined “wealth” consisting not of the money we stuff into banks or the fossil-fuel-derived goods we pile up, but of joy, beauty, friendship, community, closeness to flourishing nature, to good food produced without abuse of labor? What if we were to think of wealth as security in our environments and societies, and as confidence in a viable future?
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FULL ESSAY -- https://archive.is/XUUg7#selection-259.0-259.54

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual

Is this too much to ask? Evidently it is. 😕

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis
#ClimateAction #WarOnCars #BanCars

Damn, this sucks...
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About 60% of monkeys, apes, and lemurs are currently threatened with extinction, and climate change is only a part of it.

Habitat loss, hunting, the illegal pet trade, and disease have already cut back primate populations. Climate change will likely increase the duration and intensity of extreme weather events such as cyclones and droughts, putting more pressure on the survival of already struggling species.

FULL ARTICLE -- https://theconversation.com/monkeys-lemurs-and-apes-at-risk-climate-change-threatens-a-quarter-of-worlds-primate-habitat-161955

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency #Extinction

If you’re looking for great accounts to follow, here are some of my faves! 👏

@keke
@TXsharon
@dbc3
@greeneralia
@KeithDJohnson

#FollowFriday

Do you have your money in a bank that funds fossil fuels? The top four offenders in the U.S. are Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citibank. They continue to invest in more and more climate-destroying fossil fuel extraction.

Please do not support them!

#Banking #Money #FossilFuels #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency

If you’re looking for great accounts to follow, here are some of my faves! 👏

@ariadne
@pvonhellermannn
@NatureMC
@notjustbikes
@fkamiah17

#FollowFriday

Back in the old days...


#Inequality #Anticapitalism

Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) is a NASA climate scientist.

#NASA #Science #IPCC #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency #CO2

Life expectancy for US citizens is dropping fast, and is now lower than that of Cuba, Lebanon, or Chechnya.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/25/1164819944/live-free-and-die-the-sad-state-of-u-s-life-expectancy

#Life #Health #Healthcare #Death

System change is now a matter of survival.
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"Millionaires will burn through two-thirds of the world’s carbon budget by 2050, scientists warn"

To limit global warming to below 1.5°C, we can only burn a certain amount of carbon.

But millionaire emissions alone will deplete 72% of this allowance before 2050, according to a new scientific paper.

“Continued growth in emissions at the top makes a low-carbon transition less likely, as the acceleration of energy consumption by the wealthiest is likely beyond the system's capacity to decarbonize,” the scientists warn.

The research coincides with the release of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which warns that a ‘liveable future’ requires urgent emissions cuts.
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/22/millionaires-will-burn-through-two-thirds-of-the-worlds-carbon-budget-by-2050-scientists-w

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency #CO2 #Emissions #Anticapitalism

Here's a cheery article for you...
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"The Sixth Mass Extinction is happening now, and it doesn’t look good for us"

In the timeline of fossil evidence going right back to the first inkling of any life on Earth — over 3.5 billion years ago — almost 99% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. That means that as species evolve over time — a process known as ‘speciation’ — they replace other species that go extinct.

Extinctions and speciations do not happen at uniform rates through time. Instead, they tend to occur in large pulses interspersed by long periods of relative stability. These extinction pulses are what scientists refer to as mass extinction events.

At least five mass extinction events have been identified in the fossil record. Mounting evidence is pointing to the world having entered a sixth mass extinction. If the current rate of extinction continues, we could lose most species by 2200.

According to the fossil record, the average ‘lifespan’ of a species is around one million years, which equates to a background rate of about 0.1–2.0 extinctions per million ‘species-years’. This makes the number of observed extinctions in the modern era 10 to 10,000 times higher than the background rate. Even the most conservative estimates that ignore undetected extinctions firmly place the modern era well within the expected range to qualify as a mass extinction.

Most of the damage to the Earth’s life-support system has happened over the last century. The global human population has tripled since 1950, and there are now approximately one million species threatened with imminent extinction due to massive population declines, representing about 10–15 percent of all complex life on Earth.

Recent evidence suggests global warming causes up to ten times more extinctions than we might expect by looking only at a species’ upper temperature limit. In fact, when we take the relationships between species into account — such as predators depending on their prey, parasites depending on their hosts, or flowering plants depending on their pollinators — near-future extinctions are expected to sky-rocket.
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://360info.org/the-sixth-mass-extinction-is-happening-now-and-it-doesnt-look-good-for-us/

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency #BiodiversityLoss #Extinction

Oh, man. This comic — from 1993 — could NOT be more relevant today. As usual, Bill Watterson hits it out of the park.

#Banks #Banking #Bailout #AntiCapitalism

This cartoon is funny... 😄

so why am I crying? 😢

#Extinction #ClimateCrisis
SOURCE -- https://shopdinosaur.com/