I also see changes like those you mention, and they heightens the sense of urge, and then again it comes the thought: What’s wrong about this, and where’s the crack?
Calibrating this sense of fear to what goes on directly, I find ordinary people continuously adapt to changes, while the “Powers that be” has lost their own plot.
Man has lost trust in the feeding-machine, and when they stop giving the machine their life force, the machine withers and dies.
In short: The powers that be has become the powers that were
So, they know they have lost the battle of souls, and now they attack each other with us stuck in between.
Well the main power is your own actions. Today the community here at Kusala got together in the drizzle to plant trees in the area cleared of Brazilian Pepper. It’s trees at the moment - about 160 flooded gums and jarrah to work through, but we have many swamp paperbark, hundreds of shrubs and so forth. Anumodana!
You mean emissions right? Co2 level itself only can peak when there’s totally zero emissions and we are starting to globally suck back carbon from the air.
Right, and we need to be rapidly decreasing emissions.
The situation is complex, as we are still stabilizing from the effects of the pandemic, so it’s a bit hard to generalize right now. But yes, emissions did seem to plateau last year:
We see that while emissions from fossil fuels have increased, emissions from land use change have declined slightly in recent years. Overall, this means total emissions have roughly stabilized over the past decade.
The problem here is that measuring emissions from land use is highly fraught. In Australia, all of the supposed emissions reductions from land use are wiped out if you use the more accurate Queensland state government figures rather than the Federal government figures. The Federal government says that their figures comply with IPCC standards, which means that similarly misleading figures are likely to be common worldwide.
Basically the problem is that these “emissions reductions” are calculated from very rough figures. For example, say you have 100 acres of forested land. You chop down half the trees. How much have the emissions changed? Well, if you chop down 50 acres, then you’ve cleared 50 acres of forest. But if you chop down every second tree, you have the same forested area you started with. These would then be calculated as having very different emissions impacts.
Right, global warming is not driver by emissions, it is driven by cumulative global atmospheric CO2. Here’s how they map on to each other:
As you can see, global atmospheric CO2 continues to rise, in fact at an accelerating rate. And while emissions do seem to have leveled out in the last couple of years, this has yet to have any effect; rather, the rate of acceleration is accelerating.
I love this thread, because it reminds me of the teachings, especially the “urge” to deepen practice. I find myself going into forms of “chrysalis”, withdrawing from society, and keeping it “sacred” even through the pains. These cycles has increased, and I find no personal alarming in natural changes.
Sorry about the paywalled article, but you can get the gist.
France is perhaps one of the most pro-nuclear power countries.
It is taking some of those reactors offline as demand for energy goes down, energy prices go down, and the push for renewable power sources keeps going
Meanwhile Germany’s carbon footprint keeps climbing as it shuts down its reactors in favor of gas And don’t even get me started on the scam that is “biofuels” But this is supposed to be a thread on good news!
Yes, risk depends on the precautions, not just the intrinsic hazard. We routinely use/do a lot of things that are potentially extremely hazardous. Many medicines are potentially lethal. And (maybe a bad example in this thread…) flying in a commercial plane is relatively low risk due to the safety standards in place. Nuclear plants designed with proper precautions and waste-containment systems would be a lot safer than the Chernobyl, Thee-MIle Island, or Fukashima designs. The question you’d ask, for example, given the latter disaster, was whether you had enough coolant that could be gravity fed in the case of a catastrophic failure for long enough for a shut down. The problem they had in that case was that their cooling pumps were flooded by the tsunami.
This is significant. My apologies for not sharing this earlier:
So your mileage may vary depending on whether you country has, say, abundant wind and solar resources or, say, an existing track record of building commercial nuclear power generation.
And don’t even get me started on the scam that is “biofuels” But this is supposed to be a thread on good news! 