human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
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EU greenhouse gas emissions down 8 percent in 2023
Accelerating rollout of renewable energy sources drives stunning drop.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-greenhouse-gas-emissions-down-8-per
cent-in-2023/
The European Union’s greenhouse gas output plummeted 8.3 percent in 2023, a flagship report released Thursday revealed.
It's an annual drop not seen in decades, the EU said, driven by the accelerating rollout of renewable energy sources across the Continent.
https://climate.ec.europa.eu/document/download/d0671350-37f2-4bc4-88e8
-088d0508fb03_en
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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T 
Climate Change Will Be Different for Everyone
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
T
Climate Change Will Be Different for Everyone
A little chilly for some. A little warm for others. Depending on where you live you might want to opt for shorts in some cases, but wear a jacket in other places or you might catch a cold.
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
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some 'Art'
Unhappily Ever After: Meet the artist placing Disney characters in dystopian situations
https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/entertainment/unhappily-ever-
after-disney-dystopia-jeff-hong-412961
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The climate crisis
This is the overwhelming challenge facing humanity, and Trump’s gaslighting — dismissing it as “a hoax” — has been astonishingly effective in keeping it off the political stage. For all our scientific and technological capacity, we simply have no way to comprehend how the climate crisis will damage human civilization over the long term. More immediately, tens of millions of people are already climate refugees, and hundreds of millions more surely will be.
Climate is arguably the main reason that Central Americans have replaced Mexicans as the largest population seeking entry to the U.S. since Trump first took office, so gaslighting on climate change was essential to making his “immigrant crime” narrative work. Hurricane Helene presented the perfect opportunity for bringing the climate crisis into the campaign. The damage done was almost 1% of U.S. national GDP, far exceeding annual government spending to combat climate change. It was the moment for a supremely important public policy discussion, but Trump’s gaslighting helped keep it entirely off the agenda.
There are thousands of pages of documents making clear that the fossil fuel industry has known about the dangers of climate change for decades, and lied about them. But Trump of course claims the exact opposite: the scientists, or perhaps the Chinese, are pulling off “a hoax.” It’s classic gaslighting.
https://www.salon.com/2024/11/09/six-big-lies-that-won-the-election-ho
w-donald-gaslit-america/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How the existential terror of hurricanes can fuel climate change denial
October 30, 2024 8:40am EDT
https://theconversation.com/time-to-freak-out-how-the-existential-terr
or-of-hurricanes-can-fuel-climate-change-denial-242390
Many people deny that climate change is a worsening threat or that it exists at all. As its impacts grow more visible and destructive, how is this possible?
One answer lies in a unique facet of human psychology – specifically, in how people manage the fear aroused by existential threats. For many people, denying the existence of a climate crisis is not only convenient but may feel psychologically necessary.
Terror Management Theory
The Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Ernest Becker put it this way: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else … to overcome it by denying it in some way is the final destiny for man.”
In plain terms, he was saying that most people struggle to accept their mortality and take pains to distort their perception of reality to avoid confronting it.
In the 1980s, social psychologists developed “terror management theory,” showing the lengths people go to deny death. Hundreds of experiments have tested its implications. In a common method, participants reflect on their own death, while control groups consider less threatening topics, like dental pain. The key question: What does death awareness do to people?
After writing about death, people tend to quickly move on, pushing thoughts of it from consciousness with distractions, rationalizations, and other tactics. Healthcare professionals see this every day. For example, people often dodge screenings and diagnostic tests to avoid the frightening possibility of discovering cancer.
But here’s the rub: Terror management theory suggests that when people are not thinking about death, it nevertheless holds influence. The unconscious mind lingers on the problem even after people have used strategies to quiet the fear by pushing it from awareness.
Social psychology experiments show that people often cope with the specter of death by attaching themselves to cultural ideologies, such as religious, political, or even sports fandom. These worldviews imbue life with meaning, values, and purpose. And that can ease the terror of mortality by connecting people to an enduring and comforting web of ideas and beliefs that transcend one’s own existence.
When people are made aware of death, those systems of meaning become even more critical to their psychological functioning. Existential threats make us cling even tighter to the meaning systems that sustain us.
Climate Denial as a Defense Mechanism
Much like a terror management lab experiment – or the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic– natural disasters like hurricanes Helene and Milton trigger death anxiety.
Rising sea levels, warming oceans, and intensifying storms– all tied to global warming fueled by human actions– represent an existential threat.
From our perspective, it is not surprising that climate-related disasters disappear from the public consciousness almost as soon as they have passed. Google Trends data exemplifies this: Incoming storms instigated an uptick in searches for “climate change” and “global warming” in the days before Hurricane Helene made landfall on Sept. 26, 2024, and Hurricane Milton on Oct. 9, 2024. Then, those searches quickly declined as people shifted their focus away from the threat.
Unfortunately, climate change isn’t going away, no matter how hard anyone tries to deny it.
While climate denial allows people to protect themselves from feelings of distress, terror management theory suggests that denying death is just the tip of the iceberg. For some people, accepting the reality of climate change would necessitate reevaluating their ideologies.
Terror management theory predicts that individuals whose ideologies conflict with environmental concerns may ironically double down on those beliefs to psychologically manage the existential threat posed by climate-related disasters. It’
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Biden just finalized a major climate rule. This one could be tricky for Trump to dismantle
By Ella Nilsen | Tue November 12, 2024
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/12/climate/methane-rule-biden-trump/index.
html
The new methane rule charges companies a fee for leaking or flaring methane into the atmosphere instead of capturing it.
The Environmental Protection Agency just finalized one of the Biden administration’s only outstanding climate rules, aimed at cracking down on leaks of methane — a potent planet-warming gas with an outsized impact on the climate.
The rule, proposed nearly a year ago, was mandated by the Inflation Reduction Act, which could make it more difficult for the second Trump administration to dismantle.
The new rule charges high-emitting oil and gas producers a fee for wasting methane above a certain threshold by venting or flaring it into the atmosphere instead of capturing it. The methane fee will be charged by the federal government until the companies fix the leaks.
This fee was paired with financial incentives for oil and gas companies to fix leaky pipelines or infrastructure.
Methane is an odorless and invisible gas that has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. Methane is the main component of the gas that heats our homes and powers our stoves, and it’s one of the main byproducts of oil and gas drilling.
It’s also dramatically warming the planet. An international body of scientists has concluded that the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is higher now than any time in at least 800,000 years. It’s responsible for as much as a third of the global warming the planet has experienced so far, according to the EPA.
The rule could prove tricky for the incoming Trump administration to overturn because the program was included in Biden’s climate law, which passed Congress in 2022. Undoing it would take another act of Congress; while not impossible if Republicans take the House of Representatives, it could be an uphill climb and take longer than if the Trump administration were acting on its own.
“EPA has been engaging with industry, states, and communities to reduce methane emissions so that natural gas ultimately makes it to consumers as usable fuel instead of as a harmful greenhouse gas,” EPA administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.
According to the EPA, this rule alone would prevent 1.2 million metric tons of methane from polluting the atmosphere – the equivalent of taking nearly 8 million gas-powered cars off the road for a year.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I always get a laugh out of them, but then I kind of get a little pissed off when I see the neverending torches burning alongside the roads in Joliet, IL. Those are methane relief pipes they needed to install everywhere since the entire city was built on a landfill.
Can't we harness that energy somehow instead of just letting it uselessly burn 24/7?
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Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.
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Donald Trump was warned not to pull out of Paris climate agreement — by the CEO of oil giant Exxon Mobil
https://fortune.com/2024/11/12/donald-trump-elon-musk-climate-change-p
aris-agreement-exxon-oil/
Donald Trump’s thumping re-election threatens to upend the business of an industry he’s sworn to protect: Big Oil.
Should his incoming administration follow through on plans to once again pull the United States out of the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement — as a way to loosen regulations on fossil fuel companies — it could actually end up hurting companies like Exxon Mobil, according to the oil giant’s CEO.
Two years after Obama first helped pave the way for the Paris Accords, which seek to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, Trump led the country out of the agreement. Upon assuming office, Biden reversed this decision on Day One, going on to spur record investment in clean technology. If Trump once again pulls the U.S. out of Paris, it will have marked the fourth straight administration with diametrically opposed energy and climate policies.
“I don’t think the stops and starts are the right thing for businesses,” Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published on Tuesday. “It is extremely inefficient. It creates a lot of uncertainty.”
The Exxon Mobil boss was in Azerbaijan to attend COP29 in Baku, the second straight time that a city rich from exploiting its fossil fuel deposits played host to the United Nations climate conference after Abu Dhabi last year.
Trump has promised to “drill, baby, drill”, but this constant backtracking on agreed policy has made it difficult for companies with long term investment horizons that can end up stuck with stranded assets — such as oil companies. Woods said it was unhelpful for businesses “to have the pendulum swing back and forth as administrations change”.
He assured Exxon would not deviate from its strategy, which includes investments in controversial carbon capture technology, just because of Trump’s election. But he did not deny that adjustments may need to be made should government policy change materially.
In August, while campaigning for Trump, Musk trivialized the issue of climate change and argued there was no need at all for society to make hard choices since things would naturally work out on their own more or less. Accelerating the transition to clean energy was no longer urgent when viewed against the greater priority of reinstalling Trump in the Oval Office.
“We still have quite a bit of time, we don’t need to rush,” Musk said, “If, I don’t know, 50 to 100 years from now we’re mostly sustainable, I think that’ll probably be okay.”
Meanwhile, Trump, a climate change skeptic, argued rising sea levels was a good thing, since it meant “more oceanfront property”. Trump did not address the destruction of existing oceanfront real estate by rising sea levels.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Carbon emissions from fossil fuels hit record highs in 2024
Global fossil-related CO2 emissions are expected to increase by 0.8% this year to 37.4 billion metric tons. (Compare 37.4 billion metric tons to 2.1 billion for the entire world's solid wastes. https://www.google.com/search?q=solid+waste+world )
This is higher than the average annual growth rate seen during the last ten years.
Carbon dioxide emissions tied to burning fossil fuels are now 8% higher than they were in 2015 when the Paris Agreement was first negotiated.
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/13/carbon-emissions-fossil-fuels-record-
high
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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