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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>June 3, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[means, opportunity and intent]<br>
<b>NIFC’s forecast for wildfire potential this summer</b><br>
June 2, 2021<br>
It is influenced by the fact that more than 87% of the West is now
categorized in drought.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://wildfiretoday.com/2021/06/02/nifcs-forecast-for-wildfire-potential-this-summer/">https://wildfiretoday.com/2021/06/02/nifcs-forecast-for-wildfire-potential-this-summer/</a><br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
[Because wood grows on trees ]<br>
[TIME magazine asks a good question to Mike Roddy]<br>
<b>Wildfires Are Getting Worse, So Why Is the U.S. Still Building
Homes With Wood?</b><br>
- -<br>
Roddy, who has built more than 700 steel-framed houses around the
world, including for the actor and environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr.,
says concerns about carbon emissions aren’t the only thing driving
him to push for less reliance on wood. Because of the shorter
harvest seasons, many trees being cut down are not strong enough to
make the type of long-lasting beams that were once used to build
homes. Instead, builders engineered wood or oriented strand board
(OSB), which is made by gluing together peeled wood products. This
material contains chemicals including formaldehyde, which has been
shown to significantly worsen indoor air quality....<br>
<br>
And homes made from steel and concrete don’t warp from humidity or
water damage, and they don’t attract termites, he says—a reason that
72% of single-family homes built in Hawaii have steel-frame
structures, according to the Steel Framing Industry Association.<br>
<br>
Forest owners argue that a large-scale move away from wood will
actually hurt the environment; without a market for trees, they say
landowners have little incentive to grow them and may instead turn
their land into farmland or houses. Around 1 billion trees are
planted each year in the United States, according to the National
Alliance of Forest Owners. Besides, says Kate Gatto, a NAFO
spokesperson, wood still stores carbon when used in houses. (There’s
debate as to how much carbon is actually stored in trees once
they’ve been cut down to use for homes; Law estimates that just
about 20% of wood harvested over the last century is still in
long-term products, the rest has gone into the atmosphere.)...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://time.com/6046368/wood-steel-houses-fires/">https://time.com/6046368/wood-steel-houses-fires/</a>
<p>- -</p>
[wildfire activism]<br>
<b>A 266-Mile Walk: Youth Climate Activists March From Paradise to
San Francisco</b><br>
Ezra David Romero - May 28<br>
Madeline Ruddell, 16, says she has long lived with the effects of
climate change as a resident of Sonoma County, where wildfires have
ripped across the landscape in recent years.<br>
<br>
Ruddell, communications lead for the Sonoma County hub of the
Sunrise Movement, a national youth-led climate activist group, can't
remember a fall where she didn't prep an evacuation bag, or take
time off of school because of a big fire.<br>
"I was eager for action because I'm watching fires consume my town
and consume my county," she said. "These fires ... motivate me to
work harder."<br>
<br>
She is one of seven young activists marching 266 miles over 2 1/2
weeks in an effort to pressure California lawmakers to support the
Civilian Climate Corps as part of a Green New Deal. She hopes work
done by the corps could help reduce fire risk in California.<br>
<br>
"I want ambitious progressive climate legislation passed by the end
of summer 2021,” she said. “We only have one planet and my
generation is gonna have to live on it for the rest of our lives.”<br>
- -<br>
“We're not asking people to only reduce their individual consumption
in order to tackle climate change,” he said. “We're asking the
government to invest in people, because that's the only way we're
gonna rebuild a better future.”<br>
<br>
Follow the youth as they march across California: Twitter
@smvmtgenonfire<br>
Instagram - @sunrisegenonfire<br>
TikTok - @sunrisegenonfire<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.kqed.org/news/11875863/a-266-mile-walk-youth-climate-activists-march-from-paradise-to-san-francisco">https://www.kqed.org/news/11875863/a-266-mile-walk-youth-climate-activists-march-from-paradise-to-san-francisco</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[New Yorker says]<br>
<b>Are We Entering a New Political Era?</b><br>
The neoliberal order seems to be collapsing. A generation of young
activists is trying to insure that it’s replaced by progressive
populism, not by the fascist right.<br>
By Andrew Marantz - May 24, 2021<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/are-we-entering-a-new-political-era">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/are-we-entering-a-new-political-era</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[says the Washington Post]<b><br>
</b> <b>It’s wrong to blame ‘overpopulation’ for climate change</b><br>
By Sarah Kaplan - May 25, 2021<br>
<blockquote>“Why is the impact of population growth infrequently
mentioned? A couple producing more than two children will impact
carbon emissions to a greater degree than any other activity. That
impact cannot be offset by any practicable lifestyle change;
switching to vegetarianism doesn’t come close to balance the
scales.”<br>
— James, Lebanon, Pa.<br>
</blockquote>
When the Census Bureau released data recently showing that the
United States population is growing at its slowest rate in almost a
century, an old question reappeared in environmental reporters’
inboxes: Do we need a smaller population to save our warming planet?<br>
<br>
The answer is: Not necessarily. Climate change isn’t caused by
population growth. It’s caused by greenhouse gas emissions from
burning fossil fuels...<br>
- -<br>
Since the start of the millennium, U.N. reports show, global
resource use has been primarily driven by increases in affluence,
not the population. This is especially true in high- to
upper-middle-income nations, which account for 78 percent of
material consumption, despite having slower population growth rates
than the rest of the world.<br>
<br>
Meanwhile in low-income countries, whose share of the global
population has almost doubled, demand for resources has stayed
constant at just about 3 percent of the global total...<br>
- -<br>
Another U.N. study has found that inequality within and between
countries makes them less effective at tackling climate change. A
lack of social cohesion and the concentration of power in the hands
of wealthy people — who are more insulated from climate change’s
worst impacts — makes nations less likely to take the kinds of
collective actions needed, analysts found. In turn, the effects of
warming disproportionately harm low-income communities, which makes
inequality even worse.<br>
<br>
These data suggest that stabilizing the climate depends on
addressing the affluence and technology aspects of the IPAT
equation, Ramaswami said. “Fixating on population decrease doesn’t
make much of a difference.”<br>
<br>
Treating people as the problem isn’t just misguided — it’s
dangerous. When concern about population becomes central to
environmental policy, said researcher Betsy Hartman, “racism and
xenophobia are always waiting in the wings.”<br>
- -<br>
James, who posed the question at the beginning of this piece, is
correct when he wrote that lifestyle changes can’t mitigate a
person’s entire environmental impact. We all need to eat. We all
need homes that are warm in the winter and cool in the summer. We
all live in a world that generates most of its electricity, food and
consumer goods with fossil fuels. There is no opting out of those
systems.<br>
<br>
But systems can change.<br>
<br>
“One of the biggest opportunities is what we call ‘decoupling,’ ”
Ramaswami said. “You can still grow your population and GDP if you
decouple your basic provisioning systems from resource use and
greenhouse gas emissions.”...<br>
- -<br>
To achieve a sustainable society, Attari said, we should also
“decouple” consumption from our ideas about progress and growth.
Instead of focusing solely on GDP, nations could seek to improve a
metric known as the Human Development Index, which also considers
things like life expectancy and access to schooling. They could even
take it one step further and adopt the “planetary
pressures-adjusted” HDI, which rewards countries that promote human
development without increasing greenhouse gas emissions and resource
use.<br>
<br>
The effort to build a safe, healthy and equitable world can’t be
boiled down to a numbers game. But if you do want to focus on a
number, it shouldn’t be in the number of people on the planet. It
should be 419 parts per million — the concentration of carbon
dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. In the end, that’s the number that
most needs to come down.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/05/25/slowing-population-growth-environment/">https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/05/25/slowing-population-growth-environment/</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Esteemed British Psychotherapist comments on our condition - audio]<br>
Denis Postle <b>The End of Progress</b> [audio]<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://soundcloud.com/denis-postle/the-end-of-progress">https://soundcloud.com/denis-postle/the-end-of-progress</a><br>
- -<br>
[the 7 page text essay]<br>
<b>12 | Self & Society Vol 49 No. 1 Spring 2021</b><br>
<b>The End of Progress 1</b><br>
Denis Postle ARCA Summary<br>
This podcast tells the story of how a novel proposal about the deep
structure of our civilisation emerged from my research into climate
heating and the Covid-19 pandemic. I outline how, in the pursuit of
progress, an apparently compulsive urge to crystallise anything and
everything that is fluid has generated a level of complexity in
human civilisation that makes it increasingly vulnerable to sudden
change and possible collapse. I share some strategies for personal
survival.<br>
Introduction<br>
I guess we all try to make sense of what is happening to us and
around us.<br>
I’m going to tell the story of how I found a helpful, if tragic,
perspective on these difficult times that we are living through.
It’s a big perspective – how we’ve made civilisation and how it
makes us.<br>
I’m going to talk about digitalisation and growth without limits.
I’m going to talk about how sudden dramatic change can be
triggered.2<br>
And I’m going to have a lot to say about Crystallisation and
Fluidity. An original, at least to me, proposal about the
foundations of our civilisation. And how this probably means we are
within sight of the end of ‘progress’.<br>
And lastly, I’m going to share my experience of how we can begin to
meet this oncoming peril...<br>
more at -
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/episode-43/?mc_cid=b86a939fb5&mc_eid=56bdf1d03c">https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/episode-43/?mc_cid=b86a939fb5&mc_eid=56bdf1d03c</a><br>
This is an extended version of a psyCommons podcast –
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://soundcloud.com/denis-postle/the-end-of-progress">https://soundcloud.com/denis-postle/the-end-of-progress</a> (accessed 27
April 2021).<br>
2 Denis Postle, Catastrophe<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/episode-43/?mc_cid=b86a939fb5&mc_eid=56bdf1d03c">https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/episode-43/?mc_cid=b86a939fb5&mc_eid=56bdf1d03c</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[3 middle-aged white guys talking - from Post Carbon Institute -
goofy talk gets serious]<br>
<b>Episode 43 – Overproduction of Elites and Political Upheaval, or…
the Story of Rich People Doing Stupid Things</b><br>
<blockquote>Imagine a factory assembly line running at full steam,
but instead of spitting out car parts or plastic trinkets, the
conveyor belt is loaded down with Jeff Bezos wannabes. That’s a
disconcerting image, but it’s an accurate picture of what’s
happening: society is producing too many elite people, and their
decisions are causing extreme inequality, which is one of the key
components of today’s sustainability crisis. Join Asher, Rob, and
Jason as they struggle with elite words and phrases (who’s up for
some cliodynamics?) and try to exorcise the demons of their own
elitism. You’ll also hear how elites may have formulated the plot
of the next Spike Lee movie, “Do the Wrong Thing.” Chuck Collins,
author of The Wealth Hoarders, provides additional insights on how
we can work toward a more equitable society.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/episode-43/?mc_cid=b86a939fb5&mc_eid=56bdf1d03c">https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/episode-43/?mc_cid=b86a939fb5&mc_eid=56bdf1d03c</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[The news archive - looking back]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming June
3, 1977</b></font><br>
<br>
June 3, 1977: The New York Times reports, "To avoid accumulation in
the air of sufficient carbon dioxide to cause major climate changes,
it may ultimately be necessary to restrict the burning of coal and
other fossil fuels, according to Dr. William D. Nordhaus of the
President's Council of Economic Advisers."<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://select.nytimes.co/gst/abstract.html?res=F30E15FC355D167493C1A9178DD85F438785F9">http://select.nytimes.co/gst/abstract.html?res=F30E15FC355D167493C1A9178DD85F438785F9</a><br>
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