Matthew Haugen
@MJHaugen
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Climate/environmental researcher • @cpluscp Fellow • @DSAecosocialism Co-Chair • Writing TERRAIN, a newsletter about our ecological crises
Tuscaloosa, AL
Joined June 2009
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It is kind of a cliche at this point, but every time I use the library I think about how if public libraries did not exist and they were proposed today there is no chance we would get them.
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Incomprehensible evil, a permanent moral stain on everyone involved in perpetrating and allowing this
Children suffering from malnutrition in Gaza will be stunted for life, "if they survive,"
@unicefchief
says. "It's a painful, painful death for children."
In maternity wards, "babies don't even have the energy to cry. It's a devastating thing to see," she says.
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There is so much money in finding various ways to say "hot take: actually the status quo is good"
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Universal public goods are wildly beloved and politically durable, but our political system seemingly no longer has the will or capacity to build new ones or even strengthen existing ones. 🥲
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RIP Mike Davis. After it came out that he was transitioning to palliative care, I emailed him to send him my best and let him know about the overwhelming appreciation for him and his work I felt and was seeing across the board. This was his response:
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It's so wild that conservative suburbanites are the unassailable protagonists of US politics who must be coddled and catered to even in New York City
new: Gov. Hochul says she's indefinitely pausing the rollout of congestion pricing in NYC. "I cannot add another burden to working- and middle-class New Yorkers," or create another barrier to NY's recovery, she says, citing inflation and drivers staying home in age of remote work
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Building a mass movement (instead of a subculture) will require a lot of cringe, so get comfortable with it
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"Independent testing suggests that virtually all plastic bottles leach chemicals into the beverages they hold."
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“When you’ve got 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, nobody can push you around or tell you what to say or do"
-Fannie Lou Hamer, on the importance of food sovereignty for movements
"If I fall, I will fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom."
Activist Fannie Lou Hamer was born on this day in 1917.
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60% of House Democrats voted against reducing the Pentagon's budget to around the 2017 level
BREAKING: A House vote to cut the Pentagon by 10% just failed 93-324.
But this is the first time in decades that Congress has considered a significant cut to Pentagon spending.
The military-industrial complex will fall. We will end our addiction to endless, costly wars.
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It is interesting that causing interpersonal harm (i.e. harassment or abuse) can now sometimes bring down politicians but causing large-scale harm via policy/governing decisions (i.e. pollution, bombing, police violence, deprivation) is never even considered a scandal
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Since it's Earth Day I want to say that Mars is a terrible planet and there is nothing we could do to Earth to make it less habitable than that barren red place. Earth is a beautiful accident, the most unlikely and amazing thing in the known universe, and there is no alternative.
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The Left is on a different strategic playing field than the Right, who's on Easy Mode because they have lots of money & this whole thing—society, government, media—is amenable to their ideology while being overtly hostile to ours. We can't use the same tactics to the same effect!
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People love saying this for some reason but it simply isn't true
its ironic that the environmentalists in the 70’s probably did more damage to the environment than anyone else in history by killing nuclear
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It feels like this is a watershed moment around public perception of policing
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We need public gyms run for the people, by the people
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Every day, the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and every day the supposedly progressive Biden administration supports it anew
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@OlufemiOTaiwo
Cultivating Mass Movements: The Crisis of Masculinity and the Necessity of a Socialist Lifting Politics
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Too much "How can we decarbonize this thing?" and not enough holistic socioecological analysis questioning the underlying assumptions about whether said thing should even exist
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Our Green New Deal will include paying people well to do lots of jobs like this
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Why are people eating at restaurants, I feel like I’m going insane
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Investor-owned utilities are so wild as a concept. They get to be regulated monopolies with guaranteed profit margins for essential services but they also get to use those profits to lobby for laxer regulations in order to preserve themselves and increase their profits.
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The climate and ecological crisis is much more of a power struggle to win than a technological problem to solve.
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Much love to Bernie, but I want to talk about vultures for a sec. Vultures are amazing birds that serve a critical ecological function: they have highly corrosive stomach acid that allows them to eat decaying/infected flesh, keeping it from sitting around as a disease vector.
In America, if you're a wealthy vulture capitalist with over $250,000 in uninsured deposits at a loosely regulated bank the federal government will guarantee that your money is safe in a weekend. If you have no health insurance and get cancer, you're on your own. Unacceptable.
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Republican guy who has never cooked a meal in his life: “You can pry my beloved gas stove out of my cold, dead hands”
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Extremely wealthy people hawking crypto makes me think about this Kurt Vonnegut poem
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Guys love getting reluctantly pulled out of retirement for one last job that only they can do
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An orangutan made a medicinal paste from a plant and used it to heal a large wound
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Nuclear energy is far from dead; it still provides ~18% of electricity in the US & ~9% of global electricity. It stagnated in the 90s (not the 70s) mainly due to cost. Imagine if environmentalists were powerful enough to kill a massive form of energy generation...
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The number one most important thing in organizing or any collective/team endeavor is: do not sign up for things beyond your capacity to do well (and immediately tell someone else in the group if you find yourself unable to do a job you signed up for)
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"the odds of a new dementia diagnosis increased about 21% for every 1 microgram increase in the concentration of wildfire particles"
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The Boeing situation is a good excuse to jump-start rebuilding, nationalizing, and modernizing our national public passenger rail system
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"What keeps us going...is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight."
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Fascinating story: "The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks."
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We are actually on track for infinite global warming because greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing. Treating pledges as material is extraordinarily reckless.
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People often say “political” when they mean “partisan.” How could voting not be political?
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It is so cartoonishly evil to blockade a country then chastise it for not having the things you are stopping it from getting
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Disorganizing (stoking conflict, breaking groups apart, proclaiming futility, etc.) is way easier than organizing (building structures for people to act collectively) and is incentivized by our individualistic society
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As someone who used to really enjoy playing, watching, and analyzing the sport, I take no pleasure in reporting this
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If a fungus tried to take over my neurological system I would repel it with my mind easily
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We need to ban bitcoin mining, as China did
A Bitcoin mine moved into a Texas town--then its residents started getting sick. I traveled to Granbury and talked to 50+ people experiencing symptoms that seem to stem from the mine's noise, including heart palpitations, seizures, migraines, blood clots
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"Recreational facilities like this are not typically what comes to mind when people talk about a just transition to a sustainable society, but this type of public leisure is the building block of where we need to go."
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It's pretty amazing how many supposedly serious people continue to act as though you can't put solar panels on top of other stuff
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"Pro-labor" conservatism does not and will never exist, and it would be bad even if it did
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Thanks to a 2018 ballot initiative, Michigan has same-day voter registration. Right now is a BIG line of students waiting to register at the Ann Arbor city clerk's office (I'm told it's moving fast). This is a good sign! A wonderful
@HuronValleyDSA
brought them some pizzas. 😎
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While often well-intended, I don't think variations of "We believe in science" are helpful rallying cries. Because they flatten the idea of science into something apolitical and universal, and because science has been, and continues to be, used for all sorts of nefarious ends.
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"The ruling by Ecuador’s highest court, published on Wednesday, upheld the rights of nature, which are enshrined in the country’s constitution, and said they applied across the whole country, not just to protected areas."
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I do not understand what people think is going to happen to the economy if everyone returns to work and we have millions of deaths start happening
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Recommended reading
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The Right also doesn't care if the world burns, literally or metaphorically, while the Left feels responsibility to build/help. Certainly the question of how to best do that, especially balancing the long and short term, is often very unclear, but again—totally different field.
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Not a novel point by any means, but it's so maddening and revealing how cities will defund all sorts of vital and helpful public capacity and services to crickets (or even cheers) from elites, but defunding the police is considered beyond the pale and unserious to even mention
It turns out the situation is even worse:
NYC is now processing just 46.3% of food stamp applications on time, officials told the Council
Meanwhile, 20% of budgeted positions are vacant as
@NYCMayor
orders more cuts
W/
@MariamHydara
for
@CityLimitsNews
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Basically every meaningful measure of planetary ecological crises, from greenhouse gas emissions to biodiversity loss to deforestation to plastic and chemical pollution, is still increasing. The idea that the problem is that activists are too alarmist is patently absurd.
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Governors: Oh vaccines are ramping up and an end to the pandemic is in sight? Time to end restrictions now to get one more big spike of unnecessary pain and death in before that.
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NPR does a good job of laundering conservative ideology to liberals
The IRS has delivered more than $207 billion in coronavirus relief payments to individual taxpayers. But some of those payments, it turns out, have gone to dead people.
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Rooting for the 49ers is Putin's message. Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see.
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This should be a major story
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People who position "the working class" and "people with college degrees" as being different groups in opposition to each other have lost the plot
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@mehdirhasan
The left has no power and liberals have enormous power, which is a very significant detail omitted from this analysis
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Political analysis that does not center ecology is fundamentally the opposite of materialist
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Many people talk about a Green New Deal like it is just a job guarantee for building electric vehicles & solar panels. That is...not going to cut it. Repairing the ecological crisis requires fundamentally remaking our relationships with each other, the land, & the rest of nature.
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“This shows humans have the ability to not just allow biodiversity to flourish, but to be a part of it.”
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Fireworks are bad. They scare animals, trigger PTSD, and pollute the environment so people can look at a flash of light for a few seconds.
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[after eliminating pandemic response policies and shaping public opinion to not care about COVID-19 anymore] “unfortunately, the public doesn’t care about COVID-19 anymore so there’s nothing we can do”
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The Supreme Court is hearing arguments tomorrow in a case over a California ballot measure restricting the sale of animal products from the most horrible conditions (for pigs, that's gestation crates). I wrote about why factory farming must be abolished:
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This is an excellent article on an important issue that does not get nearly enough attention: the terrible building quality of US homes, particularly energy efficiency, air quality, and materials
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Dolly Parton's nonprofit is facilitating the privatization and defunding of public libraries here in Alabama
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Scores of people, many of whom are children, are being killed in Gaza every day by US-made weapons, but the most comfortable and powerful people in the world are focused on how dangerous it is for college students to protest this state of affairs. Really makes you feel insane.
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Under socialism, we will simply transcend our material universe by inventing magic
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It's shocking how many experts still act as if gas is significantly better than coal given that there's a new study like every week about how methane leakage is preposterously under-quantified (not to mention what we know about the health impacts of fracking)
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@RaxKingIsDead
the psychic connection between the Starks and their wolves (especially Arya's dreams)
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Climate doomerism of random folks is unhelpful/wrong, but it pales in comparison to the soft denial of capitalist techno-utopianism—that nothing needs to fundamentally change—which is the dominant ideology of the ruling class & exponentially more of a barrier to requisite action.
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Cars are one of the biggest third rails of US environmental policy. Electric cars are better than gasoline cars, but if you further entrench the car-centric design of society you are actually further entrenching the ecological crisis in the long run.
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Has anyone come up with a better term for the myriad ways that humans rely on nonhuman nature than "ecosystem services"? It sounds so economistic and dualistic.
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In general I think people overrate "intelligence" (it's not even clear to me what this means anyway) and underrate curiosity. Maintaining an intense curiosity about the world and how it works helps us evolve in our thinking, overcome blind spots, and adapt to new information.
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California voters passed a law making factory farms just a little less cruel and the industry is fighting against it with all their might
THREAD. The Supreme Court has just decided to hear a case with massive implications for U.S. democracy. I try to explain a little about it below.
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Taking the work of organizing seriously does not mean acting like an NGO or becoming more conservative, it means suppressing your ego and acting like an adult who values the collective project higher than a libidinal desire for personal political catharsis
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We need WINS. A movement that merely declares broad and distant rhetorical demands and never actually achieves anything will struggle to build and sustain itself. We need to experience how collective action can build and wield power to see how and why a better world is possible.
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An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even wizards use public transport.
"the subway wizard" david mattingly cover art for amazing stories, september 1991
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Free idea: a podcast called Commodity Fetish that goes into depth examining the political economy and ecological context of various commodities like oil, sand, soybeans, sugar, lithium, cobalt, etc.
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There is no such thing as a "free market." All markets are sociopolitical constructs, and capitalist markets (with private ownership of the means of production) require the state to bound, regulate, and enforce their parameters.
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"The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states."
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Kamala Harris should pledge to nationalize Twitter. This is where Biden announced that he was dropping out! That's vital infrastructure for the public good that should not be owned by a right-wing billionaire clown.
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It's so funny when reactionary centrists always blame the left when they fail & say we need to focus on "bread & butter issues." The left wants to give people healthcare, money, clean air/water/land, etc. but they block this stuff & do tax credits & upward wealth redistribution.
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A Sudanese refugee was fired from a pork processing plant & told by HR to finish his shift. Management called the cops, who came & murdered him as he held his company-issued band-cutter. The company covered his body w/ plastic & made everyone keep working.
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Bill Gates bought MS-DOS in 1981 and as a result I have to hear what this clown thinks about climate change for the rest of my life for some reason
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Reactionaries will not be defeated by merely fact-checking their lies
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We need an anti-car version of FAST AND THE FURIOUS about a heist team who builds family around public transit, cycling, and 15 minute communities
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