Samuel Miller McDonald
@sjmmcd
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Writing a book on the history, science, and politics of Progress ( @WmCollinsBooks / @StMartinsPress '25). PhD: @oxfordgeography @BNC_Members . Posting casually~~
Joined March 2017
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I'm thrilled to announce my first book: PROGRESS will show how extractive, expansionist economies use progress myths to reproduce themselves, with dire consequences. This book tells an alternative story of societal progress.
@WmCollinsBooks
&
@StMartinsPress
are the perfect homes
"This extraordinary book will provide a damning critique of the political status quo, rooted in a fundamental re-examination of our past",
@WmCollinsBooks
bags
@sjmmcd
's Progress: Five Myths that Shaped Our Past and Put Our Future at Risk! More here:
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A reminder that after he returned from destroying the ring, Frodo temporarily served as Deputy Mayor of the Shire, and his sole act was to defund the police
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"The fact that the Holocaust can’t be explained by theories of imperialism" is an absolutely insane thing for anyone, especially a German, to suggest. Lebensraum was the justification for basically everything the Nazis did, including the Holocaust
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@lyta_gold
I think it should be acceptable to tell edgy, tasteless jokes about anyone and anything, and also should be acceptable to slap the person telling the jokes
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For those who aren't aware, there may only be about 60,000 orangutans left living in the wild and 2,000 are killed per year. They've lost 80% of habitat in 20 years. This is so, so fast and puts them extremely close to extinction. Industrial economies simply have to stop existing
sometimes i see a creature and it feels like we shouldn’t even be allowed to gaze upon them. i realize in an instant this world is really theirs and it’s a privilege to even know they exist
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Jacobin has put out some bad ecological analysis, but publishing Ted Nordhaus to defend industrial agriculture is a new low. With the mag doubling down on anti-scientific technofetishism, it's probably getting to a point of doing more harm than good
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I wrote an analysis on nuclear energy for
@BostonReview
. The conversation on nuclear should consider what sorts of energy will be best suited to an increasingly unstable Anthropocene & how our energy choices lock in what sorts of societies we can build
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good morning to Greta Thunberg who, despite what must be immense outside pressure, has not given in to being a hope-mongering optimism scold..
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As a climate activist, I used to think we could only ask people to take small actions. Vote. Call reps. Invest in renewables. But I think I was wrong. We've entered a time in which, the only choice we have is to ask--demand--people commit acts of heroism:
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It's hard to overstate how much damage Hans Rosling and other big data visualization people have done to understanding not just basic facts about reality, but the urgency of major problems and how to fix them
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propaganda presenting itself as neutral to make the comically backwards claim that independent media is biased & unreliable while corporate media owned by super wealthy individuals with clear agendas is unbiased & reliable
Media Bias Chart 6.0, October 2020 Edition is here, featuring 17 New Sources!
Note that we have so many sources rated that they don't all fit on one static version of the chart. See our site for all other sources!
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some of the best teachers I've ever had were at community college, and some of the stupidest kids I've ever met were at Yale and Oxford
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To be clear, the Amazon didn't spontaneously begin emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. Brazil's development policies, global markets, and the broader processes of neoliberalization have transformed the Amazon into a net emitter
The Brazilian Amazon released nearly 20% more CO2 into the atmosphere over the past decade than it absorbed.
“it is the first time that we have figures showing that the Brazilian Amazon has flipped, and is now a net emitter,”
@INRAE_Intl
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I would like to submit to the NYT Opinion an op-ed arguing for the immediate extrajudicial execution of everyone with over $10 million net worth. Some may find this painful, even dangerous. But that's one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate.
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Every single economic growthist—whether liberal, socialist, centrist, or any other sort—is still a growthist only because they lack a basic understanding of ecological sciences (or are bad faith nihilists!)
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@DoctorVive
@NPR
I find this "soft" denialism--the daily ignoring--more destructive to solving this problem than the hard denial. I also find it more psychologically distressing. I can deal with denial trolls by blocking. But being surrounded by this banal denial seems inescapable
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This is what maps of access to basic necessities--food, water--will come to look like unless we seize rich peoples' wealth and redistribute it now
Hundreds of thousands of homes across California are without power. But chunks of Bay Area remain conspicuously absent from outage maps: The seats of power for nearly every major tech giant.
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can anyone explain this phenomenon? journo/take merchant with b&w avi of intellectual/literary figure? not dragging, just curious. what is the signaling?
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It’s always funny to me when pundits seem to think that announcing their ignorance about the world and entire fields of scholarship makes them look serious
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replacing all mentions of "radical" with "realistic" in my climate writing
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Economics without a basis in ecology is about as useful for understanding the world as astrology, but a lot more destructive
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one thing that has radicalized me a lot is learning about energy materiality & geopolitics = coming to understand that every state with petrodollars will strive to maintain carbon supremacy at any cost, will murder the most heroic people, and will happily bring humanity to an end
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Just some quick honesty while we’re on the subject: climate change has probably been irreversible for a while now and nothing short of completely, entirely stopping industrial production—regardless of whether it’s governed via capitalism or socialism—is going to soften it at all
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Something that pumps out carbon to manufacture, ship, and, in most places, run being a "win against climate change" reveals how divorced from reality the rhetoric around climate change still is in mainstream politics. We're not even talking about what needs to be done
Every electric vehicle sold is a win against climate change. And under President Biden’s leadership, electric vehicle sales in the United States have tripled.
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Nuclear is bad because safely storing waste/running plants requires long-term infrastructure integrity and thanks to changes already made to the atmosphere there's not going to be long-term infrastructure integrity no matter what happens—we can't even keep roads built now
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climate change illiteracy is far more widespread-broader and more deeply ingrained-than anyone would like to admit. it extends to experts in the field who don't have the interdisciplinary tools to understand the difficulty of decarbonization and consequences of collapse
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Please join Environmentalists for Bernie in endorsing Senator Sanders. It comes down to Joe's $1.7 trillion over ten years versus Bernie's $16.3 trillion for a Green New Deal. The latter may not be enough, but it's a hell of a lot closer to what we need
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as exhausting and depressing as this site can be, i think i often come on here to find solace in the reminder that there are many people who forego living in a fantasy, who also dwell on cataclysmic ecological collapse, and care about working to prevent it
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"The neoliberal promise still driving policy today that economic growth trickles down to improve poverty is clearly false...“Growth” is a euphemism that sanitizes the process of multinationals and richer nations plundering a country’s natural resources."
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Trying to reconcile Nolan's "prisoners have a stronger ethical core than civilians" parable in this movie with his "cop army must triumph over Occupy Wall Street" parable in Dark Knight Rises and having an aneurysm
If the Dark Knight ferry bomb dilemma happened in real life they would have 100% blown each other up right
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This is a good illustration of a phenomenon I detail in my (almost finished) book: big data visualizers create comforting, but false, narratives about things getting better, and then advocate for faith in non-existent technology to solve any remaining problems
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It's a sad commentary on the state of political discourse that comments like this are generally still acceptable. This tortured reasoning is based on debunked, phony science and bad history, and contributes to accelerating our march toward mass death and destruction
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Climate change isn't a problem of the future. It has been happening for decades and we are already deeply into fundamental planetary changes that are probably irreversible. The Holocene status quo is over and massive disruptions to everything on earth are happening right now
What‘s something that seems obvious within your profession, but the general public seems to misunderstand?
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made a meme for my new Current Affairs essay about ecofascism:
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Getting real sick of all these unrecoverable tipping points, and also the widespread delusion that we can stop any of them without completely dismantling the economy
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Example: the article states, "The long-term evolution of food systems toward larger-scale, more technological, and less labor-intensive production has been a boon for the environment as well." Garbage this unscientific would be surprising even coming from ag industry propaganda
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practicing mass politics is difficult in a country with the world's highest imprisonment rate, a militarized police eager to murder civilians, an economy that punishes the smallest transgressions with lifelong unemployability, and a people chronically suspicious of each other
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This Economist cover looks like an illustration
@curaffairs
would commission to make fun of The Economist
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@neilhimself
hey Neil, masters from Yale in energy politics and doing a PhD at Oxford, also energy transition politics. This piece I wrote quotes your own work to help explain why it's so necessary to achieve zero emissions as soon as physically possible:
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This widespread belief that hope in positive change is necessary to motivate action is not true and a counterproductive misunderstanding of what does motivates action
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One of the more frustrating, baffling things in the climate space has been the HUGE GAP between what should have happened to William Nordhaus (laughed out of any serious discussions) and what actually happened to William Nordhaus (got a Nobel prize)
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@calebsaysthings
Edinburgh, Scotland has (at least) two (2): Ferret Man who wanders around with two ferrets on leashes, and Nordic Hercules
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Really excited to share this piece on why fossil-fueled-food is bad (beyond the obvious climate apocalypse reasons) and what a decarbonized food system could look and feel like:
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There's a constant stream of research suggesting that climate impacts are happening faster & more intensely than previously thought. The 'serious' climate commentators always hand-wringing about moderate messaging should be totally ignored
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Wow tapping the sign a lot tonight
In history, when authoritarianism comes to a nation, sometimes formerly "liberal" corporate leaders and entertainers find pretexts to accommodate the advancing new order and give public signals that they are themselves moving to the Right.
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I think there's something very important about Millennials and Gen Z uniting to preserve life on earth, and seeing us as one huge generation bound together by the greatest calamities humans have ever endured
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Electoralism matters so much because whoever controls the US military will get to decide whether Shell, Exxon, etc increase oil & gas production 35% in 10 yrs, and therefore whether climate chaos makes civilization impossible
Shell, Exxon on path to increase oil and gas production 35% by 2030. Our job is to stop them
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I haven't heard a good argument for why Biden is "way better than Trump." Biden has spent a lifetime undermining egalitarian, pro-social, pro-environmental policies. He has been involved in virtually every action to roll back progressive policies of the past 30 years:
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What’s so insane and pathetic about this NYT hit piece is that it’s criticizing Sanders’ plan for being too ambitious when the reality is that even his plan isn’t nearly ambitious enough. NYT is spreading yet more climate denial
Bernie Sanders’ $16 trillion plan to reverse global warming would nationalize the power sector and have the fossil fuel industry foot the bill for shifting the economy wholly to renewable energy. His supporters are thrilled. Experts, not so much.
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The best way to be an objective, impartial writer/ journalist/researcher is to be transparent about your values and biases, not to pretend they don't exist. Having values and being accurate aren't mutually exclusive. As ever
@NathanJRobinson
puts it well:
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Because oil & gas makes a few people lots of money and those people control the world’s militaries, police, and media!
Truly crucial essay from Lee Wasserman asking the obvious questions: why on earth are companies still looking for new oil and gas? And why are politicians helping them?
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But unfortunately faith in technology will no more save us from climate and ecological crises than faith in a heavenly afterlife will
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"We don’t know yet if we can use it as a resource"
bro, what/.?
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The entire political spectrum except for degrowthers and environmental defenders:
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We are living in the frailest times. Human errors today carry the weight of eternity as in no other period in our time on earth. It is no exaggeration that what each of us does in this short chapter of history will reverberate through all of our species’ future
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A Czech Republic worth of energy consumption and emissions have been added to the world so some nerds can buy cocaine online
This worry about bitcoin's climate impact is dumb.
Big banks are pouring *trillions* into fossil fuels. And y'all are worried about bitcoin mining that can be cleaned up w/ renewables?
Remember: in the 90s, we thought half the US grid would be required to power the internet!
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I don't understand how there are still people who know a lot about climate change & ecological collapse and are not political extremists
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I for one think Nathan has good clothes and sincerely wish more people made an effort to look nice
truly appreciate the many supportive tweets beginning "I can't stand Nathan Robinson, BUT" or "Nathan Robinson is an insufferable preening grifter ponce, BUT"
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Not sure how many times we have to say it, there is a fixed amount of resources and usable energy, regardless of decarbonization, that can be put toward production. There are laws of physics that exist in the world, we don't live in a simulation of infinite everything
If you had the social forces to manage decline equitable, you’d have the social forces for a regime of decarbonization paired with abundance.
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Who needs scary fringe ecofascists when you have genocidal, eugenicist, ethnonationalist maniacs running every major government in the world?
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For the most part, CEOS are dumb as bricks. They take some simple data point like "People like red" and then make 1000 units of red and nothing else and then think "People like red, why does money go down?"
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And the reason this fact hasn't even nudged emissions downward is because of who pays & when: rich people pay some now for mitigation vs. poor people pay a lot later for adaptation. Decarbonization has a chance in hell only with massive wealth redistribution
Stopping climate change is only expensive compared to an imaginary world where climate change doesn't exist. It's *incredibly cheap* compared to the actual cost of a 3 degree warmer world.
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anyone saying the Sanders climate plan is too expensive or not realistic or whatever is a deeply unserious person
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The real slap in the face
President Biden's FY23 budget proposes $813.3 billion in military spending (a $31 billion increase from 2022) and $400 million to counter China's "malign influence"
$3.3 billion for clean energy projects, $11 billion for int'l climate aid, $18 billion for climate resilience
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Ahem sorry if this is a little rude activists but have you ever considered simply taking control of the richest and most militarized empire in history in order to remove the critical resource that made it the richest and most militarized empire in history?
Sorry to be a little rude, but the only viable solutions to climate change involve massive state-scale projects to completely revamp power generation and electrify almost everything, not doing community organizing to put a solar panel on the laundromat
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It is dispiriting to see people across the spectrum picking their favorite emperors though. Tankies love the red ones, libs love the corporate ones, authoritarians love the trad ones, all hate each others', and meanwhile they're all worshipping the same striving little psychopath
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Lots of pundits & politicians have said the Green New Deal is too ambitious. The fact is, it's not nearly ambitious enough. New piece at
@newrepublic
arguing that
@AOC
& others will have to push for policy much bigger than the New Deal ever was:
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just your daily reminder that George W. Bush won neither the popular vote nor the electoral vote in 2000
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There is an implicit view among many growthist pundits that whatever the current energy demand is must be the absolute minimum, until it increases, when that increase becomes the absolute minimum acceptable demand, ad infinitum. This is obviously incompatible with reality
Exhibit A on why energy consumption matters:
People in the US consume 12.8 MW/h of electricity per year, which is 3.5x times more than the global average & over twice as much as the average European.
This makes it harder to decarbonize & reap the benefits of efficiency gains.
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The reason police units have been rapidly buying up military equipment over the past six years (1033 program) is because they know conditions exist to spur revolutionary uprising, and they want to crush it. Here's how the Pentagon plans to govern cities:
This is Columbia, South Carolina right now. We are living in a police state
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I have to vote absentee, but it's fun to track my ballot and watch it sit in a sorting center in Illinois for 23 days (and counting) and know it will likely sit there until it's destroyed. Please listen to Nathan
If you want to ensure your vote is counted, and you feel safe going to the polls, do not mail your vote. Otherwise Trump's slowed-down USPS will just deliver your ballot after Election Day and it will be thrown out for being "too late."
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what people who are refusing to support Corbyn and Sanders are saying at this point is that they are happy with right-wing authoritarianism, mass extinction, and centuries of unmanageable climate chaos
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The US government is entirely captured by a small syndicate whose sole aim is to extract wealth for private control. Protecting Americans isn't even a low priority. Every single policy, especially foreign policy, should be viewed in that light
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A "five-fold increase in the size of the world economy" is a physical impossibility—at least to sustain for any meaningful period of time—and believing otherwise reveals a stunning ignorance of how the world works
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💯. Making environmentalists the most vilified issue group was the chemical & petroleum industries' greatest stroke of genius
my kookiest belief that i dont think is kooky at all is that we're going to realize in 100 years that the chemicals in our food, water and air are large contributing factors to not only physical ailments but depression, suicide and all sorts of other mental problems
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Utterly disgusting. Whatever torment avaricious souls are said to suffer in hell should be visited on their living bodies as a verifiable prelude
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'Elsevier, a Dutch company behind many renowned peer-reviewed scientific journals, including The Lancet and Global Environmental Change, is also one of the top publishers of books aimed at expanding fossil fuel production.' A damning report:
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Freedom gas is ridiculous. But so is "energy independence." They are the same thing. The real scandal is that the entire political establishment--democrats and republicans--has worked hard to expand natural gas and its GHG emissions. new at
@curaffairs
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Arguments for Biden over Trump were always immigration policy, but now this? Or climate change, but Biden has approved even more new fossil fuel development, or COVID response, but just as many have died, or student debt, but Biden resumed it, or foreign policy, but...just vibes?
BREAKING: The White House just released an immigration proposal that would increase mandatory detention and create a new system allowing mass deportations without due process.
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When people can't reconcile their rationalist secular worldview with the kind of comforting future found in much religious faith, they turn to this strategy. And I'm sure it works for them. She says it in the interview, faith in technology made her feel much better about life
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Game of Thrones started with storytelling strategies rare these days, especially in big budget shows, combining a sociological perspective, a materialist critique of progress, and interest in climate change. The final season abandoned all that:
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We have two ways of structuring global production & distribution: ecological economics or necroeconomics. Without some form of degrowth, all evidence suggests the world’s states will continue to choose economies of death until it’s no longer materially possible
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Do you want to have an impact on climate change? Here are 30 powerful actions you can take, divided in half for those with and without discretionary income:
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After all, it was Obama & Biden who lifted the 40-year ban on crude exports and dramatically expanded US oil development (and, therefore, emissions)!
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