Nick Doty @npd@octodon.social

— this quote is from the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 1955, but it seems the words apply to the climate crisis today with no changes, except that we would not today mistakenly refer to scientists exclusively as men.
https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/

Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only upon the extent of the particular expert’s knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy.

* "The Game Changers", Netflix: professional athletes, bodybuilders and fighters perform well on vegan diets; soy does not have estrogen; meat-eating might actually inhibit male sexual performance;
* "Cybertruck", Elon Musk: here's a vehicle that's even tougher than your entirely unnecessary ego-compensating giant pick-up truck; so tough that you can explicitly live out your post-apocalyptic fantasy (and also it runs on electricity and has a dramatically lower carbon footprint)

A trend:
Certain cultural properties of fragile masculinity have been entrenched by marketers to encourage unhealthy and unsustainable habits: eating meat and driving pick-up trucks.

Rather than trying to change those views of masculinity (which, sure, would be great, but it's super slow), we could instead show that the marketing is flawed or try simply to out-market on hyper-masculinity.

and more current, you could get something like this just by analyzing your credit card transactions, right?

Doconomy provides a credit card that does this:
https://doconomy.com/en/

Oreoco suggests connecting your Mint transactions:
https://www.oroeco.com

These depend on databases of carbon estimates for different kinds of products, but those are improving! including from Åland and UC Berkeley. Obviously they could be much more precise with product/service providers involved.

links:
"carbon trading credit cards" proposed by UK government in 2006:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/dec/11/uk.greenpolitics

Royal Society said in 2009 it might be feasible by 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/feb/03/personal-carbon-allowances

Tesco carbon labeling (since withdrawn):
https://green.blogs.nytimes.com//2009/08/25/does-carbon-labeling-confuse-consumers/

... these schemes have been proposed (and largely abandoned) in the past, with the long-term goal of having mandatory accounting and a trading system if you went over your annual allowance (cap-and-trade). But they might be more feasible and acceptable now.

And there have been attempts to add some nutrition-style labeling in stores (Tesco had a pilot program). But it would be especially valuable across different types of purchases, because it's the comparisons that people are so bad at.

I find the idea of a personal carbon account/charge card so attractive. Even if you swiped it just when buying gasoline, electricity/gas, groceries, prepared food and long-distance travel: I think it would be so informative to see the difference in carbon emissions from all these different actions and purchases.

Has anyone explained instant runoff voting to British people?

It seems absurd that current predictions show the Conservatives getting 9% fewer votes (than the 2017 election) but 11% more seats.

Is everyone in the UK just okay with this? Governments are determined not by your popularity with the people but by the relative overlap of the opposing parties?

Things I would like on an always-on e-ink display mounted on a wall near our front door:
* the current time
* a list of buses and how long til they leave the station
* current energy usage (in watts) of the apartment, with a breakdown by category/appliance
* outdoor temperature and the day's weather forecast

The DMV won't let me apply for a driver's license, because I don't have auto liability insurance. I pointed out that I don't own or regularly drive a car, but was told that was irrelevant.

Allegedly this is a state with a Republican legislature that sued over Obamacare because it mandated purchase of private health insurance, but when it comes to making it more difficult or expensive for poor people or people who want to go mostly without cars, I guess those conservative principles don't count.

emailing my County Commissioners regarding land use policy, mandatory parking minimums and environmental sustainability

watching Greta Thunberg and crying

PLANT TREES
Some simple, important messages at the #triangleclimatestrike #climatestrike

I'm not sure the particular impact of a digital climate strike on a personal homepage, but I still like the symbolism of the personal, public commitment. And it's easy to add: https://digital.globalclimatestrike.net/

h/t @emsenn for the prompt and https://kottke.org/19/09/get-ready-for-the-global-climate-strike-on-september-20 for the particular resource

This kind of graphic is an experiment for me, based on this Sightline blog post "What Would Our Cities Look like If We Took Our Climate Change Values Seriously?"
Getting the map sizes right was a little tricky, but I believe this is correct, and it's a striking visual.
https://www.sightline.org/2019/08/12/what-would-our-cities-look-like-if-we-took-our-climate-change-values-seriously/

Our city of Durham, NC is well over twice the area of Paris, France, but has 1/8th as many people.

We have room for plenty more neighbors in a vibrant, livable city; there is no need for further suburban sprawl.

Franzen was just trolling us, y'all. He wrote the perfect piece to make the reader both feel bad and feel good, and to be slightly ambiguous in advocating for whatever you're already doing now, so that there would be both backlash and some defense.

He's not actually trying to discourage climate action or to encourage resilience development; he's actually trying to get notoriety and clicks.

Let's keep frequent flyer programs, except that instead of giving discounts for even more flying, instead you pay an exponentially-increasing tax on every flight.

Related proposal:
http://afreeride.org/