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harleyquinnagenda · 3 days

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World Environmental Strategy Opinion/Discussion:

/semi-humorous motivational-rant/speech:

"Here's How It All Works Out"

Imagine an upside-down pyramid. Label the bottom "people", the top left corner "government", the top right corner "business".

Government has a job to do: protecting the status quo.

Business has a job to do: selling the people whatever they want, within the law.

People have a job to do: determining the status quo and buying and voting accordingly.

When it comes to environment-destruction-caused-by-legal-overpollution-caused-by-legal-overconsumption-of-legal-overpolluting-resources:

The government has an excuse: they're protecting the status quo by allowing it to continue

The businesses have an excuse: they're selling people whatever they want, within the law

The people have no excuse: it is their job to determine the status quo. What they say goes. Business and government responds to them. If the people stop buying it, the businesses fold and the government protects the people. If the people buy something legal, the government protects both the businesses and the people over it. If the people vote for something, the government protects the people over it.

Etcetera.

The government, and the businesses, will never listen to a minority of people who say they want to take away the rest of people's actively exercised right to buy things that they want, not overall.

Party-politics allows any one party to only go so far in terms of entertaining whims of partisans, and we've gone that far. We got the IRA, the best possible start any environmental movement could fairly get in the United States. It won't go further than that, from the government. And no, businesses won't stop selling oil just because they held a COP about it. And the environment won't hurl a lightning bolt at you to stop you from melting Antarctica in half.

That means the big challenge that we all know is coming is coming.

We have to convince all the people of the world including ourselves to voluntarily boycott all significant planet-harming activities, and we have to make sure it's going to stay that way, and we need to come up with the mechanisms for doing this, and we need to run the play. Those who care must convince the others. There's ways of doing this. Let's discuss it.

I see one major way of doing it: convincing

With two sub-ways of doing it: truth and reasoning

I see two major ways of doing that: through religion and through non-religion, because we're talking about the entire world, and while there are many countries there are two trends of people: religious and non-religious. Please read through what I post next in order:

Here's a copy of a conversation I started on an atheism forum:

"The Miracle of Life, from a Christian perspective

first, consider it from an atheist's perspective:

no life elsewhere, no God above

life here a cosmic accident

there are supposed to be aliens out there

where are they? we haven't found any

as far as we know, we are the only aliens

there's one planet with life itself on it: Earth

why it would happen here?

pure chance, pure accident, no creator

the elements mixing together

in unrivaled freak accident

Behold, The MIRACLE

the MIRACLE, the planet Earth

where life itself was born

cosmic creation of the elements

"the elements that got up and walked"

life itself took form here

it is the only planet with life on it

it is THE MIRACLE; all of Life itself is contained here; all of it was born here

this is the birth place of life itself

if by cosmic accident this is the most _______ish, most ___________est (pick your words)

thing that has ever happened, ever, in the cosmos

to any atheist, this would be the supreme miracle of their world

that life itself happened here, out of an atheistic universe

Isn't it?

to the religious, too, it is a miracle

though one they're familiar with

"God created the heavens, and so... "

And, so on! ... everything taken care of...

Is it not?"

(The sub thought I was attempting to convert them to Christianity on the spot, with a little poem). After much arguing with me about this, here's a comment I made back to the sub, clarifying:

"The point is: it's a conversation starter about how seriously we should all take environmentalism, giving one great reason for any atheist and one great reason for any religious person. The post was intended to confuse the two topics, as if apparently I myself was confused, to get you all to pounce all over me, which you did, and tear me this way and that sort of, thinking I was telling you to be religious. I wasn't. What I was saying was, and I'll start over now that you get it:

This is about Environmentalism.

There's two kinds of people on this planet; therefore there's two kinds of people who need to be convinced to take Environmentalism more seriously: both of them (there's religious people and there's non-religious people, when it comes to Planet Earth).

People do things well when they're convinced of a good reason to be doing it.

Reasonings: (Best reasonings I can come up with for both parties, at all, possible:)

Non-religious people: Probability is statistics; you have to have something you can count- no one's ever found or seen an alien- and yes, we are certain of this, if you're a roswell/maybe-the-government-has-aliens believer (it's all been debunked, all of it). Nobody has ever seen an alien on or from planet Earth. If there were intelligent life with thumbs out there, it probably would do things similar enough: it would make itself, unintentionally, a sort of obvious beacon in outer space: it would emit radio signals for example after making the same physics discoveries (we can assume physics are the same wherever you are). very old civilizations would have larger examples of this. ya know seti never found anything either? the "wow" signal was inconclusive. that's it; there was no sky full of alien beacons. Now, we can deduce at times whether a far-away planet has methane in the atmosphere, but there's a chance that that doesn't mean life. It might mean life. You can't confirm that through a telescope. We might be right around the corner from discovering basic animal life with some of our missions. The Mars rock with the worm-like things I think was inconclusive actually? But we're going to a moon in our solar system that could potentially have life... Anyway we haven't gone yet. Today you can say this, relevant to environmentalism: as far as any atheist has proof of, it is the greatest crime ever conceived of to do anything to damage all at once the fragile ecosystem of this, the only place in the Universe that has ever been discovered to have life on it. It's a crime with proportions that are at present mutliplied by the entirety of the Universe: there's only one rock with life on it, as far as we know, out of all the Universe's rocks (planets)???? Well, that's how big the crime is. You're damaging the only place with life on it. The crime of doing that is Universe-sized.

Reasonings for religious people: (Ahem) I believe I'm pretty sure that you believe as stated that GOD created this, the ONLY planet in all of time and reality with any life on it at all, and that this all was just as a special treat for you, proudest of all of God's creations, that you, would inherit this all, and, by default, act as its shepherd? Have you upheld such bargain and is God pissed or will be? I heard God has Hell in wait for those who displease?"

The above show my whole position on something like a basic reasoning system that comes out equal on convincing both the religious and the non-religious, using "the stick". I think these are the two most compelling reasons to hold any atheist or any religious person to, because, at times, the stick speaks louder than the carrot to us all.

However, more often, the carrot motivates, because, we like it that way. We'd prefer to do something we want for something we want, not to avoid something we don't want. Although, when you put it that way, isn't it equal philosophically? Isn't avoiding something you don't want just as cheery as obtaining something you want? I don't care, but I'd rather give them two reasons, for redundancy: stick and carrot.

The carrot goes like this:

Atheist: Don't you want a beautiful world?

Religious: Don't you want to go to heaven?

And can be combined as follows: wouldn't both of you like and want a heaven-like world?

Starting there, you have your orders. March.

The disbelievers must get convinced. Be religious about it. This is a religious movement: nothing is more religious than saving the world; I don't care what you believe in. When people talk vaguely of (whatever their myth is): forget that. There's this. There's saving the world in 2024, as an Earth-human.

All of us share a tradition that goes back 13,000 years: the building of stone and the writing of writing.

It is because we have thumbs and it is because we have vocal cords that we are different from the animals. Otherwise we're animals. Same brains. Same eyes.

We have the unique gift of communication and of construction. Therefore it is to us to organize and to enact. We are the shepherds of this planet. I don't care what you heard; throw that book away. This is now and this is true. Observe these comments, are they not wrong?

What we did with our thumbs and with our vocal cords: we tested science until it was right and then we told our others about it.

Now we have things like space shuttles that work, computers that work, and climate/pollution analyses that are not wrong.

Look at the fools who pick one over the other, and say "I believe in the existence of the space shuttle, I know that this computer works, and I think that the science is wrong on global warming!"

Creatures of comfort! For the space shuttle brings them pleasure to know about and the computer brings them pleasure to use and the environment brings them great displeasure because they would have to give up their gas-powered car today and they're not even personally on fire yet from overheating! So, eager to repel the effort, they accuse the science there of being wrong! Well, let the space shuttle come crashing down from the sky (two of them did- not because of the magic of those who naysayed the shuttle program, as this person would have the climate movement naysayed), and let this very computer that they are working on come crashing to a halt right underneath their fingers (but it is for the efficacy of science likely that it doesn't), but nay, their climate-movement feelings are wrong.

It is wrong to say let us forestall the climate movement or allow the continuance of our ways.

But don't take my word for it, and let them not suffer mine either. Take the science to them, right to them.

The next effort is, after you've understood the rest:

Do you, personally, understand the science of it, and can you explain it off the top of your head?

Here's a sample effort at doing that:

Most people aren't scientists, don't care for it, don't need to know about it. That's fine. What little they get told informs them thereafter. They hear, we breathe oxygen and spit out co2? Great, they probably think air means: 50% oxygen, 50% co2. Ultimate way to take their pants off without them knowing? Just tell them that the air's only 1% co2 anyway. All this fuss is over going from 1% to 2%. Fastest way to make any one of them turn off the "climate news".

Here's how it really works: air is mostly stuffing actually, we don't use most of it. Air is mostly nitrogen, about 70%. What's the nitrogen for? nothing. Nothing uses it. It's just stuffing. It's fair to say "air is nitrogen", that's how much nitrogen is in it.

About 20% of air is oxygen, that's the part that we use. But it's only about 20% of it! You don't need much oxygen. To breathe, you mix a little bit of oxygen (you only need a little at a time), with a bunch of just stuffing basically, and then you pressurize it, because you exist at pressure. Now you have your special air-breathing-mix-product. Yes, you breathe out co2- but there's not much of that in the air. The remaining 10% of air is random different gases. Like 1% (I'm making very broad generalizations by the way to make this easy to memorize) like 1% of the air is co2, and a little bit of the air is methane (like .5% let's say?). Okay so why all this fuss about co2 and methane, if really the air is like 70% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, and then of a remaining 10%, the air is like 8.5% random gases, .5% methane, 1% co2?

Because, and I'm going to make an analogy very similar to the one about your breathing, wherein just a little bit of oxygen in the air does all the feeding of your cells that you need:

The thing about the air is, most of the gases in it don't really trap heat. In fact, only a few of them trap heat well: co2 and methane for example (and suflyr flouryl or something they use in termite spraying? I just learned about this one but the main two are still co2 and methane). Co2 traps heat well because it has carbon in it. You know what carbon is, right? Gather enough of it together and it's black stuff that traps heat real well in the sun. Separate it out enough and it's a transparent gas that does the same thing still; the carbon absorbs infrared light from the sun and gets hot. Methane and the other greenhouse gases do the same thing I guess, but I think the above example works well enough for co2. You can help refine this section if you can think of ways to explain it better; we all need to have "the story straight" when it comes to explaining this to others.

So, the reason a little bit of gas that traps heat well is a problem is that that's the only gas in the air at all that traps heat, relatively. You shine a light through the air and it gets hot? That's only cause of the 1.5% of gases in it that trap heat at all. You remove those and the air would go cold. You double those and theoretically the air would go twice as hot. Now, it's not quite like that, actually, not by a longshot even. It's more like: you remove those and the air goes a little colder; the rest of it does trap heat a little, just not as much as certain gases. You double those gases, and the air traps heat a little more, cause it's still a small amount of gas we're talking about in there. Anyway, we have like doubled the co2 already (Keeling Curve is the name of the graph/study: should be like 200-260ppm we're at like 420+. I'm trying to write this all off the top of my head as an example, because you need to be able to do at least as much in conversation), and the temperature is climbing, and the co2 we're adding and the temperature climbing are like identical rises graphically; we're raising the temperature, mostly by burning fossil fuels constantly.

It makes sense if you think of what you're not seeing when you use cars. All that fire is contained under the hood and then filtered by the system, such that exhaust looks clear.

But you know what a fire looks like, gasoline or otherwise. When there's an open fire in your town, the smoke column reaches up into the heavens all day and is visible.

Well, that's what traffic "looks like", and you just don't see it. Imagine if every car-fire (the fire in the engine under your hood) was visible? Just cars with like open barbeque fires in the front sections, driving around, with big black columns of smoke rising up from each all day? All the highways of the world would look like solid black smoke columns all day long.

Well, that is how they look. Sorta. You just have to use your mind to see it. Ha. Okay now,

Look at the Earth sideways real good. What I mean by that is, look at one of those satellite-going-over-the-horizon photos that show you just how thin you can get Earth's atmosphere to look, at night. That's how thin it is. You know what I mean? You're used to thinking of the sky as voluminous, but if you get up high enough, you can see that Earth just has a little bitty bit of sky attached to it at all, just like a fingernail of air; there's barely any air there actually it's very thin.

So, you put those two together (you know what all-day fires look like and you know what the actual thinness of Earth's atmosphere looks like from space) well, you can just see it: we really can and really have f---ed with it. There wasn't that much to begin with and we filled it with exhaust since a hundred years ago. There's not many humans covering the Earth? Okay but look at those spots where there are humans- each one of those has been emitting a constant fire 24/7-

Okay? Now I see great things for us: look at us, the ants who learned how to seize control of the entire thing, proving control of it so far only by screwing it up: our great act of proving ourselves to be in control of the planet so far has only been in terms of us showing our f---ing-it-up ability: we got the air to turn bad a little.

Now, let's show our second great act of geo-control. Let's undo that that we just did. The second act. Once we demonstrate that we will have demonstrated control of this planet. I set this challenge before all of us.

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