studio ghibli romances be like mmm what if we didn’t kiss, but instead both spiritually matured as people because we met each other

Learning how to weave! After a brief attempt at card weaving, I discovered pick-up weaving and immediately switched over to weaving with a heddle. And since I need to make everything as complicated as possible, I'm working on creating my own patterns as I learn.

Still figuring out how to maintain an even tension when I move my set up around. Ultimately, I'll get a loom and that should solve most of my issues. They're a tad wonky, but I'm pleased with my patterns and excited to come up with more! :))

Literally

This made me cry a little

A new study shows that economic growth rates make a big difference when it comes to prospects for limiting global warming to 1.5°C, as per the Paris Agreement. A recent study by the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) shows that pursuing higher economic growth may jeopardize the Paris goals and leave no viable pathways for humanity to stabilize the climate. On the contrary, slower growth rates make it more feasible to achieve the Paris goals.

[...]

The study demonstrates that global economic growth of 4% per year, which is currently assumed in the mitigation scenarios, is incompatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement even if the most ambitious mitigation plans of any major country were implemented globally. "To reduce global emissions fast enough to limit warming to 1.5°C, we find it is necessary to pursue ambitious mitigation and shift away from growth. Even with highly ambitious mitigation, global economic growth would need to fall below the recent historical trend of ⁓2% per year, with high-income economies transitioning to post-growth," says Aljoša Slameršak, ICTA-UAB researcher and lead author of the study.

[...]

The authors warn that their scenarios provide only a simple global analysis of the climate implications of economic growth. ICTA-UAB researcher Jason Hickel explains that "our scenarios do not account for important differences between higher and lower-income countries when it comes to mitigation responsibilities and development needs. A detailed analysis across these dimensions would mean lower-income nations could reach higher rates of economic growth, while high-income nations would need to pursue post-growth demand reduction strategies." Hickel provides a brief outline of interventions that could pave the way to a post-growth scenario. The objective of post-growth is to prioritize production of what is important for human well-being and environmental sustainability, while reducing less-necessary forms of production and consumption. Key features of such a scenario are reduction of inequalities, universal access to necessary goods and services, and increased public investment for a low-carbon energy transition.

Less beef, more leftovers: 21 food sustainability resolutions for 2024 | Food waste | The Guardian

Oscar Nominated Short Film

To see The Last Repair shop nominated for an Oscar was such a heartening thing. An incredible story and directed by someone from my tiny home town. Let's keep sharing stories of quietly changing your corner of the world.

Discernment is essential when it comes to climate solutions

There are certain activities where reducing consumption or demand makes a lot of sense, and others where it doesn’t. I would not want to paint eliminating junk mail or spam email with the same conceptual brush as eliminating flying, because aviation does a lot of good—but nor would I want to put the millionaire with a private jet in the same category as a climate migrant who wants to fly to visit family in another country. Discernment is important here. If we develop the social, cultural, and political capacities to phase things down, we can apply that capacity to degrow certain things that we decide are not socially valuable. Embracing planned phasedown will help us to degrow certain things, starting with things that are obviously wasteful, harmful, or annoying, like single-use plastics or gas-powered leaf blowers. Successful phaseouts of these can act as models to encourage a more positive view of phaseout and help create a positive feedback loop. Planning for phaseout is a way of getting at the tricky question of how to begin actually doing degrowth in a targeted way. Planned phaseout is essentially a technique of degrowth.

Holly Jean Buck, Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough

This is the central argument of degrowth: standards of living can improve without growth by redistributing and sharing wealth, doing away with artificial desires and the superfluous goods and appropriation of our time destined to the making of profit, and by shifting from valuing material goods to valuing relations. There is already enough for everyone to have a decent share – if the pie cannot grow, then it is time to share it more evenly.

Timothée Parrique, Giorgos Kallis, Degrowth: Socialism without Growth

There's been a load of buzz about decoupling trends whereby several states have shown increased GDP while decreasing their emissions. This has lead to a number of people saying that capitalist markets are delivering "green growth". This video asks whether such decoupling really does represent green growth or whether we need something more.

If high-income countries are to decarbonize fast enough to stay within their fair-share of Paris-compliant carbon budgets, then urgent climate mitigation tasks – like building renewable energy capacity, insulating buildings, expanding public transit, innovating and distributing more efficient technologies, regenerating land, etc – need to happen very quickly. This “green production” requires mobilizing massive amounts of labour, factories, materials, engineering talent, and so on.  In a growth-oriented scenario, this is difficult to do because our productive capacities are already devoted to other activities (activities that are organized around profit and which may not contribute to social and ecological objectives). So we need to either compete with existing forms of production (for labour, materials, energy etc, which can drive prices up), or otherwise increase total productive capacity (i.e., grow the economy).  This cannot be done at just any desired speed.  Under these conditions, there are very real physical limits to how fast we can decarbonize.  Scaling down less-necessary production solves this problem, not only because of the two benefits indicated above, but also because it liberates productive capacities (factories, labour, materials) which can then be remobilized to do the production and innovation required for rapid decarbonization. For example, factories that are presently devoted to producing SUVs can produce solar panels instead. Engineers that are presently developing private jets can work on innovating more efficient trains and wind turbines instead. Labour that is presently employed by fast fashion firms can be liberated to train and contribute to installing renewable capacity, insulating buildings, or a wide range of other necessary objectives depending on their interests, through a public job guarantee program linked to green public works. This helps us rethink a longstanding question in ecological economics. Some ecomodernists have in the past argued that it is easier to achieve green transition in a bigger economy than in a smaller economy, because it means we have more capacity to devote to green production.  But this fails to grasp the nature of the problem. Yes, a bigger economy may have more capacity, but in a growth-oriented scenario that capacity is already allocated.  In this respect bigger economies face the same problem as smaller economies.  But a degrowth scenario is not a “smaller economy” (i.e., a low-capacity economy).  It is a high-capacity economy which is reducing less-necessary production, and therefore is suddenly endowed with spare capacity that can be redirected for necessary purposes.  This is a unique situation that carries significant potential: it enables acceleration in the speed of green production and innovation at a rate faster than what can be achieved in a growth-oriented scenario.

This monologue plays everyday in my head. How brave it is to be authentic to your experience, and how it emboldens others to do the same.

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste!"

Sappho Podcast

This week on our podcast we launched a new semester all about the people that would inhabit a sustainable utopia. To kick it off we talked about Sappho, and how diversity in our thinking about love can change the world. We also talked about the power of language through examples of her poetry and Plato's philosophy.

meadow

Kate Marvel via New York Times.

Powerful words about how we have a once in a human history chance to prevent biosphere destroying events.

No paywall version here.

"Two and a half years ago, when I was asked to help write the most authoritative report on climate change in the United States, I hesitated...

In the end, I said yes, but reluctantly. Frankly, I was sick of admonishing people about how bad things could get. Scientists have raised the alarm over and over again, and still the temperature rises. Extreme events like heat waves, floods and droughts are becoming more severe and frequent, exactly as we predicted they would. We were proved right. It didn’t seem to matter.

Our report, which was released on Tuesday, contains more dire warnings. There are plenty of new reasons for despair. Thanks to recent scientific advances, we can now link climate change to specific extreme weather disasters, and we have a better understanding of how the feedback loops in the climate system can make warming even worse. We can also now more confidently forecast catastrophic outcomes if global emissions continue on their current trajectory.

But to me, the most surprising new finding in the Fifth National Climate Assessment is this: There has been genuine progress, too.

I’m used to mind-boggling numbers, and there are many of them in this report. Human beings have put about 1.6 trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution — more than the weight of every living thing on Earth combined. But as we wrote the report, I learned other, even more mind-boggling numbers. In the last decade, the cost of wind energy has declined by 70 percent and solar has declined 90 percent. Renewables now make up 80 percent of new electricity generation capacity. Our country’s greenhouse gas emissions are falling, even as our G.D.P. and population grow.

In the report, we were tasked with projecting future climate change. We showed what the United States would look like if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius. It wasn’t a pretty picture: more heat waves, more uncomfortably hot nights, more downpours, more droughts. If greenhouse emissions continue to rise, we could reach that point in the next couple of decades. If they fall a little, maybe we can stave it off until the middle of the century. But our findings also offered a glimmer of hope: If emissions fall dramatically, as the report suggested they could, we may never reach 2 degrees Celsius at all.

For the first time in my career, I felt something strange: optimism.

And that simple realization was enough to convince me that releasing yet another climate report was worthwhile.

Something has changed in the United States, and not just the climate. State, local and tribal governments all around the country have begun to take action. Some politicians now actually campaign on climate change, instead of ignoring or lying about it. Congress passed federal climate legislation — something I’d long regarded as impossible — in 2022 as we turned in the first draft.

[Note: She's talking about the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act, which despite the names were the two biggest climate packages passed in US history. And their passage in mid 2022 was a big turning point: that's when, for the first time in decades, a lot of scientists started looking at the numbers - esp the ones that would come from the IRA's funding - and said "Wait, holy shit, we have an actual chance."]

And while the report stresses the urgency of limiting warming to prevent terrible risks, it has a new message, too: We can do this. We now know how to make the dramatic emissions cuts we’d need to limit warming, and it’s very possible to do this in a way that’s sustainable, healthy and fair.

The conversation has moved on, and the role of scientists has changed. We’re not just warning of danger anymore. We’re showing the way to safety.

I was wrong about those previous reports: They did matter, after all. While climate scientists were warning the world of disaster, a small army of scientists, engineers, policymakers and others were getting to work. These first responders have helped move us toward our climate goals. Our warnings did their job.

To limit global warming, we need many more people to get on board... We need to reach those who haven’t yet been moved by our warnings. I’m not talking about the fossil fuel industry here; nor do I particularly care about winning over the small but noisy group of committed climate deniers. But I believe we can reach the many people whose eyes glaze over when they hear yet another dire warning or see another report like the one we just published.

The reason is that now, we have a better story to tell. The evidence is clear: Responding to climate change will not only create a better world for our children and grandchildren, but it will also make the world better for us right now.

Eliminating the sources of greenhouse gas emissions will make our air and water cleaner, our economy stronger and our quality of life better. It could save hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives across the country through air quality benefits alone. Using land more wisely can both limit climate change and protect biodiversity. Climate change most strongly affects communities that get a raw deal in our society: people with low incomes, people of color, children and the elderly. And climate action can be an opportunity to redress legacies of racism, neglect and injustice.

I could still tell you scary stories about a future ravaged by climate change, and they’d be true, at least on the trajectory we’re currently on. But it’s also true that we have a once-in-human-history chance not only to prevent the worst effects but also to make the world better right now. It would be a shame to squander this opportunity. So I don’t just want to talk about the problems anymore. I want to talk about the solutions. Consider this your last warning from me."

-via New York Times. Opinion essay by leading climate scientist Kate Marvel. November 18, 2023.

If there was one right solution it would take us forever to find it. Small differences have to be put aside to facilitate a greener future.

It’s solar and wind and tidal and geothermal and hydropower.

It’s plant-based diets and regenerative livestock farming and insect protein and lab-grown meat.

It’s electric cars and reliable public transit and decreasing how far and how often we travel.

It’s growing your own vegetables and community gardens and vertical farms and supporting local producers.

It’s rewilding the countryside and greening cities.

It’s getting people active and improving disabled access.

It’s making your own clothes and buying or swapping sustainable stuff with your neighbours.

It’s the right to repair and reducing consumption in the first place.

It’s greater land rights for the commons and indigenous peoples and creating protected areas.

It’s radical, drastic change and community consensus.

It’s labour rights and less work.

It’s science and arts.

It’s theoretical academic thought and concrete practical action.

It’s signing petitions and campaigning and protesting and civil disobedience.

It’s sailboats and zeppelins.

It’s the speculative and the possible.

It’s raising living standards and curbing consumerism.

It’s global and local.

It’s me and you.

Climate solutions look different for everyone, and we all have something to offer.

I have been thinking about this for years!! Glad I'm not the only one

You know how companies used to make flour sacks with pretty flower patterns on them because mothers would make dresses out of them for their daughters? We should bring that back. Paper bags designed to be reused as wrapping paper. Jars of jam designed to look nice filled with pencils or homemade sauces. Fabric that's high quality enough to use as a patch.

Give things a second life!!