Preamble ... this is another rambling, jumbled soliloquy that may or may not make any actual points ... or, you know, sense.

"Climate Change is causing the rise in populism".

That is a theory I have entertained for many years -- going back to before the 2016 US Presidential election. And--confirmation bias being what it is--since I believe the theory, I keep seeing anecdotal evidence all over the place connecting the two.

But, thinking about it this morning, looking at it logically ... I still think there is probably a connection, but I'm not really sure. It may well just be a coincidence of timing. And even if there is a connection, I'm just not quite sure what it is. If it is true ... why? What is the actual connection?

So ... why do countries keep electing populist "Trump-like" leaders?

That's already a hard question to answer clearly, without quickly descending into personal attacks and ad hominems and such.

Plus, of course, generalization is problematic ... we're talking about different countries, different cultures, different histories driving each vote. It's not all the same. And yet, over and over again, election after election, it sure looks the same.

I think the main reason is a tribal "fear of invaders" reaction, mostly against the rise of immigration, particularly immigration from (to paraphrase Trump) "the shit-hole countries". Maybe it's an even more basic "fear of change" reaction. But I definitely think, in the US, the rise of Trump was a direct result of the illegal immigration issue -- not exclusively, but that was a big piece of the puzzle. In particular, Trump equating Muslims with terrorists, and Mexican immigrants with criminals, etc.

Here in the EU, immigration -- particularly the 2015 refugee crisis caused by the wars in the Middle East -- was probably the top reason for Brexit, as has been most of the populist surge over here since then. One country after another here keeps electing right-wing leadership based on the "we'll keep out the dirty immigrants" campaign promises. Hungary, Italy, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, the list just keeps going. I live in Germany these days, and I gotta tell you, there is nothing scarier than seeing a huge surge in popularity in the German far-right.

The other top reason that seems to be driving it is some kind of sense of nationalistic self-determination. People feeling like their country--their home--is being changed by Outside Forces, and trying to lock it down, trying to find a way back to the good old days when the white people ran things and the brown people cooked and cleaned for them.

In Hungary, Orban routinely gets massive support with his constant rants about "Brussels" (meaning the EU) trying to force their gay liberal anti-Christian agenda down the throats of decent God-fearing Hungarians, and I see variations of that theme in most of the populist movements.

Right now, I want to say the populist trend is a response to (or rather, a denial of) the consequences of Colonialism and resource depletion. I think (again, over-simplified), people here in the Industrial Western World do not want to hear that the problems in the rest of the world are our fault, and that we have a responsibility to the people there, to try to help address some of the problems we've helped cause ... and instead, people are electing leaders who tell them the rest of the world is going to hell but it's not their fault and if they just lock down their borders, everything will stay "nice" in their country.

Something like that, anyway.

Okay ... so, resource depletion and a backlash against the consequences of Colonialism.

Does that seem like a fair and reasonable generalization of what is driving the rise in populism?

Because none of that is really connected to Climate Change. Sure, it depends on "which" resources we're talking about, but even in a magical hypothetical world where burning fossil fuels doesn't cause the planet to heat up ... wouldn't we still be seeing just about the same results from the Colonialism-and-resource-depletion issues?

But then again, at a global level, everything is pretty much connected to everything else. I feel like, coming at it from that angle, I could make a fairly good argument that Climate Change and resource depletion are pretty closely related, regardless of which resources you're talking about.

Oh yeah ... one more wrinkle. I'm primarily talking about populism in the US, Canada, UK, EU. I actually know a lot less about the situations in other regions. Asia. Latin America. Bolsonaro. Millei. I know there are others, but names elude me at the moment, and I don't have an understanding of why they are getting elected. Are they part of this trend? Do they blow a hole in my logic? IDK.

tl;dr

Okay ... I guess that's my new thesis -- populism is primarily being driven by a denial of the consequences of Colonialism and resource depletion ... which may or may not be closely related to Climate Change itself; I'm still just not sure.

Or, more broadly, more Climate-Change-inclusive -- populism is about people seeing that the world is dying, and electing leaders who A) tell them it's not their fault, and B) promise to save their country, even as the rest of the world burns.

Thoughts?

I assume everyone in the New York/New Jersey/eastern PA/maybe northern Delaware area just felt their buildings shaking.

That was a 4.8 magnitude earthquake originating near Lebanon, NJ (a ways west of Edison). You can look at the details from the US government's earthquake tracking website.

I've never felt an earthquake before, so that was something. I thought the people above me had turned on a motorcycle or something. I had no clue what could shake the building like that. Then it dawned on me. Not the place you expect these things. (I'm sure the Californians find this cute!)

I moved to a place with an "actual" winter just over a decade ago -- snow, freezing temperatures, etc. In the first couple of years, I got what felt like a genuinely solid winter. Lots of blisteringly cold days. Snow that fell in large amounts and stuck around for most of the season. I love winter, so this was great for me.

In recent years, however, the winters have been milder and milder. When we do get snow, it's only around for a bit because days above freezing are now frequent enough that it's able to melt between snowfalls. Also, the snowfalls themselves are more intermittent. This year specifically we've actually had more rain than snow. I don't remember getting rain in January when I first moved here.

It irks me a bit because the shift has been so stark and noticeable in such a short period of time. There's a part of me that thinks that it's not a big deal and maybe my first years here were unnaturally cold and snowy for the area, so what I'm seeing now is simply the other side of the mean, but then there's another part of me that feels like that's simply a comforting lie I can tell myself in the face of the obvious effects of climate change.

Is there anyone else here that feels like they're missing their winters?

We often talk about the environment in abstract terms, using phrases like "good for the environment", "bad for the environment", "environmental problems", and so on. Obviously there is a place for this, but I think it also serves to abstract what is a very immediate and concrete thing that we interact with each day — our local environment.

So I wanted to ask, how familiar are you all with your local environment?

• Do you recognize (or even identify) different plant and animal species in your area? Do you know which are native and which might be invasive?

• Do you notice changes in your environment throughout the year? Do you know why these changes happen?

• Thinking longer term, if you have lived in one location long enough, have you noticed changes over the years? If so, what?

• Do you know what the most pressing local environmental issues are?

I'm hoping this can be a thread for people to talk about their local environments, but also to share tips on how to be more tuned in to your local nature.

I myself would not say I am very familiar with the flora and fauna of where I live, but I have been trying to get better. I use the app Seek (which is similar to iNaturalist for those who might be familiar, but with better recognition capabilities in my experience) to identify plants around where I live, and I'm slowly trying to get better at recognizing them. The process of stopping to take a photo has really helped me slow down and pay attention to things around me — I notice a lot more garbage, roadkill near the big crossings, etc. In addition, seeing pictures of some of these plants online have made me realize just how water deprived a lot of the ones around me are, which is no doubt an effect of the drought my area has been experiencing. This has lead me to be more intentional with seeking out news regarding water laws and rights and trying to be more tuned in to these issues.

Edit

Some great additional questions from this comment of @skybrian's:

• Do you know where your water comes from?
• Do you know where sewage goes?
• Where is the landfill that your garbage goes to?
• How is recycling done?

I've been idly browsing for a home weather station for a while, hoping to contribute to the local sensor network for a region that's got lots of microclimate variation. I saw this one from Seeed Studio today, and was hoping for some reviews and advice. Seeed Studio devices are known for open source software, and I wouldn't mind playing with writing a tie-in for sprinkler system automation so we're not irrigating when it's about to rain. It wouldn't be situated so far from the house that we'd need to use the LoRaWAN feature, though.

Concurrently, we just had an inch of rain dropped on our house in the space of 15 minutes, with winds that were taking down tree branches. The weather report says "light rain", weather stations a mile away continue to indicate that everything is bone dry with quiet air. This rainstorm breaks a nearly month-long drought. I'm finding it nerve-wracking that climate change makes it impossible to use past local weather as a predictor of what to expect for gardening, home maintenance, and outdoor activities, and local weather reports are so inaccurate. So that's (hopefully) where the weather station might come into play.

That being said, any chat about your local conditions and reporting from your station is welcome.

My life is split between the US and the Netherlands, where I have friends and work in both places. I try to fly as little as possible: only one intercontinental flight per year. But even that puts my individual carbon footprint far above the average human's. I buy carbon offsets but that just shifts responsibility.

I've long been deeply inspired by Greta Thunberg's protest act of sailing from England to New York to attend a 2019 climate summit. But sailing across the ocean in a racing yacht with a crew simply is too extreme.

So I'm curious what are the options for reducing carbon emissions when traveling between continents.

I've contemplated hopping on a freighter ship. My thinking is that: freighter ships are extremely efficient cargo-weight-to-emission ratio-wise, so the marginal carbon emission of me as added 'cargo' must be much lower than as another passenger on an airplane. Plus, the freighter ship will be sailing with or without me on board; whereas as a plane passenger I enable the business of a passenger flight.

I want to offset my carbon footprint, but I'm not sure what company (if any) is really making effective changes. Bill Gates says he pays $400/ton of CO2 he offsets - but the companies I've seen imply I can make my entire footprint of around 30 tons per year disappear for $150. That doesn't really line up. And with this being a product that isn't tangible I worry about the likelihood of being taken advantage of. How would I ever know if they're using my money in bad faith?

I've held off on buying any offsets so far because of these concerns.

There are some products which are quite obviously animal-derived (e.g. leather), but there are a lot of others where it's much less obvious (e.g. tallow-based soap).

What are some of the less obvious places people might find animal-derived ingredients/products? Also, if you know of any good substitutes or alternatives to those, give your recommendations as well!

Meta note: wasn't sure where this would best fit in on the site, but I figured ~enviro is a good fit. If it needs to be moved to a better home, feel free!

Hello Tildes,

I've been doing bokashi composting for pretty much all my vegetable and fruit scraps since last year. Lately, I've been wanting to level up my game and recycle meat scraps and chicken/fish bones as well. That's how I came across these "foodcycler" devices. They basically chop up and dry food scraps in a sealed container. I assume it works much like how industrial composting machines work, except it's scaled way down. At around 300-400 dollars, they're certainly not cheap, and probably generate a lot of greenhouse gasses during the manufacturing process. What's more is, every time you run a cycle, it has to run for 4-8 hours, though the manufacturer says the device is "energy conscious."

I'm trying to assess whether I'll do more harm than good by buying one of these things to convert more of my food scraps. My ultimate goal is to try many different ways to recycle food waste and try to get my friends to try it out as well. Some of them have already shown interest in bokashi composting, but none has actually tried it out (too much work).

Do you think commercial "foodcycler" devices do more harm than good? How should we go about evaluating this?

Edit: I've asked this question on many different places, and it looks like the general consensus is there's no strong need for something like this unless you live in apartments, in a city/town that does not collect food waste. Some believe recycling food waste via the more traditional methods (e.g. bokashi, vermicomposting) would yield better results because the foodcycler would dry up and kill a lot of the bacterial presence, though I believe the dried up scraps can be somewhat "revived" by mixing them in wet soil. Nobody seems to be able to definitively tell whether using the foodcycler would be a net positive or negative, because there's no way to verify its manufacturing process. I may do an experiment on how much power it draws if I get my hands on one in the future.

It's honestly hard to separate out companies who are genuinely making a decent effort to not be completely terrible versus those that are just green- or ethical-washing their practices as a marketing tactic. Furthermore, I realize that reducing consumption itself is the most sustainable choice one can make, so I'm asking this more as a "when I do need to buy something, what's a good place to turn to?"

Feel free to give recommendations for any areas, but in particular I'd love to hear about recommendations in the areas of clothes, linens/bedding, and coffee beans, as those are things that I'm currently on the market for. Also, if there are any good resources that aggregate reliable information about sustainable companies, let me know too.

According to this guy, societal collapse is imminent because a. entropy and b. the high EROI (energy return on investment) afforded to society by the use of energy dense hydrocarbons such as coal and petroleum will decline dramatically in the near future due to the decreasing economic viability of acquiring them and the lack of a similarly high return alternative (barring nuclear fission, which is VeRy DaNgErOuS (and also practically infeasible politically in most countries that can achieve it), and nuclear fusion, which is, of course, perpetually 20 years away) and because this EROI is (according to him) what makes the complexity of modern civilization possible, it is inevitable that we will soon see a corresponding decline in said complexity (collapse). Now there is a section in the wikipedia article that touches on some of these points (Economic influence) so it's not totally junk science (if you trust Wikipedia, that is). However, I'm still struggling to grasp the significance of this figure. As long as our means of acquiring energy is scalable, why does it matter what the EROI is as long as it is greater than 1? if we need to spend one fifth of the energy we get from solar panels on making more, fixing existing ones, and installation, can't we just make a bunch of them to match our energy needs, even if they're growing? What am I missing here?

I was just thinking, it does seem that where I am summers and winters are hotter than they used to be (I'm in the northern Midwestern US). Actually this winter we had a few days where it got over 60 degrees(!) and I do feel like it snows less than when I was a kid. But I've only been alive for less than 2 decades and I don't think the global temperature has actually risen a lot in that time? So I'm curious, has anyone else personally felt the affects of climate change in their own climate? And if so, since when?

edit: I also remember seeing lots of fireflies when I was younger. Haven't seen one in years.

As the various Arctic climate feedbacks show, we are fast approaching the stage when climate change will be playing the tune for us while we stand by and watch helplessly, with our reductions in CO2 emissions having no effect in the face of, say, runaway emissions of methane.

from this article: https://e360.yale.edu/features/as_arctic_ocean_ice_disappears_global_climate_impacts_intensify_wadhams

I've recently started trying to improve my environmental impact, so I apologize for what might be a very basic question, but how bad is it to have items shipped/delivered to you, rather than picking them up from a store near you?

I'm specifically interested in two situations:

1. If I'm buying a specialty, zero-waste product that's not available in stores nearby, which is worse: having it delivered directly to my house, or having to drive a good distance in my own car to get it? Are the two roughly comparable, or is one considerably worse than the other?

2. I use a service called PaperBackSwap that is sort of like a big, distributed, online used bookstore. You give away books from your collection to people who request them, and for each book you send out you can request one to be sent to you. I like that it's putting books in the hands of people who specifically want them (as opposed to donating them or selling them to a used bookstore where they might be shelved indefinitely or pulped), but now I'm sitting here wondering how bad it is for that single hardcover of mine to travel halfway across the country. On the other hand, the book is getting reused, potentially multiple times if it then gets requested by others after that. Should I be considering this good reuse, or a waste of resources?

Outside of those two, I'd welcome any primers on the topic at large, as well as any best practices with consumer goods that I can start putting into place. I've already done a lot to find plastic-free alternatives to a lot of what I use, but I don't know if I'm trading one ill for another by getting them from places that have to send them from hundreds of miles away.

We've all seen it all over the news in recent years (decades, for those of who've been around long enough) ... people who are originally pretty sure they're right about something, tend to "double-down" on their convictions in the face of convincing evidence to the contrary ... and then double-down again.

Admitting you're wrong about something important, when you were pretty sure you were right, is just effin' hard.

Anybody here used to think climate change was a crock? What changed your mind?

Public Transportation should be free. Or near free, like a library. The same way we tax or want to tax pollution, we should fully subside public and ecological transports.

I was thinking about this earlier and was disappointed to find very few examples of pollution tax being put to funding public transports. Even fewer of public transportation being free. It's a bit underwhelming that this isn't talked about more in environmental policies.

Hi there. It seems that minimalist and zero waste movements have picked up some steam recently in many first world countries as a reaction to the consumerist, greed-based lifestyles promoted and upon realisation of our impact on the world. As an aspiring zero waste minimalist and general conversationalist, I am interested in your opinions, so I'll bombard you with some questions.

Do any of you lead a minimalist or zero waste life, or are you aspiring to or making the transition right now?

What is your opinion of the movements?

Are you opposed to the lifestyles?

Why are you/do you want to be minimalist or create zero waste?

What is minimalism to you?

Are you a minimalist in some or all parts of your life?

What challenges did you run into when making the changes, and how did you overcome them?

Is there anything you recommend to those who are still just aspiring?

Does minimalism imply frugality?

Do you have anything else to add?

Let's assume that they have full control over congress, so politics isn't an issue. I think looking at what a good global climate policy would be useful, because it allows us to see where we stand. It could also serve as a platform for future candidates.

It seems to me that the new president should take a wide-ranging series of measures to curb emissions in all the major domains: electricity, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, etc. [1]. You might argue that measures taken in isolation from other countries are not sufficient. While that's true, someone has to start. The US taking the lead on climate change would have a profound impact on all other countries. The US could use its very strong diplomatic weight to pressure other countries to adopt similar measures.

So what should these measures be? The major one would seem to be a carbon tax, applied to all major sources of emissions: energy production (coal plants, ...), agriculture (cattle and meat imports), jet fuel (current taxes are very low), etc. Another one could be a tax on imports depending on how much the exporting country does against global warming. Maybe a new kind of free trade alliance among "climate-virtuous" countries could be created.

Any thoughts? Have any serious global policy proposals been made and studied in the past?

[1] : https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-climate-change

Impact can be in many different areas (carbon emissions, energy use, water, plastics, land use, advocacy etc etc). I just want to know something you're doing that helps the environment. It can be big or small, something you've done for a long time, just started or want to implement soon.

I'll start, about 18 months ago I bought a bike and started cycling again. Most of my shorter journeys are now by bike and I'm looking at cycling to work.

Environmental news is often really bleak, lets hear some positive efforts!