And for that one brief moment in time they will have maximized all value for their shareholders.

That’s always been the big lie, that the right doesn’t believe in climate change. They believe in it, and they plan on making a whole lot of money off of it.

I think finding a good revenue model is fine, as long as the orgs that host these services are transparent in how they operate and have business models that are not focused on 10x growth year over year. Selling Ad space has always been a good model as long as you maintain a healthy separation from your Ad customers and your regular users. Data mining is always a huge money maker but then you violate your users privacy. I wouldn’t know how to build this into lemmy or other apps but an idea I have had lately is having a sliding scale for users to decide what info to share with advertisers as well as giving the user a percentage of the money that was made on their information. That way the org hosting and administrating the service gets funds to keep the site going and their users are compensated for the sale of their personal information.

The problem is if you run as volunteer only you can only recruit from people who are socioeconomically privileged enough to volunteer. Having a revenue model isn’t always about making a single person rich, it can be about being able to properly compensate people for their time, knowledge and experience who otherwise would not be able to because other responsibilities prevent them from it.

GDP is a dumb metric but this paper is really good at throwing the William Nordhaus risk model out the window, which is what institutional investors have been using all this time when making investment decisions. IMO I think this is an avenue to Segway institutional investors into looking at things like degrowth, “you can keep investing in extraction but there is an extremely high likelihood you lose all society and wealth. Or you can invest in redistribution and there is a very high likelihood that the planet/society survives, you keep more wealth then you could really need and it will only cost a percentage of your total assets.”

The answer to what caused these fires is “D all of the above”.

Climate Change: Climate Change has caused our wet seasons to be less wet then usual as well as prolonging our dry seasons so that they overlap more with Santa Anna wind season which makes fires like this current one more likely.

Forest Management: Because we live in a capitalist system forests are managed via how much $$ they provide and not their true worth. Old growth forests where cut down in mass when Anglo settlers started moving into the area. Private logging companies have bought up land/lumber rights since then and have been treating lots of the forest as a private bank. Also when Anglo settlers started moving in they halted all native burning practices which has contributed to large amount of fuel build up.

Capitalism: The philosophy that humans can rape/pillage/plunder the land for profit without facing any of the consequences is the driving force behind these decisions. Until the system in which we manage our planetary household changes we will still continue to see the destabilization of the biosphere.

Californian here and fire lookout. So although no official cause has been made I will give my best educated guess based on my knowledge of the region and knowledge of wildfires.

So normally we get some small amount of moisture during the late fall/winter months but it has been bone dry since May 2024. Since the drought came on the heels of huge wet season you have a lot of shrubs, grasses and dead chaparral(fuel) all over the mountain regions. Now we are coming into the new year and a massive atmospheric pressure system has built up over the desert regions that then force air through the canyon areas and into the Los Angeles basin(oxygen). These are called Santa Ana winds and are usually very intense however because of the earth being at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels those intense winds became hurricane force winds very quickly, we are talking 80-100mph. With all of these elements at play all that was needed was an ignition. Now that can be anything from a car backfiring, rocks colliding with each other and sparking to mylar ballon’s from birthday parties reflecting enough direct sunlight to ignite a leaf. Once that ignition source was created the fire had everything it needed to quickly go from a small flame to a massive wildfire.

With all these factors at play it was only a matter of time before a wildfire started. 4 fires is extremely abnormal however so are 80-100 mph Santa Ana winds and these longer dry seasons. I was born and have grown up and lived in this region for 30+ years, only once did I see a Santa Ana wind event that was as intense as it was Tuesday night however it has been getting hotter and dryer in Los Angeles for as long as I have lived here and it was only a matter of time before something like this hit. We were as prepared as we could have been for this and it still was not enough.

Also it’s not over yet, high winds are expected to pick up Thursday night-Friday morning and the fires are still not contained.

Oh I think he is going to do it. However I think him and the US military are underestimating the resistance that they will face. Because it’s not just Panama he is looking at it’s all of Latin America. Him and his Oligarchs know Climate Change is real, and they are planning for it.

I am Californian and at least with my own friends, family and neighbors there has been an increase in interest in the idea of separation from the US. We are kinda getting tired of the rest of the country going against our principals and interests while still benefiting from our resources. We have a larger population then Canada yet we only get 2 votes in the national legislature. Why should we continue participating in the insane politics of a dying empire?

I would say its a yes and. Yes it costs a lot of money and it’s not as efficient as trees long term. But Trees + these machines + no longer burning and releasing CO2 at the current rate + land rewilding = a chance at survival.

China is not stupid, they have no issue with crashing the global economy by separating itself from fossil fuel consumption. They want to be the technology powerhouse of the world in the 21’st century, where/if fossil fuels play a role in that who knows.

They think they will “win” because they assume its all a zero-sum game. They will lose IMO because the rest of us don’t think life is zero-sum, corpo or not still gotta put a roof over my head and still got to put food on the table.

There is no green in growth…period.

Cool, but the insurance companies are not. Lets see who wins this game.

Agreed geoengineering is bad science/engineering IMO. You can’t know what the long term effects would be until after its been deployed. The safest bet would be to just ditch fossil fuels but that’s not as sexy.

IMO its a “meh”. Oil production is currently at an energy neutral state(amount of energy needed to extract is equal to the energy provided), in a decade or so its going to hit energy negative(energy needed to extract is more then energy provided). What should be happening is slow/begin halting extraction and storing all of that oil in the ground just in case we might need that energy surplus at some point in the future but that hurts quarterly profit returns so the oil executive solution to it is “suck it dry, not my problem”.

Because he is not an actual progressive. Hes just a spoiled rich kid who like to pretend to be a progressive.

People know whats going on and the reactions are numerous to count. Nihilism/apathy tend to win out not because we don’t have solutions already on the table to solve it but because those solutions are not consumer based and easy. We are not going to solve this via a magic bullet, fusion power isn’t going to solve the underlying problem of consumerism/neo-liberal capitalist economics.

We are not powerless to make the change, thinking that way only empowers those who have no problem with killing the planet for profit. There are millions of people all over the world actively working on changing the economic conversation away from GDP growth and consumerism to something else, however they don’t get the broadcast airtime in the US. There is degrowth, postgrowth, environmental socialism, doughnut economics, etc all with different ways/ideas to build an economy without consuming the planet in the process.

Honestly the best action an individual can take is join a group or organization that is actively trying to shift the conversation. Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future are just a small sample of the millions of organizations and groups who are actively trying to build a better future, find a local group where you live and join in-person. The work is going to be long and hard but the hardest part requires individuals to put their own ego in check and do the work not for their own personal benefit but for the benefit of the collective and generations to come. We are powerful together, but divided and stewing in our own misery and loathing about the hand we have been collectively dealt doesn’t solve anything. If anything it makes it worse. What works is getting involved with your local community, talking to people, building networks of support and collective activism. The more we do that the better shot we have at staving off the worse possible future.

It’s because of how they are financed and evaluated. Their investors/financiers expect a constant return on investment as well as yearly financial growth to justify their high stock values. It doesn’t matter if they have big enough or are already producing max profit. Gotta keep growing to match inflation which is also tied to growth. All powering a runaway train in which there is no conductor.

IMO I think the “doom and gloom” messaging has backfired into apathy and nihilism. Yes we should be honest with the seriousness and severity of the situation but I think it’s more important to provide and message hope. Also provide solutions, alternative economic systems, simpler and happier lifestyles, and especially pathways to off-ramp from the consume till we die society that we currently live in.