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Cake day: July 28th, 2025

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  • Per capita is not relevant to climate change, but it is relevant to understand the situation lifestyles motivation and economic development of people. I think there has to be a concept of a fair share.

    ‘Keep them foreigners poor because we fucked up the planet’ is not going to convince many people - outside of those who drink the greenwash koolaid and don’t see that we continue to emit way more than our fair share. Granted the UK is in about the worst position here, because of history that meant countries like India effectively were forced to pay the UK to fuck it up so its a double fuck-you if i were to say that.

    India just won’t stay poor anyway and no one is going to stop western and middle eastern oil companies wanting more cars in ‘emerging markets’ .

    I’m not saying they should replicate UK as it was in 1980. But if we’re so clean now, having achieved what i call ’ far too little, far too late’ why can’t developing countries catch up their lifestyles to ours today - the answer is we’re not clean and they shouldn’t - but they probably will and I can’t blame them for it.

    China must laugh at shitholes like the UK, can’t build Nukes (hinkley point C is what 10-12 years and counting behind schedule?) , can’t build high speed rail, can’t invest in decent public transportation, doesn’t build hydro because of fucking poets and fucking daffodils and yokels fucking sheep, and tries at every turn to follow US’s stupendously inefficient and self indulgent ‘sprawl’ model or housing instead of densifying population efficiently.


  • I think they’re just catching up to what countries like the UK did over the past 200 years. So a few hundred thousand more Indian people can afford cars or international holidays these days - that seems fair enough. what’s the indian GHG emisiions per capita? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhouse_gas_emissions_per_capita sorry still old data, but 2023 they were not much over half the UK , so what is the fair share of ghg emissions for a person in India? Any why should it be lower than , say, UK - who has a centuries old legacy of fucking the climate. The UK has a hell of a lot more reducing ghg per person to do before it can be any sort of role model -b and thats after nerfing it’s own heavy industry and not counting GHG embodied in imports.

    Back before the twats here (UK) had let the banks offshore domestic manufacturing, you might have had a point, but greenhouse gas intensity of the economy here in UK was a lot higher when we actually did shit like transforming iron ore into useful products.

    With widespread international supply chains for so much stuff, I’m not convinced by nationalistic parochialism. At least not without doing a lot of fairly complex import/export and supply / use analysis across industries and from primary through to tertiary to figure out who is really providing for whom.

    The simplistic way i see it; It’s a world full of humans (or as i like to say, cunts), they do stuff, they trade their products. some people directly do carbon intensive processes, others buy stuff off them. At the end of the day, if everyone was ‘postindustrial’, it’d be a very interesting and different ‘economy’ and i think very different lifestyles, and a very different capacity to support the human population. I’d like to think the bubble’d last about as well as the Hindenburg blimp.




  • OK, I’ll wait til the 2024 and 2025 data are out and see the radical change - but the past 30 years pretty much support my “outdated” view. I don’t accept that you putting no petrol in your car means petrol consumption is lower - someone else can (and almost certainly will) still use it somewhere somehow in some vehicle or other. Unless you’re still buying it and burying in the ground somewhere no one can find it.

    https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-statistics-data-browser?country=WORLD&fuel=Energy+supply&indicator=TESbySource

    In short - top line goes up faster than the renewables wedge grows —> global warming increases. In fact the fossil fuel wedges also grow as much or more than renewables. Maybe this will become more than a blip - maybe. But realistically I look at the graph above and 2008, 2020 are the things that stand out as a lesson.

    People need fewer datacentres not more, wherever they’re located. I think people just need to take a long hard look at themselves and see whether they can survive by jerking off to 360p or 720p porn - it is just about exactly as hollow and unfulfilling as jerking off to 4K AI generated porn.








  • dislaimer i know nothing about histort, so wghat follows may be total BS, do your own research if you really want to know.

    A few things like April fools day and the elements of saturnalia that survive in Christmas (twelfth night) had sort of formalised versions of it. In terms of reversal of roles and servants being able to mock or impersonate their masters.

    But also folk heroes like robin hood and similar stories, and folk songs and bardic poems , stuff like that would have been sometimes critical of kings or power structures.

    The peasants revolt in england in c14 is a good example. That was fairly widespread dissent against a new tax, although unsuccessful they got palmed off with some bullshit and Wat Tyler was murdered during the peace negotiations, and the boy king Richard II turned out to be a total cunt anyway. But Wat Tyler was definitely crticising the monarchy (well maybe the “regency” that was effectively in power at the time), not staying silent.

    The kings would have had far less control of the general populace before police forces came along (after large scale urbanisation). Look at something like the ‘Highland Clearances’ in Scotland to see evidence of people refusing to be shoved off the land into cities. The process of urbanisation in england was similarly tyrannical, it was just easier to orchestrate because there are far more twats in england to do the kings dirty work - and easier terrain probably helped too.

    Some rebellions and civils wars though were not as home grown though. stuff like wars of roses and jacobite rebellions were all linked to international politics and religion to some degree. Especially with england and france it was pretty much non stop aggro for a several hundred years after 1066. I guess i’m saying there was also foreign state sponsored dissent possibly more than genuine rebellion. I’m not really sure where someone like joan of arc sits as a rebellion the politics in france were quite complicated at that time - but i think she was fairly pissed off and not silent about it - but was pretty closely aligned to one king vs another, so maybe not ‘independent’ as wat tyler , say.

    Ireland had many rebellions and attempts to depose or fight back against the english crown over the centuries - but they never really got the support from france or spain or the pope that they’d have needed to succeed ( a bit like the scots too) - funnily enough it turned out to be the protestant germany that effectively weakend england enough to help Ireland achieve some freedom.

    So i think there was dissent and unrest from time to time, but not until the american and french revolutions was there any peoples movement that I can think of that was really successful.



  • And still globally the fraction of renewables in electricity gen, and even primary energy consumption (counting renewable elec gen as “primary”), remains pretty steadfast at the levels of the 1990s. The basic reason is that they’re subsidising electricity, making it cheaper and people ( and I count both final consumers and intermediate producers as “people”) are using more of it. The only meaningful hiatuses in the growth of demand was the major recessions in 2008 and 2020, but consumption largely bounced back after those.

    Savings are not totally pointless, but reducing prices of something does tend to increase consumption, and erode a notable amount (but granted probably not all) of savings. The earth’s human economy is largely set up to extract and use resources, give it more resources and it grows and extracts and uses more. We’re not going to let large amounts of cheap (or subsidised) resources sit there and go unexploited.

    Adding new generation capacity has some similarity to adding a new lane to a busy highway. Induced demand.

    From a Europe/EEC point of view It has been major restriction on coal generation (LCPD, IED, and to a minimal extent the EU-ETS) - that has reduced coal use in generation. Renewables doesn’t directly drive out fossil fuel gen , I think it has to be regulated out. Same will be with transport, if you don’t ban petrol, and just subsidise electric transport, there’ll be more trips you wont reduce petrol consumption. And even if you could ban petrol in cars, someone somewhere will start finding a way to use all that cheap fuel for something. The only saving grace for transport is that electric mass transit is way more efficient , than personal transport, and at least China knows what its doing on that front. But I’d be very worried for the planet as more and more people in India continue to start getting cars - I think they’ll easily become a market for any petrol saved by EVs elsewhere…