Podcast Episode 4: Global Climate Strike

u took the words right out of my mouth :)

Bloody good episode! I'm a mathematician and constantly get triggered by all the buggy logic used to attack renewables and efforts to curb greenhouse gasses. Your clear explanations here should be really helpful for loads of people, including me, to express clearly the errors in these logics. Of course, logic is not going to help convince most of the attackers, due to the bigger problem that logic, knowledge, expertise, and actual thinking has all been devalued and is seen as leftist, ivory-tower, "cultural Marxism" (whatever that is), and so on: tribalism and the memeing of slogans has always been here but is on the rise, and the danger of this particular rise is that half of the slogans are dressed up as "logic" that make tribe members believe that they are actually thinking logically themselves, not just repeating tribal mantras. Luckily, that tribe mentality also means that members will instantly change their views (and "logic") once their tribe accepts different views. If Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt, Alex Jones, or any other tribal Alphas were to suddenly get behind renewables, then millions more would support renewables - overnight. Come to think of it, Alan Jones might be the main reason that fracking hasn't wrecked Australia properly yet. Other dominant tribal culture works too, like Sky News, The Australian and so forth. But even just mainstream culture: once some issue has been settled, like marriage equality, for instance, then the tribe acknowledges the dominance and tucks its head in. All this means that you can't win by trying to have a sober discussion with any tribal members: they don't even acknowledge the notion of "discussion", only agreement or battle, not a constructive collaboration of thinking. However, you get use logic and communication to discuss and convince others, and as those convinced grow in numbers, you're winning the cultural war here. For that purpose, you could argue with tribal members, not to convince them, but to convince bystanders.

If Terrence Moonseed won't have a bar of it, then neither should we!

There are a few things that need addressing. 1. Climate Change. 2. neoliberalism. Both are the issues that are causing social discord, inequlaity to the people. If I was asked to summarise what is is wrong with the world today, I would have to answer leaders. The amounts spent on defence could be redirected to development of resouces to combat climate change, poverty and inequaity . Of course Taxes need be increased on the wealthy and that is what all this is about. The wealthy want protection and lower taxes and hence the world troubles have emerged. Unite the lower and Middle class towards sensible economic and ecological outcomes and we may see the major change that is required in Politics.

I have to agree on using citizen reporting of events to document the truth and encourage kids and everyone to photograph and video the truth of the situation - change begins with emotional engagement - emotional engagement begins with involvement and supporting each other. The psychology of change is clear. Love that you tackled individual responsibility vs systemic responsibility - it is something i emphasize in my climate support group. We need both. But not to beat each other up with ecological purity perspectives. Keep up the great work!!!! Waves hello from woop woop NY

Thanks for your work!

Totally agree with @CS1 Absolutely fantastic podcast guys and especially your narrative and beautiful reasoning Giordano. Fabulous argument and common sense. Loved the historic perspective as well. Well done! Pete

PS as well as going vegan, we must engage in nonviolent civil disobedience because the time for pleading with politicians is over. They don't need a 16 year old and school students to tell them how urgent it is. They know and they don't care. Here's some interesting information from a Chris Hedges' essay "A person who is vegan will save 1,100 gallons of water, 20 pounds CO2 equivalent, 30 square feet of forested land, 45 pounds of grain and prevent the the torture and killing of at least one sentient animal’s life EVERY day. Animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all worldwide transportation combined — cars, trucks, trains, ships and planes.3 Livestock and their waste and flatulence account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock causes 65 percent of all emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Crops grown for livestock feed consume 56 percent of the water used in the United States. Eighty percent of the world’s soy crop is fed to animals, and most of this soy is grown on cleared lands that were once rain forests. All this is taking place as an estimated 6 million children across the planet die each year from starvation and as hunger and malnutrition affect an additional 1 billion people. In the United States 70 percent of the grain we grow goes to feed livestock raised for consumption. The natural resources used to produce even minimal amounts of animal products are staggering — 1,000 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of milk. Add to this the massive clear cutting and other destruction of forests, especially in the Amazon — where forest destruction has risen to 91 percent — and we find ourselves lethally despoiling the lungs of the earth largely for the benefit of the animal agriculture industry. Our forests, especially our rain forests, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and exchange it for oxygen: Killing the forests is a death sentence for the planet. Land devoted exclusively to raising livestock now represents 45 percent of the earth’s land mass. And this does not include the assault on the oceans, where three-quarters of the world’s primary fisheries have been overexploited and vast parts of the seas are in danger of becoming dead zones. We can, by becoming vegan, refuse to be complicit in the torture of billions of animals for corporate profit and can have the well-documented health benefits associated with a plant-based diet, especially in the areas of heart disease and cancer. "

Good job Giordano. It was a great turn out in Hobart: 22K. It was very heartening to see that people in particular children are waking up and taking it all seriously. If ever there was a time that people need to do something, it's now. It should have happened 30 years ago because the writing was on the wall even then and politicians ignored it. My apologies for sounding like a cracked record, but I need to stress this again. If we claim to have confidence in the science, then we need to stop ignoring this following science and stop cherry picking. The following conclusion from the largest science study to date is no less important than any other science report. When I bring this to many people's attention: Crickets. I find it somewhat astonishing. "The study, published in the journal Science, created a huge dataset based on almost 40,000 farms in 119 countries and covering 40 food products that represent 90% of all that is eaten. It assessed the full impact of these foods, from farm to fork, on land use, climate change emissions, freshwater use and water pollution (eutrophication) and air pollution (acidification). “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions." "The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife." In relation to climate change, all reputable scientists include animal agriculture as a major and significant anthropogenic contributor to climate change. Even if someone talking about climate action doesn't go vegan personally, to refuse to mention it is unconscionable. It's like not mentioning the impact of petroleum-based transportation. I cannot understand how anyone can read the results of this largest science study to date and not be horrified and decide that we need to take personal responsibility and go vegan. Changing our energy production and use means getting government and corporations to make huge changes. Changing our transport systems requires huge amounts of restructuring of our cities and dwellings. These are huge, time-consuming changes that need the backing of those in power. That becomes someone else's job. Becoming vegan can be done immediately, and it is up to no-one but ourselves. While the oligarchs and end stage capitalism are taking us all to extinction, WE can do something right now, every one of us. It is a moral imperative for us all to go vegan NOW. Not when capitalism ends, nor when fossil fuels end, nor when fracking ends etc. I feel like many on the left are thinking they can ignore veganism because they think maybe we won't need to go vegan when fossil fuel consumption ends. That's kind of idiotic and hypocritical. We need to go vegan now not just for the climate emergency, but for nonviolence since we don't need to torture and kill 1 to 3 trillion land and aquatic animals each year for mostly trivial reasons of palate pleasure. Our nonveganism is destroying the Amazon rainforest. Our nonveganism is responsible for the droughts in Australia and elsewhere. It's causing tremendous water shortages, world hunger, land destruction, ocean acidification etc. The list is endless. (check out @Seaspiracy on Instagram and see the horror we are doing to the oceans and sentient life there) To not be vegan at this point is ELITIST and it is also means we are science deniers. We can be vegan AND we can protest, engage in nonviolent civil disobedience and any other measures that will mitigate the coming disaster. We do not need to ask permission from anyone to be vegan. Forgive me but if we are not vegan and not encouraging others to do so, to be blunt, we are not taking this climate emergency seriously. It's the other inconvenient truth. I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but the change from fossil fuels to renewables is not only not going to happen any time soon but if it does by that stage it will be too late, because politicians are mostly corporate owned. If we are not prepared to change our diet to a plant based one which is something that needs no permission from anyone, why do we expect anything else to change? To say I find it disappointing and depressing that many on the left just ignore this extremely important change is an understatement.

Fantastic episode, easily your strongest one yet - the improvement here compared to the first one is really obvious, the confidence with which you spoke (and presumably that's mixed in with the high from the strike) made you really engaging and captivating. I was pleasantly surprised by how witty all the kids you talked to were - the future is definitely in good hands. I also really appreciated the little discussion on the history of civil liberties; I would absolutely love to see you talk about more stuff with a historical retrospect in the future, since a lot of people who hold passionate opinions about these topics rarely stop to consider why the status quo is the way it is, and helping to educate people about these things is such a worthy and fascinating cause (to me, at least). Even if there's not an awful lot to look forward to in this current hellscape, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what you've got next, Giordano!