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 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.

I have been studying Doughnut Theory. IMO its all about metrics/measurement and Doughnut Theory gives a robust way to measure the actual health of an economy/society. You got your social foundations which you have to ensure everyone gets, and you have your ecological ceilings which are your limits on natural resource use/extraction. So the challenge is how do you build business, finance and law to do that.

I mean water amount on the Colorado river is one problem of the Colorado Compact. There is a whole lot of other problems that make the whole compact nonviable in the 21st century that are going to need to be worked out in some sort of Western States congress.

They have a lot of farm land that they buy alfalfa from but water rights are a bit different. Water rights are based on the “doctrine of prior appropriation” which means the water from the river goes to the body that is able to claim first “beneficial” use for that water, beneficial as defined as economically beneficial. Los Angeles and many Imperial Valley farmers primarily used that to build massive water infrastructure projects to divert massive amounts of water from the Colorado for projected growth. Those rights to that water are locked, however because of the crises on the Colorado river system the entire Colorado River compact is coming into question which has the doctrine of prior appropriation as a foundation to the water legal system in the west.

Just for some additional context the Colorado River Compact is essentially the West’s version of the constitution. Its a water treaty governing commerce and political power in the West. Keep in mind the American West is a desert and the only real thing of true value in a desert is freshwater. There is an old west saying “whiskeys for drinking, waters for fighting over”, and people did fight over water out here.

Its always fun watching the media machine work in real time. COP was a joke to begin with, it was a joke at the end. Nothing in that statement has any real measurements on how/when they are going to stop fossil fuel use and that’s because they legitimately don’t have one. The profit margins, the societal infrastructure that is built on fossil fuel use make them not want to touch it. They are addicted to constant non-stop GDP growth and nothing gets them there faster then using fossil fuels.