So what would Climate Stalin have to do?
So what would Climate Stalin have to do?
With the fires in LA it’s hard to feel optimistic about the future. I want to be reminded that all is not lost, we need to do a lot that likely won’t be done but there are still things to do.
So let’s say Climate Stalin became Supreme Leader of the World or just President of the United States tomorrow. Whats next? What steps do we take to stop climate change getting worse and mitigate the damage we’ve already done?
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Nationalise all polluting industries, decouple them from the profit motive and public investment, decarbonise as much as possible
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Shift production so that it's as sustainable, localised, and decommodified as possible. Meet the needs of the people and empower them to fulfill those things
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Massive investment in mass transit, bike infrastructure, and subsidies for non-car transportation.
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Protect and expand existing natural areas, overfund the agencies dedicated to preserving them
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Invest in rural communities to encourage a more even population distribution
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Focus on high density urban development with biodiverse parks and urban forests. Every city should be a garden city.
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Shift the military's priority from warfare to climate resiliency. Turn it into a job corps that builds sustainable infrastructure
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Completely subsidise education in fields that promote climate resiliency and recovery from natural disasters, encourage climate change awareness at the primary/secondary school levels.
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Shoot every billionaire in the stomach and leave them outside the city limits
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Encourage artistic movements like art nouveau to promote a cultural reverence for nature, artisanal labour, and home craftsmanship. Encourage homesteading and gardening to create a more robust and local food supply.
Invest in rural communities to encourage a more even population distribution
curious about this one. cities aren't perfect and suburbs are pretty much the worst but I thought generally city dwellers had a much lower impact per capita. not that rural communities should be disinvested either, just wondering what specific climate angle you had in mind here
I guess investing in making rural communities more... communities and not just individual suburban-style or farmstead style houses miles from civilization would be a start?
High density cities are ideal for resource consumption, but commuting out of one to do agricultural work from sunrise to sunset isn't ideal. Part of the antithesis between town and country is that rural communities are so underdeveloped that nobody would want to live there and those who do are subject to additional alienation. Agriculture is something that a single digit percentage of the population already born into it does. I go ten miles outside of my current city and there are suddenly no bike paths, no libraries, no decent schools, and no quality internet/water/power. There are just massive cattle ranches and corn farms that pay minimum wage. By investing in those communities and making them livable, I want to expand who participates in food production and reduce the land consolidation under a few ranching/farming businesses who only have an incentive to deplete the land because the scale of their production is so industrialised.
One important angle of this issue is that people in cities don't feel a direct connection to nature or natural production. They'll eat bananas in December without thinking of the cost of a 10 cent banana, and the supply side responds by always ensuring there are bananas in December regardless of the impact on those communities growing them. I want a society in which most people have some kind of direct connection to nature which depends on their stewardship of it.
Switzerland is an example of great rail infrastructure for rural areas. There are bus services to nearly every town, even if it only has 100 people. The rail services also stretch deep out into the countryside, with interurbans and rural rail lines servicing many small towns. This allows people to live in the countryside car-lite or car-free.
I live in a rural farming town, population has always been <1k people, flyover state, about an hour by car to the nearest city. Everything is walkable. We used to have passenger rail service before they dug up the tracks, and there's rail lines still operating near by that wouldn't be too hard to hook up to. Having rail infrastructure is good in general since quite a lot of food is grown here and needs to be distributed out either way. Seems not-terribly-complicated to use the same rail infrastructure to bring goods in and move people to/from the city.
In order to make the town more appealing so people didn't need or want to leave it as frequently (thereby reducing carbon footprints here), you'd need to add healthcare (doctor, dentist, optometrist, pharmacist, etc or one person who can do the basics of most/all of it plus some staff to support them), re-open the school that got shut down by libertarian experiments so kids didn't need to go to a neighboring town for education every day, and reduce the cost of groceries in town (which is literally 2x as expensive as in the city). Some version of a food truck schedule or other rotating restaurant situation would be good too for more variety (the only place that serves food is the bar which only does artery-clogging fried stuff and meat). You'd also need to add more stuff to do and places to hang out besides churches — there's a park and a walking trail and a basketball court, but it's pretty boring otherwise.
Shoot every billionaire in the stomach and leave them outside the city limits
Make this #1 and I'll give my life to this project
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People get all squeamish when you say the word 'rationing', but rationing
This. Imagine Americans being told that they’re only allowed to watch Netflix and browse the internet for 4-6 hours per day. They’d rather burn the whole planet down than to have their treats taken away.
Under rationing in the UK, most people ate better
Edit, because I just realized this is kinda ambiguous — working class people under the rationing system ate more
They aren't called Treatlers for nothing.
Step 0 - Purge 99% of US cops, politicians, and kulaks
Step 0.5 - Laugh at the memes about it
Continue with happybadger's plan
Everybody who's ever chartered a private flight gets the wall.
No more road expansions.
Everybody takes the train.
No more fossil fuels.
Take all wealth over 2 mil and use it to build public transport and renewables.
Red meat is like a once a week thing.
Companies that use engineered obsolescence get privatized.
And maybe less necessary but massively expanding public spaces so people actually had a place to go and socialize rather than all using the internet 10 hours a day.
And it would have had to happen 15 to 20 years ago.
my hot take is that on top of everything else people have been mentioning, we are going to have to do some form of intentional geoengineering. I understand that this is a big risk, but it feels like we're starting to get to the territory where we have to take risks, even if they might cause famines that kill millions etc. because if we don't the consequences would be far worse. fitting for a "climate stalin" scenario too, considering the strategy the USSR had to use to industrialize under Stalin
I agree, and the “throw a bunch of iron shavings in the ocean” option seems relatively low risk from what I understand?
i'm sure every project is inherently risky just because we dont have models accurate enough to actually know how risky something is, but it does seem like a better idea to me than simulating massive volcanic eruptions with sulfur dioxide lol, which is what I normally see get brought up as the first option
as far as what i think is the best option, im not well informed but i remember stumbling upon this wikipedia article some months back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_daytime_radiative_cooling , ive never seen anyone mention it before though so i assume it's got some big drawbacks or something like that
not sure what exactly is best meta but this game was fun
Obviously he’d nationalize the energy and transport sectors as well as heavy industry. Then: rapid cessation of fossil fuels for energy production, immediate installation of vast arrays of renewable and nuclear power plants, rapid public transit deployment, outlaw ICE cars, massive reforestation drives, redirect public research grants towards carbon capture, construct mitigating infrastructure to reduce damage from the existing impacts of climate change. And if he has the time, execute those responsible for doing this to the earth (oil executives, former presidents, etc) just for justice’s sake.
Basically what China is doing right now but with even more investment in rail. China is doing really well with high speed rail but still is spending far too much money on roads.
I would start with China's infrastructure strategy, but add on top:
-Decimate the road budget and spend it all on trams and trolleybuses. Ban the sale of new cars.
-Ban the use of semi-trucks and build electric freight rail to all industries.
-Build more rural rail lines, all electrified, to serve the community, and use timed transfers to allow for lower frequencies (what the Swiss do)
-Shut down all fossil fuel plants as soon as possible
-twice daily or more freight service to all industries to make up for lost truck capacity
Uhhh now that I look at it this is kind of what Switzerland is already doing. The main difference is that the Swiss are reliant on extractive markets in other countries and are in no way socialist. Nonetheless, the Swiss rail network is excellent and well worth emulating in many facets.
Two massive projects have to happen in parallel:
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Replace or retrofit everything single device and industrial process that uses any type of fossil fuel as an input and replace it. That means every single IC motor, every single gas powered heating element, every single chemical process that uses fossil fuels as an input - every single one of those in the world needs to be replaced.
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Start spamming out nuclear power plants, cover every single roof in solar panels, and build tons of new transmission lines. We could eventually decommission nuclear plants (I'm sympathetic to the proliferation and waste concerns), but we need them as a stop-gap solution.
Bringing up Stalin in this context is useful actually, because it demonstrates that this scale of thing is possible to do, and has in fact happened in history.
Plans for waste are greatly exaggerated and haven't there been new scientific advancements that help make them more recyclable?
Nuclear waste storage is nonexistent for political reasons, not technical ones. It's much cheaper to dump it in Africa than to hollow out Mt. Yucca.
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https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
All the electric power could be nigh-carbon-neutral on the big scale if you just did nuclear power, that's a quarter off.
Transportation is basically just cars, planes, unelectrified train lines and not much else.
Agriculture is basically mostly down to animal products and stupid shit like growing wheat in arizona or whatever
If you were climate stalin, a 5 year plan would be enough of a timespan to knock down US Emissions by about like half.
What would be the consequences of just banning air travel? Do people really need to do it?
I mean people do have loved ones across distances. They also love driving cars, eating meat and many of them hate nuclear power
The point I'm trying to make here isn't necessarily that'd be easy to do, but that it would be simple to do.
Join a party with Climate Lenin
- Ban personal car ownership unless you have a good reason to own one
- Ban air travel unless you have an extremely good reason to fly and no viable alternatives
- Massive investments in rail and other transit infrastructure
- Heavily disincentivise needless imports and stimulate much more local supply chains
- Massive investments in nuclear and sustainable energy
- Strict energy efficiency, repairability and longevity standards for consumer products
- A programme of insulation and similar improvements for all buildings
- Make the wasteful lifestyles of the rich impossible by liquidating the rich as a class and seizing their excessive assets
- Oligarchs, fascists and the like gets shot
That last one has to be first. Fossil fuels aren't being burned by themselves and unless you get rid of these people they will come back and do the same shit or worse.
I agree with this. If you don't liquidate them as a class, then you're constantly at risk of bourgeois restoration. They will do whatever it takes to undermine progress.
Nuke plants and electrify everything. Absolutely everything needs to be electrified, treat production needs to stop tomorrow, the global north needs to institute massive degrowth that won't feel like degrowth to anybody but the owners of vacation homes, and we need a fuck ton of nuke plants. We can worry about removing carbon from the atmosphere after we've electrified everything, and can pour our new massive power surplus into super power intensive carbon removal machines that make no money.
There's not enough uranium for enough nuclear plants (though China and India have those thorium reactors)
There are only two thorium reactors in the world (one in China and one in India) and they are both highly experimental. There isn't enough ground based uranium (most uranium is in the ocean and technology to develop oceanic uranium mining is promising) for 100% nuclear power, but there is enough for a lot more. The reason why nuclear power isn't more widespread isn't a technical one, but rather it costs more than fossil fuels and nuclear power is contrary to the interests of the bourgeoisie.
There's not enough uranium at the ideal enrichment levels that's profitable to extract. If we aren't concerned with getting the most profit possible mining the stuff, we have a few hundred years of supply without needing to recycle (which is easy).
Implement a system of eco-credits that accrue over time and allow people to buy luxury items when the credits fill up. Like okay, you waited X number of years, you can afford a small boat or whatever your hobby is.
Ban meat, except as byproducts from things like prairie restoration projects. Let people go nuts on that wild buffalo steak or whatever once a year on Christmas or something as a treat, if they want.
Let people go nuts on that wild buffalo steak or whatever once a year
The Purge: Carnist Edition
Implement a system of eco-credits that accrue over time and allow people to buy luxury items when the credits fill up. Like okay, you waited X number of years, you can afford a small boat or whatever your hobby is.
Alternatively, library socialism. I want municipally-owned power tools and vehicles that people can check out as needed or use in municipal workshops/co-ops. I shouldn't have a consumer incentive to buy anything I'm going to use a couple times per year or buy the shittiest version because I can't afford one that will last. If a consumer good can be repaired, I should never feel like the path of least resistance is throwing it away with no obligation to preserve it. The poorest person in that city should be able to use the same boat the wealthiest person can with equal opportunity to better themselves with it.
Bulldoze wealthy suburbs and replace them with commie blocks serviced by adequate public transport and services. Replace a lot of centralised power generation with distributed renewables. Put more research into wood molding and plant a billion trees (not monocropping though) so that as much carbon can be locked in buildings, infrastructure, and furniture as possible. Merc billionaires until they voluntarily give up their wealth.
Edit: something about meat consumption
We did a podcast episode about this: https://rss.com/podcasts/carsandcomrades/833444/
The changes wouldn't even be that draconian. Just like, kill all the cows and install trolly systems in every major city. That really would have thr US meet it's parris accord numbers
comrade bird flu reporting for duty
