Like many human-rights related conventions, USA is not a signatory of the convention on the stateless persons.

USA so far kinda got a pass on many thing for being the “world police” and buying forgiveness with NATO protection. Remove that, and the US is basically yet another rogue state.

I’m not sure I’ll have the time to go through all of your claims but I’ll try to address the most salient ones. Please tell me if there are things that I missed that you would like to see addressed. It may wait for a few days though, sorry.

What do you think of this report by GTK? See slide 23. I would be interested in what you are looking at more specifically from the USGS and how these views could be made consistent.

One of the crucial misunderstandings in this question is the nature of reserves and what it means. So let’s first check what the report you mentioned (which by the way does not cite its sources or its methodology) is using in terms of reserves. It is not clear where their numbers come from. Here is the 2018 report on nickel. They probably used the “reserves” numbers, but the USGS is a bit more pessimistic than they are there: USGS estimated 74 million tonnes. They also considered total resources of 130 million tonnes.

Here is the 2024 report on nickel: 130 million of global reserves, 350 million tonnes of resources.

What magic is that? Well, there is a reason I mentioned the definition appendix as mandatory reading:

Reserve: That portion of an identified resource from which a usable mineral or energy commodity can be economically and legally extracted a t the time of determination. The term “ore” applies to reserves of some kinds of mineral commodities, generally metallic, but for want of another term it is sometimes applied to nonmetallic commodities

Identified resource: A resource whose location, grade, quality, and quantity are known or can be estimated from specific geologic evidence. Identified resources include economic, marginally economic, and subeconomic resources.

These resources, they grow just because we explore and prospect. On most minerals, we would have between 40 and 80 years of identified resources because prospecting at a higher rate is usually non-profitable. There was a scare on lithium, and at one point on copper, because the reserves were very low. And the prices went up, not because there was a fear of a lack of geological availability, but because the mines were not opening at an appropriate rate. Since I started being interested in that question, the world has “run out of copper” at least three times.

I’ve seen other articles on a trend that worries the professional of the field, but it’s not about geological availability. It’s about the trend in prospection that change. People are not trying to identify new deposits anymore. They are trying to extend the one that they already have secured the rights to. Economically understandable, strategically problematic. There’s a chance that we cannot supply the demand for minerals, but it will come from market failing, not from lack of geo availability.

It is not at all readily apparent to be that you could have a self-sustaining closed loop system producing then maintaining ‘renewables’, all while decarbonizing the massive energy consumption everywhere else.

Here, there is a methodology question. Right now, we both agree that our current industrial ecosystem is not sustainable. It emits CO2, it uses fossil fuels. Therefore, nothing that you produce out of it will have a zero CO2 footprint. If that’s your criterion, then sustainability is just impossible to produce.

To me that’s not the criterion. The criterion is that at one point we reach a time where you don’t need to emit CO2 to run your production. To get there we will emit CO2 and we will burn fossil fuels. Hopefully, as little as possible.

The consequence of that is that I disagree that you should integrate the indirect emissions of something into your calculation on whether it’s a piece of a sustainable society. The typical example is electric vehicles, which we consider to have a terrible CO2 footprint on production, because we assume they are produced in China with mostly coal electricity mix. What I find problematic with that view is that if you were to move the factory, the exact same factory, into a country like Norway that produces its electricity mostly from hydroelectric means, then you decrease the CO2 footprint of a car by a lot, even though that’s exactly the same car.

It makes sense in some contexts, like trying to lower your own individual footprint, to consider the indirect emissions. But in order to judge if a technology is sustainable and can be part of a sustainable zero-emission society, you should only consider the direct emissions.

And here, that’s pretty clear. Let’s focus on solar panels for simplicity. Solar panels don’t require CO2 to be emitted during their production. They just require electricity and they require transport. These may emit CO2, but that’s independent of the technology used for the production of the panels. And we know that we can transport goods using only electricity. And we know that we can produce electricity by emitting zero CO2. Similarly, mining minerals can be done without emitting CO2. It requires energy. And in the biggest mines, like I said, a lot of the big vehicles are actually electric.

I think that’s your loop. Isn’t it? You produce electricity, emit zero CO2. You use that electricity to mine minerals and to transport it without emitting CO2. And you use that electricity to run your factory without emitting CO2. And you produce solar panels that produce electricity. The loop is closed.

‘Renewable’ energy harvesting machines are still a blip in the overall scale of energy system and have only added onto energy use instead of replacing it

It is about 10% which is pretty decent but of course I want to see it grow faster. I find weird the argument that it’s only added energy instead of replacing. Yes, that’s because the world is using more and more energy as poor countries gets richer. But do you think that without renewables, the growth would be different? They would just build coal power plants. In percentage, it’s definitely displacing fossil sources.

There are also examples of places where it did displace fossils pretty significantly in absolute terms. Germany is a good example: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?country=~DEU (though I find it questionnable to get our of nuclear before getting out of fossils but that’s a different debate).

So the way forward to me is to anticipate the collapse and imagine creative ways how we are going to salvage survival in that environment and under those constraints.

I see many people arguing similar things, and I used to, because I used to be a post-apocalypse sci-fi enjoyer. But then I realized that I was starting from the conclusion, that on some level, I wanted that simpler world, that less stressful world that I imagined once that complicated industrial civilization collapsed. Re-establishing a link with nature, rebuilding simple machines out of things that I would have mined with my hand. For some time, that’s kind of a pleasant dream. And actually so pleasant that many video games use that premise.

So i have no way of knowing if that’s your case or not but really think whether you reach that conclusion through well-documented premises and careful reasoning or if that’s somehow a belief that’s actually your starting point.

The thing that I understood is that I do want a different lifestyle. I do want a less stressful lifestyle, I want to be closer to nature. And I also understand that hoping that the society would collapse is actually a comfortable way for me to avoid making life decisions, to go where I want to go. So I resigned from my job in Paris. I went back to the Alps, where my parents live, and I started exploring the freelance world and the remote working world 10 years before COVID hit, when no one was doing it. I now live in a nice house, surrounded by cows and trees. Actual nature is 20 minutes away. I see my mountains every morning and I didn’t need society to collapse for that. I am helping the local hackerspace to produce lightweight electric vehicles and we are helping non-profits that recycle plastic. You don’t need to wait for the world to collapse to help it get better. And to me that’s the essence of Solarpunk.

EDIT: fixed a few typos and missing words

I agree that they mix super bad.

Personally, why am I a bright green environmentalist? That’s because when I first came upon this criticism that we may not have enough raw material, enough energy, that there may be physical constraints in the natural world that prevents us to do large-scale transitions, I was still in engineering school in the hope of solving problems that the world has. So I took this criticism seriously. Deeply. I was there to help the world, not destroy it. So I did my homeworks. And also, you know, telling to an aspiring professional problem-solver that there are additional constraints to their problems is not a showstopper at all. Actually, that’s pretty exciting.

Do we have a limited amount of energy to do the transition? Do we have to count on a limited number of tons of cobalt? Are we going to miss some crucial exotic rare earth? Hell, are we going to have to create computers out of wood? That’s actually super exciting!

And turns out that no, when you do your homeworks, when you look about the quantities that are necessary, you see that the problems are mostly invented. There is a CO2 emission problem (and also several other GHG emission problem but CO2 is the main one). There is an oil depletion problem. There is a biodiversity destruction problem. There are tons of very real but pretty local pollution and ecosystem destruction problems.

That’s a ton of problems to solve, and we need to address all of them. We need to address all of them simultaneously. People are not talking enough about the biodiversity destruction in the ocean, in my opinion. It’s as important as the greenhouse effect. Because the greenhouse effect, if we are lucky, we may reverse it. Biodiversity destruction, we will never. But I don’t make a hierarchy in these problems. We need to solve all of them and we need to solve them fast.

I do make a difference though between problems that are real and problems that are invented for reasons that are not totally clear to me. We are not going to lack any non fossil mineral resource (I guess you could make a case for helium and some radioactive isotopes but that’s about it). Copper, Lithium, Sand, Cobalt, Nickel, any rare earth you can name We have no resources problem about it If you think we have a problem on these resources Go check what the USGS says about it. Mandatory reading: the definitions about reserves.

Is it even possible to have artisan/localized ways of producing these technologies vs the current status quo dependent on highly energy-intensive six continent supply chain and cheap hydrocarbon flows. Brushing aside these kinds of difficult questions with techno-optimism leads to bright green environmentalism.

The answer is yes. The thing is, we don’t brush them away, we demonstrate them away. Energy can be produced in a sustainable way, it can be done at a huge scale and that energy can be used for the mining and transport (the biggest mining machines are electric, diesel engines can’t provide enough power). It’s all mostly about energy. Actually when you dig up a bit there’s almost nothing that you can’t replace if you have abundant and cheap energy.

A few decades ago, you had to do the math to demonstrate that it’s possible to switch to sustainable energy at scale. Now you don’t even have to do the math, you just have to look at the transition path of several countries.

How are those raw ores being reduced both on a chemical and energetic standpoint?

The chemical part is in my opinion the only problem that there is in the extraction industry right now. not because of a lack of chemical components, we have plenty of this, but because of the way the byproducts are usually just dumped into the environment. And the reason why is not because we don’t have the technology to do differently, it’s because of the economic incentives. See there is a global market for mineral commodities and as they are mostly fungible you can just compete on price. How do you get the price down? You get the price down by having slave workers and by having zero environmental concerns.

The problem here is unregulated free market. We can do responsible mining, we can do mining with workers rights, we can do mining with environmental procedures. Thing is, it just makes the mineral 10 times more expensive. And why would a company buy an expensive mineral if they can have exactly the same thing for much cheaper? This is the problem to solve. Cobalt has the same physical properties whether it was mined by a unionized worker that uses an environmental responsible way to chemically refine the minerals or if it was mined by a teenage slave in a third world country.

To me, bright green environmentalism is about recognition that we have tons of technologically workable solutions, but that we need also a lot of social innovation to get out of the externalities that capitalism produces.

So personally, I’m not shy of criticizing capitalism and proposing alternatives. But they need to be credible and workable. They need to be holistic in the actual meaning of the word: they need to consider the whole system, technological, sociological, economical, political. Degrowth could work on some of these aspects but not in all of it, for a simple reason: most of the people don’t want it and dark greens have no solution to solve that crucial political problems than just pretending it doesn’t exist.

I dislike reality denial. I think that’s harmful to whichever problem you’re trying to solve.

Like I said it describes intentions, not protection mechanisms.

Nothing in the article about solarpunk describes such protections nor in the manifesto pinned here, mere declarations of intention. Don’t get me wrong, it is obvious to me that a solarpunk future is deeply anti-authoritarian but it is not only that.

This label describes the solarpunk position on the environmentalist cluster: neither light green (let’s just make ecology a consumerist trend) or dark green (We can’t change anything unless we abolish capitalism first, we are likely doomed anyway).

You are right that it does not state its position on the authoritarian axis but I find it fairly obvious that “radical social changes towards sustainability” and “more widely distributed social innovations” do not include the promotion of “innovations” like authoritarian states.

If you think this is a top-down movement, then who is at the top?

bright greens emerged as a group of environmentalists who believe that radical changes are needed in the economic and political operation of society in order to make it sustainable, but that better designs, new technologies and more widely distributed social innovations are the means to make those changes

…

[B]right green environmentalism is less about the problems and limitations we need to overcome than the “tools, models, and ideas” that already exist for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions.

Emphasis mine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

It is not messaging. The messaging of conservatives is terrible too. It is about owning media to play the propaganda game. Policies are irrelevant, image is everything.

Of course the working class cares deeply about their social and economic well being.

They vote opposite to that. I know it sounds elitist, but it is also factual: someone poor who votes for Trump votes against their interests and does so out of ignorance.

Why do the Dems refuse to run on these issues?

They don’t?. See, they did not shout their message loud enough if you haven’t heard it. There is not a single “identity politics” item, that’s how conservatives have framed this and that’s their message you imprinted.

So fuck the platform, the same would have happened with Sanders. The problem is that the message is not being placarded loud enough into social media, TV, newspapers, that not enough people get bribed to tell voters they are stupid if they don’t vote for dems.

The gloves should have been taken off a while ago. The battlefield is the widely ignorant voter population. Either you find a way to educate them or you accept to play the propaganda game.

I don’t think you fully grasp the dynamics, but from an outside perspective I’m sure it’s difficult to truly appreciate.

Quite honestly, I often think that Americans are more confused about their own politics than the rest of the world.

I do believe the working class would be better off with Bernie Sanders than Harris, but also better off with Harris than Trump. That’s fairly obvious. So why do you believe that being more pro-working-class would help Harris win their vote?

The working class does not care about the working class. That’s the thing. The main error of the left is to not own medias like conservatives do to aggressively push their views.

And I wish at one point progressives will try to reconquer the conservative electorate instead of infighting.

A female DA against a rapist who should be in jail. I don’t know in what universe it wasnt a good match.

Applying the law but wanting it to change is what is called “rule of law” and democracy. Not understanding it is a part of what makes it so easy to slide into fascism.

“Nuance” my ass. Expecting a DA to follow its conviction instead of the law is the opposite of what you want.

I don’t know if the point of view of a foreigner is welcomed or relevant but hey, you know, American politics invites itself too much into European politics so I’ll give my opinion anyway.

we ran a shitty candidate again?

A week ago, Harris was hailed like the second coming of Christ and now she is the cause of the fall of USA into fascism. The dumb personification in US politics is super tiring.

He won. The DNC is to blame.

No, the half of your country that is fine with fascism is to blame. The issue is not with democrats or the DNC, it is the fact that Trump’s numbers are very stable despite all the bullshit he does and say. The DNC is the tool to motivate the other half of the electorate, but don’t lose sight of the half that is responsible for it.

What exactly are we protesting at this stage?

A protest has two functions: showing discontent to the rulers but also to meet, organize and network in order to resist. A protest is a social gathering where people who care enough about issues to come and spend a whole day on it can meet each other.

Or is it that we’re protesting only in the blue states or cities where it seems unfair to be governed by the will of the hillbilly underbelly.

To know the theme, you had to be there. The media NEVER represents a protest accurately.

If you really believe that Trump is going to install a fascist dictatorship, you are supposed to start organize the resistance.

Fuck.

Please don’t

If you have never seen a scallop run away, google it.

Personally I find it weird that we do generalities about a this population as it is very likely that they had all different cultures on the tribe level.

Nah the game is about friendship and time travels. The boss is kinda irrelevant.

The court was one of the best moments!

PENGUINS! IM TALKING ABOUT PENGUINS!