In his memo, Gates wrote that global warming “will not lead to humanity’s demise”. This misunderstands climate scientists’ warnings, said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy.

“I have not seen a single scientific paper that ever posited that the human race would become extinct … it’s a straw man, the way he’s proposing it,” she said. “He’s speaking about it as if scientists are saying that, and we’re not: what we are saying is that suffering increases with each 10th of a degree of warming.”

The memo from a “very influential person who controls a lot of money” hinges on “inarguably a false binary” between a world where everything is fine and “literally the end of the world”, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.

“In reality, there’s a whole hell of a lot of bad things that can happen in between,” he said.

Exactly. So many people act like there are only two possibilities: climate change is a hoax, everything’s fine and growth and prosperity will not be affected by global warming. Or climate change is real and it’s going to kill us all. Neither of those two scenarios are likely. We’re not going extinct, but everything isn’t just going to be hunky-dory, either.

The thing is, no one can tell you exactly where we’ll be by 2100, because that depends on what we do between now and then. If we get our act together and bring down emissions rapidly, we will be in a better spot in 2100 than if emissions remain elevated for longer.

Personally, I think the most likely scenario is that emissions will stay elevated for a while. I don’t see us decreasing our GHG emissions significantly any time soon.

EV adoption in the US is going to suffer as a result of the industry being dominated by tech bros. It’s unfortunate that buying into the EV industry in the US also means buying into a toxic culture. I just want a car that happens to be electric, I’m not interested in joining a techno-utopian cult.

If I’m wrong then democratic socialist candidates should do well across the country in coming elections, so I would love to be wrong. We’ll just have to wait and see.

“I’ve been a DSA member for over 10 years,” said 40-year-old health department worker Will, at the Fort Greene party. “This just shows that our politics are not radical, that New Yorkers actually think what we believe is sensible, and maybe the rest of the country is ready for sensible, commonsense, Democratic socialism.”

I doubt it.

I still consider myself a democratic socialist. I left the DSA a few years ago but my ideal is still democratic socialism. I still believe in democratic socialism, but believing in something doesn’t make it true or viable. I think the chances of viability would increase significantly if a majority of Americans believed in it too, but that’s just not the case. Now, maybe that’s just because the American people have been conditioned by propaganda into opposing any form of socialism, and that may be true, but I don’t know how to overcome that.

But while democratic socialism remains a relatively fringe ideology, I think that social democracy is much more mainstream and I think it can become much more popular again. And, unlike democratic socialism, social democracy has actually been implemented at a national level and has a good track record. It’s still capitalist, but at least it attempts to mitigate some of capitalism’s more harmful elements and provide a solid social welfare base for the country. Social democracy definitely seems much more viable, at least in the near term. Though, getting a majority of Americans to embrace social democracy again will probably still be a tough row to hoe, due to decades of entrenched right wing libertarian and neoliberal conditioning.

My day’s already off to a good start.

I wonder if Valve will ever release an official desktop version of SteamOS? I think Linux adoption would really increase fast if there was a gaming focused Linux desktop distribution with the support of an established company. But does Valve want that? A full featured operating system is a lot to maintain and provide support for.

“Seized” makes it sound like they did something nefarious, but all they really did was just invest in their own rare minerals industry and we… didn’t. And rightfully so, right? I mean, the government directing investment toward vital industries of national importance is socialism, right? And we don’t do that. We let the market decide that stuff, and the market said, “let China do it.”

I helped a family member with their Windows PC a few days ago and, omg, I hate using Windows. It’s so bloated and unintuitive. It’s a mess, and it seems to get worse every time I use it.

No it won’t.

The material difference isn’t left vs right, it’s status quo versus change.

Yes, but not everyone who wants change wants the same change, and so not every change candidate is going to appeal to every voter, even if most of them are looking for some kind of change.

I would agree that both Bernie and Trump were change candidates, but their differing levels of success shows which change message spoke more to the American people.

I agree that a political campaign promising change is the way to go (that’s been true since Obama in '08), but which one? I think it’s reasonable to assume that a change campaign built on economic populism is the way to go, but Bernie tried that twice and he lost twice.

People just don’t want to acknowledge the real problem here: inequality. When people feel left behind, they are much more likely to break either reactionary or revolutionary. Status quo politics are not going to appeal to either of these groups. At the same time, the people who are doing well for themselves within the status quo are going to be put off by both the reactionaries and the revolutionaries. The people who are doing well don’t want radical change, one way or another. Why would they? They’re doing fine and they don’t want anything to jeopardize that.

So, if a politician moves to the center they will appeal to the pro status quo group, but they will lose both the reactionaries and the revolutionaries. Similarly, if a politician moves to either the reactionary side or the revolutionary side, they will lose the other two groups.

We are divided. There is no one winning strategy because there is no one, single group of American voters to try and appeal to, AND embracing any one group means alienating the others. And we’re not just divided because we watch different cables news stations or spend time in different web discussion forums, we’re divided because our lived experiences are different. Our divisions are not merely ideological, they are material.

Welcome to back pain, Mario.

It always has been! Do people not read history books?

Finally, my like of a Kony2012 Facebook post is paying off.

Huh, imagine that.

There will be.

Not if the United States collapses.

Not if there isn’t a US house.

Newsom is worried if they go all out that voters won’t approve the measure.

He’s probably right.

Yeah, IF the higher prices caused consumers to eat less beef, but that’s not necessarily going to happen.

How rich do you need to be, you greedy fossil?