we previously had this thread but it was lost in a sitewide crash. kind of fortuitous, given all the new people!

anyways, i’m interested in how you describe yourself politically but also why you do so, and/or how you came to the beliefs that you did. be as brief or lengthy as you want in answering that.

additionally, as a preface: i would like this to be a generally non-judgemental thread and i think this community is more than capable of that, so please respect that idea.[1] in general, you are not obliged to justify to myself or anyone else why you believe what you do.

  1. exceptions, obviously, go for bigotry or intolerant beliefs that would be otherwise incompatible with the community’s ethos. bluntly if you’re a transphobe or something like that this is not the community for you. ↩︎

  • Onihikage@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    I’m rather fond of this pair of axioms regarding the rule of law:

    For a law to bind anyone, it must protect everyone. For a law to protect anyone, it must bind everyone.

    I see many of our modern problems as being rooted in laws and systems which neither protect nor bind everyone equally.

    I can understand your desire for markets to handle things, but I don’t think the global climate can be handled that way. Cap and trade means businesses get to shift their fossil emissions around while pretending they’re helping. We already see this with companies which buy land that’s already lush with old growth, then pretend like not clear-cutting it represents a reduction in carbon emissions equivalent to having planted all those trees. Giving corporate bad actors any opportunity to scam their way out of responsibility is the wrong approach.

    • OOFshoot@beehaw.orgEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      LMAO yeah forest carbon capture offsets are total bullshit. The people who set up that system did not think it through, or at least they knew exactly what they were doing in order to let people game it.

      A proper cap and trade system would require that in order to earn excess credits you must actually take carbon from the air and bury it in a non-volatile state at STP. Furthermore, you wouldn’t earn credits at a 1:1 rate, something like 1 ton of credit for every 2 tons you bury would be more appropriate. Things like pumping sewage into an old oil well wouldn’t count because you didn’t pull that carbon out of the air yourself.

      Regardless of if it’s a market system or a prescriptive system, you have to make sure it’s actually going to do what you want it to do. The Bush administration mandated E85 corn ethanol become a thing and we still haven’t managed to actually make corn ethanol a fuel source in the aggregate, nevermind a carbon neutral energy source.