It would be quite rich for Greenpeace to position themselves as “enlightened centrists” willing to sell & promote fossil fuels on the VERY flawed assumption that biofuels are a) feasible and b) a meaningful improvement, while on the other hand being uncompromisingly hardline anti-nuclear and being at the heart of the plan to shut down existing power plants based on nothing more than their dogmatic beliefs.

If a rando energy provider sells fossil fuels, I don’t care. They’re just playing by the byzantine economic incentives set by the EU in an amoral capitalistic way. When Greenpeace does it, it is inherently a political statement and so deeply hypocritical that the only rational explanation is that they are deeply corrupt and/or profoundly stupid. Which would not matter if they weren’t, ideologically and politically, strongly influential on European environmentalist activism and policy.

Biogas and hydrogen are both greenwashing products. Neither is better than electric alternatives where they are being sold. They have major major flaws that the fossil fuel industry (y’know, the one selling both of those products) won’t advertise to you:

• Biogas is derived from agricultural products. All the agricultural waste we produce can’t cover a meaningful part of even just our heating needs. This inevitably leads to a major misincentive to grow crops just to turn into methane, like we are doing with bioethanol, which has catastrophic land-use and environmental impacts.
• Hydrogen is very inefficient to produce. Most often produced with gas (lol), but even if produced through electrolysis it’s less efficient to have a double conversion than just use the electricity directly. It is also very hard to store/transport safely and efficiently.
• Regardless of any of the above, heat pumps have a COP of 3-5. A boiler has a COP of 1. I don’t care how clean your fuel is, it will always be more efficient to burn it in a regular power plant to power a heat pump than to burn it in a boiler.

And even if the above wasn’t true and biogas was awesome (it’s awful), the simple fact that they are selling trace amounts in order to promote fossil gas as their main product is an obvious act of greenwashing unto itself.

Greenpeace knows all of the above very well. I can’t say for sure that they are corrupt and bought out by the fossil fuel industry. All I can say is that I don’t have a better explanation for their stupidity.

Greenpeace Energy sells fossil fuels while fighting nuclear power. After it became a scandal, Greenpeace officially divested and changed the name but they still share the same office building in Hamburg so I think it’s more than fair to say they are strongly ideologically aligned.

I’m sure on paper they would rather renewable than fossil, but they clearly are willing to compromise with them, unlike with nuclear. When they combine forces with the openly pro-fossil fuel lobby right wing, you get the exact mess Germany is in: inexcusably high reliance on gas and a consistently worst-in-class CO2 footprint per kWh for Western Europe.

Yes, I’m extremely bitter about this. The environmentalist political class being unyielding on nuclear but soft on gas set us back more than a decade with the green transition.

“yet”

Just as a thought exercise, can you fathom and put into words a hypothetical breaking point that would wake people up to the madness around them?

Because here’s my prediction: the regime will commit atrocity after atrocity, each one somehow more monstrous than the last, and nothing will happen, because your first paragraph will still be true. They will start wars and nothing will happen because your first paragraph will still be true. Then suddenly WWIII will happen and the regime will be unstoppable. Then, some manner of nuclear exchange, potentially marking the end of human civilization, because all fascist regimes end up destroying themselves – too bad this one has the power to take the entire fucking world down with it.

If you are right that Americans won’t fight for decency now (and I think you are), then all hope is lost. All historical precedent says that we are past the point of no return and you’ve forfeited your - and quite possibly humanity’s - future.

People not understanding that we understand bookmarks exist is weird to me.

For me it’s a suspected ADHD thing. If I make a bookmark:

• I have to context-switch into “cleaning up” mode. Leaving a tab open is not distracting, having to name it and categorize it is.
• Bookmarks are virtual drawers. Anything I put in a drawer might as well be in a cave in Alaska guarded by a troll as far as my brain is concerned. If I intend to look at this in the next 2-3 weeks, I keep the tab open because it’s a virtual reminder I’ve not yet done the thing.
• Yes, I’ve got tabs open from over a year ago. Those ones don’t serve a purpose, I’ll get around to cleaning up… eventually.

Honestly if I was forced to close my browser sessions at the end of the work day, not joke, not an exaggeration, I’d switch jobs. I’m working on too many different complex things to have to rebuild my mental model of where everything was at from scratch every morning. I would not get anything done.

For me the end-game was the wrong ratio of grind-to-payoff. Everything after unlocking that one secret ability got quite repetitive. I watched a video essay from someone who praised it specifically because they’re a hardcore gamer who loves the grind and pouring sweat into it and the accompanying feeling of accomplishment, but after I discovered 90 % of the secrets of the world it felt really annoying to spend the second half of the game scouring every nook and cranny of the game for the remaining 10 %. Some of these puzzle have very long solutions with absolutely zero feedback if you do even one tiny thing wrong and that’s absolutely infuriating. I think I would have preferred it if credits had rolled at the halfway point.

However I loved Outer Wilds because while it’s huge and full of sometimes very difficult puzzles, it never gets grindy. Either you get it or you don’t, the game never presents you with a “congratulations you understand the mechanic, now go stare at every wall in the game for the next 3 hours”. I get that some people love that but it clearly wasn’t for me.

One thing I’ve learned as a non-French francophone: whatever you think is going on with the relations between Paris and overseas France, it’s about 100x more complicated than you think.

Generally these populations want (and in the case of Nouvelle Calédonie I believe have regularly and recently reaffirmed via referendum) to remain part of France. However, the socio-political situation of each of these overseas territories is unique, complex, and often tense and dividing even for the locals.

For complete strangers to pass a harsh judgement such as “imperialist pigs” based on this article alone would be an ironic form of imperialism/paternalism. If the democratically-elected local government asks for national help, then I would very (!) cautiously agree that it makes sense that they would receive this help.

I haven’t seen anyone here “support Israel”. Almost everyone agrees that the Israeli State is not free of guilt, far from it.

What people really disagree over is whether that alone makes Palestine right (nuanced) and whether it justifies Hamas’ actions (unhinged but unfortunately semi-common take on here).