What can I do? Anything.
July 15, 2021 9:19 AM   Subscribe

Long read from Heated: After 18 years of life in the world’s fifth most climate-vulnerable nation, Baig sees her family’s predicament for what it is: not just tragedy, but profound injustice. Pakistan contributes less than 1 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, and yet has been forced to bear the brunt of the world’s carbon crisis. “I’m angry about it. I’m sad about it. I don’t know how people have the audacity to prioritize money over humanity,” she said. And she can’t help but wonder if this would have happened if America—which has put more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation—had felt these impacts first. The battle for a livable future is a battle against fossil fuels, writes Emily Atkin, and right now, it's all hands on deck.

In more than a dozen interviews over the last two weeks, activists from across the climate movement have issued a common call to arms: If you have ever thought of becoming more involved in the fight for climate justice, it’s time to stop thinking, and start doing.

“This is pretty much the biggest moment in climate politics in over a dozen years,” said Jamal Raad, the executive director of Evergreen Action, a progressive climate group focused on federal legislation. “If anyone was considering climate activism at any level, from contacting their member of Congress to volunteering with an organization to attending a protest, now’s the time.”

... The ability to participate in activism is a privilege. Many simply do not have the time, money, or emotional bandwidth to take on a global cause. Climate activism also has an unfortunate history of regressive finger-wagging, blaming relatively powerless individuals for not making “better” environmental choices.

The climate activism that is needed today is not that type of activism—especially since, according to the IEA, individual “behavior” changes will only account for around 4 percent of cumulative emissions reductions in the path to net zero. What’s needed today is sustained outrage at the powerful, by those with the time and resources to express it.

For 18-year-old Jaweria Baig in Pakistan, this means pushing for big changes at powerful corporations. Her latest campaign, launched with youth activists from climate vulnerable counties across the world, targets Microsoft. She’s asking the tech giant to significantly decrease its emissions from corporate flights, and use its own video conference platform “Teams” instead, as it did during pandemic-induced lockdown. Microsoft is currently “one of the world's top buyers” of flights, the Just Use Teams campaign says, its emissions comparable to some small countries.
posted by Bella Donna (32 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
Forgot this part: Microsoft—which markets itself as a leader in the fight for climate justice—has so far declined to respond to Baig’s campaign. A spokesperson for the tech giant sent HEATED only a link to its corporate sustainability and aviation plans in response to the group’s complaints. So in the meantime, Baig is asking for people power. She wants Microsoft staff to leave anonymous Glassdoor reviews telling their bosses to use Teams instead of airplanes, and wants Microsoft customers to tweet their support.

If Microsoft’s flights don’t inspire you, though, there are plenty other campaigns in need of voices, resources, signatures, or bodies.

posted by Bella Donna at 9:29 AM on July 15, 2021


I agree wholeheartedly that the number one adversary here are fossil fuel companies - climate change is a disaster on a scale so much larger than previous threats (ozone, DDT, etc). The companies that profit from the sources of climate change are so much more powerful than the manufacturers of CFC or DDT were. Fossil fuel companies are ingrained in world governments and our society is deeply connected to their products on a fundamental level. It is hard to overstate the scale of the threat, or the scale of the challenge.

I find Michael E Mann's message in The New Climate War resonates - essentially, that focusing on personal choices is a distraction to the benefit of fossil fuel companies. You have to know your enemy and their tactics if you want to beat them.

Getting to "net-zero" can only happen if we drastically reduce fossil fuel usage, and that is a serious threat to these powerful interests. It will have to look something like this:

1. Phase out all coal generation of electricity today
2. Reduce personal vehicle use by increasing public transit frequency and decreasing fares
3. Electrify everything you possibly can - that means a quick and planned phase out of new ICE sales in favor of BEV. It also means switching from gas and oil heating to heat pumps wherever possible (most buildings)
4. Build out generation capacity with wind solar (they are fast to build and cheap) - but push it from the top level so that it actually happens fast. Lean battery systems account for clouds / low wind, allowing operators to switch on peakers as needed.

All of those things are a threat to fossil fuel sales. They are also immediately doable and can get us very quickly to a massive reduction in global CO2 output.... Not necessarily a complete phase out of all fossil fuels, but a meaningful year on year reduction. If in ten years we use 20% as much fossil fuels as today, that would be a phenomenal success.
posted by molecicco at 10:26 AM on July 15, 2021 [12 favorites]


A particular example: under Trump, oil companies lobbied hard to roll back vehicle fuel-efficiency standards.

I think David Roberts is right: This one weird trick can help any state or city pass clean energy policy.

Unfortunately, in the US there doesn't seem to be grassroots support for strong climate policy. Action on climate is being pushed forward by Democrats in spite of public opinion, not because of it.
... most people just are not that jazzed up about reducing emissions. They’re supportive, but not in a “would personally accept having less money” kind of way.

In Gallup’s current polling, 3% of the public calls climate the most important problem. That’s not terrible. It’s tied with crime, poverty, healthcare, the budget deficit, and “ethics/moral/religious/family decline.”

Rather than mass pressure dragging a reluctant and cowardly political system into climate action, an elite consensus inside the Democratic Party keeps pushing climate onto the agenda even though the mass public is not that engaged with it.
posted by russilwvong at 10:54 AM on July 15, 2021 [4 favorites]


I think the point of the FPP is that we don’t have to wait for politicians nor do we have to wait for approval from the mass public. People who understand how urgent this is can figure out ways to help push the powerful, such as Microsoft, in a better direction for the planet.
posted by Bella Donna at 11:26 AM on July 15, 2021 [7 favorites]


we don’t have to wait for politicians

As far as the US goes, getting people interested in changing behaviors on their own may be a huge ask. For example, most of the vehicles sold in the US are inefficient pickup trucks with internal combustion engines, and transportation makes up about 30% of our greenhouse emissions.

Other countries are starting to use policy to compel behavior. Norway makes it economically attractive to buy an electric car, for example, and they want to end all gas-burning car sales by 2025, while the US government pushes out policy decisions to 2045 and beyond — effectively doing nothing by leaving it to the next generation of legislators and leaders to fight about, while lobbyists keep the gravy train running.

As temperature extremes, air pollution and food insecurity worsen, circumstances will force compelling individual choices, and it will probably come to more governments doing it sooner, rather than later.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:48 AM on July 15, 2021 [7 favorites]


Note that it wasn't just Trump, the current administration has been doing their part to make things worse as well: US drilling approvals increase despite Biden climate pledge
Under former President Donald Trump, a staunch industry supporter, the Interior Department reduced the time it takes to review drilling applications from a year or more in some cases, to just a few months.

Companies rushed to lock in drilling rights before the new administration. And in December, Trump’s last full month in office, agency officials approved more than 800 permits — far more than any prior month during his presidency.

The pace dropped when Biden first took office, under a temporary order that elevated permit reviews to senior administration officials. Approvals have since rebounded to a level that exceeds monthly numbers seen through most of Trump’s presidency.

The data obtained by AP from a government database is subject to change because of delays in transmitting data from Interior field offices to headquarters.

If the recent trends continue, the Interior Department could issue close to 6,000 permits by the end of the year. The last time so many were issued was fiscal year 2008, amid an oil boom driven by crude prices that reached an all-time high of $140 per barrel that June.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 12:30 PM on July 15, 2021 [6 favorites]


I think David Roberts is right: This one weird trick can help any state or city pass clean energy policy.

(screams in red state)

Seriously, this is one of those things that makes me feel so helpless. My state was once a swing state but is now solid red. A combination of gerrymandering, a loss of urban population, and white racial panic in response to changing cultural norms really paid off for the Republicans here. I contact the people who supposedly represent me but just get bland form letters justifying their death-cult nonsense in response, and I expect that to remain the same for the near future.

My city is much more progressive than the state as a whole, but is also under-resourced and dysfunctional, hobbled by state-level limitations and pushback from conservatives anytime they try to do something radical (like dramatically improve public transit). It's also relatively small and will not have as much impact as changes in one of the larger cities.

"Elect democrats" is a battle worth fighting anyway but right now, right here? It doesn't feel like an effective strategy. Democrats are already being elected where possible and everywhere else is a screaming MAGA void. Fair Fight is inspiring, but had a larger population of Democratic non-voters to mobilize and a smaller margin to erase.

People still find a way to make the world better in small ways. A friend of mine, for example, found a way to contribute his programming and data analysis skills to a local bail fund. But when it comes to pushing for large-scale, systemic changes, I feel hopeless. Especially since I'm not able to donate money and or special knowledge. All I have is ... I guess harassing oil companies on Twitter? That feels more like an excuse to feel like I'm doing something though, rather than actually doing something. (Not that social media is completely irrelevant to public opinion, but.)

My only real hope is that bigger, more economically important states will lead the charge; that they will find some way to make the old ways of doing things unprofitable. Or that we don't slide into complete and total fascism, that we somehow manage to get a more representative and active federal government, and my state gets dragged kicking and screaming into the future.

But honestly I would not have kids here.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 12:31 PM on July 15, 2021 [11 favorites]


Readers in the US who live in rural areas - even in red states - may actually be served by a Rural Electric Coop. This logic magazine article may prove inspiring! You might have more power than you think.
posted by molecicco at 12:50 PM on July 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


Where I live we do have strong climate policy, it's moving fast, bit too broad brush at times, making some things worse (like planting billions of pines rather than thinking first about which trees best for atmosphere - not pines as they makes terpenes, methane extenders), supporting old industries which need to die.

Protest and individual choice is all fine but former is low return and performative, not knocking xr but I'm expecting to see things like;

Cooperative/federated systems of buying critical items/ feedstock commodities and hoarding them, so millions of people put in $10,more effective than waving placards. Basically using the tools of Capitalism against it;

Attacks on infrastructure nodes, there aren't many;

People acting on Ministry for the Future's less happy storylines. Even I was surprised KSR wrote that

Rogue gene engineering projects, all Red Mars

....
posted by unearthed at 12:54 PM on July 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


I am going to pick one thing. My one thing is to lobby the Nordic's largest coffeehouse chain to stop using single-use plastic containers. Dunno why that is my thing but I've been thinking about it for a year and, apparently, it is bothering me that I haven't done it yet.

Of course, that may be too ambitious. Dunno yet. But if any MeFites in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Germany want to help me start a campaign to shame Espresso House into replacing their plastic beverage cups with more sustainable ones, let me know because they need to move faster.

Doing something is better than doing nothing. So if you have the spoons for it, find your something. Or as Emily Atkins writes (my emphasis):

The opportunities to get involved in the climate fight are endless, and that can be overwhelming. But the beauty of people power is that you don’t have to do everything. “You don’t need to quit your job and become a climate activist,” said Genevieve Gunther, founder of the media-focused group End Climate Silence. “With enough people, one little thing every week, even a tweet, can make a huge difference.”

Some people may read this and believe it is pointless. That we are too late. That none of it matters. The fossil fuel industry knows this is not true. Their fear of a determined, pissed off public is why they promoted campaigns of climate denial and “individual responsibility” in the first place. They knew if people were unsure about the problem, they’d waste time fighting about it instead of mobilizing to fix it. They knew if people were confused about the solution, they’d waste time trying to change themselves and each other instead of the system.

However worse the climate crisis gets now depends on how quickly society transforms. How quickly society transforms depends on how many people demand it. The most harmful lie being spread about climate change today is not that it is fake. It’s that nothing you can do can help save the world.

posted by Bella Donna at 2:05 PM on July 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


Meanwhile the Climate Left continues to oppose nuclear power and denser urban development and all kinds of other imperfect-but-helpful-and-necessary measures to reduce carbon use. It makes me feel like my efforts - personal as well as political - are futile if the folks claiming to be most ardent about fighting climate change aren't supporting essential efforts because of their own policy externalities.
posted by PhineasGage at 2:25 PM on July 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


I also cannot understand people who have problems with denser urban living. But nuclear does have two major drawbacks: it takes a very long time to build new capacity, and it is expensive (not even accounting for the hidden costs such as military security during its lifetime, and the cost of disposing of and securing the waste for unknown numbers of generations).

Think about how long it takes before a nuclear plant is actually commissioned - if the same money is sunk into building renewables in the intervening period, you end up building and generating with renewables years before the new nuclear power plant is built, avoiding vast amounts of CO2 emissions in the meantime, and on a cost basis, generating roughly the same amount of electricity (if not more) once in operation (capacity factor being unknown).

I would however agree that switching off existing nuclear right now is not smart, so long as coal generation is still online.
posted by molecicco at 2:44 PM on July 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


nuclear... on a cost basis, generating roughly the same amount of electricity (if not more

Levelised cost of energy for new nuclear is about double what it is for new wind now. As you say nuclear takes way longer to bring online, difficult to say how long since the new European plants keep not coming online.
posted by biffa at 2:56 PM on July 15, 2021 [5 favorites]


Meanwhile the Climate Left continues to oppose nuclear power and denser urban development and all kinds of other imperfect-but-helpful-and-necessary measures to reduce carbon use.
Those are distinct groups and I don’t think conflating them is productive or accurate. Urbanism is having a big uptick in popularity with a notable generational divide, and positive trends like the e-bike boom making normal people give up car commutes.

Nuclear has two camps: there’s a generally old crowd intensely opposed but they’re much smaller than the number of people who think it’ll take too much time to have an impact (correct) and that we could deploy solar/wind faster and cheaper with immediate reductions. That’s a pretty reasonable conclusion.
posted by adamsc at 3:56 PM on July 15, 2021 [8 favorites]


we could deploy solar/wind faster and cheaper

Wind and solar now cost less than half the price of nuclear power per kW/h. That's not to say that there aren't significant problems with storage and transmission, and nuclear might still have some role to play, but advocates for prioritizing solar power over nuclear power have been making a winning financial case since 2013.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 4:22 PM on July 15, 2021 [8 favorites]


If just like to point out that in a long, rich history of the richer countries of the world fucking over the poorer ones, the environmental catastrophe brought about by said rich countries' greed and its effects already wreaking havoc with the poor of the world will be remembered as some of the most egregious, if there's anyone left to write histories.
posted by signal at 4:42 PM on July 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


adamsc: Those are distinct groups and I don’t think conflating them is productive or accurate.

I think PhineasGage has a point. In California, Scott Wiener has been pushing hard to legalize more density, e.g. via SB-50 (which would have legalized apartments near rail stations and transit stops). The Sunrise Movement endorsed Jackie Fielder, who opposed SB-50.

Environmental groups like Sunrise often seem to pick up general left causes, rather than focusing single-mindedly on climate. My favorite example is that the Green Party in BC is opposed to the Site C hydroelectric dam.

A commenter from Slow Boring:
I've long thought that climate activists should take a page from Wayne Wheeler, who ran the Anti-Saloon League and got Prohibition through a hard-drinking country by Constitutional Amendment. Imagine that, he got a majority of boozer state legislators in 3/5 of the states to ban alcoholic beverages. What was the lesson? Wheeler backed any politician who voted dry, regardless of their position on other topics. He delivered them votes and money, and did not care about their other position. American climate activists could make a lot of progress if they single-mindedly backed all politicians who support carbon-reducing policies. If a pro-life or pro-gun politician supported a game-changing carbon tax, would the climate activists today support her? Probably not, but Wayne Wheeler (in that position) would have done, and that is how Prohibition got passed. (Never mind that Prohibition turned out to be mostly a failed policy, the value of the lesson was in the passing of it.)
posted by russilwvong at 5:06 PM on July 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


I've been deep-diving on direct carbon capture technologies for the last few days, and ultimately came to the obvious conclusion that it's far better not to emit in the first place.

US CO2 emissions are upwards of 15 metric tons per person. I want you to imagine, for a moment, reaching out into the air, and pulling individual CO2 molecules out until you've captured 15.2 tons. A cubic meter of air contains about 8 grams of CO2. If you capture every molecule perfectly, it turns out you need to process over 1.8 million cubic meters of air to get the job done. And then you need to figure out what to do with this 15.2 tons of matter: Make sure it doesn't somehow get back into the atmosphere...

A mature tree captures ~22kg of CO2 per year, which comes to ~700 trees to offset one USian. It costs a few dollars per tree, and there's all kinds of questions around how to ensure that trees, once planted, stay in the ground and aren't used as firewood, etc. (Meanwhile, deforestation is a massive problem as well, so replanting is a great thing to do.) So, imagine it costs around $2,100 to offset a person's emissions via tree planting.

Meanwhile, a typical car emits ~4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year, which requires about 212 trees to offset (which you can maybe get planted for ~$600). So, it turns out I can make my quota by convincing a bit more than three people to stop driving. This number seems small enough to be something accomplishable, though of course convincing people to change their lifestyles seems at the same time insanely difficult.

So, if anyone would like to schedule a consultation on how to ditch your car for an electric bike, I am happy to make time and help you buy the bike. Gas costs on average $1,500 per year, so you save a lot of money, and simultaneously cut your personal emissions allotment by about a third.
posted by kaibutsu at 5:31 PM on July 15, 2021 [8 favorites]


Honestly, the view that I have is that all these Paris Accords and other climate agreements and whatever are going to do exactly Jack Shit to solve this problem.

This is going to take top-down, basically dictator-level restricting and reforming of industry in order to achieve any meaningful change.

They can talk all they want about plastic straws and recycling and whatever, but unless entire industries are ORDERED to stop doing THIS and start doing something different, they won't do it in any kind of timely manner. Because how things are now is making them money, and changing processes is expensive and disruptive and probably destructive in a lot of cases.

But "The Market" won't have an invisible hand pushing any lever other than "keep things how they are as long as possible", and unfortunately I think the "as possible" point was passed about 20 years ago.
posted by hippybear at 9:20 PM on July 15, 2021 [9 favorites]


Exactly hippybear. Exactly. Or as was making the rounds on Twitter :

[me, dying in a hellscape inferno] : I shouldn't have used so many plastics straws

[billionaires, on a space yacht] : yes, you shouldn't have used so many plastic straws

posted by molecicco at 9:33 PM on July 15, 2021 [8 favorites]


unless entire industries are ORDERED to stop doing THIS and start doing something different

Not to overly defend institutional mechanisms, but literally a key output from the Montreal Protocol was literally throwing money at member states to shift away from HCFC via regulatory support and enterprise subsidy. Notably, it came to be in an era when ppl still threw money because they meant it, and not to kill an initiative's momentum by taking out the money and focusing only on high-level consensus.

(Cite: my experience with the national dept of environment, whose ozone unit literally lives or dies by that allocation)
posted by cendawanita at 10:45 PM on July 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


Nuclear is interesting to people like me who spend their time thinking about deep decarbonisation - how do we get the last 10%-20% of emissions out, it joins a whole rogue's gallery of technologies such as green hydrogen which are expensive but may fill a role that otherwise cannot be filled. Or it may not, those are hard problems to solve and it might be that the answer is a technology we haven't thought of yet.

It is not the answer however to the question: "I have $X resources, how can I reduce emissions the fastest?" Wind, solar, batteries, energy efficiency all do a lot for us there. (EVs are quite far down the list but bring a lot of other benefits around managing high VRE grids and local pollution which makes them worth pushing quite aggressively anyway).

Honestly, the view that I have is that all these Paris Accords and other climate agreements and whatever are going to do exactly Jack Shit to solve this problem.

This is going to take top-down, basically dictator-level restricting and reforming of industry in order to achieve any meaningful change.

They can talk all they want about plastic straws and recycling and whatever, but unless entire industries are ORDERED to stop doing THIS and start doing something different, they won't do it in any kind of timely manner. Because how things are now is making them money, and changing processes is expensive and disruptive and probably destructive in a lot of cases.

But "The Market" won't have an invisible hand pushing any lever other than "keep things how they are as long as possible", and unfortunately I think the "as possible" point was passed about 20 years ago.


The Paris accords are voluntary only at the intra-state level (where in any case there isn't any kind of external power that could compel compliance, although in practice things like EU carbon border adjustments may play some role there). It is precisely through top down mechanisms that the emissions reductions achieved in the UK, Denmark, and Germany have been achieved and so far at least, they have done so through a combination of technology restrictions (coal phase out etc) and market mechanisms like renewable subsidies.
posted by atrazine at 2:12 AM on July 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


Nuclear is interesting to people like me who spend their time thinking about deep decarbonisation

But if you get to a position with lots of intermittent RE, potentially much more volatility in both supply and demand, maybe a decent amount of DSR, is there really a role for pricey, inflexible baseload? Do any models for future energy support that?
posted by biffa at 5:03 AM on July 16, 2021


adamsc: Those are distinct groups and I don’t think conflating them is productive or accurate.

I think PhineasGage has a point. …

Environmental groups like Sunrise often seem to pick up general left causes, rather than focusing single-mindedly on climate.
I don’t think they’re wrong that there’s a problem - I just think it’s better to identify specific people or groups rather than a large community. This is especially important when talking broadly - e.g. California politics are broken in lots of Prop 13-specific ways which don’t necessarily apply to other states and other countries don’t have the exact same racism problems dominating housing policy.

I also mentioned the split on nuclear because there’s a difference between ideological opposition and recognizing practical drawbacks. I think the community of people who would support a plan which has a plausible path to being online in less than 3 decades is much larger than the people who won’t consider the technology for any reason.
posted by adamsc at 5:41 AM on July 16, 2021


Not in the context of managing volatility, no.

I split the challenges into a few categories:

1) Intermittency (unpredicted) - This is what you need to do if the wind "suddenly" stops blowing. Will be increasingly irrelevant, modern forecasting can predict output to within a few % a few hours out. Anyway would be dealt with using batteries.

2) Intraday intermittency (predicted) - Moving energy around intra-day to deal with supply/demand mismatch. This is probably 100% battery and DSR.

3) Seasonal variations - The big question here is whether you can build enough transmission to couple together places with anti-correlated loads - i.e. if you connect Southern California and Maine with a big copper plate, then you match the average generation and average loads across the whole year since one peaks in summer and one peaks in winter. The challenge here is whether you can move that much energy that far. In the European context, you would have to connect as far south as Morocco (and even Morocco uses heating in the winter in much of the country) to match loads.

4) System stress condition - In the European context this is a particularly bad February. How do you run the system during a cold, dark, windless period when heating loads are really high? This ends up dominating your system costs in most simulations.

I would expect that between storage (including V2G) and DSR, short term demand fluctuations predicted or not are not a place where nuclear can play. Technically it could in cases 3 and 4 (in fact nuclear could technically run in the second case as well since modern reactors can load follow pretty aggressively it just doesn't make economic sense). I am not really convinced that it's a great match for a low-load factor scenario because it has precisely the wrong opex/capex split for that. I would expect it to be much more likely to see cheap gas turbines burning green hydrogen produced over the course of the year to deal with the hardest 100 hours of the year than nuclear in that role but that's also not a great solution.

Either way, these are investigational technologies which, while we should keep thinking about them, are not part of the big programmes we need between now and 2035 - they're things to think about between now and 2030 so can start building them in 2035 and finish the job of decarbonisation. The immediate priorities to get emissions down go down a different path. It might be different in China which is further along with a reactor construction programme and which does not have the insanely good offshore wind that the UK has or the amazing solar and onshore wind possibilities of the US (at least in the latter case, China's best wind capacity is much further from population centres). I also don't think that it is wise to prematurely close nuclear plants and allow their replacement with natural gas, but if I had a big stream of money to cut emissions fast, fast, fast, it is not where I would put much of it.
posted by atrazine at 5:44 AM on July 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I think we need to seriously consider nuclear power for bridging that 'last 10%', but the way nuclear power tends to be brought up immediately in any climate change conversation feels a lot like Exxon pushing a carbon tax because they believe an effective one is a political impossibility.
posted by Pyry at 7:43 AM on July 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


(To be clear, that's directed at professional concern trolls like Matthew Yglesias, not anyone in this thread)
posted by Pyry at 5:26 PM on July 16, 2021


Pyry: (To be clear, that's directed at professional concern trolls like Matthew Yglesias, not anyone in this thread)

What does "concern troll" mean in this context? You don't think Yglesias is really concerned about climate change? Yglesias has argued for a long time that although new nuclear construction is expensive, shutting down existing nuclear power plants is a bad idea - a short example from 2013.
posted by russilwvong at 9:46 PM on July 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


Yes, and "the way nuclear power tends to be brought up immediately in any climate change conversation" is usually because whoever is doing so genuinely believes it's an important tool to use among many.
posted by PhineasGage at 10:34 PM on July 16, 2021


I love this post. MeFi gets really doomy and depressive about ... pretty much every bad thing on Earth, tbh, and I appreciate this call to action. Do something. No matter how you feel, find a thing to do and do it.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 12:08 AM on July 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


What does "concern troll" mean in this context?

In almost any context, it's bullshit used to dismiss something unwelcome. I have not looked above to see what it was used in reference to here.
posted by thelonius at 6:16 PM on July 19, 2021


I think russilwvong was making the point that the label was being used without justification just to rhetorically disparage a person whose views the commenter didn't agree with.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:59 AM on July 20, 2021


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