#no exaggeration i could write a 5000 word paper on this issue

[achromic-red-dreams-doze-angrily]

(RE: my tags on wanting to talk about the energy aspect, thank you @sleek-lazy-cats-8-the-cotter for indulging me)

So I think a lot of people don't understand that (energy) sustainability is complicated. It's really easy to say "just put solar panels everywhere" when you don't know anything about how the energy industry works. As OP mentions a bit regarding reusable bags, one of the biggest things is ensuring that your solution won't make things worse. That's the point I'm going to use as my example here, because I could talk all day long about this twisted web.

Sure, solar panels are good, but how are they going to affect the land they're taking up? Is there a more sustainable use for that land than a solar farm? What happens when the solar panels are installed? What happens to the land over the 20 years the solar farm is there? What happens when the solar panels are removed? (Did you guys know that the physical actions of installing solar panels on farmland affects the compression of the soil, which in turn affects its ability to grow crops?)

Are the panels manufactured sustainably? What are the mining conditions like for the necessary rare earth minerals? Is slave labor involved? Are we destroying the local ecosystem and village around a mine in Myanmar so the US can have wind turbines and electric vehicles? That's a real example, btw:

This [northern Myanmar] forest is the source of several key metallic elements known as rare earths, often called the vitamins of the modern world. Rare earths now reach into the lives of almost everyone on the planet, turning up in everything from hard drives and cellphones to elevators and trains. They are especially vital to the fast-growing field of green energy, feeding wind turbines and electric car engines. And they end up in the supply chains of some of the most prominent companies in the world, including General Motors, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Tesla and Apple. But an AP investigation has found that their universal use hides a dirty open secret in the industry: Their cost is environmental destruction, the theft of land from villagers and the funneling of money to brutal militias, including at least one linked to Myanmar’s secretive military government. As demand soars for rare earths along with green energy, the abuses are likely to grow. […] “What would be the result if now the world would say, ‘We want to do [environmental, social, and governance] audits on all rare earths production’?” said Thomas Kruemmer, director of Ginger International Trade & Investment, which does mineral and metal supply chain management. “The result would be that 70% of production would need to be closed down.”

(I highly recommend people read that article, it's an incredible investigation that says more and in a better way than I want to in this reblog)

We need clean energy technology to fight climate change. Full stop. But it is imperative that our actions don't mess things up even more. Personally, I don't want electric vehicles made at the cost of entire communities, or solar panels made by slaves in a forced labor camp, but unfortunately I am not the one making those decisions (also a real example. Look up the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act).

So the answer to “what should we do about climate change” is that we need to destroy capitalism

Studying sustainability has taught me that the answer to things like “is it better to use paper or plastic bags?” always ends up being something like “we would need to perform an extremely in depth study on the entire life cycle of both types of bags from virgin material collection to product recollection, compare things like amount of product each type of bag can carry, material usage per bag, how frequently double-bagging is occurring, and take into account a ridiculous number of factors down to the fuel efficiency of the trucks that transport them and even after all that we would have to try to find a way to compare whether the higher carbon emissions of producing and transporting paper bags is better than the fact that the plastic bags will be plastic bags for the next thousand years. And at the end of the day all this research would ultimately not be particularly useful because our waste collection streams in the US are so fucking bad it’s depressing.”

And then someone will ask about reusable bags and you’d have to do the study again only to reveal that you need to use the reusable bag like a couple thousand times to offset the carbon emissions it takes to make the reusable bag and make it worth it over disposable bags and that’s not taking into consideration bags breaking before then or being forgotten about completely.

The answer always leads to “it’s incredibly complicated but our current practices are so terrible we would need a full scale restructuring of our economy and practices to such a degree that can literally never happen because our government is lobbied by the people who make money off of said unsustainable practices.”

So the answer to “paper bags or plastic bags?” is that we need to destroy capitalism

[cjjingram]

Hey, I came across your FF - "Starling Mysteries" and fell in love with it. I downloaded the Epub File and it is 5000+ pages of sheer brilliance and imagination written on paper. The thought, writing, storyline is absolutely engrossing from the word Go! I just wish to know if you would be coming back to write it? Again? Coz A novel like that deserved to be published as well! I hope it is okay? Wishing you a great health and thanks for sharing a story like this and writing something like that!

I say I haven’t abandoned it even though it’s been a minute since I added to it. I will say I have several more chapters written, some for a while now, but I lost my zest for Arrow in Season 4. Let me make it clear that I love Olicity, I do, but I could see the animosity in the writing even while they were supposedly giving us Olicity. Maybe it’s because I’ve been writing for a very, very long time but I knew from the end of season 3 they were going to fuck us over, especially since they didn’t even give us a kiss. They drove off into the sunset but no kiss. Even Chris turned to me and said, ‘They’re gonna kill Felicity,’ and he was right. They killed her character, or tried to anyway. Season 4 was a...fuck, it was a disaster. I don’t know the people who write for this show but they have serious issues.

I still haven’t watched a single episode of season 5 for that reason so, while I have still been writing, I haven’t been posting. Why? Well, first being that I can’t seem to care about posting. No offense to you guys, you deserve all the love, but I’ve been greedily hogging my worlds where shit makes sense and not the crap on the TV. The second reason is because watching the show was killing me; literally killing me. I was stressed out over this fucking show to the point that I would yell at my TV.

YELL at my TV--literally.

Now, I’m not a TV person, never have been. I know that sounds weird but the only show I really watched was Arrow so when I dumped it I got rid of my satellite dish. Seriously, I did that. After I did that my blood pressure dropped and my cholesterol went down 30 points.

The third reason I stopped posting was because they were taking whole passages of dialog directly from my stories--no joke--and using them on the show but not giving them to the right characters. I don’t care if you take my shit, just use it right! Again, this is not an exaggeration. For a while there I would get emails, dozens of emails from people telling me that Laurel said Felicity’s lines from Still Waters pretty much word for word.

(sigh) Still, I’ll try to get my shit together and I’m glad you liked my story. That makes me very happy...despite the fact that this fandom is going to wind up sending me to an early grave if these fucking writers don’t get their heads out of their asses and realize that making the same mistakes over and over again doesn’t fix anything.