If you search youtube for "desertification" you will find many videos on the horrors of this problem being shared by school teachers as if it where a fact.
E.g. "Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert," begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it's happening to about two-thirds of the world's grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos." https://youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI
Back on planet Earth, a review of the current scientific literature firmly disproves this thesis. Nasa satellite images clearly show the deserts are retreating, and on average there is a strong trend to global greening...
Greening of the globe and its drivers - Nature 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004 "Satellite records from 1982–2009 show a persistent and widespread increase of leaf area (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing leaf area (browning). Ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilisation effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (4%)."
Elevated CO2 as a driver of global dryland greening - Nature 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20716 "Recent regional scale analyses using satellite based vegetation indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), have found extensive areas of “greening” in dryland areas of the Mediterranean, the Sahel, the Middle East and Northern China, as well as greening trends in Mongolia and South America. More recently, a global synthesis from 1982-2007 showed an overall “greening-up” trend over the Sahel belt, Mediterranean basin, China-Mongolia region and the drylands of South America."
Global Greening Is Firm, Drivers Are Mixed - Harvard 2014 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AGUFM.B31A0515K "Evidence for global greening is converging, asserting an increase in CO2 uptake and biomass of the terrestrial biosphere. Global greening refers to global net increases in the area of green canopy, stocks of carbon, and the duration of the growing season. The growing seasons in general have prolonged while the stock of biomass carbon has increased and the rate of deforestation has decelerated. Evidence for these trends comes from firm empirical data obtained through atmospheric CO2 observations, remote sensing, forest inventories and land use statistics."
Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36130346 Prof Judith Curry, the former chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, added: "It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models).
I disagree, it's the opposite - capitalism is the fix and the lack of it is the cause. The problem is the way Rust is run and the sort of people who were invited into it in the early days.
Consider Kotlin. It originates from one large company - JetBrains have over 1000 employees and the Kotlin team alone has over 100 people on it - and has been adopted by another much larger company (Google) as an official language. There are no dramas. Why, because the Russians are mission focused and don't feel any need to constantly virtue signal.
Consider Swift. It originates from a large company. I don't remember reading about any political dramas in the Swift world. That's because Apple are mission focused.
Now look at Node or Rust. Both have attempted to build some sort of non-corporate governance system, they're based out of the Bay Area, and all of them seem to be absolutely beset by internal conflicts and strife.
There are no sources showing an increase in excess death due to vaccination because the medical and media establishment categorically deny that this could possibly be happening. As far as they're concerned more or less nobody ever dies of the COVID vaccine, period, end of story and any claim to the contrary is misinformation. This attitude is sometimes summed up as "Vaccines are amongst the leading causes of coincidences".
The US VAERS database of course tracks peculiar diseases/symptoms/deaths that follow vaccination. At this point it has more records of adverse events for COVID vaccines than all other vaccines combined since the tracking programme began, but the vast majority of problems never make it to VAERS or similar databases, so the absolute numbers aren't that useful. So the best people can do is inference. There appears to be a sharp increase in deaths due to heart attacks and strokes/other clotting disorders this year. The media are occasionally reporting on this but either claiming it's some inexplicable mystery or coming up with some absurd alternative explanation. Examples:
The UK has very good public health data compared to most countries. It breaks out heart related deaths for both with and without COVID. There has been a large rise in non-COVID heart deaths in 2021. Some of this may be/must be due to the (not really admitted) collapse of the UK healthcare system due to lockdown triggered overload. However there is also a correlation with the vaccine rollout (it's graphed):
It's a 12x increase. That's either lockdowns or vaccines but whichever it is, that's not a natural cause, it's caused by government policy.
From a quick bit of Googling there seems to be similar data from Israel but I have not checked this tweet in any depth - the tables seem legit but the summarization of it looks backwards to me:
I have a friend who is investigating this phenomenon in more depth. He found a research paper from the early 2000s that counted news reports about sudden on-field medical emergencies amongst young sports players, then compared that rate to some big lists of news stories in 2021 about it he compiled. He's still working on this project and hasn't written anything up publicly but so far it seems the rate is 6x higher than normal. Obviously this sort of investigation is limited by several factors, but as public health agencies refuse to investigate or report on this stuff, there's a limit to how far random members of the public can go.
I worked at a place that is discriminatory and has hostile attitudes against men -
1) a team I was previously on had two open headcount. I knew a friend of mine that would have been a perfect fit for the role. I suggested my friend and was told that they weren't considering men or non-diverse candidates. I'm a mixed Latino and was told this from a white man
2) a government grant was given to businesses impacted by covid, and our business assisted with this. Preference was given to women and minorities. White men were held in a queue. Eventually a lawsuit was filed by white men claiming discrimination and the court stopped the program. Dozens of people in my company Slack were furious that the white men held up money disbursement because of their "racism". This was the narrative for weeks
3) there have been official mandates to interview minorities (non-white, non-Asian men) before anyone else (is this even legal?)
4) in an effort to combat wage discrimination against men, women are paid more on average than men in respective wage bands. This is announced quarterly and celebrated
5) women get special groups, off sites, and classes paid for by the company. woman and minorities get special coverage, special interest stories, community highlights, and praise. white and Asian males do not unless they are LGBT
6) a female colleague of mine (who I like as a friend) is an extremely low performer. We've all had to pick up the slack from her, and at times I've had to explain things repeatedly that I'd fail candidates in interviews for. she's never been given a negative performance eval, yet a collage who went through a bad quarter got fired
---
edit: flagged, which is disappointing. I'm not anti-women or anti-minority. I am a minority on the race and sexuality dimensions. why isn't my experience valid?
> California has every right, legally and morally, to change the current arrangement.
I am not knowledgeable enough to discuss the legal angle, so I’ll set that aside. I disagree on the right claimed from a moral standpoint. It’s dystopian to think that the rights exercised by individuals or individual cities are only delegated to them by higher powers. At best, a situation where local powers are overridden by others at the state level amounts to a tyranny of the majority. In my opinion, locality of power and decision making is important. Palo Alto is not the only city on this continent. People, and companies, can go elsewhere - including into the interior of the country outside of California.
> Palo Alto enormously benefits from economic growth caused, not primarily by its residents and policies, but by the residents and policies of other portions of the state of California.
Another way to look at it, is that residents of Palo Alto made a smart investment, or a lucky one - but that’s okay, and they’re allowed the spoils of that choice. Or maybe they don’t care about those economic benefits and economic change just happened to take place, around them.
> it doesn't feel any responsibility to aid in housing the many thousands of new workers that increased commerce requires.
Why do the residents have a responsibility to aid new workers? If those new workers don’t have a great situation with respect to cost of living in the Bay, they shouldn’t take those jobs. There are many open jobs across the country, in many different locations. If those other jobs don’t provide the same pay or other conditions - well, that’s just life. No one can be entitled to only have a specific job in a specific city.
> This is not a tenable situation long-term. Small municipalities in the Bay Area cannot internalize the benefits of economic growth while externalizing the costs indefinitely.
High prices discourage continued population growth. Companies looking to hire and expand can set up in communities that have room or that welcome growth. Workers will go there, home prices in the Bay will change, the economy will be more distributed, and things will rebalance accordingly.
Stated another way, importing illegal immigrants has suppressed wages for Americans for decades. Nothing about that should be surprising.
Illegal immigrant labor is a key part if the American economy. These people are intentionally kept in a state of legal limbo. They're tolerated, but always could be prosecuted and have their lives destroyed. This keeps them exploitable and able to be treated in ways we would never tolerate for American workers.
The entire game is that because they are breaking the law, employers can ignore labor law when it comes to employing them. It's like any black market. The fact that everyone is breaking the law means all bets are off.
An imported serf class, intentionally kept in an exploitable legal state, is inherently going to reduce the leverage of labor that would otherwise occupy those jobs.
As a data scientist, and owner of a data science company, this idea is certainly tempting on the surface but unlikely to be effective or necessary in practice. I feel like in the long run, the market is generally pretty good at weeding out bad apples. There will always be companies who want to hire on the cheap and have to learn the hard way that qualified talent comes at a premium.
The issue is, a whole lot of people disagree that mandate = lives saved. The reason mandates are bad is that when lots of people are disagreeing with a law, there are usually rational reasons why.
In this case the increasingly fanatical "vaccinate everything over and over" brigade refuse to accept that disagreement can have any kind of rational basis, and thus don't even listen to the people who don't want to take it. But that is exactly why this type of mandate is really bad news.
As for "what about the other vaccine mandates" - yep, time to revisit them too. Apparently public health agencies aren't at their most trustworthy when talking about this topic. Their treatment of COVID vaccine data has been shockingly poor. It's not a big leap to wondering whether they've been acting like this in the past too and people just didn't notice.
"Research increasingly implies that homework is probably harmful in elementary; of dubious value in early middle school"
You are citing research that apparently is stating the obvious, namely that good students are faster at completing homework than poor students. Not sure how that supports the statement that homework is harmful for either group.
Skimming the lit review you linked, homework appears to have a moderate positive effect on the immediate measures of achievement, e.g. grades. Though the effects of lifelong habit of completing one's homework are more interesting than short term grade improvements, and a quick skim of the 60 page lit review you quoted doesn't seem to attempt to quantify this effect.
Food for thought: attempts to scientize every aspect of life, even if the measures used are obviously limited and shortsighted, is perhaps not a good way to steer an entire society forward.
- Half of the US wants their country, traditions and values
- Half of the US doesn't want a country (no border), upended traditions and no values
There are two countries and will destroy each other.
One country believes the world is going to end from climate change; that COVID19 is 10-100x more deadly than it actually is; that men can transition to women; that abortion is not murder.. I can go on.
The other believes the climate is always changing, but humans can adapt over years; that COVID19 is only 5x-10x more deadly than it actually is; and that a man can be a eunuch and dress like a woman, but still is not a woman; that abortion is murder... again, I can go on.
The polarization isn't really mend-able.
Both sides believe in polar opposites. Only one side believes this is the land of the free where anything is possible. The other side wants believes it needs to impose it's will to "stop climate change", "stop the spread", "stop the hate".
Don't you see it!? The hypocrisy of it?
Only one side wants to take away peoples ability to work, to travel, to raise a family, to educate your children, even your bodily autonomy.
This polarization is driven by hate. Hatred of traditions and of a history.
> “With those three words—‘very fine people’—the president showed that he was sympathetic to the men who staged the most highly publicized march for racism and antisemitism in the United States in many decades.”
Yes, because there were "many 'very fine people' on both sides", the omitted words are important. "There's no excuse for what happened" indeed.
This stops when both sides can admit that last years riots which left at least 38 dead were not "mostly peaceful", but a deadly riot. Similarly, that "January 6" was not an "insurrection", but a deadly riot (as the FBI already stated).
Yes, there were and are 'very fine people' on both sides, but the extremes on both sides are violent. We as a free people should not oppress our neighbors and that collaboration is required for us to continue as a civilization ... if we can even agree we want a civilization any more.
Comparing the cost of a non-intermittent energy source with an intermittent energy source excluding the cost of storage is comparing apples to oranges. Solar and wind are cheap, until you saturate the energy market during peak production hours. Then it gets exorbitantly expensive. The only viable storage solution at the moment is hydroelectric, which is geographically limited. Global lithium ion battery output for a whole year doesn't even add up to 1 hour's worth of the USA's electricity consumption.
When probed on how to address intermittency, many wind and solar advocates propose things like hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air, or other solutions that are currently in the prototyping stage and have yet to actually be deployed to a grid and demonstrate viability.
This is the chief advantage of nuclear power: it works and we have over half a century of production experience with it. Betting on one of those storage solutions panning out is betting on a big unknown.
The book "Dogs of War" by Frederik Forsyth is an excellent semi-fictional description of a mercenary operation very analogous to the ones described in the article. The book is mostly concerned not with gratuitous violence, but hiring, logistics and finance in a legally gray-and-illegal territory and such is a fascinating read.
Every year, there's also very many other vaccines administered, e.g. Influenza, so the numbers aren't that off. I'm not sure about how many others besides Influenza.
2019 there was around 170M Influenza vaccine doses with 605 deaths.
2021 there's 430M Covid vaccine doses or 223M people with at least 1 dose and there's 18400 deaths.
Usually VAERS would be expected to be very under reported.
I agree there's a lot of misinformation that's been going on, but the people who vaccinated mostly thought it was very safe so there's lower likelihood of placebo etc.
Another thing is that it's not very easy to create reports in VAERS and it takes time, doctors may not always have time or believe that some death or adverse effect was linked to the vaccine in the first place.
Overall this data alone is definitely not enough to conclude for sure that covid vaccines are not safe, but at least to me it definitely throws some red flags, in combination with all the other things, there seems to be a pattern.
Your points may be valid, but I can't determine that and unless this data is properly addressed and debated over, I don't think it's safe enough. So I would urge heavier debate and analysis of this data. I think vaccine has to be proven safe rather than me having to prove that it's dangerous.
There should be enough resources to debate and analyse this properly. Same thing --- there should be more resources allocated to debating people who claim vaccines are not safe. Seemingly no debate doesn't inspire any confidence in me. There should be full time groups of people dedicated for this, not just writing articles, but doing live debates. Debate has to be proper back and forth. Not "fact checkers" which often concentrate on one single part that can be most easily argued against and leave some other parts which usually interest me the most out.
Right now there's one side that is bashing the other side, full of strawmans and ad hominem attacks. There's no proper debate going on. Why?
If these vaccines are very safe and effective and would save the world from the pandemic, I imagine it would deserve at least 10M+ to be invested into live debates. I see a lot of investing in censoring, but no debates.
2. Myocarditis
If incidence rate was 0.0006%, meaning 1 out of 1,666,666, it would be extremely rare that a couple on this earth would have both people getting this.
Even if incidence is 1 out of 100,000 like I have seen claimed by official sources multiple times, from 1 billion couples, chance of there being at least 1 couple where both individuals had this would be 10%.
I have seen multiple anecdotal reports of couples both having issues. Danielshep60 being one who has gone on video with all the evidence and stories. It's difficult to understand frequency from anecdotal reports where people alone claim they have had it, but if you consider couples it makes it possible to at least calculate how statistically rare that would have to be. So either
a) Danielshep60 must be lying. And I don't think he is based on what I've seen, I'm usually good at spotting discrepancies and lies.
b) Chance of myocarditis is far bigger than 1/100,000.
c) Something extremely, very, unlikely has happened, and all the other anecdotes are definitely lies.
I assume you would guess it's a), but I can't conclude that myself based on also other video stories I have seen, and everything seems to match.
> As well as that, recent theory suggests it may be linked to administration method (erroneous administration into vein instead of muscle) instead of the vaccine itself.
Yes, this is possible, but it also means I wouldn't get the vaccine before it's officially acknowledged that they should do aspiration and this indeed reduces chance of myocarditis occurring.
In very many anecdotal reports where people have gotten myocarditis, they have felt metallic taste just 15 seconds after the vaccine, so it does seem that in their cases it probably has entered bloodstream, unless there's some better explanation.
> I know you said you "don't believe" the statistics, but... that's just not really how statistics works?
I believe "statistics", I love poker, I love numbers, I love making decisions based on probabilities, I just don't believe that numbers coming from trials are correct. For example, maybe people weren't properly checked for myocarditis, and this matches some reports from trial participants. I think statistics are great, I just don't trust that everything was done properly, and it seems BMJ confirms it at least for 1 subcontractor. Now this is not final evidence that trial data may not be correct, but it's enough for me to postpone the vaccine.
> I know hundreds of people who've gotten the vaccine, none of which have gotten myocarditis.
You may very well know and this wouldn't disprove that myocarditis's frequency could be for example 1 out of 300. You would still more likely have 100 friends who never got myocarditis, but these odds are for example very worrying.
If what Danielshep60 says is true, it can be statistically proven that what numbers are coming from e.g. Pfizer's studies or some other studies are wrong, as such a combination of a couple + a relative of theirs having the diagnosis would be extremely unlikely.
Also another survey, for people who had post vaccine injury, the claim for 10% of them was that they also had a relative who had persistent adverse effects after the vaccine. If they had 10 relatives on average, it could mean incident rate to be around 1%.
> 3. Fatigue & brain fog
> I should start by noting that fatigue & brain fog are widely documented to be common symptoms of the long COVID syndrome, which affects old and young. Long COVID is also alarmingly common.
Yes, totally agreed! I believe different studies say that getting long covid could be 5% to 65% chance depending on the definition and requirements for long covid. I definitely wouldn't want to get covid.
> I'm sorry to report that a subreddit does not consist of any kind of valuable correlative indicator when talking about the medical domain. There is just such a swarm of flaws in such analysis that it must be discarded entirely (biased sampling, placebo, and fabrication being the top three).
Yeah, it's impossible to determine the exact frequency, but considering everything, I see it being possible that getting covid vaccine could ruin running 1 out of 1,000 cases or more. Once again, I don't have evidence for it, but this is based on my intuition.
Yeah, will see what happens with BMJ trial.
It's definitely possible I will take this vaccine in the future, but I need more data & analysis.
Trust me, I'm not happy about spending so much time on deciding this, and I kind of wish I maybe should've just taken it in summer, so I didn't have to spend so much time and energy trying to research this. Unfortunately my research has only opened more question marks, but I'm not feeling good about taking it any longer.
Those batteries only have a few hours of storage at max power, they're for solving the duck curve not a week-long supply shortage (let alone seasonal fluctuations). If we got the Midwest on heat pumps, how you planning to keep places heated when there's a week of blizzard? Right now we have no plan for addressing the occasional bad week besides overbuilding natural gas. That's worse than keeping our nuclear running and expanding, but the solar and wind is subsidized but not the natural gas. The way the market for power works, bidding on a daily or hourly basis, doesn't account for seasonal variation. The solar and wind builders are off the hook on blizzard week but get subsidized enough to run the reliable plants out of business the rest of the year.
To be fair to Soviet Union (I'm from USSR/Russia), they were actually the reverse in that area, there were gifted programs, gifted schools where you would be tracked if you were good, competitions for school kids in many subjects (from history to physics) that would also track you to gifted schools or could earn an automatic college admission, etc. AFAIK even the classes in regular run-of-the-mill schools would sometimes be "semi-tracked", with most of the smarter/better behaved kids ending up in some classes and the less smart/worse behaved kids in others for the same age group, without any other differences (i.e. lessons would be more or less the same). Soviet Union was an evil empire, but it was not entirely dumb.
The modern progressives, on the other hand, are evil AND dumb.
There are no arguments against nuclear that stand up to scrutiny beyond emotional knee-jerk reactions.
Nuclear is safe, cheap and most importantly reliable.
Renewables are not reliable. Baseload renewables is a pipe dream that has been disproven repeatedly. Hence why jurisdictions that have dived into a heavy renewables energy mix are building gas peaking plants, utilising diesel generators in emergencies or adding batteries to the grid powered by child slaves in the Congo.
Even some of the more reliable renewable solutions like hydro occasionally have lulls that wipe out literally years of the benefit of running them.
As an example, the state of Tasmania in Australia runs on close to 100% hydro power year round, except when rare drought hits. When hydro didn't produce enough power one year, the Tasmania government flew in diesel generators to power the state and ran them for months, wiping out years of progress (diesel is worse than coal).
I grew up in a nuclear community (Richland WA, the town where it seems like half of everyone works at Hanford). My first job (after lawn mowing) was working at Exxon Nuclear (which got bought by Siemens then sold to Framatome and then morphed into Areva). I learned to code there. My first tools were tools that helped engineers optimize nuclear fuel assembly design for efficiency.
I see these articles. I barely read them. I’m a supporter already. I get all the various details and arguments.
I left that industry though. For two reasons.
1. Regulation makes it so that what seems cool and high tech is mostly 60’s tech.
2. I got discouraged working in an industry that I knew could help the world but was so reviled and feared at large.
These days I work in ag automation. Feed the world. Robots and the cloud. That sort of thing. And yet… yesterday, some of the assembly techs were spooked by the supposed ability to have a small magnet stick to the injection site of a Moderna vaccine. I watched grown men spend multiple hours coming to the conclusion that “the magnets didn’t stick after all but something weird was going on.”
I’ve concluded that Darwin was wrong. Humanity has the ability to out wit natural selection any more.
That leads me to believe that nuclear technology (sufficiently advanced to be indiscernible from magic) has as much likelihood of mankind applying it to their benefit as they do of burning witches to save the planet.
Imports and exports help to smooth out the load curve, but I don't down where you get that broadly France relies on German coal in the summer and winter. French net CO2 emissions remain stable and low the entire year, that's it. As far as I'm aware, heat waves have very little impact on nuclear energy production. Their impact on river temperatures is a few tenth of a degree and they can function on fairly high water temperatures (bellow 28c). I've read that over the last decade, which had several heat-waves, they accounted for an average production loss of 0.3%.
>It works so "well" that the French taxpayer will have to pay the UK so they can deliver their guaranteed energy prices the over-due and over budget reactor they desperately try to finish will generate.
Pretty much the entirety of the problems we've had with the EPR program has to do stopping building nuclear power plants for decades and losing the associated skill-set and industrial base.
Solar, wind plus batteries (and other intermittent sources) are only cheaper because it is subsidized by the base power stations.
Only about 20% of the cost of coal and 5% of nuclear comes from the fuel. Almost all costs are fixed costs. They need to be paid regardless of whether people use the power or not. But in the current system, those who use solar or wind and only use base power occasionally aren't paying those costs. Instead everyone else has to cover those costs, which is why the price of electricity skyrockets wherever there are more 'renewable' (or specifically, 'intermittent') sources.
This is why electricity costs 10c per kwh in many parts of the US, but 40c per kwh in European countries with lots of windmills.
basically it is a huge market distortion. The real cost of base power is a fixed yearly fee to get access, then 2c per kwh after that (i.e the 20% fuel cost). If this is what was charged no one would use wind or solar at all. (or you would have people using solar but disconnected from the grid, which would be great too).
On dark days, I don't know. For every Solzhenitsyn there are thousands if not millions of anonymous souls forced into the wastelands of Siberia with only the shirts on their backs to keep them warm and fed over the unforgiving winter. Solzhenitsyn himself was one of them, and only a long string of miraculous happenstances turned him into a pivotal character. The forces of history were looking for a vessel.
This perhaps is a reminder to pour a drop of wine in memory of those who didn't make it.
I think Solzhenitsyn's point here is about people who lie to themselves. In a way, people who do that revert to being no different to animals, acting on instinct, in no way in control and easily controlled by others.
His point is that if you live a repressive society where you must lie to survive or to get ahead, and where taking a stand will achieve nothing other than destroy yourself, at the very least don't lie to yourself, to quote the piece: say plainly "I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill."
Now obviously he intended this in part as a snide remark, and he would have hoped people would do more than this, but also I think it was getting to the crux of his point that this is still better.
I believe you would be correct on the first point, but have the second backwards. If V' was instead a chunk without the player, then res^V_V' Γ(V,F) = ∅, and the sections of sheaves are supported on {p} (as well as on any other entity with a valid chunk assignment). These sections would basically be functions providing the chunk containing a given entity, supported on the collection of all entities that actually exist on the map. Any other would give you 0 in the constructed top. space (no chunks if you don't exist).
Foucault has acquired a bad reputation in some circles as a nonsense-peddler but in my opinion it's not really deserved. Anyone interested in getting a sense of his thought should check out the transcripts of the lectures he gave at the College De France [1]. You can find a pdf of the anthology "Society Must be Defended" [2] online and this is not a bad place to start. Whether you agree or disagree with the content, you should find the lectures fairly lucid and not expressing the kind of internally inconsistent anti-reality skepticism and relativism you may expect.
> It's important to stand up to lies and to speak against recognized propaganda for what it is, but how capable are we as a society even to recognize the propaganda and lies when we see them? And how many of us have the courage to do so in the face of it?
Feel-good rhetoric aside, your impact as an individual is limited and your defenses are fragile. In real terms, speaking out in even the most diplomatic way leads you to being aggressively silenced for not endorsing whatever the Sacred Infallible Truth may be in the time period that you live in, and there can be very severe consequences that impact your weakest link; your livelihood. The best you can feasibly do as an everyman is try with the people closest to you; the people that trust and respect you. Your partner, your family, your friends, your children. This is your only feasible option.
The issue with the passage you quoted ("And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul...") is that it's a call to arms yet it ignores the reality that you have no weapons with which to fight.
Reading between the lines of your post; if your society insists on going down a certain self-destructive path there's not much you can feasibly do other than watch it and hope your perspective is the misguided one.
Is it "An" idea? Yes.
Does it scale or work at the scale of humanity or has any potential to do so? No.
There is a climate summit presently underway and the topic of nuclear energy has been completely banned from it. That should tell you enough about the political forces manipulating genuine climate concerns to further their own ends.[1]
E.g. "Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert," begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it's happening to about two-thirds of the world's grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos." https://youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI
Back on planet Earth, a review of the current scientific literature firmly disproves this thesis. Nasa satellite images clearly show the deserts are retreating, and on average there is a strong trend to global greening...
Greening of the globe and its drivers - Nature 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004 "Satellite records from 1982–2009 show a persistent and widespread increase of leaf area (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing leaf area (browning). Ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilisation effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (4%)."
Elevated CO2 as a driver of global dryland greening - Nature 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20716 "Recent regional scale analyses using satellite based vegetation indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), have found extensive areas of “greening” in dryland areas of the Mediterranean, the Sahel, the Middle East and Northern China, as well as greening trends in Mongolia and South America. More recently, a global synthesis from 1982-2007 showed an overall “greening-up” trend over the Sahel belt, Mediterranean basin, China-Mongolia region and the drylands of South America."
Global Greening Is Firm, Drivers Are Mixed - Harvard 2014 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AGUFM.B31A0515K "Evidence for global greening is converging, asserting an increase in CO2 uptake and biomass of the terrestrial biosphere. Global greening refers to global net increases in the area of green canopy, stocks of carbon, and the duration of the growing season. The growing seasons in general have prolonged while the stock of biomass carbon has increased and the rate of deforestation has decelerated. Evidence for these trends comes from firm empirical data obtained through atmospheric CO2 observations, remote sensing, forest inventories and land use statistics."
Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36130346 Prof Judith Curry, the former chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, added: "It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models).