Depression. You're always grumbling that this show is depressing, but we actually spare you from multiple shows that we think would be too depressing. It doesn't look like it, but we're cute that way.
And on occasion, we reject a subject because we go, "I won't be able to joke about that". Actually, it isn't that we're "cute". We're just tending to our own sanity.
So, what could be even more depressing than, for instance, the President trying to stage a coup, or the President pretending to do so in order to stop people from talking about how he had ghost officials? What could be even sadder than our tank parade? It was supposed to be a show of strength, but ended up being a show of how Brazil definitely CANNOT provoke anyone or wage war against anyone.
Even Suriname must've watched and gone, "Huh. . .
there's a project! " Smoke screens have never been so literal. So the song goes: "Who's firing up smoke?
The President! " When I first saw that, I thought that maybe we'd gotten a new Pope. They wanted to scare off the populace, but at most they scared off a dengue mosquito, who thought it was a bug fogger.
As a show of strength, it was fraught with disappointment. Heck, they should've called Frota. He let himself go a bit, but maybe after a few push ups he could impress a little more than those tanks.
But it became clear to us all that the Army's budget pales in comparison to other budgets, such as that of the daughters of Army staff. If only tanks got as much money as a marshal's daughter. But the parade did get one clear message across: if you want to invade Brazil, a soldier and a corporal will do.
But there is a subject more depressing than our Army's show of strength, and that is the climate crisis, which the Army's tanks definitely aren't helping to solve. I don't know about you, but for me, but there is NOTHING more depressing in this world than the fact that the Earth is becoming less and less livable. I have this weird attachment to life in this planet.
In fact, I can't talk about that. Every week, someone in the writer's room proposes it. "Greg, we should talk about the climate crisis.
. . " "No!
Stop! I won't! " They're like Jehovah's Witnesses.
"May I have five minutes to talk about the word of Greta? " "No! I don't want to know!
Please, no! " There is a term for that despair generated by the Earth's worsening climate conditions: "climate anxiety". I don't like it.
It's too vague. Because "climate anxiety" is what I feel when summer's near and I see that Carnival's coming. I feel such climate anxiety!
The worsening in the Earth's living conditions is more of a climate despair. And it makes sense - after all, there is no other planet. I mean, there are other planets, but I don't want to live in them.
Mars is like Maringá. The city of Maringá exists, but it's cold, dry, and has no signs of intelligent life. But you can't say no one is capable of talking about the end of the world in a way that's charismatic, that makes everyone want to hear.
After all, one of Brazil's greatest hits is "Minha Pequena Eva". Despite it not really being from Brazil. It's Italian, but was first reproduced in Brazil by a band called Rádio Táxi in the 1980s.
Is there a more 80's band name than "radio taxi"? If this was nowadays, it'd be called "Uber". It's the end of the Earth and of humanity, but not the end of the human race, as some escaped in a spaceship.
Such is the theme of Rádio Táxi's song. My love Look, the sun hasn't shown up today It is the end Of the human adventure on Earth Yep. They thought that the "human adventure on Earth" would end on a big explosion.
God, I miss having that hope. That things wouldn't be getting warmer, drier, and more fucked up. But if you're under 35, you've probably already heard this song.
A very different version by Banda Eva, that turned the "end of the human adventure on Earth" into a reason for smiling, and jumping, and being happy since 1997. Look closely, love The end of the Earth odyssey Rock in Rio, get off the ground! My little Eva, Eva Our love in the last spaceship, Eva Such joy!
No one's ever talked about the apocalypse this euphorically. "It's the end of the Earth odyssey. .
. GET OFF THE GROUND! " Of course, we have to.
After all, the sea level is rising. Our only option will be to "get off the ground". Ivete is so right.
In fact, Ivete singing about the end of the human adventure on Earth smiling from ear to ear. . .
It's like she thinks it's a great idea. Maybe that's why she won't opine on the Bolsonaro government. It's wonderful for her, the end of the Earth odyssey that Bolsonaro's giving us.
She already got her "abadá" for that last spaceship, that's why she's so happy. And just like Ivete, many have reacted to the decay of life on Earth by getting ready to leave it. While Brazil has been sniffing a scent of '64 in the air, with the tanks parading and such, the rest of the world seems to be going back to '69.
Yes. And like we all know, 69 doesn't smell that good. It's impossible to see a future.
. . or anything, in a 69.
It's impossible to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Which is why we can only see is a huge asshole now. Because we're in a 69.
But enough double entendres. The "69" doesn't refer to that, but to the space race we're witnessing. And if during the Cold War the race was between the Soviet Union and the US, this time the fight isn't between nations, but between billionaires who have as much money as nations.
Virgin's Richard Branson, Tesla's Elon Musk, and Amazon's Jeff Bezos are focusing more and more on space adventuring. Last month, Bezos finally managed to ride on a rocket. He's fulfilling Ivete's dream.
And I said I'd stop with the double entendres, but I can't. Bezos didn't let me. In an unpiloted ship, the richest man on Earth wrote a new chapter in the era of space tourism.
Jeff Bezos was accompanied by the youngest and oldest persons to see the Earth from the outside. The New Shepard capsule took off from the Texas base the same day as, 52 years ago, man reached the Moon. It was the first crewed and unpiloted civilian flight in history.
First, it's nonsense to fly without a pilot. The exchanger clearly took the ship's wheel. That's just wrong.
You can't drive and give Bezos his change at the same time. But you saw the shape of the ship. It must be easy to be Jeff Bezos's psychoanalyst.
They must look at the ship he made and go, "Look, Jeff. . .
This is just too easy for me. I don't even want to analyze that. I didn't get a degree for this.
I'm going after new challenges. People that are more cryptic. Tougher to assess whether they have phallic fixation.
I don't even want to say it! That it's compensating for penis size. .
. I won't say it! It's beneath me!
" And I understand that psychoanalyst, because I, as a comedian, refuse to say that his ship looks like a giant dick. In fact, it doesn't LOOK like it - it IS a giant dick. Made by a man who has a penis head, even.
His head is clearly a glans. Keeping in mind that that glans head has a glans, and that both got in a huge glans. .
. Then that ship was a dick, in a dick, in a dick. It isn't a ship.
It's a matryoshka doll of cocks. We should call it the "pee rocket". But what's most pathetic about Bezos's trip is that he thinks that, with that space tourism, he's "benefitting humanity".
So, for me, I'm very lucky, because I feel like I have a mission-driven purpose with Blue Origin, that is, I think, incredibly important for civilization long-term. . .
So what does money mean for you, being the first person in history that has a net worth of a three-digit amount of billions? The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. So that's basically.
. . Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune.
Yep - he decided to explore space because he had surplus after exploiting Amazon's workers. He must like ETs, because that means no CLT Labor Code. So, let's go.
There's a nice niche there of individuals who don't need air conditioning. Maybe not even pee! But that was unnecessary.
Because Americans don't need CLT, either. Brazilians aren't doing great, either. Want to go to Venus?
Try Rio. It, too, is hot, has no drinking water, and isn't favorable to human life, but the pictures are wonderful! Rio is the Earth's Venus.
Funny thing is, Bezos is looking in Outer Space for an escape route from the planet he and his company helped to bust with their encouragement of excessive consumerism, motorized delivery services, and containers that cross oceans in ultra-polluting trips. Though Amazon isn't the only guilty party for ruining the Earth, it is a fact that it is one of our greatest climate villains. Amazon, by itself, launches over 60 million tons of carbon in the atmosphere every year.
That's more than most of the Earth's countries. It is estimated that Amazon uses in its packaging over 550 million lbs. of bubble wrap.
Which would be enough to wrap planet Earth 500 times over. Just to be clear, Amazon disputes that data. It claims to produce only a fourth of that.
They say they couldn't wrap the Earth 500 times over, just a little over a hundred times. With bubble wrap. Sure, it'd be good for us to relieve our climate anxiety, the planet wrapped in bubble wrap.
. . It may be ending, but then we pop bubble wrap and it's all good.
Apparently there's nothing resilient enough to not need that much wrap, not even the Earth. With the possible exception of Jeff Bezos's masculinity, I mean, he did make that pee rocket. .
. But the worst part is that those companies create inequality, amass wealth to an insane degree, to the point that billionaires decide to burn it on space trips during the worst economic and mental crisis in history, just so they can use it. Amazon alone has more market worth than Brazil has in GDP.
And what's most ironic is that Bezos named his company after. . .
the São Francisco river. Oops, sorry. It was after the Amazon.
Our big Amazon River. Which he apparently never even visited. He went to space before getting to know the river he named his company after.
But it wasn't just to compensate for a possibly small dick that Bezos made the rocket. Bezos has said before that he's afraid of what's been happening to the planet. Over the last two years, while the pandemic killed over 4 million people, other happenings also spooked the world, and I don't mean sertanejo livestreams or the return of Tribalistas.
I mean climate catastrophes of ever more devastating proportions, reoccurring at an ever faster pace. Even climate scientists - those who were deemed too apocalyptic - are shocked. Because they had foreseen this situation, but only a few decades from now.
2020 was the hottest year in history, and broke records in the number of hurricanes. Which generates another problem in the US - shootouts. Because apparently there's this American trend of firing at hurricanes.
A police department in Florida, in fact, nicely asked for Americans to stop shooting at Hurricane Irma. That wouldn't work to contain it. Bullets are Americans' solution to everything.
They think they'll solve global warming by shooting at a thermometer. Thank goodness they aren't here. They'd open fire at floods.
It doesn't work. . .
Plus, the bullet could come back. I know shit about physics, but who knows? I wouldn't risk it.
And 2021 isn't looking any better than 2020. Quite the opposite - radical changes resulted in climate emergencies around the world over the last few months. In just a few weeks, floods got a chunk of Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and France submerged, while Canada and the US faced heat waves going up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
Dozens of floods have been striking China since July, and should keep going until August. Greece and Turkey, two neighboring countries that were struck by the worst heat wave in decades, struggle against fires for almost two weeks now. Fires have also been seen in Italy, Albania, North Macedonia, and countries in North Africa.
This week, a new report was issued by IPCC, the Incredible Panel of Commanding Capital. . .
no! The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that gathers the leading climate scientists in the world. The report concludes that this last decade was the hottest in the last 125 thousand years.
So, the warmest decade in Sarney's lifetime. But hold on - it gets worse. Some of the climate changes we'll be feeling are already irreversible for centuries.
And there's nothing we can do to stop them short-term. Mid-term, or over the next 50 years, there is stuff we can do. Basically, life will become impossible in this entire chunk of Brazil because of the heat alone.
In other areas, we'll see a shortage of water and food, and more disease, all thanks to the destruction of practically half of the country. And what's really the most tragic in all this is that, according to that map, apparently Maringá won't be affected. I kid - it will.
Don't worry. Floods, droughts, and heat waves. How did we get to this?
The answer is basically, "by doing what we did over the last 30 years". For these three decades, humanity behaved like us here, at Greg News: avoiding talking about climate change and climate crisis, despite science being sure that it is a very real crisis. We know exactly what's been happening since, at least, 1992, when the first climate-related global conference was held right here, in Rio, already based on solid evidence that the world was facing an unprecedented crisis.
And guess what we did after it? We broke our records in greenhouse gas emissions. Over half of the CO2 emissions seen over the last 300 years were done over the last 30, after Rio '92, when we were already completely aware of the issue.
Humanity definitely can't see a "do not do this" sign. I bet some people found it even more enjoyable to emit carbon after we found out it was dooming us. Before the pandemic, we didn't even manage to stop increasing emissions every year.
In Dilma's words, we didn't even set a goal. We let the goal open. And when we reached the goal, we doubled the goal over.
Every day it passes, I feel like Dilma predicted everything. I'm just waiting for the day we'll find out that "behind every child, there is a hidden figure, which is a dog". The explanation for this race to the abyss may be in previous climate predictions, that calculated that this tragedy would affect future generations, after we'd no longer be in this Earth.
It was the principle of "someone else's problem". Of "that's young people stuff. I don't get it.
They think I'm cringe, they part their hair in the middle. . .
I don't get it, so they'll handle it. They waste their days dancing on TikTok. .
. they won't even notice it. They'll be dancing, the world will end, they won't even see it".
But those recent studies have pointed to a new paradigm, with closer and much more disastrous changes. That isn't just our grandkids' problem. It's ours, too.
Truth is, we don't really care about what will happen in a distant future. If you invited me to debate over the "limits of humor" in Maringá in November 19, 2022, I'd agree. Sure, let's do it.
But when November 18, 2022, came, I'd be so pissed at past Gregório. Me, today. So, humanity is at the eve of the event we scheduled 30 years ago, thinking it'd never happen.
We can't even smack the past people, because they're no longer here. That's how past people troll us, by vanishing when we want to smack them. The previously predicted consequences of global warming were optimistic compared to what's already happening and what's to come.
Back in 1992, scientists had already predicted drastic effects on climate caused by greenhouse gases, with an increase of 1. 5 degrees Celsius in the Earth's average temperature. But since we not only didn't reduce emissions, but increased them even more, that increase in temperature could be of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius.
And now. . .
who knows what might happen? It's kind of like eating two extra pot brownies because you think the first one isn't hitting you. It takes a while to hit.
Be careful with that. If there's one advice I can give to the young, it's "it takes a while to hit, but it will". Many have already woken up to the fact.
The EU announced this huge post-pandemic economy recovery plan called "European Green Deal". The block will be investing 1. 8 trillion euros so as to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 50% before 2030, and become the first countries with zero emission before 2050.
A very optimistic prediction of us even having a 2050. The plan is comprehensive, going from emission reduction strategies to an increase of the forests in the continent through the planting of three billion trees before 2030. Americans, meanwhile, replaced noted denier Donald Trump with Joe Biden during the pandemic, and were gifted a nice US$2 trillion green package called the "Green New Deal".
When a green package is worth more than US$2 trillion, then clearly that "green" is quite inflated. China announced in March a US$1. 4 trillion dollars investment in infrastructure.
It will increase the provision of electric cars and high-speed trains, and reallocate resources from the highly polluting Chinese industry to the services sector, that pollute less. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro is reallocating resources to the coup sector, which is quite polluting. What do all of those sustainable green economy plans have in common?
They were all designed to benefit mainly their own countries. Trillions of dollars invested in their own territories, in the people that live within their borders. They're plans that answer to deep changes in those countries' public opinion, that started worrying way more about the climate crisis after witnessing the haunting events we've just described.
But that masks a truth regarding climate change. The vast majority of its victims aren't in New York, or the EU, or China, but in the world's poorer countries, that go through less photogenic catastrophes. Drughts, famine due to crop failures, epidemics caused by mosquitoes, floods in peripheries.
. . Problems that are way less visible than a big fire in California or Greece, but often, way more lethal.
The initiatives that richer countries have been announcing are great for reducing those countries' emissions - which is, indeed, important in order to avoid the most catastrophic cases predicted by scientists - but there is one thing those initiatives do not do: they don't help poorer countries to deal with climate changes that are currently happening, or that are irreversible. Not a cent is used to help the world's less rich countries to deal with droughts, floods, hurricanes, and the rising sea level, when the ten countries most affected by climate emergencies over the last 10 years belong to the so-called "Global South", composed by poor or developing countries, such as Bangladesh, Mozambique, Haiti, the Philippines. .
. And those countries contributed the least in causing the crisis. It's like at a bar, when non-drinkers get screwed when the one who ordered wine decides to split the bill equally.
"Let's split it equal, it's easier". And the non-drinker goes, "Yeah, sure. .
. " But that bar bill isn't split equally, because it becomes even more expensive to those who consumed the least. Accumulated data place the US as the historical champions of gas emissions, followed by the EU, China, Russia, and Japan.
All industrialized countries that burned tons of charcoal and petroleum in order to develop, and that are only that rich today thanks to that. Historical data are way more important than current data, because when carbon is emitted, it doesn't immediately vanish. It accumulates.
So, the climate changes we're seeing nowadays result from that historical accumulation of greenhouse gases. That injustice, which is already a reality now, won't disappear. Countries less responsible for the gas emissions that got us in this hole are those that will suffer the most consequences of climate changes over the next few years, too.
And that is due to many reasons. Firstly, because many of them are in environmentally sensitive areas, such as the tropics, that are more susceptible to heat waves. Secondly, because those countries have less resources to prepare for those changes and protect their people, and they often have less resources BECAUSE they didn't spend 300 years destroying the planet so as to amass resources.
So, developing countries got fucked over so that Jeff Bezos could fly. One person in Bangladesh releases 30 times less carbon in the atmosphere than one in the USA. But while Bangladesh is flooding, and there are almost 13 million climate refugees having to move in order to survive until 2050, the US only build walls and harden their immigration policies.
In Galvão Bueno's words, "A terrible atmosphere is building up". And in Ivete's, "My planet, farewell". I always thought she said, "My planet is fair and well".
That it was an optimistic part of the lyrics. But it's no surprise that rich countries, which are the most responsible for climate change, aren't rushing to help poor countries, which will feel its worst consequences. After all, their riches are closely tied to colonization, to the genocide of native peoples, to the exploitation of slave labor.
. . All those exploiting processes that were designed to enrich the so-called "core countries" at the expense of the planet's periphery, with the exception of tiny elites within those peripheries.
That is a tale that set the foundations for an extractivist and predatory system that allowed for the accumulation of resources without which an industrial revolution would've been impossible, as well as the pollution that came with it. And that's how humanity amassed ever greater riches in ever fewer hands, until we've reached outrages such as Bezos's one trillion, the richest man in all of the human adventure on Earth. Coincidentally, Bezos believes that the history of the last few centuries isn't a history of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and destruction, but one of "continuous progress".
One that he believes that can only be maintained if humanity goes to space. My life is better than my grandparents' life was. Their life was better than their grandparents' life was.
And we all want our grandkids' lives to be better than ours, and we want their grandkids' lives to be better than theirs. That's called progress. And we have been enjoying it for centuries.
If we're going to continue to make progress and make sure that our descendants have better lives than us, we need to go to space. It's not optional. He's saying that the only way to maintain the progress that's been happening over the last few centuries is by going to space.
And that it isn't optional for him. I don't know what's more bizarre, him thinking that the last few centuries only saw progress, when his very own country was colonized, with 90% of their natives being murdered, whose grandparents weren't "worse than them", and their great-grandparents weren't even worse. .
. That isn't how he perceives history. But it may be even worse that he thinks that going to space isn't optional, when the vast majority of humanity doesn't even have the option of going to a neighboring country.
And the people who work in his company apparently don't even have the option of going to the bathroom. And it's thanks to this catastrophic state of things, and the injustices stemming from them, that the term "global warming" became "cringe". We don't talk about fighting global warming anymore, as it's already an inevitable fact.
In that term's place, we saw the strong rise of a new way of looking at the changes that are already affecting the planet: "climate justice". Which is the notion of focusing global policies in reducing those injustices. But I'm not huge on the term, because if people already don't believe in climate change, they believe even less in justice, especially when the defendant is the US.
If there's one thing not happening these days, it's justice. The American and European deals, in addition to only caring about themselves, also plan on adding a new tax to the imports of everything stemming from carbon-emitting countries. Cool, but those will most likely be the poorest countries, that won't have the money to do their own energy transition, once they didn't spend centuries amassing riches by destroying the planet.
Power such as the US gleefully polluted for years, and became rich at the expense of the Earth's health, harming way more the poorest countries, that polluted the least. And now that the climate disease is in place, those countries will be using their riches to do a green turnaround - within their own borders, of course. Leaving the rest of the world to sow storms, while also getting extra taxing and no help.
It's as if the world powers were building the last airship with the profit of the explosion. And all that'd be left for us would, indeed, be the end of the Earth odyssey. The problem here, which is also the solution, in a way, is that trying to build Noah's ark in the rich countries won't work.
Just looking at oneself, in addition to being inefficient, is doomed to fail, because we all share the same planet and atmosphere. All ecosystems are connected. And because no one will suffer the consequences of the devastating climate changes in silence, without causing more destruction.
The less developed countries, such as Brazil, have a good share of the ecosystems that still help to regulate the planet's temperature and rains, in addition to being a living stock of billions of tons of carbon. If the entirety of the Amazon burns up, all of that carbon will be fired at the air, and it won't make a difference if the Germans have electric cars. Three of the four countries with the greatest proportions of foresting in the planet are poor.
Brazil and Indonesia have two of the three largest rainforests in the planet, and are the only countries in the world in which half of carbon emissions stem from deforestation, and not from combusting charcoal or fuel. And since the vegetation of their forests also absorb CO2, the less forests we have, the more the atmosphere heats up. So, if countries like Brazil and Indonesia don't have the cold, hard cash to invest in development plans that won't result in the destruction of all ecosystems, then it's not just Brazil and Indonesia who'll be fucked, but the whole world.
It's not just about protecting the Amazon. We do have the money for that. We lack a president willing to.
But in order to save the world, we need more job offerings that don't involve destroying the Amazon, including jobs in the industry of mass reforestation, and local agricultural production systems so that our food doesn't have to be transported in highly polluting trucks to get to our plates, which means people having smaller, family-based properties, that use less pesticide and feed people in their vicinity, instead of only giving soy to the other side of the planet. And a ton of other measures that, at the end of the day, would be better not only for the planet, but for us. And that's the good news amidst the apocalypse, that the real solution to climate despair, the only way to save the world, is by making a better world to everybody, one with less billionaires and less poverty.
One with a more breathable air, cleaner water, more sustainable energy, and poison-less food. The only solution to climate crisis is climate justice. And something else that would be a huge help is Bezos going to space, but forever, and taking along with him some other Earth destroyers, plus some other folks who have nothing to do with that, but whom I personally don't like, and don't think would be missed.
