(Whether you like it or not, you have no choice about watching this show. It’s on every channel, every day, all the time.)
Get ready for another week of BUSINESS AS USUAL, sponsored by Amazon, Google, and Walmart.
"Keep driving, keep flying, keep shopping, keep buying!
We've got this, everything's fine." 
Just a random toot reminding you all that I hate being human. #BusinessAsUsual
Liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, it doesn’t matter. The ONLY thing that matters is capitalism and profits.
Business As Usual must go on!
"Keep driving, keep flying, keep shopping, keep buying!
We've got this, everything's fine."
Killing (trees) for a view in Sydney's leafy suburbs
Fines for a multi-million dollar property with views is "just the cost of doing business". >>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-01/nsw-government-illegal-tree-poison-cut-council-fines-jail-sydney/105205004
#Sydney #views #trees #TreeVandalism #UrbanHeatIsland #biodiversity #crime #governance #BusinessAsUsual
@AndyDeardentsa Unfortunately, the 'Green' Transition was always #businessasusual. It was only ever marketing and propaganda.
@gerrymcgovern any "transition that relies on mining the ocean floor is NOT a green transition- it's just #businessasusual
I hate linking to articles like this one, because I don’t want to seem overly alarmist, and yet I think it’s important for us to know what’s going on — the high, sometimes fatal cost we pay for Business As Usual, for allowing corporations to make billions in profits by putting *everything* in plastic.
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Synthetic chemicals called phthalates, found in consumer products such as food storage containers, shampoo, makeup, perfume, and children’s toys, may have contributed to more than 10% of all global mortality from heart disease in 2018 among men and women ages 55 through 64, a new study found.
“Phthalates contribute to inflammation and systemic inflammation in the coronary arteries, which can accelerate existing disease and lead to acute events including mortality,” said senior author Dr. Leonardo Trasande, a professor of pediatrics and population health at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. He also is director of NYU Langone’s Division of Environmental Pediatrics and Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards.
Phthalates have been linked in earlier studies with reproductive problems, such as genital malformations and undescended testes in baby boys and lower sperm counts and testosterone levels in adult males. Studies have also linked phthalates to asthma, childhood obesity, and cancer.
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FULL STORY -- https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/29/health/phthalates-heart-disease-wellness/index.html
What has Business As Usual brought to us?
Well, for fossil fuel companies and for other giant multinational corporations it has brought *immense* profits — amounts so unimaginably huge that grabbing all that money is irresistible to the psychopaths who run the world’s economy.
But what about for the rest of us? And what about for the natural world, for our oceans and for our forests and for the millions of other species with which we share the planet?
The cost we have all paid to enrich oil company CEOs, along with billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, is almost incalculable.
Almost, but not quite…
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The world’s biggest corporations have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, a new study estimates.
A Dartmouth College research team came up with the estimated pollution caused by 111 companies, with more than half of the total dollar figure coming from ten fossil fuel providers: Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., Pemex, Coal India, and the British Coal Corporation.
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FULL STORY -- https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-liability-lawsuits-damage-trillions-5ad21e47b2aa16cc90cb7669f56297f1
Is everyone excited?
It's time for another very profitable week of BUSINESS AS USUAL, sponsored this time by Saudi Aramco, Ford Motor Company, and the US military-industrial complex.
"Keep driving, keep flying, keep shopping, keep buying!
We've got this, everything's fine."
@vaskaraeca Business As Usual, baby!
Here's an opinion piece in the Indian Express that says exactly what I find myself thinking every Monday as I post my weekly Business As Usual update...
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The world is suffocating, but we still go to work. Still scroll. Still order takeout. The disaster is not sudden. It is not a flood sweeping entire towns away in an instant, not a meteor splitting the sky. It is slower, more insidious — measured in degrees of warming, in statistics we glance at but do not absorb.
India, the fifth most polluted country in the world, breathes in poison daily. Delhi set a new pollution record in November 2024, registering air quality so hazardous that schools shut down, flights were grounded, and entire neighbourhoods disappeared behind toxic haze.
And yet, life continued. Offices remained open, cars clogged highways, street vendors coughed into their palms and adjusted their masks. We adapted, as we always do.
In Los Angeles, the world burns in a different way. The hillsides, dry from relentless droughts, ignite with terrifying ease. The fires creep closer each year, smoke blotting out the sun, turning the sky a sickly orange. People evacuate, but many stay, accustomed now to the seasonal infernos. They wear masks, not just for a pandemic but to filter the ash from the air. The news cycles through footage of mansions ablaze, of highways lined with red embers, but soon moves on. Insurance claims are filed. The city rebuilds.
We used to mark time by the seasons. Now, we mark it by disasters. The summer the fires reached the city limits. The winter when the power grids failed. The monsoon that drowned the subways.
The sky turns orange, and we take photos of it. We caption it: Eerie but beautiful. We order groceries, the courier arriving in the haze, their mask the only barrier between lungs and poison. We rate the delivery five stars.
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There's a lot more in this powerful piece, and I hope you'll read the whole thing.
FULL OP-ED 
https://archive.ph/jFl4G
DIRECT LINK [paywall] https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/middle-climate-apocalypse-we-really-care-9890542/
Q: “What’s on TV tonight?”
A: “Same old, same old.”
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It's time for another week of BUSINESS AS USUAL, sponsored by Toyota, Shell, and General Electric.
"Keep driving, keep flying, keep shopping, keep buying!
We've got this, everything's fine."
It couldn't be more clear, in the midst of an escalating climate and environmental crisis, that we urgently need to make huge systemic changes.
But instead we get this…
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It's time for another week of BUSINESS AS USUAL, sponsored by General Motors, Exxon, and the US military-industrial complex.
"Keep driving, keep flying, keep shopping, keep buying!
We've got this, everything's fine."
Excerpts from an essay titled "The Great Energy Transition Myth"...
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Forget everything you thought you knew about energy transitions.
In his new book "More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy," Jean-Baptiste Fressoz dismantles the comforting narrative that humanity has transitioned from one energy source to another. We never really transitioned at all. We just piled on more energy sources to the older ones, intensifying our overall consumption.
Take coal for example. While it became dominant during the 19th century, vast quantities of wood were still needed to support the coal economy – to build mines, railways and infrastructure.
This pattern continues today. Despite the rise of renewable energy sources like wind and solar, global consumption of fossil fuels remains at record highs.
"Transition" has become capitalism’s favourite disguise.
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FULL ESSAY -- https://theclimatehistorian.substack.com/p/the-great-energy-transition-myth
Capitalism cannot be allowed to continue.
As long as capitalism is in charge, then Business As Usual is inevitable.
But Business As Usual can only lead to collapse — of the ecosystem, of the economy, of governments, and of modern society.
Collapse, starting slowly and then growing, means tragedies beyond anything you have ever imagined.
If capitalism is still the dominating force ten years from now, then it’s too late. Collapse will happen. It may in fact be too late already — but we will never know unless capitalism is rejected and #degrowth is adopted.
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Here we are! Another week of BUSINESS AS USUAL, sponsored this time by Shell Oil, Koch Industries, and the US Army.
"Keep driving, keep flying, keep shopping, keep buying!
We've got this, everything's fine."
Here is a short (13-minute) informative video titled “The Insanity of the Carbon Capture Deception.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prrFtReaFMY
It’s about the lies we’re being told to justify continuing with Business As Usual, about the false promise of futuristic new technologies that will magically stop climate change and save us all.
There was a time not very long ago when talking about the possibility that global warming might reach 3°C above the baseline was considered alarmist. You couldn’t say that without being labeled as a Doomer.
But today it’s not just “alarmists” like me who are talking about 3° of warming. Now it’s the allegedly respectable adults in the room, like Morgan Stanley… https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/114262652848236074
And like Barack Obama… https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/113985510174651079
Except, stunningly, when those “elites” discuss such realities, it’s NOT to raise the alarm. It’s NOT to call for system change — which we so obviously need.
Rather, it’s to point out all the wonderful new possibilities for profit-taking. And it’s to calm everyone down. No need to worry, they tell us. Everything is under control. Capitalism has the solutions. We can live happily and even thrive in a 3°C world. 
It couldn't be more clear, in the midst of a surging climate and environmental catastrophe, that we need to urgently make huge systemic changes.
But those who own the system are not interested.
So instead we'll just get more and more of the same — more drilling for oil, more fracking for gas, more digging for coal, more burning of fossil fuels, along with more pollution and even more greenhouse gases. Plus we’ll also get more gigantic government subsidies to companies actively destroying the climate, AND more outrageously high profits for fossil fuel executives.
Business As Usual must go on, baby!
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Let’s all celebrate another week of BUSINESS AS USUAL, sponsored this time by BP, Walmart, and Volkswagen.
"Keep driving, keep flying, keep shopping, keep buying!
We've got this, everything's fine."
Assuming our rulers stay on their present course, following the mantra of economic growth at any cost, then all the climate and environmental crises we're experiencing today will continue to worsen with increasingly disastrous results.
What will their response be to this?
Certainly not to end capitalism or even slow things down. That would be unthinkable!
Instead they will almost certainly opt for geoengineering at some point, using technology to alter Earth’s ecosphere in an attempt to allay the damage caused by technology altering Earth’s ecosphere.
That’s senseless and stupid. But that’s what they’ll do.
It may turn out, unfortunately, that some form of geoengineering will in fact be a necessity if we are to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of global heating.
But — and this is a very big but — that prospect should NOT be used as an excuse to continue with Business As Usual. It should not be seen as a way to prolong capitalism’s reign over us.
We need #Degrowth now.
