#climate. silicon

[makingcontact]

The Promise and Peril of Geoengineering

Image of Arctic Ice by Pink floyd88 a via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;. As we head into a ever warming world, some experts and politicians are embracing a possible solution to climate change called geoengineering. Theoretically geoengineering could slow down climate change, stop it, and maybe even remove carbon from the air. It sounds like…

[probablyasocialecologist]

The cryptocurrency hype of the past few years already started to introduce people to these problems. Despite producing little to no tangible benefits — unless you count letting rich people make money off speculation and scams — Bitcoin consumed more energy and computer parts than medium-sized countries and crypto miners were so voracious in their energy needs that they turned shuttered coal plants back on to process crypto transactions. Even after the crypto crash, Bitcoin still used more energy in 2023 than the previous year, but some miners found a new opportunity: powering the generative AI boom. The AI tools being pushed by OpenAI, Google, and their peers are far more energy intensive than the products they aim to displace. In the days after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, Sam Altman called its computing costs “eye-watering” and several months later Alphabet chairman John Hennessy told Reuters that getting a response from Google’s chatbot would “likely cost 10 times more” than using its traditional search tools. Instead of reassessing their plans, major tech companies are doubling down and planning a massive expansion of the computing infrastructure available to them.

[...]

As the cloud took over, more computation fell into the hands of a few dominant tech companies and they made the move to what are called “hyperscale” data centers. Those facilities are usually over 10,000 square feet and hold more than 5,000 servers, but those being built today are often many times larger than that. For example, Amazon says its data centers can have up to 50,000 servers each, while Microsoft has a campus of 20 data centers in Quincy, Washington with almost half a million servers between them. By the end of 2020, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google controlled half of the 597 hyperscale data centres in the world, but what’s even more concerning is how rapidly that number is increasing. By mid-2023, the number of hyperscale data centres stood at 926 and Synergy Research estimates another 427 will be built in the coming years to keep up with the expansion of resource-intensive AI tools and other demands for increased computation. All those data centers come with an increasingly significant resource footprint. A recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the global energy demand of data centers, AI, and crypto could more than double by 2026, increasing from 460 TWh in 2022 to up to 1,050 TWh — similar to the energy consumption of Japan. Meanwhile, in the United States, data center energy use could triple from 130 TWh in 2022 — about 2.5% of the country’s total — to 390 TWh by the end of the decade, accounting for a 7.5% share of total energy, according to Boston Consulting Group. That’s nothing compared to Ireland, where the IEA estimates data centers, AI, and crypto could consume a third of all power in 2026, up from 17% in 2022. Water use is going up too: Google reported it used 5.2 billion gallons of water in its data centers in 2022, a jump of 20% from the previous year, while Microsoft used 1.7 billion gallons in its data centers, an increase of 34% on 2021. University of California, Riverside researcher Shaolei Ren told Fortune, “It’s fair to say the majority of the growth is due to AI.” But these are not just large abstract numbers; they have real material consequences that a lot of communities are getting fed up with just as the companies seek to massively expand their data center footprints.

9 February 2024

[quotesfrommyreading]

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.

Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.

Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.

Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.

  —  The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse

[thedisablednaturalist]

I don't think rich people should get to play with their toys if their toys are using up the carbon emissions of entire cities (and countries!) and wreaking havoc on the earth that we all share.

[thevagueambition]

the Time three parter (eps 156-158) of Welcome To Night Vale slaps so hard man

"We must put a stop to this. We were all wrong, trying to fight death this way. To put our trust in the future as though it would be anything but some other person’s present. Carlos was right. I was wrong."

"To put our trust in the future as though it would be anything but some other person’s present."

[inkskinned]

one of the things that's the most fucking frustrating for me about arguing with climate change deniers is the sheer fucking scope of how much it matters. sweating in my father's car, thinking about how it's the "hottest summer so far," every summer. and there's this deep, roiling rage that comes over me, every time.

the stakes are wrong, is the thing. that's part of what makes it not an actual debate: the other side isn't coming to the table with anything to fucking lose.

like okay. i am obviously pro gun control. but there is a basic human part of me that can understand and empathize with someone who says, "i'm worried that would lead to the law-abiding citizens being punished while criminals now essentially have a superpower." i don't agree, but i can tell the stakes for them are also very high.

but let's say the science is wrong and i'm wrong and the visible reality is wrong and every climate disaster refugee is wrong. let's say you're right, humans aren't causing it or it's not happening or whatever else. let's just say that, for fun.

so we spend hundreds of millions of dollars making the earth cleaner, and then it turns out we didn't need to do that. oops! we cleaned the earth. our children grow up with skies full of more butterflies and bees. lawns are taken over with rich local biodiversity. we don't cry over our electric bills anymore. and, if you're staunchly capitalist and i need to speak ROI with you - we've created so many jobs in developing sectors and we have exciting new investment opportunities.

i am reminded of kodak, and how they did not make "the switch" to digital photography; how within 20 years kodak was no longer a household brand. do we, as a nation, feel comfortable watching as the world makes "the switch" while we ride the laurels of oil? this boggles me. i have heard so much propaganda about how america cannot "fall behind" other countries, but in this crucial sector - the one that could actually influence our own monopolies - suddenly we turn the other cheek. but maybe you're right! maybe it will collapse like just another silicone valley dream. but isn't that the crux of capitalism? that some economies will peter out eventually?

but let's say you're right, and i'm wrong, and we stopped fracking for no good reason. that they re-seed quarries. that we tear down unused corporate-owned buildings or at least repurpose them for communities. that we make an effort, and that effort doesn't really help. what happens then? what are the stakes. what have we lost, and what have we gained?

sometimes we take our cars through a car wash and then later, it rains. "oh," we laugh to ourselves. we gripe about it over coffee with our coworkers. what a shame! but we are also aware: the car is cleaner. is that what you are worried about? that you'll make the effort but things will resolve naturally? that it will just be "a waste"?

and what i'm right. what if we're already seeing people lose their houses and their lives. what if it is happening everywhere, not just in coastal towns or equatorial countries you don't care about. what if i'm right and you're wrong but you're yelling and rich and powerful. so we ignore all of the bellwethers and all of the indicators and all of the sirens. what if we say - well, if it happens, it's fate.

nevermind. you wouldn't even wear a mask, anyway. i know what happens when you see disaster. you think the disaster will flinch if you just shout louder. that you can toss enough lives into the storm for the storm to recognize your sacrifice and balk. you argue because it feels good to stand up against "the liberals" even when the situation should not be political. you are busy crying for jesus with a bullhorn while i am trying to usher people into a shelter. you've already locked the doors, even on the church.

the stakes are skewed. you think this is some intellectual "debate" to win, some funny banter. you fuel up your huge unmuddied truck and say suck it to every citizen of that shitbird state california. serves them right for voting blue!

and the rest of us are terrified of the entire fucking environment collapsing.

[reasonsforhope]

"It is 70 years since AT&T’s Bell Labs unveiled a new technology for turning sunlight into power. The phone company hoped it could replace the batteries that run equipment in out-of-the-way places. It also realised that powering devices with light alone showed how science could make the future seem wonderful; hence a press event at which sunshine kept a toy Ferris wheel spinning round and round.

Today solar power is long past the toy phase. Panels now occupy an area around half that of Wales, and this year they will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity—which is almost three times as much electrical energy as America consumed back in 1954. Yet this historic growth is only the second-most-remarkable thing about the rise of solar power. The most remarkable is that it is nowhere near over.

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.

To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.

As our essay this week explains, solar power faces no such constraint. The resources needed to produce solar cells and plant them on solar farms are silicon-rich sand, sunny places and human ingenuity, all three of which are abundant. Making cells also takes energy, but solar power is fast making that abundant, too. As for demand, it is both huge and elastic—if you make electricity cheaper, people will find uses for it. The result is that, in contrast to earlier energy sources, solar power has routinely become cheaper and will continue to do so.

Other constraints do exist. Given people’s proclivity for living outside daylight hours, solar power needs to be complemented with storage and supplemented by other technologies. Heavy industry and aviation and freight have been hard to electrify. Fortunately, these problems may be solved as batteries and fuels created by electrolysis gradually become cheaper...

The aim should be for the virtuous circle of solar-power production to turn as fast as possible. That is because it offers the prize of cheaper energy. The benefits start with a boost to productivity. Anything that people use energy for today will cost less—and that includes pretty much everything. Then come the things cheap energy will make possible. People who could never afford to will start lighting their houses or driving a car. Cheap energy can purify water, and even desalinate it. It can drive the hungry machinery of artificial intelligence. It can make billions of homes and offices more bearable in summers that will, for decades to come, be getting hotter.

But it is the things that nobody has yet thought of that will be most consequential. In its radical abundance, cheaper energy will free the imagination, setting tiny Ferris wheels of the mind spinning with excitement and new possibilities.

This week marks the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. The Sun rising to its highest point in the sky will in decades to come shine down on a world where nobody need go without the blessings of electricity and where the access to energy invigorates all those it touches."

-via The Economist, June 20, 2024

[disteal]

The burning man debacle is rly captivating to me in the ‘convention dumpster fire poetic irony’ sense. Like ur telling me these silicon valley crystal guys are stuck in a flooding lake bed after calling the cops on climate change protestors holding up traffic into the festival? By telling the cops these unarmed protestors had a gun? Fantastic. And they’re dying from exposure- oh they’re scaring the shit out of each other with a fake ebola scare??? Of course. I’m sure they’re handling that normally. Just saw a video from a guy at the festival saying folks need to stop being ‘negative’ about the people who didn’t survive the night. And they can’t leave the flooding lake bed because nobody can move their cars- It appears Chris Rock and Diplo have escaped the lake bed by walking out, as it was only a few miles until they hit regular traffic. We do not know the state of the burning man sex plane, the plane at burning man you book to have sex in, which exists. Never before seen cataclysmic impact to the ‘white women with $5k veneers and box braids’ community.

[makingcontact]

The Ethical Dilemma of Geoengineering & Global Warming (Encore)

Image of Arctic Ice by Pink floyd88 a via Wikimedia Commons Geoengineering is defined as some emerging technologies that could manipulate the environment and partially offset some of the impacts of climate change. Seems like the perfect solution for a consumerist society that lives on instant gratification and can’t stop polluting even at the risk of our futures, right?  Well, let’s slow down.…

[probablyasocialecologist]

Blindness to material realities, unfortunately, is not unique to Silicon Valley tycoons and billionaire cowboys. Today, all of us depend heavily on countless metaphorical “black boxes,” from phones to air-conditioning to municipal water systems, whose production and workings are mostly a mystery to us. Furthermore, writes Vaclav Smil in his 2022 book How the World Really Works, the material and energetic underpinnings of civilization are of much less interest to most people these days than “the world of information, data, and images.” Accordingly, he writes, the greatest economic rewards go to work that’s “completely removed from the material realities of life on earth.” Therefore, it’s only natural that Silicon Valley types “believe that these electronic flows will make those quaint old material necessities unnecessary,” and that “‘dematerialization,’ powered by artificial intelligence, will end our dependence on shaped masses of metals and processed minerals, and eventually we might even do without the Earth’s environment.” Let them go ahead and think that, because, as my late mother would have said, “they’ve got another think comin’.”

[...]

In short, there’s no refuge from material facts. The only way that we humans can live within nature’s resource restraints and ecological boundaries is to redirect our economies toward meeting all people’s basic needs, and away from producing material overabundance. We have no choice but to converge on an equitable, modest level of energy and resource use that’s enough to provide a decent life for all.

[randomluck-ofthe-universe]

".. It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hard working immigrants who make this country go, for health care, for our climate, for science, for journalism, for justice, for free speech. It was a terrible night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors who rely on Social Security, for our allies in Ukraine, for NATO and democracy and decency. And it was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him. And guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him too. You just don't realize it yet..

[..] it was a really good night for Putin and for polio and for lovable billionaires like Elon Musk, and the bros up in Silicon Valley, and all the wriggling brain worms who sold what was left of their souls to bow down to Donald Trump. "

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

[emeraldspiral]

Listen, if you think Dib would ever be an Elon Musk stan/Silicon Valley Techbro, you could not be more wrong.

Invader Zim is a satire where the entire point of Dib is to be The Cassandra, trying to warn people about a very real problem that everyone else is too ignorant, apathetic, or complacent to do anything about. Zim is a metaphor for stuff like climate change, the anti-vax movement, the failures of capitalism, the increasing stranglehold of corporations and special interest groups on politics, and the creeping rise of fascism that Dib is the only person woke enough to notice. Sometimes it's not even a metaphor, he just outright calls out mundane real-world corruption like sending kids out to fundraise for their dilapidated, underfunded public skool but then spending the money on prizes instead of desks, or a megacorporation getting kids to invent products for them to make money off of without compensating the creators.

He would NOT be an Elon Musk stan. Elon Musk is the closest equivalent we have to a real life Zim. An obviously incompetent, narcissistic attention whore who still somehow manages to swindle gullible people into buying whatever bullshit he spews and who we could probably trick into fucking off forever if we just played to his ego and told him we had an important mission for him in outer space. Except even Zim is at least a real tech genius. Which brings me to my next point.

Dib is at least a third generation scientist/inventor. He and his father and his grandparents all know how to do actual math and coding and experimentation and physically build their own tech. They don't just come up with a half-baked idea and then pass it off to someone else to actually figure out how to make it workable. No way in hell would Dib be fooled by Muskrat's phony "real life Tony Stark" persona.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: The Moon (pt. 2)

Earth’s Moon is thought to have formed in a tremendous collision. A massive object ― named Theia after the mythological Greek Titan who was the mother of Selene, goddess of the Moon ― smashed into Earth, flinging material into space that became the Moon.

The brightest and largest object in our night sky, the Moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet's wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate. It also causes tides, creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years.

The Moon was likely formed after a Mars-sized body collided with Earth several billion years ago.

Earth's only natural satellite is simply called "the Moon" because people didn't know other moons existed until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. In Latin, the Moon was called Luna, which is the main adjective for all things Moon-related: lunar.

The many missions that have explored the Moon have found no evidence to suggest it has its own living things. However, the Moon could be the site of future colonization by humans. The discovery that the Moon harbors water ice, and that the highest concentrations occur within darkened craters at the poles, makes the Moon a little more hospitable for future human colonists.

With a radius of about 1,080 miles (1,740 kilometers), the Moon is less than a third of the width of Earth. If Earth were the size of a nickel, the Moon would be about as big as a coffee bean.

The Moon is an average of 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away. That means 30 Earth-sized planets could fit in between Earth and the Moon.

The Moon is slowly moving away from Earth, getting about an inch farther away each year.

The Moon is rotating at the same rate that it revolves around Earth (called synchronous rotation), so the same hemisphere faces Earth all the time. Some people call the far side – the hemisphere we never see from Earth – the "dark side" but that's misleading. As the Moon orbits Earth, different parts are in sunlight or darkness at different times. The changing illumination is why, from our perspective, the Moon goes through phases. During a "full moon," the hemisphere of the Moon we can see from Earth is fully illuminated by the Sun. And a "new moon" occurs when the far side of the Moon has full sunlight, and the side facing us is having its night.

The moon's near and far side.

The Moon makes a complete orbit around Earth in 27 Earth days and rotates or spins at that same rate, or in that same amount of time. Because Earth is moving as well – rotating on its axis as it orbits the Sun – from our perspective, the Moon appears to orbit us every 29 days.

The leading theory of the Moon's origin is that a Mars-sized body collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The resulting debris from both Earth and the impactor accumulated to form our natural satellite 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away. The newly formed Moon was in a molten state, but within about 100 million years, most of the global "magma ocean" had crystallized, with less-dense rocks floating upward and eventually forming the lunar crust.

Earth's Moon has a core, mantle, and crust:

The Moon’s core is proportionally smaller than other terrestrial bodies' cores. The solid, iron-rich inner core is 149 miles (240 kilometers) in radius. It is surrounded by a liquid iron shell 56 miles (90 kilometers) thick. A partially molten layer with a thickness of 93 miles (150 kilometers) surrounds the iron core.

The mantle extends from the top of the partially molten layer to the bottom of the Moon's crust. It is most likely made of minerals like olivine and pyroxene, which are made up of magnesium, iron, silicon, and oxygen atoms.

The crust has a thickness of about 43 miles (70 kilometers) on the Moon’s near-side hemisphere and 93 miles (150 kilometers) on the far-side. It is made of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen.

Long ago the Moon had active volcanoes, but today they are all dormant and have not erupted for millions of years.

With too sparse an atmosphere to impede impacts, a steady rain of asteroids, meteoroids, and comets strikes the surface of the Moon, leaving numerous craters behind. Tycho Crater is more than 52 miles (85 kilometers) wide.

Over billions of years, these impacts have ground up the surface of the Moon into fragments ranging from huge boulders to powder. Nearly the entire Moon is covered by a rubble pile of charcoal-gray, powdery dust, and rocky debris called the lunar regolith. Beneath is a region of fractured bedrock referred to as the megaregolith.

The light areas of the Moon are known as the highlands. The dark features, called maria (Latin for seas), are impact basins that were filled with lava between 4.2 and 1.2 billion years ago. These light and dark areas represent rocks of different compositions and ages, which provide evidence for how the early crust may have crystallized from a lunar magma ocean. The craters themselves, which have been preserved for billions of years, provide an impact history for the Moon and other bodies in the inner solar system.

If you looked in the right places on the Moon, you would find pieces of equipment, American flags, and even a camera left behind by astronauts. While you were there, you'd notice that the gravity on the surface of the Moon is one-sixth of Earth's, which is why in footage of moonwalks, astronauts appear to almost bounce across the surface.

The temperature on the Moon reaches about 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) when in full Sun, but in darkness, the temperatures plummet to about -280 degrees Fahrenheit (-173 degrees Celsius).

During the initial exploration of the Moon, and the analysis of all the returned samples from the Apollo and the Luna missions, we thought that the surface of the Moon was dry.

The first definitive discovery of water was made in 2008 by the Indian mission Chandrayaan-1, which detected hydroxyl molecules spread across the lunar surface and concentrated at the poles. Missions such as Lunar Prospector, LCROSS, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, have not only shown that the surface of the Moon has global hydration but there are actually high concentrations of ice water in the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar poles.

Scientists also found the lunar surface releases its water when the Moon is bombarded by micrometeoroids. The surface is protected by a layer, a few centimeters of dry soil that can only be breached by large micrometeoroids. When micrometeoroids impact the surface of the Moon, most of the material in the crater is vaporized. The shock wave carries enough energy to release the water that’s coating the grains of the soil. Most of that water is released into space.

In October 2020, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places. SOFIA detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon’s southern hemisphere.

The Moon has a very thin and weak atmosphere, called an exosphere. It does not provide any protection from the Sun's radiation or impacts from meteoroids.

The early Moon may have developed an internal dynamo, the mechanism for generating global magnetic fields for terrestrial planets, but today, the Moon has a very weak magnetic field. The magnetic field here on Earth is many thousands of times stronger than the Moon's magnetic field.

Earth’s Moon was born out of destruction.

Several theories about our Moon’s formation vie for dominance, but almost all share that point in common: near the time of the solar system’s formation, about 4.5 billion years ago, something ― perhaps a single object the size of Mars, perhaps a series of objects ― crashed into the young Earth and flung enough molten and vaporized debris into space to create the Moon.

Five Things We Learned from Apollo Moon Rocks

The chemical composition of Moon and Earth rocks are very similar.

The Moon was once covered in an ocean of magma.

Meteorites have shattered and melted rocks on the Moon’s surface through impacts.

Lava flowed up through cracks in the Moon’s crust and filled its impact basins.

Lunar “soil” is made of pulverized rock created by meteorite impacts.

If these writing notes helped with your poem/story, please tag me. Or leave a link in the replies. I'd love to read them!

Writing Notes: The Moon (pt. 1) ⚜ Writing Notes & References

[bookshelfdreams]

@hylianengineer sorry I had to make a new post, the answer got too long for replies :D

Ah, the dreaded "but wool is itchy!". Not something I can relate to (I really like it when yarn/fabric has a bit of grip and structure to it, I'm not one for the ultra-soft, fluffy wools) but let's see if I can say smth useful.

First, you're definitely not alone in finding wool scratchy! A lot of people have sensory issues regarding it. Whether it can be helped at all will depend on how sensitive you are; some people can't even handle unspun 17 mic chubut merino and at that point, wool just isn't for them. Which is fine, not everything is for everyone.

Rule of thumb: the higher quality your fibre, the softer the finished garment will be. If it's just listed as "wool", it might contain recycled fibre, wool from sheep breeds that don't have a super fine fleece, or even wool from dead animals, all of which lowers the quality.

Virgin wool (I think) refers to wool that is spun for the first time, so a yarn that has no recycled fibres in it. Lambswool is a sheep's first wool. It is finer and smoother than adult wool.

Another big impact is breed of sheep and origin of the fibre. Merinos are the go-to for high quality items, but are also kept all over the world, so look to where your wool comes from. Aotearoa and South America are well known for their high quality merino wools. Sheep that live in colder, harsher climates produce a sturdy, tougher fleece, especially if they're not merino breeds. Depending on where you are, regional wool might not be what you're looking for. Britain is famous for their wool, but Shetland wool won't be super soft. Try some BFL (Bluefaced Leicester) if you can get it; it is smoother than merino and not as springy.

Wool can be superwash treated by coating the individual fibres, so the scales on the hairs are covered. This means it won't felt and can be machine washed; it also makes it less scratchy. This process is very energy- and water-intensive. The fibres are coated in silicone, I think, which makes the finished yarn feel kinda plastic-y, and it also lowers the insulating and water-repelling qualities of the wool. (All in all, you might as well buy acrylic)

You can also try looking for sheep's wool mixed with other animal fibres. Cashmere, alpaca, and mohair are probably the most common and all have their own qualities (cashmere is shiny and drapey; alpaca is smooth and kind of dense; mohair is light, extremely fluffy and super warm). All are softer than sheep's wool and nicer to the skin.

Anyway, all that to say: Look for virgin wool, look at the breed you're getting if it's specified, look for mixes with softer fibres, look at the origin of the wool. Unfortunately, when you're sensitive, navigating the world of natural fibres can be a bit of a minefield, I know. If wool isn't for you, that's not a moral failing!