#fossil fuel usage

[skylobster]

I actually side with Toyota on this one, in spite of my passion for electric cars. Both our battery technology and our infrastructure need to be improved before we can go with a 100% electric automobile fleet. Meanwhile, I prefer plug-in hybrids as a bridge technology. Our plug-in charges at home, and handles most of our driving as an EV, carrying about 1/8 as much battery payload as a similar-sized full electric. And I don’t require major infrastructure changes in order to take a trouble-free vacation trip. And at least 75% of our miles are pure electric.

In terms of battery cost and resources used, 1 Tesla = 8 plug-in hybrids, for the same amount of lithium-ion batteries.

Or for fossil fuel consumption, 4 plug-in hybrids = 1 conventional automobile (assuming most of your electricity comes from non-fossil fuel sources)

Or for purchase cost, 1 Tesla = 1.5 - 2 plug-in hybrids. (Some other electric cars are quite a bit cheaper though)

NOTE: These are my own back of the envelope statistics. If you take repeated long trips, or your electricity comes largely from fossil fuels, a plug-in hybrid may not be much help. But the pure EV could look even worse by comparison.

[hellwurld]

sigh im such a tortured poet....

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

kill me

[reasonsforhope]

"A 1-megawatt sand battery that can store up to 100 megawatt hours of thermal energy will be 10 times larger than a prototype already in use.

The new sand battery will eliminate the need for oil-based energy consumption for the entire town of town of Pornainen, Finland.

Sand gets charged with clean electricity and stored for use within a local grid.

Finland is doing sand batteries big. Polar Night Energy already showed off an early commercialized version of a sand battery in Kankaanpää in 2022, but a new sand battery 10 times that size is about to fully rid the town of Pornainen, Finland of its need for oil-based energy.

In cooperation with the local Finnish district heating company Loviisan Lämpö, Polar Night Energy will develop a 1-megawatt sand battery capable of storing up to 100 megawatt hours of thermal energy.

“With the sand battery,” Mikko Paajanen, CEO of Loviisan Lämpö, said in a statement, “we can significantly reduce energy produced by combustion and completely eliminate the use of oil.”

Polar Night Energy introduced the first commercial sand battery in 2022, with local energy utility Vatajankoski. “Its main purpose is to work as a high-power and high-capacity reservoir for excess wind and solar energy,” Markku Ylönen, Polar Nigh Energy’s co-founder and CTO, said in a statement at the time. “The energy is stored as heat, which can be used to heat homes, or to provide hot steam and high temperature process heat to industries that are often fossil-fuel dependent.” ...

Sand—a high-density, low-cost material that the construction industry discards [Note: 6/13/24: Turns out that's not true! See note at the bottom for more info.] —is a solid material that can heat to well above the boiling point of water and can store several times the amount of energy of a water tank. While sand doesn’t store electricity, it stores energy in the form of heat. To mine the heat, cool air blows through pipes, heating up as it passes through the unit. It can then be used to convert water into steam or heat water in an air-to-water heat exchanger. The heat can also be converted back to electricity, albeit with electricity losses, through the use of a turbine.

In Pornainen, Paajanen believes that—just by switching to a sand battery—the town can achieve a nearly 70 percent reduction in emissions from the district heating network and keep about 160 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere annually. In addition to eliminating the usage of oil, they expect to decrease woodchip combustion by about 60 percent.

The sand battery will arrive ready for use, about 42 feet tall and 49 feet wide. The new project’s thermal storage medium is largely comprised of soapstone, a byproduct of Tulikivi’s production of heat-retaining fireplaces. It should take about 13 months to get the new project online, but once it’s up and running, the Pornainen battery will provide thermal energy storage capacity capable of meeting almost one month of summer heat demand and one week of winter heat demand without recharging.

“We want to enable the growth of renewable energy,” Paajanen said. “The sand battery is designed to participate in all Fingrid’s reserve and balancing power markets. It helps to keep the electricity grid balanced as the share of wind and solar energy in the grid increases.”"

-via Popular Mechanics, March 13, 2024

--

Note: I've been keeping an eye on sand batteries for a while, and this is really exciting to see. We need alternatives to lithium batteries ASAP, due to the grave human rights abuses and environmental damage caused by lithium mining, and sand batteries look like a really good solution for grid-scale energy storage.

--

Note 6/13/24: Unfortunately, turns out there are substantial issues with sand batteries as well, due to sand scarcity. More details from a lovely asker here, sources on sand scarcity being a thing at the links: x, x, x, x, x

[headspace-hotel]

Many people, especially USAmericans, are very resistant to knowing the plants and living according to the ways of the plants. They lash out with a mix of arrogance and fear: "Don't you know what bad things would happen if we lived a different way? There is a REASON for living this way. Would you have us go Back—backward to the time without vaccines or antibiotics????"

Ah, yes, the two immutable categories that all proposals for change fit into: Backward Change and Forward Change! Either we must invent a a futuristic, entirely new solution with SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY that further industrializes and increases the productivity of our world, or we must give up vaccines and antibiotics and become starving illiterate medieval peasants.

Every human practice anywhere on Earth that has declined, stopped, or become displaced by another practice, was clearly objectively worse than whatever replaced it. You see, the only possible reason a way of life could decline or disappear is that it sucked and had it coming anyway!!! Pre-industrial human history is worthless except as a cautionary tale about how miserable we would all be without *checks notes* factories, fossil fuels and colonialism. Obviously!

Anyway, who do you think benefits from the idea that pesticide-dependent, corporate-controlled industrialized monoculture farming liberates us all from spending our short, painful lives as filthy, miserable peasants toiling in the fields?

First of all, I think it's silly to act like farming is a uniquely awful way to live. I can't believe I have to say this, but the awful part of being a medieval peasant was the oppression and poverty, not the fact that harvesting wheat is a lot of work and cows are stinky. Same goes for farm labor in the modern USA: the bad part is that most people working farms are undocumented migrant workers that are getting treated like garbage and who can't complain about it because their boss will rat them out to ICE.

Work is just work. Any work has dignity when the people doing it are paid properly and not being abused. Abuse and human trafficking is rampant in agriculture, but industrialization and consolidation of small farms into gigantic corporate owned farms sure as hell isn't making it better.

Is working on a farm somehow more miserable than working in a factory, a fast food restaurant, or a retail store? Give me a break. "At least I'm not doing physical labor in the sun," you say, at your job where you're forced to stand on concrete for 8 hours and develop chronic pain by age 24.

When you read about small farmers going out of business because of huge corporations, none of them are going "Yay! Now that Giant Corporation has swallowed up all the farms in the area, we can all enjoy the luxurious privileges of the industrial era, like working RETAIL!" What you do see a lot of is farmers bitterly grieving the loss of their way of life.

And also, the fact is, sustainable forms of polyculture farming that create a functional ecosystem made up of many different useful and edible plants are actually way MORE efficient at producing food than a monoculture. The reason we don't do it as much, is that it can't be industrialized where everything is harvested with machines.

Some places folks are starting to get the idea and planting two crops together in alternating rows, letting the mutualistic relationship between plants boost the yields of both, but indigenous people in many parts of the world have been doing this stuff basically forever. I read about a style of agroforestry from Central America that has TWENTY crops all together on the same field.

Our modern system of farming is necessary for feeding the world? Bullshit! Our technology is very powerful and useful, but our harmful monocultures, dangerous pesticides, and wasteful usage of land and resources are making the system very inefficient and severely degrading nature's ability to provide for us.

What is needed, is a SYNTHESIS of the power and insights of technology and science, with the ancient wisdom and knowledge gained by closely and carefully observing Nature. We do not need to reject one, to embrace the other! They should be friends!

Our system thinks land is only used for one thing at a time. Even our science often thinks this way. A corn field has the purpose of producing corn, and no other purpose, so all other plants in the corn must be killed, and it must be a monoculture of only corn.

But this means that the symbiosis between different plants that help each other is destroyed, so we must pollute the earth with fertilizers that wash into bodies of water and cause eutrophication, where algae explode in number and turn the water to green goo. Nature always has variety and diversity with many plants sharing the same space. It supports much more animal life (we are animals!) this way. The Three Sisters" are the perfect example of mutualism between plants being used in an agricultural environment. The planting of corn, beans, and squash together has been traditionally used clear across the North American continent.

And in North America, the weeds we have here are mostly edible plants too. Some of them were even domesticated themselves! Imagine a garden where every weed that pops up is also an edible or otherwise useful crop, and therefore a welcomed friend! So when weeds like Amaranth and Sunflower pop up in your field, that should not be a cause for alarm, but rather the system of symbiosis working as it should.

A field of one single crop is limited in how much it can produce, because one crop fits into a single niche in what should be a whole ecosystem, and worse, it requires artificial inputs to make up for what the rest of the plant community would normally provide. The field with twenty crops does not produce the same amount as the monoculture field divided in twenty ways, but instead produces much more while being a habitat for wild animals, because each plant has its own niche.

[tucsonhorse]

Do you have the source for this? I'm curious how they're calculating this and what numbers they're using

When people say that cities are the real polluters, I kinda want to laugh at them

[sergal]

having sex with an offshore oil rig but shaking my head the entire time so everyone knows i dont agree with fossil fuel usage or the oil industry

[haberiler]

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[punkeropercyjackson]

Punk Percy Jackson headcanons but by an actual punk instead of someone who thinks skateboarding is an aesthetic

A remaster of an old post now that i've learned even more about how to be punk!!Posted for @sillycathorrors who when i asked if he wanted me to through with this post since i was debating wether to or not said yes♡This will include my Pjo s/i named Lex de los Santos so if that'll bother you,just don't read this and reminder that punk Percy is actually canon as per his writings so this is just letting him fully participate in the subculture!!

Percy is afrosolarpunk because he's monoracial black but multietchnic(american/dominican/greek)and the son of Poseidon so he's naturally deeply caring about enviormentalism and drawn to nature based aesthetics(and people,as seen by Lex being a Demeter kid)

He got into solarpunk because of Sally.She'd take him to the beach every other weekend to clean the beach with a group of her friends(and end each trip with lunch at the beach)

Thalia was his first real experience with the subculture head on and that's a huge reason he admired her so much and was lowkey jealous of her along with a bit of gender envy

Knows how to diy things that don't even exist(i'm sorry i'll never stop making this Percy joke,it's literally so fitting)

Straightedge(Smelly Gabe trauma)

Transfem bigender and uses any pronouns + a bunch of neos and was on estrogen but for a short amount of time compared to full transitions.Autistic too and that's a huge reason he's punk,both because of facing ableism and autism giving him punk personality traits

Radicalized Nico and Hazel,who are now goth punk and pastel goth punk respectively.The three of them and Lex are known as 'The Outcast Godlings' because of the usual treatment Hades/Pluto kids get the first two were no exception to and Percy and Lex's feelings of isolation and otherness even after getting to Camp Half-Blood,all of which were thankfully resolved by the end of Hoo and the beginning of Tods(Tales of Dead Seas,my sequel to it that happens instead of T.oa)

Owns a pair of colbat blue and black demonias that were a gift from Beckendorf and they're a little tight on him now but he still wears them to remember him by

Goes on petty crime sprees for fun,letting frustration out and as dates with Lex

Rachel,Lex and him are 'The Loser Trio',a nickname they got at Goode High they reclaimed for themselves,and Rachel is canonically punk like him since she's an activist and a huge weirdo(affectionate).Rachel is also nigerian yoruba and afrosolarpunk like Perce and Lex with Lex being pastel punk and blasian too(chinese-dominican/black-greek)so they all go to protests/riots and do charity/activism together starting all the way back to freshman year and Rachel uses Mr Dare's money to give reperations and buy gifts for her besties(from punk bussinesses ofc,otherwise what's the point?)

Intentionally travels via Blackjack,foot,Argo ||,etc so as to minimize fossil fuel usage,taught Rachel how to properly dispose of her paint water,teaches younger campers how to mend and alter their clothes so they last longer and attends mosh pits and underground parties on the regular with Lex on his arm and Nico and Hazel following behind

His favorite musicians are Mcr,Teezo Touchdown,Megan Thee Stallion,The Cure,The Misfits,Alt Black Era,Direct Hit!,Meet Me @ The Altar and Korn.Some of these aren't punk but punk is black so ofc he listens to rap and also blues and Lo-Fi Beats courtesy of LFB enthutiast Hazel!!He's a guitarist himself because Lex taught him how to play as they used to take lessons as a kid and gifted him for his 19th birthday,a sea blue diy'd guitar stacked with stickers they knew he'd love

He's 6'4 by the end of Tods and his hairstyles per book were:Baby dreads(TLT),wicks(TTC),twists(TLO),afro for most of SON because he didn't remember what he styles he likes but gives himself dreads with muscle memory by the end,makes sea material based beads for them in MOA and his hair is so long by the beginning of Tods he switches to locs

^^^Unmythologizably accurate Percy Jackson.She also loves flowy hemp pants and skirts and dyes them fun colors too,makes shawls and wraps for herself and her punk loved ones(including Sally!!)and she loves hair charms sooooo much and has a special sparkly pink sunflower one that's meant to represent Lex she saves for special occasions!

Very involved with the Demeter Cabin thanks to growing up best friends with Lex since The Lightning Thief-They were the first friend she made at camp,in fact!!Rip Annabeth's pick me ass but Lex is different-and Perlex actively try to get them involved in the camp garden

Almost entierly only weird/niche interests.She's obsessed with obscure podcasts,indie games,underrated cartoons,cult classic movies,non-corny musicals and less popular kinds of toys.The Outcast Godlings have matching Aquapets and Percy has the Beach Party Polly Pocket♡

Harrasses Poseidon into giving her money for Nico's chronic pain meds and mobility aids and helps Hazel rizz up girls as she's a baby transbian.They go to a Special ED school at Percy's convicement because she was supposed to be a Special ED kid but melted down so bad at overhearing Sally planning it she nevet tried to get her in properly and she regrets it to this day so she's making sure they get to live the happy childhoods she didn't.Nico is known as the outspoken activist nerd boy(affectionate)and Hazel is the pretty popular IT Girl who radicalizes her classmates with easy knowledge and encouragement and she does art that matches her beliefs

Including grafitti as she defaces public property with her familia y amigos y eventualmente su novia!!

Huge fan of energy drinks but his favorite is Cotton Candy Bang and Sally learned how to make punk themed blue food for the bit

Shark kin and catkin,specifically whale shark and calico cat(who're 99% female,tgirl Percy is her canon event).Lex is calico cat kin too for them soulmateisms and they discovered they're therians together by looking stuff up online together on Lex's bed at the dead of night and kept it a little them secret they provided tons of validation for too.Lex is also dragonkin,ghostkin and plantkin!

Percabeth is a cautionary tale to abuse survivors and intellectually disabled people about cutting off toxic normies.Lex hadn't seen much of Percy's relathionship with Annabeth until Hoo when the Eight Half-Bloods Shall Awnser The Call prophecy was spoken and it was inbetween then and Percy going missing that they learned the full details as reluctant camp co-leaders with her and realized she's abusive to her,planning to tell Percy when the time was right.The time turned out to be the MOA pre-climax when they were discussing everything that had happened over the years and Percy had a pit in his stomach as Lex and Hazel fell into their own pit afterwards too-That is to say,Tartarus.Hazel gets to unlock her true powers down there,as the Princess of The Underworld and The Unknown,and Lex does their best to care for and protect both of them while up on the surface Percy still hasn't broken up with Annabeth because too much was happening but the last straw is when she insulted Lex out of jealousy and she's so angry she dumps her on the spot and walks away despite it being the middle of a meeting.She also got the Hecate Mist storyline and no Nico relathionship retcon as symbolism/motifs for her finally making her own choices,including Lex,who she only didn't earlier because he didn't think he was allowed to

This follows up to Tales of Dead Seas,a year later Hoo sequel.The plot kickerstarter is Percy killing Zeus in a fit of rage and thus causing the greco-roman mythos world revolution Luke lied about wanting to do like the fascist he was,Luke also having been killed by Percy at the end of Pjo.The other mytho beings that're 'lesser' on the system than the gods gladly followed her and did their own things too and the mcs are Percy,Lex,Nico and Hazel in the four books of the last Percyverse series.'Elysium on Earth','Petallic','Arcane Rot' and 'Unmythologizable' are the titles in order,Sally opens up a family bussiness under 'Familia Jackson Beach Shack' in it and it chronicles Perlex's dating dynamic and Nico and Hazel as teens over the course of 4 years for that og Pjo throwback,including the chapter titles and the return of Rachel as an mc who basically lives at La Residencia Jackson at this point

Lex cracked Percy's egg via starting to date her with their own transmasc genderfluid and bigender but super femme identity making it kinda impossible for it to not happen and ofc she came out to them first and they showered her in affection,lended clothes that were too small on her she refused to not wear anyway and diy'd estrogen by their boygirlfriend.Percy's mermaidcore hair dye was spurred on by her transfeminism and Lex did it for her in an intimate moment as she nervously gripped their waist out of dysphoria she'd look ridicilous and they talked her down and kissed her face to help.Lex dyed their hair too in the final chapter of BOO,their bangs forest green as a self-love metaphor for their completed character development arc

Also Lex is a DC Comics fan and has Jason Todd as their favorite Robin and a crush on him so they told Percy she's a lot like him as a compliment and she got super offended,hand over her heart and everything,because she thinks Jason sucks(denial isn't just in The Kane Chronicles i see)

When it comes to makeup,she usually goes for glittery blue eyeliner tears,black glossy lipstick and edgy blue aquatic nails

Lex is the Team Mom to Percy's Team Dad when it comes to Nico and Hazel and befriended Nico in TTC too as his 'new older sister' by their offer when they found him crying over Bianca after meeting him briefly when Percy was showing him around and Hazel first thing they met in MOA as Hazel approached them onsight by recognizing them from Percy's talks of Lex,her not remembering anything except Sally at the start but Lex slowly came back to her when she eat a Camp Jupiter strawberry and noticed it didn't taste quite 'the same',sadness she didn't understand washing over her.Cute lil black punk found family sitch and Sally is the gilf-I mean abuela

Percy has the cocky flirty punk guy thing going on but it's a Lex exclusive

Perlex is also blue x pink,skateboarder x rollerbladder with Percy's board being ocean blue with black designs and Lex's skates are ultra girly and kiddy and huge x pint-sized.Lex has a raspy voice to match their rocker girl personality and Percy finds it so enchanting and they wear eachother's battle jackets and bought matching Ichigo Kurosaki and Orihime Inoue/Ichihime from Bleach figurines by store thrifting because they assigned their relathionship since they're just like them individually and together

Perseo 'Percy' Isadore Jackson:A punk legend

[ghelgheli]

According to Marx, metabolic rift appears in three different levels and forms. First and most fundamentally, metabolic rift is the material disruption of cyclical processes in natural metabolism under the regime of capital. Marx’s favourite example is the exhaustion of the soil by modern agriculture. Modern large-scale, industrial agriculture makes plants absorb soil nutrition as much as and as fast as possible so that they can be sold to customers in large cities even beyond national borders. It was Justus von Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry (1862) and his theory of metabolism that prompted Marx to integrate an analysis of the ‘robbery’ system of agriculture into Capital. [...]

Liebig harshly criticized modern ‘robbery agriculture’ (Raubbau), which only aims at the maximization of short-term profit and lets plants absorb as many nutrients from the soil as possible without replenishing them. Market competition drives farmers to large-scale agriculture, intensifying land usage without sufficient management and care. As a consequence, modern capitalist agriculture created a dangerous disruption in the metabolic cycle of soil nutrients. [...]

Marx formulated the problem of soil exhaustion as a contradiction created by capitalist production in the metabolism between humans and nature. Insofar as value cannot fully take the metabolism between humans and nature into account and capitalist production prioritizes the infinite accumulation of value, the realization of sustainable production within capitalism faces insurmountable barriers.

This fundamental level of metabolic rift in the form of the disruption of material flow cannot occur without being supplemented and reinforced by two further dimensions. The second dimension of metabolic rift is the spatial rift. Marx highly valued Liebig in Capital because his Agricultural Chemistry provided a scientific foundation for his earlier critical analysis of the social division of labour, which he conceptualized as the ‘contradiction between town and country’ in The German Ideology. Liebig lamented that those crops that are sold in modern large cities do not return to the original soil after they are consumed by the workers. Instead, they flow into the rivers as sewage via water closets, only strengthening the tendency towards soil exhaustion.

This antagonistic spatial relationship between town and country – it can be called ‘spatial rift’ – is founded upon a violent process of so-called primitive accumulation accompanied by depeasantization and massive urban growth of the working-class population concentrated in large cities. This not only necessitates the long-distance transport of products but also significantly increases the demand for agricultural products in large cities, leading to continuous cropping without fallowing under large-scale agriculture, which is intensified even more through market competition. In other words, robbery agriculture does not exist without the social division of labour unique to capitalist production, which is based upon the concentration of the working class in large cities and the corresponding necessity for the constant transport of their food from the countryside. [...]

The third dimension of metabolic rift is the temporal rift. As is obvious from the slow formation of soil nutrients and fossil fuels and the accelerating circulation of capital, there emerges a rift between nature’s time and capital’s time. Capital constantly attempts to shorten its turnover time and maximize valorization in a given time – the shortening of turnover time is an effective way of increasing the quantity of profit in the face of the decreasing rate of profit. This process is accompanied by increasing demands for floating capital in the form of cheap and abundant raw and auxiliary materials. Furthermore, capital constantly revolutionizes the production process, augmenting productive forces with an unprecedented speed compared with precapitalist societies. Productive forces can double or triple with the introduction of new machines, but nature cannot change its formation processes of phosphor or fossil fuel, so ‘it was likely that productivity in the production of raw materials would tend not to increase as rapidly as productivity in general (and, accordingly, the growing requirements for raw materials)’ (Lebowitz 2009: 138). This tendency can never be fully suspended because natural cycles exist independently of capital’s demands. Capital cannot produce without nature, but it also wishes that nature would vanish. [...]

The contradiction of capitalist accumulation is that increases in the social productivity are accompanied by a decrease in natural productivity due to robbery [... i]t is thus essential for capital to secure stable access to cheap resources, energy and food. [...]

The exploration of the earth and the invention of new technologies cannot repair the rift. The rift remains ‘irreparable’ in capitalism. This is because capital attempts to overcome rifts without recognizing its own absolute limits, which it cannot do. Instead, it simply attempts to relativize the absolute. This is what Marx meant when he wrote ‘every limit appears a barrier to overcome’ (Grundrisse: 408). Capital constantly invents new technologies, develops means of transportation, discovers new use-values and expands markets to overcome natural limits. [...]

Corresponding to the three dimensions of metabolic rifts, there are also three ways of shifting them. First, there is technological shift. Although Liebig warned about the collapse of European civilization due to robbery agriculture in the 19th century, his prediction apparently did not come true. This is largely thanks to Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented the so-called Haber-Bosch process in 1906 that enabled the industrial mass production of ammonia (NH3) by fixing nitrogen from the air, and thus of chemical fertilizer to maintain soil fertility. Historically speaking, the problem of soil exhaustion due to a lack of inorganic substances was largely resolved thanks to this invention. Nevertheless, the Haber-Bosch process did not heal the rift but only shifted, generating other problems on a larger scale.

The production of NH3 uses a massive amount of natural gas as a source of hydrogen (H). In other words, it squanders another limited resource in order to produce ammonia as a remedy to soil exhaustion, but it is also quite energy intensive, producing a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) (responsible for 1 per cent of the total carbon emission in the world). Furthermore, excessive applications of chemical fertilizer leach into the environment, causing eutrophication and red tide, while nitrogen oxide pollutes water. Overdependence on chemical fertilizer disrupts soil ecology, so that it results in soil erosion, low water- and nutrient-holding capacity, and increased vulnerability to diseases and insects. Consequently, more frequent irrigation, a larger amount of fertilizer and more powerful equipment become necessary, together with pesticides. This kind of industrial agriculture consumes not just water but large quantities of oil also, which makes agriculture a serious driver of climate change. [...]

[T]here remains a constant need to shift the rift under capitalism, which continues to bring about new problems. This contradiction becomes more discernible in considering the second type of shifting the metabolic rift – that is, spatial shift, which expands the antagonism of the city and the countryside to a global scale in favour of the Global North. Spatial shift creates externality by a geographic displacement of ecological burdens to another social group living somewhere else. Again, Marx discussed this issue in relation to soil exhaustion in core capitalist countries in the 19th century. On the coast of Peru there were small islands consisting of the excrement of seabirds called guano that had accumulated over many years to form ‘guano islands’. [...]

In the 19th century, guano became ‘necessary’ to sustain soil fertility in Europe. Millions of tons of guano were dug up and continuously exported to Europe, resulting in its rapid exhaustion. Extractivism was accompanied by the brutal oppression of Indigenous people and the severe exploitation of thousands of Chinese ‘c**lies’ working under cruel conditions. Ultimately, the exhaustion of guano reserves provoked the Guano War (1865–6) and the Saltpetre War (1879–84) in the battle for the remaining guano reserves. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark (2009) argue, such a solution in favour of the Global North resulted in ‘ecological imperialism’. Although ecological imperialism shifts the rift to the peripheries and makes its imminent violence invisible in the centre, the metabolic rift only deepens on a global scale through long-distance trade, and the nutrient cycle becomes even more severely disrupted.

The third dimension of metabolic shift is the temporal shift. The discrepancy between nature’s time and capital’s time does not immediately bring about an ecological disaster because nature possesses ‘elasticity’. Its limits are not static but modifiable to a great extent. Climate crisis is a representative case of this metabolic shift. Massive CO2 emissions due to the excessive usage of fossil fuels is an apparent cause of climate change, but the emission of greenhouse gas does not immediately crystallize as climate breakdown. Capital exploits the opportunities opened up by this time lag to secure more profits from previous investments in drills and pipelines. Since capital reflects the voice of current shareholders, but not that of future generations, the costs are shifted onto the latter. As a result, future generations suffer from consequences for which they are not responsible. Marx characterized such an attitude inherent to capitalist development with the slogan ‘Après moi le déluge!’ (Capital I: 381).

This time lag generated by a temporal shift also induces a hope that it would be possible to invent new epoch-making technologies to combat against the ecological crisis in the future. In fact, one may think that it is better to continue economic growth which promotes technological development, rather than over-reducing carbon dioxide emissions and adversely affecting the economy. However, even if new negative emission technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) are invented, it will take a long time for them to spread throughout society and replace the old ones. In the meantime, the environmental crisis will continue to worsen due to our current inaction. As a result, the expected effects of the new technology can be cancelled out.

Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene

[pinene]

Electric cars* are just genuinely evil and darksided to me. The issue is not that cars burn gas it’s that we REQUIRE every person to have a fucking car instead of investing in robust public transit. if one out of every handful of people owned a car and most of them didn’t even drive it much, the emissions would be like so negligible. but it’s wildly unbalanced! the solution is thus not to make those personal cars based on arcane creepy technology pretending to be an automobile because, at the user end, there are negligible emissions… thus eventually hoping to turn fossil fuel overuse into… rare earth mineral overuse ..? the problem. is not how the cars work guys. it’s that there’s too fucking many of them. I feel like I’m going insane

* big trucks, vans, etc are exempt imo since they do have the need for high torque at low speeds. plus, as utility vehicles, there will be a fixed number of them operated regularly for a very long time; cleaner emissions on the usage end is a fair deal here

[sreegs]

it's incredibly bizarre to grow up with a gas stove and use a gas stove basically your whole life then hear gas stove discourse. it's like when oregon residents freaked out about the law changing allowing anyone to pump their own gas at gas stations

i'm not gonna argue that gas stoves aren't bad for the environment because they use fossil fuels but like, i imagine that home gas stove use is a tiny fraction of gas usage compared to natural gas power plants. also induction/electric isn't necessarily a lesser impact if your power company runs on fossil fuels. on top of that you usually dont have a choice over if you have a gas or electric stove because you can't change it in most apartments (especially if there's no gas line) also it's expensive as fuck to replace it no matter which way you're going because you need a 240v circuit installed or gas pipe laid

however when you get to actually using a gas stove, the fear over gas leaks and burning your house down is incredibly irrational. like i get you might be a little nervous if you've never used a gas stove but like, it's not that scary. plus a gas cooktop is the best for cooking and temp control. just doesn't even come close

[communistkenobi]

reading this article about how climate change denialism is a way to express a hypermasculine anxiety to protect the continued western usage of fossil fuels, a “petro-masculinity” tied to the violent act of burning oil and gas as an expression of USAmerican sovereignty

[aerbiscuit]

So, this may be a super silly idea, but bear with me.

Giants are intriguing fantasy creatures. Depending on how big they are, their existence has massive implications for wherever they live. What do they eat, and how much/often do they have to do so? What is their population size? Where do they live that has enough room for them all? How does their waste not make large stretches of land filthy?

And, most importantly… do they fart?

No, for real, I’ve often thought about this. As a kid, I was taught that cow burps and farts contain huge amounts of methane that could threaten the atmosphere. Now, of course, I know that there are a ton of factors at play in this claim, all of which turn this glimmer of a fact into a misleading claim. (While cow farts, and especially burps, do contain a large amount of methane, the largest contributions to climate change are still human pollution and fossil fuel usage. Cow gas is remarkably small in comparison and we can change their diets to decrease their methane production anyway.)

Still, this has always made me wonder about the gas output of giants. How would their flatulence affect smaller creatures and the world around them?

… well, I now have a gassy mythology about giants. Read on for a peculiar fairy tale.

In my fantasy AU, giants exist. However, they all live on a small continent (which to them is a large island) far in the middle of a distant sea. This land is perfectly suited for their needs. A few large races of animals exist for them to eat meat from time to time, and certain quickly-growing species of fauna provide them with continuous sources of vegetation. They also eat bugs by breeding, collecting, and chowing down on them at once, kinda like how whales can subsist off large amounts of krill. The land is also large enough for them to handle the subject of their waste, which they’ve developed systems to dispose, reuse, and/or filter. They’re a smart race of beings and can live sustainably in their home country. However, they largely stay where they are, and any giant who attempts to travel to the smaller lands is seen as foolhardy and asking for trouble.

Legends say that the reason for the giants' isolation (stories which both the giants and the smaller folk tell) come from a time when lots of giants travelled around the world. Giants were friendly, and even set up homes in smaller lands to learn from the tiny races. There are still a few stories of friendly giants, and the good that they can do.

Unfortunately, many of the smaller races saw the giants as a threat. If a giant didn’t have the time or resources to set up food sources (bug farming, bringing livestock, etc.), they’d need to eat from the small folks’ land, which the small folk saw as decimating their resources. Giants also had to do a LOT of research into where they could piss or shit, unless they didn’t mind accidentally flooding or burying valuable land. As thoughtful as most giants are, you couldn’t help the occasional emergency, or just the handful of people who weren’t as considerate as the others.

And of course, there was the gas. Giants need to break wind too. It’s hard to stay around someone when one of their farts sounds like a thunderclap and produces clouds of smog that take up to an hour or so to fully dissipate. And if a giant strayed too far from a majority bug-based diet, those farts could get numerous and gnarly.

Finally, one cruel and bigoted wizard devised a plan to make enough small folk hate the giants to banish them. He used the entire freshwater lake that a group of traveling giants had claimed for their water supply to make an eternal potion of flatulence, one that was so strong, it altered your very biology into making you sensitive to most food sources. Any meal of standard meat or veggies would turn into a night full of farts, and that’s not counting eating the standard fart fare like beans, broccoli, sprouts, dairy, etc. He cast the spell, complicating it so that only he could possibly undo it, and waited.

Soon, the damage was done, and all the giants in the area turned into giant gasbags. Even if they stayed near their camps, neighboring villages could hear choruses of belching in the distance, or smell the results of dinner on the wind. Finally, enough people got so fed up that they passed official mandates of banishment. All giants, even the ones who didn’t drink from the lake, were sent away, and threatened with war if they returned.

The giants, who are peaceful folk and newly embarrassed by their tremendous eruptions of gas, didn’t put up a fight. They all packed their bags and sailed home.

Upon their return, the giant’s cycle of reproduction showed that the spell was more permanent than expected. Any offspring of a newly gassy giant with an unmodified person became half as gassy. If two gassy giants mated, then the offspring had full fart power. After enough generations of mating, all giants became gasbags to some extent. While the giants grew used to, and even happy with, their new powers, they knew this was the last nail in the coffin of their diplomacy. Now, no giant could try to live peacefully with the smaller races. Barely any giants visit the small lands even now.

The end.

… but, of course, the world goes on after “The End,” doesn’t it?

First, there were the unintentional side effects of the lake. After the expulsion of the giants, the wizard quickly used the last of his remaining power to neutralize the water. However, some damage was already done. While humans were the majority of the small races to hold issue with giants, most of the demi-humans (goat-mans, centaurs, satyrs, etc.) had no issue with giants and were happy to hang out with them, share meals with them…. and drink with them. This is the theory of why these races are flatulent even beyond their animal counterparts’ abilities. Their guts have been forever tainted by the same brew that doomed the giants.

Some of the demi-humans who liked the permanent changes to their digestive tracts acted quickly, bottling some of the water before the wizard neutralized his work. These potions of flatulence are incredibly rare, and possibly no more than legends, but people search for them to this day.

Then there are the members of the small races who don’t mind venturing out to visit the giants. After all, no rule was set up that they couldn’t visit, although some years had to pass before the giants were in a good enough mood to be visited. This is how the small amount of giant-to-small-person communication and research still persists.

And who knows? Maybe in enough time, relations will improve enough to reach the level that they used to be.

Until then, most giants will stay at home, entertaining only the most friendly (or peculiarly inclined) members of the races who banished them.

[tomorrowusa]

Russia and Iran are both terrorist states whose economies are propped up by fossil fuels.

If you'd like to see dictatorships and theocracies collapse, use less fossil fuel. Of course doing so is also helpful to the planet. 🌍

If I were an entrepreneur, I'd print up and sell stickers featuring pictures of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Iranian theocrat Ali Khamenei which people could place next to their thermostats and on their vehicle dashboards to remind them who is being empowered by oil and gas usage.

There is no downside to using less fossil fuel. Sustainable energy has a pro-democracy valence.