Climate

The German car industry has remained immensely profitable all the while driving itself off a cliff (!).

Bill Gates pretends to be good but has had his hand in many sketchy things including Epstein and climate denial here with Bjorn Lomborg.

With the price of solar panels continuing to go down, there’s no reason any surface that you see outside couldn’t generate electricity. That’s what they mean when they say Kardashev.

Hydrogen! Which irrelevant technology will Germany be financing next?

The point is that once again China is teaching us to think at scale. The future scale of a more developed, post-Western world is gigantic. If we are to have any hope of climate stabilization the only realistic policy, therefore, is not some twee Western European vision of “sustainability”, it is radical and transformative. Cities will be bigger, energy needs will be bigger, production will be bigger than anything we have previously conceived.

Paris has published a climate adaptation plan for a 50C future. In Berlin I guess we’ll just ignore it as long as possible.

A weird coincidence how a media campaign would lead to double digit billions in extra revenues for fossil fuel providers (and to worse outcomes for everybody wanting to heat their homes in Germany). Nothing behind this probably.

So much car traffic is absolutely unnecessary which makes it all the more galling that we allow people to poison everybody else by doing it.

Hundred percent sure that if the same policy would be applied to Berlin most car traffic would evaporate from our streets here immediately. Most traffic in my neighborhood is people without really that much to do who could be doing something other than driving and drug dealers.

What’s happening in Flint is a good example of how the social effects of institutional lapses are much more difficult to fix than just replacing a bunch of pipes. We’re seeing the same effects happening around COVID and its after effects and we’ll see many more examples of government distrust and chaotic confusion in the coming decades.

I made the mistake of opening the desktop Spotify app which does not really work anymore. The UI is broken and there’s lots of irrelevant stuff going on.

Judging from this article, it will probably not be good for the acceptance of new technologies long term to build data centers in drought struck areas.

What China has done in industry after industry is to flatten the supply curve by subsidizing hordes of producers. This spurs innovation, increases output and crushes margins. Value is not being destroyed; it’s accruing to consumers as lower prices, higher quality and/or more innovative products and services.

Data centres shouldn’t be using water for cooling in the first place. In the summer many parts of Europe are under water strain. It’s not weird that locals would oppose having a huge data center built near them.

I can’t believe I have to say this, but let’s do it anyway: Going to Mars is—just like the hyperloop—a distraction from the actual problems and solutions in front of us.

In the tech world we have a bunch of crypto bag holder VCs backing Trump hoping their investment will then pay off. Nothing to see there other than the moral emptiness expected of these people.

A quick look to what’s awaiting Germany-which has bet heavily on hydrogen cars-several decades in the future. California has a hydrogen highway which looks like it is on its way out.

Super useful and unfortunately increasingly relevant article about all the ways scientists are trying to quantify perceived heat.

Coffee is already incredibly under pressure due to climate change. The last thing it needs is well meaning but harmful legislative burdens from the EU.

Coming from an area in the center of Turkey where water was always scarce, it’s not really possible to be surprised by this development. Though if you talk to people locally of course many of them will continue to deny deveolpments because they have no other option.

I had previously posted about a deep dive of the connections of the anthroposophical movement with fascism.

But the nuclear exit decision was taken a generation ago and other than political troublemaking, nothing is served by wailing over spilled milk.

Old people screwing over future generations until we all die of climate change. A still life.

A comparison of the sustainability of different kinds of bikes and how progress in cycling has often come at the price of sustainability. Still however you spin it, electric cycling is much more efficient and sustainable than driving.

“This was an act of self-defense.”

Here’s an absolutely staggering number to take with you: four trillion dollars per annum

Cucumber saudis. Nice.

We have housing crises in many places and it’s remarkable how pernicious this issue is given the number of problems it would fix for us to have enough affordable homes for everybody.

It is beyond funny that the right wing conspiracy theorists have latched onto the idea of creating liveable, walkable cities as the next threat to humanity.

There is a lot in this piece on the Khaleeji Ideology and the collapse of future and landscape that is happening in the Gulf.

anti-anti-utopia

It always struck me as absurd that degrowth “couldn’t work”. At this point, it’s probably the only thing that can work.

https://twitter.com/SteveFi04457564/status/1558065690820624387

In dealing with the poverty that still plagued so much of the Indian populace, the Indian government had had to create electricity as fast as they could, and also, since they existed in a world run by the market, as cheaply as they could. Otherwise outside investors would not invest, because the rate of return would not be high enough. So they had burned coal, yes. Like everyone else had up until just a few years before. Now India was being told not to burn coal, when everyone else had finished burning enough of it to build up the capital to afford to shift to cleaner sources of power. India had been told to get better without any financial help to do so whatsoever. Told to tighten the belt and embrace austerity, and be the working class for the bourgeoisie of the developed world, and suffer in silence until better times came— but the better times could never come, that plan was shot. The deck had been stacked, the game was over. And now twenty million people were dead.

Wat is geweld? vroeg hij haar. Is het besmeuren van gebouwen gewelddadiger dan het blijven verbranden van kolen, terwijl we weten dat de broeikasgassen die daardoor in de atmosfeer terechtkomen een hoop leed veroorzaken, niet alleen voor toekomstige generaties, maar ook voor de minder gefortuneerde mensen die vandaag leven?

An in-depth study of the links between Nazism and Anthroposophy by Peter Staudenmaier at the Institute for Social Ecology with a lot of interesting bits in there.

I had no idea that most of Tesla’s FSD videos were fake. Huh.

Looking at this map of expansions we may have a tram line in front of our house in the near future.

The truth about cryptocurrencies.

Tiny cars are a huge thing and will be a much bigger deal than anything that Tesla is planning.

Elon Musk proving that he’s a peddler of garbage and global destruction once again.

[Cryptoart is] a crime against humanity.

I am immensely happy to see two friends launch Branch, a magazine about creating a sustainable internet. The way they put the magazine together mirrors the best practices of the future we should live in right now.

Canada and Russia are the big winners when it comes to climate change as can be seen in this piece about Climate Migration by Pro Publica.

A simple solution to this: how about you don’t lie to your kids?

“The technology is not the hard part. It’s already invented, but we have to pay ourselves to install it fast. So, again, that’s an economic question, and it doesn’t work in capitalism. We have the means right now to arrange for everybody alive today to have adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, education, and healthcare, within the biosphere’s carrying capacity.”

I had some people from the Greens explain to me how the SUV was not so bad after all (as my intuition told me). Turns out my intuition was right.

Caring Gardening Engendering Resurgence Nurture Contingency Knots Assemblages Terrestrial Interdependence Precarity The Dithering https://twitter.com/anabjain/status/1230150599007756289

I think there was another study about psychopathy in high status car drivers but for now this is good enough.

I thought this was a great interview with Kim Stanley Robinson but it turns out the Corona virus has not rewritten our imaginations enough, not enough at all.