Elon’s Academy

We’d better imagine something completely different, and fast. “The scenario that follows,” cartoonish though it is, “is built entirely on Musk’s own statements.” More than “perplexing”… “Imagine a day in 2035. …students port their Neuralinks into Grokipedia modules on history. They learn that the term “slave” originally referred to white people and the British Empire was important mostly for ending African slavery. Terms like “racism” and “sexism” never appear as they have been proven to correlate directly with the “woke mind virus”—considered eradicated since 2032. The great error of history in the dark years of the early twenty-first century was that “weak makes right.” This was part of what is described as the “vampire cult” of education now mercifully superseded. The powerful, she learns, should never apologize. Even great civilizations, though, do not last forever. She absorbs the surprising fact that all empires have fallen for the same reason: low birth rates. Fewer people mean not only less labor power—no longer relevant due to the replacement of almost all workers by humanoid robots—but, more importantly, less human intelligence. As she has been taught many times, intelligence is the “the primary evolutionary vector for humans.” On guard against further decline, her science class teaches her about the latest developments in selective human breeding for higher intelligence, including “iterated embryo selection” which allows for choosing specific genetic alleles and cross-fertilizing them without implanting them in a womb, as well as the now-standard “spell-checking” of genetic code to remove all mutations. Learning about this technology is framed as a patriotic duty to ensure strong offspring and reduce future burdens on the privatized health system. It is incumbent on smart women like her to produce at least 2.1 children. She is reminded again of the self-evident truth that there are only two genders and of the evils of past decades, when people changed their genders in what is now recognized as “child mutilation and sterilization.” Such actions are now punishable by imprisonment. More important of course is the pursuit of digital superintelligence. Advances have already made possible the creation of a fleet of humanoid robots ten times the human population on earth. They are a constant presence on streets and in homes. The school itself is maintained and guarded by them. They also lead the gym class, which doubles as border defense education with drills and carbon-fiber weapons. On the way home, the air is hazy with vapor and filled with a low-level hum from the cooling towers of the Neural Districts—massive data center complexes ringing the city. A Tesla sign on a fence reads “Data is Sovereignty.” Asking her parents why the trees are dead and the streambeds dry, they respond “critical infrastructure.” At home, the lights are dim because “nonessential use” is rationed to supply the data centers at peak hours. She talks to her parents about Mars. Starship is now launching twenty times a day and the rockets have become fully reusable, but the launch window only comes every two years. Promotional videos and gleeful simulations populated by animated companion AIs circulate constantly on X. One more push, one more sacrifice, they all sing, and humanity will ascend.” — Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff https://a.co/0i68r6H4

Damages

…smoke drifts across borders when there’s a big fire, but carbon dioxide constantly drifts across every border every day. And if you could see carbon dioxide, and watch its flow over time, the biggest single cloud has emanated from the United States. China may catch us someday but we’re the ones who have produced the current mess. 

I’m sitting listening to David Wallace-Wells lecture this morning at the Chautauqua Institution, and he reminds us that the carbon humans have produced “weighs more than everything we have ever built on the surface of this planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life on the planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life and buildings combined.”

So—if there are “damages” to be paid, who should pay them? Canada, whose forests are burning? Or America, who set those forests on fire. 

This is not an academic question. Lots of players are trying to extract damages from the fossil fuel companies…

Bill McKibben

https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/smoke-gets-in-yourhole-where-your?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

“Climate fiction” search results on audible

…

Climate and Punishment

Vigil

by George Saunders.

Random House, 174 pp., $28.00

Climate change is a strange kind of crime. In some sense we are all guilty of it, and all still in the process of committing it. Our car rides and plane trips, coffees and burgers, heating and cooling and clothing and everything else are paid for in blood—contributing, every moment, to the suffering and destruction global warming brings. “The onus,” as the New York Times editorial board admonished its readers a few years ago, “is on society as a whole.”

In another sense, though, a few of us are far, far guiltier than the rest. Most of us, for instance, are not the oil company executives who were told about the effects of CO₂emissions back in the 1970s and decided that the threat to their business outweighed the threat to the planet. Most of us are not the politicians they funded to vote against emissions regulations, or the scientists who helped them by toning down the conclusions of federal climate commissions, or the PR consultants they hired to sow doubt about the subject. (As the climate litigation scholar Benjamin Franta has written, a central part of their strategy has been “shifting the blame” for pollution “onto consumers and society as a whole.”¹)

Most of us are not, say, Lee Raymond, the chairman and CEO of Exxon from 1993 to 2005, who called manmade climate change an “unproved theory” years after the company’s own research had confirmed it, who declared—in what Bill McKibben has called “the single most audacious speech of the era”—that trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “defies common sense and lacks foundation in our current understanding of the climate system,” and who oversaw an elaborate campaign of misinformation and denial to prevent action from being taken. Most of us are not Duane LeVine, who in the late 1980s, as Exxon’s manager of strategy and science development, helped develop the “Exxon Position,” a plan to emphasize uncertainty and the “socio-political realities” around climate change in order to prevent a “crisis mentality” from taking hold. Most of us are not James Inhofe, the longest-serving senator in the history of Oklahoma (1994–2023), who chaired the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, received millions of dollars in donations from the fossil fuel industry, and called global warming a “hoax” and a “conspiracy” in speeches and books throughout his career.

In this sense, the destruction of our climate is an increasingly familiar sort of crime: one that has gone unpunished. The only people who have been sent to prison are those who have protested against it… NYRB

Earth Is Done For. ‘Earth 7’ Is About What’s Next.

… Unferth writes with haunting beauty about our reckless destruction. During a deep-sea field trip with other children, Dylan sees an underwater graveyard composed of “a thousand creatures the size of elephants, sea animals previously unknown, skeletons under spotlights.” “A new beginning was not on the way,” Dylan realizes. “She was part of the rubble.”

But “Earth 7” is a celebration as much as a lamentation. We’re part of this world, “a place where terrible and wonderful beauties are coming to pieces at every moment and others are constructing themselves out of the remains.” Unferth reminds us that while we may be facing microchip uploads and Martian colonies, our human and planetary heritage endures. Love, wonder, horror and all of life — it’s here in “Earth 7” and here on actual Earth. It’s our home, while we can keep it.

https://www.nytimes.com/shared/v1/cl-single.html?smid=url-share&rsrc=cl-share&uri=nyt%253A%252F%252Farticle%252Fdac547f0-de18-51f2-8d69-748520fb4a96&ca=602c188aef3355858d101b7b4d7b4eab&smid=nytcore-ios-share&rsrc=cl-share

Bikes are DEI?

…Last week Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, (whose qualification for office was appearing on the RV-based “reality” show “Road Rules,” and who has just completed a similar gas-guzzling trip with his family sponsored by Toyota and Shell) declared that he was ending federal funding for bike paths because they were “DEI.” As Edith Olmsted reported, federal grants under Biden in 2021 2021 grants funding bike lanes noted that they would serve to “improve infrastructure, strengthen supply chains, make us safer, advance equity, and combat climate change.” … Bill McKibben https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/tour-de-planet?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate

Here’s the good news: Green energy is getting better and cheaper, faster than we had ever dared hope.

This next sentence was unimaginable even a few years ago: In April, the energy think tank Ember found that all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power. That is wild.

But here is the bad news: Climate change is accelerating. We’re discovering new ways that the climate system is more fragile, more sensitive to emissions, than we previously had thought...

Ezra Klein, Bill McKibben

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000011018052/the-very-good-and-very-bad-news-on-climate.html?smid=url-share&smid=nytcore-ios-share