Environmental Ethics: December 2024

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Farewell

It's exam day (hope you remembered WJ's advice on how to prepare), our last day in class. Your final report blog posts# are due Friday.

Last words, for now:

WJ's last published essay was inspired by his odd correspondent *Benjamin Paul Blood, who was convinced that nitrous oxide and other "anaesthetic" substances provide a revelatory key to greater depths of reality. That essay concluded:

...Let my last word, then, speaking in the name of intellectual philosophy, be his word.–“There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.–Farewell!” --A Pluralistic Mystic

But of course there is advice to be given: Be not afraid, keep asking questions, pay attention, stay healthy, don't worry, be happy, enjoy the journey, don't be a stranger...

And consider taking Bioethics in the Spring, and Philosophy of Happiness in the Fall.

*Read about Blood and his improbable family in John Kaag's book American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation

Keep reading:

Best new climate books https://fivebooks.com/category/environment/new-climate-books/
25 Inspiring climate change books https://earth.org/climate-change-books/
Cli-fi '24 https://medium.com/the-ultimate-cli-fi-book-club-for-sustainability/the-ultimate-cli-fi-book-club-2024-collapse-edition-8d194dbe6466

Course evaluations close on 12/12/2024. Look for link delivered to your inbox, embedded in D2L; and/or through D2L notifications.

#Final report blogpost

OPEN YOUR EMAIL AUTHOR INVITATION, then look for the NEW POST tab in the upper right on our blogsite (do NOT create a new blog, post your final report on our site)... The topic should complement, clarify, and elaborate on some central aspect of your final presentation. Share and defend your own view(s), if you have any. Try to imagine what your best critic would say, and how you'd respond. Address one or more of your discussion questions.... Aim for a minimum of 1,000 words... Include relevant links (at least half a dozen or so) in lieu of footnotes/bibliography, video & textual embeds (a couple), and graphics (one or two): let me know if you need instruction on how to do it... When referencing texts we've read in the course, cite page #s and abbreviations (MacA, McK, GT, etc.)... Make sure your post has formatted correctly. If not, use the Clear Formatting command in the toolbar in the upper right, above, to fix it... You can continue to edit and revise until the final draft is due...

Hydrogen teleported for first time in human history: 20 tons anywhere in the world

by Sanusha S. 12/02/2024

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/hydrogen-teleported-anywhere-world/9217/

There is decarbonization that the world seems to be racing toward; hydrogen is seen to be one of the players in the clean energy revolution. Storage and transport remain big challenges in hydrogen, but innovations such as Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers or LOHC are remolding the face of hydrogen, making it more affordable and efficient in distributing it. Recently, pioneering projects that prove the high-demand and transformative use of this technology in the UK and Scotland are occurring for global implications about greener tomorrow.

Green hydrogen transport utilizing oil infrastructure is a pioneering effort by Exolum

In a historic first, Exolum has created the world’s first commercial-size project that uses existing oil infrastructure to transport and store green hydrogen. It is based at the largest freight port in England, Immingham, and the project depends on organic hydrogen carriers, compounds that can store hydrogen in liquid form in a safe manner.

This explains the hydrogen presence and absorption as well as dissipation by the carriers through chemical reactions. They are thereby utilized in efficient storing and transport without extensive new infrastructure construction. With funding of £505,000 from the UK government, the project shows the huge potential LOHC technology holds.

With a test plan to move 20 tonnes of hydrogen through 1.5 kilometres of pipeline, this project presents a scalable model to meet increasing hydrogen requirements. By placing storage facilities in immediate proximity to demanding locations such as industrial hubs and ports, Exolum conceives an accelerated supply chain to push ahead the clean energy transition.

Continue Reading here: https://www.ecoticias.com/en/hydrogen-teleported-anywhere-world/9217/

A surprise solar boom reveals a fatal flaw in our climate change projections

Solar is surging, but so is humanity’s energy appetite. We need better models.

by Noah Gordon and Daevan Mangalmurti

Dec 1, 2024, 5:00 AM CST

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/388506/solar-energy-power-projections-climate-change-pakistan

When the satellites zoomed in, you could see the panels gleaming from space. Pairing images taken miles above the Earth with Chinese customs records, BloombergNEF solar analyst Jenny Chase and her team discovered this year that the rooftops of homes and factories across Pakistan are blanketed with solar panels. Catching their own government by surprise, Pakistanis have been installing a massive amount of solar power.

In the process, Pakistan has gone from an inconsequential solar market to the sixth-largest in the world. The country of 242 million has a power grid with a peak capacity of 46 gigawatts — that’s less than 4 percent of the US power supply for a country with more than two-thirds as many people. In the last three years, Pakistanis have imported more than 25 gigawatts of solar panels from China. This disorganized, bottom-up boom has increased Pakistan’s power supply by 50 percent.

The solar surge is driven by high local electricity costs. At 16.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, Pakistan’s electricity rate for businesses is 37 percent higher than its neighbor India, and more than double the average rate in Asia. Agreements made in the 1990s have kept the state stuck in expensive contracts with independent power producers, and power plants burn lots of liquefied natural gas, which became costlier after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. That same year, Pakistan fell into a foreign exchange crisis as the country’s dollar reserves plunged, which made everything more expensive.

All of this opened an opportunity for businesses and better-off Pakistanis to begin importing solar panels from China, which can pay for themselves in as little as two years and free their users from the expensive, unreliable grid. The middle class has started to do the same. The state has come under pressure to raise rates for the conventional grid to satisfy its contracts with power producers — which the increasingly shrinking, poorer customer base struggles even more to afford. Consumers who have made the switch to solar panels, like the owner of a factory that makes soccer balls in Sialkot, told the Financial Times, “Allah has given us this gift to get out of this mess.”

But there’s a bigger story here, beyond one nation’s problems with its power grid. What’s happening in Pakistan is the latest sign that energy authorities are underestimating how much clean power the world demands — and that energy models can suffer from the same biases as their makers. Those failures in number-crunching are not merely abstract. Failing to grasp how much energy is wanted, and the things people in places like Pakistan might be willing to do to get it, leaves the world unprepared to build, fund, and plan for a cleaner future.

Continues Here: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/388506/solar-energy-power-projections-climate-change-pakistan

Monday, December 2, 2024

Exam 2 audio review

Exam 2 audio review, Part 2... Part 1

Remember to open your AUTHOR invitations before they expire.

"Rubric"

Final report blogpost

If you’ve been up all night cramming, in other words, good luck. You’ll need it. But if you’ve been diligent, have steeped yourself in the subject all semester long, and either went out to play or to an early bed the night before, your luck will be the residue of design. You’ll do fine. Relax. But don’t try too hard to relax. It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not. Care later. On exam day just show up and do your best.

Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year Is…

A slang term for supposed mental damage done by overconsumption of trivial online content triumphed over a shortlist that also included "lore," "demure" and "slop."

"...It's been quite a journey for "brain rot," which triumphed over a shortlist of contenders including "lore," "demure," "romantasy," "dynamic pricing" and "slop." According to Oxford, its earliest known appearance was in 1854, in "Walden," Henry David Thoreau's classic account of moving alone to a cabin in the woods.

"While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot," Thoreau lamented, "will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?"

The answer, apparently, is no. These days, according to Oxford, it's often invoked by young people on social media to describe the "supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state," particularly stemming from overconsumption of trivial online content..."

nyt

Sunday, December 1, 2024

Better times

Moving beyond the end…

"No wonder there is no lack of prophets who prophesy the early eclipse of our civilization. I am not one of these pessimists; I believe that better times are coming."

— The World As I See It (1934) by Albert Einstein
https://a.co/f9qt4Pe

TEXTS Fall '24

First things first--a proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don't they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.”
― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.”
― John May, The Greenpeace Story

“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”
― T.S. Eliot

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”
― Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the
environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
― Ivan Illich

	Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) http://michaelpollan.com/
5/14/15, 10:57 AM All the lectures and talks from Edible Education 101 are now online. All told, a great introduction to food politics bit.ly/1Fausvx