What the Silicon Valley Prophet Sees on the Horizon

Stewart Brand coined the term "personal computer" and was one of the first to envision what digital technology would become. He knows it got messy. He thinks tech can clean itself up.

...Mr. Brand opened the original "Whole Earth Catalog" by writing, "We are as Gods and we might as well get good at it." In his 2007 book, "Whole Earth Discipline," he modified his call to arms: "We are as Gods and HAVE to get good at it." His book endorsed nuclear power, genetically modified crops, dense cities and geoengineering.

The book was greeted by many environmentalists with outrage, and many still view him as a turncoat.

Nonetheless he has held fast to his view that nuclear power will be necessary to make the transition away from fossil fuels. At the same time, he acknowledges that he has been surprised by the rapid progress being made in other sustainable technologies. Solar got better faster than he ever expected, he said, as did battery capacity. In the end, for Mr. Brand it remains a question of perspective.

Not long ago he tweeted: "Interesting: how much bad news is anecdotal and good news is statistical. (And how invisible the statistical is.) Still, if only one of the two can be good news, I would rather it be the statistical. It accumulates toward qualitative change that lasts." nyt

In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things

The truth is new and counterintuitive: we have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels. 

By Bill McKibben

https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/in-a-world-on-fire-stop-burning-things

Podcast: Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket

Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket
Pushkin Industries and BBC Radio 4

Elon Musk's visions of the future all stem from the same place: the science-fiction he grew up on. To understand where Musk wants to take the rest of us - with his electric cars, his rockets to Mars, his meme stocks, and tunnels deep beneath the earth — Harvard professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore looks at those science fiction stories and helps us understand what Musk missed about them. The Evening Rocket explores Musk's strange new kind of extravagant, extreme capitalism — call it Muskism — where stock prices are driven by earnings, and also by fantasies. Follow along on Twitter @ElonMuskPodcast. From Pushkin Industries and BBC Radio 4. Pushkin Industries may use this feed in the future to debut new podcasts from our catalog. If you'd like to hear more from Jill Lepore, check out her podcast The Last Archive.

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/elon-musk-the-evening-rocket/id1591294233

Good news

I collect climate good news (not to ignore the bad, but to keep people motivated to make more climate good news and face the bad). pic.twitter.com/DpCWaasHKV

— Rebecca Solnit (@RebeccaSolnit) March 13, 2022

Tweet by Bill McKibben on Twitter

	Bill McKibben ⁦‪@billmckibben‬⁩ A weird time to be happy about anything, but even for veteran authors always a thrill when 1st galleys of a new book arrive. This won't be on sale till May 31, but I'm very fond of it (as close to memoir as I'll ever get). And thanks to publisher for allowing my long subtitle... pic.twitter.com/0qhPFlojBF   3/11/22, 5:05 PM

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

The Future Is Electric (review by Bill McKibben)

Because electricity is so much more efficient than combustion, totally electrifying our country would cut primary energy use about in half.

If you're looking for faint gray linings to a very dark cloud, there is, I suppose, one slight benefit of humanity's three-decade delay in dealing with climate change: we get to see the dimensions of the problem quite starkly because it looms so large. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with its Sixth Assessment Report in early August, underlined what we already know: the world is on a trajectory for destabilizing increases in temperature. The report is epic in scope and quality, the product of thousands of scientists volunteering long hours to sift through millions of pages of research. But it pales before the reports that nature issued this summer: record heat waves from Canada to the Mediterranean, record fires from California to Siberia, record floods from Belgium to Henan. If people in eastern US cities looked up from reading newspaper accounts of the IPCC report, they could see a smoky haze in the sky, the product of blazes a continent away.

That haze lets us see one thing more clearly: some of the solutions long on offer—from a carbon tax to changes in personal behavior—no longer qualify as enough, at least by themselves, since they won't work as quickly as physics demands. The IPCC has told us we need to cut emissions in half in this decade to have any hope of meeting the targets set in the Paris Agreement. There's one obvious route to reaching that goal, and it's the path that Saul Griffith describes in Electrify: we must immediately figure out how to electrify everything we do, and we must supply that electricity with non-carbon energy. The era of setting things on fire—coal, gas, oil, wood—to produce power must end. Instead, we'll have to rely almost entirely on the large flame that burns 93 million miles away.

Born in Australia and educated at MIT, Griffith is now a Californian. He's an engineer and inventor, the recipient of a MacArthur grant, and a serial entrepreneur; among other things, he founded Otherlab, a research and development firm that studies energy usage across the US, and Rewiring America, a nonprofit that promotes the movement to "electrify everything." He's apparently also apolitical (which undermines his analysis, but more on that later). What he understands, above all, is where energy comes from in our world and how it's used. His highly detailed flow charts showing things like the energy demands of outpatient health clinics—roughly equal, we learn, to those of houses of worship—are scattered throughout the book, undergirding his analysis.

As his title suggests, Griffith is fairly single-minded. Electrification is to climate change as the vaccine is to Covid-19—perhaps not a total solution, but an essential one. He begins by pointing out that in the United States, combustion of fossil fuels accounts for 75 percent of our contribution to climate change, with agriculture accounting for much of the rest. (His charts, confusingly, use "CO2 emissions" and "greenhouse gas emissions" interchangeably; given the emerging prominence of methane as the other significant greenhouse gas, this conflation is misleading, but not enough to dent the basic outline of his argument.) The US uses about 101 quadrillion BTUs (or "quads") of energy a year, and Griffith's data is so granular that he can tell you how much of that goes, for example, toward driving children to school and church (0.7 percent), flying military jets and transport planes (0.5 percent), or lighting billboards (0.005 percent). (continues)

Bill McKibben

A champion of the unplugged, earth-conscious life, Wendell Berry is still ahead of us

The writer and farmer's impassioned arguments on farming, technology, and the urban-rural divide have taken on a new urgency.

PORT ROYAL, Kentucky — Wendell Berry doesn't like screens. The 85-year-old writer doesn't own a TV, computer, or cellphone. If you call the landline at his country home in Port Royal, you won't reach an answering machine. When he reads this profile, it will be because someone else printed it out. And, if his general approach to life is any indication, he will probably take his time.

It's virtually impossible to imagine life in the modern world without our technological accessories, but Berry has consistently presented this spartan circumstance as a compelling proposition: An unplugged life, rooted in nature, he has argued, is the key to fulfillment.

As urban farms and tiny homes and movements to unplug proliferate, it's clear that Wendell Berry is, once again, ahead of us.

Perhaps most known for his 1977 bestselling book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, the writer and farmer has served as a moral beacon to Americans for half a century, warning of the dangers of consumerism, industrial agriculture, and the dissolution of rural communities. Now, as we face the greatest environmental crisis in history and grapple with deep polarization, his impassioned arguments on subjects ranging from industrial farming to technology have taken on a new urgency... (continues)

Michael Pollan

The Latest U.N. Climate Report Paints Another Grim Picture | The New Yorker

…An abridged version of the report, the so-called Summary for Policymakers, would seem to obviate the need for dystopian fiction. "The rise in weather and climate extremes," the summary notes, has already led to "irreversible impacts." Heat waves have become hotter, droughts deeper, and wildfires more frequent. These changes are "contributing to humanitarian crises" that are driving people from all regions of the world out of their homes. Those who have done the least to cause the problem are likely suffering the most from it. What the report calls "global hotspots of high human vulnerability" include East Africa, Central America, and small island nations. So far, at least, attempts to adapt to the changes have been wildly inadequate—"focused more on planning" than actual implementation…

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-latest-un-climate-report-paints-another-grim-picture

Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age | The New Yorker

I asked him if he retains any of his youthful hope that humanity can avoid a cataclysm. He replied that he's become more careful in his use of the word "hope": "Jesus said, 'Take no thought for the morrow,' which I take to mean that if we do the right things today, we'll have done all we really can for tomorrow. OK. So I hope to do the right things today."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/28/wendell-berrys-advice-for-a-cataclysmic-age

The Youth Movement Trying to Revolutionize Climate Politics | The New Yorker

…throughout American history, "whenever we have achieved a phase change it's been young people making it happen."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/the-youth-movement-trying-to-revolutionize-climate-politics

Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll

From "Don't Look Up" to Greta Thunberg videos to doomsaying memes, we are awash in warnings that we are almost out of time. But the climate crisis is outpacing our emotional capacity to describe it.

...Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we must abandon to address global warming is the anesthetizing stream of global warming content itself. As David Wallace-Wells writes in his 2019 book "The Uninhabitable Earth," climate-themed disaster films do not necessarily represent progress, as "we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by restaging them in theaters of our own design and control." Even YouTube videos of climate conferences can slip into this role. As we frame an activist like Thunberg as a kind of celebrity oracle, we transfer our own responsibilities onto a teenager with a preternatural command of dismal statistics. We once said that we would stop climate change for the benefit of our children, but now we can tell ourselves that our children will take care of it for us...

Amanda Hess 

A self-serving argument for carnivorous eating

(Or omnivorous, per Michael Pollan in "Omnivore's Dilemma"...)

If you care about animals, you should eat them. It is not just that you may do so, but you should do so. In fact, you owe it to animals to eat them. It is your duty. Why? Because eating animals benefits them and has benefitted them for a long time. Breeding and eating animals is a very long-standing cultural institution that is a mutually beneficial relationship between human beings and animals. We bring animals into existence, care for them, rear them, and then kill and eat them. From this, we get food and other animal products, and they get life. Both sides benefit. I should say that by ‘animals’ here, I mean nonhuman animals. It is true that we are also animals, but we are also more than that, in a way that makes a difference...
https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-care-about-animals-it-is-your-moral-duty-to-eat-them?utm_medium=Social

Trees also breathe

How Do You Mourn a 250-Year-Old Giant?

Protecting trees in public areas is a no-brainer. Protecting them on private land is a far greater challenge.

We need to stop thinking of trees as objects that belong to us and come to understand them as long-lived ecosystems temporarily under our protection. We have borrowed them from the past, and we owe them to the future... Margaret Renkl

This Is No Way to Be Human - The Atlantic

...we need to be more mindful of what this technology has cost us and the vital importance of direct experiences with nature. And by "cost," I mean what Henry David Thoreau meant in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run..." Alan Lightman

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/01/machine-garden-natureless-world/621268/

An Evangelical Climate Scientist Wonders What Went Wrong

Katharine Hayhoe doesn't see the love in many of her fellow Christians. She still has hope we can all do better.

Such is the grimly politicized state of science these days that the descriptors typically used to explain who Katharine Hayhoe is — evangelical Christian; climate scientist — can register as somehow paradoxical. Despite that (or, indeed, because of it), Hayhoe, who is 49 and whose most recent book is "Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World," has become a sought-after voice for climate activism and a leading advocate for communicating across ideological, political and theological differences. "For many people now, hope is a bad word," says Hayhoe, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy as well as a professor of political science at Texas Tech. "They think that hope is false hope; it is wishful thinking. But there are things to do — and we should be doing them."

... nyt

Free E-Bikes for Everyone!

We're in the middle of a climate crisis. We need big ideas.

nyt

“Our house is on fire”

"...Greta Thunberg, the 18-year-old Swedish activist who, in 2018 after Sweden's fierce hot summer of wildfires and omens of disaster, sat outside the Swedish parliament every day to get her message across. Her message was simple: "Our house is on fire."
Five words, not one wasted, and you could paint it on any wall and everyone would know what you mean.

Children have great power to shame the rest of us, as every parent knows, and this cause is worth their effort. It's about the survival of our kind. Everything we love is in the balance, language, art, music, history, the art of story, dance, Eros, baseball, bird-watching, and the effect of apocalypse on the bond market would not be good..."
https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/#:~:text=Greta%20Thunberg%2C%20the,not%20be%20good.

Tech Can’t Fix the Problem of Cars

Flashy new car technology may be exciting, but it might also be distracting us from what we need.

...Our health and that of the planet will significantly improve if we switch to electric cars. They are one focus of the global climate summit underway in Glasgow. And taking error-prone drivers out of the equation could make our roads much safer. But making better cars isn't a cure-all.

Popularizing electric vehicles comes with the risk of entrenching car dependency, as my New York Times Opinion colleague Farhad Manjoo wrote. Driverless cars may encourage more miles on the road, which could make traffic and sprawl worse. (Uber and similar services once also promised that they would reduce congestion and cut back on how many miles Americans drove. They did the opposite.)

...

nyt

Greta animated

	New York Times Opinion ⁦‪@nytopinion‬⁩ "Things may look dark, but I'm telling you there is hope. And that hope comes from the people, from democracy, from you," says ⁦‪@GretaThunberg‬⁩. pic.twitter.com/dAL63BPFnP   10/27/21, 7:32 AM

Future-world

	Dr. Alan Marshall ⁦‪@DrAlanMarshall‬⁩ This is a futuristic vision of super-ecofriendly cities -- set 100 years from now. (Film by World Economic Forum) See: ecotopia2121.com pic.twitter.com/zAhCFAZc0c   10/5/21, 10:12 PM