Remember this important comparison when reading an article about a new breakthrough in carbon sequestration and storage:
Check whether the price per unit of atmospheric carbon stored is better than buying some coal and putting it in a hole.
Pro tip: It never is, and will never be. CSS is a scam. Coal in a hole wins every time. Hell, it STARTS in a hole. Just leave it there! Win/win!
People stand up for a reason.
A few excerpts here from an excellent op-ed piece by climate scientist Peter Gleick (@petergleick)...
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It's not as though we weren’t warned. Scientists have been sounding the alarm about growing climate risks for decades. Despite repeated warnings, we have failed to adequately mitigate or adapt to climate change.
Incredibly, leading policymakers and pundits continue to deny scientific reality. In 2020, after an earlier series of devastating wildfires, then-president Donald Trump dismissed concerns over climate change, telling one California official “I don't think science knows” about global warming. “It'll start getting cooler, you just watch.”
Five increasingly hot years later, Trump is continuing to ignore the science during the Los Angeles disaster, preferring instead to point fingers at California water policy, diversity and inclusion efforts, endangered fish, and his political opponents.
These fires were unambiguously influenced by human-caused climate change. Global temperatures are accelerating upward — 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history, and all 10 of the hottest years have been in the last decade, continuing a century-long trend of warming.
Extreme hydrologic events, including floods and droughts, are accelerating, and Southern California is intensely dry. Los Angeles has received essentially no rainfall in over 10 months, with the driest start to a rainy season on record, parching soils and vegetation and setting the stage for extreme winds to intensify and spread the fires.
We know what’s coming, but we also know what to do. In addition to aggressively accelerating the energy transition away from fossil fuels, changing individual behavior, and reducing carbon emissions from other sources, we have to expand efforts to build resilience to unavoidable impacts.
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Yes, we do know what to do. But the question is — WILL it ever be done?
FULL OP-ED ➡️ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/los-angeles-fires-force-us-to-confront-our-dystopian-present/
💵 💵 Business As Usual 💵 💵
When the bottom line means more than the poverty line, when stock and bond futures are more important than our futures, when the investment climate counts for more than the actual climate, this is what you get…
➡️ https://www.dw.com/en/billionaire-wealth-growing-faster-than-ever-says-oxfam-report/a-71345320
Fascinating to see how fast Paris cleaned up its smog pollution.
Equally fascinating: how this same graphic has been making the round from French via German to now English meme status
Article link here for your ease of reference:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/4/24312002/ev-plug-and-charge-universal-protocol-sae-pki-roaming
Mastodon Family:
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Fantastic news! A universal EV “Plug and Charge” interoperable protocol will roll out in 2025.
Say goodbye to the soup of EV charging apps. The goal: just plug in & have automatic, seamless secure payment processing.
Beyond cause for rejoicing by EV owners, this is an important step towards secure vehicle-to-grid & bidirectional charging too.
Jonathan Watts is not mincing his words when he (rightly) concludes that:
'The unnatural disaster in Spain – Europe’s deadliest flash floods in at least half a century – is evidence of two undeniable truths: the human-caused climate crisis is just starting to pick up ferocity & we need to quickly kill the fossil fuel industry before it kills us'!
We have been warned, yet still we do too little; this is can that can no longer be kicked down the road!
"Emissions generated by the lifestyles of 50 of the world’s richest people are greater than the emissions generated by 155m people combined.
"Oxfam has called for a ban, or punitive tax, on luxury consumptions — at 90% tax or above — such as private jets, superyachts, SUVs, and frequent air travel."
Latest comic on Big Tech's climate hypocrisy
i dont understand why these folks in #CancerAlley dont want the 15 jobs this ammonia plant will provide
Floods in Europe.
Google and Microsoft recently admitted their emissions are soaring as they build out data centers to power the AI boom.
But new analysis from The Guardian suggests the data center emissions of Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple are 662% higher than the companies reporting.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-center-gas-emissions-tech
I added a new 🌱 Damaged Earth Catalog🌿 entry, co-written with, and about the work of, @mordremoth
❤️ Disability Driven Development🛠️
https://damaged.bleu255.com/Disability_Driven_Development/
A direct link to Amelia's work: https://spoonstack.org/
What a set of headlines, can't get any more dystopian than that. The rich go into vanity trips into space, while the common people down below drown.
The climate review for summer 2024 in the Arctic is now posted in the Alaska and Arctic Climate Newsletter. Spoiler: warm and wet overall (but of course not everywhere). @Climatologist49
https://alaskaclimate.substack.com/p/arctic-summer-2024-climate-summary
The new Starbucks CEO, Brian Niccol, is going to commute to the office 3 days a week by private jet.
Don't forget to take your reusable cup to the coffee shop!
#climate #ClimateCollapse #environment #EatTheRich
Microsoft and Google have admitted their emissions are soaring as they build out new data centers to power generative AI.
On #TechWontSaveUs, I spoke with Sasha Luccioni to discuss why AI is so computationally intensive and is a climate problem.
https://techwontsave.us/episode/229_generative_ai_is_a_climate_disaster_w_sasha_luccioni
Roger Hallam is one of the founders of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, and a leader in the fight against global climate change. I would like you to read this statement he posted yesterday… 🧵1/4
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I've just been sentenced to 5 years in prison.
The longest ever for nonviolent action.
The 'crime'?
Giving a talk on civil disobedience as an effective, evidence-based method for stopping the elite from putting enough carbon in the atmosphere to send us to extinction.
I have given hundreds of similar speeches encouraging nonviolent action and have never been arrested for it. This time I was an advisor to the M25 motorway disruption, recommending the action to go ahead to wake up the British public to societal collapse.
I was not part of the planning or action itself.
In the trial, I swore before God to tell the truth. The truth is the science. The science is clear. We're heading for billions of deaths and ecological collapse. To prove this, I presented the jury with a 250-page dossier of leading scientists' research as evidence in my defence. This was denied by the judge as an invalid - climate science is now illegal in the British courtroom.
I then began to speak about the apocalyptic conditions humanity faces - floods, wildfires, mass heat deaths - and was silenced by the judge. He sent out the jury and threatened to arrest me if I didn't stop. Instead, I stayed in the dock and argued that until I was given the right to complete my defence – I would not move. Even the prosecution tried to argue in my defence and the judge let me continue.
When the jury had shuffled in again, I spoke about the legal concept of “equality of arms” – that as the prosecution had had a right to lay facts over a whole week, I also wanted an equal opportunity. I spoke of various cases where juries had acquitted defendants when they had heard the facts, such as the Extinction Rebellion cracking of Shell's windows in 2018 as a reasonable action against criminal destruction. The Dutch Supreme Court has even said that all governments have a legal obligation to prevent the emission of greenhouse gases. Whilst the prosecution accepted that emissions pose an existential threat, for the first time in British history no less, they still tried to convict us for public nuisance rather than praise us for trying to stop those emissions. Given the objectivity of existential threat, there were overwhelming grounds to be involved in a plan to cause some disruption to the M25.
In the British law on public nuisance, there is a ‘reasonable excuse’ clause. Science says there is an overwhelming threat to my life, my children, you and your children. To argue there is not a reasonable excuse directly defies the wish of this legislation. Things are happening that cause harm – people are engaged in physical acts to stop that harm – it doesn’t matter whether it’s a protest or not.
As I began to offer up some case law, the judge kept intervening telling me I was “wasting my time” and ordering the jury to disregard me. To illustrate that I was not talking about my motivations but speaking about real necessity, I referred to a famous case over a decision to operate on conjoined twins with the likelihood that one would die. In this dilemma, I quoted the 19th Century principle that the action was necessary if the threat faced was inevitable and irrevocable, that no more should be done than essential, and that it must be proportionate. I argued that there was a “duress of circumstances” including the objective danger I’ve experienced as a farmer unable to grow food, and the global significance of “food insecurity” – a euphemism for famine and starvation.
There has never been a moment in history where ‘necessity’ has been more supported by objective facts – more than 10,000 scientific and peer-reviewed papers, indicating an outcome of mass starvation and death from man-made climate collapse.
In response, Judge Hehir called for an early lunch and dismissed the jury. He turned to me and warned that I wasn't a lawyer and that “this is not the Roger Hallam show”.
He then gave me just 15 more minutes to put forward my “beliefs” - a totally fucking incoherent statement. This isn’t belief - it’s the objective threat of destruction of property and livelihoods of billions of people and the secondary effects of famine i.e. war, rape, and torture.
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That's Part 1 of 4. Read the next below...
Monthly climate data update from NASA-GISS for the month of June 2024.
Hottest month of June since 1880.
Thirteenth hottest month in a row.
https://datagraver.com/climate-data-set-nasa-giss/
