Anders - who was a lunar module pilot on the Apollo 8 mission - took the iconic Earthrise photograph, one of the most memorable and inspirational images of Earth from space.

Taken on Christmas Eve during the 1968 mission, the first crewed space flight to leave Earth and reach the Moon, the picture shows the planet rising above the horizon from the barren lunar surface.

Anders later described it as his most significant contribution to the space programme.

The image is widely credited with motivating the global environmental movement and leading to the creation of Earth Day, an annual event to promote activism and awareness of caring for the planet.

Speaking of the moment, Anders said: "We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing that we discovered was the Earth."

In June of last year, a 14,000-panel 5.2 MW solar panel farm called the Scottsbluff Community Solar Array in Nebraska was blasted by baseball-sized hail. There wasn’t any question that the array would be brought back online because the power company had no choice. Leaving it would have been a PR disaster worse than having the array destroyed by hail.

It took 7 months to bring it back online. //

Solar releases a nasty thing called nitrogen trifluoride. And, what, pray tell is NF3’s impact on the environment? It is reportedly 17,000 times worse for the atmosphere than the dreaded CO2.

And there are other inconvenient facts like 80 percent of the silicon torn from the earth during the mining is eventually lost making crystalline silicon. A cancer biologist named David H. Nguyen noted that toxic chemicals associated with solar farms include cadmium telluride, cadmium gallium, copper indium selenide, and a bunch of other nasty toxins. Sometimes you have to wreck the environment to save it.

Solar acolytes will grudgingly admit that there is a chemical downside to manufacturing solar panels – like a byproduct called silicon tetrachloride. It’s toxic and, if not handled properly, will cause severe burns. If it is inadvertently combined with water it can create hydrochloric acid. But hey, they are made in China so, never mind. //

Northeast of Edward Air Force Base sits the tiny town of Boron. The surrounding desert is home to desert wildlife including the Joshua tree. It will soon be home to a vast solar farm owned by Aratina Solar Center. Joshua trees can survive 200 years in the desert heat but they won’t survive in Aratina’s heat sink of a project.

About 3,500 Joshua trees will be uprooted and destroyed to make room for the solar farm. Aratina (owned mostly by a private equity group known as KKR). To mitigate the bad press, Aratina is shredding trees on-site rather than piling them like so many corpses. //

On completion, the project will blacken about 2,300 acres but it will generate power for up to 180,000 homes. //

Sometimes you gotta kill a tree, to save a tree.  

As global governments push for a rapid transition to electric vehicles and to wind and solar power, they are creating a demand for copper that threatens to undermine the very goals they seek to achieve.

According to a recent International Energy Forum report, electrifying the global vehicle fleet would require the opening of 55% more new copper mines than are already needed, and twice the total amount of copper that has ever been mined throughout human history over the next three decades. //

Since copper is a core component in electronics, raising the cost of copper makes it far more difficult for developing areas of the world to access energy. Copper is a crucial component in electric vehicles. A typical EV requires nearly 200 pounds of copper, or about four times the amount needed for a combustion-engine vehicle. //

The energy industry is facing government mandates for wind and solar. A typical 3-megawatt wind turbine requires 9 tons of copper, more than the weight of a school bus. Wind power requires more than seven times the amount of copper to produce the same amount of energy that natural gas or coal does, and five times the copper as nuclear power. //

Policymakers pushing for a rapid shift to EVs and renewables are also responsible for the red tape in mining for critical minerals. Without more mining, the planned EVs won’t be built. Even Chinese critical materials won’t get America all the way to its EV targets.

The agriculture committee (AGRI) in the most recent European Parliament was known for leaning conservative, especially compared to the environment committee (ENVI), with the two clashing over the EU's green farming agenda, the Farm to Fork strategy. AGRI was also strongly pro-farmer — due in large part to the number of farmers who served on it.

Next month’s European election could return a more right-wing assembly to oversee the EU’s €387 billion farm budget, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. At the same time, Green Party lawmakers — the most vocal supporters of the Green Deal — could lose up to a third of their seats, while the number of Socialist and Liberal MEPs could also shrink.

What does this mean for European agriculture?

In practice this means there’s unlikely to be a viable coalition of the center-left, liberal, Green and left that can secure deals such as the nature restorationlaw that sparked controversy in this past term. Meanwhile, the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) will find it easier to build majorities with groups further to the right.

This might make less of a difference in AGRI as groups from the far right to the center left often vote together. However, a further rightward shift will confirm an existing trend: Out with the Green Deal, and in with the “Farm Deal.”

The polio epidemic that gripped the United States in the mid-20th century remains etched in history as a harrowing chapter of disease and public health challenges. However, recent revelations and research shed new light on the potential link between DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) and the misdiagnosis of polio cases during that era.

In the 1940s and 1950s, as the “polio epidemic” unfolded, outbreaks were notably clustered in regions with large commercial farms where DDT was extensively used as a pesticide. The timing of these outbreaks during the summer and early fall coincided with heightened DDT application and increased human exposure, particularly among children who frequented rivers, lakes, and streams contaminated with DDT runoff from agricultural activities.

What’s intriguing is that the symptoms of paralytic polio, a severe form of the disease, closely mimic those of DDT poisoning. Both conditions can cause muscle weakness, paralysis, respiratory difficulties, and neurological symptoms, leading to potential misdiagnosis and confusion among healthcare providers during the epidemic.

Further complicating matters was the widespread use and endorsement of DDT as a safe and effective pesticide, touted for its ability to control insect-borne diseases and improve agricultural productivity. The public perception of DDT as a panacea for pest control overshadowed potential health risks and unintended consequences, including its role in misdiagnosed polio cases.

Now we see that in Africa, the great apes are endangered by climate change; it's not like you might think, these apes are endangered by the mining of raw materials for electric vehicle batteries, which is destroying their habitat.

Mining companies hunting critical minerals could wipe out more than a third of Africa’s remaining great apes, a new study has found. //

Mining booms — whether for coal or cobalt — tend to be staggeringly destructive processes: A feedback loop of new roads pushed into the forest, which draw in job-seeking colonists, who further clear habitat.

This dynamic is particularly stark in Africa, where some of the world’s largest reserves of nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium lie beneath the soil — and nearly half a million great apes live in the forests above.

European farmers are reshaping the political landscape across the Atlantic just months before the EU’s parliamentary elections.

Apparently, normalcy has been restored to NYC to the point that Mayor Eric Adams has approved controversial rules regulating the amount of delicious, smokey aroma generated from the area’s pizzerias.

Democrat Mayor Eric Adams has approved a new green plan that requires facilities using wood- and coal-fired stoves to cut their smoke by 75 percent.

More than 130 businesses will be impacted by the law, including many famed pizza joints. Businesses can apply for an exemption from the mandate – which goes into effect on April 27 – but they must prove they can not financially meet the requirements.

Still, business must then cut their emissions by 25 percent. //

The costs of the ventilation control systems are enormous, and they are likely to force many pizzerias to close. //

To cook pizza in the traditional way, ovens need to reach 1,200 degrees. Only coal-fired ovens can reach such high temperatures. //

From April 2020 to July 2022, Gotham’s population fell by nearly a half million people, or 5.3% — wiping out almost three-quarters of the gains over the previous decade, DiNapoli reports, citing Census figures.

That was more than double the state’s 2.6% drop, and it came while the nation overall was expanding by 0.6%.

“Maui on its best day… 1” is the way Bezos describes the space habitat environment’s attractive force to depopulate Earth, turning it into a nature preserve. This is an orders of magnitude greater “Scale of the problem” than has been addressed in the prior two original posts here by Keith Henson regarding SPS 1 and CO2.

I’ve been working this angle since the 1980s Sierra Club retreats in the Laguna Mountains outside San Diego with the theme “What Good Are Humans?”.

Most recently has been my proposal to depopulate Earth’s land masses with self-replicating “Maui on its best day…” artificial atolls in the Western Pacific doldrums built with in situ resources of both mass and energy:

jimbowery.blogspot.com

Exponential Remediation of Civilization's Footprint 3
Introduction " The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to emotionally comprehend the exponential function ."...

The economics start out being the real estate value of “Maui on its best day…” atolls supporting 100,000 people each. After 16 doublings (to accommodate all 7 billion of Earth’s population) the industrial learning curve reduces the cost of a beach front condo to under $10,000 per family of four. Back of the envelope calculations indicate this could happen within 15 years of the first atoll “cell” capable of self-replication.

The only big environmental challenge is chlorine waste produced by the replication of these artificial atolls. That Cl2 may be injected into the connate fluid 1 available 1000ft beneath the already several-kilometer deep ocean floor turning it into CaCl2:

Secretary Pete Buttigieg @SecretaryPete
·
Extreme weather is expected to be the top factor in supply chain disruptions next year. It reminds us how urgently we must work to set up our infrastructure for climate resiliency.
foxweather.com
Extreme weather expected to be top logistics disruptor for supply chains in 2024
3:20 PM · Jan 7, 2024 //

After the lies we were told in 2020 and 2021, I've become a skeptic/cynic whenever the government warns me about something.

In theory, the supply chain disruption in 2020 and 2021 was caused by COVID. But was it? The disruption was caused by the government's regulatory response to a crisis they created and amplified. //

In short, I see this as the leading edge of a gaslighting campaign to increase government control over our lives, and that will peak in time for Joe Biden to blame a major disruption of US supply chains that they see coming on anything but his policies. //

Wilsonreagan
4 hours ago
They are setting us up for climate lock downs. Covid was the test.

“We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles” - Thomas Edison

Edison was dreaming big when he said that. //

Belgium was dreaming big when they built the Atomium. It took 18 months to design and another 18 months to build. //

J'ai vu le futur. “I have seen the future.” These words are displayed inside the structure like a mantra for humankind. It’s not wrong. Consider the structures we admire the most: the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Easter Island heads, etc. We do not argue that these structures are too big. We visit them because they are so big, to marvel at their bigness.

For much of human history, we have tried to show our greatness, or to celebrate that which we have believed to be greater than us, through constructing large monuments.

So why are large-scale projects now so heavily criticised?

It may not surprise you that the idea that big is bad came from an anti-growth, anti-technology activist.

E F Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered in 1973. The book argues in favour of what Schumacher calls small, “appropriate” technologies as a superior alternative to the general ethos of "bigger is better". The latest edition of the book features a foreword by depopulation and degrowth activist Jonathon Porritt.

The book is a holy text for degrowthers, anti-progress activists, and Malthusians alike. It suffers from the recrudescence of the common fallacy of man versus nature, as Schumacher argues that “The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.” //

What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it. Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live.”

Consider that last statement. “Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live.” And yet we have heating, lighting, telephones, the Internet, shoes, glasses, clothes, and so on, thanks to science - not Shakespeare (though I take no umbrage with the Bard). The greatest irony of this statement is that we only have books like Schumacher’s and Shakespeare’s thanks to science and technology.

That a prophet of such pessimism and blinkered thinking has influenced our ideas of large-scale technology ought to concern us. While activists argue against large-scale technological projects, note that when they consider the structures to be works of art the same argument is seldom made. For example, the construction of the Sagrada Família, the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world, began in 1882 and continues to this day. For the most part, people do not cry “it’s too big!” or “what about the cost?!” regarding the church. They allow it to be built. They want to see it finished. Similarly, the Notre-Dame is being rapidly rebuilt after it caught fire in 2019. //

The fact is that we need one - power plants - to have the other - the Sagrada Família, Notre-Dame, etc.

Back to the Atomium. With this single structure, Belgium depicted its love of physics through art. The country wanted to highlight and promote the post-war ideal of peacefully applying atomic research and other advancements in technology, and with over 600,000 visitors per year, the Atomium has achieved this aim. //

Schumacher and I do agree on one thing. He wrote: “To talk about the future is useful only if it leads to action now.” Indeed, we should act now and start building. Large-scale nuclear energy is needed to displace fossil fuels, and committing to it represents the veriest foresight. Without new power plants, we cannot hope to overcome the vicissitudes of tomorrow and maintain the progress that led us here, and beyond. Sometimes we need to dream big and build big. Or, to put it less elegantly, we should go big or go home.

As US dams age, removal is always an option—and it can be done well. //

Wending its way from the Olympic Mountains to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Washington’s Elwha River is now free. For about century, the Elwha and Gilnes Canyon Dams corralled these waters. Both have since been removed, and the restoration of the watershed has started.

The dam-removal project was the largest to date in the US—though it won’t hold that position for long. The Klamath River dam removal project has begun, with four of its six dams—J.C. Boyle, Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, and Iron Gate—set to be scuppered by the end of the year, and the drawdown started this week. (In fact, Copco No. 2 is already gone.)

Once the project is complete, the Klamath will run from Oregon to northwestern California largely unimpeded, allowing sediment, organic matter, and its restive waters to flow freely downriver while fish like salmon, trout, and other migratory species leap and wriggle their way upstream to spawn. //

The Dark Ars Praefectus
7y
10,623
org said:
That's too absolutist. Many small dams can only generate a few hundreds of kW or low double digit MW. That's a drop in the bucket for power generation but their local impact can be huge. I guess I mean you have to do case by case analysis to see when it's worth it.

Using the article as an example, the four dams being removed from the Klamath are John C Boyle (90 MW), Copco 1 (20 MW), Copco 2 (27 MW), and Iron Gate (18 MW). The four produced 686,000 MWh annually, or about 50.5% of their nameplate capacity. //

QuantifiableQuoll Ars Centurion
7y
272
greendave said:
Would have liked to see a discussion of the cost of these removals (reportedly $40-60 million for the two on The Elwha River, and $350 million overall for restoration). Those numbers seem exorbitant and make it hard to imagine that we'll be able to afford much removal/restoration in the long term.
The only reason PacificCorp, owner of the dams, agreed to the removal of the Klamath dams is because it was cost prohibitive to keep them in place. They needed mandatory upgrades and were already not competitive in a power generation market full of windmills/turbines/whatever and newer dams.

Source https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2023/klamath-river-dam-removal/

Thatch @THATCH_ARISES
·
Here is some good news!

I already have to run things through my dishwaser twice because it is so "efficient" compared to the ones which only had to be run once.

Attorney General Andrew Bailey @AGAndrewBailey
BREAKING: The Fifth Circuit has sided with us in our lawsuit against Joe Biden's Department of Energy, stating "it is unclear how or why DOE thinks it has any statutory authority to regulate 'water use' in dishwashers and washing machines."
12:38 AM · Jan 9, 2024 //

Margot Cleveland @ProfMJCleveland
·
Wait! Does this mean we'll be able to buy a dishwasher that doesn't take 3.75 hours to wash and dry?
1:22 AM · Jan 9, 2024

Mining in space might be less environmentally harmful than mining asteroids on Earth.

The trick to developing immunity to misinformation

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” ― Isaac Asimov, 1988 //

You’re probably thinking “it’s just a meme”, but it is illustrative of a wider problem where information is presented in this manner: as if the truth is subjective. I only need to open any social media app to see that ‘subjective truth’ seems to be everywhere, and every day there is new questionable information to think about (this assertion isn’t only anecdotal, but is also supported by research). //

As social psychologist Dr. Sander van der Linden points out in his book Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity, misinformation is not new. Previous large-scale examples of misinformation taking hold in populations include Nazi propaganda, which heavily relied on the printed press, radio and cinema, and misinformation campaigns that have been traced back to Roman times when emperors used messages on coins as a form of mass communication to gain power. //

Many vested interests and those who believe misinformation themselves use these biases to their advantage. If this was a war, I would argue that the other side is winning. Thanks to some of these people being convincing communicators, and using storytelling that plays on these biases to their advantage, they have been able to influence what wider populations believe on multitudinous topics ranging from gene-editing to nuclear energy to degrowth as a solution to climate change (it’s not). //

The greatest irony is that anti-nuclear activists have also been able to convincingly embed their unscientific position within environmentalism, even though nuclear energy is the cleanest and most environmentally friendly energy source available to humankind, with the smallest land footprint of all energy sources.

Slogans and stories are sticky, but they may not be true or helpful. Hence I’ve argued before that catchphrases and slogans used by activists are often convincing and successful, even when they are inaccurate. Stories, however, are essential to communicating scientific matters, and we need more people to tell them.

After all, it’s much easier and faster to respond with “what about the waste?” when I mention nuclear energy, than for me to explain why spent fuel isn’t the problem many people think it is, which takes time and isn’t as catchy or simple as the aphorism “what about the waste?” (I have covered the waste argument in detail in this article.) In my work tackling misinformation, I have honed some of these detailed responses to convey them through catchphrases that have also been popularised, such as “it’s only waste if you waste it” (in reference to being able to recycle spent fuel) and “meanwhile fossil fuel waste is being stored in the Earth’s atmosphere”, which is both true and a sticky idea. //

Although no one has studied it directly, I feel sure that coining and popularising terms like “nuclear saves lives”, “energy is life”, “nuclear energy is clean energy”, and “rethink nuclear” has helped to combat the misinformation we’ve heard about nuclear energy for so long. //

People often ask how I stay calm when countering constant ad hominem attacks, gish-galloping and sometimes outright insults. As Mr Spock once said, “Reverting to name-calling suggests that you are defensive and, therefore, find my opinion valid.” My answer is that I don’t take people’s biases personally - after all, I used to believe misinformation myself. We have all done so at some point in our lives, and we are all susceptible to believing misinformation in the future. While it’s worth learning to identify the few people who hold fundamental beliefs on a topic that simply cannot be changed, to save wasting your time debating them, remember that for most people these messages do have an impact. It took me years to change my mind from being against nuclear energy to being in favour of it, and every person who took the time to dispel the misinformation I believed, and provide better sources for me to read to counter my viewpoints, had an impact on my beliefs.

While it may not seem challenging to you, remember that when you engage with someone on a wedge issue, you are making a worldview-threatening correction. It is no different than learning that the Earth is spherical when you’ve grown up believing that it is flat. ///

Evangelism takes time and repetition.

The most common argument is that wind and solar power are the cheapest clean energy sources and that nuclear power plants are the most expensive. Taken at face value, it is true that a single solar photovoltaic (PV) panel is cheap, and that a single wind turbine is cheap, while on the other hand, a single nuclear power plant costs billions of pounds. Technically, measured one-on-one, it is correct that wind and solar are cheaper. But is it useful to compare them in this way? //

To understand why people argue that wind and solar power are cheaper, we need to examine the basic economic metric for assessing a generating power plant: the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE). This metric provides what is essentially a banker’s number that covers the total amount of power over the lifetime of an energy source, divided by the lifecycle costs over the lifetime of the same energy source.

But there’s a problem: LCOE is a terrible metric for assessing cost-effectiveness because it doesn’t include several crucial factors. For example, it ignores costs and benefits at an energy system level, such as price reductions due to low-carbon generation and higher system costs when extra interconnection, storage, or backup power is needed due to the variable output of wind and solar power.

Crucially, LCOE ignores the value of the plant’s output to the grid. For example, solar plants have a much more attractive production profile relative to wind farms because society needs most of the energy during the day when the sun is shining. So, even though the LCOE of solar power is higher than wind energy, it provides electricity that is more economically valuable. A paper found that ‘An LCOE comparison ignores the temporal heterogeneity of electricity and in particular the variability of VRE [Variable Renewable Energy]’. Therefore, the true economics of power generation can be very different to the ones predicted by the LCOE numbers.

Another issue LCOE ignores relates to different lifespans of technologies. Typically, a 20- or 30-year recovery period is accounted for, but what about when competing technologies last half a century or more? Then the comparison is faulty, as nuclear power plants can generate power for 60 to 80 years, sometimes longer.

Other factors that aren’t considered by the LCOE include:

• Cost of the land required
• Cost to the consumer
• Dispatchability, i.e. the ability of a generating system to come online, go offline, or ramp up or down, quickly as demand swings
• Indirect costs of generation, which can include environmental externalities or grid upgrade requirements
• Additional cost of integrating non-dispatchable energy sources into the grid
• Cost of disposal, which is usually built into the price of nuclear energy but excluded from the price of solar and wind power
• Subsidies and externality costs, such as the costs of carbon emissions
• The cost of backup or baseload power

Intermittent power sources like wind and solar usually incur extra costs associated with needing to have storage or backup generation available. LCOE ignores the cost of this unreliability, which can be as simple as keeping coal-fired power stations running in case they are needed to fire up and meet electricity demand when it becomes less windy or sunny. //

South Korea is our second example. In the mid-1980s the Korean nuclear industry decided to standardise the design of nuclear plants and to gain independence in building them. The country imported proven US, French, and Canadian reactor designs in the 1970s and learned from other countries' experiences before developing its own domestic reactors in 1989. It developed stable regulations, had a single utility overseeing construction, and built reactors in pairs at single sites.

The results were remarkable: between 1971 and 2008, South Korea built a total of 28 reactors. Due to the developments they made in 1989, their overnight construction cost fell by 50%. //

With nuclear energy, waste disposal and decommissioning costs are usually fully included in the operating costs, but they are not accounted for in wind and solar costs. Yes, a single solar panel is cheap. But what about disposing of it? Sadly, they often end up in landfill sites in poor countries abroad, where they leach toxic chemicals. Batteries are currently not recycled, and therefore this is another missing cost. Wind turbine blades face similar issues. And none of these elements will last more than thirty years before they need replacing. What will that cost? //

Oil and gas companies celebrate wind and solar power because they keep fossil fuels in business. Today, wind and solar are backed 1:1 by oil-and-gas-based generators, to fill the gaps when it isn’t windy or sunny, thus keeping the oil and gas industries in demand. In the future, solar purists propose mega storage, which means more batteries, and overbuilding (extra panels) as the solution. These extra costs aren't factored into LCOE. //

What I have tried to do here is trigger a thought experiment by illustrating how complicated these assessments are, that it is not a case of comparing one panel to one plant, and that the LCOE fails on all counts. Ultimately, the full cost of nuclear energy is an upfront investment for a long-lasting, reliable form of energy, which is not the cost people consider when arguing that solar panels and wind turbines are cheaper. Nuclear energy can get cheaper, or it can get more expensive, depending on how it is approached. //

I am of the opinion that we should build everything we need to bring down greenhouse gas emissions and reduce deaths from air pollution. Yet it is clean energy advocates who only like wind and solar power who argue against nuclear energy based on the myth that the latter is too expensive. //

Every time a nuclear power plant is replaced with fossil fuel generation, people die from the resulting air pollution, and more fossil fuel waste is stored in the Earth’s atmosphere. Every time a grid is made to support more wind and solar power without the baseload power to support them, fossil fuels win as they have to fill the gap. Every time a nuclear power plant isn’t built on the supposed basis of cost, the environment is further harmed and human progress takes a step backwards. Every time someone quotes the LCOE, they are either being misled, misleading others, or both.

“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be… This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.” – Isaac Asimov //

There is no argument for our complacency that is better represented than the current social movement against producing energy, which perhaps began with Boomers, but is now being led mostly by Gen Z, also known as ‘the sustainability generation’, and also to some degree by Millennials. The irony is that these generations have been the most comfortable of all (and –full disclosure – I am a Millennial); unlike my parents who grew up in poverty in India, and were then manual labourers in Britain, we have had it easy. We haven’t suffered through truly gruelling labour, we don’t need to know how electricity grids work, and most of us have never stepped foot in a mine or experienced electricity blackouts. The divide between what it takes to maintain a high quality of life and the understanding of this has also widened over generations; //

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Thanks to years of development and growth, we live in a time of prosperity, facing fewer core challenges than past generations. //

The problem is that thanks to all of this, a disconnection has occurred between our lifestyles and what it has taken to get us here. The lack of understanding of the skilled labour, need for industries, and mining for raw materials that enabled these lifestyles, and the fact that the toll those things took on the environment was inevitable, but not permanent, has repercussions for society. I was once part of the problem, fighting to forge a society that would be independent of fossil fuels, without thinking about our continued and growing need for reliable electricity and fighting for the alternatives. My argument was the standard traditional environmentalist argument: that we need to live with less. I was wrong.

Now, the argument has gone so far that activists argue that we should just stop oil overnight. But can it be done without causing immense harm to people? //

About 45% of a typical barrel of crude oil is refined into gasoline, and an additional 29% is refined into diesel fuel. The remaining 26% is used to make plastics and other products. There is good news in these figures, as it means that we can reduce a lot of our dependence on oil by making the switch from petrol and diesel cars to electric vehicles, which is a trend that is taking place in many countries already. //

Instead of going ahead anyway and virtue signalling that they are now plastic-free, Lego has ditched plans to switch to PET, since doing so would have had a greater impact on the environment.

Of course, many anti-oil activists would argue that Lego should stop making the bricks altogether. They would argue that they are unnecessary and wasteful. But I disagree. I recall many years of constructing large and complicated architectural designs with my brother when we were children; he was fascinated by the way things work and are put together, and he later trained to become an engineer (a field he now holds a senior position in). This link between playing with Lego and developing engineering skills has been well-documented elsewhere. The irony of wanting to just stop oil is well represented in the idea that we don’t ‘need’ Lego. We don’t ‘need’ to build housing, railways, or power plants either – if we are happy for society to stagnate and for future generations to suffer.

Let’s ignore the idea of an immediate transition, then, and consider what can be done to stop oil eventually. //

This brings me back to a point I’ve been making for years: we should be aiming for energy abundance.

As we shift towards electrifying everything, switching from gas boilers to heat pumps, and diesel cars to electric vehicles, much of our demand for oil will be replaced naturally. But the alternatives will require more electricity, and unless the electricity grid is supplying us with clean power, we have a problem. //

As I’ve explained before, we can build all the wind and solar power people want, but we will still need baseload power to back them up, and historically this has always either come from fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Although the upfront costs for the alternatives appear to be cheaper than for nuclear, this is incorrect when the figures are viewed in context. As well, we need to be aware of shift-loading the costs of wind and solar power onto ordinary working people. I’ve also seen NGOs arguing for building wind and solar in less wealthy countries, and I find this tactic appalling. Intermittent energy is not what we in the wealthy West used to escape poverty. We burned a lot of fossil fuels to develop. We don’t get to deny other countries of that now. //

The truth is that I am a shill. I am a shill for the human race. I want to see the end of needless suffering and death from preventable diseases. I want to see all poverty eradicated. Apart from a few specific war-mongers, who doesn’t want to see the end of all war? I want all life on this planet to thrive. I want to see the best of humankind during my brief presence on this pale blue dot that we are so fortunate enough to inhabit. I want us to live long and prosper.

Humans are capable of solving immense problems and achieving great things, through forging strong values and working together. I am a shill for progress because I want to see what we do next, once the immediate – and entirely solvable – problems like air pollution, poverty, and climate change have been solved.

JUST STOP OIL

JUST START NUCLEAR

With all the technological advances humans have made, it may seem like we’ve lost touch with nature—but not all of us have. People in some parts of Africa use a guide more effective than any GPS system when it comes to finding beeswax and honey. This is not a gizmo, but a bird.

The Greater Honeyguide (highly appropriate name), Indicator indicator (even more appropriate scientific name), knows where all the beehives are because it eats beeswax. The Hadza people of Tanzania and Yao people of Mozambique realized this long ago. Hadza and Yao honey hunters have formed a unique relationship with this bird species by making distinct calls, and the honeyguide reciprocates with its own calls, leading them to a hive.

Because the Hadza and Yao calls differ, zoologist Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge and anthropologist Brian Wood of UCLA wanted to find out if the birds respond generically to human calls, or are attuned to their local humans. They found that the birds are much more likely to respond to a local call, meaning that they have learned to recognize that call. //

How did this interspecies communication evolve? Other African cultures besides the Hadza and Yao have their own calls to summon a honeyguide. Why do the types of calls differ? The researchers do not think these calls came about randomly. //

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The article describes the calls honey-seeking humans use to get the attention of a honeyguide.

But the reverse also often happens. A hungry honeyguide who's located a beehive will seek out nearby humans and tweet at them to prod them to follow the honey guide to the beehive and safely (for the honeyguide) extract tasty food for themselves and the honeyguide. Do the honeyguides' own calls differ regionally?

An algorithm can spot beaver ponds from satellite imagery. //

Corwin’s beaver obsession met a receptive corporate culture. Google’s employees are famously encouraged to devote time to passion projects, the policy that produced Gmail; Corwin decided his passion was beavers. But how best to assist the buck-toothed architects? Corwin knew that beaver infrastructure—their sinuous dams, sprawling ponds, and spidery canals—is often so epic it can be seen from space. In 2010, a Canadian researcher discovered the world’s longest beaver dam, a stick-and-mud bulwark that stretches more than a half-mile across an Alberta park, by perusing Google Earth. Corwin and Ackerstein began to wonder whether they could contribute to beaver research by training a machine-learning algorithm to automatically detect beaver dams and ponds on satellite imagery—not one by one, but thousands at a time, across the surface of an entire state. //

According to Fairfax, EEAGER’s use cases are many. The model could be used to estimate beaver numbers, monitor population trends, and calculate beaver-provided ecosystem services like water storage and fire prevention. It could help states figure out where to reintroduce beavers, where to target stream and wetland restoration, and where to create conservation areas. It could allow researchers to track beavers’ spread in the Arctic as the rodents move north with climate change; or their movements in South America, where beavers were introduced in the 1940s and have since proliferated. “We literally cannot handle all the requests we’re getting,” says Fairfax, who serves as EEAGER’s scientific adviser.