@urlyman@mastodon.social
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urlyman

@urlyman@mastodon.social

Cycling, designing, coding, over-thinking. Bit sweary.

Climate shadow boxing https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/climate-shadow-carbon-footprint

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urlyman, to climate
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

Here’s a few really great things this article by @statsguy has/does:

  1. The best explanation of Wet Bulb Temperatures (WBT) I’ve read

  2. A great example of the value of open data

  3. Mines the data to make WBT episodes since 1990 visible to us

  4. Ends with this excellent irony-laden sign-off

“So this would be a really bad time to relax our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But surely no-one would be stupid enough to do that would they?”

http://www.statsguy.co.uk/wet-bulb-temperatures-part-1/

urlyman, (edited ) to climate
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

Sunak is right that UK governance must respond in a…

“better, more proportionate way” that’s “honest about costs and trade offs”

…but because the default position of the Conservatives is to be wrong, he’s attentive to the wrong costs and the wrong trade-offs, and is thoroughly dishonest.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66862498

DJDarren, to random
@DJDarren@mendeddrum.org avatar

I’m subbed to the RSS of Cory Doctorow’s blog, and mostly am in awe that he can read and review so many books, while also writing All Of The Things. Like, how do people bash out a few book reviews a week? It takes me two weeks to read an average length novel.

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@DJDarren he is extraordinarily prolific, the lovely bastard

guffo, to random
@guffo@topspicy.social avatar

Against my better judgement, I kind of want a Bluesky account, not to use regularly, but just to keep in touch with a couple of people who jumped ship from Twatter to The Other Place.

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@DJDarren @guffo are you on bsky Darren? I’m not and I feel enough at home here now to be almost disinterested in what Jack is building. Also, I imagine it’s still gonna be Jack with all his weird neolibertarian BS as baggage

urlyman, to cycling
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

On Portsmouth seafront today, as a bloody cyclist, I managed to break the speed limit by 0.4 mph. Not bad for an old git.

ChrisMayLA6, to random
@ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us avatar

The problem of is that in many ways her diagnosis is/was right:

''I believe that the reason for the problems we have is the 25 years of economic consensus that have led us to this period of stagnation...And I believe it is vital that we understand that & shatter that economic consensus, if we are to avoid worse problems in the future'!

The problem was what she wanted to replace it with was merely a hard-boiled version of what went before.... not a radical change in policy direction.

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@GeofCox @TheSwiv @fkamiah17 @ChrisMayLA6 this discussion makes a persuasive case that “the real problem” goes back much further than 1979 https://overcast.fm/+2tlUMFDHs

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@GeofCox @KimSJ @TheSwiv @fkamiah17 @ChrisMayLA6 I agree with all of that. The problem of the economics being divorced from ecological awareness and constraints remains.

Which has been as true of industrialism under socialist governance as it has under neoliberalism. And this thinking persists with notions like Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism, which is just differently energy blind

snaptophobic, to WordoftheDay
@snaptophobic@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Morning world. Here it is, Monday, and an early medical appointment for Best Beloved. A change in routine is probably a good thing.

Yesterday's was COUTURIER, a fashion designer.

Today's word: JALOUSIE.

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@snaptophobic that’s a cool word :)

urlyman, to random
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

We think we’re different and somehow better than animals. We’re not.

We call ourselves Sapiens. Destroying our own biosphere is not wise.

We started harnessing electricity at scale about the same time as oil, but oil is a stronger drug, and we are just animals pursuing available energy sources until an external pressure knocks us back down

joelanman, to random
@joelanman@hachyderm.io avatar

The Economist with ideas for new hobbies

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@joelanman their ideas paved the way for those museums to have those things in the first place. So I guess they are looking to divest! https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/11/liberalism-according-to-the-economist

urlyman, to UI
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

The fill-the-entire-viewport double whammy

Good job we got rid of popups in the 2000s 🙄

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@Brendanjones ah yes 🎰

urlyman, to random
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar


When the Substack buyout/rug pull happens it’s gonna be brutal

breadandcircuses, to nature

Let this sink in for a minute...

Of all the mammals on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans.

Only 4% are wild mammals.

Of all birds in the world, 70% are chickens and other poultry, just 30% are wild.

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@Jennifer @breadandcircuses the 6 minute segment at 27 minutes in to this discussion with Raj Patel, on chicken nuggets as the most capitalist object, is amazing and awful https://overcast.fm/+RBdZVmHf0/26:45

It’s a nexus of profiteering, religious fundamentalism, addiction and incarceration

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@Jennifer @breadandcircuses it’s just an audio chat. It tells a tale about how ‘Christian’ Oklahoman chicken farmers co-opted Federal largesse and the retributional justice system to get free night shift labour from vulnerable damaged people

ajsadauskas, to climate
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Right now, could you prepare a slice of toast with zero embodied carbon emissions?

Since at least the 2000s, big polluters have tried to frame carbon emissions as an issue to be solved through the purchasing choices of individual consumers.

Solving climate change, we've been told, is not a matter of public policy or infrastructure. Instead, it's about convincing individual consumers to reduce their "carbon footprint" (a term coined by BP: https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook).

Yet, right now, millions of people couldn't prepare a slice of toast without causing carbon emissions, even if they wanted to.

In many low-density single-use-zoned suburbs, the only realistic option for getting to the store to get a loaf of bread is to drive. The power coming out of the mains includes energy from coal or gas.

But.

Even if they invested in solar panels, and an inverter, and a battery system, and only used an electric toaster, and baked the loaf themselves in an electric oven, and walked/cycled/drove an EV to the store to get flour and yeast, there are still embodied carbon emissions in that loaf of bread.

Just think about the diesel powered trucks used to transport the grains and packaging to the flour factory, the energy used to power the milling equipment, and the diesel fuel used to transport that flour to the store.

Basically, unless you go completely off grid and grow your own organic wheat, your zero emissions toast just ain't happening.

And that's for the most basic of food products!

Unless we get the infrastructure in place to move to a 100% renewables and storage grid, and use it to power fully electric freight rail and zero emissions passenger transport, pretty much all of our decarbonisation efforts are non-starters.

This is fundamentally an infrastructure and public policy problem, not a problem of individual consumer choice.

#ClimateChange #urbanism #infrastructure #energy #grid #politics #power @green

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@nebulousmenace @ajsadauskas @green I agree that for consumer energy end-use, renewable* power is waaay preferable to fossil-fuelled equivalents. But that’s just part of the problem.

We absolutely need them at scale to buy us time though.

*renewables are more properly thought of as re-buildables

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@jgkoomey @nebulousmenace @ajsadauskas @green thanks for the recommendation Jonathan. I’ll explore that. I’m aware of the point you make about not needing to replace fossil energy completely.

I defer to your scholarship. From my much more limited awareness it sure looks like the scarce commodity is time. There’s what is possible in principle and what’s possible within the less-than-a-decade of Paris budget we have left

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green As with your other reply, I defer to your scholarship and understanding but unfortunately I don’t have an Elsevier subscription.

I’m aware of many scholars whose analysis suggests really significant decoupling is at best extremely doubtful. I guess we’ll know in years to come who was right.

From my layperson’s perspective the immovable constraint would appear once again to be time…

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green e.g. in this much shared tweet from last year, Ireland is the decoupling poster child but its rate of consumption-based emissions reduction over the 14 years was around 3.6% per year and 2 of those years were the global financial crisis.

It sure looks like decoupling is running at a rate decades too late so maybe we should be pulling other levers?

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green Thank you for taking the time to point to further nuance and reading. I’ll endeavour to dive in.

Like you, I hope we buck our ideas up. Fast

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green from my reading, efficiencies have a very well-established pattern of feeding Jevons paradox.

And that’s what animals are evolved to do. They pursue energy sources subject to external pressures on them. We think we’re cleverer than that. The last 30 years, in particular, strongly suggest otherwise

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green I’ve stayed relatively quiet on Jonathan’s push back because, frankly, I don’t share his optimism, but that doesn’t mean I’m a doomer: we should fight like hell for conserving as much biosphere as we can.

What we are up against is of a scale none of us can make robust sense of. Our different dispositions and attachments mean we each seize upon different territories of plausible probability…

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green …If we can make a jump to being serious at scale we’ll know soon which of those territories we are actually in. And if we can’t it’ll mostly be moot

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green I’m in the same place as you Jack. I’m just trying to acknowledge that we’re talking about turning round an unimaginably huge super tanker and we haven’t even got our hands on the controls yet.

As Mike Berners-Lee has said “If aliens were observing us they would conclude we haven’t even noticed we have an atmosphere problem”.

Right now the most important thing to do is to begin to turn.

(inadequate mixed metaphors end)

urlyman,
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@green @jgkoomey @jackofalltrades @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas ha!

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