Last year was the hottest on record and the Earth is headed towards a global warming of 2.7 degrees, yet top fossil fuel and cement producers show a disregard for climate change and actively make things worse. A new Carbon Majors Database report found that just 57 companies were responsible for 80 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions between 2016 and 2022. Thirty-eight percent of total emissions during this period came from nation-states, 37 percent from state-owned entities and 25 percent from investor-owned companies.
Nearly 200 parties adopted the 2015 Paris Agreement, committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, 58 of the 100 state- and investor-owned companies in the Carbon Majors Database have increased their production in the years since (The Climate Accountability Institute launched Carbon Majors in 2013 to hold fossil fuel producers accountable and is hosted by InfluenceMap). This number represents producers worldwide, including 87 percent of those assessed in Asia, 57 percent in Europe and 43 percent in North America.
It's not a clear case of things slowly turning around, either. The International Energy Agency found coal consumption increased by eight percent over the seven years to 8.3 billion tons — a record high. The report names state-owned Coal India as one of the top three carbon dioxide producers. Russia's state-owned energy company Gazprom and state-owned oil firm Saudi Aramco rounded out the trio of worst offenders.
Exxon Mobil topped the list of United States companies, contributing 1.4 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. "These companies have made billions of dollars in profits while denying the problem and delaying and obstructing climate policy. They are spending millions on advertising campaigns about being part of a sustainable solution, all the while continuing to invest in more fossil fuel extraction," Tzeporah Berman, International Program Director at Stand.earth and Chair at Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, said in a statement. "These findings emphasize that, more than ever, we need our governments to stand up to these companies, and we need new international cooperation through a Fossil Fuel Treaty to end the expansion of fossil fuels and ensure a truly just transition."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/only-57-companies-produced-80-percent-of-global-carbon-dioxide-130752291.html?src=rss
Last year was the hottest on record and the Earth is headed towards a global warming of 2.7 degrees, yet top fossil fuel and cement producers show a disregard for climate change and actively make things worse. A new Carbon Majors Database report found that just 57 companies were responsible for 80 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions between 2016 and 2022. Thirty-eight percent of total emissions during this period came from nation-states, 37 percent from state-owned entities and 25 percent from investor-owned companies.
Nearly 200 parties adopted the 2015 Paris Agreement, committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, 58 of the 100 state- and investor-owned companies in the Carbon Majors Database have increased their production in the years since (The Climate Accountability Institute launched Carbon Majors in 2013 to hold fossil fuel producers accountable and is hosted by InfluenceMap). This number represents producers worldwide, including 87 percent of those assessed in Asia, 57 percent in Europe and 43 percent in North America.
It's not a clear case of things slowly turning around, either. The International Energy Agency found coal consumption increased by eight percent over the seven years to 8.3 billion tons — a record high. The report names state-owned Coal India as one of the top three carbon dioxide producers. Russia's state-owned energy company Gazprom and state-owned oil firm Saudi Aramco rounded out the trio of worst offenders.
Exxon Mobil topped the list of United States companies, contributing 1.4 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. "These companies have made billions of dollars in profits while denying the problem and delaying and obstructing climate policy. They are spending millions on advertising campaigns about being part of a sustainable solution, all the while continuing to invest in more fossil fuel extraction," Tzeporah Berman, International Program Director at Stand.earth and Chair at Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, said in a statement. "These findings emphasize that, more than ever, we need our governments to stand up to these companies, and we need new international cooperation through a Fossil Fuel Treaty to end the expansion of fossil fuels and ensure a truly just transition."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/only-57-companies-produced-80-percent-of-global-carbon-dioxide-130752291.html?src=rss
Since 1979, Arctic ice has shrunk by 1.35 million square miles, a new JPL study found ice loss in Greenland is far worse than previously thought and Antarctic ice is now at the lowest level since records began. The more they melt, the faster the rate of decline for the ice that remains until we’re faced with a series of catastrophes. The most immediate of which is sea level rise which threatens to eradicate whole nations that are situated on low-lying islands. How do we stop such a problem? While we remedy the longer-term issues around fossil fuel consumption, we might have to buy ourselves more time with geoengineering.
The severity of this situation can’t be stressed enough. Professor John Moore of the Arctic Center, University of Lapland, says that we’re long past the point where emissions reductions alone will be effective. “We are faced with this situation where there’s no pathway to 1.5 [degrees] available through mitigation,” he said. “Things like the ice sheets [melting] and other tipping points will happen regardless,” adding that the Earth’s present situation is akin to a patient bleeding out on the operating table, “we are in this situation where we cannot mitigate ourselves out of the shit.”
Moore is one of the figures behind Frozen Arctic, a report produced by the universities of the Arctic and Lapland alongside UN-backed thinktank GRID-Arendal. It’s a rundown of sixty geoengineering projects that could slow down or reverse polar melting. A team of researchers opted to examine every idea, from those already in place to the ones at the fringes of science. “We wanted to be thorough,” said Moore, “because even the craziest idea might have a nugget of gold in there.” Each approach has been given a brief analysis, examining if it’s feasible on a scientific or practical basis, if it would be potentially helpful and how much it would cost. The report even went so far as to look at pykrete, a wacky World War Two initiative to create artificial glaciers for strategic use by mixing sawdust or paper products into ice.
If you’re curious and don’t have a day or two to read the report yourself, you can boil down the approaches to a handful of categories. The first is Solar Radiation Management, i.e. making the polar regions more reflective to bounce away more of the sun’s heat. Second, there’s artificial ice generation to compensate for what has already been lost. Third, enormous engineering work to buttress, isolate and protect the remaining ice — like massive undersea walls that act as a barrier against the seas as they get warmer. Finally, there are measures that nibble at the edges of the problem in terms of effect, but have more viable long-term success, like preventing flora and fauna (and the warmth they radiate) from encroaching on regions meant to remain frozen.
If you’re a climate scientist, the likely most obvious approach is the first, because we’ve seen the positive effects of it before. Albedo is the climate science term to describe how white ice acts as an enormous reflector, bouncing away a lot of the sun’s heat. Ice ages dramatically increase albedo, but there are more recent examples in living memory: In 1991 Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, erupted, spewing an enormous amount of volcanic ash into the atmosphere. (The event also caused a large amount of damage, displaced 200,000 people and claimed the lives of at least 722.) According to NOAA, the ash dumped into the atmosphere helped reflect a lot of solar heat away from the Earth, causing a temporary global cooling effect of roughly 1.5 degrees celsius. The devastation of Pinatubo isn’t desirable, nor was the ozone depletion that it caused, but that cooling effect could be vital to slowing global warming and polar melting.
It’s possible to do this artificially by seeding the clouds with chemicals deposited by an airplane or with ground-based smoke generators, which can also be used to promote rain clouds. This is a tactic already used in China to help make rain for agriculture and to alleviate drought-like conditions. In this context, the clouds would act as a barrier between the sun and the ice caps, bouncing more of that solar radiation away from the Earth’s surface. Unfortunately, there’s a problem with this approach, which is that it’s incredibly expensive and incredibly fussy. The report says it’s only viable when the right clouds are overhead, and the work would require enormous infrastructure to be built nearby. Not to mention that while we have some small shreds of evidence to suggest it might be useful, there’s nothing proven as yet.
And then there are the second order effects when these approaches then spill over into the rest of the global ecosystem. “If you do sunlight reflection methods and you put anything up in the atmosphere, it doesn’t stay where you put it.” That’s the big issue identified by Dr. Phil Williamson, honorary associate professor at the University of East Anglia and a former contributor to the UN’s keystone Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. His concern is that regional, targeted climate solutions “don’t solve the problem for the whole world,” and that if you’re not tackling climate change on a global scale, then you’re “just accentuating the difference.” With a cold arctic, but rising temperatures elsewhere, you’re climbing aboard a “climate rollercoaster.”
Second in the ranking of hail-mary climate approaches is to build a freezer to both cool down the existing ice and make more. Sadly, many ideas in this area forget that ice sheets are not just big blocks of immovable ice and are, in fact, liable to move. Take the idea of drilling down two miles or so into the ice sheet and pumping out the warm water to cool it down: Thanks to the constantly shifting ice and water, a new site would need to be drilled fairly regularly.
There’s another problem: The report says one project to bore a hole down 2.5km (1.5 miles) burned 450,000 liters of fuel. Not to mention how much energy it would consume to run the heat exchangers or freezers to create fresh ice on such a scale. That's a considerable amount of greenhouse gas pollution for a project meant to undo that exact type of damage. Dumping a layer of artificially-made snow on a mountain may work fine for a ski resort when the powder’s a little thin, but not the whole planet.
As hard as the scientific and engineering battles will be, there’s also the political one that will need addressing. “A lot of people get quasi-religiously upset about putting stuff into the stratosphere,” said Professor John Moore, “you’d think they’d get similarly upset about greenhouse gasses.” One strategy under consideration is to inject sulfur into the atmosphere to replicate the cooling effects observed after major volcanic eruptions. The sulfur would form SO2, creating thick layers of dense cloud to block more heat from reaching the ice. But if you, like me, have a high school-level knowledge of science, that’s a scary prospect given that sulfur dioxide would resolve to sulfuric acid. Given the microscopic quantities involved, there would be little-to-no impact on the natural world. But the image of acid rain pouring down from the clouds means it’d be a hard sell to an uninformed population.
But if there is a reason for concern, it’s that any unintended consequences could pose a problem in the global political space. “It’s almost like declaring war on the rest of the world if [a nation] goes it alone,” says Phil Williamson, “because any damage or alteration to the global climate system, the country that did it is responsible for all future climatic disasters because the weather isn’t the same.”
Of course, Moore knows that the Frozen Arctic report’s conclusions aren’t too optimistic about a quick fix. He feels its conclusions should serve as a wake-up call for the planet. “Nobody is going to scale up something for the entire arctic ocean overnight,” he said, but that this is the time to “find ideas that might be valuable [...] and then put resources into finding out if [those ideas] really are useful.” He added that the short turnaround time before a total climate disaster isn’t much of an issue, saying “engineers can pretty much do anything you ask them to if you put enough resources into it.” Because the alternative is to do nothing, and “every day that we choose to do nothing, we accept more of the damages that are coming.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-ice-caps-are-melting-is-geoengineering-the-solution-150004916.html?src=rss
Want some bad news as a lead up to the weekend? NASA just released its annual global temperature report and, lo and behold, 2023 was the hottest year on record since measurements began back in 1880. Global temperatures last year were approximately 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) above the average for NASA’s baseline period of 1951 to 1980.
Compared to the 1880s, the planet was 2.5 degrees warmer in 2023. If you do the math, you’ll find that the vast majority of that increase occurred after NASA’s baseline period. In other words, the past several decades have been the worst of the worst. July of 2023 was the hottest month ever measured, which is a record nobody wanted or asked for but, well, here we are.
“NASA and NOAA’s global temperature report confirms what billions of people around the world experienced last year; we are facing a climate crisis,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “From extreme heat, to wildfires, to rising sea levels, we can see our Earth is changing.”
NASA’s not burying its head in the sand and pretending this is a natural phenomenon. We did this, with Gavin Schmidt, director at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), saying the temperature shift was primarily caused by “our fossil fuel emissions.”
2023 was not an outlier. The past ten consecutive years have been the warmest on record. To that end, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently reported that 2024 has a one-in-three chance of being even hotter. Yay.
It’s also worth noting that 2023 featured some cooling events that actually worked to lower temperatures a bit, including volcanic aerosols in the atmosphere due to the January 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai underwater volcano. However, these events couldn’t keep up with constant greenhouse gas emissions and the heating effects of this year’s El Niño weather event.
“We will continue to break records as long as greenhouse gas emissions keep going up,” Schmidt said. “And, unfortunately, we just set a new record for greenhouse gas emissions again this past year.”
The Biden-Harris administration has done a few things to try to slow down our transformation into a Mad Max dystopia. The White House recently launched the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center to make critical climate data readily available and last year’s Inflation Reduction Act set aside $369 billion for climate and clean energy programs. President Biden has also pledged to bring emission levels to at least 50 percent below what we experienced in 2005 by 2025. These are good incremental moves, of that there’s no doubt, but we seem to have sped past “f*ck around” and are careening wildly into “find out.” What was that curse again? Oh yeah. May you live in interesting times.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nasa-confirms-2023-was-the-hottest-year-on-record-193626460.html?src=rss
The UN has set out a pathway to avoiding the very worst effects of climate change. Earlier this week, delegates from around the world ratified a document setting out what we need to do, and when. Even better, the text finally ended the decades-long omerta of never talking about the impact fossil fuels have had on our environment. It’s a landmark moment in history and one that means we can have hope for the future of humanity. Unless, that is, you spend any time examining the substance of the deal to see if the expectations meet the reality. Because then you’ll see that while it’s not all doom and gloom, it’s certainly not the bold action we really need.
Context
All of this took place at the Conference of the Parties (COP) an annual, UN-backed conference to build international consensus on climate change. Delegates from all UN member states, as well as bodies like the EU, all meet at a host city for two weeks to speedrun something that looks a lot like a treaty. The 28th such event was hosted in Dubai, which attracted plenty of criticism given the emirate’s fossil fuel wealth. Its president was Sultan Al Jaber, UAE minister of industry and, uh, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil company.
The perception that the event would be a fossil fuel industry stitch-up wasn’t helped when BBC News reported the UAE secretly planned to use the event to strike new oil and gas deals. Or that Al Jaber was quoted by The Guardian saying there was “no science” supporting the idea that a phase out of fossil fuels was necessary to prevent further warming. He later said his comment had been taken out of context and that he supported work to reduce fossil fuel use.
For all the light and heat around COP, it’s not as powerful as you might hope or think, since there is no real enforcement mechanism. The parties (should) negotiate in good faith but if nations don’t actually follow through on their promises, there’s no mechanism to address it. Diplomacy is a delicate art, especially with so many moving pieces, so maybe we should all learn to appreciate the subtleties. That’s the positive case.
The negative one being that COP28 has been more theater than politics. Anne Rasmussen, representing the Alliance of Small Island States, pointed out her group wasn’t even in the room when the declaration was ratified. Ironic, given that the event was dubbed as “the most inclusive COP to-date, ensuring all voices could participate in the process.” During the plenary, Rasmussen said the text, approved in her absence, doesn’t go far enough in several ways and carries a “litany of loopholes” for wealthy nations to delay, or avoid their responsibilities.
TL;DR
The text opens with a long introductory section admitting that humanity as a whole hasn’t been doing a good enough job. It admits humans are responsible for raising the Earth’s temperature by at least 1.1 degrees celsius, and we’re on the hook to fix it. And the 1.5 degrees celsius limit agreed in Paris in 2015 isn’t going to happen unless we really start putting the work in right now. It adds that while the technology is there, we haven’t made enough use of it, and that plenty of small island nations and countries in the developing world will bear the brunt of our inaction.
1: The Task at Hand
Because we’ve dragged our feet for so long, the extent of action needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees celsius will be stark. (And 1.5 degrees isn’t maintaining the status quo but the limit that keeps the slew of natural disasters it precipitates from becoming biblical.) Humanity needs to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent by 2030, and 60 percent by 2035. To get a sense of that task, we emitted around 60 gigatonnes of CO2 in 2019, and now we’ve got a decade to cut it by more than a half. Should we reach that ambitious target, we then need to repeat the same feat even faster to ensure we reach net zero emissions by 2050. Even though most climate scientists I’ve spoken to feel that the 2050 deadline is far too late.
2: The Loopholes
Rasmussen already highlighted that the goals laid out in the text are hazy, more guidelines than real processes. They’re written with the caveat that nations should contribute to the overall goal in a “nationally determined manner.” On one hand, that respects “their different national circumstances, pathways and approaches.” On the other, it allows some nations to pass off insufficient work as them doing their part without consequence.
3: Tripling global renewable energy capacity by 2030
One of the biggest pledges in the document is to triple renewable energy generation capacity by 2030. Data from the International Renewable Energy Agency says that in 2022 that figure stood at 3,371,793 MW. So, we’ve got six years or so to manufacture and build 6,743,586 MW of renewable energy, from wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear and the rest. Simple, right?
Not so much. Not to denigrate the work that’s already been going on, but we’re nowhere near that level. Between 2021 and 2022, the world got a little under 300,000 MW of new renewable generation up and running. To lay even one finger on the target COP28 has set down, the world needs to be averaging closer to 1.2 million MW every single year.
But, and here’s the thing – these figures don’t actually feature in the ratified version of the text at all. I’ve done the math from the 2022 figures because that seems relevant but the text itself has no baseline, or any frame of reference at all. It’s conceivable a bad actor could say they’ve tripled domestic renewables work from an earlier date, or start their count from zero.
4: Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems
You’ll have seen plenty of the headlines out of COP28 commenting this is the first declaration to explicitly mention fossil fuels in its text. It’s wild to think we’ve had nearly three decades of these summits and everyone has chosen to just look the other way until now. You can see how tightly these points have been massaged and lawyered to make sure while the elephant in the room has been pointed out, it’s still very welcome to stay. It can continue to knock over the furniture and drop big piles of dung, too, so long as certain folks keep making money.
One clause pledges to speed up efforts to “phase down unabated coal power,” which means plants that gesture toward carbon capture aren’t targeted. The fact that the deal doesn’t call for a near-instantaneous blanket ban on coal burning boggles the mind given the science at hand. After all, coal isn’t just the worst fossil fuel, it’s the most environmentally harmful: if you burn one ton of coal, you’ll actually create more than twice that amount of CO2. Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency said that global CO2 emissions from coal power increased by two percent, reaching “a new high in 2022.”
Another clause pledges an acceleration toward “net zero emission energy systems” that use “zero and low carbon fuels” before 2050. And then there's the big one — a clause talking about a transition away from “fossil fuels in energy systems” in a “just, orderly and equitable manner.” I’m enough of a cynic to think those phrases can be bent miles out of shape, and the fact there’s no benchmarks or enforcement mechanisms means that, for now, it’s all just cheap, sweet words.
Then we’ve got a push for other low-emission technologies which, alongside renewables and nuclear, include “abatement and removal” like carbon capture and low-carbon hydrogen. It’s fair to say that those last two should be treated like the mythical unicorns they really are. After all, abundant, low-carbon hydrogen created with renewable energy is a technological cul-de-sac. And while it’s fair to say (mechanical) carbon capture is still relatively new, data from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis suggests it’s a non-starter.
It’s hard not to be cynical watching entities with a vested interest in the status quo gesture toward these projects when they're likely to use them as license to stick with business as usual. If there’s one good point in this part, it’s that there’s a pledge to “substantially” reduce the volume of non carbon dioxide emissions. It specifically namechecks methane, a greenhouse gas that is significantly more damaging than CO2 in the short term. There’s also a reference to cutting emissions in road transport by pushing infrastructure for low and zero-emission vehicles.
As notable as the mention of fossil fuels was, the declaration also “recognizes that transition fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.” To you and me, that means countries can continue to exploit and burn fossil fuels like natural gas. Now, gas is better than coal for greenhouse gas emissions, but it’s a bit like saying you’ll only burn down the ground floor of your home rather than the whole thing. Not to mention that natural gas is predominantly made up of methane, that thing we’re also meant to be reducing.
5: The rest
Much of the work at COP28 was focused on broader issues, including making sure the financial gravity of the situation was addressed. There was a lot of negotiation around various monetary tools and funds that could be used to incentivize responsible emissions reduction. There were also pledges made for international co-operation, knowledge sharing and protecting economic growth. One clause that did leap out was a pledge to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies that “do not address energy poverty or just transitions,” which is similarly weak in its definition. And while there are gestures toward halting deforestation and restoring the natural environment, there’s little substance. One section invites — invites! — parties to “preserve and restore oceans and coastal ecosystems.”
Reactions
Dr Phil Williamson, Honorary Associate Professor in Environmental Science at the University at East Anglia said that COP28’s declaration “represents modest political process, recognising what has been scientifically obvious for at least 30 years.” And it’s this point that probably needs highlighting given how many Very Serious People will likely hail COP28 as a landmark. Yes, it’s a massive achievement to finally mention that fossil fuels are the reason we’re in this mess. But the fact it’s taken so long for us to even be confident enough talking about the problem means we now have almost no time to do the work to get us out of it.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/time-to-get-miserable-about-the-cop28-declaration-174527863.html?src=rss
Climate change isn't going away, and it isn't going to get any better — at least if we keep legislating as we have been. In Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, a multidisciplinary collection of subject matter experts discuss the increasingly intertwined fates of American ecology and democracy, arguing that only by strengthening our existing institutions will we be able to weather the oncoming "long emergency."
In the excerpt below, contributing author and Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo, Holly Jean Buck, explores how accelerating climate change, the modern internet and authoritarianism's recent renaissance are influencing and amplifying one another's negative impacts, to the detriment of us all.
Burning hills and glowing red skies, stone-dry riverbeds, expanses of brown water engulfing tiny human rooftops. This is the setting for the twenty-first century. What is the plot? For many of us working on climate and energy, the story of this century is about making the energy transition happen. This is when we completely transform both energy and land use in order to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change — or fail to.
Confronting authoritarianism is even more urgent. About four billion people, or 54 percent of the world, in ninety-five countries, live under tyranny in fully authoritarian or competitive authoritarian regimes. The twenty-first century is also about the struggle against new and rising forms of authoritarianism. In this narration, the twenty-first century began with a wave of crushed democratic uprisings and continued with the election of authoritarian leaders around the world who began to dismantle democratic institutions. Any illusion of the success of globalization, or of the twenty-first century representing a break from the brutal twentieth century, was stripped away with Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine. The plot is less clear, given the failure of democracy-building efforts in the twentieth century. There is a faintly discernable storyline of general resistance and rebuilding imperfect democracies.
There’s also a third story about this century: the penetration of the Internet into every sphere of daily, social, and political life. Despite turn-of-the-century talk about the Information Age, we are only beginning to conceptualize what this means. Right now, the current plot is about the centralization of discourse on a few corporate platforms. The rise of the platforms brings potential to network democratic uprisings, as well as buoy authoritarian leaders through post-truth memes and algorithms optimized to dish out anger and hatred. This is a more challenging story to narrate, because the setting is everywhere. The story unfolds in our bedrooms while we should be sleeping or waking up, filling the most quotidian moments of waiting in line in the grocery store or while in transit. The characters are us, even more intimately than with climate change. It makes it hard to see the shape and meaning of this story. And while we are increasingly aware of the influence that shifting our media and social lives onto big tech platforms has on our democracy, less attention is devoted to the influence this has on our ability to respond to climate change.
Think about these three forces meeting — climate change, authoritarianism, the Internet. What comes to mind? If you recombine the familiar characters from these stories, perhaps it looks like climate activists using the capabilities of the Internet to further both networked protest and energy democracy. In particular, advocacy for a version of “energy democracy” that looks like wind, water, and solar; decentralized systems; and local community control of energy.
In this essay, I would like to suggest that this is not actually where the three forces of rising authoritarianism x climate change x tech platforms domination leads. Rather, the political economy of online media has boxed us into a social landscape wherein both the political consensus and the infrastructure we need for the energy transition is impossible to build. The current configuration of the Internet is a key obstacle to climate action.
The possibilities of climate action exist within a media ecosystem that has monetized our attention and that profits from our hate and division. Algorithms that reap advertising profits from maximizing time-on-site have figured out that what keeps us clicking is anger. Even worse, the system is addictive, with notifications delivering hits of dopamine in a part of what historian and addiction expert David Courtwright calls “limbic capitalism.” Society has more or less sleepwalked into this outrage-industrial complex without having a real analytic framework for understanding it. The tech platforms and some research groups or think tanks offer up “misinformation” or “disinformation” as the framework, which present the problem as if the problem is bad content poisoning the well, rather than the structure itself being rotten. As Evgeny Morozov has quipped, “Post-truth is to digital capitalism what pollution is to fossil capitalism — a by-product of operations.”
A number of works outline the contours and dynamics of the current media ecology and what it does — Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Antisocial Media, Safiya U. Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, Geert Lovink’s Sad by Design, Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, Tim Hwang’s Subprime Attention Crisis, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s writing on how to understand the social relations of Internet technologies through racial capitalism, and many more. At the same time, there’s reasonable counter-discussion about how many of our problems can really be laid at the feet of social media. The research on the impacts of social media on political dysfunction, mental health, and society writ large does not paint a neat portrait. Scholars have argued that putting too much emphasis on the platforms can be too simplistic and reeks of technological determinism; they have also pointed out that cultures like the United States’ and the legacy media have a long history with post-truth. That said, there are certainly dynamics going on that we did not anticipate, and we don’t seem quite sure what to do with them, even with multiple areas of scholarship in communication, disinformation, and social media and democracy working on these inquiries for years.
What seems clear is that the Internet is not the connectedness we imagined. The ecology and spirituality of the 1960s, which shaped and structured much of what we see as energy democracy and the good future today, told us we were all connected. Globally networked — it sounds familiar, like a fevered dream from the 1980s or 1990s, a dream that in turn had its roots in the 1960s and before. Media theorist Geert Lovink reflects on a 1996 interview with John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder and Grateful Dead lyricist, in which Barlow was describing how cyberspace was connecting each and every synapse of all citizens on the planet. As Lovink writes, “Apart from the so-called last billion we’re there now. This is what we can all agree on. The corona crisis is the first Event in World History where the internet doesn’t merely play ‘a role’ — the Event coincides with the Net. There’s a deep irony to this. The virus and the network ... sigh, that’s an old trope, right?” Indeed, read through one cultural history, it seems obvious that we would reach this point of being globally networked, and that the Internet would not just “play a role” in global events like COVID-19 or climate change, but shape them.
What if the Internet actually has connected us, more deeply than we normally give it credit for? What if the we’re-all-connected-ness imagined in the latter half of the twentieth century is in fact showing up, but manifesting late, and not at all like we thought? We really are connected — but our global body is neither a psychedelic collective consciousness nor a infrastructure for data transmission comprising information packets and code. It seems that we’ve made a collective brain that doesn’t act much like a computer at all. It runs on data, code, binary digits — but it acts emotionally, irrationally, in a fight-or-flight way, and without consciousness. It’s an entity that operates as an emotional toddler, rather than with the neat computational sensing capacity that stock graphics of “the Internet” convey. Thinking of it as data or information is the same as thinking that a network of cells is a person.
The thing we’re jacked into and collectively creating seems more like a global endocrine system than anything we might have visualized in the years while “cyber” was a prefix. This may seem a banal observation, given that Marshall McLuhan was talking about the global nervous system more than fifty years ago. We had enthusiasm about cybernetics and global connectivity over the decades and, more recently, a revitalization of theory about networks and kinship and rhizomes and all the rest. (The irony is that with fifty years of talk on “systems thinking,” we still have responses to things like COVID-19 or climate that are almost antithetical to considering interconnected systems — dominated by one set of expertise and failing to incorporate the social sciences and humanities). So — globally connected, yet divided into silos, camps, echo-chambers, and so on. Social media platforms are acting as agents, structuring our interactions and our spaces for dialogue and solution-building. Authoritarians know this, and this is why they have troll farms that can manipulate the range of solutions and the sentiments about them.
The Internet as we experience it represents a central obstacle to climate action, through several mechanisms. Promotion of false information about climate change is only one of them. There’s general political polarization, which inhibits the coalitions we need to build to realize clean energy, as well as creates paralyzing infighting within the climate movement about strategies, which the platforms benefit from. There’s networked opposition to the infrastructure we need for the energy transition. There’s the constant distraction from the climate crisis, in the form of the churning scandals of the day, in an attention economy where all topics compete for mental energy. And there’s the drain of time and attention spent on these platforms rather than in real-world actions.
Any of these areas are worth spending time on, but this essay focuses on how the contemporary media ecology interferes with climate strategy and infrastructure in particular. To understand the dynamic, we need to take a closer look at the concept of energy democracy, as generally understood by the climate movement, and its tenets: renewable, small-scale systems, and community control. The bitter irony of the current moment is that it’s not just rising authoritarianism that is blocking us from good futures. It’s also our narrow and warped conceptions of democracy that are trapping us.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-democracy-in-a-hotter-time-david-orr-mit-press-143034391.html?src=rss
Climate change isn't going away, and it isn't going to get any better — at least if we keep legislating as we have been. In Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, a multidisciplinary collection of subject matter experts discuss the increasingly intertwined fates of American ecology and democracy, arguing that only by strengthening our existing institutions will we be able to weather the oncoming "long emergency."
In the excerpt below, contributing author and Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo, Holly Jean Buck, explores how accelerating climate change, the modern internet and authoritarianism's recent renaissance are influencing and amplifying one another's negative impacts, to the detriment of us all.
Burning hills and glowing red skies, stone-dry riverbeds, expanses of brown water engulfing tiny human rooftops. This is the setting for the twenty-first century. What is the plot? For many of us working on climate and energy, the story of this century is about making the energy transition happen. This is when we completely transform both energy and land use in order to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change — or fail to.
Confronting authoritarianism is even more urgent. About four billion people, or 54 percent of the world, in ninety-five countries, live under tyranny in fully authoritarian or competitive authoritarian regimes. The twenty-first century is also about the struggle against new and rising forms of authoritarianism. In this narration, the twenty-first century began with a wave of crushed democratic uprisings and continued with the election of authoritarian leaders around the world who began to dismantle democratic institutions. Any illusion of the success of globalization, or of the twenty-first century representing a break from the brutal twentieth century, was stripped away with Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine. The plot is less clear, given the failure of democracy-building efforts in the twentieth century. There is a faintly discernable storyline of general resistance and rebuilding imperfect democracies.
There’s also a third story about this century: the penetration of the Internet into every sphere of daily, social, and political life. Despite turn-of-the-century talk about the Information Age, we are only beginning to conceptualize what this means. Right now, the current plot is about the centralization of discourse on a few corporate platforms. The rise of the platforms brings potential to network democratic uprisings, as well as buoy authoritarian leaders through post-truth memes and algorithms optimized to dish out anger and hatred. This is a more challenging story to narrate, because the setting is everywhere. The story unfolds in our bedrooms while we should be sleeping or waking up, filling the most quotidian moments of waiting in line in the grocery store or while in transit. The characters are us, even more intimately than with climate change. It makes it hard to see the shape and meaning of this story. And while we are increasingly aware of the influence that shifting our media and social lives onto big tech platforms has on our democracy, less attention is devoted to the influence this has on our ability to respond to climate change.
Think about these three forces meeting — climate change, authoritarianism, the Internet. What comes to mind? If you recombine the familiar characters from these stories, perhaps it looks like climate activists using the capabilities of the Internet to further both networked protest and energy democracy. In particular, advocacy for a version of “energy democracy” that looks like wind, water, and solar; decentralized systems; and local community control of energy.
In this essay, I would like to suggest that this is not actually where the three forces of rising authoritarianism x climate change x tech platforms domination leads. Rather, the political economy of online media has boxed us into a social landscape wherein both the political consensus and the infrastructure we need for the energy transition is impossible to build. The current configuration of the Internet is a key obstacle to climate action.
The possibilities of climate action exist within a media ecosystem that has monetized our attention and that profits from our hate and division. Algorithms that reap advertising profits from maximizing time-on-site have figured out that what keeps us clicking is anger. Even worse, the system is addictive, with notifications delivering hits of dopamine in a part of what historian and addiction expert David Courtwright calls “limbic capitalism.” Society has more or less sleepwalked into this outrage-industrial complex without having a real analytic framework for understanding it. The tech platforms and some research groups or think tanks offer up “misinformation” or “disinformation” as the framework, which present the problem as if the problem is bad content poisoning the well, rather than the structure itself being rotten. As Evgeny Morozov has quipped, “Post-truth is to digital capitalism what pollution is to fossil capitalism — a by-product of operations.”
A number of works outline the contours and dynamics of the current media ecology and what it does — Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Antisocial Media, Safiya U. Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, Geert Lovink’s Sad by Design, Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, Tim Hwang’s Subprime Attention Crisis, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s writing on how to understand the social relations of Internet technologies through racial capitalism, and many more. At the same time, there’s reasonable counter-discussion about how many of our problems can really be laid at the feet of social media. The research on the impacts of social media on political dysfunction, mental health, and society writ large does not paint a neat portrait. Scholars have argued that putting too much emphasis on the platforms can be too simplistic and reeks of technological determinism; they have also pointed out that cultures like the United States’ and the legacy media have a long history with post-truth. That said, there are certainly dynamics going on that we did not anticipate, and we don’t seem quite sure what to do with them, even with multiple areas of scholarship in communication, disinformation, and social media and democracy working on these inquiries for years.
What seems clear is that the Internet is not the connectedness we imagined. The ecology and spirituality of the 1960s, which shaped and structured much of what we see as energy democracy and the good future today, told us we were all connected. Globally networked — it sounds familiar, like a fevered dream from the 1980s or 1990s, a dream that in turn had its roots in the 1960s and before. Media theorist Geert Lovink reflects on a 1996 interview with John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder and Grateful Dead lyricist, in which Barlow was describing how cyberspace was connecting each and every synapse of all citizens on the planet. As Lovink writes, “Apart from the so-called last billion we’re there now. This is what we can all agree on. The corona crisis is the first Event in World History where the internet doesn’t merely play ‘a role’ — the Event coincides with the Net. There’s a deep irony to this. The virus and the network ... sigh, that’s an old trope, right?” Indeed, read through one cultural history, it seems obvious that we would reach this point of being globally networked, and that the Internet would not just “play a role” in global events like COVID-19 or climate change, but shape them.
What if the Internet actually has connected us, more deeply than we normally give it credit for? What if the we’re-all-connected-ness imagined in the latter half of the twentieth century is in fact showing up, but manifesting late, and not at all like we thought? We really are connected — but our global body is neither a psychedelic collective consciousness nor a infrastructure for data transmission comprising information packets and code. It seems that we’ve made a collective brain that doesn’t act much like a computer at all. It runs on data, code, binary digits — but it acts emotionally, irrationally, in a fight-or-flight way, and without consciousness. It’s an entity that operates as an emotional toddler, rather than with the neat computational sensing capacity that stock graphics of “the Internet” convey. Thinking of it as data or information is the same as thinking that a network of cells is a person.
The thing we’re jacked into and collectively creating seems more like a global endocrine system than anything we might have visualized in the years while “cyber” was a prefix. This may seem a banal observation, given that Marshall McLuhan was talking about the global nervous system more than fifty years ago. We had enthusiasm about cybernetics and global connectivity over the decades and, more recently, a revitalization of theory about networks and kinship and rhizomes and all the rest. (The irony is that with fifty years of talk on “systems thinking,” we still have responses to things like COVID-19 or climate that are almost antithetical to considering interconnected systems — dominated by one set of expertise and failing to incorporate the social sciences and humanities). So — globally connected, yet divided into silos, camps, echo-chambers, and so on. Social media platforms are acting as agents, structuring our interactions and our spaces for dialogue and solution-building. Authoritarians know this, and this is why they have troll farms that can manipulate the range of solutions and the sentiments about them.
The Internet as we experience it represents a central obstacle to climate action, through several mechanisms. Promotion of false information about climate change is only one of them. There’s general political polarization, which inhibits the coalitions we need to build to realize clean energy, as well as creates paralyzing infighting within the climate movement about strategies, which the platforms benefit from. There’s networked opposition to the infrastructure we need for the energy transition. There’s the constant distraction from the climate crisis, in the form of the churning scandals of the day, in an attention economy where all topics compete for mental energy. And there’s the drain of time and attention spent on these platforms rather than in real-world actions.
Any of these areas are worth spending time on, but this essay focuses on how the contemporary media ecology interferes with climate strategy and infrastructure in particular. To understand the dynamic, we need to take a closer look at the concept of energy democracy, as generally understood by the climate movement, and its tenets: renewable, small-scale systems, and community control. The bitter irony of the current moment is that it’s not just rising authoritarianism that is blocking us from good futures. It’s also our narrow and warped conceptions of democracy that are trapping us.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-democracy-in-a-hotter-time-david-orr-mit-press-143034391.html?src=rss
On Monday, meteorologists documented the hottest day in recorded history, according to US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (via Reuters). July 3rd, 2023 saw average global temperatures edge past 17-degrees Celsius (62.62 Fahrenheit) for the first time since satellite monitoring of global temperatures began in 1979. Scientists believe Monday is also the hottest day on record since humans began using instruments to measure daily temperatures in the late 19th century. The previous record was set in August 2016 when the world’s average temperature climbed to 16.92C (62.45 Fahrenheit).
This week, the southern US is sweltering under a heat dome that has sent local temperatures past the 110 Fahrenheit mark (43C). Even places that normally aren’t known for their warm weather have been unseasonably hot in recent days and weeks, with the Vernadsky Research Base in Antarctica recording a July high of 8.7C.
Scientists attribute the recent heat to a combination of El Niño and ongoing human-driven emissions of greenhouse gases. Studies have shown that climate change is contributing to heat waves that are more frequent, last longer and hotter than ever. "The average global surface air temperature reaching 17C for the first time since we have reliable records available is a significant symbolic milestone in our warming world," climate researcher Leon Simons told BBC News. "Now that the warmer phase of El Niño is starting we can expect a lot more daily, monthly and annual records breaking in the next 1.5 years.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/july-3rd-was-the-hottest-day-in-recorded-history-214854746.html?src=rss
There are several countries in Southeast Asia where one of the tourist attractions is floating markets. You’ll see some in Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, and if you’ve never seen one before, it’s an interesting thing to experience. But for a lot of these countries, flooding and the harsh effects of climate change are also part of their reality. Housing can be a problem when it comes to places like this so it’s interesting to see how architects and designers are coming up with structures that will be able to withstand threats to their abodes.
A Vietnamese firm has come up with a flood-resistant dwelling that’s specifically targeted for those who live near the rivers and may experience occasional flooding. The Floating Bamboo House is basically what its name says it is. It is made from various materials that will let the house survive threats from extreme weather conditions that may be the result of climate change. Materials include compressed weaved bamboo sheets, bamboo stems, bamboo screens and with the addition of leaves and corrugated iron. All of these materials are tied together with latches and ties.
The floating part is through the plastic drums that are found on the underside of the house. It is around 36 square meters and is designed like a traditional house with a triangular shape. Inside you get an open layout with two levels although later on, they will be adding a bedroom, kitchen area, and other things that will make it feel like a real home. There will even be a freshwater storage tanks and septic tanks. The roof will also have a rainwater collection system and solar panels to make it more sustainable. There are open facades in some parts so natural light and air can come in.
The space in the upper part can also be used as a classroom or library when the floor panels are removed. This is a pretty interesting concept even if it’s still in just the prototype stage. It was designed specifically for those living in and around in the Mekong Delta area as an alternative housing solution to adapt to the worsening conditions caused by climate change.
Two employee groups at Amazon have joined together to stage a corporate walk out today, uniting to protest the company's return-to-office policy and to raise concerns about Amazon's climate impact.
Standing in front of Amazon's Seattle Headquarters, the group streamed the event live on Twitter — featuring speakers for both groups advocating for their united cause. Some speakers vented their frustrations with the company's policy to have workers return to the office for at least three days a week, telling stories about how the remote work kicked off by the COVID pandemic bought them precious hours at home with their family and saved them from hours of daily commute time. Another speaker married this idea to the company's climate goals, highlighting how remote work allowed more families to become one-car households. This dovetails into some of the groups' complaints that Amazon is failing to meet its own goals in its climate pledge of reaching zero emissions by 2040.
— Amazon Employees For Climate Justice (@AMZNforClimate) May 31, 2023
According to the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice Twitter page, more than 1900 Amazon employees pledged to participate in the walk out.
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser provided Engadget with the following statement:
“We continue to push hard on getting to net carbon zero by 2040, and we have over 400 companies who’ve joined us in our Climate Pledge. While we all would like to get there tomorrow, for companies like ours who consume a lot of power, and have very substantial transportation, packaging, and physical building assets, it’ll take time to accomplish. We remain on track to get to 100% renewable energy by 2025, and will continue investing substantially, inventing and collaborating both internally and externally to reach our goal.
We’re always listening and will continue to do so, but we’re happy with how the first month of having more people back in the office has been. There's more energy, collaboration, and connections happening, and we've heard this from lots of employees and the businesses that surround our offices. We understand that it’s going to take time to adjust back to being in the office more and there are a lot of teams at the company working hard to make this transition as smooth as possible for employees.”
Amazon also estimated that about 300 of the 65,000 corporate and tech employees in the Puget Sound HQ participated in the walkout; it doesn't look like the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice account has yet provided their own estimate for how many people participated.
— Amazon Employees For Climate Justice (@AMZNforClimate) May 23, 2023
Update, June 1st 2023, 9:00AM ET: Added a statement from Amazon.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-workers-walk-out-to-protest-return-to-office-mandates-and-the-companys-climate-impact-194937443.html?src=rss
