“The origin narrative of the University of Chicago does not begin with John D. Rockefeller in 1890. It does not even begin in the city of Chicago. It actually begins on a 3,000-acre cotton plantation in Lawrence County, Mississippi. Hundreds of enslaved African American men, women, and children lived and died on that plantation to make the University of Chicago, and its $7 billion endowment, possible. The University of Chicago refuses to acknowledge this part of its heritage.”
This documentary does a great job of connecting the shameful racist moment of Human Zoos with the political past, the approaching fascist horizon of the time, and the present. It's inspiring to read about the nascent civil rights struggle by Black leaders, and interesting to draw parallels to modern times.
The New York Times being quoted as saying about the protesters, "We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter," and denying the humanity of pygmy people has a sober recent analog.
TIL that Trump's Russian patronymic name is Fredovych.
There's a certain segment of the population that embraces collapse in a way that hastens its arrival, withdrawing to rural areas and fortifying themselves with guns and mentally preparing themselves to kill others to survive in a way that fuels right wing politics.
I think there are ways that one can prepare for collapse without contributing to the trends that accelerate it. Storing non-perishable food, for example, can be useful to survive a serious social disruption, but is also useful to support workers engaged in strike action, or give you a financial cushion to allow you to quit an exploitative job. Building networks of interdependence and support that exist outside the state are just good praxis, aside from being extremely valuable when shit hits the fan.
My 'assumptions' are that you work in machine learning and AI. We've shared this platform for a while. If you didn't announce it almost as much as you announce your anti-capitalism, I could correctly assume it from the pages of patronizing apologia you've written about it.
And while I'm happy to 'antagonize' you on behalf of all the other people you've belittled and spoken over, I don't think you're the enemy. I appreciate the pushback to my ideas occasional adversarial scholarship provides. I hope your ego eventually softens to appreciate what I'm trying to achieve here.
complaining about me giving sources.
I've taken the graphs and numbers you've given me in gratitude, and used them to debunk your ideological position. Everyone makes reading comprehension mistakes occasionally, but it unusual for someone to get things this wrong this consistently. I'm reminded of the Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." And this is tragic, because while it may benefit your short term feelings of privilege and stability to trivialize the need for drastic degrowth while engaged in an extremely energy intensive industry, you are also a victim. Your near term future is going to be impacted just like everyone else's by the widespread inability of many people like you to meaningfully grapple with the difficult but necessary steps required to avoid the worst of the climate catastrophe.
Yes, coal+natural gas has decreased. The fall in coal is bigger than the rise in natural gas. You can check it in the source the article linked.
I'd love it if you could teach me someting, but your strategy of throwing sources at me that don't back up your statements undermines your authority as a media literacy educator. The total fossil fuel use peaks in 2005, but saying the graph conclusively shows a decreasing trend in Fossil Fuel use is evidence of wishful thinking; the slopes are so small that if you drew a line from that peak to the COVID minimum in 2020 and extrapolate from that slope, the zero fossil fuel use point would still be in 2090. There is a local maximum in 2018, and an increase in fossil use at the end of the data set in 2021, suggesting a return to pre-COVID growth. Covid has nothing to do with 2018, and while it explains the increase in fossil fuel use in 2021, it doesn't explain why fossil fuel use increased faster than alternative energy use in the same year. If there was an unambiguous downward trend in fossil fuel use, you would not expect 'noise' large enough to poke holes in that hypothesis.
Some of the decrease in coal was from renewables replacing them or have you an alternate explanation?
The standard explanation I'm aware of is that with the discovery of new fracking techniques, natural gas has become economically cheaper than coal, causing some of the less profitable coal plants to shut down. This is also the simplest explanation from the explosion of natural gas on graph #1. Wikipedia lists ~30 decommissioned US-based coal power plants with +200 still firing.
You can't claim 'coal has been replaced' when a percentage of its total capacity is simply being furlowed for when it becomes competitive with other energy sources again, like your source projected it to in 2021. May I remind you that the alternative name for Jevons Paradox is the 'Bounce-Back' effect?
Furthermore, the hypothesis that manufacturing new alternative energy sources will replace fossil fuel energy use without any need for social or political pressure would predict that with each increase in alternative energy growth, there would be a corresponding decrease in fossil fuel use. This is soundly contradicted by the data you've provided.
Only the year 2010 from 1955-2010 showed negative fossil energy growth from the previous five years, and in that year the amount of energy provided by alternative sources grew much more than the amount that fossil fuel use shrank. This not only contradicts the 'replacement' hypothesis, but also supports my hypothesis, which predicts that without significant political or social resistance, market forces will cause alternative energy to complement fossil fuel rather than replace it. Using both renewable energy and fossil fuel creates lower energy prices than either one individually, and lower energy prices stimulate economic growth. Economic growth results in more demand for energy, and thus more sources of fossil fuel and renewable energy in a 'virtuous' cycle.
The more granular recent data also contradicts the 'replacement' hypothesis.
From 2010-2020, total energy used in the United States has shown little growth and been roughly static. If fossil fuel was being replaced by alternative energy, you would expect to see fossil fuel energy use decrease with each renewable energy increase. That behavior does not appear in the data. Instead it looks like the kind of bouncy data you expect from market behavior between competing goods.
I didn't expect to see the energy use stagnation in the United States from 2010-2020, which was interesting. My guess is that this coincides with a change in US trade patterns where energy-intensive domestic manufacturing was shifted to Asia.
Based on this trade graph, I would predict a boom in both new fossil fuel plants and renewable energy plants in China from 2010 to at least 2017, and similar paired growth in other Asian countries the United States traded with. I suspect the United States' stagnation is due to energy - from coal, renewables, or otherwise - being cheaper abroad than from any domestic source. Once that is no longer the case, I predict the United States will 'bounce-back' and begin producing significantly more fossil-fuel-based energy if there is no significant political or social force to stop it.
If China built no new fossil fuel plants during those years, or if manufacturing returns from abroad to a politically and socially stagnant US and there is a decrease in fossil fuel energy generation, that would be a significant blow to my hypothesis. If I haven't convinced you that the 'replacement' hypothesis is wrong, please tell me what prediction would have to be false in order for you to abandon that hypothesis?
Denmark-based ElectricityMaps.com joins Spain, Norway, and Ireland in recognizing a Palestinian State :)
münecat is always welcome here.
I joined Reddit because of the thoughtful discussions, and because it was well moderated, site:reddit.com became an extremely useful search term to find answers to difficult questions. I didn't have much appetite for meme communities and ironic shitposting. It is frustrating to try and discuss the nuance of an article with a pool of people who comment with their knee-jerk reactions to the article title but aren't interested in the actual content.
My thinking has since shifted since I started studying patterns for good community-building as a Fediverse admin. It can take significant parts of an hour to engage with long-form content like an investigative report or video essay, and that severely limits who can participate constructively in the comments section. Meanwhile a meme takes seconds to digest, which is more typical of available leisure time. A post on !documentaries or !infrapolitics is lucky to get a dozen votes and any engagement, while it is unusual for !memes posts to get fewer than 100 votes.
I'm still garbage at finding good memes or making my own, but I've come to respect that while a lot of the discussion they provoke isn't particularly constructive, the sheer volume of the response and the mechanisms of moderation and vote filtering mean some surprisingly insightful discussions can arise in 'low-effort' post comments. And people who engage with meme content often experience it as a gateway to more serious communities on the server.
While the traffic to a meme community can spill over to your other discussions and draw additional attention to your server, I don't suggest creating one if you no longer have the appetite for that kind of content. Meme communities require at least as much moderation as more serious communities, and are more likely to attract trolls and bad actors. But If you can find people interested in creating and maintaining them based on your server's ground rules, I don't think it's a bad idea to include those kinds of communities on your server.
If you come to the server to troll or argue with vegans, you're uninvited.