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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Slash electricity demand before increasing production
“The claim is ubiquitous: if we’re to meet our climate goals, we need a mass buildout of renewable energy production. But this claim is false, and worse yet, attempting it will accelerate climate collapse. The assumptions baked into this claim are:
- [Electricity] demand is natural and untouchable
- Renewable energy production reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
Both are untrue.
“So in plain language, here is the actual claim: “We have no choice but to meet all electricity demands and doing so via renewable energy increases greenhouse gas emissions by a lesser amount than fossil fuels. Now we can break that down.
“The reality is this: 1) We absolutely do have a choice because demand is politically, economically, and socially constructed, and 2) The choice between renewables and fossil fuels is a false binary. The solution becomes obvious: reduce demand and thus production. The benefits of doing so are not relative to fossil fuels, they are absolute.
“The next false assumption is that reducing demand would lead to a decline in quality of life. The reality is quite the opposite: a great deal of what drives demand makes our quality of life worse or has no effect at all — cryptocurrency mining and arbitrage, high-speed trading, AI data centers, climate-controlled empty office towers and retail spaces, always-on second homes, powered advertising, after-hours commercial lighting, and idling server farms.
“So given that, why is there so much enthusiasm for an eye-wateringly expensive and ecologically destructive renewable energy buildout? Because when it’s deployed in this manner, renewable energy avoids class struggle and ecological education. It appears to be a silver bullet.
“But any solution to climate change that doesn’t account for inequality — both of wealth and energy — is doomed to fail. Fortunately, there’s a way to make this process a real engine for redistribution while reducing demand: steeply progressive pricing of electricity.
“Allocating a cheap, reliable 10-15 kWh per day would allow everyone to meet their core needs at a lower cost than they do today. Above that, tiered pricing would function as a redistributive tax on the rich. If people were unable to meet their core needs within the 10-15 kWh per day range due to issues like poorly insulated homes, the necessary upgrades would be paid for via the ‘tax’ on the rich. For an energy transition to succeed, it must have powerful incentives and disincentives, while also redistributing wealth.”
The ecological damage of transmission lines
“Mention ‘renewable energy infrastructure’ and most people will probably picture solar and wind farms out in the country. What’s usually not envisioned are high-voltage transmission lines — how the power from these often remote sites is brought to the cities and towns.
“Currently (no pun intended) the US has 200,000-240,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines. In order to decarbonize or electrify the nation’s energy supply, many miles of new transmission lines would be needed. How many? According to a Princeton study, two to five times as much will be required by 2050 to reach net-zero, which translates to a million or more new miles of lines.
“Transmission lines are not benign structures. They have their own environmental impacts, both on-site and off, that are not trivial. On-site impacts include: habitat loss (locally), habitat fragmentation (regionally), and bird injury and death. Off-site impacts result from the manufacturing of the components themselves, and include everything from raw material extraction to component manufacturing to transportation.
“The right-of-way (ROW) for transmission lines must be cleared for construction, and kept clear for maintenance. For a 1000 acre solar power plant producing for a city 50 miles away using 500 kV lines, the total project footprint more than doubles, adding 1200 acres in ROW. Long-term maintenance of these ROWs entails on-going vegetation management including more mowing, chopping and (too often) herbicides.
“A transmission line right-of-way splits a landscape. The resulting break-up of habitat into parts is what we mean by ‘fragmentation’. The ecological make-up of the ROW diverges from the surrounding landscape, sometimes drastically. The more arid the landscape, the more persistent the scar of the ROW.
“Wildlife are harmed by the physical equipment, as in, birds are killed or injured when they run into the lines while flying, or are electrocuted. The birds who are most likely to run into lines are large raptors. Bats are also victims to the collisions with the lines.”
No basis to deny the emergence of consciousness from material interactions
“Two posts back, we discussed common objections to the materialist (monist) perspective. The thinking is that claiming Life to be ‘nothing but’ matter reduces the amazingness of life to mere ‘dead’ physics. But not only is the ‘dead’ part dead wrong, the objection itself requires a dualist perspective, fabricating a hierarchy and division between Life and matter. The problem is in concocting a dual valuation in the first place.
“Firstly, to live in the universe is to be a reductionist. To have a brain is to make flawed and woefully-incomplete mental models. Everyone is a reductionist. We’re quite happy to accept that oxygen is the component of air we need to breathe and live. We don’t blink at the reductionism of integers or addition.
“Most people are perfectly happy to draw a sharp line between animate and inanimate, inner and outer, subject and object. These are highly reductive acts. Placing everything on the same footing can be accomplished by either ‘demoting’ Life to ‘matter status’ (a dualist dichotomy from the start), or elevating the whole singular phenomenon — which gets my vote.
“For many, the fact that no one can offer an end-to-end account for how Life and consciousness arise from quarks and leptons (and of course all the interactions between them) is taken as invalidating the premise.
“The poetic irony is that rejecting the incomprehensible complexity of conscious experience as emerging from material interactions is perhaps the most reductive act imaginable! Labeling it ‘consciousness’ and declaring it to be its own irreducible phenomenological ‘substance’ is like attributing to ‘God’ any phenomenon whose origin is less than obvious.
“Materialism takes the ‘irreducible’ amalgam called ‘mind’ and explodes it into hundreds of billions of cells, hundreds of trillions of synapses, and an enormously larger number of atoms and electromagnetic interactions. How does this explosion shrink ‘mind’ to a simpler notion? Maybe instead of ‘reductionists’, materialists ought to be accused of being ‘expansivists’ that more accurately captures the position.”
Amtrak unveils Airo class train upgrade
“Amtrak gave a first look at its new Airo class trains at a media event Tuesday in Washington, D.C., showing off a brand new fleet of Amtrak Cascades train cars. The cars are expected to roll out in the Pacific Northwest this summer.
“The new Airo trains feature panoramic windows, redesigned seats, a new café car and a host of new or upgraded amenities, including personal lighting, onboard Wi-Fi and digital displays. Amtrak said the Airo trains will operate at speeds of up to 79 mph, though the new trains are capable of hitting top speeds of 125 mph.
“Airo trains will be added to routes across the country, starting with the Cascades line, which runs along the I-5 corridor between Eugene and Vancouver, B.C., stopping at Portland, Seattle and more than a dozen other cities.”
Maslow high on dopamine
“Consumption is something much deeper and more nuanced than shopping or spending. Nate Hagens outlines a ‘consumption pyramid’ framework that acts as a map for the different layers of consumption present in daily life. He explores why this is especially relevant in a world that will be increasingly volatile, expensive, and uncertain.
“We have been referring to ourselves as consumers for so long that this label now sounds normal — a neutral descriptor. But if you reflect on this word, it’s kind of weird. Economically, a consumer is explicitly a mouth, an appetite, something to feed. t turns our lives into some kind of a shopping buffet, and then indirectly our vibrant blue-green planet into a warehouse.
“So in this episode, I plan to explain a simple diagram, which I’ll label here, the consumption pyramid. It delineates the many different connotations consumption has. If you buy this premise, then being able to move lower down this pyramid by choice becomes a form of sovereignty or resilience.
“There are seven layers to this pyramid. At the bottom are the foundations, and as we move up the pyramid, we’ll find things that are less about survival and more about mood and identity and escape. Also an important note is that most of us do not live on one rung of this pyramid. You can have super discipline for three months straight and then slide upward in this pyramid during a stressful week.
“Layer one is survival needs — food, water, basic shelter, seep, essential medicines. Layer two is stability and function — things like, reliable utilities, basic transportation, the tools used for your work, childcare basics, repairs. Layer three is care and belonging, where consumption starts being about what defines us as human — relationships, health. shared meals, community obligations, therapy, exercise. Layer four is comfort and convenience — Coconut water and garbage bags, subscriptions for Netflix, nicer versions of the basic services, a bigger living space.
“I want to say clearly that none of the layers here are evil. But there’s a catch. Convenience often quietly creates dependency. It can atrophy you out of skills you used to have, can make you less tolerant of friction. It can convert small hardships into real emergencies because your life no longer has any experience or tolerance at being even slightly inconvenienced.
“Layer five is status and signaling. This category is consumption as social language, brands, and flexing, the purchase that implies that you have taste or success. Some portion of this consumption is harmless human self-expression. But some of it is also social armor for trying to secure or increase one’s status and position in a tribe.
“Layer six is novelty and stimulation. This is restless discomfort that is temporarily eased by consuming stuff, usually technology, impulse purchases, endless content to avoid distraction. This is where a lot of modern western life on the up-slope of the carbon pulse sits by default, because boredom has become intolerable in our society. We require more and more input to feel the same amount of aliveness. AKA, the wanting shouts louder than the having.
“Layer seven is escape and dopamine sinks. This is when consumption becomes a form of anesthesia compulsion. The ghost of dopamine past removes our authentic selves for a while — gambling and similar dynamics, doom scrolling, binge shopping, drugs and alcohol, porn.
“I want to be careful here because it’s easy to talk about this as some sort of a moral failure. But consumption at this level seven, which is ecologically turning billions of barrels of ancient sunlight into microliters of dopamine, is what we get in a culture when chronic stress meets engineered technological temptation.”
Capitalist wealth concentration in the agricultural sector
“Just a few hundred years ago agricultural inputs, apart from scythes and a few other tools were, not even marketed goods. Staple food seeds were mostly saved and exchanged between farmers, and more rare seeds (eg vegetables) were sometimes supplied by governments, monasteries or other social institutions. Fertility and pest control was mainly managed through good agriculture practices or with local resources.
“In Titans of Industrial Agriculture, Dr. Jennifer Clapp explains how the farm input market in four different categories, machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides became dominated by a very small number of companies. In agricultural seeds and pesticides, they are Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, and BASF. In farm machinery, John Deere, CNH Industrial, AGCO, and Kubota. Fertilisers are dominated by Nutrien, Mosaic, Yara, and CF Industries.
“Companies have applied a number of strategies in their quest for market dominance such as mergers and acquisitions, credits to farmers, influencing government standards and regulations, collusion, and sometimes outright corruption.
“Economists typically consider a 40% market share to be the threshold beyond which market distortions are likely to occur. From 2018 to 2020, the top four seed and agro-chemical firms controlled 60-70% of the global pesticides market, and 50-60% of the global seed market. Their market share is even higher in more specialized markets such as soy or corn.
“Jennifer Clapp points to a number of disadvantages of this enormous concentration — higher prices for farmers, which translates to higher food prices, mechanization driving scale in the farm sector forcing farmers to ‘get big or get out’, and enormous ‘de-skilling’ that is the result of tractors you can’t repair, seeds that you can’t propagate, and production systems that rely on pesticides and fertilizers.
“This kind of market concentration is simply an inherent mechanism in the capitalist market economy, which has been ’enhanced’ by globalisation and by digitalisation. Most people, farmers included, tend to believe that fierce competition will lead to more actors on both the input and the output side, but the development in the food and agriculture, as well as most other markets, clearly points to the opposite.”
Agrarianism can defuse the modernity bomb
” I’ve recently been having some interesting discussions on this topic [agrarianism] with physicist Tom Murphy, author of the informative Do the Math blog – https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/. I’m firmly in the anti-modernist camp, but here I’m going to dig a little into this narrative of humanity’s allegedly ancient mistakes and our blundering invention of early prototypes for modernism and the Machine.
“Tom has written two blog posts relevant to this discussion. I largely agree with Tom, although I question his historical positioning of things like possessions, property rights, surplus, hierarchy and patriarchy as arising after, and as a result of, agriculture.
“I’d argue:
- All these things were at least latent in pre-agricultural foraging societies.
- Both status competition/ranking and an egalitarian animus against them present in every human society and stretches way back beyond the supposed origins of agriculture circa 10,000 years ago.
- It’s possible to overdraw the contrast between foraging and farming. Probably most, farm societies have been heavily involved with foraging until recently.
- I do think there’s a danger of the fallacy of writing about farming came before and was the cause of all these bad things.
- Concepts like private property rights and other assumed nasties of modernity, and what they meant in local agrarian societies usually isn’t the same as what they mean in modern capitalist society.
“People have little agency over the long evolutionary haul. But I’m interested in addressing what we may be able to do in the short term to try as best we can to avoid obliterating ourselves and other species and to make the transition to what comes next as congenial as possible.
“I’ve long argued that our best option right now is low-impact and low-input local agrarianism with a distributed, bottom-up politics. Not that this will necessarily work even if it were easily implemented, but I don’t see any other game in town. In the short run, I think we’ll cause much less suffering for ourselves and other creatures if we embrace agrarian localism.
“People lived substantially local agrarian lives for many, many generations without their societies devolving to a growth-oriented, world-eating, predatory system of states. I’m interested in historical examples of low-impact, distributed local agrarianisms in case there are things to be learned from them as we – well, currently a tiny minority of us in the teeth of much ridicule – try to chart a path away from world-eating modernity.”
Tom Murphy’s reply is here – Babylonian Banter – by Tom Murphy | Do the Math.
Seattle tops in residential infill instead of sprawl
“As the housing shortage stretches into every corner of the United States, it’s clear which cities are good at adding homes in places people already live, and which are just good at paving over farms. No large metro area in the United States has been better at adding people to already-populated places than Seattle.
“Sun Belt hubs like Austin have experienced astonishing growth since the turn of the millennium. These booming metros are often celebrated for their immense housing construction. But a close analysis reveals that growth has primarily occurred in only one direction: sprawling outward. Seattle metro area is better than anywhere else in the United States at putting new people into old neighborhoods.
“Getting those new people into existing neighborhoods is key to the cultural, financial, and environmental health of cities. New residents bring new ideas, businesses, taxes, and more. It’s generally cheaper to upgrade existing infrastructure than to build entirely new roads, wires, pipes, and transit. And when residents get to live in existing close-in neighborhoods, they emit fewer greenhouse gases and pave over less natural space than if they’re forced out to exurban sprawl.
“About one-third of Americans live in neighborhoods with more than 4,000 people per square mile. Land use researcher Yonah Freemark calls places with more than 4,000 people per square mile ‘already developed’ or ‘built up’. When an area with more than 4,000 people per square mile grows, that growth tends to look like housing infill via backyard cottages, triplexes, walk-up apartments, high-rises, and the like. When an area with fewer than 4,000 people per square mile grows, that growth tends to look like sprawl.”
Long ignored Kansas Water Plan could get a boost
“More money could be flowing to the Kansas Water Plan under a new House bill, expanding the impact of a popular 2023 law aimed at addressing the growing water crisis. A 2023 law established the Water Projects Grant Fund and the Water Technical Assistance Fund to help build and maintain water infrastructure. House Bill 2558 would expand annual funding for the Kansas Water Plan from $35 million to $60 million.
“Last session, a more modest version of the bill made it through the House but was never heard by the Senate. Both that bill and the one in the current session were introduced by Rep. Jim Minnix, a Republican farmer from Scott City and chair of the House Water Committee.
“Kansas towns are running out of water. The Ogallala Aquifer, which much of western Kansas relies on for daily life, dropped by more than a foot last year. Gov. Laura Kelly has identified the crisis as a top priority for her final year in office.”
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