Tiresia

In that case, check out this list of repair cafes and other DIY stuff around Europe. It's far from complete, but there are repair cafes in the Netherlands, England, France, Italy, Portugal, and Poland.

Circuit breakers cost money and provide no benefit to the park operator, so it makes sense that they would prefer to sell the electricity for a negative price instead as long as that negative price costs them less than the circuit breaker.

Also, solar parks in Europe are subsidized, so beholden to government demands. From the perspective of the government and the public good, it's better if the electricity is sold for a negative price than if the capacity to produce it for free is wasted, because it can still be used for productive ends. The value for buyers is positive, but because it's a buyer's market the electricity is still sold at a loss because the buyers can threaten to go to a different solar park operator.

Nuclear safety standards in most western countries are legally defined as whatever was high enough to make the reactors unprofitable (with language such as "the highest reasonably attainable level of safety"). This results in ridiculous scenarios like nuclear reactors being expected to store their waste perfectly for 100,000 years even if nobody attends to it while fossil fuel plants kill millions with polluted air and agriculture just pisses pollution into the environment. We build monuments to nuclear waste so that future civilizations may know to fear it properly even if all contact is lost because oh no what if like ten of these hypothetical post-post-apocalyptic people die, while hundreds of millions are set to die right now because of the climate change that waste could have mitigated.

Nuclear reactors are safe enough that grad students can operate them. If the entire world electrical supply ran on electricity you could put the nuclear waste in a couple hundred oil drums and drop those in an olympic swimming pool and people nearby would be under less risk than from a steel mill.

And yes, without the nuclear arms industry it would have made more sense to develop cheaper and safer fuels like thorium. But nuclear disasters are like train crashes - terrible, of course, but vastly overblown by the media in a way that somehow coincides perfectly with fossil fuel/car industry interests.

So I went into a bit of a deep dive.

Observatory.wiki is curated by members of the Independent Media Institute. The Independent Media Institute has, as one of its major donors the New World Foundation.

The New World Foundation was founded by a billionaire heiress, had Hillary Clinton as one of its board members in the 80s, is New Left (rejecting ties with labor to focus on personal liberties), and has investments in tobacco companies, fast fashion companies, and logging companies. Joan Roelofs, a professor in political science, used it as a case study of how donations (and the threat of withholding them) are used to push left-wing charities towards compliance with neoliberal ideas in her book Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism.

It is unsurprising, then, that this story credits neoliberal globalists initiatives without skepticism or broader contextualization. Maybe it really is that simple and the US helped Kazachstan out of the goodness of its heart. Wouldn't that be nice?

Though... why does it credit Kazachstan for preserving 'their part' of the Aral Sea by creating a massive dam? Don't dams keep water out of places? Why is Uzbekistan given the blame here, when the article says that the US helped Kazachstan first and Uzbekistan second? Did the US just work together with Kazachstan to monopolize the Kazach part of the water flowing into the Aral sea and then blame Uzbekistan for the shared lake continuing to dry up?

Is the US holding the Aral Sea hostage to pressure Uzbekistan into compliance?

(disclaimer: this is less than an hour's work. I could truly be mistaken. Please do more thorough research before using this as evidence).

Oh, sure. It's actually a pretty broad category of stories and statements people can make, but the common denominator is that it's perceived as funny. Why do you ask?

Ah yes, because the recent explosion of tick population is surely because of our biodiversity and healthy ecosystems.

Do you know what the natural predators of ticks are? Do you know what sort of environments they like to sleep and rest and hunt? Do you know what the average American's response is to finding a burrow on their property? Or their cats' and dogs' response?

We truly haven't learned from medieval cityfolk killing cats because of the black death.

Until they repeal the law that prisons must have windows...

Most people don't work on anything that technology and medicine depend on. There are so many jobs that only exist because capitalism is inefficient and gives rich people the right to get other people to do useless things.

Imagine how many people would be unemployed (freed up for rural living) if we got rid of the meat industry, replaced cars with public transit and bicycles, replaces airplanes with high speed rail and ships and not going, had built cities to be walkable from the start, gave people a comfortable life regardless of whether they worked, banned advertisements, made clothes and other products designed to last a lifetime, had a library economy to vastly reduce the number of tools necessary, got rid of intellectual property law so people didn't need to design new drugs to repatent things and corporate megaprojects would collapse, redistributed wealth so people wouldn't buy useless toys or mansions, and put everyone in comfortable rural spaces with lots of greenery and spaces where they could hang out for free so mental health is better and people get plenty of exercise.

Most people could work in agriculture without decreasing the amount that work on maintaining and improving our level of technology.

That's called an attic. And yes, attics do help the floors below get less warm.

When you have an attic, you can go further by insulating the roof - this keeps the warm day air out, and during the night you can open windows to let the cool night air in. Historically roof insulation was done with thick layers of thatch, though light-weight synthetic alternatives are more common in modern construction. A well-insulated roof won't let through any appreciable amount of heat.

Then as things get hotter, build the roof taller, allow for natural air flow to dissipate the heat, and finally put the building on stilts so air can flow under it.

Retrofitting existing buildings to have space for good insulation is expensive, especially with the atrocities the US has been building in suburbs for the past 80 years.

Completely different world, yes. Preventing irreversible climate impacts, no.

Of course the most important thing we can do from now on is always action now rather than looking back on what could have been, but IMO it's critical to the credibility of climate scientists to be honest about the damage that has already been done. Articles like these make it sound like it's all made up because the window has been "rapidly closing" since 1960.

The average life expectancy will drop by a decade compared to where it is now in 2025. It is too late to prevent that. Over a billion people will die from famine, climate disaster, or the disease and war that result from people trying to escape hunger and climate disaster. We have to make peace with that and make clear that these deaths are the result of people's inaction.

If we continue the current course for even just the next decade, life expectancy will drop by another two decades. Billions more will die. That is worth fighting to prevent with every fiber of our being.

Labor-based production is such 20th century thinking. Modern companies don't try to make products, they try to acquire capital. Intellectual property, industrial capacity, housing, utilities access, etc. Cornering a market is so much more profitable than trying to compete in it.

Why do you think there's so much money going into AI? They can't wait to rid themselves of their human workforce so that humans starving to death won't affect their production targets.

If capitalists get their way, capitalism will outlive humanity. Inefficient humans and their annoying ecosystem dependency will be left to boil to death or something while Von Neumann probes owned by AI-managed corporations spread across the universe. Just imagine, one share in SpaceX would be worth several galaxies. You won't find a better ROI anywhere in the universe!

I feel like this post is going to be interpreted very differently depending on what the audience is.

For left-of-centrists, this seems like a decent wake-up call. Stop being depressed about there being no solutions in your narrow overton window, and embrace the necessity that society adapts to reality.

For conservatives, "pessimism" is an odd phrase, but they'll be glad to hear you're warming up to signing up for lifeboat defense duty - maybe if you work hard you can get to be in it.

For realists, "abandon" is an worrisome phrase. It has always obviously been about both. Is this another excuse to keep consumption high?