If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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PBPZAudostępnił to.
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/2
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/3
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho
NFT frauds:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/
Or planet-destroying AI frauds:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain
If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.
But - as Ryan Cooper writes for *The American Prospect* - there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and *exciting* innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:
https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/
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The Green-Energy Revolution Shows What Real Innovation Looks Like
Ryan Cooper (The American Prospect)Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/4
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Cory Doctorow
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Here's brief tour of the revolution:
* 2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);
* Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;
* Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/6
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/
The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):
https://rondo.com/products
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Building a Thriving Clean Energy Economy in 2023 and Beyond | The White House
The White HouseCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/7
https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/
Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron
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Scientists just turned toxic red mud into CO2-free iron
Can Emir (Interesting Engineering)Cory Doctorow
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https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change
It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries.
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene
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Cory Doctorow
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https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/
Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation.
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Destructive investing and the siren song of software
buttondown.emailCory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/13
Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly *physical* kind of technology. It is *labor intensive*. It is *skilled*. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is *capital* intensive.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/14
Climate tech is *infrastructural*. As @debcha writes in her must-read 2023 book *How Infrastructure Works*, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects
Climate tech also produces *gigantic*, diffused, uncapturable benefits.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/15
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/
For every mWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs.
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Climate and health benefits of wind and solar dwarf all subsidies
Ars TechnicaCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/16
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/
In other words, climate tech is *unselfish* tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action.
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Climate and health benefits of wind and solar dwarf all subsidies
Ars TechnicaCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/17
No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/
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Democracy, Deshmocracy: Mega-Financiers Are Flocking to Trump
Harold Meyerson (The American Prospect)Cory Doctorow
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As @anildash writes:
> Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.
https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/
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Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does - Anil Dash
www.anildash.comCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/19
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo
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New AI tools much hyped but not much used, study says
Tom Singleton (BBC News)Cory Doctorow
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https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
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Cory Doctorow
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https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives *personally liable* for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/
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Amazon execs may be personally liable for tricking users into Prime sign-ups
Ars TechnicaCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/22
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/
We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable.
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Cory Doctorow
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https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/
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The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt?
The MIT Press ReaderPBPZAudostępnił to.
Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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> With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before….
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html
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Preparing for Collapse: Why the Focus on Climate/Energy Sustainability Is Destructive | naked capitalism
Yves Smith (naked capitalism)Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/27
But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in *How Infrastructure Works*, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/28
These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-lost-cause-4
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mcc
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Cory Doctorow
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mcc
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Cory Doctorow
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Daniel Demmel
•Cory Doctorow
•Tengrain
•This is a great thread (and blog post where I am actually reading it).
Thanks @pluralistic!