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The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are *massive*:

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

By displacing fossil fuels, wind and solar saved the US $250 billion over 4 years.

^{Ars Technica}

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That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (*one quarter a one trillion dollars*) in social carbon savings over the past 4 years:

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

By displacing fossil fuels, wind and solar saved the US $250 billion over 4 years.

^{Ars Technica}

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By contrast, Silicon Valley is *greedy* tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

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

Today on TAP: Leading Wall Street and Silicon Valley pooh-bahs believe the tax cuts he’ll give them are a bigger deal than preserving democratic norms.

^{Harold Meyerson (The American Prospect)}

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SV epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If SV produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

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

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

^{www.anildash.com}

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To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were *actually* using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

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New AI tools much hyped but not much used, study says

Latest generation of products not becoming part of people’s "routine internet use", researchers say.

^{Tom Singleton (BBC News)}

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We need to hold companies responsible. We need to change their microeconomics to make it easier for workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

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

Emails reveal Amazon has pushed back on FTC demands for data on all Prime users.

^{Ars Technica}

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Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

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The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt?

An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar... and mull over survival.

^{The MIT Press Reader}

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