#fossil fuel decrease

[thoughtlessarse]

Solar power surpassed coal in the European Union's electricity production in 2024, as renewables climbed to nearly half of the bloc's energy mix, according to a report by climate think tank Ember. Solar overtook coal in the European Union's electricity production in 2024, with the share of renewables rising to almost half the bloc's power sector, according to a report released Thursday. Gas generation, meanwhile, declined for the fifth year in a row and fossil-fuelled power dipped to a "historic low", climate think tank Ember said in its European Electricity Review 2025. "The European Green Deal has delivered a deep and rapid transformation of the EU power sector," the think tank said. "Solar remained the EU's fastest-growing power source in 2024, rising above coal for the first time. Wind power remained the EU's second-largest power source, above gas and below nuclear." Overall, strong growth in solar and wind have boosted the share of renewables to 47 percent, up from 34 percent in 2019. Fossil fuels have fallen from 39 to 29 percent.

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[we-will-all-be-stories]

...what????

[reasonsforhope]

"To mitigate the negative impacts of climate change, the world needs to quickly transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources such as solar power.

The chart shows how much this transition has accelerated in the last two decades.

In 2004, it took the world about a year to add one gigawatt of solar power capacity. By 2023, the same amount was added, on average, every single day.

For reference, a gigawatt of solar is enough to power approximately 200,000 homes in the US.

Much of this growth has been driven by China, which by 2023 accounted for about 43% of the cumulative installed capacity worldwide.

A big reason for this acceleration has been a large decrease in the price of solar panels. Since 2001, the price has dropped by about 95%, from $6.21 to $0.31 per watt.

Learn more about why renewables like solar became so cheap so fast."

-via Our World in Data, February 6, 2025

[contemplatingoutlander]

But this fixation has alarmed some scientists and climate activists, who warn that technologies are being used to distract from the primary task of stopping fossil fuels being burned. Cop28’s president, Sultan Al Jaber, also the head of the UAE’s national oil company, has questioned the feasibility of a fossil fuel phase-out.

Inger Andersen, exec. dir. of UN Env. Prog, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, Cop28 president, & John Kerry, US special presidential envoy for climate.... Photograph: Ali Haider/EPA

“It’s frightening because they see this as a new business opportunity, a new way to make money and continue as before,” said Pierre Friedlingstein, a climate researcher at the University of Exeter, of the hopes being ladled upon carbon removal technologies. Total current technology-based CO2 removal, excluding nature-based means such as planting new forests, removes just 0.01m tonnes of CO2, according to recent research led by Friedlingstein, which is more than a million times smaller than current fossil fuel CO2 emissions. Despite its small scale, voluminous carbon removal techniques are relied upon in many climate models and plans by countries and companies to avoid breaching a 1.5C rise in global temperatures since pre-industrial times and unleashing catastrophic heatwaves, droughts, floods and other impacts. “They will scale this up, and if they do it by a factor of 100 in the next 10 to 20 years, that would be amazing, but they won’t scale up by a factor of 1 million,” said Friedlingstein. “There is no alternative to reducing emissions massively. These technologies are a distraction, a way to pretend we are dealing with the issue, but we aren’t. [color emphasis added]

The greed of the fossil fuel oligarchs will doom humankind and countless species on this planet.

Overemphasis on innovation and carbon removal risks distracting from main goal of stopping use of fossil fuels, say scientists

Machines to magic carbon out of the air, artificial intelligence, indoor vertical farms to grow food for our escape to Mars, and even solar-powered “responsible” yachts: the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai has been festooned with the promise of technological fixes for worsening global heating and ecological breakdown.

The UN climate talks have drawn a record number of delegates to a sprawling, freshly built metropolis, which has as its centrepiece an enormous dome that emits sounds and lights up in different colours at night. The two-week programme is laden with talks, events and demonstrations of the need for humanity to innovate its way out of the climate crisis.

Given the ponderous action by governments to cut planet-heating emissions – the world is still hurtling towards disastrous climate breakdown – the tech focus is helpful, said Bill Gates, the multi-billionaire Microsoft co-founder, as he ventured into the Dubai sunshine.

[the-scientist-blog]

President Trump’s relationship with climate change policy has been highly controversial and has drawn a significant amount of attention from politicians, environmentalists, and global leaders. While it is true that Trump has been a vocal skeptic of climate change science and has historically supported policies that many believe undermine global climate efforts, the assertion that he would "stop" the progress on climate change entirely is more complicated. There are several factors to consider that illustrate why it is unlikely that Donald Trump will be able to halt the progress on climate change entirely, even with policies that prioritize fossil fuel industries, deregulation, and skepticism towards international climate accords.

1. Global Movements and Public Opinion

One of the primary forces that will prevent Trump from halting climate progress is the widespread global movement in other nations in favor of addressing climate change. Over the past few decades, public awareness and concern over environmental degradation, the rise of extreme weather events, and the growing scientific consensus on climate change have catalyzed action at various levels. Even during Trump's tenure as president, the shift towards climate activism grew, with international agreements such as the Paris Agreement, corporate initiatives, and grassroots environmental movements gaining momentum.

Public opinion, especially in democracies, plays a significant role in shaping policy. In the United States, the majority of Americans support climate action, including a strong preference for clean energy and renewable resources. Despite Trump’s rhetoric, various cities, states, and businesses in the U.S. have continued to prioritize climate goals. For instance, states like California have implemented ambitious climate policies, such as transitioning to 100% renewable energy by 2045. Furthermore, a growing number of corporations have pledged to achieve net-zero emissions. The private sector’s movement towards sustainability, driven by consumer demand, investor pressure, and increasing environmental risks, represents a substantial force for climate action that extends beyond the federal government.

Even if Trump were to reverse or dismantle federal climate policies, the local and private sector commitments would likely remain largely unaffected. These bottom-up efforts represent a powerful counterbalance to federal inaction and are likely to continue advancing the fight against climate change regardless of the administration in power.

2. Economic Shift Toward Clean Energy

While Trump has been a staunch advocate for coal, oil, and gas, the global economic shift toward renewable energy is undeniable. The cost of renewable technologies, such as solar and wind power, has drastically decreased over the last decade. This economic shift makes clean energy an increasingly competitive and attractive option for both developed and developing countries. By 2025, it is estimated that the cost of solar energy will continue to fall, making it even more affordable and mainstream.

The renewable energy sector has seen significant growth in its employment. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), more than 11 million people worldwide were employed in the renewable energy industry by 2021, a figure that is expected to continue rising as nations transition away from fossil fuels. The growth of renewable energy markets is increasingly detached from political agendas, driven by technological innovation and economic pragmatism. Regardless of Trump’s policies, these forces are already in motion and will likely continue to expand, creating jobs, boosting economies, and driving global progress on climate change.

Additionally, as the consequences of climate change, such as extreme weather events, wildfires, and rising sea levels, continue to threaten communities and industries, the push for sustainable infrastructure and resilient urban planning grows. The cost of inaction will continue to drive investments in climate adaptation and mitigation technologies, further fueling the global transition to cleaner energy systems.

3. International Cooperation and Climate Diplomacy

Even during Trump’s presidency, when the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2017, international cooperation on climate change continued unabated. While the U.S. decision to exit the accord was a blow, it did not signal the end of global climate diplomacy. Many world leaders and climate organizations pushed forward with ambitious plans for carbon reduction, renewable energy investments, and international collaboration. The European Union, China, and India, as well as other nations, have made strides in combating climate change through national policies and international agreements.

Trump’s reluctance to engage with the Paris Agreement, as well as his opposition to climate-focused international cooperation, did not isolate the U.S. from the global conversation on climate change. The U.S. remained a key player in many climate-related issues at the local, corporate, and state levels, even if the federal government under Trump was less cooperative.

4. Technological Innovation and Climate Solutions

The energy sector, which has traditionally relied on fossil fuels, is undergoing a profound transformation. Advances in battery technology, electric vehicles, and green hydrogen are already making renewable energy more feasible for widespread use. As technology continues to develop, renewable energy solutions will become more efficient, less expensive, and more scalable.

Furthermore, the global push for climate action will continue to stimulate innovation. Even if Trump were to curtail government funding for green technology, private investment in clean energy and sustainability is projected to increase. Major companies are making significant strides to reduce their carbon footprints, from Google’s goal of running on 100% renewable energy to Tesla’s push for mass adoption of electric vehicles. Corporate pressure and consumer demand will continue to drive innovation and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, limiting the potential for any one individual, including Trump, to stop the progress on climate change.

5. The Resilience of Local and State-Level Action

Despite the Trump administration’s rollback of federal climate policies, local and state governments in the U.S. have continued to push forward with their climate initiatives. States like California, New York, and Washington have continued to prioritize climate action, passing laws that mandate emission reductions, promote renewable energy development, and require climate adaptation strategies.

This decentralized approach to climate action ensures that the United States remains a significant actor in the global effort to combat climate change. Even if Trump were to reintroduce policies that weaken federal regulations, states and cities would likely continue their push for climate policies in line with the global scientific consensus. This “bottom-up” approach is a vital counterbalance to the federal government’s actions and is indicative of a broader commitment to addressing climate change that transcends individual political figures.

Read the Conclusion at https://www.thescientistblog.com/blog/you-cant-stop-destiny

[wachinyeya]

The Global South is deploying renewables twice as fast as the Global North, thanks to record levels of investment and decreasing costs of clean power. Last year, deployment of clean energy sources in the Global South outpaced fossil fuel-based electricity generation seven-fold, a huge shift from a decade ago when it was even.

-via fixthenews.com

[probablyasocialecologist]

The third dimension of metabolic rift is the temporal rift. As is obvious from the slow formation of soil nutrients and fossil fuels and the accelerating circulation of capital, there emerges a rift between nature’s time and capital’s time. Capital constantly attempts to shorten its turnover time and maximize valorization in a given time – the shortening of turnover time is an effective way of increasing the quantity of profit in the face of the decreasing rate of profit. This process is accompanied by increasing demands for floating capital in the form of cheap and abundant raw and auxiliary materials. Furthermore, capital constantly revolutionizes the production process, augmenting productive forces with an unprecedented  speed compared with precapitalist societies. Productive forces can double or triple with the introduction of new machines, but nature cannot change its formation processes of phosphor or fossil fuel, so ‘it was likely that productivity in the production of raw materials would tend not to increase as rapidly as productivity in general (and, accordingly, the growing requirements for raw materials)’. This tendency can never be fully suspended because natural cycles exist independently of capital’s demands. Capital cannot produce without nature, but it also wishes that nature would vanish.

When nature cannot catch up with the accelerating speed of capital, there arises a grave discrepancy between two kinds of time that are particular to nature and capital. Marx gives the following example of excessive deforestation under capitalism:

The long production time (which includes a relatively slight amount of working time), and the consequent length of the turnover period, makes forest culture a line of business unsuited to private and hence to capitalist production, the latter being fundamentally a private operation, even when the associated capitalist takes the place of the individual. The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison. (Capital II: 321–2)

Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

As the world works to stop global heating by ending the use of fossil fuels in accordance with climate objectives, ensuring that everyone on Earth has a decent standard of living is possible if the world quickly and decisively implements emissions reductions, new research has found.

The study, led by research scholar Jarmo Kikstra with the Energy, Climate and Environment Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), looked at energy scenarios that line up with both the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“With climate change intensifying and billions of people still lacking basic necessities, addressing both challenges simultaneously is not only possible but essential,” a press release from IIASA said.

The authors of the findings analyzed whether scenarios outlined in SDGs and the Paris Agreement provide enough energy for everyone on the planet to have essential services like cooling and heating homes, clean cooking, health care, education and transportation.

“Our goal is to understand what it takes to eliminate extreme poverty while also advancing climate action,” Kikstra said in the press release. “We’re not just talking about lifting people out of extreme poverty; we’re looking at futures with high development ambition, ensuring decent living standards as a minimum for everyone worldwide.”

Using the new DESIRE model, the research team compared energy scenarios that make sustainable development a priority with those that continue with past trends.

“One striking finding is that sustainable development scenarios significantly reduce the number of people consuming less than the minimum required energy for basic needs. Under these scenarios, the number of people that do not have enough energy to meet their basic household needs is projected to decrease by over 90% — a much faster rate of progress than what would be achieved by continuing current trends,” IIASA said.

The study highlights that emissions needed to support decent standards of living are much lower than total emissions.

“Our findings challenge the notion that eradicating poverty and protecting the planet are conflicting goals. In fact, the energy needed to ensure basic human dignity is small compared to what is currently consumed globally,” Kikstra explained. “Even so, such a sustainable development trajectory means growth rates in low-income countries are much higher than we have seen. It requires appropriate development efforts and international support.”

The study, “Closing decent living gaps in energy and emissions scenarios: introducing DESIRE,” was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

[greatbeholderbrooke]

I've recently been seeing this article making rounds around this website and particularly people misusing this very cool advancement to imply that modern nuclear reactors are "unsafe" or "dangerous", which is partially due to the just blatantly bad journalism on display here.

The accomplishment of this new reactor is definitely exceptionally impressive but I think that news websites (Even ones specializing in science) have been mischaracterizing the reactor as "meltdown-proof" which is just - wrong? and implies that current reactors are just begging to meltdown.

The cool thing about this new reactor is that its passively cooled, but that doesn't mean its INVULNERABLE to nuclear meltdowns, for example the Chernobyl meltdown happened completely independently of whether it was cooled passively or not.

In fact, passive cooling would only pose an advantage in situations where ALL pumps and backup pumps break and the core doesn't get coolant pumped to it. That's happened exactly once: in Fukushima and only after a literal tsunami hit it, and there's no reason to think that the passive Helium coolant in this new reactor wouldn't also just break. Fukushima happened because of corruption in regulation, preventing suitable defenses against this exact thing from getting built, not because of unsafe reactor design.

There's also some articles like this one which talk about the new reactor being "self-regulating" which is true, but misses the point that the vast majority of nuclear reactors in service today are also stable in the exact same way. Negative feedback loops are a HUGE part of reactor design, the most popular reactor design today is the Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) which is incredibly stable - PWRs just truly hate increasing (or decreasing) energy output.

Most nuclear reactors today are already incredibly safe, even if you had complete control over a nuclear reactor it would be effectively impossible to cause a meltdown on purpose - both the physics of the system and the thousands of automated components would beat the ever loving shit out of any hope of trying to do so.

Articles like these just turn this impressive achievements into a kind of fearmongering over the "dangerous" nuclear reactors currently being used. The fact is that nuclear reactors are incredibly safe, PWRs are an incredible feat of engineering genius and its a genuine shame that the general public isn't aware of how much care goes into their design and safety, let alone how useful and essential they are in our electrical systems.

Modern nuclear reactors are clean, they are safe, and they are vital to a healthy energy grid in the post-fossil-fuel future.

A really good read I highly recommend is Colin Tucker's How To Drive A Nuclear Reactor. He's very clear and very frank with the workings and reality of nuclear power today.

[ghelgheli]

According to Marx, metabolic rift appears in three different levels and forms. First and most fundamentally, metabolic rift is the material disruption of cyclical processes in natural metabolism under the regime of capital. Marx’s favourite example is the exhaustion of the soil by modern agriculture. Modern large-scale, industrial agriculture makes plants absorb soil nutrition as much as and as fast as possible so that they can be sold to customers in large cities even beyond national borders. It was Justus von Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry (1862) and his theory of metabolism that prompted Marx to integrate an analysis of the ‘robbery’ system of agriculture into Capital. [...]

Liebig harshly criticized modern ‘robbery agriculture’ (Raubbau), which only aims at the maximization of short-term profit and lets plants absorb as many nutrients from the soil as possible without replenishing them. Market competition drives farmers to large-scale agriculture, intensifying land usage without sufficient management and care. As a consequence, modern capitalist agriculture created a dangerous disruption in the metabolic cycle of soil nutrients. [...]

Marx formulated the problem of soil exhaustion as a contradiction created by capitalist production in the metabolism between humans and nature. Insofar as value cannot fully take the metabolism between humans and nature into account and capitalist production prioritizes the infinite accumulation of value, the realization of sustainable production within capitalism faces insurmountable barriers.

This fundamental level of metabolic rift in the form of the disruption of material flow cannot occur without being supplemented and reinforced by two further dimensions. The second dimension of metabolic rift is the spatial rift. Marx highly valued Liebig in Capital because his Agricultural Chemistry provided a scientific foundation for his earlier critical analysis of the social division of labour, which he conceptualized as the ‘contradiction between town and country’ in The German Ideology. Liebig lamented that those crops that are sold in modern large cities do not return to the original soil after they are consumed by the workers. Instead, they flow into the rivers as sewage via water closets, only strengthening the tendency towards soil exhaustion.

This antagonistic spatial relationship between town and country – it can be called ‘spatial rift’ – is founded upon a violent process of so-called primitive accumulation accompanied by depeasantization and massive urban growth of the working-class population concentrated in large cities. This not only necessitates the long-distance transport of products but also significantly increases the demand for agricultural products in large cities, leading to continuous cropping without fallowing under large-scale agriculture, which is intensified even more through market competition. In other words, robbery agriculture does not exist without the social division of labour unique to capitalist production, which is based upon the concentration of the working class in large cities and the corresponding necessity for the constant transport of their food from the countryside. [...]

The third dimension of metabolic rift is the temporal rift. As is obvious from the slow formation of soil nutrients and fossil fuels and the accelerating circulation of capital, there emerges a rift between nature’s time and capital’s time. Capital constantly attempts to shorten its turnover time and maximize valorization in a given time – the shortening of turnover time is an effective way of increasing the quantity of profit in the face of the decreasing rate of profit. This process is accompanied by increasing demands for floating capital in the form of cheap and abundant raw and auxiliary materials. Furthermore, capital constantly revolutionizes the production process, augmenting productive forces with an unprecedented speed compared with precapitalist societies. Productive forces can double or triple with the introduction of new machines, but nature cannot change its formation processes of phosphor or fossil fuel, so ‘it was likely that productivity in the production of raw materials would tend not to increase as rapidly as productivity in general (and, accordingly, the growing requirements for raw materials)’ (Lebowitz 2009: 138). This tendency can never be fully suspended because natural cycles exist independently of capital’s demands. Capital cannot produce without nature, but it also wishes that nature would vanish. [...]

The contradiction of capitalist accumulation is that increases in the social productivity are accompanied by a decrease in natural productivity due to robbery [... i]t is thus essential for capital to secure stable access to cheap resources, energy and food. [...]

The exploration of the earth and the invention of new technologies cannot repair the rift. The rift remains ‘irreparable’ in capitalism. This is because capital attempts to overcome rifts without recognizing its own absolute limits, which it cannot do. Instead, it simply attempts to relativize the absolute. This is what Marx meant when he wrote ‘every limit appears a barrier to overcome’ (Grundrisse: 408). Capital constantly invents new technologies, develops means of transportation, discovers new use-values and expands markets to overcome natural limits. [...]

Corresponding to the three dimensions of metabolic rifts, there are also three ways of shifting them. First, there is technological shift. Although Liebig warned about the collapse of European civilization due to robbery agriculture in the 19th century, his prediction apparently did not come true. This is largely thanks to Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented the so-called Haber-Bosch process in 1906 that enabled the industrial mass production of ammonia (NH3) by fixing nitrogen from the air, and thus of chemical fertilizer to maintain soil fertility. Historically speaking, the problem of soil exhaustion due to a lack of inorganic substances was largely resolved thanks to this invention. Nevertheless, the Haber-Bosch process did not heal the rift but only shifted, generating other problems on a larger scale.

The production of NH3 uses a massive amount of natural gas as a source of hydrogen (H). In other words, it squanders another limited resource in order to produce ammonia as a remedy to soil exhaustion, but it is also quite energy intensive, producing a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) (responsible for 1 per cent of the total carbon emission in the world). Furthermore, excessive applications of chemical fertilizer leach into the environment, causing eutrophication and red tide, while nitrogen oxide pollutes water. Overdependence on chemical fertilizer disrupts soil ecology, so that it results in soil erosion, low water- and nutrient-holding capacity, and increased vulnerability to diseases and insects. Consequently, more frequent irrigation, a larger amount of fertilizer and more powerful equipment become necessary, together with pesticides. This kind of industrial agriculture consumes not just water but large quantities of oil also, which makes agriculture a serious driver of climate change. [...]

[T]here remains a constant need to shift the rift under capitalism, which continues to bring about new problems. This contradiction becomes more discernible in considering the second type of shifting the metabolic rift – that is, spatial shift, which expands the antagonism of the city and the countryside to a global scale in favour of the Global North. Spatial shift creates externality by a geographic displacement of ecological burdens to another social group living somewhere else. Again, Marx discussed this issue in relation to soil exhaustion in core capitalist countries in the 19th century. On the coast of Peru there were small islands consisting of the excrement of seabirds called guano that had accumulated over many years to form ‘guano islands’. [...]

In the 19th century, guano became ‘necessary’ to sustain soil fertility in Europe. Millions of tons of guano were dug up and continuously exported to Europe, resulting in its rapid exhaustion. Extractivism was accompanied by the brutal oppression of Indigenous people and the severe exploitation of thousands of Chinese ‘c**lies’ working under cruel conditions. Ultimately, the exhaustion of guano reserves provoked the Guano War (1865–6) and the Saltpetre War (1879–84) in the battle for the remaining guano reserves. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark (2009) argue, such a solution in favour of the Global North resulted in ‘ecological imperialism’. Although ecological imperialism shifts the rift to the peripheries and makes its imminent violence invisible in the centre, the metabolic rift only deepens on a global scale through long-distance trade, and the nutrient cycle becomes even more severely disrupted.

The third dimension of metabolic shift is the temporal shift. The discrepancy between nature’s time and capital’s time does not immediately bring about an ecological disaster because nature possesses ‘elasticity’. Its limits are not static but modifiable to a great extent. Climate crisis is a representative case of this metabolic shift. Massive CO2 emissions due to the excessive usage of fossil fuels is an apparent cause of climate change, but the emission of greenhouse gas does not immediately crystallize as climate breakdown. Capital exploits the opportunities opened up by this time lag to secure more profits from previous investments in drills and pipelines. Since capital reflects the voice of current shareholders, but not that of future generations, the costs are shifted onto the latter. As a result, future generations suffer from consequences for which they are not responsible. Marx characterized such an attitude inherent to capitalist development with the slogan ‘Après moi le déluge!’ (Capital I: 381).

This time lag generated by a temporal shift also induces a hope that it would be possible to invent new epoch-making technologies to combat against the ecological crisis in the future. In fact, one may think that it is better to continue economic growth which promotes technological development, rather than over-reducing carbon dioxide emissions and adversely affecting the economy. However, even if new negative emission technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) are invented, it will take a long time for them to spread throughout society and replace the old ones. In the meantime, the environmental crisis will continue to worsen due to our current inaction. As a result, the expected effects of the new technology can be cancelled out.

Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene

[aerbiscuit]

So, this may be a super silly idea, but bear with me.

Giants are intriguing fantasy creatures. Depending on how big they are, their existence has massive implications for wherever they live. What do they eat, and how much/often do they have to do so? What is their population size? Where do they live that has enough room for them all? How does their waste not make large stretches of land filthy?

And, most importantly… do they fart?

No, for real, I’ve often thought about this. As a kid, I was taught that cow burps and farts contain huge amounts of methane that could threaten the atmosphere. Now, of course, I know that there are a ton of factors at play in this claim, all of which turn this glimmer of a fact into a misleading claim. (While cow farts, and especially burps, do contain a large amount of methane, the largest contributions to climate change are still human pollution and fossil fuel usage. Cow gas is remarkably small in comparison and we can change their diets to decrease their methane production anyway.)

Still, this has always made me wonder about the gas output of giants. How would their flatulence affect smaller creatures and the world around them?

… well, I now have a gassy mythology about giants. Read on for a peculiar fairy tale.

In my fantasy AU, giants exist. However, they all live on a small continent (which to them is a large island) far in the middle of a distant sea. This land is perfectly suited for their needs. A few large races of animals exist for them to eat meat from time to time, and certain quickly-growing species of fauna provide them with continuous sources of vegetation. They also eat bugs by breeding, collecting, and chowing down on them at once, kinda like how whales can subsist off large amounts of krill. The land is also large enough for them to handle the subject of their waste, which they’ve developed systems to dispose, reuse, and/or filter. They’re a smart race of beings and can live sustainably in their home country. However, they largely stay where they are, and any giant who attempts to travel to the smaller lands is seen as foolhardy and asking for trouble.

Legends say that the reason for the giants' isolation (stories which both the giants and the smaller folk tell) come from a time when lots of giants travelled around the world. Giants were friendly, and even set up homes in smaller lands to learn from the tiny races. There are still a few stories of friendly giants, and the good that they can do.

Unfortunately, many of the smaller races saw the giants as a threat. If a giant didn’t have the time or resources to set up food sources (bug farming, bringing livestock, etc.), they’d need to eat from the small folks’ land, which the small folk saw as decimating their resources. Giants also had to do a LOT of research into where they could piss or shit, unless they didn’t mind accidentally flooding or burying valuable land. As thoughtful as most giants are, you couldn’t help the occasional emergency, or just the handful of people who weren’t as considerate as the others.

And of course, there was the gas. Giants need to break wind too. It’s hard to stay around someone when one of their farts sounds like a thunderclap and produces clouds of smog that take up to an hour or so to fully dissipate. And if a giant strayed too far from a majority bug-based diet, those farts could get numerous and gnarly.

Finally, one cruel and bigoted wizard devised a plan to make enough small folk hate the giants to banish them. He used the entire freshwater lake that a group of traveling giants had claimed for their water supply to make an eternal potion of flatulence, one that was so strong, it altered your very biology into making you sensitive to most food sources. Any meal of standard meat or veggies would turn into a night full of farts, and that’s not counting eating the standard fart fare like beans, broccoli, sprouts, dairy, etc. He cast the spell, complicating it so that only he could possibly undo it, and waited.

Soon, the damage was done, and all the giants in the area turned into giant gasbags. Even if they stayed near their camps, neighboring villages could hear choruses of belching in the distance, or smell the results of dinner on the wind. Finally, enough people got so fed up that they passed official mandates of banishment. All giants, even the ones who didn’t drink from the lake, were sent away, and threatened with war if they returned.

The giants, who are peaceful folk and newly embarrassed by their tremendous eruptions of gas, didn’t put up a fight. They all packed their bags and sailed home.

Upon their return, the giant’s cycle of reproduction showed that the spell was more permanent than expected. Any offspring of a newly gassy giant with an unmodified person became half as gassy. If two gassy giants mated, then the offspring had full fart power. After enough generations of mating, all giants became gasbags to some extent. While the giants grew used to, and even happy with, their new powers, they knew this was the last nail in the coffin of their diplomacy. Now, no giant could try to live peacefully with the smaller races. Barely any giants visit the small lands even now.

The end.

… but, of course, the world goes on after “The End,” doesn’t it?

First, there were the unintentional side effects of the lake. After the expulsion of the giants, the wizard quickly used the last of his remaining power to neutralize the water. However, some damage was already done. While humans were the majority of the small races to hold issue with giants, most of the demi-humans (goat-mans, centaurs, satyrs, etc.) had no issue with giants and were happy to hang out with them, share meals with them…. and drink with them. This is the theory of why these races are flatulent even beyond their animal counterparts’ abilities. Their guts have been forever tainted by the same brew that doomed the giants.

Some of the demi-humans who liked the permanent changes to their digestive tracts acted quickly, bottling some of the water before the wizard neutralized his work. These potions of flatulence are incredibly rare, and possibly no more than legends, but people search for them to this day.

Then there are the members of the small races who don’t mind venturing out to visit the giants. After all, no rule was set up that they couldn’t visit, although some years had to pass before the giants were in a good enough mood to be visited. This is how the small amount of giant-to-small-person communication and research still persists.

And who knows? Maybe in enough time, relations will improve enough to reach the level that they used to be.

Until then, most giants will stay at home, entertaining only the most friendly (or peculiarly inclined) members of the races who banished them.

[mariacallous]

U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have moved so fast since retaking office that it is easy for observers to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The wide-ranging scope of the administration’s actions, along with the frequent inconsistencies, norm-breaking methods, and apparent rush, can give the impression that there’s no overarching plan.

Yet those who see the administration’s doings as just an incoherent jumble of actions reflecting the personalistic whims of an impulsive, mercurial president are missing the larger picture.

Trump and his team are pursuing a relatively cohesive vision, one best understood as a combination of four major interrelated endeavors: a sociocultural project, an economic project, a political project, and a foreign-policy project. To understand where Trump is trying to take the United States, it is necessary to understand each of these projects on its own terms. Added together, they aim to rewrite the values, norms, and goals central to the United States’ national identity, redirecting the country onto a fundamentally more conservative, inward-looking, and less democratic trajectory.

1. A conservative society

Trump’s first project is a sociocultural transformation of American society, seeking to make it fundamentally more conservative across many dimensions.

The Trump administration defines “conservative” in both familiar and new ways. It embraces long-standing culture-war priorities, including law and order, so-called traditional social values, and a greater place for religion in public life. But it layers onto this a pointed anti-elitism, manifested most sharply in its attacks on elite universities, that contrasts with the economic and cultural elitism traditionally associated with American conservatism.

These values have shaped the issues at the forefront of the Trump administration’s sociocultural agenda. Scorched-earth immigration policies are intended to foster law and order, reduce white status anxiety, and decrease job competition for working-class Americans, while the strenuous attempts to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in both public and private institutions reflect the administration’s desire to undo what it regards as a decades-long progressive reengineering of society.

Alongside these two major thrusts, the administration is pursuing an array of additional social policy changes, drawing from either traditional culture-war views or the new MAGA populism. These include loosening gun control regulations, restricting access to abortion and birth control, prioritizing Christian values in public life, increasing school choice, decimating the Department of Education, reshaping policies related to transgender people, attacking the medical consensus on childhood vaccines, among other policies.

2. A remade economy

As they reshape society, Trump and his team also seek to remake the U.S. economy. They emphasize major elements of the orthodox conservative economic agenda of recent decades: lower taxes, reduced regulations, and higher energy production, especially using fossil fuels. Although these echo previous Republican administrations, the Trump team is taking them much further—not just trimming regulations, for example, but attempting to deconstruct the regulatory state root and branch, and not just ignoring the climate crisis but actively reversing efforts to address it.

To these familiar conservative economic priorities, the administration has added a more Trumpian goal: reconfiguring the U.S. economy toward greater domestic manufacturing. The flamethrower-like imposition of tariffs serves this goal, though it also reflects the president’s love of tariffs as a means of punishing other countries for what he believes are hostile trade policies toward the United States and for giving him leverage to use elsewhere.

Alongside Trump’s conventional economic policies are actions that involve financial self-dealing for the president and his family, advisors, and supporters. These include eliminating accountability guardrails, such as firing inspectors general of federal agencies; rewarding contributors in unprecedented ways, like pardoning a convicted felon who donated to Trump’s 2024 campaign; allowing Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team to attack federal entities responsible for legal and regulatory oversight of Musk’s business endeavors; creating a personal Trump meme coin and then rewarding its investors with a special presidential dinner; and much else. For some observers, self-dealing “is such a defining theme of this administration” and best understood as an economic goal of equal or even greater importance than any of its stated national economic aims.

3. A new political system

Trump and his team are also seeking to restructure the U.S. political system so that executive authority is controlled by a president who reigns supreme over all other parts of the executive branch, is fully dominant vis-à-vis all other parts of the government, and is able to suppress or at least greatly limit domestic criticism and challenges.

In pursuit of this super-presidentialist vision of the executive branch, Trump has asserted expanded power over independent agencies, taken steps to gain greater political control over the civil service, and empowered DOGE to lead a weakening and depletion of federal bureaucracy. Trump is injecting greater partisanship into civil-military relations. He seeks even tighter control over the heads of federal agencies, appointing poorly qualified people who lack the professional authority for the positions they occupy and placing political “minders” around agency heads to ensure they do his bidding.

With the rest of the government, Trump has foremost sought to limit the ability of the courts and Congress to constrain his power. The president and his team excoriate judges who rule against administration policies, question courts’ authority to limit executive power, and ignore or only partially and slowly obey judicial rulings they dislike. The administration is challenging Congress’s budgetary role by impounding appropriated funds, dismantling federal agencies and other institutions without congressional permission, and seeking to reduce or ignore congressional oversight generally.

The administration is also attempting to circumscribe the power of state and local governments, threatening to withhold funding to specific states and localities to make them conform to federal policy dictates, such as the enforcement of immigration policy.

The administration is working to curtail opposition through legal challenges, financial threats, and rhetorical attacks on political and civic actors. This includes retribution against lawyers associated with past legal actions against Trump, attacks on independent media, Justice Department investigations of political groups that oppose the administration, and attacks on universities and other civic institutions that are seen as not following the administration’s wishes relating to DEI and other issues.

4. A changed role in the world

Finally, Trump and his team are transforming U.S. foreign policy under the general banner of “America First.” They operate from Trump’s conviction that the United States has long put other countries’ interests ahead of its own and suffered from freeloading and mistreatment by others.

Central to this project is withdrawing the United States from its role as a guarantor of the international rules-based security and economic order and instead pursuing transactional deals that directly benefit the United States, emphasizing coercion more than cooperation and immediate national interests rather than broader international values.

On the security side, this means reducing U.S. security guarantees and commitments and shifting defense burdens onto partner countries. The administration’s pursuit of a negotiated peace between Russia and Ukraine and of a nuclear deal with Iran is a major element of this intended reduction—as well as a way to fulfill Trump’s aspiration of being a global peacemaker. Another part of the “America First” outlook is reducing U.S. participation in international institutions and ending or avoiding legal commitments that may constrain U.S. power. Somewhat unexpectedly, Trump has added territorial expansionism to this outlook—in Canada, Gaza, Greenland, and the Panama Canal.

On the economic side, the Trump administration is using tariffs and other forms of economic or diplomatic pressure to compel other countries to reduce tariffs on U.S. goods and to buy more goods from the United States, especially natural gas and oil. The “America First” economic agenda also entails maximizing U.S. access to global reserves of strategic minerals and largely ceasing to provide economic development aid to other countries.

One additional dimension of the United States’ foreign-policy transformation does not fit with this transactionalist outlook but instead has a more ideological cast. Trump is building a network of right-wing populist friends and seeks to advance their political fortunes. This includes leaders such as Viktor Orban of Hungary, Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, and Javier Milei of Argentina, and far-right parties or politicians in opposition to incumbent democratic governments, such as the Alternative for Germany party and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Related to this effort has been the dismantling of most of the United States’ international democracy aid, which the Trump administration has claimed was often being used against these populist leaders and parties.

A unified vision

One can identify plenty of tensions among these four projects. It is difficult, for example, to square the appeals for a reduced role of the federal government with the administration’s intrusive assertion of federal power in certain domains.

But overall, the Trump administration views these projects as mutually reinforcing. Transforming the U.S. economy goes hand in hand with resetting the U.S. international economic posture. Establishing an all-powerful, unconstrained executive is not just a personal goal for Trump but also essential to imposing heavy-handed sociocultural changes and pursuing a highly personalistic foreign policy in which he believes he can “run the country and the world.”

Inconsistencies and tensions are certainly visible within each of the projects. On the economic front, for example, there are sharp conflicts between the goal of creating a business-friendly economy and the aggressive use of tariffs. In the foreign-policy domain, the desire to reduce U.S. security commitments is at odds with Trump’s desire for territorial expansion.

One can trace these inconsistencies to the fact that Trump’s team is comprised of very different political forces and figures. Yet within this group there exists enough basic agreement on the overall vision represented in these four projects to keep moving ahead, inconsistencies and all.

Each project represents a radical break from the past. The sociocultural project foresees a sharp turn away from the core elements of the progressive agenda that has shaped U.S. life in recent decades. The economic project envisages a major restructuring toward greater domestic manufacturing, revised relations with top U.S. trade partners, and a drastically reduced regulatory role for the government. The political project aims for soft authoritarianism defined by super-presidentialist predominance within the executive, primacy of the executive over the judiciary and Congress, and a constrained and compliant civil society. The foreign-policy project wants to eschew the United States’ role as the linchpin of the rules-based international order into an unashamedly self-interested power pursuing narrowly defined economic and security interests.

Taken together, they represent the most profound attempt to reshape the United States and its international identity in living memory. Those who oppose the administration have focused primarily on its methods, which is understandable given how unprecedented, lawless, and reckless many of them are. Yet gaining wider traction requires conveying to Americans the larger trajectory that Trump is pursuing and articulating a counter vision of equal sweep and ambition.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Countries that weaken or stop their net zero and climate actions may be consigning their populations to decades of preventable illness.

Gains from net zero are often presented as global benefits and mainly for future generations. But less fossil fuel use also means less air pollution which results in local health gains right away.

For example, rapid health gains are predicted from policies for US net zero by 2050. By 2035, between 4,000 to 15,000 fewer US residents would die annually from air pollution, saving the US economy $65bn to $128bn, with even greater benefits thereafter.

A study, led by Imperial College London, has found that there are large health gains from UK net zero actions.

Dr Mike Holland, who was part of the study team, said: “Fundamental changes required for net zero will bring long lasting benefits to UK health. Or turn that around. If we don’t take the net zero path, we will be sicker. This would be a double own goal on both climate and health.”

The researchers looked at the net zero pathways for transport and buildings in the UK’s sixth carbon budget. Health improvements came about from less air pollution and also increased exercise from more walking, cycling and e-biking.

Some gains would be expected straight away, as air pollution decreased. These include fewer new cases of asthma in children and adults, as well as reduced hospital admissions for breathing and heart problems. This is consistent with recent health improvements that followed Bradford’s clean air zone and others around Europe.

Fewer strokes and heart attacks would emerge more slowly over five years as air pollution started to reduce. For lung cancer, the reduction in cases would be expected to lag air pollution improvements by six to 20 years.

But the gains would not stop in 2060. Children born in the 2050s would suffer from fewer air pollution illnesses as they grew up and aged as adults. Although less certain than the other illnesses studied, the greatest long-term gains could be in cases of dementia.

Prof Christian Brand, part of the study team, said: “If transport decarbonisation focuses mainly on commuting, how much health improvement and emissions reduction are we leaving on the table? Without policies that support all forms of mobility – especially the short, everyday trips that reduce car dependency – are we missing a crucial opportunity to maximize the full benefits of net zero?”

Participation is key to maximising these gains across society, especially amongwomen and older people. The study found that people walking or cycling for transport could expect to an average of five and half months longer life expectancy, and a healthier life.

[reasonsforhope]

"A 1-megawatt sand battery that can store up to 100 megawatt hours of thermal energy will be 10 times larger than a prototype already in use.

The new sand battery will eliminate the need for oil-based energy consumption for the entire town of town of Pornainen, Finland.

Sand gets charged with clean electricity and stored for use within a local grid.

Finland is doing sand batteries big. Polar Night Energy already showed off an early commercialized version of a sand battery in Kankaanpää in 2022, but a new sand battery 10 times that size is about to fully rid the town of Pornainen, Finland of its need for oil-based energy.

In cooperation with the local Finnish district heating company Loviisan Lämpö, Polar Night Energy will develop a 1-megawatt sand battery capable of storing up to 100 megawatt hours of thermal energy.

“With the sand battery,” Mikko Paajanen, CEO of Loviisan Lämpö, said in a statement, “we can significantly reduce energy produced by combustion and completely eliminate the use of oil.”

Polar Night Energy introduced the first commercial sand battery in 2022, with local energy utility Vatajankoski. “Its main purpose is to work as a high-power and high-capacity reservoir for excess wind and solar energy,” Markku Ylönen, Polar Nigh Energy’s co-founder and CTO, said in a statement at the time. “The energy is stored as heat, which can be used to heat homes, or to provide hot steam and high temperature process heat to industries that are often fossil-fuel dependent.” ...

Sand—a high-density, low-cost material that the construction industry discards [Note: 6/13/24: Turns out that's not true! See note at the bottom for more info.] —is a solid material that can heat to well above the boiling point of water and can store several times the amount of energy of a water tank. While sand doesn’t store electricity, it stores energy in the form of heat. To mine the heat, cool air blows through pipes, heating up as it passes through the unit. It can then be used to convert water into steam or heat water in an air-to-water heat exchanger. The heat can also be converted back to electricity, albeit with electricity losses, through the use of a turbine.

In Pornainen, Paajanen believes that—just by switching to a sand battery—the town can achieve a nearly 70 percent reduction in emissions from the district heating network and keep about 160 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere annually. In addition to eliminating the usage of oil, they expect to decrease woodchip combustion by about 60 percent.

The sand battery will arrive ready for use, about 42 feet tall and 49 feet wide. The new project’s thermal storage medium is largely comprised of soapstone, a byproduct of Tulikivi’s production of heat-retaining fireplaces. It should take about 13 months to get the new project online, but once it’s up and running, the Pornainen battery will provide thermal energy storage capacity capable of meeting almost one month of summer heat demand and one week of winter heat demand without recharging.

“We want to enable the growth of renewable energy,” Paajanen said. “The sand battery is designed to participate in all Fingrid’s reserve and balancing power markets. It helps to keep the electricity grid balanced as the share of wind and solar energy in the grid increases.”"

-via Popular Mechanics, March 13, 2024

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Note: I've been keeping an eye on sand batteries for a while, and this is really exciting to see. We need alternatives to lithium batteries ASAP, due to the grave human rights abuses and environmental damage caused by lithium mining, and sand batteries look like a really good solution for grid-scale energy storage.

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Note 6/13/24: Unfortunately, turns out there are substantial issues with sand batteries as well, due to sand scarcity. More details from a lovely asker here, sources on sand scarcity being a thing at the links: x, x, x, x, x

[cognitivejustice]

Clean Energy Boom in 2023 Slowed Global Growth of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The International Energy Agency said that the world's greenhouse gas emissions grew last year at a lower rate than in the previous year, as the expansion of clean energy and electric vehicles helped to offset increased energy demand.

Global emissions causing climate change increased last year by 410 million tons, or 1.1 percent, the IEA said in its annual update report. In 2022, emissions grew by 490 million tons.

The growth of renewable energy is so great that the world's output of CO2 from electricity production would have decreased last year if not for extreme drought that reduced the output from hydroelectric dams in many parts of the world. The reduced flow of water to turn hydro turbines forced many places to temporarily revert to fossil fuels to make up for the shortfall.

[dailyanarchistposts]

“Make the most of every crisis”

Common sense wisdom would have it that things will forever stay pretty much the same. The current situation will change, no doubt, but always gradually, taking care to maintain the guarantees of modern life. The privileged amongst us count on remaining insulated from the turbulence of history; any unavoidable volatility, meanwhile, will take place only on our television screens, never outside the front door. Maybe!? Of course, maybe not. Remember that such is exactly the arrogance preceding the collapse of every great civilisation. There’s a growing fear amongst many of us that our sacred assumptions are beginning to expire. Perhaps a day will come – a day many of us could well live to see – in which we’ll arrive at the supermarket only to find it has nothing left to sell, let alone to find in the bins. And by that point it will already be too late.

Every day, global supply chains increase in complexity, to the extent that even minor disruptions have the potential to provoke widespread instability. The integration of our needs into a single, planetary economy provides certain conveniences, but it can’t go on like this forever. Just in order to survive, the system stacks itself up higher and higher, merely ensuring it has further to fall. With oil, for example, industrial civilisation has already likely surpassed its peak capacities for extraction; in recent years, the economy has demonstrated an increased reliance on the dirtiest, most inefficient fossil fuels the planet has to offer, including shale gas, tar sands, and brown coal. Something similar can be said about water reserves, currently being depleted twice as quickly as they’re naturally renewed; already today, billions lack sufficient access to fresh water, especially during dry seasons, and the number is increasing fast. Soil erosion, too, is a significant threat, as industrial agriculture – with its relentless application of monocultures and pesticides – lays waste to what land around the globe remains capable of supporting complex life. Factors such as these suggest that, as the 21st century smoulders on, economic depression and resource wars will begin to proliferate on an ever greater scale.

There are already over 7 billion of us on the planet, and we’re predicted to hit the 10 billion mark around the middle of the century. Moreover, population growth is likely to crescendo in combination with the aforementioned factors, potentially leading to a sudden incapacity for the system to support its inhabitants in many regions. Having said that, population levels might not be the core problem here: most slum-dwellers in the Global South consume only a fraction of the resources consumed by middle-class Westerners, perhaps even one hundredth as much. What’s especially worrying is that population is booming in the very places – India and China, for example – that are beginning to emulate the resource-intensive lifestyles previously hoarded only by much smaller numbers in the Global North. It’s difficult to imagine a gentle outcome to this situation: an exponential decrease in available resources, combined with an exponential increase in our reliance on them, seems to deem some kind of major collision inevitable.

It’s not even the likelihood of crises that’s increasing, but also our inability to deal with them. We live in an age in which, having become so severely alienated from the conditions of existence, merely growing your own food is considered eccentric. This is a distinctly contemporary situation, owing to the destruction of peasant life wrought by the Industrial Revolution, as well as the further deskilling of the workforce ushered in by the Digital Revolution. Whilst the system used to concern itself mainly with the political organisation of our lives, it nowadays holds down a monopoly on almost every conceivable facet of our material needs. This brings heaps of volatility: until a few decades ago, the collapse of a civilisation would, despite the obvious turmoil, nonetheless have left most people capable of feeding themselves. The 21st century, however, is such a strange creature, absolutely convinced of its advanced abilities, yet completely lost when it comes to the most basic gestures. We can have absolutely anything we want. (Provided the credit card reader is working).

Our techno-addicted culture is expanding at an ever greater pace, far quicker than anyone can begin to understand its implications. Rather than merely altering reality, this brave new world has created an entirely new one, steadily digitising the entirety of the human experience. Information technology is used to augment basic cognitive functions – memory, navigation, communication, imagination – to the extent users suffer literal symptoms of withdrawal without them. We fantasise about cyborgs as if they were the stuff of science fiction, failing to realise that they’re already here, that we’ve already become them. Merely leaving the room without our smartphones is often unthinkable, and that’s saying a lot. We need to be wary of becoming utterly dependent on our digital prostheses, particularly when their operation relies so heavily on centralised infrastructure. Any level of disruption here – as with a solar flare, power failure, or terrorist attack – would spell major tumult.

It’s time to seriously ask ourselves: if the collapse happened tomorrow, would we really be ready? With every passing day, this question becomes increasingly unavoidable. Fortunately, however, the key solution is also quite straightforward, having already been discussed in some detail: make anarchy liveable. By securing our material autonomy now – something highly valuable in itself, whatever the future brings – we increase our chances of coping and even expanding during any unpredictable moments of future turbulence. As this civilisation tumbles into the abyss, it will expect to pull each of us along with it; yet that outcome can be avoided, insofar as we already know fully well how to live on our own terms. It would be ridiculous to wait for the supermarket shelves to be looted clean before trying our hand at growing a cabbage. What we do before things get really serious will be decisive.

For many of us, this could well be a matter of life or death. Yet the situation isn’t quite so bleak, either: there’s good reason to believe that crises (of certain sorts, anyway) present important opportunities to increase our strength. A crisis can be thought of simply as a breakdown in the smooth functioning of normality, something that might potentially offer its share of advantages. With the system failing to perform its expected roles, these are moments in which the status quo has become even less realistic, inviting autonomous projects to fill the void. Quite commonly, a self-organised response occurs organically, devoid of conscious political consideration: as with so many disaster situations, ordinary people rediscover their dormant prosocial instincts – those spontaneous, impartial inclinations towards solidarity and mutual aid – just in order to pull through. By intervening in these accidental ruptures in intelligent, sensitive ways, we can add strength to the efforts, pushing them towards a permanent break. Important examples here include US anarchists providing material solidarity to those devastated by the 2017/18 hurricane seasons, as well as the Greek anarchist movement squatting accommodation in response to the ongoing European refugee crisis. In all likeliness, however, the familiar depth of crisis will pale in comparison to what’s ahead.

We cannot shy away from crises: to hide from them is to hide from history – from our history, in particular. Literally every example of libertarian revolution – Ukraine 1917, Manchuria 1929, Catalonia 1936, Rojava 2012 – emerged from a situation of outright civil war. Perhaps that’s a shame, but it’s also no surprise, given that any large-scale experiment in autonomous living will usually need a power vacuum to fill. After all, it’s not up to us to choose which multifaceted contexts are inevitably thrown our way, only to work out how best to inhabit them.

That said, none of this suggests we should look forward to crises. Not only do they bring great danger to humans and nonhumans across the board (especially those already worst off), they also provide the moments of instability necessary for authoritarianism to lurch forward. Fascist governments, too, have relied on crises – real or imagined – in order to seize power. No less, long-standing regimes will always gladly exploit moments of panic to crack down on dissidents. Exactly that happened, for example, with the 1923 Amakasu Incident in Japan, in which the imperial army used the turmoil generated by the Great Kantō earthquake as an excuse to murder anarchist figureheads. Or look at 9/11 more recently, gleefully utilised by regimes in the Global North to roll out an unprecedented wave of “anti-terrorist” repression. The bottom line on crises is simply that, whether we like it or not, they’re inevitable – especially under capitalism. Given that stubborn conundrum, we can only ask how best to make the most of them.

This isn’t a matter of counting down the days until the shit hits the fan, quite the opposite: the crisis is already here. Social hierarchy, in its very essence, is crisis. Merely in order to persevere, it must forever overextend itself, destabilising the very fabric of life wherever it goes. By intervening effectively in the carnage that engulfs us, we can minimise the damage wrought, all the while building the strength necessary to confront the single, planetary disaster this civilisation has become. As the crises multiply in scale and frequency, it’s possible the recklessness of the system will be its undoing, granting ample opportunities for insurrection and even revolution. Just remember that the failings of our enemies will never be enough. We must also be ready to take advantage. And to do that we need to get going now.