#energy consumption reduction

[little-p-eng-engineering]

Expert Refinery Engineering Solutions by Little P.Eng.

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At the core of Little P.Eng.'s services lies a team of highly skilled and experienced engineers specializing in refinery operations. Our professionals are adept at navigating the latest industry standards, ensuring that all projects not only meet but exceed expectations. From process engineering to safety management systems, Little P.Eng. offers a comprehensive suite of services designed to address every aspect of refinery engineering.

Process Optimization for Enhanced Efficiency

Understanding the critical importance of process efficiency, Little P.Eng. employs state-of-the-art techniques and technologies to optimize refinery operations. Our approach focuses on minimizing energy consumption, reducing waste, and maximizing product yield, thereby significantly enhancing overall operational efficiency. Through detailed analysis and innovative solutions, we help our clients achieve their goals of cost reduction and improved productivity.

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In the refinery industry, safety cannot be overstated. Little P.Eng. places paramount importance on ensuring that all engineering projects adhere to the strictest safety standards and regulatory compliance. Our safety management systems are designed to identify potential hazards, mitigate risks, and create a safe working environment for all employees. By staying ahead of regulatory changes, we ensure that our clients' operations are not only safe but also future-proofed against evolving industry requirements.

Customized Solutions for Every Challenge

Expert Refinery Engineering Solutions by Little P.Eng.

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Engineering Services

Located in Calgary, Alberta; Vancouver, BC; Toronto, Ontario; Edmonton, Alberta; Houston Texas; Torrance, California; El Segundo, CA; Manhattan Beach, CA; Concord, CA; We offer our engineering consultancy services across Canada and United States. Meena Rezkallah.

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[aquariusindia]

Aquarius Projects collaborates with plant operators to enhance plant performance, improve water quality, and minimize energy consumption. We offer plant operator training in Vadodara, Gujarat, India.

[thedreadvampy]

open question: what are the remaining arguments for Scotland being in the Union? bc as I recall the main arguments used in 2014 were:

Access to UK funding for public services (after over a decade of Tory rule that's not looking so hot)

Keeping the pound (literally who cares)

Scottish pensions are safer in a UK wide system (glances over at the climbing age for eligibility to state pension)

we rely on trade with the rest of the UK. how could we leave that behind? (this would be a fair point if it wasn't entirely in the UK's power to continue that trade and open borders. I mean the UK government is composed entirely on spite and soft power so they might not but. Brexit didn't stop trade between Ireland and Northern Ireland did it hey?)

Scotland wouldn't want to have to reapply to join the EU, they can stay on Britain's membership! (lol)

Voting Yes would be "a leap into the dark" compared to the lovely stable leadership of the UK (stop stop my sides are splitting)

Like even in 2014 the Better Together campaign was pretty pathetic and the only thing it could think of to say was 'but we already HAVE a union it's going to be SO MUCH WORK to do things differently' and trying to cherry pick Things That Are Good To Have In The UK rather than, idk, Unique Benefits Of The UK That Are Impossible In Non UK Contexts.

but the thing is that in the last 8 years let's be real. the UK has fallen further and further behind and while in 2014 the Yes pitch was Let's Strike Out For A Brave If Uncertain Future now it's a lot more Water Is Pouring In Through Every Crack It's Time To Depart This Ship

the only good argument I can see for voting no in a second indyref is: if the SNP are gone who's going to be an opposition in Westminster? cause it sure as shit isn't Labour despite their responsibility to do so.

(my hope has always been that Scottish independence might over time rebalance the English political spectrum. like if the English centre-left lose the big anti-Tory strongholds in Scotland and lose the SNP in Westminster there'll be a gap to fill. not sure how much I believe that after the last decade though, tbh I think at this point it's more that either way England and Wales are fucked and public opinion means worse than nothing, so Scotland might as well bail out and try and do better solo.)

[akwyz]

The Convergence of Siemens and NVIDIA: Driving the Industrial Metaverse Forward

"Dive into the future of tech with our insights on the Omniverse and simulation tech at Nvidia & Siemens' digital partnership! 🌐💡 #Innovation #TechTrends"

The world of technology is rapidly evolving, and at the forefront of this transformation are two industry giants: Siemens and NVIDIA. In a recent conversation at a technology fair, Roland Busch, CEO and President of Siemens, and Rev Lebaredian from NVIDIA discussed their partnership and the impact of AI and simulation technology on various industries. The Next Level of Technology As day one of…

[shareyourideas]

Green Habits of Eco-Friendly People

[virtualizationhowto]

VMware Storage: Top 15 Tips in 2023

VMware Storage: Top 15 Tips in 2023 @vexpert #homelab #ESXiHostSettings #PowerManagementOptimization #StorageLatencyReduction #ServerHardwareAdjustments #BIOSPowerConfigurations #DeactivateC-states #ESXiPerformanceEnhancement

The storage layer is vital for having a high-performance, stable, and reliable virtualized environment. Specifically looking at VMware vSphere, there are specific storage best practices to note when architecting your storage for performance and reliability. If you are running VMware vSphere in production or your home lab, let’s consider the VMware storage top 15 tips 2023 for running your virtual…

[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

--

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.

--

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

[mostlysignssomeportents]

An end to the climate emergency is in our grasp

On June 20, I'm keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

The problem with good news in the real world is that it's messy. Neat happy endings are for novels, not the real world, and that goes double for the climate emergency. But even though good climate news is complicated and nuanced, that doesn't mean it shouldn't buoy our spirits and fill our hearts with hope.

The big climate news this past week is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's clarion call about surging CO2 levels – the highest ever – amid a year that is on track to have the largest and most extreme series of weather events in human history:

https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/during-year-of-extremes-carbon-dioxide-levels-surge-faster-than-ever

This is genuinely alarming and you – like me – have probably experienced it as a kind of increase in your background radiation of climate anxiety. Perhaps you – like me – even experienced some acute, sit-bolt-upright-in-bed-at-2AM anxiety as a result. That's totally justifiable. This is very real, very bad news.

And yet…

The news isn't all bad, and even this terrible dispatch from the NOAA is best understood in context, which Bill McKibben provides in his latest newsletter post, "What You Want is an S Curve":

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/what-you-want-is-an-s-curve

Financier and their critics should all be familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." This is true outside of finance as well. One of the reasons that we're seeing such autophagic panic from the tech companies is that their period of explosive growth is at an end.

For years, they told themselves that they were experiencing double-digit annual growth because they were "creating value" and "innovating" but the majority of their growth was just a side-effect of the growth of the internet itself. When hundreds of millions of people get online every year, the dominant online services will, on average, gain hundreds of millions of new users.

But when you run out of people who don't have internet access, your growth is going to slow. How can it not? Indeed, at that point, the only ways to grow are to either poach users from your rivals (through the very expensive tactics of massive advertising and sales-support investments, on top of discounts and freebies as switching enticements), or to squeeze your own users for more.

That's why the number of laptops sold in America slowed down. It's why the number of cellphones sold in America slowed down. It's why the number of "smart home" gizmos slowed down.

Even the steepest hockey-stick-shaped exponential growth curve eventually levels off and becomes an S-curve, because anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop.

One way or another, the world's carbon emissions will eventually level off. Even if we drive ourselves to (or over) the brink of extinction and set up the conditions for wildfires that release all the carbon stored in all the Earth's plants, the amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere has to level off.

Rendering the Earth incapable of sustaining human civilization (or life) is the ultimate carbon reduction method – but it's not my first choice.

That's where McKibben's latest newsletter comes in. He cites a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute, which shows a major reversal in our energy sources, a shift that will see our energy primarily provided by renewables, with minimal dependence on fossil fuels:

https://rmi.org/insight/the-cleantech-revolution/

The RMI team says that in this year or next, we'll have hit peak demand for fossil fuels (a fact that is consistent with NOAA's finding that we're emitting more CO2 than ever). The reason for this is that so much renewable energy is about to come online, and it is so goddamned cheap, that we are about to undergo a huge shift in our energy consumption patterns.

This past decade saw a 12-fold increase in solar capacity, a 180-fold increase in battery storage, and a 100-fold increase in EV sales. China is leading the world in a cleantech transition, with the EU in close second. Cleantech is surging in places where energy demand is also still growing, like India and Vietnam. Fossil fuel use has already peaked in Thailand, South Africa and every country in Latin America.

We're on the verge of solar constituting an absolute majority of all the world's energy generation. This year, batteries will overtake pumped hydro for energy storage. Every cleantech metric is growing the way that fossil fuels did in previous centuries: investment, patents, energy density, wind turbine rotor size. The price of solar is on track to halve (again) in the next decade.

In short, cleantech growth looks like the growth of other technologies that were once rarities and then became ubiquitous overnight: TV, cellphones, etc. That growth isn't merely being driven by the urgency of the climate emergency: it's primarily a factor of how fucking great cleantech is:

https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/the_incredible_inefficiency_of_fossils.pdf

Fossil fuels suck. It's not just that they wreck the planet, or that their extraction is both politically and environmentally disastrous. They just aren't a good way to make energy. About a third of fossil fuel energy is wasted in production and transportation. A third! Another third is wasted turning fossil fuels into energy. Two thirds! The net energy efficiency of fossil fuels is about 37%.

Compare that with cleantech. EVs convert electricity to movement with 80-90% efficiency. Heat pumps are 300% efficient (the main fuel for your heat pump is the heat in the atmosphere, not the electricity it draws).

Cleantech is just getting started – it's still in the hockey-stick phase. That means those efficiency numbers are only going up. Rivian just figured out how to remove 1.6 miles of copper wire from each vehicle. That's just one rev – there's doubtless lots of room for more redesigns that will further dematerialize EVs:

https://insideevs.com/news/722265/rivian-r1s-r1t-wiring/

As McKibben points out, there's been a lot of justifiable concern that electrification will eventually use up all our available copper, but copper demand has remained flat even as electrification has soared – and this is why. We keep figuring out new ways to electrify with fewer materials:

https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/copper-wire-price-remains-stable-amidst-surplus-supply-and-expanding-mining-25416#:~:text=Global%20Copper%20wire%20Price%20Remains%20Stable%20Amidst%20Surplus%20Supply%20and%20Expanding%20Mining%20Activities

This is exactly what happened with previous iterations of tech. The material, energy and labor budgets of cars, buildings, furniture, etc all fell precipitously every time there was a new technique for manufacturing them. Renewables are at the start of that process. There's going to be a lot of this dematerialization in cleantech. Calculating the bill of materials for a planetary energy transition isn't a matter of multiplying the materials in current tech by the amount of new systems we'll need – as we create those new systems, we will constantly whittle down their materials.

What's more, global instability drives cleantech uptake. The Russian invasion of Ukraine caused a surge in European renewables. The story that energy prices are rising due to renewables (or carbon taxes) is a total lie. Fossil fuels are getting much more expensive, thanks to both war and rampant, illegal price-fixing:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-oil-price-fixing-conspiracy-caused

If not for renewables, the incredible energy shocks of the recent years would be far more severe.

The renewables story is very good and it should bring you some comfort. But as McKibben points out, it's still not enough – yet. The examples of rapid tech uptake had big business on their side. America's living rooms filled with TV because America's largest businesses pulled out all the stops to convince everyone to buy a TV. By contrast, today's largest businesses – banks, oil companies and car companies – are working around the clock to stop cleantech adoption.

We're on track to double our use of renewables before the decade is over. But to hold to the (already recklessly high) targets from the Paris Accord, we need to triple our renewables usage. As McKibben says, the difference between doubling and tripling our renewables by 2030 is the difference between "survivable trouble" and something much scarier.

The US is experiencing a welcome surge in utility scale solar, but residential solar is stalling out as governments withdraw subsidies or even begin policies that actively restrict rooftop solar:

https://twitter.com/curious_founder/status/1798049929082097842?s=51

McKibben says the difference between where we are now and bringing back the push for home solar generation is the difference between "fast" and "faster" – that is the difference between tripling renewables by 2030 (survivable) and doubling (eek).

Capitalism stans who argue that we can survive the climate emergency with market tools will point to the good news on renewable and say that the market is the only way to transition to renewables. It's true that market forces are partly responsible for this fast transition. But the market is also the barrier to a faster (and thus survivable) transition. The oil companies, the banks who are so invested in fossil fuels, the petrostates who distort the world's politics – they're why we're not much farther along.

The climate emergency was never going to be neatly solved. We weren't going to get a neat novelistic climax that saw our problems sorted out in a single fell swoop. We're going to be fighting all the way to net zero, and after that, we'll still have decades of climate debt to pay down: fires, floods, habitat loss, zoonotic plagues, refugee crises.

But we should take our wins. Even if we're far from where we need to be on renewables, we're much farther along on renewables than we had any business hoping for, just a few years ago. The momentum is on our side. It's up to us to use that momentum and grow it. We're riding the hockey-stick, they're on that long, flat, static top of the S-curve. Their curve is leveling off and will start falling, ours will grow like crazy for the rest of our lives.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops

[anarchywoofwoof]

Full Article Text:

The United Kingdom is facing dire food shortages, forcing prices to skyrocket, and experts predict this is only the beginning.

What's happening?

According to a report by The Guardian, extreme weather is wreaking havoc on crops across the region. England experienced more rainfall during the past 18 months than it has over any 18-month period since record-keeping began in 1836.

Because the rain hasn't stopped, many farmers have been unable to get crops such as potatoes, carrots, and wheat into the ground. "Usually, you get rain but there will be pockets of dry weather for two or three weeks at a time to do the planting. That simply hasn't happened," farmer Tom Allen-Stevens told The Guardian.

Farmers have also planted fewer potatoes, opting for less weather-dependent and financially secure crops. At the same time, many of the potatoes that have been planted are rotting in the ground.

"There is a concern that we won't ever have the volumes [of potatoes] we had in the past in the future," British Growers Association CEO Jack Ward told The Guardian. "We are not in a good position and it is 100% not sustainable," Ward added.

Why is it important?

English farmers aren't alone — people are struggling to grow crops worldwide because of extreme weather.

Dry weather in Brazil and heavy rain in Vietnam have farmers concerned about pepper production. Severe drought in Spain and record-breaking rain and snowfall in California have made it difficult for farmers to cultivate olives for olive oil. El Niño and rising temperatures cut Peru's blueberry yield in half last year. Everyone's favorite drinks — coffee, beer, and wine — have all been impacted by extreme weather.

According to an ABC News report, the strain on the agriculture industry will likely continue to cause food prices to soar.

If these were just isolated events, farmers could more easily adapt — bad growing seasons are nothing new. The problem is that rising temperatures are directly linked to the increasing amount of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, humans have burned dirty energy sources such as coal, oil, and gas, which release a significant amount of those gases. Our climate is changing so drastically that the 10 warmest years since 1850 have all occurred in the last decade.

"As climate change worsens, the threat to our food supply chains — both at home and overseas — will grow," Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit analyst Amber Sawyer told The Guardian.

What can we do about it?

"Fortunately, we know many ways we can make the food system more resilient while reducing food emissions. The biggest opportunity in high-income nations is a reduction in meat consumption and exploration of more plants in our diets," said Dr. Paul Behrens, an associate professor of environmental change at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

If we replace a quarter of our meat consumption with vegetables, we could cut around 100 million tons of air pollution yearly. It may seem strange to suggest eating more vegetables with the decline in crop production. However, reducing the land and water used for animal agriculture and diverting those resources to growing more produce would drastically help the declining food supply.

Growing our own food is also a great way to reduce our reliance on store-bought produce, and it can save you hundreds of dollars a year at the grocery store.

[left-reminders]

(Below are broad vibes for each of the numbers. They are not meant to represent every opinion one could have within those parameters. Some aspects of the description may apply to you while others won't. If you picked a number with a description that doesn't match your perspective, let us know what your actual perspective is in a reblog comment! Comments in general are nice too, of course 👍)

(You also might notice a bias in favor of 5; or at least a far deeper description of what it would entail when compared against the other four. This is partly just because I wanted to soapbox, but I hope it doesn't detract. I genuinely want to hear the perspectives of the 1s, 2s, and 3s, if you're out there and don't appreciate my potential oversimplification!)

1 — It does not factor in at all. Much of the discourse around green politics is a liberal distraction and/or a roadblock holding us back from organizing for socialism. Economic development and human concerns will always matter more. Capitalism was a necessary/justifiable component in the march of history towards socialism, even if it did have certain negative impacts on the environment. The ideal society looks like Star Trek or fully-automated luxury communism (FALC) — one where we overcome "the state of nature" and become masters of our own fate.

2 — It doesn't factor in much, even if I may recognize the reality of climate change and/or the need for environmental protections. We can solve the biggest climate problems with advancements in green technology or perhaps expanding resource frontiers into outer space. In general, other social issues take priority when building socialism.

3 — I care about combating climate change and solving ecological problems, but I find other issues to be more important in my life and I will leave most discussion of it to people more knowledgeable on the subject. The world could be doing far better on these issues and changes are needed, but most of the modern civilizational infrastructure should remain unchanged (albeit organized under a socialist mode of production).

4 — It is very important to my politics. We can balance socialistic technological development with the dire needs of a planet in crisis. Certain human activities and production methods will have to be curbed or eliminated entirely if we are to find this balance (fossil fuels, widget production, private jets, etc), while others will have to be uplifted (renewable energy, public transportation, shared living, etc). Modern civilization is ultimately redeemable, but it needs to undergo a radical transformation.

5 — It is among the most important factors in my politics. I take influence from eco-socialism, social ecology, degrowth, post-civ, anti-civ, deep ecology, or any number of other political perspectives which are ecologically-focused. Locally-organized economies; drastic reductions in working hours and energy throughput; rewilding of the land; emphasis on non-consumptive forms of leisure; an end to consumerism, growth-based economic metrics, and imperial conceptions of "development"; agroecology and polyculture as core methods for obtaining food; and a vast deconstruction of much of the civilizational edifice are all pieces to this puzzle and are required if we are going to have a habitable planet for the generations to come. The ideal society looks like a Miyazaki film, that yogurt commercial, or lightly-automated comfortable ecological socialism (LACES) — one where we "don't seek to become larger within socialism, but rather more realized" (Joel Kovel).

[probablyasocialecologist]

Capping demand from the top fifth, even at a fairly high level, cut greenhouse gas pollution from energy consumption by 9.7%, while raising demand from people in the bottom fifth who also live in poverty to a fairly low level increases emissions by just 1.4%. “We have to start tackling luxury energy use to stay within an equitable carbon budget for the globe,” said Milena Buchs, a professor of sustainable welfare at the University of Leeds and the lead author of the study, published on Monday in the journal Nature Energy, “but also to actually have the energy resources to enable people in fuel poverty to slightly increase their energy use and meet their needs.”

[...]

“The study confirms that energy demand reductions can contribute significantly to climate change mitigation, even as poorer households are lifted out of energy poverty,” said Felix Creutzig, an IPCC author and professor of sustainability economics at the Technical University of Berlin, who was not involved in the study. “High-income, high-education households have more scope and also more capacity in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions – and also carry more responsibility.”

[...]

Studies have shown the global rich – which includes middle-class people in rich countries – play a disproportionate role in heating the planet. In 2015, the top 1% of earners emitted twice as much carbon dioxide as the bottom 50%, according to estimates from the Stockholm Environment Institute and Oxfam. Rich people have more agency to cut their emissions and those of others. A commentary in Nature Energy argued in 2021 that this covered not just how they shop, which the authors stressed was a powerful lever, but also how they act as citizens, investors, role models and workers.

[queeranarchism]

Hej, I just came across your post about carbon emissions and energy and may be I am wrong but it seems to me to be the entirely wrong approach to reduce consumption on the indivdual level. Because for instance I can't reduce my energy any further in a meaningful way with out compromising my wellbeing. Maybe if I shut down using my computer - which I can't for occupational reasons, plus it would isolate me for good. Well we can go of course the full way and declare electricity a mistake. Would inconvience a whole lot of people, kill plenty of them too and so on. But hey! there's been some emission avoided! Well that is just my opinion and may be I am just too negative

It is aboslutely 100% true that we can not meaningfully reduce CO2 emissions by reducing consumption on an individual level.

Of course we can do some things, like 'eat plant-based and local when possible' and 'don't fly' and 'repair instead of replace' but the impact of these things is minor compared to the total CO2 output and it isn't realistic for most of us.

Simply put: I can not get rid of my car if there is no bus service. I can not repair my phone if companies are allowed to deliberately make phones that can not be repaired. I can not eat local if everything is monoculture mass-argiculture for walmart. I can stop flying, but it is no good if all the private jets stay airborne. I can take shorter showers, but it's no use if the massive digital billboard next to my house is using more energy per month that i use per year.

The real massive reduction that we need requires a full societal transformation. Which means ending capitalism and going from a profit driven economy to one that is based on meeting collective needs while reducing CO2 wherever possible. Which means that when it comes to electricity and battery use, we prioritize human needs like medical care and accessibility devices, NOT the latest gaming platform or super car.

This will be a society without private jets, without fossil fuel mining, without advertising, without unnecessary plastic trinkets, without fast fashion, without mega-farms, without cryptocurrency, without bullshit jobs, without the military-industrial complex, without a constant stream of more wireless and battery operated gadgets. But it will be a society with broadly available and affordable public transport, with locally organized and sustainable food production, with medical care for all, with worker control over the workplace, with free repair-workshops everywhere, and more.

I can't imagine every aspect of that world because I am only one person with limited knowledge of all aspects of producing the things we need, but I know it starts with moving from a society organized around profit to a society organized around meeting human needs, including our very immediate need to stop climate change to prevent even more suffering than has already been caused by climate change so far.

[desianarchist]

Solar energy requires the erection of massive solar industry complexes, which lay bare the land by clearing out human populations and the migration routes of animals and people for giant solar fields, substations, and access ways. All of these require unusually high-carbon concrete. Wind and solar energy as well as the production of bio-fuels all require 100-1000 times the land area as the production of fossil fuels. Fuck the Chinese subsistence farmers who have carcinogenic industrial waste dumped on their lands everyday from those solar panel factories. They’re just not thinking ecologically enough. And forget the Ghanaians who complain when worn-out solar panels are piled into mountains in their backyards with the rest of the West’s obsolete tech. They are just impeding ecological progress. Whether oil wells, coal power plants, or megalithic “green” projects – all are rooted in an unprecedented destruction of habitats for human and other beings. Therefore it cannot be the goal to replace one destructive technology with another. The goal should be a massive and radical reduction in energy consumption. Anarchists who only struggle to free industry from capitalism must finally face the brutal reality. Down with industry, down with work. To use the words of the Indigenous Anarchist ziq: Seize the Means of Destruction! And fucking burn it to the ground… What comes next depends on what we do. The necessity of getting active has never been so great as today

[beautyandlifestyleblog86]

Ways to practice eco-friendly living in your home

1. Reduce energy consumption:

- Install energy-efficient appliances and LED light bulbs.

- Turn off lights and unplug electronics when not in use.

- Use natural light as much as possible.

- Set your thermostat to a lower temperature in winter and higher in summer.

- Insulate your home properly to reduce heating and cooling needs.

2. Save water:

- Fix any leaks in faucets and toilets promptly.

- Install low-flow showerheads and faucets.

- Collect rainwater for watering plants.

- Only run the dishwasher and washing machine with full loads.

- Use a broom instead of a hose to clean outdoor spaces.

3. Practice waste reduction:

- Recycle paper, plastic, glass, and metal.

- Compost kitchen scraps and yard waste.

- Opt for reusable products instead of disposable ones (e.g., cloth napkins, rechargeable batteries).

- Avoid single-use plastics, such as plastic bags and water bottles.

- Use a reusable shopping bag.

4. Use eco-friendly cleaning products:

- Choose natural, non-toxic cleaning products or make your own using ingredients like vinegar, baking soda, and lemon juice.

- Avoid products containing harmful chemicals that can harm the environment and your health.

5. Grow your own food:

- Plant a garden to grow vegetables, fruits, and herbs.

- Use organic and natural fertilizers instead of synthetic ones.

- Compost food scraps to enrich the soil.

6. Opt for sustainable materials:

- Choose furniture made from sustainable materials like bamboo or reclaimed wood.

- Use eco-friendly flooring options like bamboo, cork, or reclaimed hardwood.

- Select paint and other finishes that have low or no volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

7. Reduce plastic waste in the kitchen:

- Use glass or stainless-steel containers for food storage instead of plastic.

- Replace plastic wrap with beeswax wraps or reusable silicone covers.

- Use refillable water bottles and avoid buying bottled water.

8. Conserve energy in the kitchen:

- Use energy-efficient appliances.

- Cook with lids on pots and pans to retain heat and reduce cooking time.

- Opt for smaller appliances like toaster ovens instead of full-sized ovens when possible.

9. Encourage sustainable transportation:

- Use public transportation, walk, or bike whenever possible.

- Carpool or arrange a car-sharing service with neighbors or colleagues.

- Transition to an electric or hybrid vehicle if feasible.

10. Educate and involve your family:

- Teach your family about the importance of eco-friendly practices and involve them in the decision-making process.

- Encourage everyone to adopt sustainable habits and lead by example.

- Discuss environmental issues and brainstorm new ideas for greener living.

[climatecalling]

Ecology tells us that many species overshoot their environment’s carrying capacity if they have temporary access to an unusually high level of resources. Overshoot declines when those resources return to more stable levels. This often involves large-scale starvation and die-offs as populations adjust. Access to fossil fuels has allowed us to temporarily overshoot biophysical limits. This lifted our population and demands on the biosphere past the level it can safely absorb. Barring a planned reduction of those biosphere demands, we will experience the same “adjustments” as other species. One advantage humans have over other species is that we understand overshoot dynamics and can plan how we adjust. This is what the degrowth movement is attempting to do. ... Humanity exceeds its fair share of natural resources by more than 50%, and likely needs to reduce this demand by 70-80% to operate within carrying capacity. Those with greater wealth are responsible for a disproportionately large share of overshoot. ... The climate crisis is seen as a problem requiring a solution rather than a symptom of overshoot. The problem is generally formulated as looking for a way to maintain current lifestyles in the wealthy world, rather than reducing overshoot. The ecological perspective accepts that we exceed biophysical boundaries and emphasises the importance of reducing energy and material consumption – regardless of how the energy is provided.

[a-mole-of-iron]

Yes, we can stop climate change - and solve ecological problems in general

In the last few years, I have seen again and again a particular social response to climate change that can leave human civilization just as devastated as denying or ignoring climate change: and that is doomism, and fellow-traveler ideas of eco-fascism and eco-austerity. Make no mistake: climate change is a very serious issue that can cause noticeable damage to Earth and a hell of a lot of damage to humanity, but people absolutely love to take it to lurid extremes, like "Mad Max hellworld" and "Earth becoming the second Venus by 2100". In this post, I'm just going to lay out numerous reasons why the situation is far from hopeless, why sensationalized narratives of climate change are just a petty excuse for inaction, why "we'd better start taking mud baths to get used to being in the ground" rhetoric is incredibly dangerous (not to mention a betrayal of the weak and vulnerable by the strong and well-off), and why, ultimately, things aren't as dire as "the common wisdom" proclaims - so that people can stop feeling crushed by hopelessness, and start solving all of the very, very real environmental problems the way they're already being solved. All my examples will be sourced from the IPCC reports and real-world accomplishments in eco-restoration, via an extremely helpful blog called Doomsday Debunked, which just reprints all the IPCC and IPBES findings that doomist media and activism deliberately omits.

Most of this post is adapted from one I already made before elsewhere - but perhaps on Tumblr it's going to become more popular and widespread. I'm going to split it into three different sections: climate change mitigation, biodiversity recovery, and why "green austerity" is not a brilliant idea, will not save anything, and is ultimately an outdated falsehood that emerged from a place of insufficient knowledge and understanding. Almost all paragraphs contain links to sources/more info, but they may be hard to see in some custom Tumblr themes - be sure to mouse over if you want to find the links.

CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION AND YOU: how renewable energy really can save the world!

Here's the biggest thing first: Climate Action Tracker, which is a pretty damn respectable source, has slashed off 1.1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius off its average warming projections since 2010, according to their own records. Hell, in 2018, three degrees of warming was a pledge, and four degrees was the expected upper limit; now three degrees is expected if the current level of fossil fuel consumption continues without any reduction - and two degrees is the policy target, while optimistic projections are inching closer to 1.5 degrees. And to "achieve" 5 degrees Celsius of warming, which is misleadingly described by journalists as "business as usual" when by our current day it's anything but, we would need an economic mobilization from now to 2100 to burn all the coal that we can possibly burn. With coal plants shutting down in reality simply due to being unprofitable, I don't have to tell you how "realistic" and "plausible" that is. The takeaway from this is simple: the Paris Agreement and environmental activism work, and I really don't see them winding down unless we let doomism reign supreme.

A specific example of policy and technology that can seriously reduce climate change is the amazing growth of solar power over the last 10 years. I am old enough to remember the early 2000s, when solar photovoltaics (the panels that convert sunlight directly into electricity) were an unproven, esoteric, and expensive technology, and people meant solar water heaters when they said "solar power"… but nowadays? There is literally predictions that if solar energy keeps growing at current rates, and considering it already beats fossil fuels on price, it might simply price out gas, coal, and oil before 2050, rendering them entirely obsolete. Even now, investment into coal or gas power plants is seen as an incredibly stupid thing to do, because they might become "stranded assets" - too expensive to run, and unable to even recoup their initial cost.

The clathrate gun/Arctic methane bomb hypothesis has been effectively disproven at the current time. The release of methane from clathrates is endothermic, meaning it takes in more heating than it releases; a direct opposite of a gunshot/explosion, which is an exothermic reaction. More modern research also turned up the fact that methane has been seeping upwards at a constant rate for millennia now - we just didn't monitor it. Seabed disturbance could possibly upturn some of the clathrates, but ocean warming alone simply can't do it - it would take thousands of years of warming for the temperature change to propagate to the kind of depth that methane clathrates are found at.

The hypothesis of runaway greenhouse effect has effectively been disproven too: with a more powerful greenhouse effect, Earth's albedo grows just as fast as the heat-trapping capacity, meaning runaway warming is highly unlikely and the only cause are human industry CO2 emissions, which can be obsoleted by renewables and thus stopped.

The biggest threat from climate change as it is now appear to be extreme weather events; for example physically straining heatwaves, or severe floods from large amounts of rainfall. And those are serious problems. But heatwaves can be deal with by adapting our environments - the most obvious example being to plant some trees instead of layering our cities in concrete. Similarly, flood management isn't some arcane art; we know how to do it. It's just been ignored due to complacency and budgetary stinginess.

The expectations of social collapse from climate change are… overstated, let's say. The IPCC's own worst-case scenario is NOT "Earth as a lifeless desert" or "collapse of human society"; the situation IPCC associated with three-degree warming is that hundreds of millions risk being displaced by sea level rise and temperatures in the tropics getting too hot for comfortable life with no weather difficulties (NOT THE SAME as "you go out at any point during the summer, you die in ten minutes"), and the UN Sustainable Development Goals will be left in ruins. In other words, the poor people of the world will go back to starving and suffering, and the rich, especially in the West, will for the most part retain their quality of life. And so to me, as a non-Western, not-ultra-rich person, doomism is a personal affront, and doomism from solarpunks and environmentalists is a grave betrayal.

Speaking of the IPCC reports: the last one states with decent confidence that as soon as we stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, temperatures will begin to drop. Just think on this for a minute.

The "1970s MIT supercomputer that predicted the collapse of civilization by 2040"? That computer was not just less powerful than a smartphone from five years ago - it modeled the world as a single pixel, primitive even by the standards of the day. (Link to article that features actual model comparisons, via browser-based Javascript emulation. 'Nuff said.)

The so-called "deep adaptation" paper that managed to put people into therapy by its sheer grimness? Junk science that was rebuffed by Michael Mann - the author of the "hockey stick graph" of global temperatures, so not a climate denier by any means - in a four-letter tweet.

Earth turning into a second Venus by 2100? Yeah. That's… not gonna happen. We literally don't have enough fossil fuels to induce a greenhouse effect this bad, at any timescale, and I don't know if we could do it even if we started importing dry ice from space and cracking carbonate minerals for their carbon content to deliberately destroy the planet for some stupid reason.

And just because I feel like mentioning it: no, Earth can't run out of oxygen for us to breathe, barring an invasion of Galactus or some other planet-devouring alien.

BIODIVERSITY + CONSERVATION: lies, damned lies, and statistics

The infamous notion that we are heading for a world without insects was based on a study where half the map was blank, and some countries only counted the domestic honeybee (which relies on humans to thrive). Not all plants need insects to pollinate them, either. But at the same time, overuse of insecticides in agriculture is a serious issue with many adverse effects, and it has to be fought against. There is currently a campaign in Europe with this aim. Native grass lawns in cities help a lot too, more than you would think at first.

Similarly, there is a general notion that we are "in the middle of a sixth mass extinction", except we're not "in the middle". We're in the beginning of one. Now, if we all start/keep behaving like the Glukkons from the Oddworld series of games, or the Blargs from the first Ratchet & Clank game, for a few hundred more years - then we're totally going to face an impoverished biosphere with half or more known species dead. But if we do that, I'd say extinction of species would be far from our only problem.

The number one agricultural land use that drives deforestation is grazing cattle and growing crops to feed them; cropland and cities simply don't compare. Ergo, just by shifting to plant-based diets supplemented by lab-grown meat cultures and sustainable fish, we can rewild nearly 30% of Earth. And climate impacts there can be reduced too, if you simply buy local.

For a reforestation success story on a massive scale, look no further than the Loess Plateau.

Conservation success stories are actually plentiful; however, they do not get aired on the news because good news does not draw in views, clicks, and outrage. You can just go through this article on Doomsday Debunked to see how successful nature conservation can actually be.

The only two biomes that are most endangered by climate change are coral reefs (which would be replaced by the more resilient sponge reefs at 3 degrees of warming or around that), and the mountain glaciers, which will take thousands of years to recover, unlike the polar ice caps that'll be back in a couple of decades. But even corals have shown more resilience than expected before, so the scale of devastation is not nearly as huge as people might imagine.

GREEN AUSTERITY: "Friendly fire! Stop shooting, you pointy-eared leaf lover!"

A common, in fact extremely common, idea is that the only way to save the planet is accepting massive reductions to our quality of life - and by "massive" I mean "living in dugouts and doing subsistence agriculture while literally billions of people die for lack of warmth and medicine". Not only is this unacceptable, it's also a complete lie. The best way for someone living in the car-dependent, fossil-fuel-hungry sprawl of North America to reduce their carbon footprint is actually moving to a country with walkable, bikeable cities and good public transportation, like the Netherlands… or preferably, reforming and rebuilding their own local environment to this standard that used to exist in NA before its suburbanization that included zero public transport due to auto industry lobbying. NotJustBikes is an entire YouTube channel that explains this better than I ever could.

Another common idea is that building enough renewable generation capacity is just not possible with existing resources here on Earth. But consider this for a moment: when we mine metals and make them into electric engines or batteries, they don't go anywhere, with the only possible exception being metal flaking off due to corrosion. The metals composing wind turbine generators, electric vehicle motors, and batteries, or silicon composing the solar panels, remain in place and can be recycled several times, if not infinitely. Oil and coal that our current civilization burns for fuel EMPHATICALLY CANNOT be recycled - the entire problem we have is that they turn into carbon dioxide and clog our atmosphere, while soot and other exhaust fumes damage the health of people living in cities. Getting rid of 99% or more of fossil fuel infrastructure doesn't seem like that hard of a choice when you remember that feeding a renewables-based infrastructure requires a far more modest production capacity.

The issue of soil depletion from intensive agriculture is not only exaggerated by the negative/doomist framing (no, we are NOT going to run out of topsoil in 60 years!) - it's also a problem of mismanagement rather than an inherent agricultural problem. Stop oversaturating fields with fertilizer, introduce polyculture and crop rotation, and you'll see how much better things can get.

Similar to the above: the production of fertilizer does not require fossil fuels, no matter what some people might be saying. The three types of fertilizer are nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium. All of those are abundant chemical elements on Earth, and circulate through the biosphere freely; nitrogen is the 70% of our atmosphere and cannot possibly run out, and phosphate with potassium are abundant in the Earth's crust. The only direct use of fossil fuels in fertilizer production is the Haber-Bosch process that condenses nitrogen from the air into ammonia, and guess what molecule it needs for that? Hydrogen, which is the stronger half of the elements composing hydrocarbon fuels and which we could have in abundance by simple electrolysis of water!

Related to the above: it is beyond ridiculous how cow manure is dumped into rivers or similar by most modern farmers, when with right subsidies it could be transformed into cheap-as-free fertilizer to be used in agriculture. Someone should go create subsidies for large-scale composting...

Surprisingly enough, even consistent economic growth - which I am not a fan of by any means - can be achieved on a finite planet, because economic growth is all in what you count and how you count it. If we calculate economic growth not by production, but by improvements in human condition and condition of ecosystems (i.e. an economy that grows with the growth of trees), then we'll see that right now some world regions (like, again, North America) are failing as much as countries poor in money, but also that there is an enormous space for growth measured in sustainable prosperity.

The much-touted problem of water wars is an actual problem only for regions way, way inland. Any coastal countries have access to efficient desalination; it's not 1850 anymore. Water doesn't disappear from the world after people use it in cities and industries, it goes right back into the soil/atmosphere/rivers and oceans, so we can't "run out of water".

Interesting fact: we don't actually require any particularly specialized carbon capture technology to remove all the excess CO2 from the atmosphere, and will not require us to divert society's resources to expensive machinery. The old adage about the best carbon capture technology that's called "planting trees" still holds - and what's even more interesting is that there actually are even better methods that are not much more complex… and produce other things for the environment and for civilization in the process.

CONCLUSION

To sum things up: yes, the situation is serious, and "already bad enough" as Michael Mann put it (admittedly, he's been leaning into negative framing himself… but it can't be all positive, the problems of climate change really are dangerous, especially to the world's poor), and there's been a lot of environmental damage due to industries and rich consumers deliberately ignoring the externalities/knock-on effects of their resource use - but it's not nearly as horrifically bleak as some people presume. Right now there is great momentum behind climate action - which, yes, is partially propelled by increasingly hostile weather, but also by an understanding that social progress, democracy, and collective action are vital to build any form of a decent society, as well as by seeing new opportunities rise from cheaper renewable energy, better cities, and other innovations that will both stop climate change and make life actually worth living no matter where you might be. And in these conditions, throwing in the towel or surrendering to eco-austerity or even eco-fascist thinking is the worst possible action any one person can take. The green, sustainable, egalitarian future is not merely a dream or flight of fancy - it's eminently attainable if only we keep pushing for it and help eachother achieve it. But of course, there are people who stay up nights thinking how to take that future away from us, and now that climate change denial is no longer tenable, with more and more people believing their own eyes, the doomism and inactivism have become their primary, perhaps only, means of holding onto their power…

I hope this post will be helpful to people here who find themselves in the grip of doomism and hopelessness. I expect some people to disagree, but I prefer to believe the sources like the IPCC, IPBES, Climate Action Tracker, and all the climatologists behind these organizations' reporting - who've been closely watching both the worsening extreme weather from climate change, and the emergence of all the simple, usable, life-improving technologies and social practices to combat it. If we don't believe these people, then really, who can we believe? And if you do trust their reports on all the positive things being done and planned for environmental needs, it is not simply an idea that we can deal with climate change and restore, then protect our environment - it's objective reality, it's respectable science, and thus, it's good hard common sense.

More information: Doomsday Debunked (layman explanations and positive framing, also covering a ton of other "not actually the end of the world" topics for scared people), Carbon Brief (more technical and a bit less brazenly optimistic, but showing things like the absolutely crazy speed of renewable energy development), Not Just Bikes (an urbanist YouTube channel showing how cities can be improved, not made poorer, in the process of reducing fossil fuel use and car dependency).