#for this and for the renewal

[ceiwiart2]

I'm sharing this again because he saved us, y'all.

[camilleflyingrotten]

Happy Good Omens renewal eheheheheheehhhhhhh

[hansoeii]

Ohh look, it's the dead boy detectives!

[hope-for-the-planet]

World surpasses 40% clean power as renewables see record rise

This is from the Global Electricity Review 2025 by Ember. Although this isn't something you are going to see in newspaper headlines, the progress we made with renewables in 2024 is a pretty big deal and if you're someone who likes a lot of data and graphs it's really worth reading.

I'm going to leave this video here because Hank Green does a better job of covering it than I am going to.

"This to me feels like news. It feels like a big deal. It feels like things are changing, like we are hitting a moment with electricity generation that really does matter. And over the next five years we will hit the point where we are generating less and less energy with fossil fuels every year. That's great. And that's not news. I didn't see anyone covering this [...]. It's not news because it's not bad and it's also not news because it's not like 'we did it, we hit the moment!'."

I think this quote from Hank's video does a good job of encapsulating how the slow, gradual progress that is happening often doesn't make it into the news--because it's not a dramatic emergency or a "we did it, we fully solved climate change!" kind of moment that makes for good headlines.

But that then gives people the idea that we're hardly making any progress on addressing climate change, which is not true at all. The fact that we need to continue to double-down on this progress to do it more and faster does not negate that so much progress has already been made.

[scamcall]

funeral for a mask

[reasonsforhope]

"Scientists in Singapore have broken a long-standing limitation on the ability to generate electricity from flowing water, suggesting that another elemental force of nature could be leveraged for renewable electricity: rain.

With the simplest and smallest scale test setup, the team could power around 12 LED lightbulbs with simulated rain droplets flowing through a tube, but at scale, their method could generate meaningful amounts that could rival rooftop solar arrays.

Singapore experiences significant rainfall throughout the year, averaging 101 inches (2581 millimeters) of precipitation annually. The idea of generating electricity from such falling water is attractive, but the method has long been constrained by a principle called the Debye Length.

Nevertheless, the concept is possible because of a simple physical principle that charged entities on the surface of materials get nudged when they rub together—as true for water droplets as it is for a balloon rubbed against the hair on one’s head.

While this is true, the power values thus generated have been negligible, and electricity from flowing water has been limited to the driving of turbines in hydropower plants.

However, in a study published in the journal ACS Central Science, a team of physicists has found a way to break through the constraints of water’s Debye Length, and generate power from simulated rain.

“Water that falls through a vertical tube generates a substantial amount of electricity by using a specific pattern of water flow: plug flow,” says Siowling Soh, author of the study. “This plug flow pattern could allow rain energy to be harvested for generating clean and renewable electricity.”

The authors write in their study that in existing tests of the power production from water flows, pumps are always used to drive liquid through the small channels. But the pumps require so much energy to run that outputs are limited to miniscule amounts.

Instead, their setup to harness this plug flow pattern was scandalously simple. No moving parts or mechanisms of any kind were required. A simple plastic tube just 2 millimeters in diameter; a large plastic bottle; a small metallic needle. Water coming out of the bottle ran along the needle and bumped into the top section of the tube that had been cut in half, interrupting the water flow and allowing pockets of air to slide down the tube along with the water.

The air was the key to breaking through the limits set by the Debye Length, and key to the feasibility of electricity generation from water. Wires placed at the top of the tube and in the cup harvested the electricity.

The total generation rate of greater than 10% resulted in about 100 watts per square meter of tube. For context, a 100-watt solar panel can power an appliance as large as a blender or ceiling fan, charge a laptop, provide for several light bulbs, or even a Wi-Fi router.

Because the droplet speeds tested were much slower than rain, the researchers suggest that the real thing would provide even more than their tests, which were of course on a microscale."

-via Good News Network, April 30, 2025

[aboutmercy]

if you have a mubi subscription you might want to cancel it as they have now closed a $100M deal with zionist investment firm, whose partners are located in occupied palestine and are actively involved in funding israel’s military

screenshots of the links below the cut.

[elucubrare]

i firmly hold that it's my duty as a reader to believe it when an author tells me at the beginning of the series that the dragons are gone forever and never coming back. but god it's a struggle sometimes.

[leahaart]

Spooky Ghosts

[roseetube]

Been thinking abt this quote from end of an era!! It makes me THINK

[ceiwiart2]

Artist meme from @darooart from twitter!

[starfruitsomething]

He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Do you think He would squander souls?

[xsjkxs]

charles was a sticker guy believe me

[apollos-boyfriend]

this is the funniest fucking community note i’ve ever seen

[reasonsforhope]

"China’s carbon emissions have flatlined over the past six months and there’s now an opportunity for substantial declines over the next decade, analysts say.

The rapid growth in clean energy generation has been sufficient to offset a recent surge in power demand caused by higher air conditioning use amid late-summer heatwaves, and the government’s manufacturing push, according to an analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

China’s carbon emissions fell by 1% in the second quarter of 2024 and were flat in the third quarter, providing another indication that emissions may have already peaked.

This is largely because solar power output was up 44% in the three months to end-September, compared to a year before, while wind power generation grew 24%. In the first nine months of 2024, China installed 161GW of new solar capacity and 39GW of wind, per CREA data.

For emissions to post a decline in 2024 as a whole, there will need to be a 2% reduction in the fourth quarter, Myllyvirta’s calculations show. That’s probable if power demand growth cools as expected and hydro plants perform in line with historical averages, he wrote in a post on X, adding that over the entire summer period, clean energy expansion covered all electricity demand growth.

“If the current downturn in China’s emissions is sustained — with emissions falling in the second quarter and stable in the third quarter — that would open the door to the country beginning to reduce emissions much faster than its current commitments require.

“This would have enormous significance for the global effort to avoid catastrophic climate change, as China’s emissions growth has been the dominant factor pushing global emissions up for the past eight years since the signing of the Paris climate agreement.”

Based on current trends and targets, CREA expects China’s emissions will decline 30% by 2035. The International Energy Agency says emissions will fall 24% by then based only on stated policies, but that could be raised to 45% if the country follows a pathway that’s consistent with its long-term carbon neutrality target.

For the time being, Chinese policymakers are setting relatively unambitious targets, and “it’s vital that future targets reflect ongoing clean energy trends to avoid locking in lower ambitions,” Myllyvirta said."

-via The Progress Playbook, October 29, 2024