There are issues with GSNO. The "time out" message pops up for quite some time now whenver one posts something on the site, although after reloading the site it shows that the post has been sent..
For about 24 hours GSNO doesn't receive any messages from Mastodon or GS nodes, although some of my GSNO messages turn up on mastodon.social.
« REN21 said the share of fossil fuels in the global energy mix was 80.2% in 2019, compared to 80.3% in 2009, while renewables such as wind and solar made up 11.2% of the energy mix in 2019 and 8.7% in 2009, the report said. »
[There is no way that in the next decades the consumption of fossil fuels will drop or be substituted by renewables. With increasing need for more electricity, I don't see renewables playing any serious role. Nuclear seems the best of all bad options.]
« REN21 said the share of fossil fuels in the global energy mix was 80.2% in 2019, compared to 80.3% in 2009, while renewables such as wind and solar made up 11.2% of the energy mix in 2019 and 8.7% in 2009, the report said. »
Thea Riofrancos, "The rush to ‘go electric’ comes with a hidden cost: destructive lithium mining" https://gnusocial.cc/url/548033
One reason I don't support renewables & electric vehicles: They are part of western Eco-Colonialism that puts the downsides of "renewable" and "clean" squarely on the global South. I prefer energy sources that keep the waste in my country, i.e., nuclear.
No guests at the restaurant so I had two days off. I kind of wonder whether customer numbers will get back to pre-pandemic highs any time soon. Because if not, then even with the governmnet subsidies a lot of restaurants will close. Which means job losses for people who for years only made minimum wages.
At the same time prices for electricity and fuel are climbing while inflation accelerates and food prices already higher than the past couple of years. Which will make the situation for people on minimial wages, 0-hours contracts, and insecure jobs even more precarious.
Seems like my gut feeling of one year ago that people will need to hold their money together as prices will soar proves right. I wonder how inflation in the U.S. and Europe (Germany in particular) will develop. I don't have any proper understanding of economics, but it feels like a major economic crisis is already on the way.
At this D-Day, commemoration should extend to Operation Bagration, the Soviet spring offensive at the east front that made the western allies's landing in Normandy even possible.
« This book compares the cross-border integration of infrastructures in Europe such as post, telecommunication and transportation in the 19th century and the period following the Second World War. In addition to providing a unique perspective on the development of cross-border infrastructures and the international regimes regulating them, it offers the first systematic comparison of a variety of infrastructure sectors, identifies general developmental trends and supplies theoretical explanations. In this regard, integration is defined as international standardization, network building and the establishment of international organizations to regulate cross-border infrastructures. »
I suspect that the real climate change deniers are not those who don't "believe in the science" and the forecasts, but those who do and insist that we need to do something, anything, quickly They're simply not capable to accept death. Who can? But to think that there is anything humankind could do to avert or mitigate the worst prospects of climate change is outright nitwitted. The emissions are baked in. The tipping points and "positive" feedback loops occur because of the things done in the past not in the present or near future.
Again, the last chance to have averted this was 1960. We're 70 years too late.
Add to this a seemingly inconspicuous entity: the shipping container.First introduced in the 1950s in the U.S., standardised in the mid 1960s, it quickly became the main facilitator of global trade of goods and resources.
The global infrastructures began to emerge and coalesce around such utilities of transport, energy, and finance, and created the current forms of material exchanges that now can not quickly be abandoned. Perhaps we might have had a chance to avert or mitigate climate change in the early 1960s, when nothing of this new mega-system of infrastructures was yet on the horizon. (Obviously, this mega-system of infrastructures has been the main perpetrator of the climate crisis.) But now that it is, and given how long it takes to change fundamental features of this mega-system of infrastructures, there simply is no way to reshape it in time.
In the past weeks I repeatedly thought about that the last chance to have the worst impacts of climate change mitigated and the various tipping points and mutually enforcing feedback loops halted may indeed have been at the beinning of the 1960s. Not later. And in particular not as late as the 1980s or 1990s when talk abut climate change spread into the public for the first time.
People tend to date the beginning of globalisation and neoliberalism at the mid 1990s. That is too late. The coal crises in Britain of 1969 and early 1970s, the oil crisis of 1973, they are part of a change in the infrastructures, both with regard to global interconnection as of the local conversion and refurbishment of urban and industrial agglomerations. There is a saying that Western Germany lost more of its urban buildings and constructions in the early 1970s than during the whole of WWII. Infrastructures were reconstructed, older systems slashed.
Back in the office (physically) for the first time since the beginning of December 2020: all the laboriously rehearsed procedures have been forgotten by the body and the mind: where are the keys? What do I have to take with me? How do I enter the classrooms? etc. The preparations for the way to work feel like preparations for an expedition.
The biggest surprise: walking to work, through the ever more sparsely populated city streets, get the mind going. I'm completely lost in thought, as I have not been for a long time. That doesn't work at all in the countryside, where walks in the landscape have a calming but always draining effect. »
« There is particularly a shortage of raw materials produced in the U.S., like lipids. "Through the Defense Production Act, we are simply unable to get certain products out of the U.S.," [CureVac CEO] Haas says. CureVac has little understanding for an America which, on the one hand, is hording both vaccine doses and raw materials necessary for vaccine production, while on the other hand, it is demanding that patent protections be suspended in order to help supply the rest of the world with vaccine. »