Collapse, Renewal and the Rope of History

“In Indonesia, one of the world’s biggest palm oil growers has announced a plan to rehabilitate an area half the size of New York to atone for its past clearing of rainforests and peatlands. In Bolivia, a massive new two million acre reserve has been established on the Amazon’s deforestation frontier, thanks to a partnership between indigenous communities and private donors. Last month, the United States restored protections for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, home to thousands of watersheds and fjords, and more than a thousand forested islands. The new protections will end large-scale old growth logging and support restoration, climate resilience, and recreation.”

Collapse, Renewal and the Rope of History
https://futurecrunch.com/collapse-renewal/
via Instapaper

Decarbonisation

https://www.exponentialview.co/ev-342p

While scientists have recently warned about worsening global warming, the goals are still in place, and we must find creative ways to meet them. The Energy Transitions Commission has just released a list of actionsthat can be taken on a large scale to keep the 1.5°C target alive. These include rapid reductions in methane emissions, halting deforestation, beginning reforestation, decarbonising the power sector and phasing out coal. What’s remarkable about the report is how clearly it identifies the steps that need to be taken to safeguard the planet. We have the road map; we need capital and governments to follow it.


Economics and climate change

https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/what-climate-change-requires-of-economics-by-daron-acemoglu-2021-09


When we account for endogenous technology, we find that the transition to cleaner energy is much more important than simply reducing energy consumption, and that technological interventionsneed to be redirected far more aggressively than they have been. Similarly, when one incorporates more realistic assumptions about the costs of global warming – including the possibility of climate tipping points – one’s conclusions about how to approach the problem tend to change substantially. 






Airlines and CO2

https://www.forbes.com/sites/prakashdolsak/2021/09/19/pew-reports-widespread-support-for-low-emission-lifestyles-will-individuals-then-cut-down-on-air-travel/?sh=319a551b6d6d

Aviation accounts for about 2.5% of global carbon emissions. This is a big deal because it would make the aviation sector the world’s 7th largest carbon emitter if it were a country. Airlinesaccount for roughly about 1 billion tons of carbon emissions. Sweden, Greta Thunberg’s home country, contributes 40 million tons. California, the leader in US climate policy, accounts for about 250 million tons. Thus, aviation accounts for 25 times Sweden’s emissions and four times California’s emissions.


Why Economics Says Our Civilization is Going to Collapse - Umair Haque

“The first is that we’re consuming more than we invest. How much more? Three times as much. We invest at 25%, and consume at 75%. Those are ruinous economics. They are why three to five decadesgg of unprecedented catastrophe are now headed our way. The 2030s — the decade when climate change goes catastrophic. The 2040s — the era when mass extinction goes unclear. And the 2050s — the Final Goodbye, when the earth’s great ecosystems finally begin to irreversibly die off. All that will take our civilization’s systems — from secondary ones, like finance, employment, and shopping, to primary ones, like food, air, water, and medicine — with it. Bang! The lights go out.”

Why Economics Says Our Civilization is Going to Collapse
https://eand.co/why-economics-says-our-civilization-is-going-to-collapse-b3bc6fc8973e
via Instapaper

ESG futures

https://medium.com/volans/where-will-the-esg-backlash-lead-3db42f0c7c63

The most egregious example of the ESG industry’s self-serving vagueness — its ‘cloudy linguistics’ and ‘marketing gobbledegook’, in Fancy’s words — is the blurring of the distinction between risk and impact. As Fancy writes, ‘protecting an investment portfolio from the disastrous effects of climate change is not the same thing as preventing those disastrous effects from occurring in the first place.’One salutary effect of the ESG backlash will be to make it much harder to dress up ESG risk management as being about making the world a better place.


GPT3 realism

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/22/1007539/gpt3-openai-language-generator-artificial-intelligence-ai-opinion/

To understand why, it helps to think about what systems like GPT-3 do. They don’t learn about the world—they learn about text and how people use words in relation to other words. What it does is something like a massive act of cutting and pasting, stitching variations on text that it has seen, rather than digging deeply for the concepts that underlie those texts.