mbgerring

A battery will replace your generator and you are too late to stop it.

Site last modified in 2015

Lots of us working in clean energy read this book, and everything that’s happened since it was published makes the projections here useless

Right, as long as you specify “without energy storage”, renewables “can’t work alone,” even though energy storage is included in most common sense definitions of “renewables”

Thankfully, energy storage is being deployed worldwide, so this is a moot point, and renewables can and will replace fossil fuel electricity generation.

“According to my paranoid fantasy derived from internet fan fiction, worrying about currently-occurring real-world harm doesn’t make sense”

We are living through an ongoing mass extinction event of non-human species. There is a very well understood risk to the stability of human civilization resulting from global average temperatures reaching and sustaining 1.5deg above the historical average. The higher the temperature goes, the greater the risk of social collapse. We are already seeing it, and it is almost certainly going to get worse.

EA cult members do not take this very real, measurable, non-speculative danger seriously. Consequently, I don’t think they should be trusted or consulted on any subject of any importance.

They literally cannot. They can detect the user’s intent to do math, and then use a different tool to do math, hopefully with the correct inputs. The LLM is not suited to giving deterministic answers to math problems.

Times have changed my friend.

It’s extremely annoying that this was taken down, because anybody who’s followed rationalism/EA/adjacent groups since their public emergence in the last decade knows that this is true, and I really, really wish this was more commonly understood.

I was talking to a friend about the billionaire's tax and this issue came up. Here's how I see it: either individually wealthy people stay here, and we take their money to build state capacity to even out the distortions created by their wealth, or, they leave, and the distortions fix themselves.

The easiest one to point to is property prices. Wealthy people buy land, and drive up the price of land and rent for everyone else. If a lot of people suddenly make a lot of money in San Francisco, in general, for me and most of the people I know, there's no "rising tide" that lifts our boats. Our income remains the same, but our rent goes up, and maybe our lives don't make sense anymore, and we have to move.

But if there's a wealth tax, and it encourages rich people to leave the state? Awesome. Go drive up rents in Texas or Montana or somewhere else. Or pay the tax, and then the state can use that money to build affordable housing.

Before you say anything: I lived through the 90s, and you can't trick me with "WOW YOU THINK THE GOVERNMENT CAN DO THINGS? WHAT ABOUT THE DMV???" Go somewhere else.

We need to stop beating around the bush and hit these companies with severe criminal charges. There is no good reason to allow these companies to behave as if they’re above the law.

The linked article doesn’t say what you think it does.

It says that China’s use of coal this year is increasing after a multi-year trend of leveling off or decreasing, mainly because China is using coal in place of LNG imports made more expensive due to the U.S. attacks against Iran.

The overall trend is very clear — China is expanding both its supply of electricity, and generation from renewable sources, at the same time. Which we should also be doing in the United States.

This is cope. Oil, gas, and coal are dead, and with them, America’s control over the global financial system, and its political hegemony.

America is actively ceding the future to China, and our ruling class have no ideas left other than looting the place as it’s burning to the ground.

> the math doesn’t add up

There’s no way for you to know that. You don’t do the math. People like me, who work in the clean energy industry, do the math. The math works fine. You should try working as hard as the math does, instead of complaining.

Cool man, how good of a job would you do at your craft if I only gave you $5

This paper was extremely influential for me, and it’s worth reading for a perspective shift that’s not often considered in these discussions: what happens when you consider “the apocalypse” as an event in the very distant past? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325453561_Indigenou...

People have been saying this a long time, and I’ve participated in this movement, and I think we need to add something: science fiction can be gritty, realistic, and full of conflict, and also optimistic. I’ve encountered a lot of “climate fiction” that just comes off as schmaltzy, and I don’t think that does the job.

> although I doubt something else would be widespread in in just one decade.

I know this is off topic, but I feel compelled to point this out — the transition away from fossil fuels is happening extremely fast, in punctuated bursts, in broad daylight, and you still get comments like this. And meanwhile, many putatively smart people are really worried about an imminent robot apocalypse.

If I had the money to do it, I would be willing to make a large wager that neither gas-powered lawnmowers, nor lawns, nor robots capable of autonomously stealing power from your neighbor, will be common in 2035.

Not in my lifetime!

This is the missing context for NIMBYism. The legal mechanisms used to stall construction in San Francisco were created because of an explicitly racist plan to demolish people’s homes to build freeways. The people building datacenters should stop, take a breath, and think a few moves ahead about how to get to real agreement and mutual benefit with surrounding communities instead of just driving a truck over them. Nobody’s going to be happy with the consequences.

Really, you can’t? When the President and his party have been saying out loud for decades that they want to destroy the EPA?

IMO, capitalism is itself an unaligned artificial intelligence, with its own logic and goals orthogonal to human life. All “ex risk” paranoia is a projection of sublimated anxiety about capitalism.

This lost me at “the economy is composed of tasks”

There’s so many assumptions packed into that assertion that tell you the horizon of possibility considered here is uselessly shallow.

I was laid off as a senior product manager in December of 2025. I’ve been looking for a new job in clean energy (which is supposedly “having a moment” due to data centers) since then. There is no “jobs boom”. There are certainly job openings — black holes into which you can lodge your resume. Occasionally, multiple rounds of interviews that go nowhere. I’ve been paying my bills as an art fabricator and live event electrician, the kinds of blue collar jobs that are supposed to make up for the destruction of “knowledge work”. The work is inconsistent, and the pay is less than half of what I made before. There is no “jobs boom”, of any kind.

Yes, I do use the recursive autocomplete trained on Stack Overflow, what does this have to do with “training machines to love”?

Do I fully endorse everything the people holding guns to my head are forcing me to do to stay alive? Definitely not, but I’ve decided that for now, living to fight another day remains worth it

AGI is a cult and its Jonestown moment is inevitable

I’ve encountered this same inability to think or count when people claim that the lifecycle emissions of solar panels or batteries wipe out any potential emissions savings from use. It’s easy to confuse people with big numbers!

If you’re one of the people wondering why there’s an enormous backlash to AI, here’s your answer: “this thing we’re building is going to he fucking terrible and ruin your life. Please give us all your money to build it.”

Are you being serious? Are you actually not aware that Elon Musk ran the federal government department tasked with cancelling federal grants and firing government employees in 2025? How is it possible that you are not aware of this?

He personally ran the department that eviscerated funding for basic scientific research in the United States