218 karma · joined August 13, 2018
No, propaganda is often quite blatant. Look at the posters from both of the World Wars, depicting US enemies as vicious, inhuman monsters.
Even the “Rosie the Riveter” and Uncle Sam imagery is propaganda.
Propaganda can be any sort of one-sided media used to manipulate public opinion. It doesn’t necessarily have to be banned, but people need to learn more media literacy to recognize it.
> The presented data, especially for 2022, are thus preliminary and subject to backward revisions. The more recent data are usually more incomplete and therefore can undergo upward revisions over time. This implies that several of the reported excess mortality estimates can be underestimations.
Nuclear and renewables are not 1:1 interchangeable. Nuclear adds to the base electric capacity —- it’s a constant 2GW. To replace it with intermittent renewables requires several times that amount of capacity.
And electricity is only about 20% of our energy use. As we’re electrifying heating and transportation, all of that adds an enormous demand to the electric grid. The electricity powering Amazon’s 900MW data center could be used to power people’s basic needs.
The “energy transition” is not a simple problem to solve —- if it were, we’d be doing it. In reality, additional renewable generation is only adding to the total energy consumption, not replacing fossil fuels.
Like I said, if we cared about the future, we’d take a triage approach to any new electric loads.
Of course, nobody is thinking that far ahead. If we cared about the future, we wouldn't be building energy-draining data centers anywhere.
The grid in Pennsylvania is mostly gas and coal. If we actually wanted to eliminate emissions and electrify everything, then we would take a triage approach to building any new infrastructure.
Not really. The current would be too high on low voltage DC. And high voltage DC is dangerous.
In indoor urban spaces, concentrations are probably already typically 800ppm. It might explain some of our social dysfunction...
[1] https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/ove...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Natural_si...
I'm not "parroting Big Oil propaganda". They're one of the worst culprits, who managed to addict us to cheap energy. Now everybody expects access to cars, planes, and electric grids, no matter how destructive they are.
Industrial civilization must stop. full stop.
The fact that none of the (seemingly non-controversial) action items are being addressed should tell you something about how our leaders think.
Instead, they're proposing plans for the next pandemic which amount to more authoritarian surveillance and control.
> What poisoning caused all our ERs to overflow during the pandemic?
I suggest you look into it. ERs weren't all overflowing. https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/new-york-city-er-visits-plumme...
I agree that those items are worth doing for other reasons. But I also question whether pandemics even operate in the way that we've been conditioned to believe.
> Those risks still exist, the wet markets just need to end completely, while for the bio labs it's always good to have people imagining various ways things could go wrong in order to make them not actually go wrong outside of our imagination.
The fact that biolabs haven't been regulated at all (in fact, even the notion of investigating biolab safety has become some sort of partisan issue) should be a huge clue that the COVID response has been a political operation.
I try to use this medium to share a perspective that addicts wouldn't ordinarily encounter.
It's probably not very effective, since the addiction runs so deep.
If the cause of COVID had nothing to do with infectious disease labs, food standards, or air filtration, then those three action items would be irrelevant.
If the cause of COVID was acute poisoning combined with a global, coordinated psychological operation, then you've got bigger fish to fry.
Our society is addicted to energy.
Yes, they're all bad. Markets are no substitute for morality. And if the market properly accounted for environmental damage, all of those uses of energy would be priced out of existence.
In a world of dwindling EROI and exponential carbon emissions, all data centers are bad.
If we cared about the future at all, we'd be switching them off and triaging our energy use.
These projects may reduce emissions, and they may improve health outcomes, but they also keep the poor subjugated by the global industrial system. That must be a factor in the programs’ popularity — it’s another way to extract wealth from the poor.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitte...
There’s certainly low-hanging fruit. If the top 10% of emitters reduced their emissions to that of the average European person, global emissions would fall by 30%.
And consider the low lifespan of IT equipment.
This has been explained repeatedly since “Manufacturing Consent”.
Already there’s been a 75% decline in insects, over the past 30 years.
When all the pollinators die out, how much longer will humans survive?
The problem is that the IPCC doesn’t factor in climatic tipping points. When we pass 2°, chances are, we’ll accelerate toward 3-5 and beyond.
Global industrial civilization is driving the sixth mass extinction on earth. Every species that goes extinct is gone, forever. If you’re a member of one of those species (or depend on them for your survival), it’s an existential problem.