Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)

#climateDiary
Norway’s main export is chaos inflation.

By exporting chaos Norway has become extremely ‘wealthy’. And even though its national wealth fund makes more money than it spends each year, almost 100% of the investments that fund makes are concerned only with investing in chaos.

Turns out Norway is not hermetically sealed
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/14/nordic-heatwave-climate-crisis-sweden-norway-finland

…earlier this year I watched Simon Reeve interview Trond Grande, the deputy CEO of Statens pensjonsfond, who confirmed that it’s permitted to invest “up to 2%” in ‘green’ technology but currently only invests about 0.2%, saying

“We try to keep this fund as apolitical as possible in Norway. All we do is with a financial return in mind.”

Ah yes, the ‘non’ politics of digging humanity into its own grave

24 minutes in at https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002cg5n

…Daniel May was the first to explore the fog rolling around the slopkeeper, Elias Thorne.

A thorny tale

https://danielmay.co.uk/posts/cheap-agents-alumni-shirts-and-elias-thorne/

I have a mutual in @coreysnipes who has wittily changed his display name.

Today, I mistakenly called Corey by his display name, because I was insufficiently attentive 🤦♂️

But I have now attended to the mysterious Elias Thorne.

Thanks Corey 😄

https://www.404media.co/elias-thorne-chatbots-llms-chatgpt-lighthouse-keeper-story/

At the beginning of August, the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) was at just under 305 million barrels, down about 110 million barrels across a 4 month period of drawdown. So about 27 million barrels used per month.

The industry consensus is that the SPR loses structural integrity below 300 million. Additionally, it is about 6x slower to refill than to withdraw from.

Trump has absolutely screwed his voters and things will get pretty real quite soon

https://www.tapbit.com/en/learn/article/strategic-petroleum-reserve-2026-oil-left-20260811

@futurebird I read a couple of Rand books in my late teens via my obsession with Rush.

I don’t remember much about the books other than them being pretty boring.

The realisation about what Rand stood for unfortunately came later

@aral

Love the web numbers thinking 💚

Currently on a journey into emacs, working my way through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48JlgiBpw_I from @daviwil which is helping a lot 🙏

@inthehands thank you for putting so eloquently how I feel – as a designer who codes more than as a developer developer.

The phrase I come back to as my attempt to encapsulate it is *the lack of care economy*.

That’s always been underlying financialised modernity but it’s currently running unabashedly rampant

I think I want to watch a serialised drama scripted by @selzero

$298 billion would retrofit all the UK’s homes to a good level of energy efficiency and therefore massively reduce power consumption, which would increase energy security more than building military infrastructure that depends on fossil fuels

https://theconversation.com/replacing-warships-with-drones-is-not-an-upgrade-in-capability-286507

Is it feasible to live without fossil fuel use at scale?

Yes of course. Until about 300 years ago, nearly everyone did, and there are people alive today who live like that.

- - -

Will hundreds of millions of people born this century *have* to do so? Yes. It won’t be optional.

- - -

Is it possible for anything like our current hyper-mobile high consumption culture to work without fossil fuels at scale?

My answer is a near certain “No”.

- - -

Why these questions?

Well… (continues)

“Climate.us launches independent website for trusted climate information.

Built by members of the team behind NOAA’s Climate.gov, the new nonprofit resource is supported in part by more than 2,500 small donations from people who want reliable climate science information to remain accessible.”

https://www.climate.us/news-features/feed/climateus-launches-independent-website-trusted-climate-information

UK Prime Ministerial tenures since Milk-Snatcher Thatcher, approximated as lettuces

Keir Starmer
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬

Rishi Sunak
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬

Liz Truss
🥬

Boris Johnson
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬

Theresa May
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬

David Cameron
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬

Gordon Brown
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬

Tony Blair
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬

John Major
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬
🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬🥬

My dad, his brother and their generation of the British Empire fought heavily militarised and expansionist fascism.

But the British Empire and its American allies were racist af. Their generation and that of their parents murdered tens of millions of people with darker skins.

They subjugated the descendants of those people and co-opted them into their wars.

And then attempted to rebuild the same social structures afterwards.

We should remember that too as well as the first bit

Just had a chat with a client who was describing how ChatGPT has saved his bacon by enabling him, without technical understanding, to conjure an API-based solution to a time-constrained data transfer issue.

Our dilemma is that the tools obviously have great utility if one is prepared to ignore their costs.

And we live in a culture that is committed to ignoring its costs.

These are the FOMO meets FAFO years of LLMs
https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112095290545697095

I’m on the fringes of a Claude-adjacent discussion. I’ve been abundantly clear that I want nothing to do with it.

It’s being considered for a thing I’ve put some prior thinking into.

Thing is, even if it works on a superficial level (or deeper), its use is antithetical to the project.

Tech continues to make me want to abandon tech

…“OpenAI alone has been valued at north of $800 bn. Anthropic, yet to produce a single year of profit, commands a valuation in the same stratosphere. These numbers need an addressable market large enough to justify them.

There is only one market that large: the global labor market.

…

The financial model requires the elimination of human cost at civilizational scale. If it doesn’t do that, these companies are the most overvalued assets in the history of capitalism.”

https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

“Last year, over half of new content on the internet was AI-generated. The humans are still there, scrolling, but the thing they’re scrolling through has become a performance staged by machines for an audience that hasn’t yet realized the show isn’t for them.”

https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

“The researchers took data on reconstructed historical weather – a so-called hindcast – in the Atlantic Ocean over one year and used a computer model to work out optimal routes and speeds.
…
On average, the energy consumption of ships taking the optimal routes would be 75% lower than those taking direct routes, the team found. Schwedt presented the results at a recent meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.”

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2526648-wind-assisted-cargo-ships-could-more-than-halve-shipping-emissions/