Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social), page 2

…Our dilemma is that we’re a culture addicted to uninterrupted and growing power consumption.

So if we don’t keep the implications of that front and centre as we advocate for the transition from one set of minerals to another set of minerals, we’re just shifting where the fragility of our economics is located without fundamentally ratcheting down the fragility

So far, only about 1% of the British electorate has registered an interest in having a vote on channeling water management away from dumping effluent for profit and instead into public ownership for health.

Perhaps we can bump the numbers a bit, at least to the point where how not to enshittify what we drink and cook with might be debated by MPs?

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/762640

What kind of rich is Ireland?

“They feel: the 3-hour commute in traffic, the closed GP list, the €2,200 rent, the 14-month wait for an MRI, the buses that don’t come, the trains that don’t exist, the schools with no places, the pubs that close before midnight, the €12 sandwiches.

And they keep being told: Ireland is the second richest country in Europe with a €23 billion surplus, record employment, and even if you’re not happy with this, just shut up and put up.”
https://mastodon.ie/@ccferrie/116407638837677583

“BIG, POORLY RUN” you say?
https://mastodon.social/@MAKS23/116373058838530359

Image description by @aral https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116373480015097739

I’m aware that the likes of Ember say we could save 40% with full electrification: https://ember-energy.org/focus-areas/electrification/

Which could bring Europe’s current 38 EJ primary energy demand [1] down to 22.8.

But in November 2025, before the Gulf war, the European Environment Agency were projecting that renewables might meet 42.5% of Europe’s demand in 2030: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/share-of-energy-consumption-from

So if Europe managed a steady-state from here (tricky), renewables could be generating roughly 16 EJ by the end of the decade?…

In the same time period, the world’s privately-owned oil companies have made $5 billion in elevated profits.

So we might infer that the price of a tonne of carbon should be $1,000 per tonne.

The EU has one of the highest carbon prices. It’s currently at about €68 ($79), so at least 12x too low

#climateDiary https://mastodon.world/@davidho/116271391844076790

Spot on from David:

“The UK AI Action Plan is vaporware touted by spivs. The Government is going along with the vapor because they are utterly out of ideas and they need AI to be magic. So they’re not bothering to check anything — looking could only lead to disappointment. The press release is the entire project deliverable.”
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/116207192154450466

@tofm2

“in France in 1872, the government made a conscious decision not to collect certain kinds of data about people, including data about their religious affiliation,” Veliz said. “The result was that the Nazis found and killed about 73 percent of the Jewish population in the Netherlands, and in France, 25 percent of the Jewish population were killed.”

@junesim63

https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111776292820572600

“When will [an LLM] shortening the text be good enough for a reliable summary? Probably only when summarising consists of nothing else than turning something unnecessarily repetitive and long-winding into something short. That is far less of a use case than people think.
…
It really might take a while until people have experienced enough of this for GPT-fever to pass.”
https://helvede.net/@jwcph/116122024069598014

I spent quite a bit of time on BlueSky for several months and found that if you’re a nobody there is close to no engagement. If you’re a somebody, the platform laps it up.

But on Mastodon the conversation flows irrespective of who you are.

I know where I’d rather be https://fediscience.org/@kathhayhoe/116065653289142235

I look at other people’s
languages on here and I don’t have to understand them to see that they are just beautiful.

People modelling large language scopes are wondrous. Machines modelling languages for profit at the expense of habitability are shit

Bloody hell: Alphabet, Amazon, Caterpillar, Chevron, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, and Palantir https://mamot.fr/@Khrys/116034466199737167

2024 heating up
Geopolitically
Environmentally
#climateDiary

Wonder why things are heating up in, as Christopher Clugston puts it, our…

BLIP:
Humanity’s 300-Year
Self-Terminating Experiment
With Industrialism

🤔

In 1875, the global hegemon was the UK. Global extraction of iron ore was 25 million tonnes.

In 1945, the global hegemon was becoming the USA. Global extraction of iron ore had increased more than 6x to 159 million tonnes.

In 2015, the global hegemon was becoming China (militarily it’s still the US, for now). Global extraction of iron ore had increased 92x on 1875 to 2.3 billion tonnes.

The source of these charts from which these numbers are *extracted* is Richard Heinberg’s book, Power.

The hegemon is hegemanic
https://climatejustice.social/@patricktsudlow/111867381920562320

Helluva book cover

2026 update (thanks to Cameron in the replies): Christopher did have a website for his book at readblip\.com but that’s now been co-opted by some spamming endeavour.

For an overview, see more lower down the 2024 thread https://mas.to/@jackofalltrades/111868294339918049

“Every time someone says ‘it is what it is’, it makes it so. It is not inevitable just because Sam Altman tells his over-leveraged investors it is so. It becomes inevitable when you, *you personally*, decide that you just don’t want to think about the externalities or put in the work to find better alternatives.

We are making this choice. But really, that means *you* have already decided for me.”
https://phpc.social/@Crell/115998212669441825

Posts in my timeline (from outside the US) about Americans needing to get their act together. FFS.

I also see posts of astonishing Americans putting their health and lives on the line.

I will not be berating Americans because I have no fucking idea what I would do when confronted with armed psychopaths

On the radio, Jeremy Bowen, describing where Iran’s theocracy seems to be at, reached for the well-known quote from Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’:

“‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways’, Mike said. ‘Gradually and then suddenly’.”

Which is the nature of power relationships. Whenever there is a trajectory of extraction there’s a threshold beyond which it cannot stand up.

Much of our era is in the ‘gradually’ phase with ‘suddenly’ inching ever closer…