Link: “A world without mining”
Pretty good, short piece on why we should move to extract minerals from recycled goods instead of mining. Sort of insane that it doesn’t already happen tbh…
Posts tagged ‘environment’
Link: “The Cuyahoga River Caught Fire at Least a Dozen Times, but No One Cared Until 1969”
Maybe due to my age, I hadn’t heard of this incident until recently. People complain about the Yarra being polluted (which it is) but maybe it’s a sign of how expectations have changed over time that I take it for granted that rivers don’t catch fire.
Link: “Is Colombia’s Military Displacing Peasants to Protect the Environment or Sell Off Natural Resources?”
Link: “The rising threat of eco-fascism: Far right co-opting environmentalism to justify anti-immigration and anti-Semitic views”
This is worth being aware of. In Australia we hear a lot about “overpopulation”; this article talks a bit about how the far-right uses such rhetoric and a conservative, “back to nature” romanticism to promote their racist ideologies.
Link: “Massive Texas gas failure during climate extremes gets blamed on wind power” by Ketan Joshi
It’s only been a half year since blackouts spread across California during intense summer heat. Those blackouts were immediately blamed on renewable energy; of course it turned out later on that a string of failures in the state’s gas plants were to blame. In fact, it turned out later on that a major part of those blackouts was an instance of a misheard verbal instruction issued to a gas generator. Instead of turning up as instructed, they decreased their output. And it’s five years since South Australia’s 2016 blackout, in which precisely the same sequence of events occurred. A pattern is now clear.
Major blackout events, usually instigated by grid stress related to climate extremes, become opportunities to attack renewable energy. Media articles, political pronouncements, tweets, Facebook posts, everything – the entire media ecosystem assumes that renewable energy must have done it and runs hard with it. And of course, later, it comes out that fossil fuel failures played a significant or even majority role in the cluster of causes of the event – none of which is covered with the intensity of the original stories.
Native Australian Crops
Earlier this year I read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, which is a pretty interesting primer on Aboriginal ways of life pre-colonisation. One of the things that stood out to me personally was all the native crops that used to be cultivated here, things like native millet and rice. One of the perennial problems in Australia – getting worse with climate change – is long periods of drought requiring careful water management, something that is not very compatible with growing imported crops like cotton or Asian rice.
Jessica Smith is a left-wing feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also very interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.