Happy autumn everyone! Seriously though fall is one of my favorite aesthetics in animation.
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tdp fandom how we feeling?
From the article:
Scientists analyzed coal ash from power plants across the United States and found it could contain up to 11 million tons of rare earth elements — nearly eight times the amount the US has in domestic reserves — worth around $8.4 billion, according to recent research led by the University of Texas at Austin. It offers a huge potential source of domestic rare earth elements without the need for new mining, said Bridget Scanlon, a study author and research professor at UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences. “This really exemplifies the ‘trash to treasure’ mantra,” she said. “We’re basically trying to close the cycle and use waste and recover resources in the waste.”
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The present isn't a dystopia. It's just a complicated, chaotic, sometimes amazing, sometimes brutal world.
The future is, I think, unlikely to become a dystopia in the sense we imagine it. I saw this for two reasons:
First, I say "the sense we imagine it" because dystopias are based on the idea that all hope (for humanity, usually, sometimes all life) has been extinguished forever, and the forces of dystopia shall never be overthrown.
I don't believe that kind of world is possible - a world where there is never more hope. A true end to history. I don't think it's ever possible for all humans to stop fighting, as long as we're here. I have lots of evidence to based this on, much of which is called "all of human history." (And eternal dystopia is especially impossible if you look at deep time - there have been five previous mass extinctions, and life is still here.)
But it will not come to that.
Here's why:
We have already averted truly apocalyptic levels of warming.
Yes, read that again. Let it sink in. This is what the science now says. We have already averted truly apocalyptic global warming.
To quote David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, from his huge feature in the New York Times:
"Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years... The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse." (New York Times, October 22, 2022. Unpaywalled here. Emphasis mine. And yes, this vision of the future is backed up by the current science on the issue, as he explains at length in the article.)
So we've already averted truly apocalyptic warming, and we've already cut expected warming IN HALF in just the past five years.
The pace of technology, of innovation, of prices, of feasibility, of discovery, of organizing, of grassroots movements, of movements in other countries around the world, have all picked up the pace so fast in the last five years.
Renewable technology and capacity are both increasing at an exponential rate. It's all S-curves, ones that look like this:
-via The Economist, June 20, 2024.
How much more will we manage in another five years? Another ten? Another twenty?
I know the US is about to fucking suck about the environment for the next four years. But the momentum of renewable energy is far too much to stop - both in the US (x) and around the world.
(Huge shoutouts to India, China, and Brazil for massive gains for the environment in renewables, and Brazil for massive progress against Amazon deforestation.)
We're going to get there.
Say it with me. We're going to get there.
Just wanted to share some shockingly good news in these difficult times. The full article is really worth reading. [Find it here]
"Is it a safe space to say i hate-" NOT IN THE MAINTAGS IT ISNT