- Some good news - the International Energy Agency (IEA) and others are forecasting that carbon emissions from electricity generation are likely to peak this year. This would be a welcome development for sure, as it gives hope that overall emissions could start falling, though there's a long way to go.
- That said, one of the hardest problems to solve is air travel. When people are polled about whether they favour "doing whatever it takes" to address climate change, some 80% of people favour action in the abstract, but when something specific is mentioned support decreases. In particular, any mention in the question about a "ban", "phaseout", or "mandate" triggers something in people's reptilian brains, and when the thing for which these measures are proposed is leisure travel, the problem is doubly hard. When philosopher Agnes Collard wrote an article last year entitled "The Case Against Travel" (which, incidentally, does not focus on the environmental consequences but simply whether travel accomplishes what people think it's "supposed" to accomplish in terms of personal growth) the Reddit community responded with fierce resistance (including a lot of ad homenim remarks like "The author has convinced me that I would not enjoy traveling with them").
- Also disconcerting is the power of the fossil fuel industry to get the sheeple to oppose green energy projects. At least 15% of counties in the US, many of them in the most productive areas for solar and wind, have banned or restricted such projects.
- Another issue - the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, aka the Jones Act, requires any domestic marine transport in the US to use US ships - and the US doesn't have the specialized ships used to build offshore wind farms efficiently, so the parts have to be hauled out on ordinary barges, adding costs and complexity to the process.
- A check of old documents has found that fossil fuel companies knew that climate change could eventually be a problem as far back as 1954. If nothing else, this might be useful in court to support litigation against those companies.
- Publicly available AI chatbots have "guardrails" in place to prevent people from getting the wrong sort of information from the services (e.g. information on bomb-making). Interestingly, though, these can sometimes be evaded by the use of obscure languages (such as Scots Gaelic or Zulu) because the chatbots have not been properly trained on those languages. Apparently you don't need to even speak the language, just put your question into Google Translate and put the output of that into the chatbot. Ironically, AIs not meant for the public, in wargame simulations, seem a bit too keen to recommend bombing.
- A passenger on a bus in Winnipeg demanded that the driver divert from the scheduled route to drop him off at a location he considered more convenient from him, and viciously attacked the driver when his request was denied.
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