One storyline of 2019 is creeping authoritarianism. Another is people power. Major protests this year in Hong Kong, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Sudan, Chile, Bolivia, Russia, France — and now India.https://t.co/vRchvID9Bu
CEOs from fossil fuel corporations including BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and Norway’s Equinor were attending the annual gathering of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative in New York, which includes industry leaders who claim to be committed to taking “practical” action on climate change. On the agenda for lunch was to “explore options for long-term engagement” with young people the industry could trust. Student Energy, a nonprofit based in Alberta, near Canada’s tar sands region, helped organize the event, which included time for students to grill the CEOs about their inaction on climate change.
Tension in the room was high, Student Energy’s executive director, 30-year-old Meredith Adler, told The Intercept. “The whole discussion started off with one of our participants talking about why youth don’t trust oil and gas companies,” she said. But by the end of the meeting, Adler tweeted that she was “very impressed” with OGCI. “I don’t feel they had all the answers or strong enough answers but they are really listening,” she wrote.
The students’ questions may have been tough, but the event was great PR for the fossil fuel industry. Gone are the days when CEOs openly questioned the existence of climate change. Today, industry leaders are feigning a sense of climate urgency while pushing forward proposals for climate action that will allow companies to keep harvesting carbon-emitting products well into the future. Subjecting themselves to a cohort of skeptical students was an opportunity for oil and gas executives to boost their credibility in an era when many young activists will only engage with them with picket signs.
Young activists say they’re seeing more of this “youth-washing” as the global youth climate movement gains momentum, including at the U.N. annual climate conference, known as COP 25, which is wrapping up in Madrid this week. With “youth” becoming synonymous with climate action, corporations and politicians are increasingly using young people to portray themselves as climate serious.
If you know what short selling is, then this article will interest you and surprise you. Short selling is an investment technique. For example, assume Company X is selling a pharmaceutical drug that allegedly cures some disease (name it). Word is out that the drug isn’t as effective as promised, although Company X and its tribe of supporters are controlling the narrative. Most of us think Company X is doing great. Assume its stock is selling for $100, but the short sellers believe that it is way overvalued. So, the short seller borrows 1000 shares from any shareholder, then sells those shares and realizes $100,000 ($100 per share times 1,000 shares). The short seller waits, and sure enough, doubts creep into the market and the stock drops to $40 by the time the short seller is required to return the shares to the original lending shareholder. The short seller buys the shares at $40, for an aggregate of 450,000. Short seller has made $60,000 profit on the transaction. Short seller sold the shares she/he borrowed for $100,000, but only had to spent $40,000 to buy them back. Bingo!
This article tells us that some short sellers are out there, hunting for companies who may be green-washing, or touting ESG values (environmental, social and governance) that are overblown. Once the market realizes that some of these companies are full of ESG shit or are green-washing, then they pounce.
Excerpt from this story from
Reuters:
Tens of trillions of global investment dollars are pouring into companies touting robust environmental, social and governance credentials. Now short-sellers spy an opportunity.
Such hedge funds, often cast as villains of the piece because they bet against share prices, scent a profit from company valuations they believe are unduly inflated by ESG promises or which they say ignore risks that threaten to undermine the company’s prospects.
Investments defined as “sustainable” account for more than a quarter of all assets under management globally, according to the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance. About $31 trillion has been invested, buoyed by analyst reports that show companies with strong ESG narratives outperform their peers.
Some short-sellers, including Carson Block of Muddy Waters, Josh Strauss of Appleseed Capital and Chad Slater of Morphic Asset Management, argue share prices can be bolstered by corporate misrepresentation about sustainability, or so-called “greenwashing”.
“Greenwashing is absolutely rampant now,” says Slater, whose fund bets on both rising and falling share prices. If companies fail to engage with long-term investors, he sees a red flag.
No one ever mentions that “Fortune favors the bold” is what Pliny the Elder said as he set sail toward erupting Vesuvius, where he landed, and was promptly killed on the spot.
seriously how did we get from “bicycle for your mind” to “cash register/surveillance device for optimizing premium content consumption” in just a few short decades
An efficient way to find out about a scientific literature: Toss out a half-formed idea on Twitter, wait for angry academics to tell that there’s a big literature on that topic, ask them for links, block the ones who are too angry to give you links, and follow the ones who do
Is there a single climate policy decision or policy recommendation that would (or should) change if we all finally agreed to rule out the cursed RCP8.5 as a plausible future? I honestly can’t think of any.
the mainstream art and pop culture tropes of 2019 feel sort of like 1999 all over again - futuristic fantasy aesthetic with underlying nihilism and dread for the inevitable collapse of modern civilization
The remaining carbon budget left to limiting warming to 1.5C is so small that its effectively impossible at this point (~235 GtCO2 for a 66% chance of avoiding; 395 for a 50% chance). So how do we create plausible scenarios to limit warming to 1.5C? More negative emissions! ¼ pic.twitter.com/cd4zQFjmVu
The earliest cephalopods date back to the Cambrian period. They predate trees and land plants. So, the Earth knew tentacles before it knew leaves. Anyway, sweet dreams.
The quantifiable nature of music streaming means that “the music you listen to the most” is increasingly conflated with “your favorite music.” To me, these are profoundly different concepts.
‘the patience has been replaced by a grim, creeping dread. A fear that it won’t be over soon, or ever. It feels like karma. This is what the scientists have warned us about, begged us to think of, all these years. It’s here. And it’s going to get worse’https://t.co/TxO0K60wrP
After a year of work our paper on evaluating performance of historical climate models is finally out! We found that 14 of 17 the climate projections released between 1970 and 2001 effectively matched observations after they were published. https://t.co/xbmOh4ZPcn 1/19 pic.twitter.com/xjez5FWwd3
Students finishing up socially-minded design and art projects: This might be a useful time to ask yourself about the relationship between wonder + urgency in your work. If you’re stuck, ask: is it all wonder, no bite, no urgency? All earnest urgency, but lacking wonder?
“Upon seeing Utah for the first time, Tarkovsky remarked that now he knew Americans were vulgar because they filmed westerns in a place that should only serve as backdrop to films about God.”
Thread: 50 years ago, on Dec. 4, 1969, Chicago cops killed 21-year-old Black Panther, Fred Hampton
Hampton’s death wasn’t just another police murder. Even more than MLK or Malcolm X, Hampton’s murder might be the most important black assassination in US history. Here’s why:
Has anyone run a #decellerator program? One focused on #ethics and long conversations about the multitude of futures of an idea/startup with their founders? Something remote with no wifi? or is that just @DoLectures
81 years ago I was the first to show that CO2 levels in the atmosphere were increasing due to burning fossil fuels, and that global land temperatures were observed to be warming as a consequence.
The issue all along with Tech and the Arts hasn’t been that it will replace artists and craft, but that it will replicate and populate the world with even more mediocrity https://t.co/6HfmaZcSyr
When each sector of analysis (e.g., the classic STEEP Social/Tech/Econ/Enviro/Politics model) shows signs of collapse in process, it’s very hard to imagine what to do or where to focus. Every action feels insufficient or pointless.
Most people are not lazy enough. The kind of relentlessly effortful living conservatives love to preach is unnatural except perhaps for hummingbirds. Half of survival of the fittest is the patience to wait for the steals and deals and moments of unreasonable leverage.
A good rule of thumb is that unless you work for a secret government spy agency, something has gone terribly wrong if your employer has automated online services to help with getting your cover story straight with your family. https://t.co/4WrI0imm4x
“We all know that moment. You register for a new service, type in your chosen password, but can’t get in. Your password could very well be secure, but the opinionated service you’re trying to use disagrees.“
“The process, called ‘acoustic enrichment,’ had a ‘significant positive impact on juvenile fish recruitment throughout the study period.’ The acoustically enrich reefs attracted fish faster and maintained them longer than the reefs without a healthy soundtrack.”
What was the last phenomenon, observable as a stream of discrete events, that “popped” from background to foreground for you, and what if anything triggered the pop?
Example for me: fancy water bottles trend. Now I notice them everywhere. Noticed when I got one as schwag.
“My pick for the book of the year Infinite Detail, is a before-and-after tale of near-future social collapse..It’s hard to believe it is a debut, so assured and evocative is Maughan’s writing” hot damn @arrroberts in the @guardianhttps://t.co/5PJlF4jwp8
There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING that says “FUCK YOU” to Brexit more than a terrorist being taken down by a Polish man brandishing a Narwhal tusk. There’s your second referendum right there. REMAIN!
My new heist movie is just 100% crew-assembling. A new character is introduced every five minutes. It has the most unweildy cast in the history of cinema. The Smashmouth soundtrack never stops playing. Critics are calling the plot “nonexistent.” It has grossed $30bn worldwide
Sci fi book of the year?@timmaughan’s Infinite Detail
“It’s hard to believe it is a debut, so assured and evocative is Maughan’s writing. As a portrait of the fragility of our current status quo it’s as thought-provoking as it is terrifying”https://t.co/amq2JMO89R
1. Auto-cluster tweets per user (shitposting, representing, thought leadering, shilling, sharing, thinking aloud) and auto follow/unfollow dynamically based on that.
2. Live filter resulting first-pass output by mood (restless, serious, beefy)
Starlink’s light pollution is yet another case of what’s called ‘the enclosure of the commons.’ A public good (the clear night sky) is appropriated by a powerful man simply because he can do it, and now those who shared it are beggars at his table.
We have done it!
Thanks to all the support and proud to have gathered a large majority in the European Parliament to make Europe the first continent to declare a climate and environmental emergency.
We are today meeting the expectations of European citizens.#ClimateEmergency
Considering the merits of debugging a Nvidia/Xorg problem verses taking a long term view by spending that time looking for a vacancy in a monastery or Amish community.
While Americans agonize over how to purge the last vestiges of discrimination from algorithms, China has a “massive cybernetic brain” that directs the police to investigate and detain whole categories of people. https://t.co/DMCDVC22of
Technical Debt: the first 10000 years is the bug in Plough Technology that it basically destroys soil health and no one noticed until the situation was critical. https://t.co/LZXBg3ULT2
The California Ideology — the mindset that to this day is core to the way the Internet as infrastructure (and much of hacker culture) thinks — does not accept the idea of social responsibility, nor of any meaningful collective constraint on individual action, regardless of cost.
“A recorder that ‘records’ sounds of the future troubles the linear temporality and becomes a haunted medium of different worlds - human and nonhuman, life and afterlife, and a liminal site of competing worldviews, value systems, and modes of justice.”
‘Reality is too important to be left to the realists. The stories are ludicrous in so many obvious ways, but they are offered as a weird reflection of where we might be.’
I think the correct response to all change is to mitigate the effect of the change on the people from lose out from it, not to try to stop or reverse the change.
— Land Reform In Developed Countries Stan Account (@csilverandgold) November 24, 2019
Researchers compare two cutting-edge carbon sequestration techs (CCS &, uh, trees) & find trees “are less expensive per ton of CO2 stored [&] have a longer history of success, stronger near-term viability, more robust co-benefits, & fewer risks than CCS.” https://t.co/Ti4Snisxfj
In the current state of climate emergency, the Internet of Dead Things Institute (IoDT) is dedicated to repurposing obsolete technologies. MinitelSe allows you to stream radio, browse the Internet in text mode, read the news, chat & more. See more at @recyclism & @noschoolnevers. pic.twitter.com/yVW81paj9r
Today at the 2219 Opening Conversations, at @ArtSciMuseum, futurist Scott Smith (@changeist) provided an invaluable introduction to the history of futures work, focussing firstly on the early work of Herman Kahn at the RAND Corporation post-World War II.#SG2219#FuturesImaginedpic.twitter.com/EDjw4CWG0K
1. Reality is not a game.
2. Evolution & general intelligence are not really game-theoretic.
3. The mind is not a machine.
4. Thinking isn’t computational; computation is something thinking sometimes does.
5. In life, there is no hardware / software distinction (h/t: @normonics).
Last month’s global average concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) was nearly 412 parts per million (ppm), up approximately 24 ppm from October 2009. #2009vs2019https://t.co/qjYgQZqqbL
McKenzie Wark (2015) on the ecopolitical factions of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy: On the new planet the Greens are the terraformers, for whom “nature is synonymous with life.” Whereas for the Reds “nature is prior to life, greater than life:” the alien planet itself. pic.twitter.com/p4eLa4np7D
‘The Way is a void,
Used but never filled:
An abyss it is,
Like an Ancestor
From which all things come …
It is like a preface to God …
The student learns by daily increment.
The Way is gained by daily loss.’
Climate is a disaster response issue.
Climate is a disaster recovery issue.
Climate is a disaster mitigation issue.
Climate is a disaster preparedness issue. https://t.co/god7Q8CWwc
“Lifeforms are lagoons, repressed pockets of forgetting, temporarily protecting themselves against the outside that created them and will destroy them” (Mackay 2012, 28). pic.twitter.com/kTg0vRQcI9
test-driving a take that the “tv or cinema” debate is a misunderstanding of the only truly significant distinction between different branches of the arts, which is Going Out vs Staying In
Our glorious algorithmic future. When “garbage in, garbage out” was just the world of programming it was one thing, now it’s bleeding into the real world like the stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
…our nervous systems, our realities, and the evolving forms of media that inevitably insert themselves between the two. A series of seemingly random topics are slowly woven together: shootings, bees, the right’s rules for radicals, climate control, dogs pretending to be children, the oil we eat, and the right of every American to believe whatever they want to believe — your brain’s ear lets nothing remain entirely random. It’s not the content, it’s the edit that shows us what we all know to be true, and it’s the things that one is most tempted to enjoy as harmless entertainment that often turn out to be living animals. Splicing together Occupy mic checks with US militia rallies, FOX news hosts with ecoterrorists, and your own sanity with the home viewing habits of Negativland’s lead vocalist, the Weatherman, when you put the word True next to the word False, a broader reality reveals itself.
Cuneiform in Iraqi street art. These are the Sumerian logograms ama-gi4 𒂼 𒄄
In cuneiform texts, the term refers to a reversion to a previous state, like in the manumission or release of slaves. In modern contexts, it has come to mean freedom #IraqProtestspic.twitter.com/WfJTaobK0J
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan” - Eliel Saarinen
Which means you need to research the next larger context and not just ‘your’ thing.
A good hack to find interesting ideas to work on is to start with a word that seems to pick out an important concept, but has been rendered annoyingly vacuous by abusive overextension. Examples: strategy, meaning, irony. Other examples?
“And so while it may seem strange and even naïve to look to mythology for tools to understand the earth’s six mass extinctions, we think that in an era dominated by technocratic solutionism (which leaves little room for paradox, ambiguity, and non-modern ways of relating to the world) it is naïve to think that we could rely on the styles of thought and reasoning that brought about the problem in the first place. In this way our project, as well as our work as a collective, calls upon humans to harness the powers of mythical fabulation in order to address our relation to an earth future that we will bring into being (it is a product of human design), but which completely escapes our human capacities for understanding.”
