Tthis is perhaps good news, but it does not amount to a change of course, unfortunately. If we have passed peak emissions, it is still a long way from net-zero emissions. Like if you pass your peak rate of overspending your salary, but you are still continuing to go farther into debt. Even when you get to parity between salary and expenditures, you will STILL have the accumulated debt and in the case of CO2, that debt is wreaking ecosystem destruction. Do not cheer this news.

There is a new process for treating wastewater sludge that destroys the microfibers, so that is good news at least. I think it may be expensive, of course. It is called “hydrothermal carbonization”. Basically put the sludge in a giant pressure-cooker and the heat breaks the plastics into carbon and some water-soluble residual molecules which can go back to the start of the wastewater treatment plant to be biodegraded. But like others say, the main source in general is tires - not sure if they know whether tire microplastics are the main source in agricultural land though.

In economic terms, nature is often referred to as an “externality” - meaning, as you say, things which do not appear on corporate balance sheets - that are unvalued. We have collectively recognized that clean water in rivers is something valuable to society, and converted the externality of “use the river to carry away the pollution!” and “use the river water to cool the process plant” into actual costs: not by making investors put their money into riverine systems for future profit, but by requiring permits which restrict what can go into or come out of the river. We can, and sometimes do, manage the land in similar ways. I advocate for it, but of course I get a little anxious about the details if it comes to MY land!

I spent a couple of years in Guna Yala, the indigenous-peoples’ territory of northeastern Panama. The Guna people live in towns on islands just offshore of the coast, and they farm and hunt in the mainland forest. When a Guna family wants to grow crops, they go with a village chief to the forest area near the village and identify a piece of land that is suitable. The chief approves it and records the location, and the family has it for three years. They can cut trees, plow soil, plant whatever. After three years, they have to abandon it and nobody can use that land for three years.

I feel very much that my land is not REALLY mine. I have stewardship. The people that had it in the recent past (20th century), did not treat it well and shame on them. But they are dead and gone, so they don’t care I guess. I am treating it better and someone later will probably be glad to acquire it because of the great soil, healthy and perhaps valuable tropical hardwoods, and well-connected ecosystem. I’ll be dead and gone so I won’t care. It is IMMEDIATELY gratifying to live in this place and see it heal and prosper and that is all the return on investment I could ask. But I would at least say they should give me a break on property tax for land I restore to forest (even food forest). Maybe I will donate it to the Nature Conservancy some day, to lock in the gains.

From the immortal Journal of Irreproducible Results, “The Data Enrichment Method”: “. . .its principal shortcoming is that before the enrichment process can be started, some data must be collected. It is quite true that a great deal is done with very little information, but this should not blind one to the fact that the method still embodies the ‘raw-data flaw’. The ultimate objective, complete freedom from the inconvenience and embarrassment of experimental results, still lies unattained before us.”

fwiw, this story is also covered here, imho a more credible source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/1/palestinians-demand-international-inquiry-after-mass-grave-found-in-gaza

I note that only one of the photos accompanying the article features PLASTIC rubbish. curious

The article mentions hydrogen from electrolysis of water, but I think a bigger source in the future could be steam reforming of biomass. That is, when you heat biomass (plant matter, sewage sludge, maybe even municipal garbage) to about 300C in steam, the organic matter breaks down into simple molecules like hydrogen, carbon monoxide (highly flammable!), methanol, elemental carbon (biochar) and miscellaneous others. Some of those molecules can be recovered for important chemical feedstock (since we won’t have petroleum or natural gas as feedstocks anymore, right?), and the gas can be fuel.

In the early days of natural gas use, towns would “reform” the methane (CH4) by reacting it with steam to make carbon monoxide (CO) and 3 molecules of H2 - a mixture known as “city gas”. It is not new technology.

gotta admit, that is a lot safer approach than trying some shit on the real thing

The statistic of low Firefox use is based on accessing US government websites. Could it be that there is significantly LESS government site access by the population of users that prefer Firefox? As a corollary I recently read that game companies observed significantly HIGHER bug reporting from Linux users on Steam, not because there were more Linux-related bugs, but simply because that set of users were more likely to initiate bug reports. Of course Firefox is not Linux and Steam is not the world, but a statistic from a relatively narrow segment of the internet should not be assumed representative of the whole.

lmao

In the US, stove burners are rated in the confusing units of “BTUs” which is actually a unit of energy, not power. When they say BTU, they mean BTU/hour. The highest-rated burners on a typical stove are about 10,000 Btu (per hour), but high-end stoves can get up to about 18000 - that is equivalent to about 5000 watts. My single-element induction top is only rated for about 1000 watts. So although it heats and cools rapidly, I suspect it is not up to the demands of wok cooking (unless one wants to cook only very small portions).

not Chinese, but I cook a lot with a wok. I also have a single induction cooktop and surprisingly, the wok has enough iron to work with it while some old cheap conventional cookware did not. However, wok cooking needs to be hot all over the wok and not just in that little point where the wok is close enough to the induction coil.

I have a conventional propane stove which I need to keep, because here in Puerto Rico the power system is quite unreliable (especially during a bad hurricane year). But the conventional stove burners are not really hot enough. With a 1/16 - inch drill bit I could increase one of the burners capacity substantially. I painted the stove knob red so people have some warning when they light that burner! It burns more gas, but wok cooking is really fast, so in the long run it is probably more efficient than lots of other cooking approaches.

I would definitely consider a wok-shaped induction heater. Induction heating is quite remarkable.

Have you tried your hand at biochar? I know composting the chips for mulch is high value in a farm operation, but a few tons of biochar can work like a permanent upgrade - improving the soil permanently with one addition - though ongoing permaculture operation continues. I am about to make a biochar cooker out of two steel barrels - inner fuel chamber and outer draft shell. It would probably be more effective with wood scraps than chips though - some air passages through the fuel.

To test it out for myself, I made a miniature version documented at https://github.com/jcadej/TLUD-biochar-reactor (uses a gallon paint can for the fuel chamber. You could test it small and see how it does with wood chips. When I make my bigger version, I will add it to the github project. My rough idea is to cut one barrel down the side and squeeze it smaller and bolt it so it fits inside the other.

I have heard this, and I can imagine it is true, but have you seen any analysis? There must be a large crew traveling and lots of equipment - transportation is a big user of petroleum in general – for entertainment. Though they say the entertainment is good.

the ultimate run-away train! No matter how impossibly big it is, it just grew infinitely bigger in the past second.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/36/37/42/36374294e5183a96de3e3e6696f4d3ad.jpg

maybe space is the graviton field itself(!), but maybe there is a graviton field (or is it the Higgs field?) and gravitons (and Higgs particles?) are excitations of that field; like other particles are excitations of their various postulated quantum fields

I have plain ol’ Ubuntu LTS and I do not recall a Steam crash in a decade. Playing with Nvidia GPU on AMD Ryzen in recent years.

What the author is saying, I think, is that the inevitability of the tragedy is the right-wing concept. The concept of the commons is totally legit and the tragedy that can befall it from unregulated use is also clear. The right-wing concept that is dubious is that humans will self-regulate and do not benefit from governance.

Declining birth rate is not a problem that requires fixing, it is a mercifully wise collective decision by intelligent creatures who’ve become educated and aware enough of their place in the biosphere to recognize the destructive effects of their own overpopulation. The idea that declining birth rate is decidedly NOT economic - lower birth rate does not arise among the poor and uneducated in the world.

There is no problem in today’s world that would be mitigated by increasing birth rate. I live in a region where there is a burgeoning elderly population and sometimes people say - we need more young people in this economy! But that does not mean that having more babies here is any help: by the time they are adults, the wave of excess elderly people will be gone. Economic crises are far more immediate than generational solutions - if a region lacks workers, economic forces are more effective to relocate workers than biologically growing new ones. Of course, governments often fail to anticipate needs and adjust migration policies in a timely way, or housing policies, or other such issues that create barriers contrary to the economic forces.