“We need both. When it comes to transitioning away from fossil fuels, we need to cut with both arms of the scissors—demand and supply,” Michael Poland, campaign director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, told Sierra in an email from Sharm el-Sheikh, where this year’s climate talks are taking place.”

What Is the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty?
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/what-fossil-fuel-non-proliferation-treaty
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“For 30 years we have been making emissions reductions targets but the fossil fuel industry has been continuously expanding production,” Tzeporah Berman, chair of the initiative, said at Cop27. “We are trying to reduce the demand for fossil fuels without reducing the supply, which is like trying to cut with one half of the scissors. There is no treaty on what governments can produce and where and, without a treaty, we will be unable to bend the curve on emissions.”

What’s the problem with more fossil fuel production?

The problem is that there is far more coal, oil and gas in company and government reserves, and planned for production, than can ever be burned if global heating is to be kept to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Put another way, burning all the fossil fuel currently on companies’ books would guarantee climate catastrophe.

Many major studies support this conclusion, including one that found 90% of coal and 60% of oil and gas reserves could not be extracted. In May, a Guardian investigation revealed that the world’s biggest fossil fuel firms were planning scores of “carbon bomb” oil and gas projects that would result in catastrophic global impacts.”

What is the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/11/what-is-the-fossil-fuel-non-proliferation-treaty
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“When it comes to global warming, we know that the real problem is not just fossil fuels—it is the logic of endless growth that is built into our economic system,” Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, has written. Climate change can’t be dealt with using the tools of capitalism, because it is a product of capitalism. It can be dealt with only by throwing off capitalism in favor of something else—a system aimed not at growth but at “degrowth.”

“The difficult truth is that, to prevent climate and ecological catastrophe, we need to level down” is how the British environmental writer George Monbiot recently put it.”

Climate Change from A to Z
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/28/climate-change-from-a-to-z
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“McCourt believes that the dominance of a few Golathian social media platforms will give way to “a thousand Davids” that better cater to smaller communities with more specific interests and needs. This has already begun, with apps like BeReal and Mastodon gaining huge interest in the past half-year.

Larkin boldly predicts that within five years, most social media users will be on a decentralized social media graph; McCourt says three. “We have an ambitious timeline in terms of creating real change fairly quickly, because I don’t think we have time,” Larkin says. “Social media is the main driver of undermining democracies, so we can’t wait around.”

Challenges to Overcome

Technologists who have worked in the decentralization space far longer than McCourt are cautiously optimistic about Project Liberty. “I’m really excited that Frank McCourt and Project Liberty are bringing a different level of resources to this space than has typically been here. And I think that that could accomplish a great deal,” says Glen Weyl, an economist and a researcher at Microsoft Research. “At the same time, there are really challenging technical problems that can’t be solved theoretically. They have to be resolved through actual experiments, with real user bases—and they’re at the beginning of their journey of exploring that landscape.””

Another Billionaire's Plan to Rebuild Social Media
https://time.com/6235171/frank-mccourt-project-liberty/
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“The richest 20 percent of people worldwide take 80 percent of the flights, according to estimates by the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit think tank. The top 2 percent of frequent fliers take about 40 percent of the flights.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/climate/aviation-emissions-net-zero.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/climate/aviation-emissions-net-zero.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
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“Saudi representatives pushed at the United Nations global climate summit in Egypt to block a call for the world to burn less oil, according to two people present at the meeting, saying that the summit’s final statement “should not mention fossil fuels.” The effort prevailed: After objections from Saudi Arabia and a few other oil producers, the statement failed to include a call for nations to phase out fossil fuels.”

Inside the Saudi Strategy to Keep the World Hooked on Oil
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/climate/saudi-arabia-aramco-oil-solar-climate.html
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“The key inputs for batteries – lithium, nickel, and cobalt – are projected to be in short supply within the decade, as are the rare earths used for electrodes. Global battery production will suffer if manufacturers have to “friend-shore” these commodities. After all, most of these resources are mined in unstable or conflict-ridden countries, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and much of the existing refining is done in China and Russia.”

Deglobalization Is a Climate Threat | by Raghuram G. Rajan - Project Syndicate
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/deglobalization-threatens-fight-against-climate-change-by-raghuram-rajan-2022-11
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“The tactic of the bad guys is delay, and delay is incredibly easy to achieve; a body at rest stays at rest. Our job is acceleration, and that’s not happening, at least at the pace that’s required. We’re starting to run out of years, so we best make the next one count.”

The Tyranny of Inertia
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-inertia
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“Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.

The terms social network and social media are used interchangeably now, but they shouldn’t be. A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.”

The Age of Social Media Is Ending
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/twitter-facebook-social-media-decline/672074/
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“There have been some notable rhetorical flourishes, not least from António Guterres, the UN secretary general, who has turned climate speeches into something of an art form. The world is on a “highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator”, he warned. “Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish.””

‘Like Vegas, but worse’: Sharm el-Sheikh fails to charm Cop27 delegates
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/11/like-vegas-but-worse-bemusement-week-one-cop27-sharm-el-sheikh
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“Let’s just focus on the future demands of minerals needed for the clean transition — the demand is set to grow exponentially. That is as daunting as moving a hunter-gathering species of 10 million from foraging to domestication.

We have an existence proof which suggests that this rationale is flawed.

We did scale agriculture all over the globe, band by band, in parallel, in similar ways and in different ways. In fact, we have gotten so good at it, we can adequately feed six billion people, and overfeed a further one billion of them. And we even need less land than before.


To believe that it is impossible to decarbonise the global economy quickly because we won’t be able to scale up clean energy requires the same flawed rationale to argue that agriculture never happened.”

🤔 Can the clean transition happen?
https://www.exponentialview.co/p/weekly-commentary-can-clean-transition-happen
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“Green hydrogen is a zero-emissions hydrogen fuel capable of powering planes, cars and homes. It’s produced using wind and solar power, along with a high-tech electrolysis process. By 2050, cleanly made hydrogen could remove seven gigatons of CO2 emissions annually if scaled successfully, roughly 20 percent of human-caused emissions, according to McKinsey.”

From nuclear power to bamboo: The climate solutions at COP27
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/11/cop27-climate-change-solutions/
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“US officials hope the plan will combat global warming by unlocking “tens of billions” of private capital to fund the energy transition in emerging economies, according to a person familiar with the discussions.”

COP27: US works on plan for companies to fund emerging nations’ fossil fuel switch
https://www.ft.com/content/cf064250-e4ce-48c2-a4dd-dc96bc7660e2
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“Powerful AI technologies are increasingly shaping our lives, relationships, and societies, and their harms are well documented. Social media algorithms boost misinformation, facial recognition systems are often highly discriminatory, and predictive AI systems that are used to approve or reject loans can be less accurate for minorities.”

The EU wants to put companies on the hook for harmful AI
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/01/1060539/eu-tech-policy-harmful-ai-liability/
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A new report from climate research organization Oil Change International has found that almost half of the fossil fuels that could come out of existing coal mines and oil and gas fields need to stay untouched, if we’re going to stop warming at less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Oil Change International researchers added estimates of already developed oil, gas, and coal projects and how much carbon they would emit and calculated that 40% of those fossil fuels need to stay in the ground to avoid blowing past our carbon budget. This work helps expand on the International Energy Agency’s report, which found that no new oil and gas fields or coal mines can be developed if the world plants on staying within 1.5 degrees C warming.

“That’s where we get the conclusion that we’ve already developed too much,” Kelly Trout, co-author of the study and research co-director of Oil Change, told Earther. “If policymakers wanted to aim for a higher certainty of staying below that limit, there would actually need to be more fossil fuels that would need to stay in the ground.””

Yeah, We're Gonna Need to Leave That Shit in the Ground
https://gizmodo.com/leave-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground-1848943187
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“While large parts of the world still lack access, unplugging is often seen as a luxury for the internet-rich. A search in Factiva, the international media database, shows that the United Kingdom tops the list of countries referring to ‘digital detox’, followed by Germany, the United States, India and Australia. While many struggle to connect, others struggle to disconnect. What people disconnect from varies, but some digital irritants are worse than others. The most mentioned industries in connection with digital detox are, by far, social media and smartphones, and Mark Zuckerberg is the most referenced individual.”

The pleasure, the pain and the politics of a digital detox | Psyche Ideas
https://psyche.co/ideas/the-pleasure-the-pain-and-the-politics-of-a-digital-detox
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“The global aviation industry is responsible for about 2.5 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions – a bigger contribution than Australia - and if the aviation industry was a country, it would be one of the world’s 10 worst polluters.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, airlines were scrambling to adopt various measures to combat emissions and soothe growing guilt among passengers about travelling, including voluntary carbon offset schemes and investing in sustainable jet fuel.

But now, with travellers again flocking to the skies after two years of on and off lockdowns, sustainability experts believe the best way for the sector to meaningfully cut emissions is by taxing frequent flyers. That could be good news for carbon-conscious travellers, but also a problem for Australian airlines and passengers.”

Can a frequent flyer tax could solve aviation’s carbon challenge?
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/can-a-frequent-flyer-tax-could-solve-aviation-s-carbon-challenge-20220928-p5blne.html
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“We know that everything goes through sense perception and the exact form of how it appears to us is constructed in the brain: all perception is mediated. So the only meaningful sense in which I really do see or hear you, even in real life, is that what I am seeing and hearing is in some importantly truthful way causally related to you.”

Where simulation ends and reality begins: an interview with David Chalmers - Prospect Magazine
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/where-simulation-ends-and-reality-begins-an-interview-with-david-chalmers
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“Here’s how Chalmers describes this vision (starting at 22:27 in Youtube video below):

“For me, that raising the possibility of a massive failure mode in the future, the possibility that we create human or super human level AGI and we’ve got a whole world populated by super human level AGIs, none of whom is conscious. And that would be a world, could potentially be a world of great intelligence, no consciousness no subjective experience at all. Now, I think many many people, with a wide variety of views, take the view that basically subjective experience or consciousness is required in order to have any meaning or value in your life at all. So therefore, a world without consciousness could not possibly a positive outcome. maybe it wouldn’t be a terribly negative outcome, it would just be a 0 outcome, and among the worst possible outcomes.”

Chalmers is known for his work on the philosophy of mind and has delved particularly into the nature of consciousness. He famously formulated the idea of a “hard problem of consciousness” which he describes in his 1995 paper “Facing up to the problem of consciousness” as the question of ”why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?””

Automation Nightmare: Philosopher Warns We Are Creating a World Without Consciousness
https://bigthink.com/the-future/automation-nightmare-we-might-be-headed-for-a-world-without-consciousness/
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“But between the start of the Industrial Revolution and current times, four great forces began to transform our food system: (1) the Bosch-Haber process for the production of synthetic fertilizers; (2) high-yielding crop varieties pioneered by Norman Borlaug; (3) increased globalization and trade; and (4) mass agricultural industrialization and mechanization.”

9 astonishing ways that living standards have improved around the world
https://bigthink.com/the-present/9-ways-living-standards-improved-world/
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“But these examples are not statistical outliers. Over the same period, countries across the economic spectrum, from low-income to high-income, experienced a dramatic improvement in life expectancy. As the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum, circa 1800, virtually all countries had a life expectancy at or below 40 years; today, just six countries have a life expectancy below 60 years. Put another way, a daughter born into a family in Lesotho or the Central African Republic — the countries with the lowest life expectancy today, each at around 53 years — can expect to live a longer and healthier life than the newborn daughter of an Englishman or American in the year 1800.

Global improvements in life expectancy have not been limited to the early industrial past. Much progress has been made, particularly in developing countries in the greater Asia region, in just the last 30 years. Between 1991 and 2020, China, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan gained life expectancy improvements from 5 years (Pakistan, from 61 to 66) to 11 years (India, from 60 to 71).”

9 astonishing ways that living standards have improved around the world
https://bigthink.com/the-present/9-ways-living-standards-improved-world/
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“White House Office of Science and Technology Policy that outlines five principles designed to “protect the American public in the age of artificial intelligence.”

You should be protected from unsafe or ineffective systems.
You should not face discrimination by algorithms and systems should be used and designed in an equitable way.
You should be protected from abusive data practices via built-in protections and you should have agency over how data about you is used.
You should know that an automated system is being used and understand how and why it contributes to outcomes that impact you.
You should be able to opt out, where appropriate, and have access to a person who can quickly consider and remedy problems you encounter.”

Do we need an AI Bill of Rights?
https://email.unfinished.com/ai-bill-of-rights
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“What is even more remarkable, though, is how the tech companies’ claim to be the sole masters of “innovation” has been taken at its face value for so long. But now two eminent competition lawyers, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke, have called the companies’ bluff. In a remarkable new book, How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation – And How to Strike Back, they explain how the only kinds of innovation tech companies tolerate is that which aligns with their own interests. They reveal how tech firms are ruthless in stifling disruptive or threatening innovations, either by pre-emptive acquisition or naked copycatting, and that their dominance of search engines and social media platforms restricts the visibility of promising innovations that might be competitively or societally useful. As an antidote to tech puffery, the book will be hard to beat. It should be required reading for everyone at Ofcom, the Competition and Markets Authority and the DCMS. And from now on “innovation for whom?” should be the first question to any tech booster lecturing you about innovation.”

Tech firms say laws to protect us from bad AI will limit ‘innovation’. Well, good | John Naughton
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/08/tech-firms-artificial-intelligence-ai-liability-directive-act-eu-ccia
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“Yuval Noah Harari wrote about a timeline in which the higher class of society effectively become superhuman through advances in cybernetics, bioengineering and healthcare. According to Harari, this new class of superhumans would possess superintelligence and extended lifespans thereby allowing them to act as the ruling elite.”

The Technological Singularity
https://medium.com/synergy-publication/the-technological-singularity-4086a8953ac7
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“In mathematics, a point which is not well-defined and behaves unpredictably is called a singularity. Indeed, mathematician and computer scientist John von Neumann hypothesised a point in time where technology would advance to such a level that society would become completely unrecognisable.

“The ever accelerating progress of technology… give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the (human) race beyond which human affairs… could not continue.”

~ Von Neumann paraphrased by Stanislav Ulam (1957)”

The Technological Singularity
https://medium.com/synergy-publication/the-technological-singularity-4086a8953ac7
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“New companies have sprung up to commercialize artistic AI tools. A website and app called Wombo can generate images in a variety of styles in response to a text prompt or an existing image, and it sells prints or NFTs of the results. Midjourney, an independent research lab that has made its technology available to beta testers, can turn text prompts into vivid, sometimes abstract illustrations.”

When AI Makes Art, Humans Supply the Creative Spark
https://www.wired.com/story/when-ai-makes-art/
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“But we haven’t just been wrong about things we thought would come to pass; humanity also has a long history of incorrectly assuring ourselves that certain now-inescapable realities wouldn’t. The day before Leo Szilard devised the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, the great physicist Ernest Rutherford proclaimed that anyone who propounded atomic power was “talking moonshine.” Even computer industry pioneer Ken Olsen in 1977 supposedly said he didn’t foresee individuals having any use for a computer in their home.

Obviously we live in a nuclear world, and you probably have a computer or two within arm’s reach right now. In fact, it’s those computers — and the exponential advances in computing generally — that are now the subject of some of society’s most high-stakes forecasting. The conventional expectation is that ever-growing computing power will be a boon for humanity. But what if we’re wrong again? Could artificial superintelligence instead cause us great harm? Our extinction?”

Opinion | How AI could accidentally extinguish humankind
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/31/artificial-intelligence-worst-case-scenario-extinction/
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