I am confident that the septuagenarians in Congress will jump right on this.
(Sam is a tech mega millionaire)
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1444690487110082565
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1444690488330571778
“Why aren’t these lazy kids fixing the world we set on fire” is… a take.
I’m also guessing that “mega smart college kids” probably means rich kids in ivy league technology courses. He would get a different view in other courses and schools I imagine.
Man that’s an infuriating series of tweets.
There’s some weird, weird shit here on this dude’s read between the lines wikipedia page.
He co-founded a social media site at age 19 in 2005 no one’s ever heard of, dropped out of Stanford, and failboated it for 7 years until it was sold off for 40 mil aka nothing in 2014.
Then he magically became incredibly powerful and influential, and very, very, rich, at age 30, with this startup investment corp. Why? How? And 7 years later he’s worth 250MM?
Honestly this is a super bizarre wikipedia page to me. I like most of you probably more or less trust wikipedia’s editorial review and process but this one is way out there. 
it’s not that surprising. getting into vc can be a logical career move after an exit. even at 25 starting anew can be seen as a demotion. plus founders tend to hang around a lot of vc people, and it’s a total sausagefest social club. once you are in VC it’s mostly about 1) being in the right decade and country, and 2) having enough money to diversify your bets. plus y-combinator is very successful.
Uh, he obv put money into crypto and got a shitload of magic money that appeared from literal thin air.
When I was watching the NFL London stream yesterday I saw an ad for a show which was basically about “How everything is getting more expensive, people barely have enough to pay for all the necessary stuff”. At this point it dawned on me that there is the perfect storm brewing right now with regard of the mankinds future on this planet.
Last year I thought if Trump wins again it means basically game over. My assumption was that no matter what Trump did losing another 4 years would be huge because drastic policy changes need time to be implemented and even more time before we the switch in behaviour is completed. So Biden won and nothing happened. A few senators holding everything hostage and in 12 month the presidency of Biden could basically be dead in the water if the midterms favour the GOP. So that means that the biggest economy on earth and one of the biggest polluters on earth wont implement meaningful change which also has a cascading effect on other countries as well who love the excuse why they shouldnt change if the US and or China dont change first.
So now we had the elections in Germany and people basically voted for very restrained climate change policy. Because the biggest party wants to combat climate change but only if it doesnt effect their voters financially. CO2 taxes are pretty much capped right from the beginning and probably wont reach a price that would be needed to have an lasting effect. Since they most likely will also have to deal with the liberals in any government we are again down to hoping for technological breakthroughs rather than changing our ways of living.
Back to the ad I meantioned in the beginning: We are talking about one of the richest countries on earth and not some developing or 3rd world country. The media helps cultivating a fear that basically stops everything dead in its tracks. People want to fight climate change but not the associated costs with it. And that is what you read about everywhere: THE COSTS.
Well there was a way to maybe pay for this and lessen the burden on everyone but yet a big chunk of first-time voters voted for a party that hates higher taxes on the rich. Yesterday I saw clip from a satire show in Germany which analyzed the last election. 72% of voters were for a wealth tax but only 45% of the voters voted for a party that campaigned for a wealth tax and in the end only 4.9% voted for a party that would continue to pursue a wealth tax after the election.(clarification: SPD and Greens pretty much gave that up in order to form a government with the Liberals.) A classical case of people voting against their self-interest again. So what does that mean? We probably wont get any meaningful change especially if the minister of finance is a Liberal because this ministry can block a lot of stuff that the other ministries want to implement if it deems it to expensive because adding more debt is not the way to go apparently.
Add the current steep increase in prices for gas and energy in various countries that most likely will put an additional burden on consumers over the winter and will weaken the will to pursue meaningful policy to combat climate change.
The worst thing of all this is that we are crying about it when we still have very (unnatural) low prices due to exploitation in other regions of the world or not adding the real costs onto goods. Over the weekend I was looking for fair produced clothing. Sweatpants were around 80€ and if I add a hoody its another 80€(thats fair produced clothing and organic cotton with GOTS label). I probably get a similar outfit for 20 or 25€ in a store in my town. Nope only very few will be able to pay for that or want to pay that much for that and that is the real sad part for me: We are crying about how to pay for it when we still have big parts of the world involuntary paying for us. But at least everyone can be certain that if they get rich they wont have to pay a wealth tax.
TLDR: We are fucked.
Want to get your blood pressure up?
In the end it is just that: a report. But when you see how these nations lobby to get certain phrases, paragraphs changed you know that there is absolutely no will to do anything. Economy first forever.
The big show is underway. India wants to be net-zero by 2070. Biden promises that the USA will lead the way despite not having the votes for it at home. Apart from the strongmans like Putin everyone can just talk shit knowing full well they wont get anything through if they want to get reelected or they simply dont have enough votes to get things done. Oh yeah and everyone arrived in his own jet. A newspaper counted 400 private jets currently sitting at airports in Glasgow and Aberdeen.
Yeah the govt here is now pretending to be interested in climate change mitigation because you have to do that now or the EU will slap you with tariffs, but they’re not going to actually do anything.
Net zero is going to be broadly achieved … by carefully choosing the definition of net zero to match the window dressing approach touted by large corporations.
Headline: IS CARBON CAPTURE HERE???
Paragraph 14:
The problem is that Orca’s output equals just three seconds of humanity’s annual CO2 emissions
Edit: I did the math so you don’t have to. We would need 10,512,000 of these stations to counteract humanity’s output.
It is a permanent solution, unlike the planting of forests which can release their carbon by rotting, being cut down or burning in a warming planet.
God damnit, trees. You had one job
This is just terrible logic. It’s the same as saying the vaccine isn’t 100% effective so why take it.
These technologies have to be part of the solution.
the iceland trial is impressive, and the details are worth looking closely. they have cheap access to geothermal, access to basaltic rock, and political will.
Orca is billed as the world’s first commercial DAC unit because the 4,000 metric tons of CO2 it can extract each year
meanwhile, forests replanted in iceland since 1990 sequester at this stage 210,000 metric tons of co2. those forests should continue to sequester more over time, and replanting is also accelerating. compared to most of the world, iceland climate is also less adept to actual growing of trees.
Forests planted in Iceland since 1990 sequester 210,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year - about a tenth of the country’s total emissions. Iceland has its work cut out in growing that number, and funding decisions have undercut its quest to at least triple afforestation efforts within the next three or four years. Funding for afforestation increased in 2019, and the Icelandic Forest Service is on track to plant at least 3.5 million seedlings this year, a number Eysteinsson expects will increase to 8 million annually.
the point is that if we believe co2 sucking machines can be scaled to a necessary amount in a decade, it is awell within feasible reach that forests can also be scaled.
But without ice Iceland is just another Greenland.
Nobody respectable treats these as either or. It’s obviously both and others.