[✔️] Dec 25, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Al Gore optimism, Carl Sagan video, Billionaires without climate clout, Andre Malm, 2008 WaPo wipe-out

[R.Pauli]

/*December *//*25, 2023*/

/[ Time for a Christmas Miracle - article from Politico ]/
*‘We can reclaim control of our destiny,’ Al Gore says of climate change*
The former vice president found hope in the possibility that humans have 
the tools to repair the planet.
By DAVID COHEN
12/24/2023

Former Vice President Al Gore expressed optimism that humanity can still 
repair the damage to the environment that is causing global warming.

“The good news is we can reclaim control of our destiny,” Gore, who has 
long warned of the dangers of climate change, said on “State of the 
Union” in an interview that aired Sunday.
“We have the ability to do this,” Gore said, adding: “And it’s not 
impractical,” citing solar power, wind power and electric vehicles.

“We can do this,” he told host Jake Tapper, “if we just overcome the 
greed and political power of the big fossil fuel polluters who have been 
trying to control this process. It’s time for people at the grassroots 
level in every country to speak up, and the good news is, that’s 
happening too. “

Sunday’s episode of “State of the Union” focused on 2023 as a year of 
record-setting temperatures and natural disasters. Gore made it clear 
that humans still have to choose the right course and follow it to fix 
the planet or face grave consequences.

“If we don’t take action, there could be as many as one billion climate 
refugees crossing international borders in the next several decades,” he 
said. “Well, a few million has contributed to this wave of populist 
authoritarianism and dictatorships and so forth. What would one billion 
do? We can’t do this. We could lose our capacity for self-governance. “
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/24/al-gore-climate-change-00133166



/[ Lecture from long ago, still valid - 16 min video ]/
*Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 on climate change*
3,079,567 views  Aug 19, 2021
Original source: https://www.c-span.org/video/?125856-1/greenhouse-effect
DECEMBER 10, 1985
“Witnesses testified on how the greenhouse effect will change the global 
climate system and possible solutions.”

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saganism/?hl=en

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saganism_?s=21

https://carlsagan.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI



/[ In this essay, CleanTechnica defines our global predicament ]/
*Pity The Poor Climate-Aware Billionaire Oligarchs*
Michael Barnard
As we celebrate the passing of another year with the rituals of our 
religions, our families and our cultures, spare a thought for a poor 
benighted billionaires who are trying and failing miserably to address 
climate change. They have a place to stand, a lever long enough, yet 
cannot move the world. Everyone around them keeps telling them that they 
are right, yet nothing that they do succeeds.

Imagine, if you will, being Bill Gates, spending another Christmas in 
his echoing 100,000 square foot mansion in the suburbs of Seattle, 
Washington. No, this isn’t another story about his home automation 
system blue screening and leaving him shivering in the dark waiting for 
tech support because it runs on Windows, although that is a reason to 
pity him as well.

For two decades, Gates has been funding directly and indirectly through 
Breakthrough Energy Ventures innumerable startups in the climate space. 
Yet none are disrupting the world. None are actually breaking through 
and solving climate change. Not that Gates is aware of it, but an 
outsized number of them simply invite ridicule. Everyone he talks with 
agrees nuclear and lots of it is absolutely required to address climate 
change. His many billionaire buddies who co-founded Breakthrough Energy 
Ventures with him in 2014 agreed that renewables clearly weren’t fit for 
purpose.

His nuclear energy firm TerraPower hasn’t built and sold a single 
reactor after 18 years of existence, despite grants worth up to US$4 
billion. He went begging to Congress for billions in subsidies for 
nuclear and didn’t get it. The Breakthrough funded Heliogen puts a 
meter-wide disc of light in a completely nonsensical place a hundred 
meters in the sky, only provides heat a few hours around noon and 
requires square kilometers of free and flat land, and as a result no 
industrial customers are remotely interested in the non-solution...
- -
More recently, Breakthrough funded HeirLoom, a hipster Rube Goldberg 
device that captures homeopathic amounts of CO2 from the air with 
technology that could have been built a hundred years ago. This is on 
form for Gates as he also backed Carbon Engineering, a direct air 
capture nonsense burger whose only natural market was enhanced oil 
recovery, which only ever started one project which was for enhanced oil 
recovery, and then was bought outright by the oil major doing the 
enhanced oil recovery. Breakthrough also funded AirLoom, a nonsensical 
wind generation device which actually adds failure conditions to 
vertical axis wind turbines and is a conceptual design that has failed 
multiple times in the past as well.

At COP28, only 22 countries signed up to triple nuclear 30 years from 
now, while 120 countries signed up to triple renewables by 2030. And the 
countries that signed up for the nuclear pledge included Ghana and 
Moldova, hardly power houses of technical and economic might.

Of course, Breakthrough loves itself some green hydrogen for energy and 
synthetic fuels made from green hydrogen, as if thermodynamic and 
economic nonsense was manna from heaven. They want to use it for 
industrial heat. They want to use it as a fuel for jets. They want to 
blend it with CO2 captured from the air to make trucking fuels.

So many people agree with him, after all, that he knows he must be 
right. Vaclav Smil agrees with him, after all, and he loves Smil’s 
books, all 46 or so of them now. Pity that Smil was too far from energy 
and so made three fundamental errors that render his conclusions 
virtually worthless, the most glaring of which is assuming that the 
roughly 20 billion tons worth of energy in fossil fuels consumed 
annually had to be replaced, instead of just the third that isn’t lost 
as waste heat.

Gates turned Microsoft into a global juggernaut through shrewd business 
dealing, some technical insights and good luck. He is courted at Davos. 
Heads of state ask his opinion. Epstein included him in the small group 
of people privileged to fly on his private jet to his private island 
(oops). He’s not just some crank sitting in the woods in Washington state.

I could go on (and on and on) about Gates’ failures to align with 
empirical reality since the 2000s. But I won’t. I am strongly of the 
opinion that the success of the Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation related 
to communicable diseases had a lot more to do with Melissa than Bill 
based on the evidence of the past 20 years, but that’s an assumption on 
my part.

How has he been so consistently wrong in such flagrant ways for so long 
without being corrected?

If he were alone, this wouldn’t be worth writing about. He’d just be 
Howard Hughes in his long fingernails and Spruce Goose phase. But Gates 
isn’t alone.

Let’s talk about Elon Musk. The guy is clearly brilliant (and driven and 
very lucky). He was deeply integral to figuring out an alternative 
payment system with PayPal, well into the engineering, fiscal and 
regulatory weeds in the late 1990s and first couple of years of the 
2000s. He rebuilt his brain as a rocket scientist in the 2000s, working 
with not only fundamental texts but actual rocket engineers, and created 
SpaceX, a firm which has reinvented and disrupted throwing mass into 
orbit. He took over Tesla in the mid-2000s, seeing clearly that battery 
electric vehicles were the future and working with hardcore battery and 
automotive engineers and some of the best thinkers in the industry to 
create a business model, technology stack and distribution system with 
roughly 15 different fundamental innovations. The modularized, highly 
automated and replicable Gigafactory and eliminating dealerships alone 
are worth books by themselves.

But since then? SpaceX and Tesla continue, thankfully, despite Musk. The 
Boring Company was a company created because Musk didn’t like the 
traffic jam at the entrance to the California Tesla HQ, and he didn’t 
bother to learn anything about tunneling or traffic, instead spinning up 
a deeply over valued firm that’s managed to dig 2.4 miles of tunnels 
that don’t add any value except as novelties in seven years, roughly a 
mile every three years instead of the mile per week Musk was touting. 
He’s on record as saying he doesn’t believe induced traffic demand 
actually exists despite a century of empirical evidence from everywhere 
in the world that it is a very real thing. The firm has 200 employees 
wasting their lives on this nonsense.

His Hyperloop concept was equally brain dead. More tunnels, but these 
ones with partial vacuum in them, mostly above ground, with maglev 
passenger bullets supposedly traveling at 1,000 kilometers per hour. 
This design ignores the lessons learned from mass transit and rail 
systems globally and if built would have led to every passenger 
projectile vomiting on every trip. Claims that the entire exercise was 
intended to disrupt California’s high speed rail plans don’t stand up to 
scrutiny, as if he’d actually spent any time looking at that boondoggle 
he’d have realized it was dead without his assistance. Others formed a 
Hyperloop company, spent scads of money and wasted lots of engineers’ 
time before it inevitably failed in the past couple of weeks.
He bought Twitter and managed to turn one of the most successful social 
media platforms in the world into a smoking dumpster fire in a cesspool, 
alienating every user and advertiser except the furthest right 
conspiracy theorists and the con artists who prey upon them.

He’s been the richest man in the world multiple times! He married 
Grimes! Twice! Or was that the other one? Every engineer with an idea in 
the world wants to pitch it to him! His tweets were able to sell 10,000 
weed burners with The Boring Company logo on them! He’s a genius! 
Everyone he works with tells him so. Other billionaires love him. Now 
Republicans love him too!
How has he been so consistently wrong in such flagrant ways for so long 
without being corrected?
The list goes on. Richard Branson is part of the group that founded 
Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and owned a big chunk of Hyperloop before 
they realized that putting humans in the thing was the worst idea since 
putting hydrogen in cars. Despite being climate change aware, he bought 
a space tourism firm which gave decamillionaires a few minutes of free 
fall above the 100 km notional line delimiting our atmosphere from 
space, a pure vanity waste of time and money that predictably went 
bankrupt, costing him $1.5 billion.

Vinod Khosla was part of the Breakthrough Energy Ventures founding crew 
as well, is on record as blaming environmentalists for nuclear energy’s 
failure to deliver on time and on schedule, and is investing in other 
direct air capture nonsense technologies. In energy his fund is into the 
fusion of solar energy, perovskites, despite decades of failures and no 
actual requirement for the cheapest and simplest form of electrical 
generation we’ve ever invented to get a slight bit more efficient. The 
fund is also into actual fusion, throwing good money after decades of 
bad. It’s invested in thermal energy storage technology whose first use 
case is returning electricity, ignoring fundamentals of thermodynamics 
and energy markets. Khosla — with Gates again! — invested in LightSail, 
the Thiel acolyte compressed air storage in expensive carbon fibre tanks 
nonsense that inevitably collapsed.

Jeff Bezos founded the Bezos Earth Fund, so is definitely climate aware. 
Yet he also created a different space tourism rocket concern, one which 
in his mind is somehow competitive with SpaceX, although it’s best known 
for making rockets that look like phalluses and not delivering on any of 
its commitments to customers. He’s also invested in fusion. There’s good 
stuff in there, as there is with Khosla’s fund, but there are many 
purely inane choices that defy rational thought.

Larry Page and Sergei Brin founded Google, building the world’s monopoly 
search engine and advertising platform. No flies on them. Yet on climate 
they wasted tens of millions on Makani, the airborne wind energy gizmo 
that was clearly a failure before it ever took off, and yes, wasting 
good engineers’ time and energy in the process. Then Page funded Kitty 
Hawk, yet another electric vertical take off and landing failure, 
something that was clear before the first stylus hit the first drafting 
tablet. Yet more talented engineers’ time and energy wasted.

Why do these talented, intelligent, successful billionaires all turn 
into funders of snake oil, boondoggles and vanity projects, despite 
their hearts being in the right places, at least according to their PR 
teams?

And here’s where we get to pity them. An inevitable feature of life for 
these billionaires is staff. Those staff know that their entire wealthy 
livelihood exists at the whim of a single person who has an inflated ego 
due to their massive early success, regardless of how much luck played a 
part in it. That means that they inevitably end up telling that person 
what they want to hear, not what they need to hear.

And some of the staff are solely there as filters. Their entire purpose 
is to cull the massive stream of information and requests and media that 
might be of interest down to what is actually of interest to that single 
person they serve. And those people fear the person at the center of the 
system not liking something that they send onward because it contradicts 
their biases or highlights their failures.

Without massive, ongoing willpower to counter this by the person whose 
every whim is catered to, billionaires inevitably end up in bubbles of 
disinformation that confirms their biases and doesn’t conflict with 
their biases. Their inevitable failures are explained to them as not 
being failures, or just being bad luck. Their absurd whims for tunnels 
for their cars under traffic jams turn into reality because no one will 
look at them, get their attention and tell them that they are being 
idiots and to drop the idea.

It’s not like clearly explained assessments of why the technologies 
listed above are dead ends aren’t published fairly constantly by experts 
and independent analysts. The links in the article are mine and go back 
a decade, but I’m one of a myriad of bright, technically oriented 
analysts who can do math and assess business models. I can’t tell you 
the number of times people have tried to get Breakthrough Ventures or 
Bill Gates to read my material and take my advice, but his filters mean 
that I’m treated as a virus he must be protected from, not a cure for 
the intellectual pathology he has devolved into.
A Khosla fund junior staffer recently reached out to see if I’d be 
interested in doing a direct air capture technology survey to see which 
ones would be suitable for investments. I told them that I was pretty 
sure that they were uninterested in giving me lots of money to tell them 
no multiple times in different ways and sent them a copy of my Carbon 
Engineering case study from 2019, gratis. I offered to assist if there 
were a chance to get the fund to stop investing in the space, and of 
course haven’t heard back. The odds that even if the new member of the 
staff floated the idea, they’d be quickly put in their place. After all, 
Khosla thinks direct air capture with mechanical devices is something 
useful, and he can’t be challenged in his biases.

The billionaire oligarchs, no matter how good their intentions, drift 
into being equally coddled and mocked shadows of their best, younger 
selves. Where once they were deeply attached to reality, positioned with 
the right skills and resources at the right places to change the world, 
now they have all the time and money in the world and no idea how to use 
it. The odds of them being right in anything that they do at this stage 
of their devolution approaches zero, and the people around them are 
terrified of telling them that.

Kings used to have court jesters. The jesters weren’t just entertainers 
for the king, his court and his guests. They had the license to say 
anything and to mock anything. They were often the sole source of truth 
and reality in courts that had matured into degeneration, providing a 
useful service to keep the absurdities of courtiers and sycophants from 
becoming policy.

Billionaires no longer have court jesters. Those of us who analyze 
failures like airborne wind energy, direct air capture, Smil’s energy 
writings and more publish with the vain hope that something will get 
through the filters, but nothing ever will. The hangers’ on surrounding 
the billionaires will protect their privileges at all costs, just as the 
courtiers of old would do anything, no matter how petty and vile, to 
preserve their place in court.

Do you think I’m wrong? Remember Davos in 2019, when headlines around 
the world announced that a historian and author had shocked everybody by 
telling the assembled billionaires the truth? Those headlines weren’t 
about the material, just the person having the temerity to tell 
billionaires something that they didn’t want to hear to their faces. It 
was a man bites dog headline.

And so, let’s feel some pity for these poor benighted oligarchs. All the 
power, influence, money and connections it is possible to have, and 
little remaining connection to empirical reality to allow them to direct 
those nigh infinite resources. They’ll reach the end of their days and 
wonder why they accomplished so little for the last decades of their 
life, despite everyone assuring them at every step of the way that they 
were doing so much.

Nah, screw that. Screw the billionaires too. It’s not like this is a 
problem that hasn’t been understood and documented for thousands of 
years. It’s not like the tale of King Canute isn’t a frequently told 
allegory about ensuring that you know when to remind your courtiers to 
stop blowing smoke. And screw the filterers and handlers of the 
billionaires as well. Their cowardice and venality isn’t worth respecting.

These billionaires claim to be using their vast power, wealth and 
influence to address climate change, but they fail the first test of 
good strategies, which is to get reality right. That’s on them. It’s not 
like reality isn’t readily available and they can’t pay for good advice. 
It’s not like their many bad investments couldn’t have been avoided 
simply by seeking out actual expertise, ensuring it’s independent with 
very simple tactics and keeping a strong leash on their arrogance. The 
climate is arguably worse because of these guys, although Musk gets a 
bit of a pass simply because he got Tesla off the ground before 
ascending into the La La Land of Billionaires.

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https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/23/pity-the-poor-climate-aware-billionaire-oligarchs/ 




[ Opinions and revelatory activist discussions - with Andre Malm - No he 
is not promoting sabotage.]
*Climate Change Is Violent, That’s Why We Need Sabotage | Downstream
*Nov 9, 2021  Downstream - NEW episodes every Sunday 6pm UK
 From food scarcity to extreme weather, climate change will affect the 
lives of billions of people around the world. But at what point are its 
future horrors unacceptable? And how should that shape climate politics now?

Aaron Bastani speaks to author Andreas Malm about the limits of today's 
activism and what is to be done in a world of runaway warming.
Novara Media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clMazbSFdsk




/[Article gone as //WAPO is wiping out archives - when does wisdom 
become lost?  ]/
/*December 25, 2008*/

December 25, 2008: The Washington Post reported: "The United States 
faces the possibility of much more rapid climate change by the end of 
the century than previous studies have suggested, according to a new 
report led by the U.S. Geological Survey."

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-12-25/news/36892488_1_climate-change-ice-sheets-sea-level-rise




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