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Tag: environment

  • ‘Technofossils’: how humanity’s eternal testament will be plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones – The Guardian

    “Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.” […]

    Gabbott says: “The big message here is that the amount of stuff that we are now making is eye-watering – it’s off the scale.” All of the stuff made by humans by 1950 was a small fraction of the mass of all the living matter on Earth. But today it outweighs all plants, animals and microbes and is set to triple by 2040. This stuff is going to last millions of years, some releasing its toxins and chemicals into the natural world,” she says, raising serious questions for us all: “Do you need that? Do you really need to buy more?”

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  • Apocalypse later: How the world used to end – Parapraxis

    But it’s that small narrative pivot, from scenes of fiery ruin to an atmosphere of simmering expectation, that invests all these homely details with a creeping nightmarishness. Not that the temperature of the prose ever once rises; conspicuously, it does not. The characters each and all comport themselves with mildness and a distinctly Anglophilic style of polite restraint, like guests soldiering through a stilted garden party. All is strangely unemphatic. There is no high drama, no keening in the face of coming annihilation.

    Instead, On the Beach immerses us in the secular mundanity of ordinary lives, and the cumulative effect of this is potent and eerie. This world, the character world of the novel, turns out to be brimming with figures who are, in an odd and insinuating way, near to us indeed. For these are people for whom what had been a menacing prospect, a likelihood even, has with an almost imperceptible shift been transformed into an irrevocable certainty. And that’s On the Beach: a sustained fiction in which those two cataclysmically different states—anxious expectation, blighted certitude—converge toward an awful vanishing point.

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  • Man who lost bitcoin fortune in Welsh tip explores purchase of entire landfill – The Guardian

    “If Newport city council would be willing, I would potentially be interested in purchasing the landfill site ‘as is’ and have discussed this option with investment partners and it is something that is very much on the table.” … The council has resisted Howells’ attempts to allow him to search, insisting that the hard drive had become its property when it entered the landfill site.

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  • Newport landfill site in £620m Bitcoin saga set to close – BBC News

    A council spokesman said: “The landfill has been in exploitation since the early 2000s and is coming to the end of its life, therefore the council is working on a planned closure and capping of the site over the next two years.” … The council has secured planning permission for a solar farm on part of the land. That was approved last August and is expected to power new bin lorries.

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  • Climate, technology, and justice – Data & Society

    Climate change is perhaps the most urgent issue of the 21st century. The changing climate already disproportionately impacts communities in the majority world, and energy-intensive technologies like generative AI make the problem worse, exacerbating global emissions. Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program investigates how technologies impact and influence the environment, and how communities participate in or resist these processes. We examine the social and environmental repercussions of the expanded global infrastructures and labor practices needed to sustain the growth of digital technologies, from AI and blockchain to streaming and data storage. We trace the environmental implications of technology development across the entire life cycle, from ideation and use to disposal or refurbishment. We also seek to better understand the sociotechnical implications of climate-focused technologies, from low-carbon innovations like community energy, solar, and wind turbines, to the integration of algorithms and AI into climate modeling, disaster prediction, and emissions tracking.

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  • ‘The world order could start to evolve from the Arctic’: Trump, thin ice and the fight for Greenland’s Northwest Passage – The Guardian

    Denmark, which is responsible for Greenland’s defence, does not have a single icebreaker – having retired its remaining three in 2010. Yet the ownership of these specialist vessels has suddenly become what could be a new front in the fight for dominance between the world’s biggest powers – commanding access to everything from shipping routes to search and rescue and minerals. Such is the attraction of Greenland that Trump has not ruled out using military force to get it. […]

    Russia is by far and away the icebreaker superpower. It is understood to have at least 50 icebreakers – at least 13 of which can operate in the Arctic and seven of which are nuclear – as well as a substantial network of ports in the region. China is understood to have four that are suitable for the Arctic, while new Nato members Sweden and Finland, as well as the US and Canada, all own their own versions of these specialist vessels.

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  • The Augmented City: Seeing Through Disruption – Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech (pdf)

    What is the next disruptive technology to reshape the urban public realm? And how can they better anticipate its effects upon arrival? … What are future uses of augmented reality in cities, and what are the implications for managing public space and safety? […]

    This report explores future threats and opportunities for cities posed by the next wave of potentially disruptive technologies, headlined by AI and AR. Before further unpacking these futures, it’s important to define key terms, technologies, and context — such as the difference between augmented-, virtual-, and mixed-reality (not to mention “spatial computing”). In addition, how do practices such as “luxury surveillance” and “digital redlining” combine to create “diminished reality?” And does “the metaverse” really mean anything at this point? (Not really.)

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  • The cure for disposable plastic crap is here—and it’s loony – WIRED

    Even so, in the US, only a minority of PET bottles get recycled. The main PET industry association puts the recycling rate at 29 percent, while Greenpeace says it’s 20.9 percent. In Norway, though, Infinitum recycles nearly every damn bottle. How the heck did they achieve this?

    With a combo of clever technology and deft public policy. As is often the case, the policy was the prime mover. Running a recycling program requires a lot of expensive labor and systems. You have to collect the plastic and separate it by type, which is expensive.

    So in the late ’90s, Norway passed a law that forced somebody to pay for it—specifically, companies such as Coca-Cola that make plastic PET containers. Firms got hit with a new tax if they didn’t pay to collect and recycle used bottles. If the beverage companies can prove they’re recycling 95 percent as many bottles as they sell, they pay no tax. Otherwise, the less they recycle, the more they owe—until they’re paying “hundreds of millions of Norwegian kroner,” Maldum said (tens of millions of US dollars).

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  • Why does Home Depot sell a white paint called Climate Change? – Curbed

    Last year, Emily Mediate found herself in a Virginia Home Depot, studying an array of off-white paint chips all with names like Frost and Bakery Box, Harmonious and Vintage Linen. She was planning to paint her deck and picked up a calm, generic beige. Then she noticed its name: Climate Change. “It threw me off,” she said. Mediate is an executive at a nonprofit with an environmental push; she sees climate change as a catastrophe, not a décor project. “It’s like naming a color after a disease,” she said. “I keep wondering, Who did this, and what were they thinking?”

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  • Booker Prize is awarded to Samantha Harvey’s ‘Orbital’ – The New York Times

    Harvey has said that while writing the novel she continually watched streaming video from the International Space Station showing Earth from space. “To look at the Earth from space was a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself,” she said during her acceptance speech.

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  • Endless fields of detritus blanket Cássio Vasconcellos’s aerial composites – Colossal

    “These photos may look like post-apocalyptic scenarios, but they could be our future,” the artist says in a statement. “We still have to learn that by throwing things away and taking them out of our sight, we don’t make them disappear. In fact, they keep existing somewhere else, outliving us most of the time.” Vasconcellos cuts out individual shipping containers, trucks, dumpsters, and piles of detritus in a meticulous and time-consuming digital process. He never repeats an element in a composition, and each piece is scaled and situated so that the shadows align with the directionality of the light. He then adds dust and dirt to the surfaces, simultaneously emphasizing the patina of time and an eerie sense of timelessness.

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  • Not my problem – Noema

    Elsewhere, the “new normal” world feels dangerous and confusing to many, a lot of whom find themselves still living in ever-growing city-sized refugee camps, unsure if they will ever be able to return home. Looking for a little comfort and distraction at a time when the traditional media and entertainment industries have all but collapsed, they find themselves turning to the abandoned generative art platforms and prompted content. Bixby Snyder rides again, his infamous catchphrase “I’ll buy that for a dollar” repurposed as a darkly humorous, self-deprecating refrain for the millions who find themselves falling into poverty and displacement.

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