🥺🥺🥺
Excerpt from this story from Wired:
One hundred miles west of Johannesburg in South Africa, the Komati Power Station is hard to miss, looming above the flat grassland and farming landscapes like an enormous eruption of concrete, brick, and metal.
When the coal-fired power station first spun up its turbines in 1961, it had twice the capacity of any existing power station in South Africa. It has been operational for more than half a century, but as of October 2022, Komati has been retired—the stacks are cold and the coal deliveries have stopped.
Now a different kind of activity is taking place on the site, transforming it into a beacon of clean energy: 150 MW of solar, 70 MW of wind, and 150 MW of storage batteries. The beating of coal-fired swords into sustainable plowshares has become the new narrative for the Mpumalanga province, home to most of South Africa’s coal-fired power stations, including Komati.
To get here, the South African government has had to think outside the box. Phasing out South Africa’s aging coal-fired power station fleet—which supplies 86 percent of the country’s electricity—is expensive and politically risky, and could come at enormous social and economic cost to a nation already struggling with energy security and socioeconomic inequality. In the past, bits and pieces of energy-transition funding have come in from organizations such as the World Bank, which assisted with the Komati repurposing, but for South Africa to truly leave coal behind, something financially bigger and better was needed.
That arrived at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021, in the form of a partnership between South Africa, European countries, and the US. Together, they made a deal to deliver $8.5 billion in loans and grants to help speed up South Africa’s transition to renewables, and to do so in a socially and economically just way.
This agreement was the first of what’s being called Just Energy Transition Partnerships, or JETPs, an attempt to catalyze global finance for emerging economies looking to shift energy reliance away from fossil fuels in a way that doesn’t leave certain people and communities behind.
Since South Africa’s pioneering deal, Indonesia has signed an agreement worth $20 billion, Vietnam one worth $15.5 billion, and Senegal one worth $2.75 billion. Discussions are taking place for a possible agreement for India. Altogether, around $100 billion is on the table.
There’s significant enthusiasm for JETPs in the climate finance arena, particularly given the stagnancy of global climate finance in general. At COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, developed countries signed up to a goal of mobilizing $100 billion of climate finance for developing countries per year by 2020. None have met that target, and the agreement lapses in 2025. The hope is that more funding for clear-cut strategies and commitments will lead to quicker moves toward renewables.
I think the internet is connecting us in ways we’re not ready for because the other night a guy I went to school with who I haven’t seen on facebook in about a year made a status at 2am that just said “sick of these nightmares…”. Who could have predicted this is where technology would lead us in 2016. Live reports on the anguish of people on the absolute periphery of our lives. Nobody saw this coming. There’s no Jetsons episode where George gets a holo-call from a guy he hasn’t even thought about in three years saying “hey, I had the dream about the blood again…” and George says “hmm” and hangs up.
tbh i love the recent spike in appreciation for Gorcharov (1973) but I feel like everyone is forgetting about the musical spinoff “Gorcharov: Time and Time Again” I don’t remeber much of the movie from when I had seen it, but the musical has stuck with me ever since.
Important to note that ALL trans people are targeted by this ruling. Trans men will be stripped of all chess titles won, which can only be returned to them by “changing the gender back to a woman” (a direct quote from the ICF’s ruling). ALL transgender chess players will be marked as trans in their files.
Not trying to deflect from the blatant and virulent transmisogyny present here. Just giving a bit more info.
Erin Reed did a good breakdown of the ruling here:
‘We hid our stock in case we were raided’: Scotland’s pioneering LGBTQ+ bookshop
Opened two years after the country legalised ‘homosexual acts’, Lavender Menace made a huge impact. Now it has opened a public queer books archive
by Katie Goh
It was the early 80s, and on an autumn day in Edinburgh’s New Town, a young man appeared at the top of the steep stairs that led down to the city’s gay bookshop, Lavender Menace. He had just been made redundant and wanted to donate part of his severance pay to the shop. “He gave us £50,” remembers Sigrid Nielsen, who ran the bookshop with her business partner Bob Orr. “I still wonder who he was.”
Lavender Menace bookshop was founded in 1982, two years after homosexuality between men over the age of 21 was legalised in Scotland. Although its physical presence on Forth Street only lasted for five years, the bookshop made a lasting impact on Scotland’s LGBTQ+ population. During its operation in the 1980s, Lavender Menace was one of two gay bookshops in the UK; the other was London’s Gay’s the Word. Orr and Nielsen opened Lavender Menace after Orr found success selling literature from a bookstall in the cloakroom of the gay club Fire Island, and then later from a glass cabinet in Edinburgh’s Gay Centre. “We were scattered and underground,” says Orr about Edinburgh’s LGBTQ+ community in the 1970s and 80s. “None of us came out at work. We didn’t get on with our parents. By the time the bookshop opened in 82, we knew we were taking a risk, not just financially, but socially as well, whether the neighbourhood would put up with it or not.”
Lavender Menace operated as a bookshop and a mail order service that sold LGBTQ+ literature across Scotland. Orr and Nielsen took advantage of the flourishing gay and lesbian publishing industry in North America and imported new books for UK readers. But, like Gay’s the Word, they faced trouble from customs. “We lost several thousands of stock at Glasgow’s docks that we had to pay for,” says Orr. “We would hide our stock in the shop in case we were raided like Gay’s the Word.”
Source: theguardian.com
Ancient books and manuscripts, some dating back to the 16th century, that have been affected by devastating floods in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna are being stored in freezers in an effort to salvage them.
Volunteers have been transporting the books and other precious documents, which became submerged in water and mud in flooded libraries in the worst-affected areas, to Cesena, where the items will be placed on shelves in temperatures of -25C in industrial-size freezers provided by Orogel, a company that specialises in frozen food.
Ukrainians are breaking their ties with the Russian language
By Francesca Ebel and Kostiantyn Khudov
KHARKIV, Ukraine — In Kharkiv, a historically Russian-speaking city in eastern Ukraine, just 25 miles from the Russian border, Ukrainian classes are in high demand. Waiters, hairdressers and shopkeepers have stopped using Russian. Ukrainian language books are flying off the shelves, and local publishers are struggling to keep up with orders.
One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s central — and false — justifications for invading Ukraine, that he was defending Russian-speaking people, has backfired dramatically.
In cities across Ukraine, people started bringing their Russian literature to local recycling stations to be shredded and converted into toilet paper. Street names have been changed to honor Ukrainian heroes instead of Russian writers. Russian dishes, like pelmeni dumplings, have been relabeled on restaurant menus. Radio stations stopped playing songs by Russian artists, long popular in Ukraine.
“For many people, it has become impossible to speak Russian because it is the language of the enemy,” said Iryna Pobidash, an associate professor of linguistics at Kyiv’s Igor Sikorsky Polytechnic Institute. “Russian is now a marker of everything that has happened: a marker of pain and tragedy.”
“Language is not only about communication, but also about positioning oneself. It’s my ‘who am I?’” Pobidash added.
Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov, who writes novels only in Russian, said that after the invasion, he felt “in pain” when writing because he was so ashamed of Russia.“I understood that Russia was destroying itself and destroying Russian language culture worldwide,” he said.
Source: Washington Post
It was gut-wrenching when I realized that many people alive today have never seen a truly mature tree up close.
In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.
Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.
The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.
When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.
It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.
That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.
I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?
That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.
You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.
The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.
Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.
But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.
Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.
Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.
And where does that silt come from?
Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.
The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.
You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.
All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.
Preserve the old growth forests of the present, yes, but it is even more vital to protect the old growth forests of the future.
Putting on my Ecologist Hat, I once had a friend ask me "how long does it take for an old-growth forest to form? how old is 'old-growth'?" I gave the question a good bit of thought, and I will stand by my answer: for pretty much any temperate forest I'm aware of, after about 100 years after a major disruption (fire, the saw, pest/disease outbreak, volcanic eruption) it will begin to noticeably take on old-growth characteristics*. And after 250 years it will be meaningfully indistinguishable from an undisturbed forest. This is, of course, not including pests and diseases that eliminate an entire species or genus from the ecosystem, or the introduction of new species. But even in those cases, this is about the right timeframe for a new autopoeic old-growth ecosystem to be established.
This is sort of bad news, in that old-growth forests do take a long time to reestablish. But I think it will come as good news to many, who imagine that old-growth forests are necessarily millennia old.
*What are old-growth characteristics? Well, these: trees of a wide variety of ages and size classes forming a complex, multilayered canopy; an abundance of late-successional, shade-tolerant species; a forest floor community featuring herbaceous species adapted to dense forest conditions and a deep organic layer of decomposing leaf litter; animal communities similarly adapted to these conditions; large amounts of dead wood, both standing and on the ground; and the complex forest floor topography associated with repeated uprootings of large trees.
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Putting on my Lumberman Hat, once upon a time some coworkers and I found a particularly impressive surviving old-growth redwood on a protected area of a timber company's lands. Now, this tree was impressive by 'surviving a century and a half of intensive logging' standards, but compared to what's out there in the never-logged stands, it was pretty average. We did some quick, back-of-the-envelope geometry to estimate how much recoverable timber would be in that tree, and when we got home we checked out the stumpage prices for old-growth redwood lumber. Conservatively, a sawmill would pay $40,000 for that tree. No, I didn't add a zero there: the wood in that single tree was worth a year's wages for a workingman.
I suddenly became much more sympathetic to the greed of the lumber barons. Yes, they were short-sighted, foolish, and possibly blasphemous in the speed and extent of the destruction they caused. But there have been, and continue to be, people who would sell out things even dearer to them for far, far less money than that.
capitalism ruins everything
Because I'm only seeing other Jews posting about this, non-Jews I need you to be aware that for the past month or two there has been a wave of bomb threats and swattings at synagogues all across the US. They usually do it when services are being livestreamed. I haven't seen a single non-Jew talking about this. High holidays are coming up in a few weeks, which is when most attacks happen against our communities. We're worried, and we need people to know what's happening to us.
"no children are being forced to take hrt or have surgeries that change the appearance of their genitals" intersex children are, actually
"everyone was assigned a gender at birth" there are intersex people who were not assigned a gender at birth
"trans women are amab trans people and trans men are afab trans people" there are intersex people who were assigned male at birth and later transitioned medically and socially to male, and intersex people who were assigned female at birth and later transitioned medically and socially to female
"assigned gender at birth is a 1:1 predictor of tma vs tme experience" there are intersex people who were assigned female at birth and experienced violence for being a woman with a penis + testes + secondary sex characteristics like facial hair + having a testosterone-dominant hormone profile, and had to transition medically and socially to be socially and medically recognized as women as adults
"bodies born with sex variations are medically nonbinary" no, they are intersex, and intersex people can be a binary gender if they want to be
"nonbinary people who want non-cisnormative sex variations are mentally ill/diseased for wanting a disordered body" no, bodies with sex variations are not disordered, and it harms intersex people for them to be seen as disordered regardless of if the body in question was born that way or created through surgery
"cis women don't experience transphobic body policing/will never understand how it feels to have your womanhood constantly in question and subject to violence over things you can't change" intersexism overlaps heavily with transphobia and an intersex woman can both identify as cis and have a penis, testes, be testosterone-dominant, etc, and have visible signs of those traits. an intersex woman can also have been amab or be currently legally designated as male by the government and still identify as cis.
stop saying intersexist shit in your trans discourse thanks
Creepiest monster thing alive: moves like that
this little girl: 😊☺️😄😄☺️😊🤩
This is so cute omg my heart is going vrooom vroroooooom
obviously the porn industry is fucked up but I refuse to believe that it follows that looking at pictures of naked people is inherently evil and harmful to the body
Anonymous asked:
Ready to update your bio again?
I love how this has now become a ritual
The ritual is complete
unstained white shoes and an immaculate manicure. they absolutely did not dig for shit
It’s looking a lot like they started the fire themselves.
What was the point of making this antisemitic?
