Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/12/how-to-build-a-small-solar-power-system/ Image: a solar panel with charge controller and lead-acid battery. Photo by Marie Verdeil. View original image View dithered image Readers have told me they like to build small-scale photovoltaic installations like those that power Low-tech Magazine’s website and office. However, they don’t know where to start and what components to buy. This guide…
Andreas Malm’s 2021 nonfiction book How to Blow Up a Pipeline was a punchy 161-page manifesto on the role of violence in social movements, probing why rich-world climate activists have largely shunned tactics like sabotage. Director Daniel Goldhaber’s fictionalized film adaptation releasing this week, on the other hand, offers a stylized, tense picture of…
It’s hard to live in the modern world without feeling like you should start committing some felonies. Shutterstock Dan Brooks Thought Experiments Sometimes, in idle moments, I get a vision of my teenage son’s son — my imaginary unborn grandson — manually pollinating soybeans for 12 hours a day in exchange for a ration of…
Camille Stevens-Rumann never used to worry about seeing dead trees. As a wildland firefighter in the American west, she encountered untold numbers killed in blazes she helped to extinguish. She knew fires are integral to forests in this part of the world; they prune out smaller trees, giving room to the rest and even help…
Screenshot the from “Bitcoin Clean Energy Initiative Memorandum” You have probably heard it said that bitcoin is really bad for the environment. You might have heard it said that mining it — ie the computer processing that is required to produce new “coins” — is more energy-intensive than [insert increasingly large nation state]. It’s one…
Facebook is no stranger to climate misinformation. Just last month, the platform became a key player in spreading surrounding the wildfires raging across the West Coast to an audience of tens of thousands, taking them down only after public outrage. And last year when activists that climate misinformation seemed to be exempt from the platform’s…
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist, has become the new target for rightwing men, who are losing their shit over a teenager. On Fox News on Monday night, Michael Knowles, a conservative troll and Daily Wire podcast host, described Thunberg as a “mentally ill Swedish child” who is “being exploited by her parents…
Why do right-wing men hate Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so much? Researchers have some troubling answers to that question. Climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg has built his global brand on keeping his cool. “Cool it,” his best-selling book told those worried about the warming planet. For some reason, however, he seems to have difficulty sticking…
Hundreds of thousands of young people around the world have taken to the streets on Friday to protest government inaction on the climate crisis.CreditCreditSydelle Willow Smith for The New York Times Sept. 20, 2019Updated 2:36 p.m. ET They are in open revolt. Anxious about their future on a hotter planet, angry at world leaders for…
“The Trump Administration is revoking California’s Federal Waiver on emissions in order to produce far less expensive cars for the consumer, while at the same time making the cars substantially SAFER,” Trump tweeted. The President made the announcement while visiting California for fundraisers. He was in his hotel in Los Angeles when he sent…