Tag Archives: climate change

Front and back images of the Google Pixel 8 Pro

Why I reluctantly bought a Google Pixel in my struggle against surveillance capitalism and planned obsolescence

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Many people who believe in software freedom and digital rights install Linux or another operating system such as BSD that is free/open source software (FOSS) on their personal computers (PCs). Far fewer people unlock the bootloader on their mobile phones and tablets to install a FOSS operating system. Even though mobile phones are a bit more complex than computers due to their cellular modem and sensors, it should be possible for people to install custom operating systems on them just like on PCs.

It is arguably even more important that people control the software on their mobile phones than on their personal computers. Although Android is built on the code of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which uses an Apache 2.0 license, Google started moving core APIs and functionality out of the FOSS layer and into its proprietary Google Mobile Services in Android 4.4 KitKat, released in October 2013. Google has largely abandoned the development of most of the FOSS apps in AOSP, and replaced them with proprietary apps that are designed to collect people’s personal data in order to monetize it. Modern cell phones are the machines of “surveillance capitalism,” as Shoshana Zuboff aptly terms the collection and monetization of people’s personal data. Google essentially created Android and originally gave it away for free to the phone manufacturers in order to have a vehicle to collect people’s personal data for targeted advertising.

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Preorders and preorders per day for the Aptera

Why the Aptera solar car represents a paradigm shift for the auto industry

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The two-seat Aptera solar car is arguably the most important automobile currently under development, despite the fact that some don’t consider the three-wheeled autocycle to be a “real car” at all. The Aptera represents a paradigm shift in the auto industry, not just because it will be the first production solar car on the market, but because it has design goals which fundamentally challenge the dominant paradigm governing the auto industry. For the last 4 decades, the auto industry has used its gains in technological advancement to produce bigger, taller and more powerful vehicles. The Aptera, however, is designed with the goals of being as energy efficient as possible and minimizing the capital costs of its production, and those two design criteria lead to a fundamentally different kind of vehicle, which promises to revolutionize the auto industry.

The three-wheeled, two-seat Aptera with an aerodynamic dolphin-like shape, butterfly doors that swing upward, a composite body made of large CF-SMC and GF-SMC panels and 4 solar panels.
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Understanding the growth of e-bikes around the world

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The revolution in electric micro-mobility is happening all over the world, but it is happening at varying speeds and in diverse ways around the globe. Although most news outlets focus on the competition between Tesla and BYD to gobble up the market of the legacy auto companies, and the latest EV startups to crash and burn, the changes in micro-mobility happening on the ground around the world are far more interesting and exciting in my opinion.

Unfortunately, it is hard to keep track of what is happening, since much of it doesn’t make headlines and is often poorly reported. I thought it was worth summarizing some of the trends in electric bicycles that I see globally and observing how I think they will translate in the future to developing countries like Bolivia where I have lived for the last 17 years. What happens in places like China, Europe and North America does reverberate in the rest of the world, but how that plays out on the ground is often unexpected and worth our attention.

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Why net zero GHG emissions by mid-century is an achievable goal and we shouldn’t give up

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Climate science demands that the planet gets to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to avoid over 2 degrees C of global warming. The Conference of Parties negotiations at the UN still maintain that global warming can be limited to 1.5°C, but that is a fantasy considering that 2023 is now expected to be 1.40°C over the historical average between 1850 and 1900. James Hansen now says that 2°C of global warming is inevitable and 3°C is likely, and I trust his math far more than the IPCC AR6 report, which was edited for political considerations and the need for scientific consensus.

Even at current agricultural production levels, we are going to have trouble feeding the expected global population of 12 billion by 2050. Production of the principal caloric crops (wheat, rice, corn and soybeans) is expected to drop significantly over 2°C of warming and collapse over 4°C, so we are looking at a very dire future with widespread famine and the breakdown of global trade when the principal grain producers (US, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine, etc.) start restricting exports in order to feed their own populations.

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Questioning the moral authority of the Catholic church

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The Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas recently decided to sever its ties with the Girl Scouts. Instead, the Archdiocese will support the American Heritage Girls troops, which is a Christian-based scouting program. It is decisions like this which alienate me from my Catholic faith and make me question why I should invest much time or energy in organized religion in general.

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Dirty shipping: Low sulfur standards in marine fuels

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The most energy efficient way to move things around the world is stick something in a 40 by 8 foot foot shipping container that is hauled to port by an 18 wheel truck and loaded on a gigantic container ship. These ships piled high with goods from all over the world can be as large as 400 by 59 meters and can carry up to 9000 of these 40 foot shipping containers at a time.

These ships are often designed to burn the dirtiest type of fuel, which is the residual sludge left over after oil distillation that is called heavy fuel oil. This sludge is so viscous that it has to be heated just to pump it into the ship engines to be burned. Most large ships operating today use a type of fuel known as intermediate fuel oil, which is a mixture of heavy fuel oil which has a viscosity up to 700 mm2 per second and marine gas oil, which is No. 2 distillate with a viscosity between 1.5 and 6 mm2/sec. This intermediate fuel oil is generally sold as IFO180 or IFO360, meaning it has a viscosity of 180 mm2/sec or 360 mm2/sec.
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