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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • It’s about return on energy. Fossil fuels return 20x what you invest it’s essentially free energy.

    (edit: roughly, this translates to how many people are free to do things with the work of one, if every person lives alone, it’s 1, if each person has a personal slave/robot, it’s around 2, we want to stay well above 2. Modern society has 19 people doing all sorts of non-survival things for each one farming and collecting resources because fossil is so “cheap”)

    Renewables can reach 5-10 at best, which is not so bad (medieval was around 1.3, pre-industrial with slavery was around 1.8), so you can do it, but it will have to reshape society, which will be fine, if we know what we’re doing or can at least imagine what we are aiming for to avoid disappointment. It’s hard to be utopian going backwards.

    This whole debate started with carbon footprints and carbon pricong, because I believe that creating a market can help the less virtuous among us to use their greed to help solve the problem of public consent in a consumerist society without devolving into a dictatorship.

    But yea, let’s aim for that energy return of say… 7 and try to imagine what such a society would look like. A return to slower shipping by sail again…more solar boilers for all hot water…solar desalination…peak-solar hydrogen for fertilizers and airplanes…more compact cities with mass transit and bikes, lots of working from home, more fixing things DIY…a return from cities to the countryside and decentralisation would help, but only if those communities were more self-sustained and local, with 2x more power to farming, mining and wind/solar communities (meaning potentially smaller countries)…now I could describe all the potential setbacks of all of those points, but I won’t, because this is solarpunk and we need more imagining of what things are going to be like when we succeed…not so much the year 500 :)














  • https://www.outlookindia.com/international/geopolitics-of-language-how-china-s-confucius-institutes-become-extension-of-chinese-state-on-campuses-news-195212

    In 2008, Israel’s Tel Aviv University closed an art exhibition on Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that originated in China. The following year, America’s North Carolina State University cancelled a visit of Tibetan spiritual leader the 14th Dalai Lama.

    An Israeli court found that the Tel Aviv University had illegitimately cancelled the Falun Gong exhibition because of Chinese government pressure. In North Carolina, the Confucius Institute’s director warned state officials that the Dalai Lama’s visit could hurt “strong relationships we were developing in China”.

    Since their inception in South Korea’s Seoul in 2004, Confucius Institutes have enrolled up to 9 million students at 525 institutes in 146 countries and regions, as per the Heritage Foundation. In 2018, Politico magazine reported that the Chinese government was pouring in up to $10 billion annually into the initiative.

    It’s an interesting sum for the promotion of one’s language. But it’s not. In the Chinese government’s own words, the initiative is a propaganda arm of the state. Politburo standing member Li Changchun said in 2009 that Confucius Institutes are an “important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up”.

    He further said, “The Confucius Institute is an appealing brand for expanding our culture abroad. It has made an important contribution toward improving our soft power. The ‘Confucius’ brand has a natural attractiveness. Using the excuse of teaching Chinese language, everything looks reasonable and logical.”

    Politico cited a 2010 Chinese state-run People’s Daily article by propaganda minister Liu Yunshan as saying, “With regard to key issues that influence our sovereignty and safety, we should actively carry out international propaganda battles against issuers such as Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, human rights, and Falun Gong. We should do well in establishing and operating overseas cultural centres and Confucius

    Yes (I’m not saying it’s terribly wrong, other countries have their equivalent, but at least own up to what you’re doing)