“The origin narrative of the University of Chicago does not begin with John D. Rockefeller in 1890. It does not even begin in the city of Chicago. It actually begins on a 3,000-acre cotton plantation in Lawrence County, Mississippi. Hundreds of enslaved African American men, women, and children lived and died on that plantation to make the University of Chicago, and its $7 billion endowment, possible. The University of Chicago refuses to acknowledge this part of its heritage.”

-- A Case for Reparations at the University of Chicago

This documentary does a great job of connecting the shameful racist moment of Human Zoos with the political past, the approaching fascist horizon of the time, and the present. It's inspiring to read about the nascent civil rights struggle by Black leaders, and interesting to draw parallels to modern times.

The New York Times being quoted as saying about the protesters, "We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter," and denying the humanity of pygmy people has a sober recent analog.

I meant to share a BBC source on current events. My bad.

TIL that Trump's Russian patronymic name is Fredovych.

There's a certain segment of the population that embraces collapse in a way that hastens its arrival, withdrawing to rural areas and fortifying themselves with guns and mentally preparing themselves to kill others to survive in a way that fuels right wing politics.

I think there are ways that one can prepare for collapse without contributing to the trends that accelerate it. Storing non-perishable food, for example, can be useful to survive a serious social disruption, but is also useful to support workers engaged in strike action, or give you a financial cushion to allow you to quit an exploitative job. Building networks of interdependence and support that exist outside the state are just good praxis, aside from being extremely valuable when shit hits the fan.

My 'assumptions' are that you work in machine learning and AI. We've shared this platform for a while. If you didn't announce it almost as much as you announce your anti-capitalism, I could correctly assume it from the pages of patronizing apologia you've written about it.

And while I'm happy to 'antagonize' you on behalf of all the other people you've belittled and spoken over, I don't think you're the enemy. I appreciate the pushback to my ideas occasional adversarial scholarship provides. I hope your ego eventually softens to appreciate what I'm trying to achieve here.

complaining about me giving sources.

I've taken the graphs and numbers you've given me in gratitude, and used them to debunk your ideological position. Everyone makes reading comprehension mistakes occasionally, but it unusual for someone to get things this wrong this consistently. I'm reminded of the Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." And this is tragic, because while it may benefit your short term feelings of privilege and stability to trivialize the need for drastic degrowth while engaged in an extremely energy intensive industry, you are also a victim. Your near term future is going to be impacted just like everyone else's by the widespread inability of many people like you to meaningfully grapple with the difficult but necessary steps required to avoid the worst of the climate catastrophe.

Yes, coal+natural gas has decreased. The fall in coal is bigger than the rise in natural gas. You can check it in the source the article linked.

I'd love it if you could teach me someting, but your strategy of throwing sources at me that don't back up your statements undermines your authority as a media literacy educator. The total fossil fuel use peaks in 2005, but saying the graph conclusively shows a decreasing trend in Fossil Fuel use is evidence of wishful thinking; the slopes are so small that if you drew a line from that peak to the COVID minimum in 2020 and extrapolate from that slope, the zero fossil fuel use point would still be in 2090. There is a local maximum in 2018, and an increase in fossil use at the end of the data set in 2021, suggesting a return to pre-COVID growth. Covid has nothing to do with 2018, and while it explains the increase in fossil fuel use in 2021, it doesn't explain why fossil fuel use increased faster than alternative energy use in the same year. If there was an unambiguous downward trend in fossil fuel use, you would not expect 'noise' large enough to poke holes in that hypothesis.

Some of the decrease in coal was from renewables replacing them or have you an alternate explanation?

The standard explanation I'm aware of is that with the discovery of new fracking techniques, natural gas has become economically cheaper than coal, causing some of the less profitable coal plants to shut down. This is also the simplest explanation from the explosion of natural gas on graph #1. Wikipedia lists ~30 decommissioned US-based coal power plants with +200 still firing.

You can't claim 'coal has been replaced' when a percentage of its total capacity is simply being furlowed for when it becomes competitive with other energy sources again, like your source projected it to in 2021. May I remind you that the alternative name for Jevons Paradox is the 'Bounce-Back' effect?

Furthermore, the hypothesis that manufacturing new alternative energy sources will replace fossil fuel energy use without any need for social or political pressure would predict that with each increase in alternative energy growth, there would be a corresponding decrease in fossil fuel use. This is soundly contradicted by the data you've provided.

Only the year 2010 from 1955-2010 showed negative fossil energy growth from the previous five years, and in that year the amount of energy provided by alternative sources grew much more than the amount that fossil fuel use shrank. This not only contradicts the 'replacement' hypothesis, but also supports my hypothesis, which predicts that without significant political or social resistance, market forces will cause alternative energy to complement fossil fuel rather than replace it. Using both renewable energy and fossil fuel creates lower energy prices than either one individually, and lower energy prices stimulate economic growth. Economic growth results in more demand for energy, and thus more sources of fossil fuel and renewable energy in a 'virtuous' cycle.

The more granular recent data also contradicts the 'replacement' hypothesis.

From 2010-2020, total energy used in the United States has shown little growth and been roughly static. If fossil fuel was being replaced by alternative energy, you would expect to see fossil fuel energy use decrease with each renewable energy increase. That behavior does not appear in the data. Instead it looks like the kind of bouncy data you expect from market behavior between competing goods.

I didn't expect to see the energy use stagnation in the United States from 2010-2020, which was interesting. My guess is that this coincides with a change in US trade patterns where energy-intensive domestic manufacturing was shifted to Asia.

Based on this trade graph, I would predict a boom in both new fossil fuel plants and renewable energy plants in China from 2010 to at least 2017, and similar paired growth in other Asian countries the United States traded with. I suspect the United States' stagnation is due to energy - from coal, renewables, or otherwise - being cheaper abroad than from any domestic source. Once that is no longer the case, I predict the United States will 'bounce-back' and begin producing significantly more fossil-fuel-based energy if there is no significant political or social force to stop it.

If China built no new fossil fuel plants during those years, or if manufacturing returns from abroad to a politically and socially stagnant US and there is a decrease in fossil fuel energy generation, that would be a significant blow to my hypothesis. If I haven't convinced you that the 'replacement' hypothesis is wrong, please tell me what prediction would have to be false in order for you to abandon that hypothesis?

Pop Media Literacy Quiz!

Here is a graph from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What information is supported by this graph?

a) The total amount of fossil fuel used in energy generation is decreasing

b) Coal power plants are being shut down and replaced by wind farms

c) The percentage of the energy generation from Coal has decreased since 2000, and the percentage of energy from renewables has increased, but not as quickly as the energy from natural gas. ~~The graph is scaled based on the total energy generation in the year 2020.~~

Here is the second graph from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What information is supported by this graph?

a) Coal is being phased out for renewable alternatives

b) There has been a major shakeup in how the United States gets its energy during the last five years

c) Where the United States generates its energy changes over the timescale of months, but from 2019 to 2022 has remained roughly static.

This is text taken from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What can be inferred from this text?

a) Coal is being phased out, never to return as a source of energy generation in the United States

b) Desire for clean energy overwhelms market forces when it comes to using coal as fuel

c) Coal use is projected to increase more than it decreases, and will rise to be the second most prevalent energy source behind natural gas in 2021.

Denmark-based ElectricityMaps.com joins Spain, Norway, and Ireland in recognizing a Palestinian State :)

Let's disregard all of the other misapprehensions you've made and focus on one thing. This is the second time you've repeated it:

Jevons paradox is fed by the economic efficiency (USD/kWh) of energy production. We are interested in its carbon efficiency (CO2/kWh). Replacing a coal power plant by a wind farm of the same capacity and same economic efficiency (aka cost) has no reason to cause a rebound yet would cause a huge change in terms of carbon efficiency.

Are coal power plants and wind farms mutually exclusive? Does one existing prevent the other from existing simultaneously? Is it possible to run both at the same time?