Puerto Rico is demonstrating yet again that capitalism cannot solve climate change.

I wrote a few days ago about the total failure of Puerto Rico’s privatized power grid under Hurricane Fiona. As of seven hours before writing, half the island is still without power. In case it’s unclear to anyone, this – both the failure of privatization and the arrival of another hurricane – was entirely predictable. That’s what makes it all the worse that it seems as though most or all of the rebuilding from that disaster was done without any attempt to guard against the next hurricane. Many of you may have seen this already, but the most dramatic example from Hurricane Fiona is this bridge that was build shortly after Maria:

A temporary metal bridge in Puerto Rico, built in the wake of Hurricane Maria, was swept away in the rushing floodwaters of Hurricane Fiona.

The bridge, over the Guaonica River in Utuado, was destroyed Sunday, the same day Fiona made landfall on the island, officials said at a news conference.

It’s been five years, and they still just had a temporary bridge. Why didn’t they build something sturdier, or something that could be lifted out of the way of entirely predictable floodwaters? How much damage did that bridge do on its way downstream?

To me, this is emblematic of the Age of Endless Recovery. Puerto Rico had not rebuilt from Maria before Fiona hit, and what rebuilding they did do seems to have been dragged down by the same kind of greed and corruption that plagues all the rest of the United States. We know that storms are going to be getting stronger. We know that Puerto Rico is in dire need of resilient infrastructure, as is most of the rest of the world. If we valued human life and wellbeing above profit, then we would prioritize infrastructure that won’t be destroyed by entirely predictable weather events.

This is one of the many reasons why I think capitalism is incompatible with real climate action, or with the long-term survival of humanity. From the perspective of a construction corporation, there’s more profit to be made in building the same bridge every few years, than in building one bridge that can actually meet the demands of its location, and last for decades with maintenance. Obviously, this is not a problem limited to Puerto Rico, but remember the fundamental rule of climate catastrophe in our society – it hits those at the bottom first and hardest. While there are a myriad of communities in the United States and its colo- sorry, territories – Puerto Rico is both a laboratory for disaster capitalism, and for the shambling, undead horror that is Reaganomics. You know how conservatives of both parties always talk about lowering taxes to attract rich people “because of all the prosperity that brings”?

Puerto Rico has done wonderfully at attracting rich people, and I hope it’s clear to all of you that doing so has not helped the people of that island. The defining trait of a rich person is their selfishness, and there is no reason whatsoever to assume that they will spend a cent on something that doesn’t benefit them personally. They moved there for tax purposes, because they don’t care about things like infrastructure. It’s far better for them to just leave the island until the peasantry has managed to pull it back together, and then they’ll move back.

Capitalists do not care about climate change, or about the billions of lives that are at risk. Capitalism means that the capitalist class has total freedom, paid for by the rest of us. They have open borders. They can go anywhere they want whenever they want.

Our entire society has been designed to reward greed and ruthlessness, and this is the result. Obviously it’s good to provide material help to those in need if you’re able, but if we want the world to get better, we need to change how people interact with politics, and build the collective power we need to actually topple the hierarchy that’s currently driving us towards extinction.

Video: The Anti-Trans Disinformation Pipeline

I’ve been working on a couple posts about this general topic for a while now, and I’m hoping I’ll have them done soon. This is one of those topics where my own ignorance on the subject makes me wary of mistakes. It’s also one of those problems where the longer I take to finish a post, the more stuff I have to add in. The fascist effort to erase trans people from U.S. society is moving at a horrifying speed, and they are quite openly using stochastic terrorism as a weapon. Jessie’s work is always worth looking at, but I think this particular breakdown of how the right wing is creating and aiming outrage is important. They are trying to get people killed. They are trying to create a climate of terror, with the goal of either killing all trans people, or forcing them into hiding. This is not a drill, and while I think it is related to the 2022 midterms, I do not think it will go away without a very deliberate mass movement to crush this genocidal campaign.

Lives are traded for profit yet again, as Puerto Rico’s newly privatized grid fails.

It’s been said many times that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster these days. With all of our technology, we’re capable of building resilient infrastructure, moving people out of harm’s way, and engaging in herculean rescue efforts. As a rule, big disasters are made worse but inaction, incompetence, and corruption. At the end of the day, there’s more money to be made in the aftermath of a disaster than there is in preventing one. That means that when there was a push (eventually successful) to privatize Puerto Rico’s grid after the disaster of Hurricane Maria, it wasn’t hard to predict that the end result not be good for the people.

Now, under the advance of Hurricane Fiona, the entire island has apparently lost power.

A “total blackout” was reported on the island of Puerto Rico on Sunday as heavy rainfall and powerful winds pounded the island before Hurricane Fiona made landfall just before 4:00 pm local time.

Weather forecasters said the rainfall is likely to produce devastating landslides and severe flooding, with up to 25 inches (64 cm) expected in some areas. A Category 1 storm, with sustained winds of 85 mph, Fiona is nowhere near as powerful as Hurricane Maria which slammed the island in 2017, nearly five years to the day, as a Category 4 monster.

It wasn’t lost on many that the nation’s sole power utility company, LUMA—granted control of the territory’s electricity system in a 2020 privatization deal in the wake of Maria’s devastation—is the institution now in charge as the entire island has lost power in the face of Fiona.

In July, major protests were organized by Puerto Ricans opposed to LUMA—a joint venture by Canada-based ATCO and Houston-based Quanta Services. Citing increased outages, unreliable service, and higher bills, opponents demanded the 15-year contract with the company be canceled.

As Reuters reported in July, “Power rates have gone up five times since LUMA began operating Puerto Rico’s transmission and distribution system on June 1, 2020. The last rate hike, which took effect at the start of July, pushed rates up by 17.1%.”

Earlier this month, protests again were again on display in San Juan and elsewhere condemning LUMA.

In a statement on its website Sunday, LUMA said “full power restoration could take several days” and asked for “support and patience” from its customers.

Carmen Yulín Cruz, who was the progressive mayor of San Juan when Maria hit the island in 2017, offered a sobering comment in response to news of the blackout:

“Puerto Rico is 100% without electrical power,” she tweeted. “The cycle of death begins.”

“The cycle of death” is a good alternate name for disaster capitalism. I’m at a point where I am no longer willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to anyone in power. We know how this plays out. It’s been done over and over and over again all over the world. The people running our government – the leadership of both the Democrats and the Republicans, and the capitalist class they serve – know what they are doing. They know that things like privatizing Puerto Rico’s grid will result in high costs for unreliable results. They knew this would happen and they wanted it anyway. If someone wants to insist that they didn’t know, then they are so incompetent and out of touch that their ignorance is literally getting people killed.

Either way, things need to change.

It’s a video about Paw Patrol. How dark could it get?

In discussions surrounding the recent death of Queen Elizabeth the Second, there were a number of criticisms raised. One of them was that she acted as a powerful propagandist for the British Empire, and as that faded, the Commonwealth. No matter what the government of the UK did, she was the face of the country – a kindly, dignified lady that was treated almost as a papal figure by some. I suppose that’s fitting, given that she was the head of the Church of England. Even if there was nothing to criticize in her own actions, the role she played in putting a friendly face on a not-so-friendly country is worth some discussion, at least.

Likewise, it’s important to discuss the role that dogs play in putting a friendly face on the police. How’s that for a transition? Thematically consistent? I’ll leave that up to you.

I’ve heard of Paw Patrol once or twice over the years, but I never cared enough to look into it. I knew it was some show involving dogs acting like cops, I think? Regardless, nothing could have prepared me for the reality. This video is apparently part of an established tradition of thought-pieces that take this cartoon for children very seriously. More than that, it joins the chorus of voices calling this show downright sinister.

I suppose it might be more accurate to say that it’s part of a sinister societal pattern of media portraying police as hyper-competent heroes, to cover up the horrific reality. This video touches on that aspect of the show, but it also delves into that same reality. Thankfully, the video does not show pictures of the injuries inflicted by police dogs, but the list of described injuries, that include amputations and other life-changing injuries. And for all we talk about the hundreds of police shootings in the United States, police dogs send thousands of people to emergency rooms every year, and you’d better believe they’re disproportionately non-white, and poor.

Maybe things have changed since I left – is adequate medical treatment still out of reach for poor people in the U.S.?

Paw Patrol seems to be an absolutely terrible toy commercial disguised as an even worse show. From what I can tell, it’s worse than the original Transformers or He-Man stuff, but at least those weren’t putting a cutesy face on systemic racism and bloody horror.

 

Tegan Tuesday: “Smart” devices are giving corporations the ability to surveil you and your family 24/7

Digital security is an actual nightmare. We are surrounded by internet-capable technology at all times. Even if you personally do not have a smart watch, a smart phone, GoogleGlass, a car run through a computer, a smart doorbell, a smart washer, a smart fridge, a smart printer, a smart tv, a smart thermostat… the chances are incredibly high that your neighbor does.

And every single one of them is tracking you.

How could advertisers know what to sell you if it didn’t know that you mentioned ‘oreos’ in a conversation just seconds ago? What makes it even more frustrating is that this kind of technology is useful.

A woman I know with mobility issues and extreme temperature regulation problems has a smart thermostat because she can adjust it from her phone; an obviously helpful aspect for someone who’s bed-bound and having temperature problems. What is less helpful is the built-in feature where the power company can override any of her settings and decide FOR HER what temperature her house should be. Another woman I know has her smart watch connected to her pacemaker, all the better to moniter her health. Many of the technologies in my earlier list have equally helpful aspects to them. But just as people with sleep apnea have their CPAP machines locked or taken away from a perceived ‘lack of compliance’, each of these life-saving technologies are primarily being used to erode personal liberty and privacy.

What is honestly even more frustrating than this kind of monitoring is how easy they are to hack. There are countless stories of baby monitors being hacked, not to mention cars, smart tvs, and smart fridges. Each one of these systems, logged into your personal network, is a door to your personal data that could be used in a myriad of ways. Some of the reasons for this is that tech companies often don’t bother putting any effort into dealing with security. How many of us have gotten letters or emails informing us that Macy’s, or WalMart had a security breach and “your credit card information may be among those affected”? But with the prevalence of technology in every aspect of life, that risk is both compounded, and an expected part of life.

Ah well. We are adults. We can make the call about what is an acceptable invasion of privacy for improved ease of living or comfort. What then about the increasing amount of technology on children? We know the effects of long-term surveillance on developing minds: extremely negative. There have been discussions of the the impact of Elf on the Shelf (and it’s 24/7 surveillance of the child) for nearly a decade.

This was about the status of the interaction of life and technology up until 2020. Then the pandemic and its resulting lockdowns began. Jobs and schools alike went remote. Workers were observed at all times (Fun fact: my admin job in 2009 put surveillance software on my computer, so my boss could observe every action, every mouse movement, every keyboard entry. My boss could also override my own actions on my computer. I put in my two weeks that day. But how easy is it to find that type of job without it now?) But of course the mandatory laptops and tablets provided to students are monitoring their every move, too. In the case discussed above, think about the long-term implications of your child accidentally uploading child pornography just because their phone put their (fully clothed) selfie on the cloud or the school district’s network? This is a problem with far-reaching implications and I Want It Gone. The reckless and unrelenting monitoring of private information needs to stop.

Which brings me to the spot of good news: remote test proctoring software has been ruled a violation of constitutional rights. Cleveland State University, much like every other university on the planet, used a third-party monitoring program to assess whether students taking remote exams were cheating (My opinions about the over-reliance on exams and a pathological fear of ‘cheating’ is a different story). But a student went to court claiming that the proctoring software, which scanned his room and stored that information, was a violation of his privacy. The judge agreed! This type of monitoring is a violation of the Fourth Amendment right protecting citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures. Which is absolutely wonderful news! Now to get from Stage: ‘It’s Illegal’, to Stage: ‘It’s Not Used.’

This is a long fight ahead, since laws always lag behind technology by at least a decade. But it’s a start.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Wall Street is sacrificing lives for money, as usual.

There are patterns in this society of ours, and the most reliable one is rich people screwing over poor people, because the greed of the rich is endless. It’s frustrating to see the same problems happening year after year, decade after decade, without even any real change in the justifications given for poverty around the world. Our political and economic systems are designed to reward profit-seeking above all else, and this is the result:

Russia’s war on Ukraine has wreaked havoc on global commodity markets, driving up energy and food prices and exacerbating hunger emergencies around the world.

But while disastrous for the global poor—millions of whom are living on the brink of famine—the chaos has been a major boon for Wall Street giants, according to new data showing that the world’s 100 largest banks are on pace to smash commodity trading profit records this year.

“The 100 biggest banks by revenue are set to make $18 billion from commodities trading in 2022,” Bloomberg reported Friday, citing figures from the London-based firm Vali Analytics. “That would be the highest in the data, which goes back 14 years, and exceed the previous high watermark in 2009.”

“The prediction is the latest evidence that the wild swings in energy prices triggered by the war in Ukraine are delivering a boon to commodity traders, even as they push European nations into crisis,” Bloomberg added. “Vali, an analytics firm that tracks trading business, compiled data that includes the leading five banks in commodity trading: Macquarie Group Ltd., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., and Morgan Stanley.”

I would argue that in addition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the volatility of the markets and the rise in food prices also relate to the climate emergencies that keep happening. I do not think we’re currently at the point of climate-driven famine. The current crisis is being caused by the same thing that has been causing most of the planet’s problems in my lifetime: Capitalism. I’ve discussed before how the profit motive leads corporations to grow food to feed to livestock, rather than people. This is another piece to the puzzle. In the magical land of Real Capitalism, “market forces” will take care of supply, rationing, and so on. If something becomes scarce, the price goes up, and people at the bottom just… do without. The problem is that there’s nothing in the system that actually places a value on people. We’re valued for the work we can do for those with money, but actual people? We’re just another over-regulated commodity, in the eyes of the aristocracy. That means they get to play games with human life, so they make more money:

“People’s misery makes capitalists’ superprofit,” Salvatore De Rosa, a researcher at the Lund University Center for Sustainability Studies, tweeted in response to Bloomberg‘s reporting. “How do you reform this?”

Wall Street banks have not just benefited from the commodity price increases—they’ve actively helped fuel them, experts say.

“We’re in a market where speculators are driving prices up,” Michael Greenberger, former head of the Division of Trading and Markets at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told Mongabay in July.

“Commodity markets are supposed to be hedging markets for people who are dealing with the commodity involved,” Greenberger said. “In the case of wheat, it would be farmers and people buying wheat. But if we looked at it, there would be banks in there with no interest in what the price of wheat is, writing swaps and controlling this price.”

“It’s too easy to say the war in Ukraine has unbalanced all these markets, [or that] supply chains and the ports are shot, and that there’s a supply and demand reason for these prices going up,” Greenberger added. “My own best guess is anywhere from 10% to 25% of the price, at least, is dictated by deregulated speculative activity.”

There will always be an excuse. There will always be some justification for why things just have to be this way. This is not something that can just be reformed away. This is the inevitable result of an economic system designed to funnel money and power upwards. This is the system working as intended.

There’s also not any point at which things get so bad that the people just rise up and change everything. Maybe there have been revolutions like that in the past, but from what I can tell, the story of Les Miserables paints a more accurate picture of what happens if you expect “the people” to just rise up because life sucks.

Change – meaningful change – will only come from the bottom, and only through organization. Whether it’s getting people vital supplies, or communicating in a crisis, or bringing a nation to a halt with a general strike, organizing will be key. Humanity’s greatest strength is our ability to work together to achieve better results than we could alone. That stuff requires coordination, and we’re at a point where we need billions of people to pull in the same direction. Historically, we’ve left that kind of work to our governments, under the notion that they would work on our behalf. There are ways in which that abdication of responsibility does makes life easier for a great many people, but both history and current events show just how catastrophic that can be in the long term.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Unequal distribution of temperature and green space is killing people.

Racial and economic inequality have always come with environmental inequality. The least powerful tend to be forced to live closest to our most dangerous waste products, from traffic pollution, to industrial or electronic waste. As the planet warms, there’s a new kind of environmental inequality, but rather than the things we’ve come to expect – poisoned air and water – we’re facing unequal distribution of temperature.

Equipped with heat sensors, this group of citizen scientists were participating in a groundbreaking study: the first ever street level assessment of heat in New York City. The goal was to find differences in neighborhoods – which communities were relatively cool? Which were sweltering hot? – and map the city’s heat inequality.

Joined by others in upper Manhattan and Harlem, the volunteers scanned temperatures along the streets with sensors attached to their cars and bikes. The results, presented to community members in January, showed a harsh reality of city living: the south Bronx was 8F (4.5C) hotter than the Upper West Side and Upper East Side, some of the city’s richest neighborhoods, just a few miles away.
“The variation in temperature is stark,” said principal investigator Liv Yoon. The data was analyzed by Climate Adaptation Planning and Analytics Strategies and is part of a nationwide heat-mapping initiative by Noaa. “The built environment really matters on how heat manifests and what people feel,” said Yoon.

The results mirror what residents and researchers have known and brought attention to for years: in cities like New York City,heat is distributed unequally – and people of color and low-income residents shoulder the highest burden of heat. Poor air quality, inadequate access to cooling and air conditioning further exacerbates the likelihood of heatstrokes and deaths from heat exposure. There are approximately 370 heat-related deaths in New York City on average each year, with the Bronx being especially vulnerable.

This is not a surprise. I’ve talked before about the various health benefits of living near greenery, and I think it’s no accident that wealthier parts of cities tend to have more trees, more parks, and more vegetation in general. As the temperature continues to rise, that inequality will increasingly become a matter of life and death.

Heat is especially severe for people with pre-existing conditions such as heart disease, and as higher night-time temperatures prevent people from recuperating overnight, it is also driving a rise in sleep-related mental health problems.

Some residents, who have been living in close proximity to sweltering asphalt and further away from parks and trees, may not be surprised by this.

“The thing is, we already knew where the hotter areas were,” said Yoon. “What we wanted to contribute is connecting the dots.”
Environmental advocates say the data, because of how granular it is, can help make the case that certain neighborhoods need better resources and access to green space.

“We have always gotten the brunt of the city’s pollution,” said Melissa Barber, researcher and co-founder of environmental justice group South Bronx Unite.

The difference in temperature between the south Bronx and the Upper West Side reflect a myriad of other environmental inequalities. There are five major highways that run through and around the south Bronx, including the hulking Cross Bronx Expressway, which contributes to the surrounding area’s noise and air pollution. Despite being bounded to the south by the Harlem River, the waterfront in the south Bronx is so developed that residents cannot readily access the blue space. Meanwhile, the Upper West Side sits between Central park and Riverside park, which looks out on to the Hudson River.

Asphalt roads and densely built buildings in cities trap heat. These urban pockets of heat can also overlap with other health disparities: the south Bronx has one of the highest asthma rates in the country. Residents here also live in housing that tends to trap heat, and where the median age of apartment buildings is nearly 90 years.

“These spaces are not only deprived because of the heat they’ve acquired, the existing infrastructure is failing as well,” said Satpal Kaur, an architect who volunteered in the heat-mapping survey.

Climate change is killing people right now, and it was entirely predicted that it would hit the poorest first and hardest. That very fact may well be part of why the richest among us felt comfortable ignoring the problem for their own benefit. As things continue to get hotter, and people continue to suffer and die because of it, remember this: We, as a species, have the resources to help. It does not have to be this way.

Video: Can Capitalism Solve World Hunger?

In writing about yesterday’s good news, I mentioned the fact that we currently produce more food than is needed to end world hunger. As usual, Second Thought provides a nice, approachable overview of the scale of the problem, why capitalism cannot solve world hunger (and why, as I’ve explained, that means capitalism also can’t solve the coming famines caused by global warming).

There’s one point I wanted to add that’s often left out of conversations about this topic. As I briefly discussed in this post, there’s a big portion of farmland that could grow food for people, but is instead dedicated to growing food for livestock. While some of that is hay, a lot of it is various grains fed to livestock like cattle. That means that actually feeding everyone with our current system would require a shift away from animal agriculture. Basically, we need to start growing more food for us, and less food for our food. I can imagine a variety of reasons why this is left out so often, but that speculation on that matters less to me than just correcting the deficiency.

What the video DOES cover well is the role that the IMF and World Bank has played in the unequal distribution of food, for the sake of profits for the upper class of wealth countries. With all of that said, I hope you enjoy the video!

Good news: Bioengineered photosynthesis hack promises to dramatically increase yields in a variety of crops

Norman Borlaug is widely credited for saving a billion people from starvation. This comes from his development of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties, which play a real role in the over-abundance of food we currently produce. It remains the fact that, despite hunger still being a big problem in the world, we produce enough food to feed billions more people than are currently alive. Nobody starves because we can’t feed them – they starve because their miserable deaths are more profitable than their lives. That said, I fully expect climate change to cause ever-increasing difficulties for the conventional farming practices on which we rely. This means that even if we do manage to build a society that values life, we may be hard-pressed to grow enough food to keep people alive on a rapidly warming planet. No matter what the future holds, Borlaug’s work will continue saving lives in to the future. It now appears that there may be another similar advance in another staple crop – soybeans:

Photosynthesis, the natural process all plants use to convert sunlight into energy and yield, is a surprisingly inefficient 100+ step process that RIPE researchers have been working to improve for more than a decade. In this first-of-its-kind work, recently published in Science, the group improved the VPZ construct within the soybean plant to improve photosynthesis and then conducted field trials to see if yield would be improved as a result.

The VPZ construct contains three genes that code for proteins of the xanthophyll cycle, which is a pigment cycle that helps in the photoprotection of the plants. Once in full sunlight, this cycle is activated in the leaves to protect them from damage, allowing leaves to dissipate the excess energy. However, when the leaves are shaded (by other leaves, clouds, or the sun moving in the sky) this photoprotection needs to switch off so the leaves can continue the photosynthesis process with a reserve of sunlight. It takes several minutes for the plant to switch off the protective mechanism, costing plants valuable time that could have been used for photosynthesis.

The overexpression of the three genes from the VPZ construct accelerates the process, so every time a leaf transitions from light to shade the photoprotection switches off faster. Leaves gain extra minutes of photosynthesis which, when added up throughout the entire growing season, increases the total photosynthetic rate. This research has shown that despite achieving a more than 20% increase in yield, seed quality was not impacted.

“Despite higher yield, seed protein content was unchanged. This suggests some of the extra energy gained from improved photosynthesis was likely diverted to the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the plant’s nodules,” said RIPE Director Stephen Long (CABBI/BSD/GEGC), Ikenberry Endowed University Chair of Crop Sciences and Plant Biology.

This is very, very, very good news. As a species, we currently get about 17% of our protein from the oceans, and that is devastating oceanic ecosystems. While many of us really need to decrease our protein intake, the fact remains that we need to stop commercial fishing. That means that we’re going to need alternate sources of protein – doubly so because we really ought to get rid of most animal agriculture (though we need to keep some for those with dietary restrictions, and we need to guarantee access to good food, so the decrease in animal agriculture doesn’t suddenly make it astronomically expensive to exist if you require meat to survive). As with most innovations, this one by itself isn’t going to solve all our problems. That said, this could solve a lot of problems, and make it much easier to feed people despite the decline in good farming conditions around the world.

What’s more, this innovation is not limited to soybeans – it seems like it could be used for a wide variety of crops:

The researchers first tested their idea in tobacco plants because of the ease of transforming the crop’s genetics and the amount of seeds that can be produced from a single plant. These factors allow researchers to go from genetic transformation to a field trial within months. Once the concept was proven in tobacco, they moved into the more complicated task of putting the genetics into a food crop, soybeans.

“Having now shown very substantial yield increases in both tobacco and soybean, two very different crops, suggests this has universal applicability,” said Long. “Our study shows that realizing yield improvements is strongly affected by the environment. It is critical to determine the repeatability of this result across environments and further improvements to ensure the environmental stability of the gain.”

Additional field tests of these transgenic soybean plants are being conducted this year, with results expected in early 2023.

“The major impact of this work is to open the roads for showing that we can bioengineer photosynthesis and improve yields to increase food production in major crops,” said De Souza. “It is the beginning of the confirmation that the ideas ingrained by the RIPE project are a successful means to improve yield in major food crops.”

The RIPE project and its sponsors are committed to ensuring Global Access and making the project’s technologies available to the farmers who need them the most.

“This has been a road of more than a quarter century for me personally,” said Long. “Starting first with a theoretical analysis of theoretical efficiency of crop photosynthesis, simulation of the complete process by high-performance computation, followed by application of optimization routines that indicated several bottlenecks in the process in our crops. Funding support over the past ten years has now allowed us to engineer alleviation of some of these indicated bottlenecks and test the products at field scale. After years of trial and tribulation, it is wonderfully rewarding to see such a spectacular result for the team.”

Combined with changes in farming practices, an increase in indoor farming, and increased reliance on things like microalgae and edible bacteria, this could save billions of lives, if we can build a society that sees that as a thing worth doing.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: The Perverse Incentives of Utility Companies

There are a lot of ways in which our political and economic system is set up to prevent effective environmental action of an type. It’s one of the reasons why I think we actually need “revolutionary” systemic change. As things stand, the most powerful entities in the world are fighting against climate action, which means that until we take their power away, we will not be able to change course. We might be able to slow down a touch, or make slight changes in direction, but everything about our world is designed to block radical change in a leftward direction. It’s pretty obvious that moving things to the right is easier at this point.

This video breaks down how that problem manifests with utility companies in the United States, and I have to say that while I knew the situation was bad, I didn’t know it was this bad. I think a key thing to understand going into this is that “The Free Market” has always been a myth. It never existed, and never could exist. Even if we reset everything to zero tomorrow, under the right-wing libertarian model, you’d quickly see people accumulating wealth and power, and using that to manipulate the market just as they do today. That means that from the beginning of capitalism, the boundaries, freedom, and incentives of “The Free Market” have always been set by the government, generally following the interests of the capitalist class.

With that as an introduction, the TL:DW of this video is that all of the profit incentives for utility companies, combined with corporate law, basically require them to oppose distributed power generation, renewable energy, grid maintenance, and a whole host of other things. The end result is that the incentive structure is set up based on the circumstances and thinking of the 1930s, and the U.S. government has become too dysfunctional to change course since then. This is one of many reasons why capitalism needs to be replaced with something that actually values life and freedom, if we want humanity to survive, which I do.