No major kernel decisions were made,” jokes Russinovich in a post on LinkedIn.

Man, wouldn’t that be wild, though?

You know that meme that came out of the pandemic? “We are the virus.” I’ve thought about it and I don’t agree. We’re not a virus, we’re more like a large asteroid impact.

Periods of rapid climate change are often associated with mass extinction events. Earth could experience a mass extinction event like the one that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs, as a result of this period of extremely rapid climate change that we’ve created.

No, we’re not a virus, we’re a natural disaster on par with some of the worst to ever befall this planet.

It really depends on how you define “successful.” If your measure of success is based on how closely these societies resemble Western, liberal, capitalist societies, then, yeah, you’re probably not going to see a whole lot of “success,” but that’s not what these revolutionary movements were trying to achieve. I would say that first and foremost what essentially every communist movement was striving for was just autonomy and independence, and many have been successful in that regard. Vietnam is an independent nation, instead of a French colony. China, similarly, is no longer under the thumb of the British. You may not like what these nations do with their autonomy, but that is what they were striving for and they have achieved it.

…a strategy that limits fossil fuels in the short term or encourages people to limit consumption is “doomed to fail”.

Maybe, but the world has to reduce global carbon emissions by half, within a relatively short amount of time, to have any chance of limiting warming to a level that gives us the best possible chance of not passing critical climate tipping points, and the only way to do that is to significantly reduce our use of fossil fuels. Carbon capture will likely also be necessary, and maybe so will be geoengineering (god help us), but there is no possible strategy for limiting warming and hopefully avoiding passing critical tipping points that doesn’t involve rapid and dramatic reductions in fossil fuel use. So, if that’s doomed to fail, then the world not passing critical climate tipping points is also doomed to fail. I think a lot of people just figure that’s a foregone conclusion at this point, and maybe it is, but if that’s the case then let’s just be honest and say that what we’re facing in the latter half of the 21st century, and possibly sooner, is significant catastrophe.

To be replaced with a new kind of feudalism. Company towns will come back, only they’ll be whole cities. Our nations will be carved up by ultra wealthy lords, each will take ownership and control of their own company city. The Lord will be both our employer and the sovereign of the city. We will essentially be their property. We will work for them, buy from them, and follow all of their rules. They will demand a cult-like religious devotion. That’s our future.

the missed deadline adds to concerns that climate action has fallen down government agendas

I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. It’s just not a priority in most countries.

I don’t agree. I think these people are acting out of what they believe to be self interest, even if it is an unenlightened self interest. Why else would they desire to be at the “top of the collective?” What do they hope to gain if not special, INDIVIDUAL, privileges, opportunities, liberties, etc?

The centralized monopolies are built to serve the interests of, and to consolidate the powers and control of, a relatively small number of individuals. There’s nothing more freeing for an individual than total power and control over others.

Nvidia doesn’t give a shit about gamers anymore…Their bread and butter now is AI, and large scale machine learning. Where businesses are buying thousands of cards at a time.

I’m just quoting this for emphasis.

Welcome to the polycrisis.

Despite much investment in and expansion of renewable energy, humanity has continued burning fossil fuels at a furious pace.

Infinite growth requires infinite energy. I’m certain renewable energy production will continue to grow, but it won’t replace fossil fuels, renewable energy will just be added on top of fossil fuels.

How many of those 200 nations actually need to radically transform?

Many, if not most.

But I suppose that depends on where the threshold is, at which radical transformation becomes necessary. How poor and small does a nation have to be for it to be exempt from radical transformation?

At the end of the day, we have to radically transform society, and we have to do it fast

No, we don’t need to radically transform one, single society, we need to transform hundreds of separate, distinct societies. Yes, we live in a highly globalized world, but there is not one, global society, with one culture, language, nationality, government, legal framework, etc. There are nearly 200 independent nations on the planet, each with their own culture, needs, ambitions, goals, ideology, and beliefs, and many of these nations are in direct competition with one another. There are several nations directly competing, in a zero sum contest for global supremacy.

I suppose many people see US (or more broadly “Western”) global hegemony as essentially the same as a single global society, but that hegemony was not chosen by the world, it was imposed on them, and there are several nations aggressively trying to challenge and ultimately destabilize said hegemony.

proactively develop governance frameworks, coordinate globally, and prepare our societies for unprecedented change

Get in line behind climate change.

Multinational corporations are…destroying Earth for profit. If we want real change, we have to be willing to threaten those profits – and to learn from the people who have. Here in Co Mayo, activists with the organisation Shell to Sea worked for more than a decade to oppose the construction of a local gas pipeline and refinery by the fossil-fuel giant Shell. Starting in 2005, the campaign picketed the construction sites, prevented workers from entering, and even sabotaged infrastructure…By 2012 it was estimated that the delays caused by community action had tripled the cost of the project overall. Yes, the pipeline was ultimately built.

Protests and picket signs aren’t going to work. Even in this very example given by the author, it didn’t work! The damn pipeline still got built.

People have been trying to abolish capitalism for well over a century now. Most have failed, and even the few who didn’t outright fail have succeeded only in controlling or managing capitalism, through a powerful, central state. There’s a reason why it’s so much easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

Capitalism is an unstoppable force, and nature is an immovable object. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?..

I am absolutely convinced that geoengineering is coming.

In theory, geoengineering should slow down the rate of warming while we transition away from fossil fuels. Since the transition to a zero GHG emission global civilization will inherently take more time than we have, to prevent warming beyond 2.0C, we could use geoengineering to buy us some time. In theory, it makes perfect sense, but I am leery. I’m concerned about potential unintended consequences and side effects, but I’m even more concerned that geoengineering will make people complacent, slowing down the transition. Even theoretically, geoengineering only works if we are rapidly transitioning at the same time, otherwise it’s just like throwing more and more dynamite onto a pile, and all it would take is for us to stop geoengineering, for whatever reason, for the dynamite to explode.

An AMOC collapse “is a really big danger that we should do everything we can to avoid,”

Hmm, that seems quite alarmist to me. It’s probably a hoax, but even if it isn’t, the effects are likely being over blown. An AMOC collapse would only cause a slight drop in GDP, a couple percentage points only, and it’s probably already priced in on stock markets. I also believe in the power of entrepreneurship to find solutions. I’ve got it! We dump a whole heck of a lot of salt into the ocean. Boom! I’ll head the start-up. We’ll just get our capital from investors like Black Rock and Bill Gates. Oh, and governments, of course. We’ll get governments to pay us to drive massive, diesel powered cargo ships, loaded with salt, out to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. See, market solutions. Oh man, ecological collapse is going to generate so much profit and shareholder value. Take that, doomers. /s

I’m glad we’re starting to talk about absolute temperature instead of temperature anomaly. I think it’s much simpler to communicate to people.

The demand exists because there is machinery all around the world that was designed to run on fuels derived from fossil hydrocarbons. To eliminate the demand, all of that machinery must be replaced with alternatives that do not run on fossil fuels.

Some of the alternatives exist now and are available on the market today, although some are still prohibitively expensive for many, and not all of the newer machines have all the necessary supporting infrastructure. Much more needs to be done by governments to make non fossil fuel machinery accessible and affordable, and to rapidly build out the necessary infrastructure.

Some of the existing machinery does not yet have a non fossil fuel alternative available. For that machinery, fossil fuels are still necessary. Once again, governments must do more, to help speed up R&D on new technologies, and to make sure those technologies will be affordable and accessible once they are ready for market deployment, and, again, that all the necessary supporting infrastructure is in place.