ecology understander

I mostly hate it here but some of you are cool 🖤

[Matthew Todd 🌏🔥 @MrMatthewTodd]

Norway, traditionally famous for its high temperatures and wildfires

[Anti-Racist South |🇵🇸 #FreePalestine @antiracistsouth]

Axon is supplying body worn cameras to Walmart employees equipped with facial recognition. They are just as bad as Flock if not worse, because Axon is also deeply integrated with Israeli tech companies as well and their various cameras are proliferating in nearly every space.

[I Dissent @DissentFu]

We are just straight fucking the Earth up

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

🚨 BREAKING: Al Jazeera exposes a massive European supply chain crisis.

The Rhine River is so dry that cargo ships must slash their loads by 60 percent just to stay afloat.

Shipper Iris Dijs confirms it now takes three ships to do the work of one. Total disaster!

[Robin Boardman @RobinBoardmanUK]

Ten days of water. That is what is left in northern Italy. Salt from the Adriatic pushing upstream into soil that fed generations.

Emergency meetings next week. Crops already turning.

We bear witness to a land dying on a timeline measured in days, not decades.
https://t.co/MSjq6YjZMh

[Purrs 🏴 @NewPerspectives]

how much is too much? before you can't take it anymore?

[Daniel Swain @Weather_West]

A major new wildfire outbreak is now underway across interior Pacific Northwest, with dozens (or more) new wildfires already popping up in eastern Oregon & Washington following tens of thousands of lightning strikes in region experiencing moderate to extreme drought. #ORwx #WAwx

[Justin Lee @DailyJLee]

So many people should be wearing respirators in the wild fire smoke, but nobody is because of how badly covid anti-mask narratives scrambles their brains

[Chris Bataille @bataille_chris]

Up until ~10 years ago, most boreal forest lightening strikes and human ignitions fell on damp ground, often damp from recent snow melt. Climate change has transformed this, turning the northern half of North America into a giant tinder box, where even the soil carbon can burn.

[Colin McCarthy @US_Stormwatch]

The wildfire situation across North America just got worse.

Tens of thousands of lightning strikes across the Pacific Northwest has ignited dozens of new wildfires across Oregon and Washington.

[tern @1goodtern]

The world is barrelling headlong into environmental collapse, and instead of doing something to stop it, we're doing all the things to accelerate it.

[Financial Times @FT]

FT Exclusive: The International Energy Agency has forecast US-based spending on power plants fuelled by coal and gas will reach $50bn this year, as companies rush to build out data centres. https://t.co/cd3XQoAPsW

[ecology understander @autonomeee]

In case it wasn't already clear, they are ramping up fossil fuel use (and emissions) in order to roll out AI. It's no wonder certain people don't want to talk about climate change anymore.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Elon just personally bought a $1 billion gas turbine company, and no one announced it. No press release, no tweet. The deal only surfaced because a firm holding a 5% stake had to disclose its $50.4 million payout in an SEC filing. What he bought tells you where the real bottleneck in AI is.

APR Energy operates a fleet of mobile gas and diesel turbines totaling over 1 gigawatt. Their units arrive on trucks and can be delivered, installed, and commissioned in as little as a month. The fleet was built for blackout zones and disaster response in countries with unreliable grids.

Here's the constraint that makes it worth $1B to one man: Nvidia can deliver 100,000 GPUs in months. A new grid connection for a power plant spends a median of roughly 5 years in the interconnection queue. The chips depreciate while the paperwork sits.

Elon already lived this. xAI's first Memphis cluster ran 100,000 GPUs on about 150 megawatts, much of it from roughly 35 leased mobile turbines while grid power was pending. Environmental groups sued. The DOJ intervened to keep the turbines running. He was renting the most important input to his most important company.

So he bought the landlord. At $1B for 1+ gigawatts, he paid roughly $1 per watt of dispatchable power he can park anywhere. A gigawatt runs on the order of 600,000 H100-class GPUs.

Every AI lab can buy the same chips. Only one of them now owns a power plant fleet that ships by truck.

[박주현 @hermit_hwarang]

I remember about 10 years ago when the fires on the west coast started getting this bad. At the time some people talked about the advantages of Great Lakes or east coast living. The truth is that none of us are going to outrun climate change.

[Dr. Genevieve Guenther (she/they) 🪬 @DoctorVive]

This is a great illustration why trying to solve climate change just with “abundant energy” is so wrongheaded.

@heatmap_news @robinsonmeyer show that the majority of tech’s rising emissions come from not electricity, but embodied emissions, eg in the construction of data centers

[Prof. Ryan Katz-Rosene @ryankatzrosene]

According to this projection, data centres could be using more than double the natural gas they are presently in less than a decade.

[LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @LongTimeHistory]

ICE agents chased out of Starbucks—citizens yell "We want coffee with no ice!"

"ICE agents separate families," people shout.
"You should be ashamed of yourself!"

"You should not be comfortable going anywhere—you should not be able to sleep at night."

Agents slink back to car where other agents wait for them—empty handed.

Crowd follows them the whole way yelling:
"Shame! Shame! Shame!"

Incident occurred at a Starbucks location in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey.

ICE Out of NJ doesn't have an account on this platform—so posting first full length and credited video here to help raise awareness.

[ecology understander @autonomeee]

Woke up at 4:30 to an actual thunderstorm in Portland with tons of lightning and immediately thought, "oh shit, here come the fires"

[Michael Snyder @SeattleWXGuy]

Numerous Fire starts, close to 20,000 lightning strikes so far with this event! #wawx #orwx

[Scott @disorderlyswine]

Seems like a good time to share CR instructions again. https://t.co/Yf5RPfZEqn

[Ben Inskeep @Ben_Inskeep]

The federal government is hearing widespread concerns from Americans about dirty diesel generators at data centers.

So they've decided to make you shut up about it!

🚨🚨A new EPA rule could *eliminate* public comment opportunities for most data center air permits.