The Daily Blog Open Mic – Saturday 17th August 2019

1. More perspective on Hong Kong.

   The West seems to be prepared to ditch the massive gains made by China in the cost and efficiency of PV cells in retaliation for “crimes” that are miniscule compared to the West. How is it possible to be such avid supporters of oil purchases from Saudi Arabia where dissidents regularly have their heads chopped off and to isolate economically the largest producer of solar panels for attempting to quell protests without loss of life while giving a free pass to France for a more violent reaction to a more peaceful protest?
   China is the most focused nation on solar energy and this is seriously needed. We dont need American and Saudi oil money doing their damndest to shut diwn the move to renewables

2. The Inconvenient Truth of Modern Civilization’s Inevitable Collapse
   https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2019/02/19/the-inconvenient-truth-of-modern-civilizations-inevitable-collapse/

   A myth that many uninformed people hold is that biospheric health will quickly bounce back after we humans get our act together. Nothing could be further from the truth. Much of the damage we are already seeing is irreversible on human time scales. Positive feedbacks were already occurring at less than 1°C of warming. Many carbon sinks are on the verge of becoming or have already become carbon sources. As we race toward a nightmarish future with no realistic way to stop, we leave behind a “forever legacy” that will haunt mankind for the rest of eternity.

   • We are entering territory that is completely new. We have just entered a phase whee wind and solar have reached parity with fossil fuel electricity generation so uptake will now be accellerated. To be swamped by despair at this point seems a little premature. We dont know when its too late. A message from the past

     “By 1894 the British capital, now the largest city on Earth, confronted a crisis of epic proportions. Having survived the threat of invasion for almost a millennium, be it the Spanish Armada or Napoleon’s Revolutionary Army, an unexpected foe now imperilled the city – horse shit. The ‘Horse Manure Crisis’, as it was termed by The Times that year, struck fear into the hearts of Londoners who soon expected their city to be so covered in faeces that its streets would resemble the canals of Venice.
     Such a threat had been a long time in the making. Over the preceding century London’s population had quadrupled, and it had no rival in industry, social complexity or geographical spread, with New York only surpassing it on each measure by the early 1920s.
     This success was what precipitated the 1894 crisis. London was at the leading edge of trends resulting from the Second Disruption (industrial revolution), especially rapid population growth – as fewer infants and children died and life expectancy, after a generation, began to increase. This, combined with rapid urbanisation, began to create major infrastructural problems in housing, transport and sanitation.
     But while the Second Disruption meant more people, more trade and more work, a vital piece of technology remained from the pre-steam era: the horse. Even as late as the 1890s – when some of London’s streets had electric lights – there were around 11,000 hansom cabs in the city, as well as several thousand horse-drawn buses, each employing twelve large animals. That meant a staggering 50,000 horses transporting people around the city every day, not to mention the many more horse-drawn carts and drays delivering goods. The sheer number of animals, in addition to their size, meant London’s streets were covered by at least 1.5 million pounds of horse manure every day.
     Which is why when The Times speculated in 1894 about the city a half century thereafter it concluded, ‘In fifty years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.’ Such a conclusion seemed reasonable – after all, cities of this kind had never existed before and they appeared to be unsustainable. Even an urban studies conference convened specifically to discuss the issue some four years later, failed to arrive at any solutions.
     And yet we now know such predictions never came to pass. The technologies of the internal combustion engine and electricity, already in evidence as The Times penned its obituary for the world’s leading experiment in urban living, meant cars, buses and electric trams replaced the horse-drawn cart and carriage. By 1912, a seemingly insurmountable problem had been solved. In every major city horses were being replaced with motorised vehicles. What looked like a secular problem was merely a hangover of the First Disruption (agricultural revolution) coming up against the birth pangs of the Second.”

     You may laugh at this and think it naive to equate this with our current pollution problem but the fact is that we dont know and we may get to look back and laugh if action is taken soon. As noted, electricity had appeared and the Internal combustion engine but the cascading effect Was still to come. The above story is from Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani pgs 136 – 139 in my ebook

3. New research has highlighted the vast amount of unhealthy food on offer at supermarkets.

   University of Auckland experts analysed 13,000 packaged food items as part of the inaugural State of the Food Supply report. Its author, Sally Mackay, says they found nearly 70 percent could be classed as ultra-processed.

   “They’re ready-to-eat or drink items, they’re based on refined substances, and they often have added salt, sugar and fat, and other additives,” she told Newshub.

   https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/lifestyle/2019/08/most-packaged-food-on-sale-in-nz-is-unhealthy-report.html?fbclid=IwAR1fIkPz5ERTekSEx5_i0XhGB9dL0k3avQxWVq4y–FGL94tE5qW72JYzpI

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