Michael Tae Sweeney: The media isn't interested in the biggest technology story of the 2020s, the rapid transition to clean energy, because 1) it will destroy a bunch of oil based wealth and is a boring, competirive low margin business 2) it makes Democrats look good for helping it and they want Republicans to win

The media isn't interested in the biggest technology story of the 2020s, the rapid transition to clean energy, because 1) it will destroy a bunch of oil based wealth and is a boring, competirive low margin business 2) it makes Democrats look good for helping it and they want Republicans to win

THERE’S A QUIET NEW DEAL GOING ON The antidote to Project 2025 is happening now and will die if Trump seizes power. So let’s make some noise.

Why is The Quiet New Deal so quiet? | the earlyworm societywww.patreon.com Get more from the earlyworm society on Patreon

The powers that be are desperate that American voters not find out about this because so many of them profit from the Saudi's bonesaw regime and it's alliance with Trump bsky.app/profile/crai...

There is a one-two punch the administration is pulling off here. Not only accelerating the transition to clean energy but breaking oil’s ability to manipulate the market to defend its position. bsky.app/profile/chri...

I suspect what will happen is that Saudi Arabia realizes they are in a "use it or lose it" situation with their oil reserves and turns on the taps at full volume and puts all the other oil producers in expensive-to-extract regions out of business rapidly. But who knows bsky.app/profile/meze...

I worry that we haven't really seen exactly what the death throes of the oil wealth look like yet. They're not going to be able to stop the energy replacement, its moving too fast and its too far along, but there's so much money in oil still that I wonder how they'll try to take the economy hostage

So far the thing Saudi Arabia is going to try to transition away from reliance on oil profits is like "give Karim Benzema $200M to play soccer in empty stadiums" so I don't really have a lot of faith in their rationality going forward

there's that giant city that's in a straight line too

You know those abandoned half-constructed cities in China? This is gonna be like one of those turned up to 11.

If it ever gets built?

my impression of those things is it’s just graft by the construction companies plus mbs on a bender

Hmm I'm not an expert but I believe SA has 1) a lot of sun and 2) a lot of sand. Sand is mostly silicon oxide. Solar panels are 75% glass and 5% silicon. Glass and silicon both come from sand. What I'm saying is: they should build a big city in a straight line.

bet it all on Neom, that's the ticket

Aside from the oil under their feet, the thousands of princes of the KSA do not actually know how to do anything! You can just look at how horribly the haij is managed

Their political constraints seem pretty harsh - they've got a huge constituency of very good boys who only know how to receive largess. How do you turn a ship that big when the money is still flowing?

yup they've tried shifting the economy a couple times in the prior decades and they've never been able to pull significant reforms b/c of entrenched interests

The smart play would be to find the 1000 best solar engineers in China and offer them each $50M to come make solar cells in Saudi instead.

They do have an awful lot of sun.

we have absolutely no problem thinking of texas oil money as basically lottery winnings because someone's grandpa happened to farm the right stretch of dirt, but somehow we think the saudi royal family aren't basically the same?

No? Do run into a lot of KSA supporters who think this way?

The future is golf

Hahaha

They are transitioning to "give Mo Salah $150M to play soccer in empty stadiums" It's progress, but not quick enough

No way they get Salah that cheap

Yeah I guess that would just be the transfer fee. Then they'd actually have to pay the man

I hadn’t thought of it that way but maybe that’s actually strong evidence that oil producers think the market will be gone sooner rather than later - they’re pursuing short term high life over investment?

ksa and russia did cut production to boost russian/ksa funds and try to kneecap dems in the midterms. i kinda suspect it’ll be a lot more of that and ksa trying to switch off but that’s not going to be an option for russia

They can pump oil cheaper than anyone else. If everyone switches tomorrow to EVs and e-bikes, the US and UK and Norway get out of oil- but everyone will still need Saudi oil for jet fuel, plastic, lubricants, etc etc.

Transportation and energy are 70% of the world oil market, but the Saudis only produce 11% of the world total. They expect to be pumping at full capacity 100 years from now, with monopoly control of a crucial market, and they’re probably not wrong.

Their current plan is to convince everyone to put hydrogen in everything.

Oil is still going to have value in a post-fossil fuel world since it's a really useful feedstock for chemicals and plastics. I also suspect there may be some niche fuels where we can take the hit and remain well below net zero. US/Russia/maybe UK will retain some domestic production, otherwise: ME

I did notice gas jumped 20¢/gallon over the weekend but I suspect that’s mostly the annual “jack up the price right before July 4 week/weekend” that happens domestically and has little or nothing to do with the global market.

We’ll get podcasts explaining this in 5-10 years, but in the present day it’s too nuts-and-bolts. Hopefully the podcasts will be about what a breakthrough it was, and not about how good it was briefly before Trump killed it on behalf of oil companies.

I am really trying to figure out how to consistently tell exactly this story in a compelling way, but it's challenging for a bunhc of reasons.

Interested in hearing what the problems you've been having are. The thing I hear a lot (because my audience on here is mostly left wingers) is denial or disbelief, because the news on this is so much better than anyone anticipated, and seems to make painful climate austerity unnecessary

I mean, I end up showing...a lot of charts? And the charts are great! There are ways to tell the story in other formats, not nightly cable news that I think would be awesome (and I"m actually working on), but the question of 1) visuals and 2) narrative tension/heroes-villains is tricky here

Framing the coal plants that are closing as the villains being defeated probably has some juice, like until very recently this subhed would have sounded absurd.

the problem is that it's a global issue and far more net coal capacity is being added than removed www.carbonbrief.org/china-respon...

China responsible for 95% of new coal power construction in 2023, report says - Carbon Briefwww.carbonbrief.org China accounted for 95% of the world’s new coal power construction activity in 2023, according to the Global Energy Monitor.

Is there maybe a good union angle on this? A lot of this installation is IBEW work

what about telling it from the perspective of "the power grid of Texas hasn't collapsed because of how much new solar they have"

Honestly Brian Cox did great bringing charts to interviews and literally throwing them at people. It's something I think should be done more in this space occupied by deniers asking congressman what % of the atmosphere is CO2 as a gotchya question. youtu.be/sG8gLt4GChg

Climate Change: Professor Brian Cox clashes with sceptic Malcolm Roberts - BBC Newsyoutu.be Professor Brian Cox has verbally sparred with a newly elected Australian politician who believes climate change is a global conspiracy. The British physicist...

I don’t know if this is anything but I remember when a bunch of celebrities were campaigning for marriage equality and there was a funny musical number NPH did about how “there’s money to be made” (by divorce lawyers lol). How to make common sense and kindness be cool again and go viral 🤷‍♀️

What makes the narrative tension/heroes-villains tricky?

This isn’t aimed at Chris, and might not be the right place, but it’s a shame that news has to be framed as a hero/villain story. I think that news framing has to do a lot with where we are as a country.

There's an interesting story to tell about how the different major energy players -- BP, XOM, Chevron, etc. -- are reacting to the growth of renewables and grid/off-grid storage; each one is taking a different approach to "future-proofing" their strategies, which I think has been interesting to see.

Just lead every story with a now-retired coal plant being blown up---people love "BOOM, falls down" visuals. There's got to be at least one every couple months. (This one is being replaced by an energy storage facility). www.fox2detroit.com/news/watch-t...

WATCH: Trenton Channel Power Plant boiler house implodedwww.fox2detroit.com A few seconds and a lot of smoke later, the boiler house was down. Watch the implosion here:

This - on the narrative challenges of the "apocalyptic systems thriller" - is maybe useful www.nytimes.com/2024/03/29/b...

This Is the Way the World Ends (According to Novelists)www.nytimes.com A new kind of disaster fiction is serving as scenario planning for real global crises. Call it the apocalyptic systems thriller.

part of the problem is that it's totally invisible. you don't see it, it doesn't change your bills or your power, it's totally seamless — which is simultaneously the goal and a big problem

There is a faction of individuals for whom the austerity and fundamental reorganization of society was the point. That we can still solve this problem without dismantling capitalism worldwide is not a viewpoint many are open to hearing.

A whole lot of people thought they could use the climate emergency for everything under the sun from racial inequality to colonial reparations and gender equality So many people on Twitter yelled at me for only wanting to listen to the „white savior“ Great and not indigenous people from Honduras 🙄

Don't misrepresent the problem. It's more of a social contract problem than a technical problem, but the way we live changes, especially for the wealthy (thus the social contract). Six short films from Cambridge University Department of Engineering: www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/new-res... 1/n

New resource: Tick Zero’s Real Climate Solutionswww.eng.cam.ac.uk By the end of the century, over one billion people living near the equator are at risk of starvation as a result of climate change. We know that the surface temperature of our planet is increasing,

The National Academies wrote a chapter on the same puzzle - to change, the political system needs consent. You have to tell people what's going on, accurately. There's almost no country on Earth doing this well, and the US is doing it not at all. nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25931/c... 2/n

Read "Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States: Technology, Policy, and Societal Dimensions" at NAP.edunap.nationalacademies.org Read chapter 5 Public Engagement to Build a Strong Social Contract for Deep Decarbonization: Addressing climate change is essential and possible, and it o...

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