Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil
fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics
for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a
reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply.
…
In fact, the sheer scope of that potential change seems to
be motivating much of the current backlash against clean
energy in the U.S.
Plus, I always love a bit on e-bikes; not only fun, but an excellent way to get around without burning things:
E-biking—best thought of as biking without hills—may prove
to be an even more important innovation. The e-bike is
almost unbelievably efficient: to fully charge a
five-hundred-watt e-bike costs, on average, about eight
cents. That charge provides some thirty miles of range, so
it costs about a penny to ride five miles.
Tons of facts here that indisputably illustrate how the transformation of global energy that is not only under way, but accelerating:
The United Kingdom—where, after all, fossil fuel really
began—now has so much wind power that in 2024 its carbon
emissions fell below what they were in 1879
Worth a read. Let’s see if the optimism I felt while reading it is still there in five years.
Sarah Fortune, a professor and the chair of the
department of immunology and infectious diseases at
Harvard’s school of public health, is among the world’s
leading experts on tuberculosis, the No. 1 infectious
cause of death globally. She had a sixty-million-dollar
N.I.H. award for a seven-year moon-shot effort to unravel
exactly how tuberculosis makes people sick, in order to
find ways to better control the disease. It is now the
beginning of the fifth year of the contract, which has
supported work involving some sixty people across
fourteen institutions—including Case Western Reserve
University, in Ohio, the University of Pittsburgh, the
University of Colorado, and clinical sites in South
Africa and Uganda. That work—in humans, animals, and
machine-learning models—had already revealed a pathway to
a truly protective vaccine against T.B., which was
previously believed impossible. The team had been
conducting testing in macaques of an injectable vaccine
developed by researchers at Boston Children’s
Hospital.
But, on Tuesday morning, Fortune had received
an e-mail with a letter from the N.I.H. ordering her to
stop her research, “effective immediately.” Virtually all
spending was halted. This was reminiscent of the
stop-work orders and terminations at U.S.A.I.D., which
ended more than eighty per cent of the agency’s programs
and led to layoffs for some two hundred thousand people
in the U.S. and around the world. These programs and
people had saved lives by the millions. The indifference
to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is
most horrifying.
In the pediatrics ward, a cramped space that had cartoon
characters painted on the walls, a nine-year-old named
Mariam cried softly as another of my colleagues examined
her. Her hair was neatly braided and tied with a yellow
scrunchie. Mariam had lost an arm to amputation after an
air strike, and shrapnel had slashed a hole between her
bladder and her rectum. She had already undergone five
surgeries. On a bed next to her lay a three-year-old boy,
who had needed surgery after he was injured in an air
strike; his five-year-old brother was killed in the
attack. The boy was suffering from an infected surgical
wound. “It just doesn’t feel real,” Saleem told me later.
“How can something so horrible be real?”
…
Israeli forces have now dropped more explosives in Gaza
than fell on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined during
the Second World War. More than fifty thousand
Palestinians have been killed.
…
I asked the paramedics what was hardest about this work.
Responding to an air strike and discovering that it’s your
own family, one said. Recovering the bodies of children,
another said. He paused, then added, “It is strange that
the world has allowed this to happen to us.”
The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.
According to investigator Walter F. White of the NAACP,
Mary Turner was tied and hung upside down by the ankles,
her clothes soaked with gasoline, and burned from her
body. Her belly was slit open with a knife like those used
“in splitting hogs.” Her “unborn babe” fell to the ground
and gave “two feeble cries.” Its head was crushed by a
member of the mob with his heel to hide any evidence of
what had happened, the crowd then shot hundreds of bullets
into Turner’s body. Mary Turner was cut down and buried
with her child near the tree, with a whiskey bottle
marking the grave. The Atlanta Constitution published an
article with the subheadline: “Fury of the People Is
Unrestrained.”
The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.
A large group of people feels one way, while a small
group with a disproportionate amount of structural power
tells them they are wrong to feel it. This is
particularly true for college students around the
country. Their Instagram feeds are full of eviscerated
children, but their passionate protest—the real-world
application of everything their liberal, humanistic
education was supposed to impart—has made them criminal,
first in the eyes of their school administrators, and now
to their government. The tactics of the protest movements
they read about in their textbooks comprise illegal acts.
Mykala’s Branches - show announcement in the newspaper! I ran to the library to see if I could find this, and I was SOEXCITED to see it there. From there, I raced to the last remaining newsstands in Woodbury (Kowalski’s and Lunds) to buy up the day’s papers. SO fun to have this.
