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Katie Singer writes about nature and technology in Letters to Greta. She spoke about the Internet's footprint in 2018, at the United Nations' Forum on Science, Technology & Innovation, and, in 2019, on a panel with the climatologist Dr. James Hansen. Her most recent book is An Electronic Silent Spring. www.DearGreta.com and www.ElectronicSilentSpring.com.
OpEd News Member for 540 week(s) and 1 day(s)
194 Articles, 8 Quick Links, 27 Comments, 2 Diaries, 2 Series, 0 Polls
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Tuesday, March 11, 2025Call Me a Localist While radical, daily policy changes make the whole world precarious, I wonder how to keep healthy and survive""how to sleep well every night, have a good bowel movement every day and keep peace between my ears. As much as possible, I figure we've got to keep local.
Tuesday, March 4, 2025Remembering Arthur Firstenberg: May 28, 1950 - February 25, 2025 For nearly 50 years, Arthur Firstenberg lived with awareness of technology's harms. May he rest in peace.
Friday, February 21, 2025A Tale of Two Counties & Two Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) On January 16, 2025, Vistra Corporation's battery energy storage system (with a 4,000-megawatt-hour capacity, possibly the world's largest BESS) in Moss Landing, California, 70 miles from San Francisco, caught fire for the fourth time in three years. This time, eighty percent of the system's lithium-ion batteries went up in toxic smoke.
Friday, February 14, 2025Images from the techno-sphere In his recent substack, "The Cost of a Battery," Max Wilbert posted Frank Forencich's Spring, 2021 photograph of Thacker Pass, Nevada-- and an "after mining" image that Forencich created with photoshop.
Tuesday, February 4, 2025Questions for commissioners voting on a proposed battery-energy storage system (BESS) To reduce fossil-fuel use, corporations now commonly propose installing large-scale solar PV or wind facilities with backup battery-energy storage (BESS). Corporations call these facilities "green", "clean", "sustainable", "renewable" and/or "zero-emitting". These are marketing terms.
Monday, January 20, 2025Questioning lithium-ion batteries, fire risks & hydrating dry regions While finishing this Substack, I learned about the explosive fire that started January 16, 2025 at Moss Landing, California's Vistra Power Plant, the world's largest battery energy storage facility, housing tens of thousands of lithium-ion batteries.
Thursday, January 9, 2025What the world needs now is directions for reducing our dependence on technology Last month, Geoffrey Hinton, godfather of artificial intelligence (A.I.), winner of the 2024 Noble Prize in physics, warned that there's now a 10% to 20% risk of A.I. wiping out humanity within 30 years.
Friday, December 27, 2024The Whole Elephant: The Best of 2024 When I read about households or communities that claim to reduce their ecological footprint by using solar PVs, industrial wind turbines, batteries and/or e-vehicles, I fret and sigh. Calling these technologies "green" is like weighing an elephant by the tip of its tail.
Thursday, December 19, 2024It's just before midnight--and I need skills To locate humanity's place in the world, the late David Brower, father of the modern environmental movement, called the Earth's four and a half billion years a six-day week, with each day representing about 750 million years.
Thursday, December 5, 2024Skillset #2 for A Brave New World: Know Your Bioregion Inspired by the 1981 Bioregional Quiz developed by Leonard Charles, Jim Dodge, Lynn Milliman and Victoria Stockley 1. From where you read this quiz, which way is north?
Wednesday, November 27, 2024Skill #1 for a Brave New World landscape and the natural world. Looking ahead, we see a need to reform the relationship""but find it hard to know just how we might alter our direction, shift our momentum, adjust our speed. We seek a more careful "meshing" of social and natural systems, but we have no sure map to guide us. ""Conservation biologist Curt Meine, "Inherit the Grid," 1997
Friday, November 1, 2024Before, during and after Election '24 If a candidate you don't respect wins, could you name one benefit to their winning?
Friday, October 18, 2024Inspiration & Education Check out Julia Barnes' extraordinary watercolors of marine creatures. The Canadian filmmaker's documentaries are The Sea of Life and Bright Green Lies.
Thursday, October 10, 2024A recipe for respecting nature and technology's limits-- and another for exploiting them 1. Abide by Herman Daly's principles: Do not take from Earth faster than it can replenish, and do not waste faster than Earth can absorb the waste.
Sunday, September 8, 2024The Great Salt Lake is Disappearing. So, Utah Banned the Rights of Nature. A guest essay by Will Falk For 11,000 years, The Great Salt Lake and its wetlands have provided habitat for hundreds of species. Today, more than 40 million people in the U.S. and Canada depend on the Lake's water. Nearly 350 bird species-- totaling more than 10 million migratory birds-- depend on this ecosystem for food like brine flies and brine shrimp.
Sunday, September 8, 2024Fire hazards at the battery storage system coming near you On Friday, August 30, Applied Energy Services Corporation (AES), a global utility and power-generation company, submitted a proposal to Santa Fe, New Mexico county commissioners to build a 700-acre solar facility with a battery energy-storage system (BESS).
Wednesday, September 4, 202421 questions for solar PV explorers Today's post is inspired by Bill McKibben's speaking in Santa Fe for the second time in less than a year. In 2023, he advised people not to be a "NIMBY" when corporations propose installing large-scale solar or wind facilities. Alas. I've still got questions about these systems...
Sunday, September 1, 2024Three questions for Israelis and U.S. Americans (weapon-suppliers): Do you know the Jewish law that forbids warriors from trapping an enemy--because trapping endangers the trap-maker?
Saturday, August 31, 2024A Strategy of Peace President Kennedy's extraordinary June 10, 1963 Speech at American University.
Thursday, August 22, 2024Calming behavior in children with autism and ADD: a free, EMR-reduction protocol In 2006, a two-year-old with delayed speech, high-pitched screaming and anxious behavior visited California pediatrician Dr. Toril Jelter's office with his parents.
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