Climate crisis

There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic. Nvidia's Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down 15kW of power. That's 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that's 1,875 watts per GPU.

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Worse still, Huang said that in the future, he expects to see millions of these kinds of AI processors in use at data centers around the world.

One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.

Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that's natural gas, coal, or oil, produce even less. There's no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting sources.

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In one segment of the keynote, Huang talked about the potential for Nvidia ACE to power 'digital humans' that companies can use to serve as customer service agents, be the face of an interior design project, and more. This makes absolute sense, since who are we kidding, Nvidia ACE for video games won't really make all that much money.

However, if a company wants to fire 90% of its customer service staff and replace it with an Nvidia ACE-powered avatar that never sleeps, never eats, never complains about low pay or poor working conditions, and can be licensed for a fee that is lower than the cost of the labor it is replacing, well, I don't have to tell you how that is going to go.

We once heard a story from a driver in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia who was annoyed that a cyclist was slowing him down. Do you know what he said? “You’re not saving the environment, buddy.” This was interesting. The assumption was that if you’re on a bike trying to get somewhere you must be doing it for environmental reasons, probably in an annoyingly self-righteous way. But what if it was just a convenient way to get to work without having to worry about parking? What if it was how he spends time with his kids? What if he just enjoys the fresh air and activity? What if he sold a car in order to save money for other priorities? What if he just finds driving unpleasant? None of this occurred to the driver. The assumption was that the cyclist was there on a bike slowing them down for environmental reasons, probably climate change in particular.

Young children, older adults and homeless people are especially at risk for contact burns, which can occur in seconds when skin touches a surface of 180 degrees Fahrenheit (82 C).

Since the beginning of June, 50 people have been hospitalized with such burns, and four have died at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix, which operates the Southwest’s largest burn center, serving patients from Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Southern California and Texas, according to its director, Dr. Kevin Foster. About 80% were injured in metro Phoenix.

Last year, the center admitted 136 patients for surface burns from June through August, up from 85 during the same period in 2022, Foster said. Fourteen died. One out of five were homeless.

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Thermal injuries were among the main or contributing causes of last year’s 645 heat-related deaths in Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix.

One victim was an 82-year-old woman with dementia and heart disease admitted to a suburban Phoenix hospital after being found on the scorching pavement on an August day that hit 106 degrees (41.1 C).

With a body temperature of 105 degrees (40.5 C) the woman was rushed to the hospital with second-degree burns on her back and right side, covering 8% of her body. She died three days later.

A multibillion-dollar slate of moderate climate-mitigation measures in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has been met so far with general public approval. But a broader reaction to the historic federal action underlies the discourse: What took you so long?

A survey-based study published on Tuesday suggests that a shared delusion among nearly all Americans could contribute to the long delay in significant federal climate policy. Despite polls showing widespread concern about climate change and majority support for policies to mitigate it, the new study shows that Americans almost universally underestimate the extent of climate concern among their compatriots. They also underestimate the extent of public support—at the state and national level alike—for policy measures to address the climate emergency.

Distorted beliefs about support for climate policy, and about concerns over climate change in general, are so commonly held among the more than 6,000 American adults in the researchers’ nationally representative sample that the study’s authors call these misperceptions a “false social reality.” Recent polls from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that 66 to 80 percent of people in the U.S. support major climate mitigation policies. But participants in the new study estimated that only between 37 and 43 percent do so. A range of 80 to 90 percent of those polled by the researchers underestimated the U.S. population’s climate concern and support for major climate mitigation policies.

Earlier versions of these new imported vapes, exemplified by Elf Bar, are beefier and more colorful than Juuls, and are usually single use, despite containing rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Wired describes a new generation of mostly disposable vapes that, in addition to being extremely cheap and wildly potent, let vapers play games on tiny touchscreens and track their vape’s location on devices that cost as little as $5 apiece. The devices are a grotesque example of electronic waste, viral marketing, and the easily exploitable idiosyncrasies of cross-border commerce in 2024.

But they’re also an example of a bigger trend that’s been gaining momentum for years. If you’ve spent much time on the internet’s burgeoning discount-retail platforms — Temu, TikTok Shop, and Wish, to name a few — disposable vapes with screens and logic boards sound almost reasonable. On Temu, for example, some of the top-selling items in the electronics category are Bluetooth earbuds with touchscreens built in to the case with interfaces of extremely dubious value that can be used to control playback, show screensavers, or just fidget, some of which cost less than $10. There are $4 USB cables with built-in screens to tell you how fast you’re charging; $7 cigarette lighters covered in LED lights and displays; USB hubs that double as external displays; $65 dressers with touchscreens; $48 toasters with software interfaces; $16 rechargeable neck coolers with LED readouts; hundred-dollar motorcycle backpacks with two LCD screens; $18 school backpacks with voice-activated flashing displays.

In short, although policies to improve broadband access are important, policies that help ensure the availability of low-cost devices are also essential.

But advocates of digital equity are not the only constituent groups concerned with the supply and accessibility of computing devices. Environmental and labor rights activists advocate for policies that extend the lifecycle of existing devices, which can help to minimize e-waste and protect the viability of the repair and refurbishing labor markets, respectively. Making computer repair cheaper and bolstering secondhand and refurbishing markets better ensures that low-income consumers can afford to maintain the devices they already own and that they can purchase devices as needed (Fosdick, 2012; Islam et al., 2021). Extending the life of a device through repair is often a more affordable choice than purchasing a brand-new device (Svensson-Hoglund et al., 2021). Furthermore, optimizing the lifecycle of existing devices helps exert market pressures on manufacturer's pricing of new devices, helping to keep down the cost of brand new devices (Islam et al., 2021; Leclerc & Badami, 2020). Thus, policies championed to reduce e-waste and protect the right-to-repair (R2R) can also enhance digital equity.

Policies that have mutually beneficial outcomes for different sectors have been described as multisolving innovations (Dearing & Lapinski, 2020). Multisolving innovations can broaden the coalition of activists in support of a given policy issue and can be strategically framed to appeal to constituent bases that might otherwise be disinterested or even antagonistic (e.g., framing environmental policies around health outcomes to appeal to conservatives) to an issue.

Gah! You don't fix a food shortage with interest rates!

A third of the food price increases in the UK in 2023 was down to climate change, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think-tank.

“There’s a material impact from climate change on global food prices,” says Frederic Neumann, chief Asia economist at HSBC. “It’s easy to shrug off individual events as being isolated, but we’ve just seen such a sequence of abnormal events and disruptions that, of course, add up to climate change impact.”

Such repeated events result in “a permanent impact on the ability to supply food,” argues Neumann. Food price rises once considered temporary are becoming a source of persistent inflationary pressure.

Globally, annual food inflation rates could rise by up to 3.2 percentage points per year within the next decade or so as a result of higher temperatures, according to a recent study by the European Central Bank and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. 

But the only long-term solution is that Europe needs to phase out fossil fuels and increase renewable energy production. And to do this fast enough to meet existing climate commitments it is necessary to reduce excess energy demand. Achieving this in a just and equitable way requires two things: first, reducing the purchasing power of the rich (who use extremely high levels of energy), and second, ensuring that everyone has guaranteed access to the essential goods and services they need to live a good life. 

This forces us to confront a paradox at the heart of our economic system. Wealthy economies have high levels of production, with resource and energy use vastly exceeding sustainable boundaries, but they still fail to meet many basic human needs. This occurs because, under capitalism, the goal of production is not to improve well-being or achieve social progress, but to maximise and accumulate corporate profit. So we get plenty of SUVs, fast fashion and planned obsolescence, but chronic shortages of essential goods and services like public transit, affordable housing and universal healthcare.

Ecological economists argue that one of the best ways to deal with this problem is to establish universal public services. Public services mobilise production around human needs and well-being, and can deliver strong social outcomes with lower levels of resource and energy use. It also enables a more rapid, coordinated shift to more sustainable systems. By decommodifying and democratising key sectors such as food, mobility and housing, we can solve the cost-of-living crisis – by directly reducing prices – and help solve the climate crisis at the same time. This requires reversing the current tendency of neoliberal governments to defund and dismantle public services, which has led to the extraordinary crisis that is presently engulfing the NHS and the railways in the UK.

Clearly co-written by the gas sector, the document even freely admits world destroying temperature increases of 2.5 degrees are on the cards. Which, to be fair, is important because that’s what the policy is entirely consistent with.

The strategy runs to more than 230 pages, but the upshot is the handful of mostly foreign fossil fuel giants that have for decades been robbing our nation blind have been given the official greenlight to continue doing so indefinitely — “to 2050 and beyond”, no less.

Released under resources minister Madeleine King it opens the nation up to wholesale new gas fields. That’s despite the International Energy Agency (and many others) repeatedly warning new oil and gas projects are incompatible with keeping global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees.

At this juncture it’s worth remembering that every single resources minister of the past 20 years has gone on to work for fossil fuels companies. 

Developing social workers’ capacity and engagement in collaborative community-based innovations to climate-driven and other environmental hazards better ensures progress on the Grand Challenges. Such inclusive solutions value community leadership and are culturally responsive and justice-centered. Multisolving, pioneered by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, offers a framework to pair social work goals from the Grand Challenges with climate-responsive interdisciplinary solutions by tackling multiple problems simultaneously with a single investment of resources. Exploring multisolving case studies that align closely with the Grand Challenge to create social responses to a changing environment, the authors consider collaborations and share experiences teaching courses and workshops that integrate multisolving into the social work curriculum and align with professional ethics to achieve these goals.