Allegiance to nature while living in a techno-region: A health care directive by Katie Singer, May 2022. After decades of wondering how to live within my financial and ecological means, I’ve started asking how/can I die within my means (in this culture)? www.OurWeb.tech/letter-39
E-vehicles’ un-sustainability
“Globally, the number of electric vehicles is expected to swell from 7 million to 400 million by 2040. The transition to zero-emission cars is estimated to add 2,000 TWh to annual energy demand by 2050—a 40% increase—according to a study by global advisory group ICF.… Stanford researchers developed a model framework to help utilities calculate charging patterns—and manage electricity demand. In California, it found that peak charging demand would more than double by 2030 if EV owners opted to charge in the evening at home.
Boston Consulting Group’s study estimated that utilities with two to three million customers will need to invest between $1,700 and $5,800 in grid upgrades per EV through 2030 in order to reliably meet the surge in energy demand.” https://www.aol.com/finance/californias-electrical-grid-ev-problem-101718033.html
Meanwhile, John Deere is re-designing agriculture (to increase extractions and energy use to manufacture and sell new tractors? to increase the agriculture industry’s dependence on mobile access networks?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzl3wkkKtoA
Space-based tourism and Internet thrive (despite their ecological impacts) Researchers estimated that the single Falcon 9 rocket (for space tourism) produced around 116 metric tons of carbon dioxide in the first 165 seconds of its journey, an amount equivalent to that emitted by about 69 cars over an entire year [in the UK]. To repeat: 69 car years of driving versus 165 seconds of rocket flight… For each kilometer climbed by the rocket at the highest altitudes examined, the simulated Falcon 9 sent out a mass of CO2 equal to 26 times the amount already present in one cubic kilometer of the mesosphere.
“At the same time, the rocket shot out similar amounts of carbon monoxide and water vapor, which are typically only present in the mesosphere in trace amounts. And then there are the dreaded nitrogen oxides (NOx). On top of being bad-to-breathe pollutants that can trigger respiratory diseases, these gases also degrade our atmosphere’s critical ozone layer. In the first 70 seconds of the studied launch, the SpaceX rocket produced an estimated one metric ton of NOx, equivalent to about 1,400-cars-worth of annual emissions.”
Question: How do rockets that launch space-based Internet satellites compare?
See: Lauren Leffer, “Rocket Launches Could Be Polluting Our Atmosphere in New and Unexpected Ways: Rocket exhaust could have a ‘significant cumulative effect’ on the atmosphere, the climate and human health,” May 19, 2022. https://gizmodo.com/rockets-launches-pollution-exhaust-emissions-spacex-1848936443 Magdalena Petrova, “Amazon has bold ambitions to take on SpaceX in the satellite internet business,” May 1, 2022.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/01/amazon-takes-on-spacex-in-the-satellite-internet-with-project-kuiper.html
In 2010, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively owned one long-distance cable. By 2024, they will own all or portions of more than 30. “Sea Change: Google and Meta’s new subsea cables mark a tectonic shift in how the internet works and who controls it,” by Andrew Blum and Carey Baraka, 10 May 2022. N.B., publisher Rest of World is funded by Google’s Eric Schmidt. https://restofworld.org/2022/google-meta-underwater-cables/
How/does this impact Canada’s plan to ban Huawei and ZTE (Chinese vendors) from deploying 5G because of security issues?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/canada/canada-to-ban-china-s-huawei-technologies-from-5g-networks-sources-say/ar-AAXul7y
Preferring the truth to illusions of helping the environment Tish O’Dell, from Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), “Some things never change, but we better start!” https://celdf.org/2022/04/some-things-never-change-but-we-better-start/
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