[Plura-list] Electrons, not molecules
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Wed Mar 6 09:41:05 EST 2024
Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/06/exxonknew/
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At long last, the San Francisco stop of the book tour for my new novel "The Bezzle" has been finalized: I'll be at the San Francisco Public Library Main Branch on Wednesday, March 13th, in conversation with Robin Sloan!
https://sfpl.org/events/2024/03/13/author-cory-doctrow-bezzle
Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle:
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/cory-doctorow-novel-collection-tor-books-books
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Today's links
* Electrons, not molecules: Renewables don't generate above-average returns for Exxon's shareholders.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023
* Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
* Recent appearances: Podcasts, events and more.
* Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Colophon: All the rest.
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🏏 Electrons, not molecules
When hydrocarbon barons do their damndest to torch the Earth with fossil fuels, they call *us* dreamers. They insist that there's a hard-nosed reality - humanity needs energy - and they're the ones who live in it, while we live in the fairy land where the world can run on sunshine and virtuous thoughts. Without them making the tough decisions, we'd all be starving in the frigid dark.
Here's the thing: they're full of shit.
Mostly.
Humanity *does* need energy if we're going to avoid starving in the frigid dark, but that energy doesn't have to come from fossil fuels. Indeed, in the long-term, it's *can't*. Even if you're a rootin' tootin, coal-rollin' climate denier, there's a hard-nosed reality you can't deny: if we keep using fossil fuels, they will someday run out. Remember "peak oil" panic? Fossil fuels are finite, and the future of the human race needn't be. We need more.
Thankfully, we have it. Despite what you may have heard, renewables are *more* than up to the task. Indeed, it's hard to overstate just how much renewable energy is available to us, here at the bottom of our gravity well. I failed to properly appreciate it until I read Deb Chachra's brilliant 2023 book, *How Infrastructure Works*:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects
Chachra, an engineering prof and materials scientist, offers a mind-altering reframing of the question of energy: we have a *material* problem, not an *energy* problem. If we could capture a mere *0.4%* of the sun's rays that strike the Earth, we could give every person on the planet the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, only colder).
Energy isn't just wildly abundant, though: it's also *continuously replenished*. For most of human history, we've treated energy as scarce, eking out marginal gains in energy efficiency - even as we treated *materials* as disposable, using them once and consigning them to a midden or a landfill. That's completely backwards. We get a fresh shipment of energy every time the sun (or the moon) comes up over the horizon. By contrast, new consignments of material are almost unheard of - the few odd ounces of meteoric ore that survive entry through Earth's atmosphere.
A soi-dissant adult concerned with the very serious business of ensuring our species isn't doomed to the freezing, starving darkness of an energy-deprived future would think about nothing save for this fact and its implications. They'd be trying to figure out how to humanely and responsibly gather the materials needed for the harvest, storage and distribution of this nearly limitless and absolutely free energy.
In other words, that Very Serious, Hard-Nosed Grown-Up should be concerned with using as few molecules as possible to harvest as many electrons as possible. They'd be working on things like turning disused coal-mines into giant gravity batteries:
https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene
Not figuring out how to dig or flush more long-dead corpses out of the Earth's mantle to feed them into a furnace. That is a profoundly unserious response to the human need for energy. It's caveman shit: "Ugh, me burn black sticky gunk, make cave warm, cough cough cough."
Enter Exxon CEO Darren Woods, whose interview with *Fortune*'s Michal Lev-Ram and editor Alan Murray contains this telling quote: "we basically focus our technology on transforming molecules and they happen to be hydrogen and carbon molecules":
https://fortune.com/2024/02/28/leadership-next-exxonmobil-ceo-darren-woods/
As Bill McKibben writes, this is a tell. A company that's in the molecule business is *not* in the electron business. For all that Woods postures about being a clear-eyed realist beating back the fantasies of solarpunk-addled greenies, Woods does *not* want a future where we have all our energy needs met:
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-most-epic-and-literal-gaslighting
That's because the only way to get that future is to shift from molecules - whose supply can be owned and therefore sold by Exxon - to electrons, which that commie bastard sun just hands out for free to every person on our planet's surface, despite the obvious moral hazard of all those free lunches. As Woods told *Fortune*, when it comes to renewables, "we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders."
Woods dresses this up in high-minded seriousness kabuki, saying that Exxon is continuing to invest in burning rotting corpses because our feckless species "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society." In other words, it's just too late for solar. Keep shoveling those corpses into the furnace, they're all that stands between you and the freezing, starving dark.
Now, this is self-serving nonsense. The problem of renewables isn't that it's too late - it's that they don't "generate above-average returns for our shareholders" (that part, however, is gospel truth).
But let's stipulate that Woods sincerely believes that it *is* too late. It's pretty goddamned rich of this genocidal, eminently guillotineable monster to just drop that in the conversation without mentioning the role his company played in getting us to this juncture. After all #ExxonKnew. 40 years ago, Exxon's internal research predicted climate change, connected climate change to its own profits, and predicted how bad it would be today.
Those predictions were spookily accurate and the company took them to heart, leaping into action. For 40 years, the company has been building its offshore drilling platforms higher and higher in anticipation of rising seas and superstorms - and over that same period, Exxon has spent millions lobbying and sowing disinformation to make sure that the rest of us don't take the emergency as seriously as they are, lest we switch from molecules to electrons.
Exxon knew, and Exxon lied. McKibben quotes Woods' predecessor Lee Raymond, speaking in the runup to the Kyoto Treaty negotiations: "It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now."
When Woods says we need to keep shoveling corpses into the furnace because we "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society," he means that his company *lied to us in order to convince us to wait too long*.
When Woods - and his fellow enemies of humanity in the C-suites of Chevron and other corpse-torching giants - was sending the arson billions to his shareholders, he held back a healthy share to fund this deceit. He colluded with the likes of Joe Manchin ("[D-POLLUTION]" -McKibben) to fill the Inflation Reduction Act with gifts for molecules. The point of fantasies like "direct air carbon-capture" is to extend the economic life of molecule businesses, by tricking us into thinking that we can keep sending billions to Exxon without suffocating in its waste-product.
These lies aren't up for debate. Back in 2021, Greenpeace tricked Exxon's top DC lobbyist Keith McCoy into thinking that he was on a Zoom call with a corporate recruiter and asked him about his work for Exxon, and McCoy spilled the beans:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew
He confessed to everything: funding fake grassroots groups and falsifying the science - he even names the senators who took his bribes. McCoy singled out Manchin for special praise, calling him "a kingmaker" and boasting about the "standing weekly calls" Exxon had with Manchin's office.
Exxon's response to this nine-minute confession was to insist that their most senior American lobbyist "wasn't involved at all in forming policy positions."
McKibben points to the forthcoming book *The Price Is Wrong*, by Brett Christophers, which explains how the neoclassical economics establishment's beloved "price signals" will continue to lead us into the furnace:
https://www.versobooks.com/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong
The crux of that book is:
> we cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing.
Nearly 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Today, we can say that it's impossible to get an oil executive to understand that humanity needs electrons, not molecules, because his shareholders' obscene wealth depends on it.
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🏏 Hey look at this
* How Comics Were Made: a Visual History of Printing Cartoons https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/glennf/how-comics-were-made
* On women’s anatomy and the power of paying attention https://going-medieval.com/2024/03/05/on-womens-anatomy-and-the-power-of-paying-attention/
* Instagram fatigue and the rise of 'Resentment Reels' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIqOLehArVw
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🏏 This day in history
#15yrsago Middle schooler wins C-SPAN prize for doc about NSA spying https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/03/middle-schoolers-win-c-span-prizes-nsa-documentaries
#10yrsago Chocolate cookie milk shots: milk tumblers made from chocolate chip cookies https://www.eater.com/2014/3/5/6269103/dominique-ansel-to-debut-milk-cookie-shots-at-sxsw
#10yrsago Make taser-proof clothing with carbon-fiber linings https://hackaday.io/project/196-homamade-carbon-tape-taser-proof-clothing
#10yrsago Why does Hollywood like dystopian LAs and utopian SFs? https://boomcalifornia.org/2014/02/27/postcards-from-the-future/
#10yrsago Why DRM’ed coffee-pods may be just the awful stupidity we need https://memex.craphound.com/2014/03/06/why-drmed-coffee-pods-may-be-just-the-awful-stupidity-we-need/
#10yrsago Complaint: WIPO director illegally collected staff DNA in order to out whistleblower https://unwatch.org/un-whistleblower-head-world-intellectual-property-agency-stole-employees-dna-samples/
#10yrsago US Embassy and Godaddy conspire to censor dissenting Mexican political site https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/03/mexican-protest-site-censored-godaddy-us-embassys-help
#10yrsago Harry Reid on the Koch Brothers’ agenda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2-cIpXIoY4
#10yrsago Rob Ford’s pitiable moment on Jimmy Kimmel https://www.joeydevilla.com/2014/03/04/rob-fords-red-faced-interview-on-jimmy-kimmel-live/
#10yrsago Video explainer: why open spectrum matters, and why you’re about to lose it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhVx-kH7RAQ
#10yrsago Feds drop link-related charges against Barrett Brownhttps://www.techdirt.com/2014/03/05/barrett-brown-tells-court-that-sharing-link-is-not-crime/ https://www.techdirt.com/2014/03/05/barrett-brown-tells-court-that-sharing-link-is-not-crime/
#5yrsago Ruminations on decades spent writing stories that run more than 1,000,000 words https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/03/lessons-learned-writing-really.html
#5yrsago A thorough defense of Modern Monetary Theory https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2019/03/05/mmt-sense-or-nonsense/
#5yrsago A brilliant, simple exercise to teach privacy fundamentals https://twitter.com/Klonick/status/1102970732890316801
#5yrsago GOP lawmaker driven mad by bill that would decriminalize children who take naked photos of themselves, delivers a frenzied rant about anal sex on legislature’s floor https://www.thestranger.com/news/2019/03/05/39511377/a-bill-decriminalizing-teen-sexting-passes-the-house-causing-republican-to-scream-about-anal-sex-on-the-floor
#5yrsago Bounty hunters and stalkers are able to track you in realtime by lying to your phone company and pretending to be cops https://www.vice.com/en/article/panvkz/stalkers-debt-collectors-bounty-hunters-impersonate-cops-phone-location-data
#5yrsago From prisons to factories to offices: the spread of workplace surveillance and monitoring tech https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/DandS_WorkplaceMonitoringandSurveillance-.pdf
#5yrsago NH GOP lawmakers mocked gun violence survivors by wearing clutchable pearl necklaces to gun control hearing https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/06/gop-lawmakers-wore-pearls-while-gun-violence-victims-testified-activists-were-outraged/
#5yrsago Omniverse CEO rejects piracy accusations, claims that he has a legit, “mind-blowing” 100-year license to stream TV on the internet https://www.lightreading.com/video-broadcast/omniverse-ceo-i-m-doing-everything-literally-by-the-book-
#1yrago Biden set to appoint mass foreclosure cheerleader to the Fed https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly
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🏏 Upcoming appearances
* Tucson Festival of Books, Mar 9/10
https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/?id=676
* The Bezzle at San Francisco Public Library, Mar 13
https://sfpl.org/events/2024/03/13/author-cory-doctrow-bezzle
* Enshittification: How the Internet Went Bad and How to Get it Back (virtual), Mar 26
https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3781006
* Wondercon Anaheim, Mar 29-31
https://www.comic-con.org/wc/
* The Bezzle at Anderson's Books (Chicago), Apr 17
https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/event/cory-doctorow-1
* Torino Biennale Tecnologia (Apr 19-21)
https://www.turismotorino.org/en/experiences/events/biennale-tecnologia
* Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (Winnipeg), May 2
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337?aff=oddtdtcreator
* Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival (May 5-11)
https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/
* Media Ecology Association keynote, Jun 6-9 (Amherst, NY)
https://media-ecology.org/convention
* American Association of Law Libraries keynote, (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/
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🏏 Recent appearances
* Is Social Media Becoming a Bit Shit? (The Briefing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPlpMd1KEw
* Radioactive (KCRL)
https://krcl.org/blog/grist-investigates-doctorow-seed/
* The enshittification of music (Music Ally)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh20fD3XXbg
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🏏 Latest books
* The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
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🏏 Upcoming books
* Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025
* Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
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🏏 Colophon
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025
* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Latest podcast:
The Majority of Censorship is Self-Censorship https://craphound.com/news/2024/02/25/the-majority-of-censorship-is-self-censorship/
This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
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"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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