Thighs of Doom

TL:DR is that while it’s not entirely true that renewables are without geopolitical issues (we may not invade but we certainly exploit), the key difference in my mind is that renewable energy has room to innovate away from exploitation and fossil fuels does not.

So yes, oil, very bad geopolitically and also environmentally. “Green” energy also has this problem to a smaller degree because it’s not yet on the same scale as fossil fuels, and it doesn’t contribute at the consumer end to the climate crisis to the degree that fossil fuels do.

(Holy shit they’re called fossil fuels because they’re extracted from fossils. I’m sorry, my brain is clearly having a moment.)

Anyway main green energy makers; Wind and Solar. They both require an amount of rare earth metals to function. At the scale of fossil fuels, we would be trading carbon output for environmental degradation. These metals are mined mainly in China and central Africa at this time. There are little to no safety regulations and I guarantee you there is a not insignificant amount of child labor occurring. There is also a push to find alternative sources in the deep sea. Mining in the deep sea presents an extreme risk to climate stability. We don’t know enough about the biogeochemical ocean cycles to know the consequences, but filling the water column with ocean dust will disturb the carbon sink that is ocean floor sediment and disrupt fish that grow/reproduce/live on the ocean floor and in the water column.

(I must interject, the ocean floor is not just sand or something. It’s is the old growth forest of the sea, except the scale is likely older than trees. The amount of carbon sequestered is enormous and it is full of microbes. And the life cycles down there are slow and delicate. Coral growth is measured in centimeters per year, and that’s the speedier ones.)

But. I have a point I promise. But. Fossil fuels have no innovation left. They have no incentive to innovate, but the best they could do (I presume) is get you more miles per gallon. That’s it.

Meanwhile, wind and solar are young industries, but they are also ideological industries that are focused on developing energy production without increasing the human and environmental costs (in terms of its PR, they have a consumer base that holds them to account,) which means they are encouraged to innovate. And they do so, regularly. A great book I read called The Brilliant Abyss by Helen Scales discusses the risks of deep sea exploitation for green energy and how the geopolitical climate can impact access to rare earth metals. So what do we do?

From the book: a Denmark based consortium is developing a wind turbine that uses a superconductor and completed successful field tests in 2019. It uses 2 pounds of rare earth metals (gadolinium) compared to the current 1 ton of neodymium.

The most popular and currently cost efficient solar panels use silver. A second generation model uses tellurium, both are rare earths and expensive. However, people have been developing solar using perovskites. At the time in 2019, they need to be upscaled and made more stable, but they are an accessible metal.

Batteries currently require a lot of cobalt, which is mostly mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Solid state batteries, iron cathodes, hydrogen fuel cells, are all developing or existing alternatives to cobalt cathodes.

And that book’s copyright is 2021. So yes, green energy still has an amount of geopolitical consequences. Rare earths are a huge factor. But fossil fuels have crude oil and that’s it. There is no other, less bad oil, just the one.

This movie feels like the spiraling of hope into despair. The rage is only a product of dashed hope. At the very end she is called insane. She responds ‘I honestly don’t think I am.’ Her actions are the logical conclusion of women denied justice, of being treated as sub human, as being not worth as much as a man.

That line hit me hard, it is an echo of a feeling I have all the time. A combination of righteous rage mixed with the despair of constant disappointment. All she wanted for the whole movie was for the people who harmed her friend to remember her name, to take responsibility for the damage they did, to express remorse. And all but one person could not do it. Only one person.

This movie is clearly meant to be a mirror. It’s meant to show reflections of ourselves and our society and I think a lot of people don’t like this movie because they’re very uncomfortable where they’re reflected. Some people have watched this film and said the same things characters say. ‘We were kids’ I have to give him the benefit of the doubt’ ‘She was drunk’ ‘I’m a nice guy’ ‘Get over it’ ‘She’s asking for it’

One of my current band favorites is falling into this. Mannequin Pussy’s lead singer has stated that the pervasive online censorship is likely going to cause the death of her band. I don’t have a tiktok, but apparently if you search for Mannequin Pussy you get nothing. You can, again apparently, search for mannequin dick and get results. So now the censorship reinforces sexism in language, and also actively harms musicians. I don’t want Mannequin Pussy to change their name. I want the world to put on its big girl pants. If you don’t like the word fuck then don’t fucking say it, but do not for a second think you can take my swears and vulgarity away from me.

midnight rhythm