things i learned

This week Greece’s electric grid ran entirely on renewable energy. And it looks like per person CO2 emissions have probably peaked.

However at the same time, the Alaska snow crab population has collapsed (although fishing methods may also have played a role).

My mental model for the climate change story is that for the foreseeable future, there’s going to be significant progress on renewable energy, decarbonization, and the like. It’s actually going to be shockingly fast. Eventually carbon removal is going to be figured out and costs will fall pretty quickly. A critical mass of people have accepted that decarbonization is a problem that has to be solved and it is technically feasible to solve it (with some innovation required along the way).

Alongside this though, a fair amount of environmental cost going to be paid and people and communities are going to suffer because of it. To a large extent, these costs are no longer preventable - the time for that was 10 years ago.

I’m not advocating for this path, but think it’s the likeliest outcome and if you suffer from climate anxiety, it will be crucial to remember that both those things things are happening at the same time.

Queen Elizabeth has reigned for an incredible 30% of US history. That is from Matt Glassman.

This is chart via Max Roser. You can argue that decarbonization isn’t happening fast enough, but it’s definitely happening.

Via Ethan Mollick, who is an excellent twitter follow,

It is our tendency to fixate on the 1st solution we come up with, preventing us from finding better ones

I’ve definitely felt the pull that comes from my first idea on how to solve a problem and how difficult it is to set it aside. Sadly the abstract doesn’t give any strategies for neutralizing the effect.

is closer in time than you think it is. From Scientific American:

In 2004 mathematical modeling and computer simulations by a group of statisticians led by Douglas Rohde, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicated that our most recent common ancestor probably lived no earlier than 1400 B.C. and possibly as recently as A.D. 55. In the time of Egypt’s Queen Nefertiti, someone from whom we are all descended was likely alive somewhere in the world.

The mechanism here, which is intuitive as soon as you understand it is that the number of branches in your family tree grows exponentially as it goes backwards. But that’s not all:

“Branches of your family tree don’t consistently diverge,” Rutherford says. Instead “they begin to loop back into each other.” As a result, many of your ancestors occupy multiple slots in your family tree. For example, “your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother might have also been your great-great-great-great-aunt,” he explains.

Some other surprising estimates from this article:

• It is estimated that everyone alive today in South America has at least some European ancestry

• It is estimated that “nearly everyone of Jewish ancestry has ancestors who were expelled from Spain beginning in 1492”

Via Max Roser