Squeezed by data centers' relentless demand for electricity, a Nevada energy company just said it's going to stop supplying energy to Tahoe. The city has a year to figure out how to meet 75% of its energy needs without it.
Incredible that a lot of governments haven’t started it already
Without real public power (which is not the same as mass consumer ownership) we will keep reproducing similar disappointing outcomes.
In California, fire and heat blackouts have been a motivator to go solar with backup batteries (solar alone doesn’t provide backup power), but that is expensive, most would need to finance it. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how this disintegrates further into haves and have nots.
Basing a transition to solar on private property ownership or financing solar or green improvements borrowing against your home has a terrible track record. See for instance the doomed PACE program in LA county that resulted in some people losing their homes: www.latimes.com/california/s...
Oil shock will cause suffering around the world. But even in ‘wealthy’ but highly unequal US, the approach to residential solar was based on individual debit and at times outrageous predatory lending. @alanasemuels.bsky.social did great reporting on this back in 2023. time.com/6317339/roof...
Unsurprisingly, those with the capital to buy solar up front vs leasing solar had better returns, along the familiar lines of racial and economic inequality in the US. Financing not good deal. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Anxious and angry about forever wars over energy? Want to do something to make a better world happen sooner? i have good news.
Electricity is the backbone for everything in our future, and you can do something now. Instead of feeling hopeless, you can join in with others to change everything.
I have a short piece in this MERIP collection of essays on the war on Iran and across the region. Some great interventions covering a lot of topics: IRGC, Lebanon, GCC, geopolitics, Afghanistan, and more
Nearly one in five people in Lebanon have been forced from their homes as Israel launches new 'ground operations'
Nearly one in five people in Lebanon have been forced from their homes as Israel launches new 'ground operations' https://aje.news/3grqr2
War and technology: As broadcasting one's position via the usual technologies (GPS, AIS etc) makes a ship a target, seafarers have turned off their transponders (only 16% of all vessels in the Gulf have their transponders on) and are reverting to navigation by "traditional" methods.
This is so good and key. And another good reminder of why we need to push for rights to housing instead of "access" to real estate. Sobering number in this report is that there are only 1.7 million people in public housing in the US. climatecommunityinstitute.substack.com/p/public-hou...
What a great pair of essays to see side by side and read together and share widely.
Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.
I'll add a few to this list, works of fiction. First one is by Emil Habibi, a relative of mine: www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Se...
We are living in a world shaped by California big tech fantasies, including the advent of killing robots targeting people via cell phones, and where 'freedom' is a solar power system at your house and your neighbors in the dark. lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...
You can say it was a rapid transition to solar, but one that left everyone on their own, reverse-engineering apartment buildings into individualized solar power plants, with backup diesel generators if they could find the fuel. Obviously not the "freedom" and "independence" Tesla promises.
As I watch the attacks on Lebanon from afar, a scale of destruction I never thought possible, and fear for my loved ones there, I can't help but think about how much Lebanese people struggled with total grid collapse in recent years. www.merip.org/2024/07/off-...
Tesla writes "Powerwall brings you independence and security." You can be the only one left with the lights on and be "independent" from everyone else. This is the fantasy of ultimate disconnection, freedom from obligation and reciprocity. www.tesla.com/support/ener...
Butler knew that this was always at the heart of the colonial project in California - race, technology, agriculture, forced labor, private prisons. This is what first confounded me about the ideologies around green tech. Why Tesla's ads were all about the individual home illuminated in a blackout.
In Octavia Butler's 'Parable of the Sower,' set in a dystopian Los Angeles after there is no fuel left for cars or a functioning electricity grid, people are faced with a choice: live in homemade fortified gated communities, or sell themselves to corporate agro-farms.
An utterly necessary collection of essays on the US/Israeli war on Iran, and its impact not only on Iran, but the wider region:
www.merip.org/2026/03/war-...
Much ink has been spilt on Elon Musk as an individual personality rather than as a product of political economy. On 28 October listen to Quinn Slobodian propose a theory of Muskism analogous to Fordism. For details and to register go to www.exeter.ac.uk/events/detai...
this has been one of my central arguments the past ten years. the theory underpinning the anti-democratic elements of the american constitutional order is wrong!
Really hits home how the only way the Left can deliver a massive public goods agenda is through power at the Federal level. 🫤
Sadly the US govt and state of California has underwritten Tesla. So I guess all of us have paid him out of our tax dollars.
If 1000 billion dollars for a single human beings work really makes you think about the labor theory of economic value AND the madness of economic reason...
the Pope:
