Greta Boycotting COP27

Greta Thunberg is boycotting the upcoming COP27 meeting in Egypt. She explains why in this video clip:

https://youtube.com/shorts/rFNxtSllzOw?feature=share

COP27 is from from 6 November to 18 November.

US Energy Consumption Flat Since 2000

Interestingly, US energy consumption is essentially flat since the year 2000, between 100 to 105 exajoules (1 EJ = 10¹⁸ J). Even though population is increasing, per capita energy consumption is decreasing, from 12,900 watts in 1973 to 9,900 W in 2021.

Source: EIA

Charts - "Code Red" on Planet Earth

We are now at “code red” on planet Earth. Humanity is unequivocally facing a climate emergency. The scale of untold human suffering, already immense, is rapidly growing with the escalating number of climate-related disasters. Therefore, we urge scientists, citizens, and world leaders to read this Special Report and quickly take the necessary actions to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

This week a group of a dozen scientists published "World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2022" in the journal BioScience, led by two scientists at Oregon State University, William J. Ripple and Christopher Wolf. It's open access, so I won't discuss it in depth (news & video), but I wanted to publish this interesting set of 16 graphs of time series of "climate-related responses."

I recently broke my left little finger and my hand & arm are in a cast, and Windows speech-to-text function is iffy, so I'm not going to write more than this. But it's interesting to have all these data in one place.

Money Supply Increase Under Trump, Not Biden

Conservatives like Ross Douthat complain that Biden ran up the money supply, causing inflation, but in fact the huge increase occurred under Trump, not Biden:

This is the M2 money supply relative to GDP, which is of course the correct comparison.

If the increase in M2 caused any inflation, it occurred during Trump's administration, not Biden's.

Blast from the Past

Remember these? Information used to be precious. Imagine not having the 1981 population of Bulgaria at your fingertips....

For some reason I've been carrying this around for 19 years. That ends today, but I always feel a little guilty about throwing away a book.