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When will you know

Google anything and you’ll see what they’re up to, with the “AI” results pushed up top. Scare quotes for reasons but really, the Google is doing a weird thing to the internet by this strategy – and they know they’re doing it.

But when will people realize it? When will they know?

Because the appearance of “AI” in expected places has already become… expected and rather commonplace. And this is what they at the Google understand well, that humans get used to stuff. However, now, you must look past these top results to find actual websites, with real information from people trying to provide it. People trying to find you – or have you find them. That’s one reason they have a site. I know, it sounds trite.

But those sites are being buried beneath these “AI” results. How concerned should you be? Should you care?

So, context: Open AI has unleashed all these free products training models like ChatGPT and several iterations you can pay for, in order to train us to use and become dependent on their products. But they need to make money. Lots of money and fast.

So we can know that, should we so choose. It’s expensive to run these things – both in financial and environmental costs, and the information they provide becomes degraded rather quickly – a thing humans still readily recognize [they call that foreshadowing in the biz].

These tech companies realize all of this, plus the fact that the media does all of their PR for free. And yet they are still burning through cash, mostly, it seems, on the vibes that people aren’t noticing the sixth finger or the clunky syntax, will grudgingly embrace accept most of it with a kind of dull fascination.

Are you overwhelmed? Is it all so little that it seems too much? What if there was a way to sharpen your fascination instead?

 

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Word games

As puzzling as it seems [to me], maybe this is what the Times is ultimately after – a smash up of word games and news where terms are need to be replaced to convey meaning?

Example 1.  “While we recognize the US’ significant economic and financial strengths, we believe these no longer fully counterbalance the decline in fiscal metrics,” Moody’s Ratings in a statement as it downgraded the US thanks to government debt that’s approaching  $37 trillion. Hmm. Fiscal responsibility, but whose? A different kind of non-puzzle, but Points to Ponder. Keep playing to access the new clarity level.

You can’t win if you don’t play.

Example 2. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will scale back on the number of recreational sites at Lake Lanier that will be temporarily closed due to the USACE’s current staffing levels.

Who are these so-called engineers, and to whom do they answer? Current staffing levels has to be a clue. Who does what and for why bleeds into a little bit of everything and it might take some blurred vision to see the outlines of causes and effects of such downgrades and closures. So it’s a good thing you can’t afford those new glasses, see?

And isn’t this fun already?

 

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Prosperity Gospel Vamp

As mentioned many times, including public fora, sustainability is a vanishingly low bar. Just transfer the concept to say, friendship, and try to be whelmed at all.

Accordingly, this discussion about ‘everything-bagel-liberalism’ as a stymie to de-carbonization and other incursions into societal progress looks a bit pekid when corporate interests and provincial politicians are allowed the posture of disinterested bystanders:

Green-energy developers will tell you that among the biggest obstacles to new solar or wind projects online are 1) intransigence by gas-dominated utilities that make it practically impossible for renewable developments — which are less profitable for utilities than fossil-fuel infrastructure — to interconnect with the grid, and 2) campaigns by oil-and-gas front groups that work to gin up opposition to clean energy with deceptive claims like “wind turbines kill whales” and “solar panels cause cancer.”

We could pass all the federal permitting reforms Klein and Thompson could dream of, but if powerful fossil-fuel interests continue to call the political shots, we’ll never achieve the clean energy build-out we desperately need.

Similarly, when it comes to the scarcity of affordable housing, Abundance primarily blames zoning laws for constraining supply and driving up prices.

So much of the discourse on sustainable solutions reaches for just-in-time incrementalism that never can be, and only serve to preserve the status quo when radical change is required. Just like prosperity preachers, Abundance liberals need all of the attention for which they clamor. The best of among of them, like those cited here, even move us to consider why their arguments achieve such lift-off velocity in major media. Kudos – it’s a gift. Look askance and ponder.

 

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Phosphorus edition

The Devil’s Element is a tale of folly, waste, greed, and excess, which Egan unspools with a light touch and a brisk pace. He opens the book with a police foot chase; the unfortunate suspect is eventually fished out of an algae-choked canal and hospitalized in Cape Coral, Florida. In its final pages he describes a pilot project to capture phosphorus from the pee of residents of Brattleboro, Vermont, and its use of an educational video featuring a talking drop of urine named Uri Nation. Along the way we meet Hennig Brand, an alchemist who first succeeded in isolating pure phosphorus from urine in 1669 while searching for the philosopher’s stone, the mythical substance that could turn lead to gold. Others quickly discovered that while the waxy, glowing stuff did not produce gold, it was poisonous, extremely unstable as a solid at room temperature, and prone to exploding. These properties earned it the moniker “the Devil’s element,” which in turn presaged its other modern application as an ingredient in some of the most horrendous weapons that humans use on one another. (Egan writes about a German beachcomber whose leg began to melt and char after a small orange rock he had collected exploded in his pants—a pebble-size legacy of the Allied firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 washed up on a Baltic shore.)

At the outset of the Industrial Revolution many nation-states figured out that they couldn’t feed their fast-growing populations without finding a lot more phosphorus than was available from manure and crop residues and naturally occurring in soils. Egan gives a grim global tour of the various predatory lengths to which imperial powers and modern multinational firms have gone to secure phosphorus. Soon after the Battle of Waterloo the British dug up their own fallen soldiers’ phosphorus-rich bones, shipped them home, then heated and ground them up as fertilizer to grow food for the living. In the middle of the nineteenth century, European and American farmers became reliant on imports of guano (bird poop) strip-mined from Peruvian islands by indentured Chinese laborers. When those reserves were exhausted in the 1890s, they turned elsewhere. Thus began the century-long ordeal of the Banaba Islanders, displaced from their Pacific homeland by the voracious English-owned, Australia-based Pacific Phosphate Company. After a company agent discovered vast reserves of phosphorus-laden rock on Banaba one day in 1900, the firm’s miners carved up the island chunk by chunk. The rocks were carried by conveyor belt to ships that ferried them onward to fertilize fields around the world. Banaba’s destruction helped Australia and New Zealand boost the productivity of their soils and become wealthy agricultural exporters. After the late 1970s Banaba’s phosphate reserves were largely depleted—by that point, mining firms had stripped 90 percent of the island’s land surface and removed 22 million tons of material. In the process, they also ruined many of the sacred caves where the islanders had collected water to survive periods of drought.

From Planet Ooze by Jonathan Mingle in the April 10, 2025 issue of the New York Review of Books

As always, support and invest in physical media. Subscribe to print journalism, buy books and records, experience the thrill.

Image: Decades of phosphate mining has left the surface of Banaba Island a moonscape of coral pinnacles. Photo by Janice Cantieri. National Geographic

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The costs of economic illiteracy

Discussions around financial literacy abound – and slosh over into the role (and track record) of journalism schools NOT teaching reporters how to educate the public. Or that it’s part of their job, to research a story sufficiently to inform and educate. Which is why we get a vibes election about inflation and the price of eggs. See? Sloshy.

En tout cas,  the Financial Times takes a run at efforts in Finlandia to learn-up their young charges with super-positive reinforcement:

Fully 91 per cent of Finnish students take part in a 10-lesson programme, during which they learn how business, the economy and society work as well as how to apply for a job. Finally, they are let loose in the business village for a day to practice teamwork in their work uniforms, buy drinks and food with the money they earn, and even find out what happens if they spend too much and they need to make emergency cash.

…

“The goal in Finland regarding financial literacy is that people make sustainable and value-creating economic decisions,” said Simo Karvinen, a teacher at Lauttasaari High School for International Business in Helsinki. “These decisions are made in various roles, whether as individuals, in households, in businesses, or almost in all activities within society. Therefore, it’s not just about how to manage your own financial wellbeing and capital.”

Anu Raijas, a financial literacy adviser at the museum of the Finnish central bank who led the writing of the national strategy on financial education, said the Nordic country still had more to do, particularly with women and less-educated young people.

Meanwhile, we’re missing flights trapped in circling robo taxis.

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Dollar amounts to muddy waters on global warming

As massive storms cause catastrophic – and catastrophically expensive – damage to the built infrastructure, a weird and unnecessary thing happens. Actually, it doesn’t just happen. People make it happen and then make it worse, kind of like global warming:

Although traditional statistical methods cannot quantify the influence of greenhouse gases on rising disaster costs, many scientists say that global warming has intensified hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, which must be leading to greater economic losses.

“A lot of these extremes are really ramped up,” said Adam Smith, the NOAA climatologist who has led the billion-dollar disaster project for more than a decade. “If you want to act like nothing’s happening or it’s minimal, that’s just not the case in what we’ve seen in these extreme events in the United States.”

In September, Smith experienced a billion-dollar disaster firsthand when Hurricane Helene’s record rainfall overflowed the rivers that run through Asheville, N.C., where NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information is located. Smith and the other NCEI employees survived the floods, but the agency’s trove of meteorological data, including the billion-dollar disaster website, was knocked offline and remained inaccessible for weeks.

…

As the billion-dollar disaster tally climbs, the question grows more urgent: Is global warming to blame?

To answer that, it helps to first ask another question: What do scientists really mean when they say that global warming is causing a trend? For that matter, how does scientific knowledge get created in the first place? In the case of the billion-dollar disaster dataset, the answer begins with two self-described weather nerds at NOAA’s office in Asheville.

Come on people. There is no need to use one thing to confuse another. Unless you are trying to do that deliberately, in which case, not okay then.

The point becomes moot in the context of decades-earlier debates on whether it would be too expensive to do anything about global warming, and especially whether those amounts were alarmist. . As these get eclipsed by economic data adjustments and comparisons, the murky, cause-effect-correlation confusion sets in. It seems like a reasonable question to raise. But no more-perfect distraction has been designed than the billion-dollar disaster data set, other than the caveat farm itself where this story was harvested.

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Moving away from cars

As difficult, and complicated, as contemplating the move away from cars might be, it can be strangely contextualized by reckoning with the move away from Florida:

The Sunshine State rode a post-pandemic growth wave to surpass New York as the country’s third-most populous state, and has four of the country’s five fastest-growing metro areas‍—including Cape Coral–Fort Myers, which Hurricane Ian slammed in 2022, producing the third-most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history. Will Florida’s lifestyle migrants decide they would rather live on higher ground? “The Great Florida Migration Is Coming Undone,” warns the Wall Street Journal.

Fat chance. To the extent that these storms will push anyone from Florida, it will not be people with the means to go, but people without the means to stay. This phenomenon—sometimes called “climate gentrification”—cuts against one popular idea of climate migration, in which wealthier households move to more secure locations and leave the poor to face extreme weather.

Locals are already conscious of this outcome. “The price of repairs may mean we lose our character,” Sam Henderson, the mayor of Gulfport, told the Tampa Bay Times after Helene. “There will be a different kind of people who can afford to live here, moving forward.”

So, a series of counterintuitive developments – much like many of these communities themselves – where, rather than becoming cheaper and less habitable, Florida becomes more expensive and more appealing.

If history is any guide, this devastating hurricane season will increase the state’s rents and home prices, rather than drive them down, and Florida’s growth will continue apace.

Then again, as hundred-year-storm chasers know, history may not be much help in the era of unprecedented weather events fueled by a changing climate. The hazards of long-term sea-level rise are distinct from those associated with disaster recovery, which comes with rebuilt, functioning infrastructure and a sense of returning to normal. Future climate change risks are not included in FEMA flood maps, insurance policies, or Florida land-use planning—and seem not to impact the way people consider the risks of coastal property.

Oh, yes. People prefer less complication.

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Oil Sports

Like Soap Operas, only when you’re watching this week’s marquee match up® brought to you by our friends at BPExxonMobilShellConocoPhillipsChevron where “what’s a little feel good fossil fuel propaganda between friends?”

Well, the UCLA Emmet Institute on Climate Change & the Environment conducted a survey:

Many major league sports teams in the U.S. have sponsorship deals with some of the companies most responsible for the polluting products fueling climate change. But how many exactly?

This survey of 2024 sponsorships across six major league sports leagues in the U.S. reveals more than 60 recent deals with high-polluting companies. This includes sponsorship deals with oil and gas companies—most of them Big Oil’s household names. It also includes deals with lesser-known utility companies that generate electricity from fossil fuel-burning power plants and sell fossil gas directly to consumers. Not every team plays this way. This survey also highlights some that have chosen a different path.

LAT follows up with an easy-to-understand analogy:

If you’re wondering why this matters, I could tell you about research suggesting that fossil fuel companies, much like tobacco profiteers back in the day, pay off the owners of beloved institutions, including our favorite teams, to cleanse their dirty images — and lull us into forgetting that their noxious products are causing hotter heat waves,more intense wildfires and growing water scarcity (not to mention regular old deadly air pollution).

I could tell you about the research. Or I could ask you to imagine going to watch the Sacramento Kings — or the Giants, or the 49ers, or LAFC — and seeing a cigarette advertisement above the scoreboard. Or a gun ad.

Unimaginable, right? So why is Big Oil propaganda considered acceptable?

At some point, the shift in consciousness about banning fossil fuel ads will break through into legislation. It really has to. Though big statements are waiting to be redeemed for PR gold, public outcry won’t be enough. Because we may wince at the violence on the field/ice with the same grimace that we wince at these ads, allowing for both. As we consume that media – that’s what we’re doing – designed to make us think about some things rather than others, the next thing happens in our brains. Acceptance or rejection. Allowing the infringement of advertising does not allow for ambivalence. Marketers have thought of that, too. Ask me how I know.

Or better yet, start to notice the ads. In a different way.

Image via

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The Green Revolution

No, not that one. This one:

The Green Revolution refers to a transformative 20th-century agricultural project that utilized plant genetics, modern irrigation systems, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides to increase food production and reduce poverty and hunger in developing countries. The Green Revolution began in Mexico, where scientists developed a hybrid wheat variety that dramatically expanded yields. Following its introduction, hunger and malnutrition there dropped significantly.

The model was subsequently extended to Asia, Latin America, and later Africa to increase food production for growing populations without consuming significantly more land. Over time, however, the techniques and policies of the Green Revolution were questioned as they led to inequality and environmental degradation.

Ahem. Such language. But being mindful of these transformations is important, especially as we seem to be on the verge of several others happening simultaneously and at terrific speed. For instance, which kind of battery will follow lithium-ion? In early 2023, we heard about iron-air batteries that use a water-based electrolyte and store energy using reverse rusting. Now, that’s the sexy tech we need. Companies are being funded and manufacturing facilities built. The storage needs changing, not to mention the problematic issues around mining lithium, are driving this ongoing series of shifts. Like the earlier Green revolution, it’s less important to cheer these development as good or bad but rather to see them in a kind of continuum and consider how each new standard performs under these changing market conditions. Yes, market – the economics as well as the social and physical constraints.

Climate tech is on-again, off-again as we get jaded accustomed to shiny new things, seek improvements and various strategies win out. But as the pressure continues to push costs down and use up, the newer green revolution can usher in a more stable form of societal improvements for everyone.

That, we should expect.

Video: the great Arthur Blythe (Thanks D!), with Bob Stewart on Tuba, doncha know.

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Auto-propulsive asphyxiation

The driverless car as beau idéal continues to fascinate. The question of whether self-driving cars will work morphs into ‘can it be done at all’ and escapes the gravity of the actual world even as the fantastically expensive contraptions are tested on real people in real streets of real cities:

Waymo’s app, Waymo One, looks and works just like Uber’s does. Riders enter their destination and get an estimated wait time for a ride. Once you enter your requests, the company dispatches from its fleet of 250 white Jaguar vehicles it operates across the city. The cars are staggeringly expensive, outfitted with high-tech sensors and cameras, and are worth as much as $200,000.

The link within that paragraph goes to a 2021 article that paws at the question of the bottomless investment barrel being emptied into autonomous vehicles. And maybe we’re already onboard the 30-year odyssey toward the achievement. But if this is the way home, what is home supposed to look like once we’ve emptied every pocket to get there? We might ask, is the journey worth it? In a way, yes robotaxis can work. But… is this actually an achievement, or just the most expensive movie of all time?

Note how the writers/riders describing their self-driving taxi rides were mostly meh about the futuristic experience.  Sounds familiar.

Image: A Waymo driverless car arriving in front of the Painted Ladies on Monday. Credit…Andri Tambunan for The New York Times