In Nepal, Indigenous peoples have ongoing struggles against dams. Lakpa Angjuk Bhote, secretary of Chyamtang-Kathmandu Welfare Society, told their story to Mongabay. “The rivers, lakes and forests are at the center of many people’s faith and folklore stories and therefore sacred to locals. The destruction of untouched sacred forest around the project area is desecration… Read More »

In 1979, representatives of the Indigenous Sámi people went on hunger strike to protest a decision by the Norwegian government to build a dam at Áltá. Land Sámi lived on for untold generations was expected to become a Green Sacrifice Zone for hydroelectricity, like so much other land, from Mexico to the Philippines, from Australia… Read More »

Yet we can’t escape the hype. It seems like almost every day we hear a story about how ‘cheap’ hydro, wind, solar and biomass have delivered 50%, 70%, 100% of electricity demand. It sounds amazing, like the energy problem is almost solved if we only believe a little more in these new magic technologies. There’s… Read More »

‘Renewable’ energy has another trick up its sleeve. It has become a key weapon in the War on CO2. ‘Renewable’ energy reduces CO2, therefore renewable energy is untouchable, holy, irreproachable. That other stuff—overconsumption, mining, manufacturing, recycling, biodiversity, soil, vegetation, water, air, animals, life, etc.—it’s important, sure. We’ll get to that later. No we won’t because… Read More »

‘Renewable’ energy is not renewable. It’s a Big Lie that’s helping accelerate environmental collapse by encouraging overconsumption. It externalizes and makes invisible the materials. ‘Renewables’ can only become renewable by a magic trick: Look! Look over here! The renewable wind. The renewable sun. Don’t look over there at the non-renewable materials, the mining, the ecocide,… Read More »

“We walk for the water we need,” Juan, a middle-aged man born in the Indigenous rural community of Maconí, Mexico, explained. “If we don’t walk, who will give it to us? It’s a four-hour journey each day to fetch water … Since last year, there hasn’t been rain, and this year it’s the same.” The… Read More »

Soon, we will be producing thousands of zettabytes a year. It’s a tsunami of data every day, every hour of every day, every minute of every hour, every second of every minute. As a result, important data that definitely does need storing is getting lost. In relation to academic research, for example, we are flooding… Read More »

It’s not simply crap content. Computer code bloat is everywhere. For starters, most software, most features, serve no useful function. A pile of crap software is launched and then either it dies a death, or else for years badly designed fixes are made to try to get it to work in the most basic manner,… Read More »

We need to talk about the data. Crap data. We’re destroying our environment to create and store trillions of blurred images, half-baked videos, rip-off AI ‘songs’, rip-off AI animations, videos and images, emails with mega attachments, never-to-be-watched-again presentations, never-to-be-read-again reports, files and drawings from cancelled projects, drafts of drafts of drafts, out of date, inaccurate… Read More »

As soon as Lars Ruiter stepped out of his car, he was confronted by a Microsoft security guard seething with anger, Morgan Meaker wrote for Wired. The security guards for data centers are specially trained to be aggressive and confrontational, so as to reinforce the air of secrecy and alienness of a data center in… Read More »