climate

See what the scientists are saying:
climate references (updated 2019-9-18)

Leave of absence for climate

When I became updated on the seriousness of our current climate-situation (september 2019), I decided to take a leave of absence from my job, to spread the word. Too few people in my inner circle had heard about the coming collapse of civilization, if we continue changing as slow as we have been doing (see what the scientists are saying).

This was a sign for me to help the dissimination along, firstly through the symbolism of placing myself in public space with a climate-sign, talking to people on my way, in public transports, on the street and in shops, and involving myself in related events. At the same time I worked on the climate section of this site, and working on a climate art performance.

My climate log

2019.09.27: "Break for Climate"-strike

The talks were good, but I noted that one of the speakers talked about solutions for the climate primarily being emission-neutral fuels for ships and planes, and planting trees.

The problem is that these solutions doesn't influence other countries directly; our climate problem is global in nature - so we need to be one of the actors pushing for global change. This can e.g. be done with emission-taxes (as several climate scientists have suggested), where the paid taxes are given directly back to the people. This gives less polluting products the advantage, which will lead to a shift in the types of products that are feasible to produce (see e.g. this TED talk by Dan Miller). Of course this is better done on a grander scale - e.g. at the scale of the EU.

2019.09.22: First climate art projection test at Kongens Nytorv, Copenhagen

I borrowed a 7k lumen projector and bought a big truck battery to power it. To get some intuition for what it takes to setup a projection, I took a trip to Copenhagen and in the end settled on doing it at Kongens Nytorv. My performance only worked for about 20 minutes, but several good lessons were learned. The two first images are from the trip to Copenhagen, and the last one is of the final setup.

2019.09.13 -> now: Working on climate art projections

I will post more details on this shortly. The current plan for performances:

21. sep.: Public projection somewhere in Copenhagen
11. oct.: Public projections somewhere in Copenhagen during 'Kulturnatten'

This will also be my first public usage of the art instrument, niseq (n-dimensional image sequencer), that I've been iterating on for a long time. It's a piece of software that strives to go back to the roots of early experimental film-making, but as a live instrument. Its goal is to shed the narrative focus of modern film-making and explore the less explored potentials of the medium.

2019.09.17: Extinction Rebellion: Meeting on climate-art

2019.09.10: Extinction Rebellion: Meeting on climate-art

2019.09.10: My climate demonstration: Langebro @ Copenhagen

Again, sat and read climate related articles and wrote on the climate-section of this site, with a climate-sign exposed to people passing by. Talked with a couple of people about the climate situation and got an umbrella from a young guy as it had started raining - thank you (:

It's very apparent from speaking to random people in the public, that very few people are aware of the seriousness of the climate situation we are in.

2019.09.06: Techfestival: The future of energy

Several presentations were held by people from DTU and the industry. I especially took note of:

All the countries being so dependent on fossile fuels, e.g. the U.S., Russia, China and other emerging economies.

A representative from a danish molten-salt reactor startup, Seaborg, were speaking about:
- Very small-scale thorium-based reactors. E.g. pr. city or big ships.
- It's "easy" to cleanup the radioactive material after an accident, as the molten salt can't be dissolved in water.
- Timeframes of production pretty far out in the future, at least compared to the zero CO2 emission goal of the climate-scientists behind Extinction Rebellion (XR), which is in year 2025.

Also, I asked a couple of the speakers about reaching the zero CO2 goal of 2025. Here are some of their statements and my deductions.

The representative from Seaborg:

Statement: Didn't believe it possible to change the world to fit that goal.
Statement: Didn't know about Extinction Rebellion (XR).
Deduction: The current plans for the molten-salt reactors presupposed a continuing thriwing

industrial and capitalistic world order. This presupposition is incompatible with going for zero emissions in 2025, as there is not enough time before industrialized civilization needs to be stopped or slowed down, as of the reccomendation from XR.

One of the scientists from DTU (didn't get her name) said that she was informed that there is no will from the top actors in society to redefine our ways of production. So she agreed that the change would need to come bottom up, i.e. as is the plan of XR. She didn't know about XR either.

Some of my conclusions:

There is a big need for dissimination of tactics for actually solving the climate crisis before it's too late, and for dissiminating the science to different actors. Even dissimination of science to scientists inside the field...

There needs to be a story for removing the dependence on fossile fuels for all countries globally. A couple of my thoughts on this:

Start proving it's possible to be fossile fuel independent in the developed countries.
Make green-tech exportable on a grand scale to less developed countries.
As a big percentage of the worlds wealth is still placed in the west - which is therefore a big market for goods; force other countries to become CO2 neutral by putting grand CO2-taxes on all imported goods.
- Use this as a transition before beginning producing all goods locally, to avoid the emissions of transport of goods around the world.

2019.09.05: Techfestival: Food-tech summit

This summit was about brainstorming in groups about bettering our global food, social and economic systems, in a world that today is not sustainable.

Our final ideas after a days work:

Make a centralized global platform for broadly acknowledged truths, especially the truths stemming from science. The content on the platform should be easily understood by the public - so it can be a competitor to the news-media for disseminating what problems we need to solve globally.
Implement laws that make it economically inefficient to trade globally - so local production has an advantage. The point is to avoid the CO2 emissions of transport of goods, and to increase connectedness and transparancy between the consumers and the products.
Implementation of global infrastructure and laws for supporting full transparency of efficiency of production of products - where pollution is part of the efficiency-budget.
- This enables taxation of all products based on their efficiency.
- And enables a system where consumers can get pollution/efficiency information about all products they think about buying.

We evolved a 3d-map of our existing food-system through discussions, towards a system we believe would be better. We analyzed what the differences of the respectively initial- and end-systems were: