FEATURE: Are Some Countries Quietly Preparing for the Apocalypse?
John Shirley
From the Washington Post of 7/19/2023:
Chinese officials have focused on softening the impact of extreme weather, rather than cutting emissions, even if it means burning more fossil fuels.
After last summer’s — also record-breaking — heat wave dried up reservoirs and caused power shortages from idled hydropower stations, the government has turned to coal to ensure the same doesn’t happen this year. Local authorities approved more coal power plants in 2022 than in any year since 2015.
The People’s Republic of China is populated by intelligent, forward-looking people. They are resourceful, and thanks to their style of government they are capable of instituting vast national changes by fiat.…
FLASH FORWARD to Coping with Climate Migration
John Shirley
UPDATE! An alternate possibility for the coming mass global migration of desperation.
A theoretical update, anyhow. Earlier in this column I said that one of the great challenges of climate change this century will be adapting to a vast “migration of desperation” of climate refugees. There could be as many as two billion people forced to migrate to other countries due to endless drought, dustbowls, climate-caused famine, extreme weather flooding, and the attendant social chaos. I sketched one way nations could begin to plan for it–no nation seems to be planning for it yet–but I’ve been skeptical that our feverish, greed-driven, myopic world civilization will be able to organize on a scale large enough to deal with this humanitarian crisis.…
FEATURE: Two Futures for the Internet
Jack William Bell
Where We Were
In 1993 the World Wide Web (WWW) was two years old and there was a total of 130 websites. There was no need for search engines, there were no ads or websites selling things. Social media was email and Usenet – a distributed discussion system where messages were exchanged between servers.
Mosaic, the first general-user Internet browser was released that year. But few people installed or used it because connecting a home computer to the Internet was both expensive and difficult; even if you had an Internet service provider you needed to install special software and network drivers.…