keepthepace

J'aimerais soutenir Blast, j'aimerais soutenir Mediapart, j'aimerais soutenir également Le Monde qui fait des lives qui sont bien. J'aimerais soutenir ma presse locale. Mais si je fais tout ça, je vais m'en sortir pour 60 euros par mois. Il n'y a pas une offre groupée pour ce genre de choses ? Pourquoi ils ne développent pas une espèce d'abonnement global ?

Je sais que la BNF permet d'accéder à des archives, mais je cherche un moyen de soutenir sans non plus s'abonner à 10 médias différents.

I am doing some review for farm robotics and I stumbled upon that project, which I thought was pretty cool. I have met the people who are doing it 6 years ago, when they described themselves as "hippies working off the sustainability budget of Sony Research" and looks like now they manage to live off public European funding and open sourced their designs.

I'm part of a group that promotes light electric vehicles (hybrids between electric bikes and cars) and I'm also a huge user of deep learning technologies. As a part of that I am also involved in a fablab, where we often use things that are weirdly cataloged as low-tech despite being high-tech, like DIY electronics. Discussions about what's beneficial, what's compromise, what's something to avoid crop daily and I would like to clear a few points out. I hope it will be useful, and I hope it will bring some interesting discussions here.

Our transition to a sustainable society requires us to make choices, often tech choices, in a way that's aligned with the final objective. There is a general misunderstanding about the different types of accounting you need to do at the individual level, organizational level, national level and global level in order to achieve true sustainability on a global scale.

CO2-equivalent accounting (which is by the way not the only metric that matters, but is still a crucial one) is generally divided into 3 scopes:

• Scope 1 is the CO2 that's directly emitted by the subject. You burn fuel in a generator or in a thermal engine, that's scope 1 emissions.
• Scope 2 is the CO2 that's emitted by the energy that you are using, mostly electricity, but can be heat and cooling.
• Scope 3 is the CO2 that's emitted by your production chain. In other words, that's CO2 that you don't directly emit, but that through your activity, you make others emit. For instance, you're asking for the delivery of something. The CO2 emitted by the truck that brings it is scope 3.

Note that CO2 that's accounted in your scope 2 & 3 is actually somewhere in the scope 1 of someone.

If you on a personal level or on an organizational level you want to minimize your impact on global CO2 emissions you need to have all three into account and 1, 2, 3 is kind of a good priority order.

The tricky part is that as soon as you have a higher point of view, be it at the regional, national or global level, you should not add these different scopes because that makes you count emissions several times depending on the length of your supply chain.

Consider a paperclip factory. Let's say that extracting material to make one paperclip emits one gram of CO2, that the transport of the raw material to the factory emits another gram, and that the transformation uses electricity that emits one more gram. If we consider it's the same company that does the mining, the transport, the electricity production, and the transformation, it has a scope 1 of 3 grams of CO2. That is the actual real number of gas emitted.

Now imagine if the mining, the transport, the electricity production and the manufacturing factory are actually separated entities:

• Mining: 1g CO2 in scope1
• Transport: 1g CO2 in scope1
• Electricity produciton: 1g CO2 in scope1
• Transformation: 0g in scope1, 1g in scope2, 2g in scope3

Add all of this, through the magic of accounting, we have twice the amount of emissions! Now my point is not to debate whether this exists as a genuine tool to reach carbon neutrality or as a greenwashing tool to make fake savings easier. I think it has a purpose and a use but it needs to be used carefully, because a naive reading of that would be that we can cut CO2 total emissions by just concentrating companies into a few zaibatsus.

Especially when you are trying to decide if a specific technology could be part of a sustainable society on the longer term, only scope 1 actually matters: a sustainable society is a society where all scope 1 are at 0, which means it will automatically make all scope 2 and 3 at zero too. In a transitional period, sustainable tech will need to deploy with some scope 2 & 3 emissions, it is unavoidable but as long as it diminishes the total sum of scope 1 out there, it is a net benefit.

As an engineer, scope 1 is usually what I'm looking at. But it also often makes me blind to other paths of action. When I am looking at the above example, I'm thinking that the transformation step is non-problematic and that we should focus on the other three sectors (mining, transport, electricity) in order to have a sustainable society. Thing is, this example is an oversimplified reality. As a company or individual, you usually have a choice between several alternatives, especially when it comes to electricity production or transport. And you can decide to pay more for something that emits less. So there is a point into pressuring organizations to reduce their scope 2 and scope 3 levels as well.

However, when it comes to evaluate not a company, but a technology, one should only look at its scope 1. We can produce electricity, transport things and mine materials without emitting CO2. Therefore, if your production only uses electricity, raw materials and transport, it can be part of a sustainable society, at least from the CO2 point of view. It does not mean that the companies producing/deploying that tech will automatically be carbon-neutral (scope 1,2,3 = 0), especially if we demand them to optimize their costs in the current industrial ecosystem, but then it is the business/industrial practices that need to be attacked.

This is a paradox that is present in electric vehicles and basically anything that mostly consumes electricity for use or production. If you make the accounting on a personal or organizational level, you can't dismiss the fact that the production of your electric vehicles will have emitted a lot of CO2 during production (scope 2 and 3). However, it is often missed that the most important part of making an EV switch is that it brings down your own scope 1 dramatically. Your scope 2 and scope 3 emissions are usually more than offset by the savings your scope 1 brings into other people's scope 3.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/48NAY

Source : David Revoy

source

Pepper & Carrot is an awesome webcomic that the author, David Revoy, releases under CC-BY

With the advent of electric airplanes, a group of engineers and designers took a radically different path than the "fast, heavy" trend that prevailed in the 20th century.

Using light materials and an exaggeratedly large wingspan they managed to put enough solar panels on the wings to never need to land, especially when high above the clouds. In a plane, altitude is energy storage so through a mix of slow descent and just the right amount of batteries, the cruise goes through each night peacefully.

Travel is a different experience than transport and living a few weeks over the clouds is actually a very nice break from the bleak city life.

I like the content here, but needed a 1920*1080 wallpaper

I was digging up old layers of the Internet and found out about old (well, late 90s, early 2000s) texts by Bruce Sterling who mentioned his Viridian notes where he describes something very close to a solarpunk movement (sustainability focused tech and social changes). It is fun to read because some have very strong cyberpunkish vibes but with the twist that cyberpunk describes the world we are in right now and viridian is the world we want.

It led me to learn that there is a label that more or less matches solarpunk in political theory: Bright Green Environmentalism

This is a huge corpus of text and I obviously disagree with some things, and the 1999 vibes of promoting at the same time intense air travel (for multi-culturalism) and sustainability sounds a bit tone-deaf, but I find it interesting to dive in with a tolerant curiosity.

(Dig that 1999 GIF btw!)

Accompanying article [fr] https://bonpote.com/la-carte-des-pensees-ecologiques/

Sorry this is in French but I think many movements have a similar enough name that English speakers will understand what "écosocialisme" or "écologies anti-industrielles" means. A note though: "libertaire" is not "libertarian" it is closer to "liberal" with a stronger left-wing bias.

I found it interesting because while they mention that it is extremely hard to make such a map and that it has tons of very debatable links and placement, I still see solarpunks being all over the left 2/3 of the map.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27579423

Communities are clustered by common users. I am also part of jlai.lu, a french-speaking instance, that is pretty isolated, while slrpnk.net is very spread out. I find it an interesting view.

This is my first try at creating a map of lemmy. I based it on the overlap of commentors that visited certain communities.

I only used communities that were on the top 35 active instances for the past month and limited the comments to go back to a maximum of August 1 2024 (sometimes shorter if I got an invalid response.)

I scaled it so it was based on percentage of comments made by a commentor in that community.

Here is the code for the crawler and data that was used to make the map:

https://codeberg.org/danterious/Lemmy_map

Incremental change.