Beautiful writing from Rebecca Solnit, that encapsulates what I’ve been trying to say:
You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby.
The opening of my talk Of Time And The Web deals with our collective negativity bias. The general consensus is that the world has become worse. Crime. Inequality. Poverty. Pollution. Most people think these things are heading in the wrong direction.
But they’re not. Every year the world gets better and better. But it’s happening gradually. Like I said:
If something changes gradually, we don’t notice it. We literally exhibit something called change blindness.
But we are hard-wired to notice sudden changes. We pay attention to moments of change.
“Where were you when JFK was assassinated?”
“Where were you on September 11th?”
Nobody is ever going to ask “where were you when smallpox was eradicated?”
I know it might seem obscene to suggest that the world is getting better given the horrific situation in Gaza and the ongoing quagmire in Ukraine. But the very fact that the world is united in outrage is testament to how far we’ve come.
I try to balance my news intake with more positive stories of progress. Reasons to Be Cheerful is one good source:
We tell stories that reveal that there are, in fact, a surprising number of reasons to feel cheerful. Many of these reasons come in the form of smart, proven, replicable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. Through sharp reporting, our stories balance a sense of healthy optimism with journalistic rigor, and find cause for hope. We are part magazine, part therapy session, part blueprint for a better world.
Most news outlets don’t operate that way. If it bleeds, it leads.
Even if you’re not actively tracking positive news on a daily or weekly basis, the end of the year feels like a suitable time to step back and take note of our collective progress.
Future Crunch has 66 Good News Stories You Didn’t Hear About in 2023:
The American journalist Krista Tippett says that we’re all fluent enough by now in the language of catastrophe and dysfunction, and what’s needed are more of what she calls ‘generative narratives.’ This year, we found over 2,000 of those kinds of stories, and shared them with tens of thousands of readers in a weekly email. Not dog-on-a-surfboard, baby-survives-a-tornado stories, but genuine, world changing stuff about how millions of lives are improving, about human rights victories, diseases being eliminated, falling emissions, how vast swathes of our planet are being protected and how entire species have been saved.
The Progress Network reports that something good happened every week of 2023:
Despite the wars, emergencies, and crises of 2023, the year was full of substantive good news.
Positive.news has its own round-up. What went right in 2023: the top 25 good news stories of the year:
The ‘golden age of medicine’ arrived, animals came back from the brink, the renewables juggernaut gathered pace, climate reparations became reality and scientists showed how to slow ageing, plus more good news.
On the topic of climate change, the BBC has nine breakthroughs for climate and nature in 2023 you may have missed:
Record-setting spending on clean energy in the US. A clean energy milestone in the world’s power sector. A surge in lawsuits against polluters. A treaty for the oceans 40 years in the making.
This year has seen some remarkable steps forward in tackling the nature and climate crises.
That’s the kind of reporting we need more of. As Kate Marvel wrote in the New York Times, “I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore.”:
In the last decade, the cost of wind energy has declined by 70 percent and solar has declined 90 percent. Renewables now make up 80 percent of new electricity generation capacity. Our country’s greenhouse gas emissions are falling, even as our G.D.P. and population grow.
There’s a pernicious myth that a crisis mindset is necessary to drive change. I think that might be true for short-term emergencies, but it’s counter-productive for long-term problems.
Speaking for myself, I am far more likely to take action if I can see that progress has already been made, and that my actions won’t be pointless. Constant doomerism isn’t just lazy, it’s demotivational. See my excoriating words when reviewing Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife:
Instead of asking what the future might actually be like, it instead asks “what’s the absolute worst that could happen?” Frankly, it’s a cop-out.
As we head in 2024 it’s worth taking stock of the big-picture improvements we’ve collectively made so that we can continue the work.
If the news headlines continue to get you down, take some time to browse around Our World In Data.
And if you find yourself instinctively rejecting all these reports of progress, ask yourself why that might be. As I said in my talk:
We have this phrase: “sounds too good to be true.”
But we don’t have this phrase: “sounds too bad to be true.”
Humans are allergic to change. And, as Jeremy impressively demonstrated, we tend to overlook the changes that happen more gradually. We want the Big Bang, the sudden change, the headline that reads, “successful nuclear fusion solves climate change for good.” But that’s (usually) not how change works. Change often happens gradually, first very slowly, and then, once it reaches a certain threshold, it can happen overnight.
Earlier this month, Jeremy Keith posed the question: “How green is my server?”. As Jeremy notes, it’s surprisingly hard to get that information! So how do you ensure that you’re hosting your website on a green server?
The Session does very well in terms of performance. You can see the data from the Chrome UX Report (CRUX).
What’s good for performance is good for the environment. Sure enough, The Session gets a very high score from the website carbon calculator:
Hurrah! This web page achieves a carbon rating of A+
This is cleaner than 99% of all web pages globally
But under the details about hosting it says:
Oh no, it looks like this web page uses bog standard energy
The Session is hosted on DigitalOcean, who tend to be quite tight-lipped about their energy suppliers. Fortunately others have done some sleuthing to figure out which facilities are running on green energy.
One of the locations to get the green thumnbs up is the Amsterdam facility housed by Equinix. That’s where The Session is hosted.
I’m glad that I was able to find out that the site is running on 100% renewable energy, but I wish I didn’t need to go searching to find this out. DigitalOcean need to be a lot more transparent about the energy sources for their hosting facilities.
I not only worry that “cli-fi” might not be an effective form of environmental expression – I have come to believe that the genre might be actively dangerous, stunting our cultural ability to imagine a future worth living in or fighting for.
It’s a popular myth that a Bitcoin’s value is based on nothing, just pulled out of thin air by math. But that’s not true—Bitcoin is a way to commoditize energy consumption without accidentally producing anything useful. Other energy-intensive industries tend to convert energy into useful materials like aluminum or cement. Bitcoin converts electricity into waste heat and records its destruction in the form of numbers, which can then be traded for other numbers but not used to make anything people need or converted back into energy.
Solarpunk and synthetic biology as a two-pronged approach to the future:
Neither synbio nor Solarpunk has all the right answers, but when they are joined in a symbiotic relationship, they become greater than the sum of their parts. If people could express what they needed, and if scientists could champion those desires — then Solarpunk becomes a will and synbio becomes a way.
Interesting to see an article on web performance on the BBC. Perhaps we should be emphasising green over speed?
Behind the scenes, animation and interaction effects were added using HTML and CSS, two fundamental web languages. That meant there was no need to download large JavaScript files often used to do this on other sites.
As a society we need to treat AI resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. We need frugal AI.
This observation feels spot-on to me:
The shift that I noticed, totally anecdotally, is literary writers are starting to write more dystopian climate futures and science fiction writers are starting to write about climate solutions.
I really like the format of this bit of journo-fiction. An interview from the future looking back at the turning point of today.
It probably helps that I’m into nuclearpunk just as much as solarpunk, so I approve this message.
Atomkraft? Ja, bitte!
But is it always the case that faster websites are greener websites? We reluctantly have to consider another facet: if making a website for a car manufacturer faster leads to an increase in the number of cars sold, can we really say that our website is greener?
This is very timely for me, given that Clearleft is currently engaged on a project that’s making me decidedly queasy for this exact reason—the success metrics of the project would be net negative for the world.
A fascinating and inspiring meditation on aerodynamics.
The best climate fiction can do more than spur us to action to save the world we have — it can help us conceptualize the worlds, both beautiful and dire, that may lie ahead. These stories can be maps to the future, tools for understanding the complex systems that intertwine with the changing climates to come.
192 more stories of progress from 2021.
Some welcome perspective on healthcare, conservation, human rights, and energy.
Ben is writing a chapter a day of this cli-fi story. You can subscribe to the book by email or RSS.
These days I tend to think of dystopias as being fashionable, perhaps lazy, maybe even complacent, because one pleasure of reading them is cozying into the feeling that however bad our present moment is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the ones these poor characters are suffering through.
Kim Stanley Robinson on dystopias and utopias.
The energy flows on this planet, and humanity’s current technological expertise, are together such that it’s physically possible for us to construct a worldwide civilization—meaning a political order—that provides adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, education, and health care for all eight billion humans, while also protecting the livelihood of all the remaining mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, plants, and other life-forms that we share and co-create this biosphere with. Obviously there are complications, but these are just complications. They are not physical limitations we can’t overcome. So, granting the complications and difficulties, the task at hand is to imagine ways forward to that better place.
Hannah Steinkopf-Frank:
At its core, and despite its appropriation, Solarpunk imagines a radically different societal and economic structure.