The Monday Mix (19/12/2022)
Hi friends,
This is the last of these newsletters for the year. I’m going to take a break over the Christmas period and the next one will be in a few weeks’ time on the 9th January. Christmas is a time to relax and as much as I like sending this email out, it’s nice to take a break and enjoy life too.
It’s a been fun year, if acrimonious, with everything that’s going on in the world. Hopefully, 2023 is better and see progress on several fronts such as a Ukrainian victory in their fight against Russia and the overthrow of the oppressive theocracy in Iran. I aim to get my reading list for November out on Wednesday and the December one will follow the first email of the new year.
To everyone, have a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!
Dismantling Sellafield
A look at the work ongoing at one of Britain’s nuclear power stations to decommission it. The timescales talked about in this piece are off the scale. It’s crazy to think that the nuclear waste at the site will still be harmful to humans in hundreds, if not thousands of years. While nuclear power has a part to play in the energy transition, this piece highlights its downside. The cleanup operation is huge, time-consuming and very expensive. If we can find a solution for nuclear waste, then we, and our ancestors, will be better for it.
Green World Cup
Given the World Cup finished yesterday (Vamos Messi!!!), this feels like an appropriate piece to share. Qatar spent $220 billion on hosting the finals, and the construction and emissions from all the fans flying in will not have benefitted the climate. But is there a way to mitigate this? Given it has to be hosted somewhere and countries from across the globe have to get there somehow.
While it’s unlikely to ever be a carbon neutral event, as Qatar claimed theirs was, or a zero carbon event, it makes sense to reduce emissions wherever possible. Some of the solutions suggested in this article are intriguing and hint at how football clubs could make changes too.
The Coffeehouse
With Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter going from bad to worse, this piece looks back at the coffeehouses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in European cities such as Paris and Vienna and asks how we can improve social media. It’s an interesting look back at what made these coffeehouses a hub of ideas and political chatter.
Some of the ideas suggested in the piece are good and would undoubtedly improve Twitter and other social media sites. The issue is whether Musk or Zuckerberg would ever contemplate such changes. Facebook feels like a sinking ship while Twitter has potential but is in the hands of an egomaniac. Maybe the best is starting from scratch and bringing the coffeehouses of yesteryear into the digital age.
Book I’m reading - Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert is one of the best environmental writers around. Her book, The Sixth Extinction is essential reading if you love nature. This is her latest book and looks at some of the crazy ideas floating around about geoengineering and how to ‘fix’ the climate crisis. It’s an important piece of writing and one that has me open-mouthed in disbelief in parts!
Quote I’m pondering: – “The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.” – J. Robert Oppenheimer
That’s all for this week.
Until next time,
Tom