Tibetan Plateau, about 14,000 feet

They’ve gone ahead and built a solar and wind power manufacturing juggernaut. Its a big deal for anybody like me who wants those deployed at scale. You’ll find that I’m also critical of China on other topics.

The same reason we allow them on any other technology — they create a financial incentive for innovation.

2°C is likely to be ecologically and economically quite damaging, and also at the edge of where we can be reasonably assured that agriculture remains viable. Its not an everybody-dies-instantly threshold

We already lowered the rate of emissions growth, taking us from 4°C by 2100 to ~3°C by then. Getting more is on us; you can’t sit around hoping somebody else acts

You are clearly not a Chinese typewriter historian

You’re assuming that the world is covered in server racks. I don’t expect anything like that, even with significant increases in datacenter construction.

Let’s assume 1kw per person. 10 billion people at peak population some time hence. So about 150 billion m² to provide 1kw per person 24/7. The earth’s surface area is 510.1 trillion m², of which about 1/3 is land. So we’re probably just fine on renewables.

Nothing people do has zero impact. But pretty much everything else has a bigger one. Coal will utterly destroy the land, and the gases emitted after it burns will destroy far more.

Solar like this on a few percent of the land will supply all the electricity people need. So it looks huge, but is surprisingly low-impact compared with other options, or things like raising cattle

They mass imprisonment and cultural destruction is a more recent phenomenon. China first spent several decades bringing in colonists and executing those who complained too loudly.

Meanwhile, in the real world

The New York Times has been covering Uyghur issues since 2001.

It looks like a planned gradual turnup

I’m pointing to an old one because the causes are well known, there isn’t any current propaganda campaign to confuse people about it, and its a wide-area unanticipated failure.

That kind of facility tends to have its own backup power, often with a week or so of fuel stockpiled on-site.

Back when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there was a period where the only building with power was a datacenter. The lights prompted soldiers to break in, and the system admin wound up having to pretend that they’d discovered evidence of somebody nefarious forcing the door, so they’d clear the building and leave.

I think that one is coming from the UK Daily Mail which is generally unreliable.

During one of these events, it’s really common for all kinds of misinformation and rumors to fly, and even to come from otherwise trustworthy people.

I’ll note that the US had some very large-scale blackouts in the 1960s which were caused by fairly ordinary technical problems.

In the US, the towers that provide mobile service are required to have a few hours worth of battery backup. The EU may require more, but I’d expect them to go down not too long after the main grid goes out.

It’s a gift link. Folks with Javascript enabled just get the article without needing that.

Definitely not 100% external. A chunk of cases are known to be genetic.

And these people were eating a mushroom known to be mildly poisonous.

Exactly. There’s a reason I won’t eat any Amanita: the similarity of edible and deadly species in that genus makes them the main source of mushroom fatalities in North America.

By contrast, messing up a bolete ID is likely to result in a meal that is too bitter to eat. That’s a much more acceptable risk.