Image is of the Herðubreið tuya in northeast Iceland, formed when ice sheets covered Iceland thousands of years ago. It’s not really relevant to the Grindavik situation but I think they look neat. The title also doesn’t make much sense but I saw the pun and took it.
Off in Iceland, different kinds of tunnels are causing problems. Underneath the town of Grindavik in southwestern Iceland, not far from the capital of Reykjavik, tens of thousands of earthquakes are portending the movement of magma in tunnels underneath the peninsula, which could breach the surface and cause an eruption. The 4000 residents of the town have been evacuated as the magma has risen to less than a kilometer below the surface.TRG
Icelandic volcanism is pretty fascinating, with the country sitting on the mid-Atlantic ridge, the birthing line of new oceanic crustal rock running right down the Atlantic ocean for many thousands of kilometers, as well as a hotspot, an upwelling of mantle material of debated origin which also feeds otherwise-inexplicable volcanism in the middle of tectonic plates, like Yellowstone and Hawaii.
An additional factor here is the presence of glaciers. When a volcano erupts underneath a glacier, the melting water cools the lava rapidly, causing features usually seen in volcanoes that erupt under the sea like pillow basalts, but also unique features like tuyas, which are steep-sided but flat-topped volcanoes. The rapid melting of water can also cause glacial floods called jökulhlaups.
Icelandic volcanoes have had significant regional and even global impacts in the past. In 2010, the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which was a volcano covered by an ice cap, erupted and the ash cloud spread across Europe, causing airline disruption for about a month which caused nearly $2 billion in total losses for airline companies - though this seems pretty quaint compared to the pandemic’s impact on airlines in retrospect. Back in the 1780s, the Laki volcano killed a quarter of the Icelandic population due to sulphur dioxide causing massive crop failure and cattle death. This eruption’s impacts spread to Europe and beyond, causing notable worldwide temperature drops and thus crop failures and may well have been a contributing factor to the outbreak of the French Revolution, which obviously heralded the death of the feudal order and the eventual primacy of capitalism in its place. That being said, any eruption at Grindavik is very probably not going to have any significant worldwide impacts - there are over a hundred volcanoes already in Iceland, and regular climate change is doing a great job at causing mayhem right now anyway. It’s also still possible that there won’t be an eruption at all, at least not in the short to medium term.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Iceland! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
This week’s update is here!
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week’s discussion post.
China is on track to blow right past their Paris Agreement targets. Peak oil, peak coal and peak carbon are all coming way ahead of schedule and China’s contracting construction industry is a huge boon to GHGe targets.
Some aggregated analysis on the current status of China’s energy transition. Recall what China’s updated Paris Agreement commitments are
Analysts today are expecting China to hit peak carbon by 2024, 6 years ahead of schedule. This is primarily driven by hitting peak gasoline in 2023 driven by plug-in EVs and hybrids making 38% of new car sales and growing fast, as well as peak coal in 2024 driven by massive adoption of renewable energy. New solar deployments in China in 2023 are expected to reach >150GW and wind projects are progressing at a similar rate. In fact, clean energy deployments are expected to exceed demand growth in 2023. By every metric, China is on track to blow this commitment out of the water.
Note that some research was already indicating that China could hit peak carbon around this time:
We can also choose to break this down by industry. Today, China’s emissions are dominated by electricity (42%), steelmaking and cement (15%+12%), and transportation (11%). Let’s consider each industry.
In the electricity sector, we have already discussed the rapid deployment of renewables and the possibility of peak coal by 2024. Looking at things more closely, we see how this does not contradict with China’s construction of more coal power plants with 392GW of coal power plant capacity in the pipeline. First, note that China has decreased coal power plant utilization from 70% to 53%. This means that each power plant is on for only 53% of the time. Moreover, recall that the past few years have seen rolling blackouts across the country due to droughts and insufficient peak electricity capacity. It’s difficult to argue that addressing rolling blackouts shouldn’t be a pressing issue, and it’s one that renewables are currently unsuited to address due to variability in production. It’s expected that China will use coal power plants for peaking demand and rely on renewable deployments increasingly for typical load. This is supported by recent national policy that pays for unused capacity for fossil fuel producers: the goal is to idle plants until they are needed to address peak demand.
With regards to steel and cement, we have to look at China’s construction industry which is the largest consumer of these products. Recall that in 2020, China took the decision to tighten financing rules for developers to curb reckless borrowing. This has driven a significant contraction in the construction industry and has led to stagnating demand for steel and cement. This is not a coincidence. Meanwhile, China has been increasing EAF deployment (which uses scrap instead of iron ore to produce crude steel) to further decarbonize the steel industry. The cement industry is further along and China’s mass adoption of modern cementmaking techniques have significantly reduced the carbon footprint of cement. In general, the real estate industry is a microcosm of Chinese economic policy: China drives massive investment into an industry using economic stimulus, cuts stimulus and pushes towards privatization with large government contracts, pushes the industry to overcapacity to leverage economies of scale (exploiting market processes to drive down costs), then ratchets down demand to replenishment levels. What this means is that costs get driven down extremely fast and efficiencies are extracted at scale, but long-term market stability is iffy. For example, we can compare costs between China and the US in construction (Tier 1 cities in China average 1000USD/sqm, US (apartments) average 4300USD/sqm), or in high-speed rail (21 million USD/km of HSR in China, compared to 126 million USD/km in the US). The same story is true in the solar, wind, and battery industry. China sacrificed short-term GDP growth from real estate in exchange for reducing emissions from a contracting construction sector… and it’s worked.
With regards to transportation, we can point to the rise of HSR (supplanting air travel), the rise of electric vehicles (supplanting ICE vehicles), the rise of subways (supplanting cars), and the rise of micromobility vehicles (also supplanting cars). Passenger volume on HSR replaces air travel demand, 38% of new cars are EVs, buses and taxis are increasingly electrified, massive expansion into urban rail transit, and the largest micromobility sector in the world. This increased electricity demand was expected to drive an increase in coal demand, but as we saw coal demand is expected to plateau as early as next year anyway.
China is also leading in reforestation, which acts as a huge carbon sink that is often misreported in official numbers. Frankly, more data is needed to understand the true impacts of reforestation in terms of carbon sequestration. I believe that reforestation efforts provide the key to carbon capture and storage mechanisms in the near future.
at some point in school we had a project about solar energy, and seeing charts showing China’s solar completely dwarfing the rest of the world was such an eye opening moment
Everyone else is just importing Chinese panels anyway lmao