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Welcome back, Shit Givers.
Here’s the deal. This week’s essay is a day late because I spent the whole week writing about bird flu and it got me super down. To the point where I couldn’t finish it.
So I decided to share some good news instead.
Because we all need it, and because as much as we will continue to tell it like it is, we will also celebrate how far we’ve come, and what the hell you can do to contribute.
Bird flu is still coming, but for today, please enjoy this hopeful ditty on how we have finally harnessed the sun ☀️ — and how we’re just getting started.
— Quinn
Listen to last week’s essay now 👇
I’m Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit.
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THE AGE OF SUN MACHINES
The climate change era (the “find out” follow-up to the Anthropocene’s “fuck around” stage) is further along than we’d like to admit.
But as much as we have so much work left to do, with so much of society, so many industries, economies, and housing to replace and build anew, we have also made more progress, more quickly than you can possibly imagine.
The race is on, and seemingly all of the sudden, the age of sun machines is upon us.
And just in time.
You’re a human alive today, so I don’t have to describe how untenably fucking hot it is in the summer and how much catastrophically warmer winters are; how much drier and wetter it is; how much migration is increasing; how much our staple crops are threatened and how few heat and employment protections the farmworkers who seed and harvest them have.
You may think this is all going faster than advertised, and while it actually isn’t, that feeling is understandable. The power systems that be have lied to you for decades now — the most consequential decades of them all.
And yet — even the most astute and incentivized among us drastically underestimated how much ground distributed solar could (literally) cover in that same stretch of time.