Tag: global climate
How Octavia Butler Told the Future
Somehow she knew this time would come. The smoke-choked air from fire gone wild, the cresting rivers and rising seas, the sweltering heat and receding lakes, the melting away of civil society and political stability, the light-year leaps in artificial intelligence—Octavia Butler foresaw them all.
Butler was not a climate scientist, a political pundit, or a Silicon Valley technologist. The author of imaginative and often disturbing speculative fiction such as Parable of the Sower (1993), she was a
This Public Utility Has a Path Toward Clean Energy. Environmentalists Hate It.
On November 10 of last year, at a place called Paradise in western Kentucky, the Tennessee Valley Authority blew up the cooling towers of a large coal-fired power plant. The three stout towers, each 435 feet high, buckled at the waist in synchrony, then crumpled like crushed soda cans. Within 10 seconds, they’d collapsed into a billowing cloud of dust.
To anyone who watched the demolition happen, or saw the footage online, the message was clear: TVA, a sprawling,