Jonathan Schofield

Why is it that police feel able to arrest retired women holding cardboard signs in pedestrian areas but not masked men marauding across roads and through a town? In what sense do the government or the police uphold that “The right to peaceful protest is fundamental to our democracy”?

TIL of the British Brothers’ League, a 1901 to 1923 anti-immigrant group that campaigned for ‘England for the English’. Initially, it was “interested in keeping out the poorest immigrants regardless of background, although eventually Jews became the main focus”. Among its public supporters were the Portsmouth goalkeeper, Arthur Conan-Doyle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Brothers%27_League

…“For each 1 degree of temperature rise, crop yields drop by approximately 10%.” Warming in Australia during this El Niño cycle is already at 2.5°C and is projected to reach 4°C and persist for longer. #climateDiary

…”What we’re looking at here is the collision of two systemic events. One is the El Niño, the second is the fertiliser. In 2009/10 we had simultaneous wheat crop failures in Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan. In Canada, they had too much rain and wheat yields were down. Spot prices for wheat tripled. In the Middle East, which is the largest wheat importer in the world, it simply became too expensive for people to eat. And the food crisis multiplied into the Arab Spring.” #climateDiary

…When oil affordability really drops off a cliff – and it will – bikes will suffer too. But because there is a lot less to maintain, and because they are mechanically simple, they’ll remain viable longer. For how long, who can say. But the age of the automobile is dying. It just doesn’t know it yet #bikemaxxing #bikeTooter

…Governments won’t plan for this. And people certainly won’t vote for it, cos they LOVE CARS. But it or something like it will happen anyway. Because systems adapt to material conditions and then over time people say “Yeah, this is just normal”

…Diesel is what the modern economy runs on. When there is heavy work to do, it’s done with diesel. The recent spikes in its price will be assumed to be a temporary blip precipitated by Donny Dumbfuck. But diesel production has probably peaked and is already in decline: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116334360613944158 Which means rationing of oil products is in our future. With that comes a contraction of every supply chain. Which means the cost of maintenance will rocket too. Less to maintain wins #bikemaxxing

…What might we do? Well, for one thing, being vegan is a way to have a calorific footprint that can be 1/10th of eating meat. Personally, I think that consuming less every day (in terms of energy used from farm to plate) is better than consuming vastly more than Earth’s regenerative capacity up to the point that it crashes

…There are no prospects for ‘AI safety’. It’s an intrinsically unsafe tech, which has been clear for many years: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/110966487572472021 The US created and used an ultimate bomb in 1945 and has spent the next 81 years perfecting and building more of them. But that wasn’t MAD enough, I guess. Now it’s adding an extra layer of madness

…“Rice is the main source of calories for half the world’s population, and supplies 20% of the global diet. In Asia, most countries grow their own rice. Only 10% of rice that’s produced is traded internationally, unlike wheat. So if a country which is normally an exporter has a crisis, it can really flatten the rice market very quickly. And we know that plantings in Asia are down already, in Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia.” #climateDiary

…but don’t worry, tokenmaxxing and Frontier Models will address all this 🙄

…In the early 20th century, horses moved heavy shit, and produced a lot of shit doing it. But that was on the back of centuries of breeding horses to do it. Today, horses are a hobby and making hundreds of millions more of them again as draft animals will take a long time. Into the gap will step bicycles. Moving shit by bike will move from being viewed as ridiculous now to essential

…Here’s an article on Irregular’s irregularities. A year ago, Fortune said the company was San Francisco based, but CNBC and many others say they are Tel Aviv based. The nexus of LLM credulity that continues to come out of Israel deepens by the day https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/09/israeli-startup-irregular-linked-to-ai-hacks-openai-anthropic-meta.html

There have been about 12,000 to 15,000 generations of Homo Sapiens. It’ll have taken about 12 to fuck everything up #climateDiaryhttps://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111284511932083107

Roughly speaking, the same level of increase in ppm in the 9 years I’ve been on here took 12 years prior to me being on here. What chance 450ppm by 2033? https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111281195022592662

…Diesel will become reserved for critical functions. Private diesel vehicles for road use (as opposed to farm equipment) will get written off. Gasoline cars will become prohibitively expensive. EVs will be expensive too, because the supply chains they rely upon are fossil-fuelled

Between a Rockford File and a hard Place #TVShowProverbs

…One year in, for more on the irregularities linked to Irregular, see Kelly’s thread at https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vq5s7pmjzrx4wqbuebz35x33/post/3mvtrafsvd22f And join the dots with the following segment of the CNN article linked to at the top: ‘“The internal tools are mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick,” said a former senior US official familiar with the AI systems used by military and intelligence analysts.’

…Re containment, here’s a Forbes puff profile from September 2025 of the *debate me* bros who co-founded Irregular, the company apparently used by Anthropic, Meta and Google as a common dependency in their “breaking containment” incidents https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/09/16/openai-pays-a-450-million-startup-to-test-chatgpt-capacity-for-evil/

…There are some moderately detailed explanations of communication intent in the above post’s image description.

I’ve come up with it because every time I have something to say about what I perceive to be the frailties of renewables strategy, I get mixtures of replies that:

• assume I am anti-renewables: I am not
• think I don’t know about the potential wins: I do
• entirely ignore or miss the point I am trying to emphasise, which is…

we REALLY need to address demand if we are at all serious

…Of course these diagrams are woefully simplistic and inadequate at expressing the complex interplay, including with many factors not mentioned. But none of them mean I am not *for renewables*. It’s just that the tech is a wholly inadequate lever to pull. I should make clear that the primary reason for the impossibility of ‘fit’ in the “Renewables-powered future” circles is our *on-going incontinent use of fossil fuels*. We need #degrowth or we get increasingly unforgiving #postgrowth

#carbonBombing 5/n No-one got bombed, right? The 190kg or more of CO2 per flight per 1,000 km flown for the 135,000 flights that fly every day …didn’t burn anyone, right? Even though the aggregate CO2 weighs more than 14,000 WW2 incendiary bombs (per 1,000 km) https://climatejustice.social/@muellertadzio/117002259967264822

#climateDiary “50 years after Carter’s speech, China has executed on what he asked of the West — without ever making environmentalism the justification. While Washington and Brussels argued about green and brown, Beijing simply built both. Whatever the climate benefits, China did not build 1.2 TW of solar capacity primarily for them. It built that capacity because it understood the MEOW lesson better than Carter’s own successors — security first, with decarbonization as a welcome dividend.”

#carbonBombing 4/n …Globally, average aircraft occupancy is about 135 people: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116946809548817236 So we can perhaps extrapolate. A ‘short haul’ flight from London Heathrow to Berlin (also about 1,000 km), carrying 135 passengers, might emit 250 kg of CO2 (250g x 1,000 km). Which is about 1.85 kg per person. And that is a *carbon bomb* equivalent to 1 small incendiary dropped on Dresden in 1945. But it’s not a bomb, because we can’t see it, right? #climateDiary

…not least because at the same time as we are taking decades to build new infrastructure while trying to square these circles, our collective habitability is contracting, so supply chains fracture. I should add that for some people I’ve drawn the smaller future ‘imagined use of fossil fuels’ circle too big. They imagine it won’t be there at all or will be infinitesimal. That is pure Emperor’s New Clothes fantasy

LLMs are uncritically fine to use, which is broadly Richard’s perspective, is a stupid hill to die on. *Especially* for any voice campaigning for greater equity

@tansy@wandering.shop that’s great. Thanks for making me aware of Strands :)

Programming is the modelling of entire landscapes in one’s head:

• terrain right in front of you and under foot
• and terrain obscured by buildings and trees (mostly buildings these days)
• and terrain visible but across a river
• and terrain over the horizon.

A good sense of direction and gradient needed.

LLMs have no sense of direction, though their vendors do, and I don’t want to traverse the denuded landscapes they’re selling

https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116623150311153409

…Modern renewables (not old ones: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116786589051840846) require more metals per joule generated than fossil fuels. The metals circle above is orange because processing them requires massive amounts of heat and power. A huge increase in crushing and grinding ores and in sintering, smelting and annealing the resultant materials for renewables will require on-going fossil fuel use. Less than at present because we will do some of that work with renewables power but probably not as much as hoped…

…It’s also worth noting that the perfect overlap in our present moment between imagined use of fossil fuels and power generation from fossil fuels is itself impossibly ideal. At the macro system level, that overlap is very close, through the magic of the invisible hand and all that, but at the institutional level it goes awry. For example, oil and gas futures markets are currently severley misaligned with spot prices. That misalignment will collapse soon. Painfully… https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/117031399048475043

…Anyway, it’s intended as a thinking aid, not a plan. Perhaps this thread can be a resource I can point replies to. Please feel free to challenge my understandings and the assumptions I model from them. More lenses to follow

#climateDiary …The perspectives of Jeff Currie, précised above, are set out in a long essay with much more detail at https://www.carlyle.com//carlyle-compass/the-abundance-illusion

#climateDiary

☝️“When Carter told Americans the energy shortage was a crisis, the admission was honest and politically fatal. His political successors drew the obvious conclusion, and thus the abundance illusion was born: never admit to scarcity.

Fear may drive policy, but greed is what gets votes. So the template became:

• reassure markets with words and hundreds of millions of barrels from strategic reserves
• and hope that talking down prices would bridge the gap until supply returned”

…5. Blocs: “The US is the largest energy* source, but it doesn’t have metals. Russia has both metals and energy. China has metals, but no energy. So those are your three largest commodity producers.” (*When we and people like Jeff talk about ‘energy’ in this way what we actually mean are commodities capable of *power-generation*)

…anyway, it is interesting for me to note that Jeff says:

1. The Hormuz situation, coupled with constriction/precarity of the Black Sea and Red Sea, and Ukraine knocking out nearly 50% of Russia’s refinery capacity, means we are “in the foothills of the Himalayas” on food and commodity shocks

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1. Russia, the “largest product and crude exporter in the world”, is having to “import jet fuel from Japan and diesel from India”…

@nixCraft@mastodon.social the teleology of AI seems straightforwardly to be to use non-renewable resources faster. More of everything, all the time, on a finite world. Which seems intrinsically stupid

@degrowthmalmo@climatejustice.global but surely… postgrowth is not degrowth? Conflating the two does the ambition of degrowth a disservice

…Ok, this diagram is more flawed, but it attempts to visualise the relationship between fossil fuel and metals extraction and processing, and the mismatch of expectation that overlays that. Some notes follow…

…and when that oil and gas markets misalignment collapses it will to some extent help the even greater public misapprehension converge on reality. At which point we begin to get into a reality check on affordability, which also seems to be living in fantasy land at present. So my final diagram for now attempts to address price, which is not the same as biosphere cost. Some notes follow…

good vibes 😊 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G383538qzQ

…Which reminds me to say something about https://overcast.fm/+BTumUxn-uk which I listened to yesterday. It has some interesting takeaways (I’ll cite those in a bit), but towards the end, Jeff Currie is credulously stupid on Claude, and AI more generally, and fairly incoherent on climate and batteries. He obviously has good insights on commodity markets but I’m guessing his wealth has addled his critical skills in broader areas

…3. The large commodity producers will probably flip into hoarding at some point:

“I think the next response out of the US would be to ban exports of [oil and gas] products”

Which will be fun for countries like the UK that gets close to a third of its oil from the US 😬

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1. Pollution: “even the Soviet Union didn’t want this stuff in their backyard ’cause it’s polluting, it’s toxic, it’s terrible. Let the Chinese do it. The Chinese will do anything." That’s what the Russians told me.”

@brucelawson@social.vivaldi.net 4px inline margin on 360px width seems a bit stingy?

…Renewables are currently famously cheaper than fossil fuels at point of consumer use. But that’s a function of the catastrophically cheap price of fossil fuels (https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/114318199772501074) upon which all the infrastructure to make renewables has been built. In the coming years, maybe beginning in just a few weeks, the price of fossil fuels will increase dramatically, at which point the price of renewables inflates too, because they are made and deployed with them…