- Important, Not Important
- Posts
- The Sun Machines Cometh
Free Edition
Unsplash
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.
Every week, I help 36,000+ humans understand and unfuck the rapidly changing world around us. It feels great, and we’d love for you to join us.
Together with Refind
Brain food, delivered daily.
Every day we pick the best links from around the web that make you smarter, tailored to your interests.
Refind is a must-read newsletter loved by 450k+ curious minds.
Sign up for free today.
🤝 Want more news that makes you say “fuck yeah!”?
Become a Member. We’re 100% independent and proudly supported by readers like you.
Members get:
Ad-free emails. Self-explanatory.
Vibe Check: Our news homepage, curated daily just for you. Never doomscroll again, thx
Half Baked: Weekly briefs to help you think and act on specific, timely issues as they happen
Lifetime thanks for directly supporting our work
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.
Subscribe to Important Membership to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of Important Membership to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.
Already a paying subscriber? Sign In
Reply