Oliver Morton, Eater of Sun
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eaterofsun.bsky.social
Oliver Morton, Eater of Sun
@eaterofsun.bsky.social
15K followers 770 following 2.3K posts
Author, Editor @ The Economist, Chair @ The Degrees Initiative. Climate change, planetarity, critical zones, tv, burdens of life, etc. Reposts are not endorsements
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eaterofsun.bsky.social
Any hard SF writers out there in search of a truly challenging new locale?
arxiv.org/abs/2509.04558
Abstract from the paper linked to: A handful of enigmatic Jupiter-mass objects have been discovered orbiting pulsars. One such object, PSR J2322-2650b, uniquely resembles a hot Jupiter exoplanet due to its minimum density of 1.8 g/cm^3 and its ~1900 K equilibrium temperature. We use JWST to observe its emission spectrum across an entire orbit. In stark contrast to every known exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star, we find an atmosphere rich in molecular carbon (C3, C2) with strong westward winds. Our observations open up a new exoplanetary chemical regime (ultra-high C/O and C/N ratios of >100 and >10,000 respectively) and dynamical regime (ultra-fast rotation with external irradiation) to observational study. The extreme carbon enrichment poses a severe challenge to the current understanding of "black widow" companions, which were expected to consist of a wider range of elements due to their origins as stripped stellar cores.
December 4, 2025 at 11:54 AM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
Anyone know what this is all about? Haven't changed anything but TV and computer screens now all showing this. What is a "Netflix household"?
Screengrab, white on black: "Your device isn't part of the Netflix household for this account"
November 27, 2025 at 10:41 AM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
@sean note this passage from the article Ketan links to
Elsewhere in the world, the situation looks different. In a talk at the Paris Peace Forum last month, Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Ablakwa hailed the research into solar-radiation management currently under way in Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa, and his own country.
November 25, 2025 at 9:14 AM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
For comparison, here is the NME list.
www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/1980.html
1. Closer – Joy Division 2. Get Happy – Elvis Costello 3. I Just Can't Stop It – The Beat 4. Sinsemilla – Black Uhuru 5. Movies – Holger Czukay 6. Remain In Light – Talking Heads 7. Crocodiles – Echo And The Bunnymen 8. Borderline – Ry Cooder 9. Scary Monsters – David Bowie 10. Searching For The Young Soul Rebels – Dexys Midnight Runners 11. Sound Affects – The Jam 12. The River – Bruce Springsteen 13. Signing Off – Ub40 14. The Correct Use Of Soap – Magazine 15. Songs The Lord Taught Us – The Cramps 16. Laughter – Ian Dury & The Blockheads 17. Night Passage – Weather Report 18. Grace And Danger – John Martyn 19. Empires And Dance – Simple Minds 20. Suicide – Suicide
November 23, 2025 at 10:34 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
Fuck the actual fuck off
clip from a youtube page i just visited with a picture of a winsome hot young woman, blue haired against pink out of focus stripey background. Text reads "Realistic AI Girlfriend "Tired of dating drama? Build a virtual companion who truly gets you Big "learn more" button Sposored by Get-honey.ai
November 19, 2025 at 11:55 AM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
Incidentally, this, from Jesse's post, made me feel almost optimistic, in part because the two conditions can be linked by smart diplomacy. Both sides have things the other wants, and in the big picture exchanging them is mutually beneficial.
From Jesse Scotts post: NZE is a world which needs unprecedented international cooperation, including both most countries opening their markets to clean energy (Chinese) technology and countries (China) not hogging critical minerals, plus an acceleration of technological learning through widespread IP transfers.
November 12, 2025 at 3:13 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
This seems a bad take for a number of reasons. One is that the IEA says that it isn't.
Clip from this webpage where the IEA explains the scenarios: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/scenarios-in-the-world-energy-outlook-2025 It reads: The CPS might seem like a “business as usual” scenario, but this terminology can be misleading in an energy system where new technologies are already being deployed at scale, underpinned by robust economics and mature, existing policy frameworks. In these areas, “business as usual” would imply continuing the current process of change and, in some cases, accelerating it. In the CPS, however, potential constraints slow the uptake of these new technologies, whether due to insufficient infrastructure, grid integration costs, a lack of institutional capacity or financing, or the absence of continued policy support. It therefore tends to project slower adoption of new technologies than has been seen in recent years, or than is seen in the STEPS. I have chosen to highlight the first sentence.
November 12, 2025 at 3:06 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
True for many
screen grab from email inbox: it comes from Linked In and says "Tom Standage is someone you might know"
November 11, 2025 at 10:47 AM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
....and Ben and Krishna finding pics and creating the cover (not seen in all REGIONS) and Cat and Rachel helping it make climate sense and get into the newsletter, for which you also need Aaron, and the socials team for getting it out through other channels and so on. To all of whom my thanks.
Cover of The Economist November 8th; image shows a vast field of solar panels spreading over a desert. Headline reads "China's Global Power Play -- A special report on renewable energy"
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
Standing back, this, from our subscriber newsletter, The Climate Issue, puts the new dynamic intro the context of #COP30.
www.economist.com/newsletters/...
Text from screen grab: There is more to decarbonisation, and thus emissions reduction, than cheap renewables; there are questions about electricity markets, about grid infrastructure, about storage and more. When there were no cheap renewables those problems seemed like additional burdens. Now that there are lots of cheap renewables, they can be recast as opportunities: the better you can solve these problems, the more of the cheapest form of energy you can use. And this is where Made in China and the Paris agreement start to synergise. The Paris agreement is based on the idea that as the world gets better at reducing emissions countries will become more ambitious in their attempts. But it is not compelling as to why this should happen. Now China has a manifest interest in making it happen: more ambitious emissions reductions in other countries are in China’s near-term economic interest as well as its long-term climate interest. It has an incentive to encourage the ratcheting-up inherent in the Paris process.
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
And some of this will be unfamiliar even to experts. Note the way that China is heating up even quicker, over the past few years, than average land temperatures around the world
Chart showing land temperature anomalies by year for the world and for china, 1930 to present, with ten year moving averages for both. In the 2020s both steepen, China's even more markedly
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
And, besides, I think the way Jeremy and Gabriel have brought things together puts that knowledge in a new and really revealing light. From the fifth article, which looks (inter alia) at the Chinese people's concerns and interest in action.
www.economist.com/special-repo...
The fact that the Chinese people want action does not mean they will get it. But their co-opted concerns have been a factor in past Chinese environmental progress. They may be again. An opportunity to please the people while taking the place on the world stage which those people consider their country’s due does not come to many leaders outside times of war. And, outside times of war, no economy has ever turned its power so effectively to a particular real-world goal. America’s Apollo programme pushed a specific set of technologies faster and harder; but having done its job, it was shut down. The factories and supply chains providing a terawatt of clean solar and wind capacity every year are something else entirely. The brute, massive fact of them may well be as important to understanding the world in the decades to come as the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers.
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
www.economist.com/special-repo...
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
The fourth article looks at the remarkable way China's ability to decarbonise is spreading round the world.
www.economist.com/special-repo...
Screen grab. Text reads: China’s green technology is reshaping landscapes, markets and geopolitics across much of the world—but Pakistan is perhaps the most striking example. This year it became the world’s second largest importer of solar panels. It has become a laboratory for the green-energy transition in the global south. It is also a test of China’s willingness to lead that transition, rather than just provide the wherewithal for it. Travel around Pakistan and you will see solar panels everywhere, from pukka bungalows to mosques, from farms to roadside shops. In rural areas, they are often mounted on trailers that can be towed from household to household. Increasingly, solar panels are included in marriage dowries.
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
And, again from the leader:

www.economist.com/leaders/2025...
Screen grab from the article: text reads: The scale of the renewables revolution in China is almost too vast for the human mind to grasp. By the end of last year, the country had installed 887 gigawatts of solar-power capacity—close to double Europe’s and America’s combined total. The 22m tonnes of steel used to build new wind turbines and solar panels in 2024 would have been enough to build a Golden Gate Bridge on every working day of every week that year. China generated 1,826 terawatt-hours of wind and solar electricity in 2024, five times more than the energy contained in all 600 of its nuclear weapons.
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
But as other articles in the package make clear, the scale of the potential response is epic, too. From the second article...
www.economist.com/special-repo...
Text from clip: Given that the industry is built on light, it is surprisingly dim inside this solar factory in Chengdu, a city in south-western China. But the workers do not mind. They are almost all robots, whirring around carrying square slices of a grey crystalline “polysilicon” 16cm across and a hair’s breadth thick. As they move through the factory these wafers are heated, lasered, bathed in acid and engraved with silver circuits. They come out as solar cells. This factory can churn out enough of those photovoltaic (PV) cells in a week to build a power plant with a capacity of more than 500 megawatts—which is about as big as current solar plants get outside China, India and the Gulf. Two months of work produces the capacity to generate considerably more electricity over the course of a year than a large nuclear reactor.
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
In that piece the scale of the problem is laid out www.economist.com/special-repo...:
Text from screen grab: Last year China burned 4.9bn tonnes of coal. Imagine a black and glistening Great Pyramid of Giza; then imagine, stretched behind it, a line of 1,500 more just the same. Three things combine to make the country’s appetite so gargantuan. First, it has a huge economy. Second, a lot more of its final energy demand is met with electricity than in most other places. Those first two factors explain why, in 2024, China generated almost a third of the world’s electricity. The third factor is that, in matters electric, China’s fossil fuel of choice is cheap and abundant domestic coal.
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
It does not skip over the difficulties ahead, most central of them the move from using renewables to add capacity to using renewables to replace existing capacity:
Screen grab from the article. Text reads: Plans to phase out coal will face resistance from plant operators and from local governments. Dealing with that will require not just political exertion, but also a commitment to making the vast electricity system better capable of dealing with renewables. That means very large investments, careful regulatory planning and levels of market-driven flexibility that a system historically based on tight control will resist.
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
The special report was written by Gabriel Crossley and Jeremy Page; I edited it.
www.economist.com/leaders/2025...
A screengrab of the table of contents of the special report : China, energy and climate A time that has come Special reports - Nov 8th 2025 It is the world’s renewable-energy superpower. Gabriel Crossley and Jeremy Page ask whether China could be the world’s climate leader, too → China, energy and climate: The world’s renewable-energy superpower → Gigawatts-a-go-go: Solar in China has become too big to fail → 1,500 Great Pyramids: Cleaning up a coal-fired mess → Cleaner air, quicker heat: China’s air-quality improvements have hastened global warming → Solar eclipse: How China sparked a rooftop solar revolution in Pakistan → Code red: Why climate change now threatens China’s future
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
At the heart of the argument is that China's climate interests—reduce global emissions—and its economic interests—sell the rest of the world stuff it wants—are increasingly well aligned.
www.economist.com/leaders/2025...
Clipping from leader: This anti-emissions machine is powered by self-interest. More clean tech elsewhere lowers China’s own climate risks by reducing global emissions. At the same time it brings economic benefits. For many years countries’ economic and climate interests have often been thought to diverge, encouraging a free-rider problem in which they seek the benefits of slowing climate change while dodging its costs. Today the economic and climate incentives of the world’s biggest manufacturer and many of its export markets are increasingly aligned.
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
🧵In @economist.com this week there's a "special report" on China, energy and climate. It seeks to make clear the world changing nature of China's ability to manufacture renewable-energy capacity. As the associated leader says:
www.economist.com/leaders/2025...
Text of clipping from Economist leader: In the context of the cold war, the distinctive measure of a “superpower” was the combination of a continental span and a world-threatening nuclear arsenal. The coming-together of China’s enormous manufacturing capacity and its ravenous appetite for copious, cheap, domestically produced electricity deserves to be seen in a similar world-changing light. They have made China a new type of superpower: one which deploys clean electricity on a planetary scale.
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
What, exactly, is this meant to communicate about the project?
Screengrab from trailer for "All her fault" saying "From the producers of The Day of the Jackal & Downton Abbey"
October 31, 2025 at 4:31 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
Now with added picture! (thanks @tds153.bsky.social
Photograph of a fossil collection box with fossils around it on a green background
October 6, 2025 at 10:34 AM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
And this is the caption I mistakenly cut out from the second post in the thread (and which set me to thinking about the issue in the first place)
Caption: In Anderson’s action thriller, Sean Penn plays a U.S. Army officer hellbent on capturing a former militant played by Leonardo DiCaprio
October 1, 2025 at 1:13 PM
eaterofsun.bsky.social
The misprision carries through to the illustration itself. Fair enough, perhaps, to give Mr Penn and Mr diCaprio pride of place; there is a symmetry in the roles they play. But the intimation that the film is "about" a relationship between them (as in, say, "Heat") is deeply misleading.
Illustration by for the piece in a comics-y style; it is credited to Chirrikenstein. Five jets from a central explosion cut the frame into six panels arranged with a central symmetry. The top two panels show the faces of Lockjaw (left) and Bob (right) both looking forward. The main left-hand panel shows Perfidia, pregnant, firing a machine gun. She is seen from the waist up, in profile, facing and thus firing right. The main right-hand panel shows Willa in a mirror image of the same pose, this firing left. The small bottom panels continue the images of Perfidia and Willa. The overall palette is yellow-orange-brown.
October 1, 2025 at 1:08 PM