Wow. Drag. Bury his brother alive with him. So does his kid now also get to inherit everything entirely while acting like he earned it? The “Art Pope Shuffle” asI like to call it. Everything that is wrong with American can be summed up with a name like Koch. One down, one to go. Good riddance.
The vast majority of the deforestation is taking place in order to get land to either graze beef, or grow feed for beef. Other nations can refuse to import Brazilian beef (or just eat less beef in general, which we should all be doing anyway for a variety of reasons). Or if you want to get real radical with it, send the Navy to blockade their ports until they comply with our Amazon-preservation desires.
Nuclear and Solar/Wind have the same downside, which is they don't respond well to peak demand. Nuclear because it's incredibly slow to scale up and down, and very much likes to operate at a steady state of power output (making it great for baseload) and Solar/Wind because their intermittency issues means they may not be available to respond to peak demand given the weather conditions. A good storage solution would allow us to use either nuclear or Solar/Wind and just bank excess power during periods of low demand, but we don't have a good storage solution yet. As for safety, you're actually exposed to more radiation living near a coal fired power plant than you are living near a nuclear one, which is a fun fact that kinda blew my mind the first time I heard it. Outside of Soviet fuckery, nuclear's safety record is nearly unblemished. Three Mile Island had zero impact on public health, Fukushima actually did most of its damage when evacuating elderly rather than anything radiation related (and the meltdowns could have been prevented if the backup generators were kept on the roof instead of the basement, but who expects to get hit with a massive earthquake and a tsunami at the same time?). On a per MWh basis, nuclear is safer than even Solar and Wind, because even they have the occasional whoopsie when manufacturing or maintaining them.
Yeah... if only we knew of some area that quite successfully manages all of that on a daily basis... oh, wait! Most of my power is nuclear! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Nuclear_Generating_Station
The Wiki isn't showing me much about how it handles peak demand, do you have more info on what it does exactly?
I wrote that too quickly. I meant that paying them would be the only alternative I can think of, besides military intervention, to get them to stop bulldozing the Amazon. I don't think it's something we could or should actually do.
Norway actually does pay them. Or they did, they halted payment due to the recent fires, basically admitting that the current Brazilian government is too corrupt to deal with.
It doesn't matter, really. Peak Demand only is a problem if you are 100% nuclear, which you never will be. But even then, I've never heard of this as being any kind of an issue or reason to not pursue nuclear power... do you have any info on that? Again, 60% of our power consumed in Ontario is from the nuclear power plant.... so they've got it sorted out one way or the other. Supplemented with wind (at about 4% right now I think), and Hydro, it's a very viable solution.
I’m not a fan of China and their bullshit, but let’s be honest, it’s beneficial to both countries. They exploit us for our tech and we exploit them for their slave labor. Now that trade partnership is dissolving. But guess what? China will still steal our IP. So win?
My point was the issue going to 100% nuclear and/or renewables. Right now the peak demand is handled mostly by natural gas peaker plants. If we were to remove them (which is the goal) we would need to replace them with something. Our present solutions are "overbuild capacity so that baseload = peakload, and then dump excess at all other times" or "build expensive storage solutions to time shift production from valleys to peaks," neither of which is particularly cost efficient.
Eh. On its own China is an economic black hole being crushed by its own weight. Its growth is grinding to a halt through default after default by its largest industrial and manufacturing companies. Not sure what the winning scenario is for them in this.
I kind of think that's a problem that would solve itself moving forward, once you got going in that direction. Or at least it would happen slow enough that you could re-assess as you got closer and sorted it out. It's kind of like software development... have a lofty, far-off goal, but then work at it in 2 week chunks and deliver/re-evaluate. Adjust direction/goals, maybe even pivot with major developments, then do the next chunk. Wash/rinse/repeat. For people to just say "well 100% will never work" and discount it because of that seems silly to me... sure, it might not be attainable, but I still think it's a very reasonable goal, especially at the time scale we're talking about, and the amount of time we have left to do something about it before things get really fucked. And in order to get to 100%, you first have to get to 10. Then 20. Then 50... so even the milestones along the way are a major step forward.
I'm completely on board with getting after it. We should be constructing non-emitting power generation as fast as humanly possible. I'm just saying that there's a known challenge coming up and we need to be looking for solutions to address it now, before it becomes a serious bottleneck to progress.
Which was a glimpse into why it would never work. I think our best options are economic sanctions and trade embargoes. Nearly every nation with a powerful economy on the global stage is getting behind sustainable alternatives. Most countries would rather keep their financial/trade relationships than outright refuse to invest in renewable energy. At some point military intervention would have to be on the table if a country was doing severe enough damage and refused to comply, but that should be a last resort, and probably one that won't be needed in the vast majority of cases. Of course, we have to get our own shit together before we start worrying about how to bully everyone else into falling in line.
I hate bringing everything back to Trump, but I think a lot of the perception that China is a healthy juggernaut with nothing to fear from an ever deteriorating US relationship is about endlessly crafting arguments into why every policy Trump implements must be an absolute disaster. Eg, I never heard any of this shit when the EU put (much higher) steel tariffs on. Both sides face FUD over current relations, but the approach the left has taken towards analyzing it is really skewed.
Pretty clear it’s to prop up their own economy for as long as possible while buying American assets so they’ll have stability once the bottom truly falls out on their economy. The Ponzi scheme to end all Ponzi schemes.
It would be interesting to see those challenges on a somewhat realistic timeline... it is 10 years away? 50? Never mind the normalizing effect of things like home battery adoption, whereby you store your off-peak power for peak use, that kind of thing.
In other news Ginsburg just got treated for a malignant tumor on her pancreas. Is it wrong that I kind of feel bad for her? I know how important a supreme court seat is, and for balance purposes I would rather see the next president appoint one, but she's 86 and doctors are barely keeping her body from giving out. She should have retired years ago, but the pressure to stay on the bench is so enormous. When the current structure of nominating justices was drafted nearly everyone who got a terminal illness croaked shortly thereafter. Just by how long we can keep sick people alive these days I think it needs restructuring. I don't see what's wrong with something like what Aetius suggested, where each president nominates 2 justices per term. Of the most elite positions in our government only on the supreme court is the term of service 'for life' by default. The only thing I do like about the current system is that it frees justices to act on what they really think is best, without having to worry about political consequences down the road. It's not at all uncommon to see both liberal and conservative justices rule against the expectations of the presidents who nominated them. Even so, I think a lengthy term that isn't simply for life still frees them up to do that, given how old a justice usually has to be to get nominated.