When coal first arrived, Americans said 'no thanks'
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Anyway, always found that interesting.
In coldest part of winter I think we'd go through roughly a 5 gallon pail per day of it. (stove would need charging every 12 hours)
If you look at in based on percentages, you see whilst the amount may be large on a human scale, the time to 'get' that last bit isn't worthwhile.
It is not just “church folk” that participate - my kids public school does it as part of their community service projects.
It was very hard and black and shiny.
It had its own rail line to bring in coal. When you drove in you’d drive by a pile of coal about 50 ft high.
We got a tour of the power plant and it had recently been upgraded in terms of efficiency and emissions.
Pretty sure it’s been shutdown now.
Found this article about it
https://www.thedickinsonpress.com/business/coal-is-king-on-n...
What's the reasonable worst case scenario with a nuclear plant failing? Is that particularly clean?
What happens to the waste? Does it have to be stored and protected long term?
Nuclear can be great at eliminating scarcity. And it can be clean in use (if you ignore extracting and refining the fuel. And ignore contamination. And ignore waste storage. And ignore decommissioning).
How do you define "Clean"?
Deaths per watt? https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Maybe there's no where to store waste? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
Radiation from the waste though? "The current analysis indicates that the repository will cause less than 1 mrem/year public dose for 1,000,000 years"
Or maybe we're worried about a meltdown? Perhaps we could read up on Fukushima?
Well there, one person died from radiation, and 2000 from the evacuation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
The most at-risk individuals experienced a lifetime 1% increase chance of cancer. The rest were less that 0.5%. COVID had a bigger fatality rate initially.
let's compare that to the 20,000 people the wave killed. (The one that caused the meltdown).
These are good questions to ask, but there are, what, three total nuclear disasters to consider in modern history? And of those, only the one in Russia caused deaths (plural) and true disaster. And of the horrific conditions, incompetent design, and complete mismanagement and deliberate lying, 30 people died total.
Fossil fuel pollution is responsible for (by some figures) 1 in 5 deaths worldwide. Enough.
Uranium is 16,000 as energy dense as Coal (and coal is the densest) . That means you'd need ONE tanker sized craft to transport way, way more fuel than all the tankers of the world.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/468405/global-oil-tanker...
France might have been the poster child for nuclear energy, but it’s on the verge of becoming a poster child for what happens after you over rely on it for two decade.
No, it's on the verge of becoming a poster child for what happens if you _neglect it_ for two decades.
This isn't unique to private sector - public infrastructure suffers from underinvestment too.
The same way that you get GCHP, coal, wind and solar infrastructure, or roads and rail infrastructure supported - long term backing from governments.
> The proponents of nuclear fission often forget that greed and neglect runs rampant.
And the opposers will point at the failures and ignore the huge successes of decades of low cost, low carbon electricity globally around the world.
Looking at the UK (where I live, purely because I'm familiar with the situation here) the newest currently operating nuclear plant here was built in 1995, meanwhile the oldest gas plant in the country was built in 1993. The operating lifespan of the majority of these power stations has been 50 years, meanwhile we're still building them and struggling to build _one_ nuclear plant here in the last 30 years.
So to answer your original question - stop having them build gas power plants and have them invest in nuclear plants instead.
A third of their energy usage is nuclear. This will change as electric cars become more common
What this means is that commercial power can in principle achieve the same safety outcomes with planning and engineering and maybe something south of 'obscene' amounts of money.
This is actually what happened when the commercial power industry first started. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Rowe_Nuclear_Power_Stat...
There's also the fact that a lot of the expense for the nuclear Navy is having to achieve militarized and maritime variants of gear that can be produced much more simply for civilian applications on land. Fitting anything into a submarine is going to be expensive, including diesel engines, but we don't use that as a reason to say diesel is not practical for civilian transport elsewhere.
Those are the official Soviet figures, right? My understanding is that these were laughably understated.
I don't disagree with the rest of your analysis, but my experience is that people become more hostile to nuclear power when we fail to be transparent with the numbers. Moreover, even if we assume a liberal 10k deaths from the Chernobyl reactor, the math still works out in your favor.
official international numbers
There is consensus that a total of approximately 30 people died from immediate blast trauma and acute radiation syndrome (ARS) in the seconds to months after the disaster, respectively, with 60 in total in the decades since, inclusive of later radiation induced cancer
The contested numbers are those related to long term radiation exposure
There is no strong evidence of an increase in deaths
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_...
Still no strong evidence found
WHO is not working for USSR AFAIK
> that many kids died in their teens and early 20s or are living with cancer today.
that's not surprising
there are many people who are living with cancer worldwide
radiation exposure is not the only cause for cancer
I truly wish it was
My dad worked in oncology, he saw too many people die of cancer in the past 45 years.
Long before Chernobyl was a thing.
> Maybe they didn’t die, but they no longer have thyroids
Half of my family no longer has thyroids, they are all from Italy, born between 1945 and 1974.
All of them are still alive and well.
> Saying that 60 total died from Chernobyl is insulting
but it still might be the truth
Nit: it was in Ukraine.
Look at how ugly coal gets, for the same amount of energy. Kids down in the mines, miner's strikes when it ended, people dying of smog. All sorts of terrible things derived from coal need to be included in this comparison.
The only thing nuclear really has against it is that when it goes wrong it can go really wrong. And people have thought about those modes of failure quite a bit, so why don't we see if they've come up with something?
We should try nuclear and see where it goes.
I wouldn't guarantee they would not do that again, but the incentives are very different this time around, so the design of the power stations shouldn't produce material suitable for modern nuclear weapons as a side effect.
As opposed to the Windmill Fairy?
What's the reasonable worst case scenario with a nuclear plant failing?
Using Fukushima as an example, the worst case is that fewer people died as a result of the meltdown than died from the hasty reaction of shutting down all of Japan's other nuclear plants (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/10/31/shutting-...).
What happens to the waste?
It's contained, which is a large improvement over spewing it into the atmosphere.
These clever questions you're asking have been studied extensively, and nuclear comes out far ahead of fossil fuels on every conceivable metric. You can try to make the argument that we don't need to build any more nuclear plants because wind and solar will provide everything we need in 10 years, although you'll need to explain why this is true now when people have been incorrectly claiming it for 40+ years. But if you're shutting down nuclear plants and burning more coal as a result (hello Germany), you've taken a very wrong turn.
The data is clear, in terms of deaths per TWh of generated power, nuclear is the safest, cleanest form of power we have. [1]
Coal power kills between 24 and 100 people per TWh generated (100 for brown coal). Nuclear is 0.03 - between industrial solar and wind, and significantly lower than rooftop solar. It also has a lower carbon impact than both wind and solar.
Yes people were evacuated. But they'd have been evacuated anyways whatever kind of plant was there.
An analogy to your argument: TWA flight 800 killed all its passengers, therefore all flights should be banned.
Edit: maybe try to learn your own internal biases, because I suspect you would make better arguments if you understood your weaknesses.
The full cost of nuclear including externalities is lower than say coal, but far higher than wind or solar or even hydro and the market has spoken as a result.
An area of Japan and an area of Ukraine are now uninhabitable for a generation or two due to previous disasters. The cost of that is very very high and more than most societies are willing to bear even if in theory the risk is low, but more importantly decommissioning costs on waste and plants are huge, so fusion is far behind.
Every time I hear people push nuclear I get a sense of "perfect is the enemy of good". Sure, nuclear is better in some dimensions. But along the "short term deployability" dimension, it's just not in the running.
Until you ask them about energy storage, and then they start talking in superlatives.
Here's nuclear fan David Mackay to explain it to you, in a quote from his 2008 book:
> If we kick fossil fuels and go all-out for renewables, or all-out for nuclear, or a mixture of the two, we may have a problem. Most of the big renewables are not turn-off-and-onable. When the wind blows and the sun comes out, power is there for the taking; but maybe two hours later, it’s not available any more. Nuclear power stations are not usually designed to be turn-offand- onable either. They are usually on all the time, and their delivered power can be turned down and up only on a timescale of hours. This is a problem because, on an electricity network, consumption and production must be exactly equal all the time. The electricity grid can’t store energy. To have an energy plan that adds up every minute of every day, we therefore need something easily turn-off-and-onable. It’s commonly assumed that the easily turn-off-and-onable something should be a source of power that gets turned off and on to compensate for the fluctuations of supply relative to demand (for example, a fossil fuel power station!). But another equally effective way to match supply and demand would be to have an easily turn-off-and-onable demand for power – a sink of power that can be turned off and on at the drop of a hat.
> Either way, the easily turn-off-and-onable something needs to be a big something because electricity demand varies a lot
Mackay does go on to hit the nail on the head at the very end - a big problem for power grids is that variable supply like peaker plants are incredibly expensive, whereas controlling demand via smart grid is significantly, significantly cheaper.
The Ontario grid is basically perfect, IMO. 59% nuclear. 24% hydro. 8% wind. [1] 92% zero-carbon. 7% natural gas, what I assume is peaker capacity. Sure, that could be replaced by grid storage. But we're talking 5% improvement overall from grid storage. Incremental, not a step-change.
[1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
He does this because he wanted to build lots of nuclear and phase out fossil fuels, and he wanted to work out how to do that for real within physical and economic constraints.
Hydro (which was often built alongside nuclear for this very reason) is one such answer. Demand response is another. Green/pink hydrogen another. All apply equally well to nuclear and renewables. Some make sense even for gas grids and that's where we started rolling them out.
Which is bad news for nuclear, because once you build enough of these solutions, you just need to choose the cheapest way to generate the bulk energy, which probably involves a lot of wind and solar and not much nuclear.
I disagree with that framing, I think we deserve better than the cheapest way. We deserve the best way. Cost factors in but is not the be all and end all.
The CANDU design supports thorium fuel. In fact, India is looking to take advantage of this. [1]
I've heard the exact same argument in favor of Nuclear. As I understand, the argument is that renewables need a grid-scale storage solution to be viable as a complete solution to our energy needs, since wind and the sun are not consistent and reliable everywhere. That solution doesn't exist yet, so we need to supplement renewables. If we have to do that, Nuclear is a better option than fossil fuels.
Now apply the same analysis to the manufacture of solar panels and lithium batteries.
These are real grievances that real people have about nuclear, and silencing those people and the questions they raise does great harm to a potentially nuclear-powered future.
One great thing about nuclear waste is that there really is fuck all of it.
Clean up those 20,000 barrels of DDT off the coast of California and dump all the nuclear dry casks of all nuclear waste there instead and the world would be much better place.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-04-30/barrels-leaki...
Uranium isn't cheap. Sunlight (=> wind) is free. Safe nuclear plants (hypothetically) are very, very expensive. (And have to be shut down regularly for weeks for servicing.) Nukes are much, much more expensive than windmills ($10B/GW vs $1B) and solar panels (which retain 93% efficiency after 20+ years). Then there's safe storage of dangerous waste vs. little (non-dangerus) waste.
If sun and wind are "free", so is nuclear, so is coal. It's the getting them to be useful that's costly.
It's interesting to note that coal was the solution to a prior generation's ecological problem, and now it's the source of our generation's problems.
Especially since, as stated in the article, the fireplace of the time were inefficient..
It's literally a quote from Ben Franklin? They cut down all the firewood for "near 100 Miles to some towns".
> when the population increase at some point forests cannot provide enough wood for everybody
Yes, of course, but not by 1744.
There are more forests now in France and some other places in western Europe than there were in the 13th century.
The point isn't that coppicing et. al. produces infinite wood, it's that it's a better way to manage forests than just chopping down all the fucking trees, eh?
Coal has never been the solution to an ecological problem.
At the turn of the century, horses were considered a massive public health problem, because there were just so much horse feces and dead horses lying on the streets in major cities.
> On average a horse will produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day, so you can imagine the sheer scale of the problem. The manure on London’s streets also attracted huge numbers of flies which then spread typhoid fever and other diseases. Each horse also produced around 2 pints of urine per day and to make things worse, the average life expectancy for a working horse was only around 3 years. Horse carcasses therefore also had to be removed from the streets. The bodies were often left to putrefy so the corpses could be more easily sawn into pieces for removal. The streets of London were beginning to poison its people. But this wasn’t just a British crisis: New York had a population of 100,000 horses producing around 2.5m pounds of manure a day. This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”
Of course, now particularly in the US we see many downsides from having nearly totally shifted to a car-only culture. But that seems to have been preferable to managing the logistics of millions of pounds of horse manure.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great...
Wow. Just googling horse lifespan gives range of 25-30 years. Those horses must have been massively abused (or have huge disease problems) to die so quickly.
You'd think they'd have taken better care of them, since I imagine they weren't cheap. But I guess it's probably an example of market incentives creating perverse results quite different from what the propaganda would tell you.
If you think that was bad for humans, imagine what the horses dealt with.
Unrelated to the article, but I thought this was an odd characterization. The building I live in in SF is at least 10 years older than that. Most of the buildings around me were built before 1910. I think my building is ugly and sucks because of noise and draft and stuff falling apart. I wonder if they built better in DC because of the snow and comparably more rain?
It doesn't really matter how you build a home though, it's eventually going to become creaky and drafty over time. The only real way to mitigate it is regular maintenance and repair. That's true of all infrastructure.
Why is that?
Of course some materials last longer than others but that doesn’t make the resulting structures habitable.
What are they building houses out of where you live?
For example I’ve got a rubble wall that’s really showing the effects of freeze-thaw just now and if I don’t actively spend the money and time to fix that damage it will fall down eventually.
Grady of Practical Engineering has a good segment on that:
* Plenty of structures were built prior to 1100CE. You can't build a freeway in Tucson without digging up an late archaic (~2300-1500 BCE) pithouse, as an example.
* Plenty of indigenous structures have centuries of continuous inhabitation. Taos is a good example, having a single structure that's been inhabited since the 13th century. Other communities are older (e.g. Oraibi dates from ~1150), but don't have extant usable structures from those early days.
* Indigenous structures were not abandoned prior to European contact, let alone because of deforestation. Did you autocorrect from "disease" (which would also be mistaken, but less so)? Very simplified statement here because this is a topic that could fill a library. Happy to talk more on it.
Can you give me an example of a "medieval-era houses in the US" that somebody lives in today? The ones you mentioned were built after the middle ages, your dates are not right and describe the time the settlement was created, not the time the structures were built.
Which Taos structure has been inhabited since the 13th century? The Taos pueblo structures standing today were built around 1400, not the middle ages, not the 13th century.
The Oraibi _settlement_ has been inhabited for centuries. The structures were built in the 17th century, not the middle ages, not 1150.
The 13th century when the earliest kivas and walls at Taos Pueblo are well-agreed to be dated. Oral histories date it rather earlier, but I'm being conservative. I have pretty terrible internet access right now, so I can't link anything on those dates, but I'm fairly sure that's how the UN filings date it at least, though I couldn't tell you whether those apply to the north or south houses specifically.
Re: oraibi, I tried to make it clear that I was talking about the town itself rather than specific structures within it. The earliest structures are below the cliff, not above where the modern town is. That move happened in the 17th and 18th centuries to make it more defensible. As far as I'm aware, most of the extant buildings are 20th century at the earliest.
As for "structure", a pithouse is a structure and a primarily aboveground one at that. The name refers to the fact that they're dug into the ground for thermal and flooring reasons. The late archaic ones in the Tucson area along the Santa Cruz river were often built alongside small irrigation canals and house groups often had low walls around them. Again, can't link, but there are experimental reconstructions of Pueblo I era pithouses that you can look at pictures of. They're "similar enough" to be worth looking at, even though there are meaningful reasons they're part of different archeological periods.
I think the claim "There are still people living in medieval-era houses in the US " is misleading and possibly wrong. A more accurate claim would be "It is possible but unconfirmed that there are a handful of occupied houses in one location in the US with walls that were originally built in the late medieval era. These are extremely far from population centers, so it's unsurprising most people don't think about them the way Europeans think about older structures".
The argument was that in many places in Europe it’s literally unremarkable that people live in houses significantly older than the mentioned 1910 specimen in DC (my completely unremarkable apartment building in Berlin was built around the same time and nobody thinks of it as significant in any way & I know multiple people in Austria and Germany living in houses built in the 1800s and earlier).
While Native Americans built structures before colonizations the number of Americans currently living in such is negligibly small.
Some of the pueblos that were built around 1000 years ago are still used (e.g. Taos Pueblo, although most of the buildings have been retrofitted with modern conveniences like doors)
The Taos Pueblo structures were built ~1400. Can you give an example of a "medieval-era structure" that somebody is living in today?
Both these phrases are true:
"There are still people living in medieval-era houses in the US"
[There are] "ruins that make Rome look young"
The Mediaeval period in Europe extends from the 5th to the late 15th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages
The Taos Pueblo has been continuously inhabited since the 13th century, if not before. This qualifies to satisfy the truth criteria of the first phrase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taos_Pueblo
Note that the second claim refers to ruins and not continuous inhabitation.
I'm not a specialist in North American indigenous cultures, but am aware that there are signs of human inhabitation at sites such as Bandelier (NM) dating to 10kya, and elsehwere cliff and/or pueblo dwellings dating to several thousand years BCE.
Both would make Rome look old.
Heading further south, the earliest Mayan villages date to 2,000 BCE, again pre-dating Rome. Cities emerged in the period 750--500 BCE, roughly contemporaneously with the agreed origins of Rome (753 BCE), and well before the rise of the Roman Republic (509--27 BCE) or Empire (27 BCE -- ~480 CE (Western)).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_of_Rome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire
Cholula, Mexico dates to 2000 BCE.
The reason Americans don't think about old buildings the way Europeans do is that there aren't any anywhere close to where most Americans live, and anything older than 600 years requires an extensive intentional search to find. It's not a lack of awareness, as the GP implies.
You're countering with opinion.
Just sayin'.
In Europe, most people see buildings built before 1500 every day. Many people live in them.
Those are both facts. My belief/opinion is that these facts explain the difference in attitude between Americans and Europeans. It has nothing to do with whether "most Americans simply don't identify with or think about history prior to British/American colonization"
Also I'd like to point out that both of my paragraphs are facts, not opinions. The difference is that I could be wrong if for example there was evidence that the Taos pueblo structures were built in the 13th century, but there isn't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32120884
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Given your unwillingness to acknowledge any other of your multiple refuted statements, engagement has been rather futile for some time.
Cheers, mate.
I am quoting it directly so having difficulty understanding the discrepancy.
> It's a cultural thing that most Americans simply don't identify with or think about history prior to British/American colonization.
That is the claim
> There are still people living in medieval-era houses in the US and ruins that make Rome look young
This is technically true but highly misleading. There is one site in the US where oral tradition maintains that some parts of two of the structures were built prior to 1400. There has been no radiocarbon dating of the structures. The closest contemporaneous account is from 1540 and doesn't describe the structures in detail, only the settlement.
The ruins are not visible to most Americans,
> but they don't occupy anyone's mindspace when it comes to how they think of age.
The claim here is that despite the existence of medieval-era home and ancient ruins, Americans don't identify with history prior to colonization.
My counter argument is that the evidence for any medieval era homes is weak, and at most there are two, both located at one site. The ruins are extremely rare and far from population centers, which explains the lack of awareness.
It's true that most Americans don't identify with history prior to European colonization, but it's true _because of_ the lack of ruins and ancient homes, not in spite of their existence.
This is all in contrast to Europe where people see and interact with medieval era homes and buildings all the time.
Disclaimer: I am not a mod. I just wish we could all get along better.
https://ggwash.org/view/74166/dc-preservation-hprb-denies-fr...
As someone who has lived nearby, I can say that this house is not rare nor remarkable in that area. It's technically a piece of American history but there are thousands of equally historic homes within walking distance. The author was using a bit of poetic license to add some flourish to the article.
There’s no reason to not densely pack solar panels atop commercial buildings or any other large pieces of land, then “transport” the energy to the homes. The constraints are completely different.
With coal the concern is the sooth, dust, pollution, and smell. It's just nasty, toxic stuff. Smog from coal is unpleasant. It's not like a wood fire which at least smells nice. Coal is what you used to burn if you could not afford wood or gas. Throwing a lump of coal on the fire is nobody's idea of a romantic thing to do. Making a nice wood fire, completely different thing.
Here in Berlin, people were burning coal in some parts of the city until gentrification caused most of the remaining DDR construction to get renovated. As recent as ten years ago, you could smell coal in the winter in e.g. Prenzlauer Berg, which is now a properly gentrified area full of hipsters, coffee shops, etc. One of my colleagues at the time rented an attic with only a coal furnace. He had to carry the stuff upstairs if he wanted heating. But he payed very little in rent so he was OK with that. It's the most run down, poor areas that got rid of coal last.
One of the deadliest building disasters happened because of not respecting weight limits of the roof. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampoong_Department_Store_co...
My gut reaction is that it probably costs a ton more to install and wire solar shingles and is less efficient? Unless we're talking new commercial installs and not residential?
It does (Tesla), but might still make sense if you need to replace your old roof.
That is an externality. My company gets there profit, other people die, but I do not need to pay for it. How is this legal?
Didn't that turn out to be considerably lower than the average suicide rate in China?
It’s actually nothing like slavery at all. The workers can leave at any time, and demand for those jobs is extremely high.
"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776).
Smith also defines wealth as "the annual labour and produce of the nation".
Market transactions don't generat wealth, a social good, but profit, an accounting fiction, maximised by internalising revenues and externalising costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_Russia
The externalising of costs and internalisation of benefits (within Party operations, to specific high-power entities within the Party) can explain much of this.
The specific political dynamics of pollution and environmental degredation within Western countries (the UK, US, India, Western Europpe, etc.) is often quite similar. The politically powerful impose environmental costs on the disempowered, racial outsiders, minorities, immigrants, colonies, etc.
I see far more similarity in these systems than differences.
It wasn't the captains of industry and political power who embraced Leopold, Carson, Meadows, and Commoner. And a surprising amount of early environmentalism had a strong tinge of racism about it (c.f., Muir).
Power differenctial informs far more than any specific ideology does.
If so, I have a few issues with it:
1. Everyone who resisted the transition to coal in the 1800s-1860s has been dead for over a hundred years. A different set of people are resisting it now. They don't know each other, or coordinate. They don't draw inspiration from each other. Much has happened in the interim. So, this feels like a meaningless historical anecdote, and not an enlightening framing device.
2. The vast majority of Americans support solar and wind energy as power sources. Around 80% support for increasing both solar and wind energy[1].
3. Coal isn't sustainable and it's a huge source of air pollution. That's how we phrase it today, whereas in the 19th century they complained about not being able to grow coal themselves, and about it being a "secret poisoner". But the complaints amount to the same thing. On what basis do we imply their concerns were ignorant and short-sighted when it seems like they turned out to be essentially correct?
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/08/most-americ...
But a lot of the reaction was like today economic. If you owned mills or real estate around steams, the notion of some upstart putting you out of business with a steam powered facility was not well received. Lots of people rag on electric cars, because they are one of the millions of people making a living based on ICE cars who will find themselves redundant.
It’s quite interesting how even the wording echoes over time. Hawthorne’s belief that firelight is essential to discourse reminds me of the critiques of mass newspaper reading (that modern society would be ruined because everyone would have their face in a newspaper), or how novel reading would bring ruin to women.
The point being that the status quo today, or the status quo in the 1950’s, is itself the result of many changes that people at the time thought were ruinous, from mass reading, to bibles written in colloquial speech, to voluntary marriage.
This does not mean resistance to change is bad: it certainly seems like a useful reflex to keep chaos at bay. Your third point is quite apropos. A good example of that as well was the popular resistance to the automobile. People at the time saw the mounting fatalities, the congestion and pollution, all of which is so normalized today.
Unrelated to the main topic, but why does old English writing often have seemingly arbitrary capitalization of words -- like Years, Miles, Fewel (Fuel), Article, Expence, and Families? Ben Franklin was a newspaper editor and printer so I assume he knows what he's doing, but what's the rhyme or reason for it?
On a side note, eWaste is becoming a biger issue every day as we produce ever increasing "things" to make our life easier.
So, what's your argument?
Electronics manufacturing has its risks and concerns, but is an easier problem to address as manufacturing is a centralized activity, easy to regulate.
Theoretically.
Well worry not, as coal is known to be the greatest contributor of radioactive elements and mercury in our environment at the moment.
My blood boils, of all the things to be a busybody about what someone builds on the roof of their own property, you want to have them throw away free energy and keep burning fossil fuels because you are used to the current aesthetics of the roof, no doubt made that way out of practical choices made with the technology of the time but now frozen for the dubious benefits of nostalgia..
You can have both. But really the entire planet works on making negative side effects of solving a problem someone else's problem and this spans from globalisation of supply chains to energy supply. This attitude just enables it.
People needs to start looking at local self-sufficiency of energy and materials to some degree.
This is a complete, unrealistic pipe dream. Yes, we've obviously seen a "deglobalization" occurring, and many countries are feeling the pain of being completely dependent on critical fuel and materials from one or a few other countries with shaky political systems.
But the idea that "local self sufficiency" is possible on a wide scale, without sending us all back to the stone age, is quite frankly nonsense. I remember reading an article a while back about how something as ubiquitous as a cheeseburger is only possible with wide, nation-crossing supply chains.
Saying "we should look at local self sufficiency" makes people think of planting a garden in their back yard, when in reality it would mean virtually all of the advances in human comfort, health and convenience over the past couple hundred years or so would have to be given up.
UK is a fine example. We had a great steel industry here. But it's cheaper to buy it from China and India and it helps us hit our pollution targets not processing it here. But we just pushed the problem to where the side effects aren't immediately visible. The real issue is our consumption and use of materials.
This is the reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy63PEgmm8w
The problem is the market externalities of the pollution of our current shipping methods, and likely the imbalances in the labor markets and regulation.
If you fixed those, then it would probably no longer make sense to do that, but you can't fix those systemic problems by banning the symptoms of them.
I'm the article was informative but I know where a few cows are and I know how to at least field dress a carcass, so I bet I can wrangle me some hamburger.
You will be fighting your neighbours for that cow and wasting most of it.
Similarly with "backyard plots" and that other great modern stupidity, the vertical indoor garden. Like anybody will be lazily reaching over to pick a tomato from their indoor vertical garden instead of the monstrous greenhouses that most tomatoes come from these days.
As a supplement, it's worthwhile. As a substitute it's non viable.
The degree to which they’re a good idea personally varies quite a bit, but backyards represent a lot of viable farmland on a national scale.
Then the city grew and houses were built all over the good soil, pushing agriculture further out. The last market garden in the area became a housing subdivision about 5 years ago.
but at what cost? "The $64 Tomato" comes to mind.
This is obviously not true in any meaningful sense. I assume this is based on "fresh" restricting the numbers to a meaninglessly small fraction of total production. It doesn't even make sense within an order of magnitude.
In absolute numbers they allowed a 50% increase in total vegetable production over farms alone in the US. Fresh in this context referred to the amount of canning going on. So they made a very significant difference to diets of people domestically.
Once again, this is a facially stupid claim. If you know anything about industrial agriculture, it's clearly impossible. Where are you reading this?
My guess is you're being confused by the "fresh" qualifier, which is probably the intention.
That’s 3 pounds per person per week, or 1/3 of the total 12lb of vegetables per person consumed per week.
https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400530/pdf/hist/bhnh...
https://costagroup.com.au/our-categories/tomatoes/
Their Guyra tomato farm is an enormous undertaking that produces all year round. I'm sure in WWII Britain it was easy to double vegetable production because while the UK is covered in farms, they are relatively tiny and unproductive and only survive through subsidies.
I know you are just giving an example - I get your concept - but frankly all the ingredients for a darn good cheeseburger are produced within a two hour drive of where I live, on an industrial scale. Maybe I'm just really lucky, but on the other hand if you go back just a bit more than 50 years ago, most small towns had their own dairies, bakers, butchers, local farmers and rancher, they had various kinds of factories and industrial producers - and maybe this is one place where we need to go back in history.
A deep philosophical skepticism of central planning, a lust for industrial-scale profits, and the lessons of warfare where certain kinds of weapons won and the loser was dead forever; all contributed to this kind of decision-making contest. We live amidst the results now.
https://positivechangepc.com/uncategorized/dc-will-now-allow...
Why Federal? Under which Constitutional Authority would such a Federal law be placed?
Frankly a HUGE part of the problem we have today, including the ever increasing division is the federal government expansion in areas (like property use) never envisioned or authorized by the US Constitution
So no we do not need a federal solar access law.
I am missing that from my copy? 10th Amendment would clearly put that in the power of the States.
Remember the people and States created the LIMITED federal government for specific purposes not to be all powerful and all encompassing
The 14th amendment DID NOT expand the power of the federal government, it simply grated the federal courts authority to strike state laws using the federal constitution
No where in the 14th amendment does it claim what you imply
> The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Nonsensical.
So, under the US Constitution, state and local authorities can enact laws that the federal government cannot do anything about. The state governments absolutely have the power to prevent local governments from restricting the installation of solar panels.
So a local government would have to be granted regulatory authority over solar by the State government, which could also remove that authority.
State governmental power are dictated by the State Constitutions, those things that people have largely forgotten about has a federal government as swallowed more and more power and authority. Each State has it own binding constitution granting it authority and powers over the people of that State.
Sunlight crosses state lines, to boot.
The Commerce Clause. Same thing that authorizes the Communications Act of 1996 and FCC OTARD rules.
I would love beyond all measure to see Wickard reversed
Oh FFS. It's not religion, that's why it includes an amendment process. Constitutional fetishists are as bad as Marxists, having some good long-lasting principles is not the same as being right about everything and isn't a good excuse to overlook centuries' worth of additional insights because they don't fit neatly into the original codebase.
I bet early stoves were ugly too but kitchen appliances do have styles and they've gotten better with updates.
>Tasteses are informed by what is common and what is common is so because of technical reasons, most of the time.
I think you're making a mistake here in going to generalities over the specific area we are talking about: roofs on homes. And we have literally thousands and thousands of years of examples of lots of humans caring quite a bit about the look of bulk surfaces on their homes. All modern roofing materials properly installed will do the core job of keeping out the elements. But there are wide varieties of colors, styles, and types, not for technical reasons but because lots of humans care. They care about the siding material, about stain/paint and trim color details. Having nice patterns even just with concrete. Not everyone of course, but many. We've been decorating surfaces since we lived in caves! I think you're the one being myopic with your view of "function" that entire ignores form and a significant artistic impulse across our entire species.
So no, I think plain solar panels on roofs go against pretty fundamental instincts. They all look the same for starters, and they cannot be decorated or made individual in any significant way (obviously painting over them would largely defeat the purpose!). People certainly can tolerate stuff they don't like, or even outright hate, in the name of functionality. Lots of people live in architecture they dislike or even conditions they dislike because that's what they can afford (or that's what their job demands or whatever else). But I don't think you can honestly look at the vast array of buildings that are built and continuing development of design and then just claim all of that going away in favor of big uniform silicon panels on everything is simply "taste".
Also, there isn't in fact a technical reason for it. Highly customizable solar shingles are clearly technically possible and could be produced in bulk. It's not as if they require platinum group metals or something inherently expensive. If you really care about this as I do, then if aesthetics would accelerate tolerance of mass installation of solar power then that is absolutely something plans should take into account. On the scale of the kinds of subsidies we give to fossil fuels and the costs we're looking at for global warming impact effects, tens or even hundreds of billions down to speed things up and help with the human factor can be quite justifiable.
Aesthetics can be important but pragmatically they’re far less important than the health of our planet.
I actually think the solution here is to have the people who care about this buy the roofs they want to look at, (possibly through the state if need be), pay to subsidize some kind of aesthetic compromise, or stop complaining.
Imagine being so selfish that you are opposed to something that is objectively good for the world, just because you think it's ugly.
Not to mention, you can barely even see solar panels against black roof shingles, which is typical in most of the US.
A randomly selected house being covered in solar panels is not "objectively good for the world". Please do some research into energy production and distribution economics before having such a strongly-held opinion.
Even individual-choice solar deployments at small scale have benefits from a testing-and-development standpoint, increasing technical understanding of installation, operation, maintenance, and decommissioning.
Domestic solar has an extremely tenuous value proposition. If you don't have batteries in your house, you're using the grid as an extremely inefficient subsidy for solar production/load mismatch (externalizing many costs). If you do have batteries in your house, it's more expensive (and less efficient) than using grid power.
Domestic solar is usually not a good thing compared to grid power, and any small marginal benefit may easily be outweighed by aesthetic costs.
In absolute magnitude, it's roughly equivalent to total built area, and dual-purposing land that's already dedicated to human use rather than appropriating crop or wild landscapes has its benefits.
Not all structures can be readily retrofit, but again, blanket prohibitions on aesthetic grounds seems exceedingly short-sighted and petty.
I don't think most solar & wind maximalists realize how little of the world is both optimal for solar panels AND located near a urban centre.
Having solar in the middle of the Sahara is utterly worthless because transmission makes it comically inefficient (beyond how inefficient solar is to begin with), and then you take another inefficiency tax storing it in batteries. Having solar panels on a random home will almost certainly be worthless because most major urban centres are not in solar-efficient areas. Who knew humanity doesn't like living where the sun is baking them 18 hrs / day year round?
See: https://zeihan.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/globalsolarpot...
And it's about as bad with wind.
If only there were a very efficient, clean, and geographically-independent source of energy we could use that didn't depend on the weather or sun, and could be placed trivially near urban centres.
The proof is in the pudding. Even with all the structural headwind, people can put solar on their roof and a battery in the basement and trivially source the majority of their own power. Who is going to give you the $15B+ it takes to build your nuclear power plant that needs to run 50+ years when that's what is possible today? That's why no one is building them anymore - it's not plausibly ever going to make money.
Why are you swearing - are you upset about this?
It's 0kW/m^2 at night.
> people can put solar on their roof and a battery in the basement and trivially source the majority of their own power
The key here is "majority". The remaining 20% or whatever is disproportionately expensive, and people who are using solar while connected to the grid are externalizing the vast majority of the negative costs of using solar to other grid participants.
If you need to generate 100% of your energy using solar, you need to significantly over-allocate and spend a huge amount on batteries. People who generate "most" of their power using solar would need to spend multiple times as much to go to 100% solar, so A) the approach doesn't scale and B) they're imposing a much higher marginal cost on the grid per joule consumed than a "normal" customer.
The seasonality isn’t that great and you can displace like 80-90% of grid energy use affordably with a battery (at least in bulk prices) even without net metering.
15kW of solar, which is about what you can get with a roof full of solar panels, would be enough to handle the household energy including heating, cooling, cooking, and commuting in electric cars for my household of five.
And with tandem Si-perovskite cells commercialized over the next couple decades, etc, that amount could climb to ~20-30kW for the same roof, taking care of seasonality effects, etc, except at very high latitudes.
I love nuclear, too, but if nuke-bros are gonna make excuses for NIMBYing solar roofs, I don’t want any part of that.
If this is the level of your discourse, why would you expect people to take your claims seriously?
> 15kW of solar, which is about what you can get with a roof full of solar panels, would be enough to handle the household energy including heating, cooling, cooking, and commuting in electric cars
You are aware that solar panels do not work at night? I.e. the time during which you would be most likely to heat your home and charge your car?
Sorry for "NIMBYing" you with the duck curve.
> …you can displace like 80-90% of grid energy use affordably with a battery (at least in bulk prices) even without net metering.
But no point in doing that while solar penetration is low, which it still is in my area.
As far as level of discourse, yeah, that’s precisely my point. Claims like this are so far from true for the vast majority of the world that it lowers the level of discourse to misinformation and slander:
> … Having solar panels on a random home will almost certainly be worthless because most major urban centres are not in solar-efficient areas.
It's a great idea to get a metal roof first then solar. Even the cheap ugly metal roof since the large ridges are great for attaching solar panels. Then in 20 or 30 years you don't have to remove the solar panels if you need to upgrade the shingles if you have metal roof.
Corporations convinced the public to vote against green energy, and the public does!
Democracy would be much better if our brains were equipped against such practices.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con...
Massachusetts has a thunderous $1 fine for your first, second, and third jaywalking offense ($2 for those subsequent), and the world has not ended.
In other words: the restrictions that Tokyo places on urban car traffic would make the average American driver scream bloody murder.
[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/10/1/lessons-from-t...
How about emergency response vehicles of any kind?
You're right that police in many areas can't be trusted with that responsibility, though, and maybe we'll have to think about how to deal with that.
In New York and many other pedestrian-oriented cities around the world, more people get around via walking than driving for intra-city trips — the cars are the ones blocking traffic flow there.
Nevertheless, I’m of the persuasion that people who live in a neighborhood/city/region should be prioritized more for quality of life purposes than those merely passing through on a commute. Thus I would argue a pedestrian-hostile six lane road has no purpose going through a residential area, and in the same way I think there’s as many places where pedestrians should be prioritized highly above cars, such as neighborhoods, school zones, and dense commercial corridors.
It’s all contextual.
Driving in NYC should be a matter of necessity, not pure expedience. If and when our policies match that fact, those drivers that need to drive will find that they’re stuck in less traffic as a result.
If you are able to walk and you aren't carrying cargo, you should be walking. (EDIT: cyclists who can cycle at pedestrian-safe speeds are welcome, too!) The overwhelming majority of a city's residents fit into this category and the ridiculous amount of square footage allocated to car-asphalt is in defiance of this. And every able-bodied person who drives into the city for an office job should be dissuaded by geometrically increasing parking costs for increasing that unnecessary traffic load.
I live in on the edge of the suburbs and my car's gotten sixteen thousand miles on it in the last five years. Almost all of which is going to Home Depot and back or visiting people significantly outside of the city.
Upscaled and colorized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8
You can see pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, and early automobiles all "flowing" together.
Employee tries to go against the flow? Management replaces them Management tries to go against the flow? Ceo replaces them. Ceo tries to go against the flow? Board replaces them. Board member tries to go against the flow? They are outvoted or stock price crumbles.
As long as it’s possible for individuals to decide things via voting, there will be an incentive to convince those individuals to vote in particular ways.
Corporations have tens of billions to spend on marketing. To put things in perspective: what do regular people have in terms of a propaganda budget in order to target corporations?
The very fact that corporations have these kinds of budgets to just point at regular people—and regular people have no recourse other than “don’t be stupid”—betrays the fact that ours are democracies in name only.
If a nation had a population of millions and a handful of billionaires who just bought off the politicians then the real fundamental problem would be the massive wealth disparity, not the fact that the billionaires could de jure buy off politicians (they could have done that de facto if there was no such explicit law).
I think you over estimate the power of money on people’s thoughts and opinions.
The original claim was that our brains are broken because we respond to propaganda. I don’t have the inclination to address the opposite claim as well.
Sure it works...to a degree. But if people don't like you or your ideas, all the money in the world won't change that.
Trump was absolutely loathed, such that getting him out by any means far outweighed Biden's personal popularity for most people. Biden's slumping poll numbers indicate that he has little support in his own right.
AOC is unusually charismatic and youthful, in contrast to a somewhat dull middle-aged opponent that she defeated. But there were 3 other factors at play in that race: Crowley, the incumbent, had won his seat 20 years before in an open race following a retirement, the political equivalent of easy mode; the demographics of the district had changed during his tenure; and the DSA are decent organizers who took advantage of the general low turnout in NY Congressional primaries.
There are certainly lots of ways to overcome the influence of money on politics, but understating its influence is as naive as throwing in the towel when outfunded. Again, if things like advertising didn't work candidates wouldn't spend so much on it; and if money didn't matter political operators wouldn't put effort into pushing the legal envelope to allow more into a race.
Consider a recent case, in which Ted Cruz successfully sued the FEC to get rid of limits on the use of post-election fundraising to retire personal campaign debt (ie where a candidate loans money to their own campaign, which is not subject to campaign contribution limits). Cruz 'overpaid' by exactly $100, incurred a fine, and litigated the case. Previously, the limit of $250k in post-election fundraising put a ceiling on the amount of money a candidate would typically be willing lend to their own campaign; now you can raise any amount from your supporters after the election.
https://www.fec.gov/updates/supreme-court-finds-limit-on-can...
Going back to your first post, you could argue that bloomberg threw vast amounts of money into the race because he wasn't worried about being paid back. But that's kind of the point; Bloomberg spent $1 billion and people laughed, because there was wide public awareness that he's worth $82 billion so losing one of his 82 giga-bucks was not a big deal. He had big name recognition because of his news business, but not big personality recognition outside of NY, and his extreme willingness to self-fund ended up looking even more crass than Trump. This was the political equivalent of an army provisioned with a million swords but only 5000 swordsmen.
EVs are probably really worse than hybrids. https://youtu.be/S1E8SQde5rk
Solar panels are pretty toxic. Present recycling produces all sorts of toxic waste that might be poorly handled. https://www.cfact.org/2019/09/15/the-solar-panel-toxic-waste...
Batteries are often sourced from slave labor. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/green-battery-r...
Lithium miners often continue exploration of indigenous peoples. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/t...
Lithium mining often poisons the environment. https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/the-env...
The list goes on.