ZeroGravitas

Since year 2000 wind has gone from 0 to 30% of UK electricity generation

Coal has gone from 32% to 0.

Gas has gone from 40% to 30%

How do you square these numbers with wind being responsible for the amount of gas burned?

The UK uses far more gas to heat homes than to generate electricity, and uses some for industrial purposes so it seems weird to attribute LNG use to wind, the technology that more than any other has reduced gas usage in the UK.

Current legal setups generally actively encourage people to waste water that they have property rights to. It would be infinitely better return on investment to reform that and put proper incentives in place, rather than work around it with technology.

Even the poster boy for nuclear is reducing nuclear output as its fleet ages and filling that gap with renewables (reducing its electricity emissions from 2005 when their nuclear peaked too).

So it apparently doesn't matter what your existing grid is, coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, of whatever mix, the thing you should be building now is mostly solar, wind and (not quite caught on globally but just about to make a very big splash) batteries.

I believe the EPC is being updated to fix that and googling suggests it has gone into effect a few months ago.

Condensing gas boilers similarly run more efficiently at lower temps.

If the water returning to the boiler isn't below 54C then there will be no condensing at all, and the advertised 90%+ efficiency won't happen till the return value is more like 46C.

That translates roughly to max winter temp of 65C leaving the boiler and lower when lesss heating is required.

This can be tweaked by the end user and save 10-20% on heating bills.

This is referred to as "Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES)" and seems to have been pioneered in the UK and adopted by Netherlands and France and then the EU generally.

In some locations you can't rent out places without minimum energy efficiency ratings, which then leads to insulation and heat pumps getting installed.

Ancient Chinese proverb say: Never interrupt your enemy when he's fucking things up at a scale that is hard to comprehend.

Apparently TikTok is "spiritual opium" and they used that to befuddle the man JD Vance called "cultural heroin".

If you have proof a whole bunch of academics would be glad to see it as they're all arguing about the cause:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop

Googled this:

>As of March 2025, the cost of residential solar energy in Australia averaged just AUD $0.90 (USD $0.59) per watt—less than a quarter of the U.S. average.

It's generally attributed to consistent sensible regulation which has created a competitive market and reduced any time wasting paperwork.

North/south bifacial shifts the generation seasonally, trading much less in summer for a bit more in winter when the sun is low.

Is the cost difference between Australia and the US really down to safety standards?

Or is more likely a general antipathy to solving beaurocratic problems if it will endanger fossil fuel profits?

Subtly different safety rules by region (or any other type of rule variation) is just a symptom of the latter issue.

Crime has been trending down for decades.

Solving a problem like a psychopath might also include lying about the existence of a problem to scare people into putting you in charge. And then not solving it but abusing your position to get rich.

The anti-China story on Sodium batteries used to be that the evil Chinese had monopolised all the lithium that the rest of the world mines and then ships to them for processing and turning into batteries.

So American companies would develop sodium instead and break this market wide open.

But the Chinese appear to have beat them to it.

A parallel worth bearing in mind is that LFP batteries became super popular over the last few years and are now 50% of all EV batteries worldwide, but are still rare in the US.

This is partly because the US is a richer market with higher end desires but it might mislead people in that geography into thinking that the battery mass manufacturing world moves slowly.

Meanwhile in the storage market it's gone to 90% LFP as the big deployments take advantage of the cost reductions available.

In fact the biggest impediment to sodium being rolled out was continuing reductions in LFP cost which made people less enhusiastic for alternatives.

It appears they've managed to drive costs down even further, prompting its graduation into mass scale manufacture.

Didn't Epstein introduce at least two tech executives (and one president) to their wives and get one of them divorced for introducing him to beautiful women and their daughters?

Anyone looking into that from a national security standpoint?

I walked past a near identical delivery quad to their TM-Q not an hour ago.

> Nuclear electricity generation has been only 33% efficient (and no imminent breakthroughs are expected).

This is a good example of the pointless numerology deployed against renewables by people like Smil, because he's doing it to nuclear here.

What does this number mean in real life? Basically nothing. Why is he bringing it up then?. Because it sounds like a low number.

Most of the numbers he uses are used because they sound like a big number. That's the level of debate he's aiming for.

Smil is the only degrowther that doesn't get totally dunked on by radical centrists types for being a degrowther, which I find interesting.

Apart from that oddity, it reinforces my thoughts that degrowthers are fairly rational people except they've fallen for the fossil fuel propaganda generated by people like Smil and then tried to take it seriously.

I'm not familiar with this blog but it appears the author falls into that group.

Wow, I wonder what happened in November 2018 to cause the previous zero import situation?

Reuters doesn't feel it's worth mentioning so probably just random fluctuations in the market or a previous Trump trade war, something like that of no relevance to the current situation and so best ignored.

Here's an economics paper summarising and putting dollar values on the fallout that time:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069...

Estimating the market effect of a trade war: The case of soybean tariffs

* In 2018, China levied a 25% retaliatory tariff on U.S. soybean exports.

• That tariff led Chinese buyers to favor Brazilian soybeans.

• We estimate the tariff lowered U.S. prices at the Gulf by $0.74/bu on average for about five months.

• USDA’s trade aid payments for soybean damages summed to $3.70 for 2 bushels over two years.

•We project that USDA’s trade aid to soybean producers exceeded the tariff damage by about $5.4 billion.

Government advisor pushing for them to address chemtrails:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/10/rfk-jr-s-maha-wants-t...

I'd quibble about wether the two main technology fixes mentioned (nuclear power and geo-engineered aerosols) are in any way (good or bad) "capitalist".

If anything I'd say the main problem here is that the techno-capitalist are insincere about both and are using them as (half-literal) smoke screens to excuse using more fossil fuels in the immediate future.

But even in that insincere approach it's government action (or very rich philanthropy) that is required to do these things without direct market incentives.

What you are suggesting is a Vimes' Boots approach to keeping those countries poor.

You don't have enough money to buy the cars with lower TCO that you can fuel with renewables installed in your own country, or at worst from EU neighbours?

Instead you need to buy the "cheap" ICE car and then pay again and again and again to import fuels and somehow you have the money for that?

Plus, has anyone who actually runs a grid in that country suggested EVs would be a bad thing? Generally they welcome them as they help bring costs down by using off peak power. So you've shot yourself in another foot by falling for this propaganda.

So the european car industry can coordinate and not destroy itself in a prisoners dilemma where they all try to defect by going slow to maximise short term profits.

The fact this is probably misinterpreting or typo-ing is that they met their 2030 target for deployment of solar and wind 6 years early in 2024.

That goal was set in 2019.

So, fast progress, and even China is needing to update its goals in response to the unexpected success of solar.

You are right that their net zero goal is by 2060, though they recently stated that they intend to have peaked GHG emissions and be 10% below peak by 2035.

Some observers feel they may have peaked this year or last which might also be influencing what he was trying to say.

Discussion point 1: exactly how many decades do we want to be dependant on imported energy?

I thought to be diagnosed as ADHD you needed to have the symptoms from childhood, as many other things cause similar symptoms?

Your next sentence seems to suggest you think ADHD only affects children?

In this case the guy literally calling for armed soldiers to be positioned on US streets is being defended by an HN commenter who thinks disagreeing with that opinion is violence.

Trump is arguing before the Supreme Court that these protests are "rebellion" and thereby authorise the use of force only intended to quell foreign invasions and civil wars.