ZeroGravitas

Worse, I've seen people say they are waiting for hydrogen cars. I've seen them write op-eds to that effect.

Which the Japanese government and Toyota have also been pushing hard for reasons that don't appear to make any logical sense.

The classic examples of "groupthink" used to be the Japanese Navy in WW2 but I think we have a new contender.

My friend's slightly less geeky approach was just to rebuy a lot of his classic albums on CD that he'd previously sold, which his daughters seem to enjoy at about half the age of the one in the story.

Possibly bossing their dad around to do the actual disc insertion is part of the fun at that age.

As someone who borrows books from the library rather than buys them (partly as an added motivation to actually read them within a set timeframe) I have similar thoughts about my bookshelves that mostly contain gifted books.

Yes he's GOP but is he from the evil and insane GOP faction or the evil and sane and getting paid too much to care about the insanity GOP faction?

I recommend McGill's Back Mechanic book, which is an end-user focused distillation of his academic work.

It suggests simple tests to discover exactly where your pain is coming from and then appropriate exercises to mechanically strengthen the right area and a few workarounds to avoid stressing that area in regular life e.g. alternate ways to pick up light items from the floor.

McGillcs big three are three simple exercises that are generally good for those with no patience for ordering a book and intros to them can be found all over YouTube.

The big problem is that it is only covering about a third of electricity, same as coal at the moment.

We can cost effectively replace the vast majority of that coal and gas and stop people building more without it ever being necessary to guarantee 24/7 clean energy until much later. And save lives as well as money in the process.

Why people feel the compulsion to leap ahead and invent non-problems and purity tests to slow that process down is fascinating but deeply depressing.

Remember when that Civil War movie came out and everyone said its lightly sketched out back story didn't make any sense?

And now in reality we've got military deployed to "war torn" Portland due to Fox News reruns?

One of the touted benefits of e-fuel is the purity that after combustion reduces the exhaust soot.

I wonder if factoring in the contrail reduction of this tilts them towards financial breakeven.

edit: Googled it and an Airbus test last year suggested a 25% decrease in contrail formation:

https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-06-wo...

Smelters around the globe are doing this already. Rio Tinto operates one in New Zealand to help manage seasonal hydro flows for example.

In Australia the same firm is vocal that unless the local area moves from coal to renewables they won't hit price points that are competitive on the global market.

The issue was that the decarbonisation of electricity (and therefore society) would slow or stop before we'd decarbonise if expensive solar lost any of its market. Not cheap energy, that is a good thing.

Between batteries, wind, demand response, EVs etc. that slowdown doesn't seem likely to happen.

And the lure of cheaper energy expands solar out horizontally to new markets, speeding up global decarbonisation.

A Spanish bank has calculated that the solar and wind built there between 2019 and 2024 reduced wholesale electricity prices by 40% compared with if they'd stuck at 2019 levels.

They project a further 50% drop by 2030:

https://www.bde.es/wbe/en/publicaciones/analisis-economico-i...

Australian rooftop solar is the cheapest consumer energy in history. This is despite the hardware and salaries being roughly equal to the US where the cost is about 3 times more. So it's not wise to extrapolate from US prices.

And in general, you should check your electricity bill to see how much is actually for generation vs transmission.

This was one of the actual problems highlighted by the people who coined the term "duck curve" over a decade ago.

One of the main ways we've avoided this problem so far is that solar kept getting cheaper.

So it's not really a problem caused by cheap solar, it's just basic market competition, lots of supply with no barrier to entry drives prices down towards the long term marginal cost.

Solar capacity factor in good locations like Australia averages about 22 and peaks under 30%. That isn't going to stop it being the primary source of energy for the human race soon.

It's just weird numerology that gets people hung up on these numbers. It's not clear people even understand what they mean when they bring them up.

You get a lot of this benefit even with one way charging.

The UK was ahead of the game with this, mandating chargers that could react to grid demands.

Now they have things were you plug your car in and the grid decides when to charge up for massive discounts.

Generally fair take, though most of the comments here don't seem to reflect the article's take that it is high gas prices and ongoing work to upgrade transmission that accounts for much of the cost.

They don't mention the previous government effectively banning onshore wind in England which seems relevant. The current version of that party is abandoning net zero to win back gullible voters they themselves misinformed about renewables.

If we want to point fingers for mismanagement I'd start there and probably also allege corruption.

Some of the largest batteries in Europe have been built recently beside these two grid boundaries.

There's a nice diagram of the Scottish side in this article:

https://www.zenobe.com/news-and-events/blackhillock-battery-...

His conclusion point 8 covers this.

Basically it shifts risk to developers and we want developers to install lots of green energy over the next decade.

(I just noticed the recommended related article is research on exactly this topic)

There's other machanisms to incentivize demand closer to production, though whether they are being used optimally is debatable.

> Solar generation growth alone met 83% of the global rise in demand in the first half of 2025

That is a staggering stat.

This is the next step to people realising that building the walls of buildings from PV panels makes sense.

Yes, but you have to somehow insinuate that this is a bad thing without ever clearly stating a thesis of why it's a bad thing.

Otherwise people might think investing in green energy, EVs and heat pumps is a good idea with good return on investment and positive externalities and should be done by any competent government.

I'm intrigued by his theory that some very rich people started supporting Trump because of metoo.

And that he doesn't seem to be saying this to insult or denigrate the fascists, but to blame Trump on the sexual assault victims who spoke out.

China is in the process of crippling 10% of Japan's GDP in automotive, just by building EVs and EV components and selling them to other nearby countries where Toyota (and other Japanese brands) currently dominate and hae vchosen not to compete in this new format. So we don't need Tom Clancy to generate scenarios where this will be bad for Japan.

Another for the long list of environmental issues that suddenly become salient when someone can tie them (possibly spuriously) to alternatives to fossil fuels.

But I'm not sure that "Support fossil fuels because they're too expensive for farmers to use to pump water for their crops" is really a successful marketing message.

There were calls to roll out renewables faster when Russia first entered Crimea, mostly focused on wind since it was 2014.

Traitorous climate frauds like Bjørn Lomborg responded by claiming that wind power didn't work and we should instead invest in some new unspecified alternative to wind and solar.

So 20% from renewbles, 10% from nuclear, and roughly 25% from fossil fuels and 45% lost as waste heat when using fossil fuels.

So we're more than half way there.

If solar or wind are cheaper than the fuel for gas plants you can save money by deploying them.

Here a blog with an interactive website to explore that:

https://electrotechrevolution.substack.com/p/renewables-allo...

> This means renewables are economically worthwhile based solely on the fuel savings they provide. Even if they would never fully replace fossil power plants, but only reduce how much fuel those plants consume, they would be worth it. Simply reducing fossil fuel use during sunny or windy periods—or when batteries charged from these periods are available—saves more money than the entire investment in renewables. That's how remarkably cheap solar, wind, and batteries have become—and precisely why they're winning around the world today.

It's a little easier to read if you translate different types of production to CO2 per kWh:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

But as you say, the US is more wasteful with energy, which can make it seem better if you look only at absolute levels of the clean energy, and really bad if you look at absolute levels of the dirtier energy.

Apparently the new Paul Thomas Anderson film "One Battle After Another" is inspired by Vineland after the director adapted Inherent Vice previously.

You could read this summary of his criticisms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger#Criticism_of_Wiki...

What people don't realise is that the bans that are discussed as big government overreach are actually for the benefit of large corporations to coordinate.

They each know that without time boxed regulation they'd all try to defect and let the others take the early losses leading to the entire industry collapsing.

It's fixing a prisoners dilemma.