ZeroGravitas

Also promoting German language and culture (I think technically an independant charity but I guess there's a lot of government financial support):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe-Institut

China mostly builds them on the coast to use sea water cooling.

The desert one you refer to is an experimental prototype I think:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1

I think both nuclear steam and car engines are affected by high ambient temp, gas and coal engines too.

That is after all why they bring in water or air to car radiators, to cool them.

Probably only a single percent or so for a few degrees change though.

I'd love to see an engineering writeup of the full end to end charging times from a user perspective.

There's been multiple times in software engineering history where just logging all the things and what time they take has revealed a lot of low hanging fruit.

Examples I'm vaguely aware of is that some EVs will preheat/cool the battery to the perfect temp for charging as you drive towards the charger.

Some chargers require faffing around with apps or ID cards but others let you just plug in and it does a digital handshake. How long do these digital handshakes and credit card authorisations take? What can be done in parallel or assumed to work and then cancel if necessary?

If we are now measuring charging times in seconds then these things start to matter and might not require new hardware in many cases and can be applied to older cars and chargers too.

UI around which chargers are fastest/cheapest and maybe pre-booking to let you drive right into the specific parking slot is another factor.

Matt Ridley the coal-mine owning climate-change denier?

I guess disasters might be his area of expertise since he once crashed a bank and led the official pro-Brexit campaign, but the other stuff seems like a conflict of interest.

Everyday people are generally more pro-renewables and climate action. The politicians can be targeted with bribes by anyone affected by the transition.

A classic collective action problem as described by Mancur Olson.

The propaganda has done it's job here, because your base assumption is that dealing with climate change is a cost.

But all the research suggests dealing with climate change is the cheaper option.

There's complexities there but you're effectively saying that you're too poor to pay off a credit card. Okay, but your only going to get poorer by not engaging with reality.

> thus exploding their CO2 emissions

Except their emissions have continued to go down.

Whether you count just electricity or economy wide.

And even before this "explosion" they were about half the US on per capita economy wide and now are less than half.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

I believe they are singled out in a feeble attempt by climate change deniers and fossil fuel boosters to discredit renewables. Which Germany played a pivotal role in kick-starting and which are currently saving the world.

Maybe I'm less of a fan of epic ancient poetry translated from dead languages than the average man in the street but none of these make me interested in reading on.

Distilling can be done by fast follower closed models too, so this argument against open models doesn't hold up.

Maybe their own companies would make more money and pay more tax if American companies would stop breaking the law all the time.

Sodium batteries use a relatively similar process to lithium, so I'd say overall that has sped up their adoption in manufacturing.

But the economics part is true, people looked to sodium as lithium prices went high and then enthusiasm cooled as they dropped again.

However they now seem to be passed that slump and the long term benefits seem enough for sustained investment.

It helps that the wider market is growing. You can keep your lithium battery factory and use your know how to set up a new sodium battery factory and aim to sell both to slightly different markets for the life of a factory.

See also lFP batteries from A123:

> In October 2012, A123 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was thrown into a narrative of Obama-era green energy failures with defunct California solar company Solyndra that had received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal loan guarantees — a comparison to which Vieau objects because A123's technology was "proven," and it built plants and hired people with government support.

> Wanxiang Group Corp., a subsidiary of the largest auto parts supplier in China, acquired its assets for $256.6 million after it had sought to acquire 80% of A123 earlier that year

Tangentially related Good news: You can avoid about half the greenhouse effects of flight by slightly changing the flight plan to avoid cloud forming regions

Bad news: this generally wasn't counted before and when counted roughly doubles the impact so in some senses you're back to where you started.

But it's a much lower hanging fruit than anything else and as yet we're not doing it.

> In 2016, Kennedy said of Trump, according to newly uncovered recordings: “He’s not like Hitler. Hitler had like a plan, you know, Hitler was interested in policy."

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/rfk-jr-compared-trump-...

Yes and their metric considers that things are "getting better" because those undeserving rich started a war and killed over half a million people and caused about 2 million causalities.

Their argument for why we don't need wealth taxes is partly supported by a bunch of super rich people causing widespread mayhem and so slightly reducing their own wealth.

Billionaire Russian oligarchs starting a war is not an improvement in the market failure. It is in fact much much worse, even if they got poorer at the same time.

People do this a lot and count the money they made with their monopolies and not the money they destroyed by having a monopoly.

You'd expect better from something called The Economist.

"Darling candidate" is overselling it but there's a solid chunk of anti-vax, covid-truthing, lab-leak is-proven-fact, JFK just wants better food nutballs on HN.

They overlap with the climate deniers, the nukecels, libertarians and Trump fans.

And it clearly goes to the top, since his vice-president and primary funded was a Google CEO ex-wife, and he had high level support even before he went back on his stated opinions and joined the Trump campaign.

"Trump isn't Hitler, Hitler had policies" being one memorable zinger of his.

The German government guy "admitting it was a mistake" hates wind turbines and claims they will all be replaced in a decade or two by nuclear fusion.

An absolute loon when it comes to energy. It is mind blowing that he is being touted as the voice of reason.

I thought this already happened?

I kept seeing YouTube videos of people reviewing electric chainsaws or snowblowers or whatever and apologizing to their core audience that they weren't woke Democrats, it was just a better tool for many uses.

Like the national debt and a thousand other things, it seems to be just a stick to beat the Democrats with, not something they actually care about when their team spikes both with a pointless war.

On the other hand, it read to me like an oligarch threatening a nuclear attack on Europe if Russia doesn't get its way.

Maybe that's a practical business take on matters but if anything it makes me less interested in saving Russia from its own stupid mistakes.

Maybe threats is how you make billions in post-Soviet-collapse finance. Clearly it's not by building a better society for the people who live there.

Just a plucky contrarian kid who works for a climate denial think tank.

https://www.desmog.com/committee-constructive-tomorrow/

Those household prices should still put a German EV substantially ahead of the average new US vehicle in fuel cost per mile.

If they did all their charging at 70 they'd probably lose on cost to a US car (or a German diesel) but be equal to a German petrol car.

I think Germany has a cultural thing with smart meters which are mandatory for the ultra cheap charging available in many EU countries but it appears that you can get still those rates in Germany and pay about half what you quote, expanding the gap with the average US cost per mile.

I saw a headline the other day suggesting excess deaths from wildfire smoke alone are already projected to cost the economy more money than many mainstream estimates of climate damages thought the total cost of damage would be.

Seems dramatic but if you assume the mainstream numbers were driven more by politics than science or economics then it makes sense.

There's a Jevons Paradox type thing where they ended up spending roughly the same to travel a mile due to Japan or the EU pushing for efficiency due to needing to import the fuel (might be visible in California too due to them fighting their geography that causes smog).

Possibly the EU is pulling ahead on price per mile now with the shift to EVs.

Most of the work is shifting from fossil fuels.

Those are becoming more expensive than clean alternatives (renewables, batteries, EVs, Heat pumps), particularly for the 70% of countries that rely on imported fossil fuels.

Now the implosion of the American empire also makes those imports less reliable and more expensive.

America can delay this for a while, but they hurt themselves by doing so. Hopefully one day they realize that.

He was/is a right wing policy wonk, putting out oligarch misinformation from oligarch think tanks:

> His policy scholarship has been published by the Mercatus Center, the Foundation for American Innovation, the Hoover Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Federation of American Scientists, the Manhattan Institute, and American Compass.

Then Trump admin AI guy and OpenAI "Head of Strategic Futures".

Is the "who is going to step in" quote over the image of the (military?) headstones with American flags supposed to invoke the thought of the American government being a global AI policeman?

"race to the bottom" is the negative framing of "competitive market prices".

So a company or union might say "this is a race to the bottom" when someone new enters their market, but to people buying their services this might be seen as welcome competition.

Do you actually see a negative impact from competition in this area? Or do you just mean competition will further reduce prices?