elproxy

« selon que vous serez puissant ou misérable, les jugements de cour vous rendront blanc ou noir » "The laws on little culprits fall;/ Great criminals escape them all."

Nothing new since 1678 it seems

In fairness, he did so in part because this was going to go against Total's interests (see Oil, Power and War for that part of the story), but yeah, it was still the right stance to have and history proved him right.

I am not sure his death is confirmed though. Apparently he had a new stroke.

Yup, or things like sulphur thermal storage[1]. Also, hydrogen is pushed heavily by the fossil fuel industry, as it will provide another out for all their methane reserves (via steam reforming).

[1]https://www.solarpaces.org/why-solar-sulphur-cycle-ideal-sea...

Or they did, because the people to benefit from those tax cuts happen to own the media and pushed the very anti-abortion and xenophobic ideas that got him elected...

Or let oceans do some of the work: https://www.withouthotair.com/c31/page_246.shtml

So, should the FNSEA be dissolved then? https://twitter.com/SebastienM/status/1671842089502494721?s=...

And just the same, copyleft licenses (which are not "non-permissive" in my book) such as GPL don't "mean that you cannot without consent", they just want you to share the result back under the same license (which is often an issue for some corporate projects).

The only thing these people want to save is their class privilege, just so we're clear...

I assumed it was going for psoas, but popoasson would work too...

Not books on Software engineering, but since you asked for most impact:

* Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows & Randers)

* Sustainable Energy: Without the hot air (David MacKay) Available here: https://www.withouthotair.com/

* Sitopia (Carolyn Steel)

Nuclear is expensive first and foremost because of the unreasonable yield demands of capital and the advent of neoliberalism causing states to cave to said demands (source: https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po...)

Paris-Madrid is a poor choice, provided the French and Spanish rail gauge are different, meaning one needs to change somewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian-gauge_railways

C++ mostly ;)

Yes, and as pointed out in the link I shared, air pollution is part of the limited impacts it is applicable to, but points out "it does not apply to impacts like resource use and energy use".

The Environmental Kuznets Curve is problematic though, see for instance: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2020/10/9/response-to-mcafe...

From the article linked above: "(...) We call this whataboutism. Actors advancing this discourse often deploy statistics demonstrating their own small contribution to global emissions, or they point to large emitters such as China – “We are a nation that produces 1.8 per cent of global carbon dioxide, so I do not get closing down our aluminium smelters, most of our steel production, and now our refining industry …” "

Either we start giving get out of jail free cards to specific sectors and so on or we agree that everything needs to reduce its emissions by ~8%/year from now on, regardless of their share in total emissions, and of how hard it is technically to decarbonize.

Yes, sure, we can go mine the bottom of the oceans and extract it by centrifuging ocean waters, that probably would give us marginally more than a doubling of margin. Point remains: reserves are exhaustible, an exponential consumption may not be desirable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#:~:text=As%20of%2....

Besides the fact that electricity generation is merely one aspect of GHG emissions (hello agriculture, land use, transportation, etc). The ultimate argument against the "let's not radically change our ways and only retool the engine" view is the following: we have ~120 years of known reserves for the current fission reactors, with a potential 10x multiplier with fast neutron reactors should anybody (other than the russians and the chinese) bother to invest into researching the field. How many more doublings in our economy (and hence energy use) does it take to consume it all ? At a measly (by economists and politicians standards) rate of 2%/year, you get a doubling every 35 years. in 350 years (yeah I know this sounds very far in the light of the current news) we'd have increased our demand by 3 orders of magnitude...

Beyond the fact that electricity-generation is once again only part of our emissions issue, there's about ~450 reactors worldwide and the uranium ore reserves give us around ~120 years of operation on current 3rd (/3+) gen reactors (short of having fast neutron reactors basically). Having 1000 in the US (or rather 900 more or 3 times as many globally) would have brought that deadline closer by the inverse ratio, and we'd likely already have tensions on nuclear fuel sourcing. Agree with you on the role of government spending though, but there also needs to be a radical paradigm shift in how we view the economy and what needs to happen in each sector (not just within energy in fact).

A lot more complicated than that in fact [0]. CO2 is only causing 1/3 of the radiative forcing. High atmosphere chemical interactions and contrails have a massive impact. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223102...

> Aviation contributes only 2% of global air pollution Whataboutism, one of the identified discourses of climate delay [0]. Besides, the proportion of radiative forcing (what actually matters) caused by aviation is more than twice that [1].

[0]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-sustainabilit... [1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223102...

It isn't all about electricity generation: how areagriculture, land use, global logistics (to a good extent) affected by electricity generation ?

Yes it's slow to build today, though it hasn't always been the case: France once built 56 reactors over 15 years [0]. Yes it's expensive, but once again, this isn't a feature of Nuclear power, but one of the capitalist (or at the very least neoliberal) system it is built into: 60% of the Hinkley point C costs are due to the mode of financing (not 100% public) [1]. The real question is not whether this or that type of electricity generation is better (although it's also an important question), but rather how we can completely redesign our socio-economic system to quickly wean ourselves off of fossil fuels (hint: global logistics are far from electrified), reduce emissions from the agricultural sector (we do need to eat), etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme... [1] https://www.nao.org.uk/report/hinkley-point-c/

Nuclear’s problem is not regulation, it’s that it is relatively slow to come online with large upfront investments. It’s simply not well aligned with the current financial world. The “fix” for this within the neoliberal paradigm would be to do the same as with renewables: have the state put long term price guarantees and subsidies for it. Alas, unlike renewables, this doesn’t also create a market for gas producers, so very little chance for it to happen magically if you ask me.

I would add that beyond that, electricity is usually a rather small (~25%) fraction of final energy consumption in developed economies, so really there's a lot more to worry about if we're thinking about climate, and that might well imply "lifestyle changes" as David MacKay called them.

Nuclear doesn't need pumped hydro storage so much. France has historically been doing load following with its reactors, and the rate of modulation is of 80% over 30min. (so 24MW/min for a 900MW reactor). Sure, having a bit of pumped hydro to help for really steep spikes can't hurt, but its role is minor. Storage for renewables on the other hand...

Yup, a lot of the conversation around energy and electricity feels like we're not at all talking about the same things. A book worth reading on the subject: https://www.withouthotair.com/

Not a technical problem, it's just that long term projects with large upfront investments end up costing a lot within the socio-economic system we have. These are societal choices. Do we collectively want low-carbon electricity, with proper regulation and independent safety authorities, or do we want neoliberalism, small government and free markets... https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po...

That's a misread of Malthus: https://twitter.com/g_kallis/status/1285950145553731584?s=20 And in the meantime the state of science has evolved a bit. We have a better idea today where we stand on planetary boundaries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries