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Sonori

@ sonori @beehaw.org

Posts
3
Comments
361
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Are Electric Cars the Solution?

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  • Actually, because of just how inefficient small scale combustion is and how much fuel goes into getting that gas to the car in the first place, even if you run an EV directly off the most polluting coal plant in the North America it’s still significantly better for the environment. Admittedly if you use a more average energy mixture, the benefit is far larger, but there is still a benefit.

  • Are Electric Cars the Solution?

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  • The ‘substantially heavier’ is doing a lot of work there, given the change is only about 5 to 10% on average and typically EV’s are still not the heaviest vehicles in their same class. Compared to the car obesity epidemic in North America, the drivetrain is irrelevant. A European EV for instance is nearly always going to far, far lighter than a modern US gas car.

    Also, becuse if the road degradation is exponentially tied to tire wheight it is almost always a function of trucks, busses, and freeze thaw cycles, cars tend to be to light to cause significant share of the damage.

    Break dust is an odd thing to bring up, seeing as one of the other common gripes with EVs is that they use their breaks so extremely rarely that they corrode and might be ineffective in an emergency.

    Tire dust is an factor, but again one that’s more impacted by the increase in North America’s car size than drivetrain and which is reduced by getting cars back to sane sizes and out of dense areas like cities, not pretending that a 80 to 90% reduction in one of the largest causes of climate change is somehow the same.

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    Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract

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  • Probably, but I would much rather be a background character in the intro to a space opera instead.

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    Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract

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  • Well on the bright side, getting fired from one of the largest mega corps in the world for complaining about the company’s providing resources to kill civilians is a hell of a thing to be able to put on your resume.

    On the not so bright side, I don’t like being a background character in a cyberpunk story.

  • Has Tesla peaked? And what would that mean for the climate?

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  • Counterpoint, their is a very big difference between burning oil and an infinitely recyclable metal that does not inherently release carbon and only ever has to be mined once before it is used forever. It’s not a solution to say the inherent waste of using a massive vehicle to move a single person in a crowded environment, but from the perspective of preventing the vast destruction of climate change, replacing things that inherently output carbon to things that don’t is a solution.

    Again, there are plenty of other methods of transport like trains, trams, bikes, etc… but it is simply ridiculous to claim that buring oil is just the same as not buring oil.

  • Global coral bleaching event called by US climate agency for the fourth time in history after year of extreme ocean heat

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  • The short answer is that no fish ladder is 100% effective, and part of a river becoming a lake will always change the local ecosystem for better or worse. Both of these things arn’t new, not all fish have ever made it upstream and land slips create new lakes often enough, but they do have an impact.

    You’re probably better off looking at one of the few major dam removal projects in California if you want to see the ecological arguments against hydro however, as I don’t think I can make a very good case when I personally think that combating gobal climate change should absolutely take priority over local effects.

    Mostly because if we are building renewables as fast as ‘economically practically’ will allow, and we are still using coal and natural gas to generate significant amounts of electricity at any time, then shutting down ang renewable or low carbon generation like hydro or nuclear inherently means that load is being generated by coal and gas at cost of putting hundreds to thousands of metric tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere per day said plant is offline.

  • Global coral bleaching event called by US climate agency for the fourth time in history after year of extreme ocean heat

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  • I think at this point everyone who could care about the continued existence of coral or the large set of marine life that depends on it are already Voting for it. About the only change I can think of such events having is creating a greater acceptance of the local environmental inpacts created by lower carbon sources of energy like Hydro as the fish they inpacted die off anyway.

  • Solar panels are being used in Gaza to power wells, creating clean water

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  • From my understanding the main reason why solar panels were so commonly imported to and so prized in Gaza in the last decade is because it’s the only way to ensure that you’ll reliably have power for at least some of the day to purify water, charge phones, etc… with how often the Israeli government cuts the power.

  • How is the hydrogen made?

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  • Current gobal hydrogen demand is in the region of a 100,000,000 metric tons per year. That is not too small a market to be worth creating green hydrogen, and the fact that green hydrogen cannot come close to meeting even that demand would seem to prove that more demand for hydrogen is not the problem. Indeed if too expensive for applications that actually need to use hydrogen, why would expanding applications that waste half of it like cars be at all helpfull?

  • How is the hydrogen made?

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  • Neglecting that we actually study and know how fast large batteries degrade with age and time, and thusly know that they do last far more than ten years, it does actually matter that hydrogen is to expensive to make with excess green energy and that no company is willing to buy it precisely because green hydrogen made from excess green energy is so many times more expensive to make then grey hydrogen.

    If it is saves more money to electrify and save wear and tear on equipment by shutting down when there is an excess power than could ever be made by making and selling green hydrogen with it, people arn’t going to make much green hydrogen. Put another way, green hydrogen being so expensive that even with free electricity it is still too expensive to compete is a problem for green hydrogen.

    Maybe raising taxes on grey hydrogen to the point green hydrogen can compete might be worth it, but that is a very different solution to a very different problem then what you originally claimed, which was that there wasn’t enough demand for hydrogen.

    Indeed given the actual problem facing green hydrogen, which is that it is too expensive to produce compared to the more common grey hydrogen, increasing demand for hydrogen is actually directly harmful to the planet from a global warming perspective.

  • How is the hydrogen made?

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  • Except there is already a massive market for hydrogen. It is needed, produced, and used in bulk for a vast collection of industrial processes. The problem is that green hydrogen is simply expensive to make, gains very little from being done at scale, and when it comes to competing with other energy storage techs any that don’t inherently have to throw half the energy away as waste like hydrogen does are always going to have an advantage.

  • US Homes Face Costly Retrofits for Induction Stoves, EV Chargers | New homes in the US may not be “electrical ready” after an international standards agency excluded building electrification measures

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  • Coming as someone who did the same themselves, basically all mains wiring is good up to 600v in the US, and all main and sub panels have breakers precisely because you can overload them just by using a decent portion of your circuits to their fullest.

    Putting in new circuits or plugs isn’t exactly uncommon or particularly difficult. The biggest thing to watch out for being the extra 20% safety margin the NEC requires on top of a circuits rated capacity that if I remember correctly puts you a gauge up from what the circuit itself requires, but if the state certified inspector signed off on it then it’s almost certainly good to go.

  • US Homes Face Costly Retrofits for Induction Stoves, EV Chargers | New homes in the US may not be “electrical ready” after an international standards agency excluded building electrification measures

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  • Remember that this was removed at the request of a industry group that strongly recommends all new homes have natural gas lines run to all appliances just in case some future homeowner might want them.

  • US Wind and solar capacity projections rose as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act

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  • Nope, live in a modern-ish single family house in a northwestern state bordering Canada with a diy grid tied solar system plus smart thermostat that gives me plenty of metrics and have spent plenty of time in an off gird cabin.

    Mostly what I’m getting from this conversation is that you think your experience must by extension be universal for everyone, everywhere, all the time, and of course that if you can’t refute the quick skim of an argument, statistic, or claim you just ignore it and all context in favor of a scenario where it might not apply and then pretend the conversation was actually about that specific scenario all along.

    Given this conversation about a third party’s offhand comment has been going on for nearly a day and is far two deep in replies that Memmy won’t render them let’s just agree to disagree and save our time for IRL stuff or commenting on how unified major cooperations are in greenwashing destroying the planet or something.

  • US Wind and solar capacity projections rose as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act

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  • US Wind and solar capacity projections rose as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act

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  • Again, where are you getting the idea that the original commenter has to be talking about being set on a old, poorly insulated home?

  • Here’s how EVs could get 200 miles per gallon | A new report says that electric vehicles could double in efficiency in the next decades — if automakers make the right moves

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  • Thanks for the summary.

    The problem with most of thouse of course, it that there are good reasons why we don’t do them already, mostly cost. Higher density batteries means the low cost, very scalable, and rare material-less batteries like LFP or Sodium Ion are right out, rolling resistance is very hard to reduce without sacrificing road adhesion and traction, and carbon fiber can’t be welded or bent to shape, making manufacturing more difficult and expensive.

    From a climate perspective, what matters is the boring everyday sedan, suv, minivan, and pickup, not the top of the line luxury market, as much as amarican automakers would like to pretend otherwise.

  • US Wind and solar capacity projections rose as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act

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  • We are literally talking about whether it is practically possible for a major renovation to a lifelong dream home. If they are in love with an old poorly built and insulated home in a very cold area then yes, in a few decades when this do this they will have to have it insulated to at least modern standards and of doing so it’s likely worth it to go to far better, but that is a very long way from your position that no one could even think about it being feasible for anyone in a few decades.

  • US Wind and solar capacity projections rose as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act

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  • In most (sane) numbering systems, you can use a k in place of thousands, m in the place of millions, etc. Becuse all the numbers around the scale of energy use involving the entire monthly power consumption use of a heat pump in a cold climate as well as solar production and storage needed are in thousands, you will note I wrote all the relevant numbers with the abbreviation k, so 5,475 kwh is equivalent to 5.4k kwh.

    Admittedly 5.4 mwh would have been more clear, but because megawatt hours is less commonly used and would involved useing two diffrent units next to each other I used thousands of the same unit for consistency. Please go back and re-read all of my comments with this new knowledge in mind.

    Yes, many heat pumps are installed in warmer climates, though that is changing, but blowing through the entire yearly national average in three weeks and then doing it again is lot of power for a climate contentious and thusly presumably well insulated off grid modern house to use. (Also, if we go back to what this conversation is about, the original commenter gave no indication that they were in a very cold climate with thousand dollar a month heating costs in the first place.)

  • US Wind and solar capacity projections rose as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act

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  • Are you suggesting a 7kw heat pump, or 7,000kwh/m highest hearing load? Because the former would already come out to about 2.5k kwh assuming a 12h duty cycle for 30 days, while the latter would cost over a thousand dollars a month to run at average US electricity prices during the month of highest load.

    For reference the typical heat pump in the typical amarican single family house consumes 5.4k kwh in an entire year.