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Sonori

@ sonori @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

  • The Really Dark Truth About Bots.

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  • Hopefully, but I worry no small part of it at the moment is just that we’re too small to be worth the bother. If the fediverse grows big enough to matter, well I worry about what dedicated teams of people working a full time job could do. One or two people can easily run a few dozen active accounts, which in turn could easily dominate conversation on an instance.

  • Trump wants to ‘Drill, baby, drill.’ What does that mean for climate concerns?

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  • With current battery and hydro storage prices, their cheaper than natural gas with with the cost of the buffer, and absurdly cheap for any industrial application that doesn’t.

    Also there are bulk industrial processes to make steel, concrete, fertilizer, and glass with little to no carbon emissions, they just require more electricity and so aren’t cost effective if your electricity comes from fossil fuels, hence why most such plants only started construction once the cost for electricity in general dropped below the cost for fossil electricity.

    Moreover while mining and shipping are only starting decarbonization, the required fossil fuel extraction is already far, far smaller than what’s continually required to run the generation they are replacing, and that’s only going to continue to drop as more and more primary energy is electrified with renewables.

  • Nuclear Power Was Once Shunned at Climate Talks. Now, It’s a Rising Star. | Growing worldwide energy demand and other factors have shifted the calculus, but hurdles still lie ahead.

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  • For the most part to my knowledge it’s the same as maintaining any large, complex piece of infrastructure. As it gets older spare parts get harder to find and have to be replaced with different similar parts requiring new engineering analysis, more and more big components like pipes and tanks get to the point where they need to be wholly replaced, etc…

    Design lifespan is the point the designers expected a lot of annoying to replace things to wear out on paper for the cost of maintenance to rise, but now in the present we can inspect things to see how they actually did in practice.

    This means that operations gets more expensive and you need to shut down for major work every now and then, but compared to the ever increasing cost of building an entire new plant just replacing the parts that have worn out in order to squeeze an extra fifteen or twenty years is probably going to be more cost effective to a point.

    We just need them to hold in long enough for us to get enough renewables and storage capacity on the grid to replace all the fossil sources, at which point we can keep building renewables and replace the most most expensive to maintain nuclear and most fish limiting dams and the like.

  • Nuclear Power Was Once Shunned at Climate Talks. Now, It’s a Rising Star. | Growing worldwide energy demand and other factors have shifted the calculus, but hurdles still lie ahead.

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  • Nuclear power was absolutely the answer, 50, 30, or even 20 years ago, but given the long construction times and cost relative to wind and solar backed by battery and hydro, the time for new construction has probably passed outside of niche regions. It’s still much more cost effective to keep existing plants online, but when the primary bottleneck is funding focusing on the more cost effective technologies just makes sense.

    Of course, I imagine that’s the same reason why the oil and gas companies that have been fearmongering about nuclear power for the last half century have suddenly come around on it.

  • Trump Wins, Planet Loses | With control of the White House and the Senate, Republicans are poised to upend US climate policy.

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  • I also wasn’t talking about individual solar. Utility solar is nearly always divided between manufacturing, installation, and the operator. The operator is the only one benefited by solar’s long term return on investment. Everyone else makes their money in construction, which is very much price competitive.

    In my experience none of these groups however have even a fraction of the cash of a company like BP or Exxon Mobile, and what piles of cash they do have tends to be investment in rather than profit from. As it’s a lot harder to spend investors cash on buying regulators than it is to spend incoming profit on it this limits the amount that they can spend on such an endeavor.

    There are also a lot more places banning utility scale solar and wind than are oil and gas, so delaying renewables rollout seems like an evidently effective strategy for limiting their lobbying power.

  • Trump Wins, Planet Loses | With control of the White House and the Senate, Republicans are poised to upend US climate policy.

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  • No, i’m thinking of solar.

    Over decades a solar system will pay back itself many times over, but that’s irrelevant to the question of how big of a money pile can business throw at politicians in the here and now.

    That’s determined by the profit margin for companies manufacturing and installing them, which tend to be rather thin given the highly competitive nature of the market. No solar installer anywhere near the profit that oil companies are raking in, and the people owning the panels are usually paying off the loan to install them, using the profits to build more capacity, or saving, not buying off politicians.

    Without subsidies there would be far less profit for oil companies, which is exactly why it is so important for them to ‘reinvest’ some of their recent massive profits into continuing and expanding said subsidies and slowing down the adoption of alternatives. Buying off the government with its own money is a benefit since it leaves more for them.

  • Trump Wins, Planet Loses | With control of the White House and the Senate, Republicans are poised to upend US climate policy.

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  • Counterpoint, Alberta exists and low costs benefit the consumer, not the company. I am fully confident that the profit made by oil and gas is significantly more than the tight profit margins in renewables, which means far less money to throw at politicians. Oil and gas can therefore throw much more money at Trump and still be in the black on their ‘investment’, even if you ignore that Trump has deep ideological and political opposition to renewables.

  • Initiative 2117: Voters supporting Washington State’s carbon market

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  • 2066, the require the run Natural Gas to every building in the state and don’t plan to stop polluting at any point measure, is however still on track to pass through.

    Come on King county uncounted votes, we’re all relying on you now.

  • AI's $1.3 trillion future increasingly hinges on Taiwan

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  • I’ve considered it, but as they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Given you have to pay interest on short positions and can only make as much as the stock falls by, if they can keep the grift going for another year or two the market could crash and you would still turn a loss.

  • The Polls Are Underestimating the Importance of Climate Change | The climate crisis is the ultimate "kitchen table" issue, argue activist Saad Amer and Rep. Ro Khanna

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  • It was created in its current form by the formal adoption of senate rule 22 in 1917, which would explicitly take a two thirds majority to edit or remove and if not removed would leave the filibuster on the books. It’s also worth noting that filibusters were incredibly rare in the 1800s, especially pre civil war, with its use to stall civil rights legislation mainly being a 1940s and later thing.

    The procedure to go around rule 22 by rasing a point of order in contradiction to established precedent is commonly called the ‘nuclear option’ by everyone from the media to reformists discussing it, and is recognized as the only likely way short of the two thirds majority needed to amend rule 22 to get around the senate filibuster. I think the name is more than a little grandiose, but it is the commonly accepted name for the procedure.

  • THE BEES RULE

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  • The Polls Are Underestimating the Importance of Climate Change | The climate crisis is the ultimate "kitchen table" issue, argue activist Saad Amer and Rep. Ro Khanna

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  • A simple majority vote via the nuclear option could be undone just as quickly once things shifted, and from my understanding would never be an option in future if done once. To actually officially change the rules and eliminate the filibuster in a way that isn’t just procedural a two thirds majority is required.

  • Know thy enemy

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  • Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.

    While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.

  • The Polls Are Underestimating the Importance of Climate Change | The climate crisis is the ultimate "kitchen table" issue, argue activist Saad Amer and Rep. Ro Khanna

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  • Multiple opportunities, in the last few decades? To my knowledge the only point they had the votes to was that one three month period where they got the ACA though, before that was in the 70s when party line votes were pretty rare.

  • The Polls Are Underestimating the Importance of Climate Change | The climate crisis is the ultimate "kitchen table" issue, argue activist Saad Amer and Rep. Ro Khanna

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  • The US could do similar, but the Democrats couldn’t on account of all legislation in the last decade needing Republican approval to not get filibustered, and Republicans hating the idea of any subsidy that interferes with the “free market” outside of oil subsidies.

    While the US government could absolutely be doing more in theory, in practice I think the climate legislation the Democrats have managed to get past Republican obstruction has been very impressive.

  • One California City Wants to Get Rid of Gas | Residents of liberal Berkeley will get to vote on a second attempt to curb use of the fuel in buildings.

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  • So what your saying is that given fuel makes up 3-5% of a commercial kitchen’s operating costs as per the Department of Energy, it would at worse add ten percent to the prices of kitchens that currently use natural gas instead of propane or electric? And that’s worse case, ignoring that Berkeley sure isn’t paying average kitchen labor costs given minimum wage there is nearly two and a half times the national average.

    So all in all nowhere near a large enough price hike to kill all demand for large restaurants in the city even by the worst case figures of a company lobbying against it.

  • One California City Wants to Get Rid of Gas | Residents of liberal Berkeley will get to vote on a second attempt to curb use of the fuel in buildings.

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  • You realize that natural gas distribution networks don’t exist everywhere and that even in the highly built up US they tend to only serve cities, towns, and nearby suburbs, right? Everywhere else uses propane or electric.

  • One California City Wants to Get Rid of Gas | Residents of liberal Berkeley will get to vote on a second attempt to curb use of the fuel in buildings.

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  • You should probably go tell the millions of commercial kitchens in places that don’t have natural gas that they don’t exist then.

  • The Struggle Against Mining in Maine

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  • Of course there is an alternative, as the article is arguing implicitly, you ban mining and other unsightly industrial activities in rich areas with strong environmental and safety laws, and outsource it to poor nations without the political leverage to strongly regulate mining companies. This objectively results in far, far more environmental damage, but that environmental damage is contained to highly populated areas full of poor people you don’t have to think about.

    I really wish more environmentalists were pushing for potentially environmentally hazardous processes to be moved to areas with strong regulation and environmental protection laws, instead of just pushing them onto poor people, but unfortunately a lot of people seem to be so (purposely) disconnected from the industrial processes necessary to make everything from wind turbines and trains down to the food that appears on the shelves that they view the mining and manufacturing of these things as completely unconnected to these things themselves appearing in their lives.

  • I refuse defeatism

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  • As to solar, payback is usually 7-15 years depending on overhead costs, while most panels are still at 80% output in 20 to 25 years. Batteries don’t last as long as panels when being used to near capacity, but they’ll still do about half the lifespan of the panels. Batteries prices are also falling about as quickly as panel prices, with us now being in the neighborhood of 100 dollars per kwh of storage.

    I also think it’s a bit of a misnomer, especially on this instance, to consider these things completely dead and worthless at 80% effectiveness, especially when that is still far more effective than a brand new top of the line one a decade ago. I think that there are a lot of people in the world who wouldn’t mind the system taking up 25% more space if they could get them much cheaper, it’s just that much like EV battery range, a lot of people are finding that they don’t really need to replace the thing away at 80% capacity in the first place.