I used to live in the US, in Iowa, and I always let my lawn grow longer than the neighbors - damn them if they didn't like it. Every spring it was a shower of colour - purple and white from the violets, yellow from the dandelions, white from clover, etc. I refused to mow it until the flowers were withering and the dandelion was starting to go to seed. If everyone did that, pollinator populations near settled areas would be orders of magnitude higher than they are now.
Here in Iceland I have a good chunk of land in the countryside, which I wouldn't even dream of mowing. Lots of thyme, crowberries, wildflowers down by the river, etc. The land could really use some restoration, though, historic overgrazing has really depleted our soils. I have mixed feelings on the possibility of planting lupine - it's beautiful, does its job, provides pollen, and generally disappears after several decades when it can no longer compete with native plants in the now-fertile soil. But it's non-native, invasive, and slightly poisonous to livestock.
Never feed bees honey from the store. If you want to give them something to eat, pretty much anything sugary except honey is better. Honey can be a disease vector for bees. A commercial packaging operation receives the honey from a huge number of hives, and at least some of them are likely to be carrying bee diseases.
The "no threat" aspect is that the annual colony death rate would have to reach 99% everywhere on Earth in order to exceed the rate in which queens can be bred; anywhere on Earth that queens can be bred with an annual colony loss rate 98% or less, they can have excess to export, in bulk. And even then you could work around it by doing queen breeding in highly controlled environments. Because of this, it's essentially impossible to wipe out honeybees. Going from 15-20% annual loss rates to 30-40% just isn't going to cut it.
But higher annual loss rates can certainly hurt the economics for keeping them.
Even in a "no pollination services" scenario, that still doesn't mean "no growing pollination-requiring crops". It does however mean "no pesticide-intensive single-species single-cultivar monoculture". If you want to support local pollinators to a level sufficient to meet your needs, you have to spread out the flowering periods in a given region, and make sure not to wipe them out with broad-spectrum pesticide application. Having everything bloom all at once means there's suddenly a wealth of food that there's not enough insects to take advantage of, and then it's starvation for them for the rest of the year.
Of course, single-species, single-cultivar monoculture is more economically efficient. And it's easier just to wipe out everything except for when you're paying for pollination than to practice proper IPM and only do careful, targeted pest interventions. But thankfully at least the latter is slowly changing.
Sorry, but the GP is correct and you are wrong. Lettuce is self-pollinated. Spinach can be either wind or insect pollinated. In the field, you don't want either of them pollinated, you want to harvest before they bolt (flower). The amount of acreage required for seed production is vastly smaller than that for food production, to the extent that even if pollination was required (it's not), it could be done by hand or with mechanical systems. Tomatoes get improved fruit set when pollinated, but still produce fruit when self-pollinated, and there are even some cultivars which can only be self-pollinated. Most commercial asparagus these days is male-only cultivars, not pollinated at all, because female plants waste energy on producing seeds rather than stalks.
You see people, that's what Kushner was trying to talk to the Russians about: food assistance in the upcoming beepocalypse. But all of you are too negative and partisan to stop and think about how he was trying to save everyone from a horrible death through starvation.
"Enslaved" is a pretty mean way to describe having their shelter provided by the beekeeper, along with routine inspections for (and treatments of) parasites that would kill them. Yes, the keeper will rob honey from the hive, but not enough to kill it during the winter - and may well supplement the hive for the winter. Keepers that offer pollination services also move their bees from one rich food source to the next.
There is no threat to honeybees (which in the US aren't even native). Queens can be bred in bulk (there are tricks to make a hive produce lots of queens), and starting a new hive only takes a queen and a handful of workers. Beekeepers can order them by mail.
These dieoffs are not about fundamental threats, but economics. It means more labour and cost to beekeepers, which they have to pass on.
The Slashdot summary presents a pretty accurate description of the reasons for the dieoffs - they appear to be multifactor, but varroa is what you find most commonly in afflicted colonies.Note that annual dieoffs are normal among honeybee colonies - 15-20% over winter is pretty typical, although it depends on location.
Bees are amazing creatures, and many of their problems have been brought on by humans. There are many bee species around the world, and many have long had their own specific parasites, which they're adapted to. As people have moved around the world, they've taken honeybees with. As a consequence, they've spread all of these local parasites and diseases around the world, into European honeybees that have no natural resistance to them. Ironically some were accidentally spread by programmes trying to breed resistance to other pests and diseases, bringing in bee stocks from around the world (a big example being the Buckfast Bee). Also, attempts to optimize bees for docility and honey production ended up reducing honeybee genetic diversity; for example, the European dark (formerly the most common in northern Europe) was considered an inferior breed, and was reduced to just a handful of colonies. But it appears that the European dark has some natural resistance to varroa, as well as being better at defending its hives from wasps (they're also much better adapted to cold climate areas).
It's interesting the means different bee species use to defend against the pests and predators that they evolved to in their natural range. One of my favorites is how Japanese honeybees fight off the nightmarish Japanese giant hornet (don't look it up if you have any fear of being stung by a huge insect). It's far too well armoured for honeybees to hurt it, so instead what they do is swarm it and beat their wings like crazy, creating heat. Because their maximum survivable body temperature happens to be just a couple degrees hotter than the hornet's maximum temperature, so they basically cook it to death;)
Doing some math here... if we say that the absorbed oxygen is 20% of the absorber's mass, burned stoichiometrically with methane, at 50% efficiency due to high temperatures and pressures, then storing a day's worth at 1MW would require 62 tonnes of absorber. At iron oxide bulk costs and iron oxide densities, that'd be about $44k and 11 cubic meters, respectively. 1GW-day, $44m and 11000 cubic meters (say, a storage yard 50x50x4,4m). None of this seems at all unreasonable, given that a thermal plant usually runs about $1/W or more in capital costs; the absorber could be far more expensive and the storage time far more than a day's worth without being prohibitive.
All very good points. And the possibility of higher temperature combustion didn't occur to me, but that may well be possible - you get higher adiabatic flame temperatures in pure oxygen combustion. If the oxygen absorber isn't very costly, the higher Carnot efficiency could potentially pay for the cost.
Another interesting possibility that now occurs to me is high pressure combustion (also greater efficiency). The oxygen-rich absorber is almost certainly going to be dramatically more oxygen-dense than even compressed air feedstocks. You could have some crazy-intense combustion out of that. You're basically looking at something like the thermite reaction. In the thermite case, you have iron holding onto oxygen relatively weakly reacting with aluminum which forms a high energy bond with oxygen. Aluminum burns poorly in air because the oxygen is so sparse, but when it has such a concentrated oxygen source (the iron oxide), it burns extremely aggressively. I could easily envision the same sort of situation here - just methanothermic reduction rather than aluminothermic.
Wow, just thought of another thing: combustion doesn't have to occur at the same time as oxygen collection. So for a peaking plant you could dramatically downsize the intake section and scrubbing bed, so long as the oxygen absorber isn't too expensive (which it probably isn't - most common metal oxides are dirt cheap). It stocks up on its oxidized material when demand is low, but when demand is high it burns through it like crazy. And on top of that, burning feeding in your oxidizer as a solid means a physically small footprint on the combustion side. So overall the plant is scaled down.
You know, the more I think about this, the more interesting it sounds.
Indeed. The problem is even worse than that because a lot of people on benefits have marginal - but some - ability to work. Taking on a job is a risk. They want to hold a normal job, but there's the fear that if they take start working and lose their benefits, and then it turns out that their condition ultimately means that they can't hold down the job, then they're back to being unemployed, but without any benefits. Which is of course a scary situation.
These perverse incentives hinder the economy. You want people working to whatever extent they're capable of, not being hindered by fear of consequences if they accept a job.
Speak for yourself. And if you had the baggers be checkers instead, you could have literally twice as many lanes open. So if you want to talk about "holding everyone up"....
And, FYI? Our checker counters have a divider where the groceries come out, and the checker can route groceries to either side. So a person doesn't need to be done bagging for them to start checking the next person's groceries.
But then again, it's that whole "rational solutions" thing that Americans are so allergic to.
What's to prevent the fat and lazy from living meager lives on basic income and never contributing to society greatly increasing our taxes?
What's to prevent the elderly who are still in good enough health to work from simply living on pensions and not contributing to society greatly increasing taxes? What's to prevent people currently on existing safety net programs from avoiding working too much so as not to lose their benefits?
More to the point, the reason that people currently on existing social safety net programmes overwhelmingly do end up working if they are capable of it is because people want a better life. So unless you're talking some UBI that is vastly better paying than the existing social safety net, you're not talking about a great life on it either.
What's wrong with bagging your own groceries? I don't really understand why the job of "grocery bagger" exists in the US. It's like stores treat their customers as invalids. If the customer is too disabled to be able to put their groceries in bags, how did they manage to collect them all and wheel them around in the first place? And if you're going to go so far as hire baggers to do the "difficult" job of bagging, why not also hire "shoppers" to fetch the groceries for the customers, so that they can just sit down and eat a bowl of nachos instead of having to do all that pesky walking?
How are you going to afford all that dope on only basic income - living in tent? I'm not sure what most people picture when they think of UBI, but if it's going to replace existing "social safety net" programmes, then life on UBI alone means living like life on existing social safety net programmes. Aka, you'll survive, but it won't be a pretty life.
You seem to be picturing the simultaneous implementation with UBI and a massive downwards transfer of wealth to boost the basic UBI to far beyond existing social safety net levels. While that's certainly possible to do, and I'm sure there's a good section of the population that would support that, it is in no way a fundamental requirement of UBI.
I support a mostly revenue-neutral transition to UBI. As UBI gets ramped up, all other existing benefits (including minimum wage) get deducted against UBI payouts. Whenever ~90% of a programme's former recipients are no longer getting a benefit from that programme due to UBI benefits, it is eliminated entirely - so as UBI goes up, overhead from other programmes goes down. Businesses become more efficient and markets less distorted as minimum wage ramps down and ultimately disappears, boosting tax revenue; eventually eliminating the need to deal with most payroll taxes also saves money.
Now, as people who previously might have "fallen through cracks" get covered, that adds new expenses, which might not be fully covered by savings. Also, since some "social safety net" programmes pay more than others, the more you want to engulf the more higher-payout programmes with a higher UBI baseline, the more you have to pay. The balance between 1) cutting the higher-payout welfare programmes to match a lower UBI, vs. 2) increasing tax revenue to pay for a stronger UBI, vs. 3) setting the UBI payment scheme to more closely match the existing payout distribution, involves political decisions to be taken by the government in power during UBI implementation negotiations.
We run these patchworks of programmes to try to approximate the effects of universal basic income. Lost your job? Unemployment insurance. Chronically unemployed? Food assistance, welfare, etc. Homeless? Housing assistance / public housing / shelters. Too old to work? Pensions / social security, and in the US, Medicare. Too poor for health insurance in the US? Medicaid. Physically can't work? Disability. Job wouldn't pay enough to afford basic expenses? Minimum wage. On and on.
Isn't it about time that we just simply accept what we're trying to approximate, and just do it directly? Then scrap the patchwork of programmes that try to approximate it, and all of their overhead (ex: all of them), market distortion (ex: minimum wage), and perverse incentives (ex: trying not to earn too much to avoid losing benefits). People can reasonably differ about the amount that defines "basic needs", how much if any to boost people who "permanently can't work" vs. those who simply don't have a job for whatever reason, how to deal with dependents, etc. But it certainly simplifies the debate versus having a whole complex and inefficient patchwork to argue over.
It's an interesting tech, but I'm not all that sanguine about it.
1) Presenting it as being some sort of lossless, no-downsides system isn't accurate. There's always going to be some losses when you add an extra chemical intermediary step in (in this case, a solid-state oxygen transfer mechanism).
2) It's not really all that fundamentally different from what's done to capture CO2 today. To capture CO2 you have the exhaust stream flow through a bed of CO2 absorbers, which you then reversibly degas. Here they're having the input air stream flow through a bed of O2 absorbers, which they reversibly degas for combustion. They've just moved it from the output side to the input side and switched absorbers. I can see some potential advantages to this (for example, the broader range of O2 absorbers; all other pollutants being captured with the CO2 rather than just a fraction of them; etc), but when it comes down to it, it doesn't look like some huge game changer.
Assuming that your plan is to grow greenhouse biomass to burn for power. Which would be a pretty weird plan.
CO2 has plenty of uses (a big one is in enhanced oil recovery), but yes, the amount produced in generating baseload power is far more than industry needs. That said, the objective is not to have CO2-intensive power as baseload - only peaking. With an ideal generation infrastructure (solar + wind, HVDC links connecting different regions), the amount of CO2 generated drops by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Which puts it more in the range of industrial needs.
For the record, the Audubon Society supports wind farms. Because while they kill birds, coal kills far more, between direct and indirect effects. Now, of course, they insist on proper siting and proper measures taken to minimize bird deaths, and work towards strong laws on this front. But they do support and advocate for wind power.
Per cubic meter mined, yes, uranium mining is far dirtier than coal. But you need to move a lot less rock for uranium mining to produce the same amount of energy, even accounting for the orders-of-magnitude higher tailings fractions in uranium, and the fact that only 0,7% of recovered uranium is U-235, and of that you'll only burn half of it.
That said, nuclear power is not being killed by wind, solar, gas or coal. It's being killed by its own price. Which only seems to go up with time, not down; it's the only major power generation method which has demonstrated a negative learning curve.
Beyond what everyone else is pointing out: no, wind is not baseload; it's intermittent. But:
1) Intermittent + Peaking = Baseload 2) Intermittent + Storage = Baseload 3) Intermittent + Hydro uprating = Baseload 4) Intermittent + Different kind of intermittent = Less intermittency 5) Intermittent + Geographic diversity = Less intermittency 6) Current grid = Demand intermittency (aka, we're already used to dealing with the situation, just in reverse).
Yes, high wind penetration means better grid interconnects and/or more peakers. But wind is so damned cheap now (contracts on new wind farms in the US averaging around 2,5 cents per kWh) that you can afford to invest in better interconnects and peakers. Which does everyone a service, because it makes your grid more reliable with conventional baseload plants or existing links go down. Solar, by contrast, is more expensive than wind (the cheapest new contract in the US being 4 cents per kWh - although places outside the US are under 3 cents). But solar, in addition to pairing nicely with wind (the latter peaks when the sun is down, the former when it's up), actually reduces peaking demand at low penetrations (offsetting the daytime peak, and corresponding roughly with cooling needs), and doesn't require as extensive peaking at higher penetrations.
I'm calling BS on this one. Even Cape Wind, the most expensive wind power in the US (really more of a research project), is only 18.7 cents per kWh. And the first power it's displacing some crazy-expensive oil-fired power. Wind currently averages 2.5 cents per kWh to produce in the US. Now, that's the cost to the grid operator, not the consumer, and you have to pair it with peaking, which will add a penny or so to the cost per kWh. But it's gotten absurdly cheap. US solar contracts are now starting to come in at under 4 cents per kWh. And at low penetration, they actually reduce peaking requirements rather than raising it.
Furthermore, your claim "overall bill used to be 6 c/kw but now 9 c/kw and climbing, all due to wasteful subsidies" makes me even question whether you know what a subsidy is. If you were being hurt by a subsidy, it'd show up on your taxes, not your bill. If anything, your bill would get lower. And the $7B per year in subsidies for renewable electricity (which includes, by the way, research) equals $1.70 per month per person in the US. How does that compare to your electricity bill?
Also, there's a huge difference in terms of workforce employed to run generating infrastructure, versus workforce employed to build generating infrastructure. Solar and wind are undergoing huge scaleups at present. Hydro, not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to live in the US, in Iowa, and I always let my lawn grow longer than the neighbors - damn them if they didn't like it. Every spring it was a shower of colour - purple and white from the violets, yellow from the dandelions, white from clover, etc. I refused to mow it until the flowers were withering and the dandelion was starting to go to seed. If everyone did that, pollinator populations near settled areas would be orders of magnitude higher than they are now.
Here in Iceland I have a good chunk of land in the countryside, which I wouldn't even dream of mowing. Lots of thyme, crowberries, wildflowers down by the river, etc. The land could really use some restoration, though, historic overgrazing has really depleted our soils. I have mixed feelings on the possibility of planting lupine - it's beautiful, does its job, provides pollen, and generally disappears after several decades when it can no longer compete with native plants in the now-fertile soil. But it's non-native, invasive, and slightly poisonous to livestock.
*** This. ***
Never feed bees honey from the store. If you want to give them something to eat, pretty much anything sugary except honey is better. Honey can be a disease vector for bees. A commercial packaging operation receives the honey from a huge number of hives, and at least some of them are likely to be carrying bee diseases.
The "no threat" aspect is that the annual colony death rate would have to reach 99% everywhere on Earth in order to exceed the rate in which queens can be bred; anywhere on Earth that queens can be bred with an annual colony loss rate 98% or less, they can have excess to export, in bulk. And even then you could work around it by doing queen breeding in highly controlled environments. Because of this, it's essentially impossible to wipe out honeybees. Going from 15-20% annual loss rates to 30-40% just isn't going to cut it.
But higher annual loss rates can certainly hurt the economics for keeping them.
Even in a "no pollination services" scenario, that still doesn't mean "no growing pollination-requiring crops". It does however mean "no pesticide-intensive single-species single-cultivar monoculture". If you want to support local pollinators to a level sufficient to meet your needs, you have to spread out the flowering periods in a given region, and make sure not to wipe them out with broad-spectrum pesticide application. Having everything bloom all at once means there's suddenly a wealth of food that there's not enough insects to take advantage of, and then it's starvation for them for the rest of the year.
Of course, single-species, single-cultivar monoculture is more economically efficient. And it's easier just to wipe out everything except for when you're paying for pollination than to practice proper IPM and only do careful, targeted pest interventions. But thankfully at least the latter is slowly changing.
Sorry, but the GP is correct and you are wrong. Lettuce is self-pollinated. Spinach can be either wind or insect pollinated. In the field, you don't want either of them pollinated, you want to harvest before they bolt (flower). The amount of acreage required for seed production is vastly smaller than that for food production, to the extent that even if pollination was required (it's not), it could be done by hand or with mechanical systems. Tomatoes get improved fruit set when pollinated, but still produce fruit when self-pollinated, and there are even some cultivars which can only be self-pollinated. Most commercial asparagus these days is male-only cultivars, not pollinated at all, because female plants waste energy on producing seeds rather than stalks.
Bees can (and do) leave any time they want.
You see people, that's what Kushner was trying to talk to the Russians about: food assistance in the upcoming beepocalypse. But all of you are too negative and partisan to stop and think about how he was trying to save everyone from a horrible death through starvation.
"Enslaved" is a pretty mean way to describe having their shelter provided by the beekeeper, along with routine inspections for (and treatments of) parasites that would kill them. Yes, the keeper will rob honey from the hive, but not enough to kill it during the winter - and may well supplement the hive for the winter. Keepers that offer pollination services also move their bees from one rich food source to the next.
There is no threat to honeybees (which in the US aren't even native). Queens can be bred in bulk (there are tricks to make a hive produce lots of queens), and starting a new hive only takes a queen and a handful of workers. Beekeepers can order them by mail.
These dieoffs are not about fundamental threats, but economics. It means more labour and cost to beekeepers, which they have to pass on.
The Slashdot summary presents a pretty accurate description of the reasons for the dieoffs - they appear to be multifactor, but varroa is what you find most commonly in afflicted colonies.Note that annual dieoffs are normal among honeybee colonies - 15-20% over winter is pretty typical, although it depends on location.
Bees are amazing creatures, and many of their problems have been brought on by humans. There are many bee species around the world, and many have long had their own specific parasites, which they're adapted to. As people have moved around the world, they've taken honeybees with. As a consequence, they've spread all of these local parasites and diseases around the world, into European honeybees that have no natural resistance to them. Ironically some were accidentally spread by programmes trying to breed resistance to other pests and diseases, bringing in bee stocks from around the world (a big example being the Buckfast Bee). Also, attempts to optimize bees for docility and honey production ended up reducing honeybee genetic diversity; for example, the European dark (formerly the most common in northern Europe) was considered an inferior breed, and was reduced to just a handful of colonies. But it appears that the European dark has some natural resistance to varroa, as well as being better at defending its hives from wasps (they're also much better adapted to cold climate areas).
It's interesting the means different bee species use to defend against the pests and predators that they evolved to in their natural range. One of my favorites is how Japanese honeybees fight off the nightmarish Japanese giant hornet (don't look it up if you have any fear of being stung by a huge insect). It's far too well armoured for honeybees to hurt it, so instead what they do is swarm it and beat their wings like crazy, creating heat. Because their maximum survivable body temperature happens to be just a couple degrees hotter than the hornet's maximum temperature, so they basically cook it to death ;)
Who said anything about things being destroyed?
Doing some math here... if we say that the absorbed oxygen is 20% of the absorber's mass, burned stoichiometrically with methane, at 50% efficiency due to high temperatures and pressures, then storing a day's worth at 1MW would require 62 tonnes of absorber. At iron oxide bulk costs and iron oxide densities, that'd be about $44k and 11 cubic meters, respectively. 1GW-day, $44m and 11000 cubic meters (say, a storage yard 50x50x4,4m). None of this seems at all unreasonable, given that a thermal plant usually runs about $1/W or more in capital costs; the absorber could be far more expensive and the storage time far more than a day's worth without being prohibitive.
Nifty. :)
All very good points. And the possibility of higher temperature combustion didn't occur to me, but that may well be possible - you get higher adiabatic flame temperatures in pure oxygen combustion. If the oxygen absorber isn't very costly, the higher Carnot efficiency could potentially pay for the cost.
Another interesting possibility that now occurs to me is high pressure combustion (also greater efficiency). The oxygen-rich absorber is almost certainly going to be dramatically more oxygen-dense than even compressed air feedstocks. You could have some crazy-intense combustion out of that. You're basically looking at something like the thermite reaction. In the thermite case, you have iron holding onto oxygen relatively weakly reacting with aluminum which forms a high energy bond with oxygen. Aluminum burns poorly in air because the oxygen is so sparse, but when it has such a concentrated oxygen source (the iron oxide), it burns extremely aggressively. I could easily envision the same sort of situation here - just methanothermic reduction rather than aluminothermic.
Wow, just thought of another thing: combustion doesn't have to occur at the same time as oxygen collection. So for a peaking plant you could dramatically downsize the intake section and scrubbing bed, so long as the oxygen absorber isn't too expensive (which it probably isn't - most common metal oxides are dirt cheap). It stocks up on its oxidized material when demand is low, but when demand is high it burns through it like crazy. And on top of that, burning feeding in your oxidizer as a solid means a physically small footprint on the combustion side. So overall the plant is scaled down.
You know, the more I think about this, the more interesting it sounds.
Indeed. The problem is even worse than that because a lot of people on benefits have marginal - but some - ability to work. Taking on a job is a risk. They want to hold a normal job, but there's the fear that if they take start working and lose their benefits, and then it turns out that their condition ultimately means that they can't hold down the job, then they're back to being unemployed, but without any benefits. Which is of course a scary situation.
These perverse incentives hinder the economy. You want people working to whatever extent they're capable of, not being hindered by fear of consequences if they accept a job.
Speak for yourself. And if you had the baggers be checkers instead, you could have literally twice as many lanes open. So if you want to talk about "holding everyone up"....
And, FYI? Our checker counters have a divider where the groceries come out, and the checker can route groceries to either side. So a person doesn't need to be done bagging for them to start checking the next person's groceries.
But then again, it's that whole "rational solutions" thing that Americans are so allergic to.
What's to prevent the elderly who are still in good enough health to work from simply living on pensions and not contributing to society greatly increasing taxes? What's to prevent people currently on existing safety net programs from avoiding working too much so as not to lose their benefits?
More to the point, the reason that people currently on existing social safety net programmes overwhelmingly do end up working if they are capable of it is because people want a better life. So unless you're talking some UBI that is vastly better paying than the existing social safety net, you're not talking about a great life on it either.
What's wrong with bagging your own groceries? I don't really understand why the job of "grocery bagger" exists in the US. It's like stores treat their customers as invalids. If the customer is too disabled to be able to put their groceries in bags, how did they manage to collect them all and wheel them around in the first place? And if you're going to go so far as hire baggers to do the "difficult" job of bagging, why not also hire "shoppers" to fetch the groceries for the customers, so that they can just sit down and eat a bowl of nachos instead of having to do all that pesky walking?
How are you going to afford all that dope on only basic income - living in tent? I'm not sure what most people picture when they think of UBI, but if it's going to replace existing "social safety net" programmes, then life on UBI alone means living like life on existing social safety net programmes. Aka, you'll survive, but it won't be a pretty life.
You seem to be picturing the simultaneous implementation with UBI and a massive downwards transfer of wealth to boost the basic UBI to far beyond existing social safety net levels. While that's certainly possible to do, and I'm sure there's a good section of the population that would support that, it is in no way a fundamental requirement of UBI.
I support a mostly revenue-neutral transition to UBI. As UBI gets ramped up, all other existing benefits (including minimum wage) get deducted against UBI payouts. Whenever ~90% of a programme's former recipients are no longer getting a benefit from that programme due to UBI benefits, it is eliminated entirely - so as UBI goes up, overhead from other programmes goes down. Businesses become more efficient and markets less distorted as minimum wage ramps down and ultimately disappears, boosting tax revenue; eventually eliminating the need to deal with most payroll taxes also saves money.
Now, as people who previously might have "fallen through cracks" get covered, that adds new expenses, which might not be fully covered by savings. Also, since some "social safety net" programmes pay more than others, the more you want to engulf the more higher-payout programmes with a higher UBI baseline, the more you have to pay. The balance between 1) cutting the higher-payout welfare programmes to match a lower UBI, vs. 2) increasing tax revenue to pay for a stronger UBI, vs. 3) setting the UBI payment scheme to more closely match the existing payout distribution, involves political decisions to be taken by the government in power during UBI implementation negotiations.
... to let people starve in the streets, why not?
We run these patchworks of programmes to try to approximate the effects of universal basic income. Lost your job? Unemployment insurance. Chronically unemployed? Food assistance, welfare, etc. Homeless? Housing assistance / public housing / shelters. Too old to work? Pensions / social security, and in the US, Medicare. Too poor for health insurance in the US? Medicaid. Physically can't work? Disability. Job wouldn't pay enough to afford basic expenses? Minimum wage. On and on.
Isn't it about time that we just simply accept what we're trying to approximate, and just do it directly? Then scrap the patchwork of programmes that try to approximate it, and all of their overhead (ex: all of them), market distortion (ex: minimum wage), and perverse incentives (ex: trying not to earn too much to avoid losing benefits). People can reasonably differ about the amount that defines "basic needs", how much if any to boost people who "permanently can't work" vs. those who simply don't have a job for whatever reason, how to deal with dependents, etc. But it certainly simplifies the debate versus having a whole complex and inefficient patchwork to argue over.
It's an interesting tech, but I'm not all that sanguine about it.
1) Presenting it as being some sort of lossless, no-downsides system isn't accurate. There's always going to be some losses when you add an extra chemical intermediary step in (in this case, a solid-state oxygen transfer mechanism).
2) It's not really all that fundamentally different from what's done to capture CO2 today. To capture CO2 you have the exhaust stream flow through a bed of CO2 absorbers, which you then reversibly degas. Here they're having the input air stream flow through a bed of O2 absorbers, which they reversibly degas for combustion. They've just moved it from the output side to the input side and switched absorbers. I can see some potential advantages to this (for example, the broader range of O2 absorbers; all other pollutants being captured with the CO2 rather than just a fraction of them; etc), but when it comes down to it, it doesn't look like some huge game changer.
Assuming that your plan is to grow greenhouse biomass to burn for power. Which would be a pretty weird plan.
CO2 has plenty of uses (a big one is in enhanced oil recovery), but yes, the amount produced in generating baseload power is far more than industry needs. That said, the objective is not to have CO2-intensive power as baseload - only peaking. With an ideal generation infrastructure (solar + wind, HVDC links connecting different regions), the amount of CO2 generated drops by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Which puts it more in the range of industrial needs.
For the record, the Audubon Society supports wind farms. Because while they kill birds, coal kills far more, between direct and indirect effects. Now, of course, they insist on proper siting and proper measures taken to minimize bird deaths, and work towards strong laws on this front. But they do support and advocate for wind power.
Per cubic meter mined, yes, uranium mining is far dirtier than coal. But you need to move a lot less rock for uranium mining to produce the same amount of energy, even accounting for the orders-of-magnitude higher tailings fractions in uranium, and the fact that only 0,7% of recovered uranium is U-235, and of that you'll only burn half of it.
That said, nuclear power is not being killed by wind, solar, gas or coal. It's being killed by its own price. Which only seems to go up with time, not down; it's the only major power generation method which has demonstrated a negative learning curve.
Beyond what everyone else is pointing out: no, wind is not baseload; it's intermittent. But:
1) Intermittent + Peaking = Baseload
2) Intermittent + Storage = Baseload
3) Intermittent + Hydro uprating = Baseload
4) Intermittent + Different kind of intermittent = Less intermittency
5) Intermittent + Geographic diversity = Less intermittency
6) Current grid = Demand intermittency (aka, we're already used to dealing with the situation, just in reverse).
Yes, high wind penetration means better grid interconnects and/or more peakers. But wind is so damned cheap now (contracts on new wind farms in the US averaging around 2,5 cents per kWh) that you can afford to invest in better interconnects and peakers. Which does everyone a service, because it makes your grid more reliable with conventional baseload plants or existing links go down. Solar, by contrast, is more expensive than wind (the cheapest new contract in the US being 4 cents per kWh - although places outside the US are under 3 cents). But solar, in addition to pairing nicely with wind (the latter peaks when the sun is down, the former when it's up), actually reduces peaking demand at low penetrations (offsetting the daytime peak, and corresponding roughly with cooling needs), and doesn't require as extensive peaking at higher penetrations.
I'm calling BS on this one. Even Cape Wind, the most expensive wind power in the US (really more of a research project), is only 18.7 cents per kWh. And the first power it's displacing some crazy-expensive oil-fired power. Wind currently averages 2.5 cents per kWh to produce in the US. Now, that's the cost to the grid operator, not the consumer, and you have to pair it with peaking, which will add a penny or so to the cost per kWh. But it's gotten absurdly cheap. US solar contracts are now starting to come in at under 4 cents per kWh. And at low penetration, they actually reduce peaking requirements rather than raising it.
Furthermore, your claim "overall bill used to be 6 c/kw but now 9 c/kw and climbing, all due to wasteful subsidies" makes me even question whether you know what a subsidy is. If you were being hurt by a subsidy, it'd show up on your taxes, not your bill. If anything, your bill would get lower. And the $7B per year in subsidies for renewable electricity (which includes, by the way, research) equals $1.70 per month per person in the US. How does that compare to your electricity bill?
Where are you, by the way?
Also, there's a huge difference in terms of workforce employed to run generating infrastructure, versus workforce employed to build generating infrastructure. Solar and wind are undergoing huge scaleups at present. Hydro, not so much.