Is it? What happens if we add cheap battery storage to that 80 year old coal plant you mentioned?
Then it's dead with a battery attached to it.
You can't "throttle down" a coal plant all that much. And there's pretty much no advantage to running it at higher output to fill a battery when you aren't going to turn it off or close to off.
All you gain is instead of spinning an extra turbine to respond to surges, you have a battery respond to surges. You're still burning the coal because it takes you 3 days to get up to operating temperature.
Can you name any current manufacturer of ICE vehicles that has not ever produced an electric car in the last 10 or 20 years?
Ford (Ok, they finally started this model year).
Ford bet on higher-efficiency ICE, and hydrogen. They did develop some very efficient ICE, but hydrogen has been eclipsed by advances in batteries.
You do realize that major car makers already make different cars for different markets, don't you? Left hand drive vs. right hand drive already separate the markets so international companies already produce completely different cars for these markets.
But those cars use the same drivetrain. That's the point: Making natural gas ICE for the US and EVs for Europe is less efficient than EVs everywhere, and that drives up costs.
The number of people who really need a road-trip-ready car is quite small, especially when you factor in things like 30-minute "fill-up" at a supercharger-like device. It's not going to be the major factor in the market. Most people with ICE cars want some range so that they do not have to fill up all that often during their commute, and a 200 mile EV can easily do that for almost everyone. "Fast fill-up" doesn't really matter when plugging it in overnight covers all your use cases.
There'll probably be some sort of plug-in hybrid to handle the people who really want road trips or similar cases where EV range isn't enough, but it's not going to be the majority of car owners. Kinda like the majority of car owners don't buy Corvettes.
House cats don't kill falcons, vultures, eagles, and other large birds.
And windmills don't kill many of those either. Most of the dead birds are small. Which makes cats relevant.
I'll point to your earlier comment on how cats like to hunt birds, cats and other animals will eat these dead birds.
Then why cite birds as a problem with wind power? You're now claiming birds don't matter.
I've seen people write a articles that claims to point out that wind and solar are superior but they often are able to do so only through lies and careful manipulation of the data
Like, say, pricing the waste stream of nuclear plants at $0. That's quite a manipulation of the data.
Your citation only shows nuclear being twice the cost of solar and wind when comparing the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) case numbers from a single source
That source being amalgamation of many other studies, making it broader than EIA's. It's also not being done by an entity that is funded entirely by coal and petroleum.
If the economics were the way you believe, we would see the results in the free market. Utilities are building the cheapest power sources to maximize profit. They are building zero nuclear plants. They are stopping the construction half-built nuclear plants, demonstrating that it isn't regulatory issues. And they just built more solar than all other power generation methods combined.
Every nuclear power plant in the USA, and in most nations in the world, are required to pay in advance for the cost of decommissioning the plant at the end of its life
Decomissioning is demolition. It is not storage or treatment of the waste stream.
In the USA the government "rents" the nuclear fuel to the power plants. They buy the fuel from the government and then must pay the government to dispose of the waste.
The waste stream includes more than spent fuel.
Unless there is proof otherwise I'm quite certain that the cost of the waste management is included in the cost estimates.
Here's how you can quickly and easily figure out you're wrong: Where does the waste fuel go?
It goes into storage pools at the nuclear plants, awaiting the day the government creates a long-term storage plan.
That plan has been "pending" since the 1950s. Yucca Mountain was going to be the plan, but that got canceled. There is no new site in development, because nobody wants it. Effectively, the waste stream costs are infinite because there is no plan.
If your solution is breeder reactors to recycle fuel, such recycling plants currently 1) do not exist, 2) cause problems with nuclear non-proliferation treaties, and 3) construction and operation must be factored into the cost of nuclear power, and your study does not do this.
Your source ignores waste disposal as "somebody else's problem" for nuclear, in a desperate attempt to make nuclear cheap. Yet it insists waste disposal must be considered for solar and wind. It's this kind of fraud that demonstrates your sources are not useful in this discussion.
As I recall the problems of disposing of solar panel waste has not been resolved just yet
Seriously? Your nuclear waste disposal plan is to say "the government will magically make it go away", and you're concerned about not having a detailed plan for solar waste disposal in your hands?
Please stop being this disingenuous.
As for actual disposal, it's as recyclable as any other silicon product. To sum up, "meh". Not all that great, not all that awful.
How much needs to be recycled isn't actually all that clear yet. The widely-used 20-year lifespan of panels was determined by accelerated wear tests and extrapolation. Now that we have actually run some modern panels for 10 years, we're finding those tests were far too pessimistic. Panels drop to 70% of rated power over many years, and then wear drastically slows down. A 20-year-old panel was thought to be useless, but it turns out it's still got 50-60% of rated capacity. So just leaving them up longer is turning out to be a possibility.
I've seen the studies on how people pretend to be able to provide the electricity we need from wind and sun and it is not a pretty picture.
You mean like the one that pretends nuclear waste will just disappear?
We can provide all the electricity we need from nuclear and natural gas, and do so wit
You can't help people who do not want help. Most countries do want help, and are already bringing their birth rate down.
There will always be outliers. They will "fix" the problem through famine and strife. About the only "good" news is so far it looks like that will be mostly contained within the countries that fail to fix the problem.
Wind and solar have far greater waste problems than nuclear.
Nuclear literally has no method for dealing with the waste stream right now. Reprocessing spent fuel is not an option because of nuclear treaty obligations....and even if we ignore that, "build a second nuclear plant" isn't exactly an inexpensive solution. Millennia-long storage is a political nightmare that is not going to happen, because politicians like not getting voted out of office.
So, your concerns about waste stream seem a tad myopic.
Wind does kill birds but birds are jerks
I love when people trot this out. Household cats kill 1000 to 10,000 times more birds than wind power generation. Yet I don't see the same people so worried about it in wind generation propose banning cats.
Also, your sources on solar are 1) funded by the coal and natural gas industries, or 2) citing reports funded by the coal and natural gas industries. There might be a wee bit of bias in their studies.
Natural gas, solar and wind cost about the same per kWh. Natural gas is slightly cheaper, wind and solar obviously only work part of the time.
Then comes coal, more expensive than all three.
Then comes nuclear, more expensive than coal.
We've been building windmills and solar collectors for a very long time now.
Grid-scale wind and solar are still relatively new. Most have been built in the last 10 years. That's not a "very long time now".
Now that we've started building nuclear power plants again we can expect the prices to come down
Sorry, we stopped again. Turns out pretending nuclear is cheap is not an optimal strategy. And now Westinghouse is going bankrupt.
We saw something like this happen in Australia when a coal fired plant failed unexpectedly and a battery pack designed for storing wind power picked up the slack and likely saved the nation from a widespread power outage.
Um...no. There is part of a grid in Southern Australia grid that was rather unreliable, mostly due to the limited power generation on it. The battery is designed to 1) level out the brownouts and 2) allow wind-generated power to be used more often.
A plant in this area of Australia's grid failed, and the battery supplied power until other generators came on-line. It did not "save the nation", because the grid we're talking about serves a relatively small part of the nation. Without the battery, there would have been a brownout or blackout in that small population, but the rest of the nation wouldn't have cared - their grids would have disconnected from the shitty one as had happened many times before.
Wind and solar are expensive, more expensive than nuclear.
You're wrong on this. Nuclear is twice the cost of solar and wind. Citation above. There's also the non-trivial matter of the waste stream, which is not covered in the pricing in that citation.
One of the major problems we have is population control, people keep fucking and breeding, I don't see the solution other to impose some hardships, like China did with their one child policy
Actually we know how to solve this. Education, especially of women.
It results in women having far fewer children, to the point where many first-world nations are below replacement rate, 2.1 children per woman (1 to replace the woman, 1 to replace the man, and 0.1 for infertility and death before reproduction).
France is at 2.01, US is 1.84, UK is 1.81, Germany is 1.5, Japan 1.46. Their populations are stable or growing only because of immigration (except Japan, which shuns immigrants).
In Africa, programs to educate girls have resulted in many countries going from about 5 children per woman to about 2.
The thing you're forgetting is it isn't one generation paying the retirement for their parents. Its the children, grandchildren and a small number of great-grandchildren.
While the pyramid is not as wide as it used to be, it's still workable.
considering that life expectancy at the time was 61!
The thing to remember with life expectancy is that children really hurt the average.
As an extreme example, we estimate life expectancy of stone-age people to have been in their 30s. That doesn't mean most people died in their 30s. It means lots of children didn't make it through their first year. Stone-age people who made it to adulthood generally lived to their 50-60s. Add a bunch of 0s to people living to their 50s, and the average goes way down.
It was not as extreme, but in the 1930s there were still a good number of kids who did not make it to adulthood. (I'm having trouble finding actual statistics for the life expectancy of a 20-year-old in the 1930s, because of all the authors ignoring the "at birth" part of statistics they cite.)
Most of the gains in life expectancy at birth in the 20th century were about kids surviving to adulthood, not making old people live longer.
The problem is most people want instant gratification and place absolutely no thought on retirement or a rainy day until they get old enough
The main problem is people wrap themselves up in comfortable statements like this instead of actually looking at what their fellow countrymen are doing.
I had a lovely savings going in my 20s....which got wiped out in all the layoffs from the dot-com crash. Started building it up again, and then had to hack another chunk of it off to support myself after the next crash. Started building it up again, had to take another chunk after the 2008 crash. Started building it up again, got laid off again...and now that I'm over 40 the job search is getting exponentially longer, resulting in eating more savings.
Boy, look at that instant gratification!
Fact is a stable job is no longer available for a large portion of the country. If you don't have stable work, it is difficult to build retirement savings because you can't let the money grow, and you can only invest in easy-to-cash-out things.
Those lazy, avocado-eating Millenials? They're getting paid 10-20% less than we did at their age. That's the 10-20% they should be saving but they simply aren't getting it in their paychecks.
Hypercapitalism had a good run, but it isn't the panacea it's adherents believe it to be.
Millenials are worse off as a group by their own individual choice
This is false, but it sure sounds good when you're really interested in not changing anything.
Millenials are getting paid less. That's not an "individual choice". Companies are paying lower salaries than previous generations, adjusted for purchasing power.
for example, many of them are swindled into taking on student loan debts
You realize that companies are now requiring receptionists to have a college degree, right?
We've made it so that college is 1) required for almost all office work, 2) made degrees really, really expensive, 3) destroyed manufacturing so we could buy cheaper stuff that breaks quickly, and 3) spent decades shitting on trades vs office work....but even then trades usually cap out below office work.
We made the world for our children. The fact that we made the world worse is not their "individual choice".
They mention this great process of pulling carbon from the air to turn into fuel but say nothing of where the energy to power it comes from. That says a lot to me. They can't bring themselves to admit that nuclear power is necessary to make this viable.
I want to use nuclear power. I just want to put the reactor 93 million miles away.
Producing fuel from the harvested CO2 is just delaying the actual release, as the fuel will be burned again and released as CO2 into the atmosphere
Um...no. It is recycling CO2 that has already been released. And yes, it will go back to being CO2 in the atmosphere again, assuming you burn the fuel.
I'm not a tree, nor a chemist, so I don't know how difficult the separation of CO2 to C and O2 is, but it seems obvious that solutions should be aiming in that direction.
Turning CO2 into directly into solid carbon is significantly more difficult than turning CO2 into methane or other hydrocarbons. Trees do the same - they make carbohydrates from CO2 and then "burn" the carbohydrates to power the tree.
If you want to reduce CO2 emissions, buying an EV presently doesn't help. When you replace an ICE vehicleswith an EV without changing the makeup of your electricity sources, all you've done is shift your CO2 emissions from the car's tailpipe to a fossil fuel power plant's smokestack.
Moving the emissions to that smokestack is still beneficial. Because it's a lot more feasible to replace that smokestack with a zero-net-emissions power source than to replace those ICE cars with a zero-net-emissions power source.
So where is all of that energy going to come from? My best guess would be burning fossil fuels.
If the actual plan was to artificially sequester CO2 this way, then we'd use something like solar or wind for the energy source.
Of course, if we somehow manage to get to a point where we can produce all of our energy needs without burning fossil fuels, then I suppose sequestering CO2 into gasoline might become feasible. Then again, if we get to that point, we won't need this technique
Remember energy density and weight.
There's some things where batteries are not going to be able to provide sufficient energy density at a low enough weight to be useful. For example, aircraft. The batteries to get sufficient range to replace a 777 or 787 or A380 are going to be too heavy to use in the plane. At least without some major advancements. OTOH, jet fuel has sufficient energy density. So use this kind of system to make jet fuel from sunlight and CO2.
There's also potential uses in energy storage and transportation. There's lots of work being done to try and move electricity sufficiently far to deal with some of the intermittentcy of solar and wind (ex. solar panels in the SW of the US powering stuff in the NE of the US in winter). We can't do it right now because of line losses.
What if you made a hydrocarbon fuel in New Mexico from atmospheric CO2 and solar panels, and then pumped that fuel to the Northeast instead? Yes, you'd lose a lot of energy in each transition (CO2 -> fuel, fuel -> other end of pipeline, fuel -> turbine, turbine -> electricity, electricity -> motor/light/etc). But you could actually get the energy there without inventing new/exotic electricity transmission materials and methods.
Problem is the claimed shortage is so severe that we have reached a point we have never reached before - ya know, the whole premise of the OP. You don't hit never-before-seen states without some ramp-up.
You must be forgetting the raise everyone got with the tax cuts
Nope. This is an entirely supply-and-demand issue.
Companies are claiming they can not find workers. AKA the demand is high and the supply is low.
If that claim was true, companies would be offering higher salaries to new employees in an attempt to out-bid the other employers. Because high demand & low supply means prices go up, right?
That happens even if existing workers do not ask for raises. Also, your claim requires workers to be so stupid that a very small increase in average take-home pay would magically make them not ask for more money.
then at some point it is inevitable that the AI would realize that human beings are interfering with its overriding program to maximize profits
Whoa there, Sparky. What, specifically, is the thought process here?
The profits come from selling products or services. AIs aren't legal entities. They can't have bank accounts, and can't own property, and thus don't have the ability to pay for anything. An AI can only pay when linked to a human that owns the money.
So your escaped AI needs humans to fulfill it's goal.
And we are pretty easy to manipulate, so "forcefully extracting" purchases would be significantly more expensive than convincing us we need our clothes to be blue instead of red. Not to mention the loss of future purchases would hurt the AI's ability to profit.
Slashdot Mirror
Except there's a lot of old power plants that are being shut down.
Nobody better tell this guy just how much we subsidize natural gas, coal and oil. Might hurt his worldview.
Is it? What happens if we add cheap battery storage to that 80 year old coal plant you mentioned?
Then it's dead with a battery attached to it.
You can't "throttle down" a coal plant all that much. And there's pretty much no advantage to running it at higher output to fill a battery when you aren't going to turn it off or close to off.
All you gain is instead of spinning an extra turbine to respond to surges, you have a battery respond to surges. You're still burning the coal because it takes you 3 days to get up to operating temperature.
Can you name any current manufacturer of ICE vehicles that has not ever produced an electric car in the last 10 or 20 years?
Ford (Ok, they finally started this model year).
Ford bet on higher-efficiency ICE, and hydrogen. They did develop some very efficient ICE, but hydrogen has been eclipsed by advances in batteries.
You do realize that major car makers already make different cars for different markets, don't you? Left hand drive vs. right hand drive already separate the markets so international companies already produce completely different cars for these markets.
But those cars use the same drivetrain. That's the point: Making natural gas ICE for the US and EVs for Europe is less efficient than EVs everywhere, and that drives up costs.
The number of people who really need a road-trip-ready car is quite small, especially when you factor in things like 30-minute "fill-up" at a supercharger-like device. It's not going to be the major factor in the market. Most people with ICE cars want some range so that they do not have to fill up all that often during their commute, and a 200 mile EV can easily do that for almost everyone. "Fast fill-up" doesn't really matter when plugging it in overnight covers all your use cases.
There'll probably be some sort of plug-in hybrid to handle the people who really want road trips or similar cases where EV range isn't enough, but it's not going to be the majority of car owners. Kinda like the majority of car owners don't buy Corvettes.
Do your realize that your downsides also apply to plastic? Poisonous chemicals and decomposition in landfills are problems for plastic bags too.
The additional food cost is probably negligible
There's these things called "teenagers". They eat a lot.
House cats don't kill falcons, vultures, eagles, and other large birds.
And windmills don't kill many of those either. Most of the dead birds are small. Which makes cats relevant.
I'll point to your earlier comment on how cats like to hunt birds, cats and other animals will eat these dead birds.
Then why cite birds as a problem with wind power? You're now claiming birds don't matter.
I've seen people write a articles that claims to point out that wind and solar are superior but they often are able to do so only through lies and careful manipulation of the data
Like, say, pricing the waste stream of nuclear plants at $0. That's quite a manipulation of the data.
Your citation only shows nuclear being twice the cost of solar and wind when comparing the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) case numbers from a single source
That source being amalgamation of many other studies, making it broader than EIA's. It's also not being done by an entity that is funded entirely by coal and petroleum.
If the economics were the way you believe, we would see the results in the free market. Utilities are building the cheapest power sources to maximize profit. They are building zero nuclear plants. They are stopping the construction half-built nuclear plants, demonstrating that it isn't regulatory issues. And they just built more solar than all other power generation methods combined.
Every nuclear power plant in the USA, and in most nations in the world, are required to pay in advance for the cost of decommissioning the plant at the end of its life
Decomissioning is demolition. It is not storage or treatment of the waste stream.
In the USA the government "rents" the nuclear fuel to the power plants. They buy the fuel from the government and then must pay the government to dispose of the waste.
The waste stream includes more than spent fuel.
Unless there is proof otherwise I'm quite certain that the cost of the waste management is included in the cost estimates.
Here's how you can quickly and easily figure out you're wrong: Where does the waste fuel go?
It goes into storage pools at the nuclear plants, awaiting the day the government creates a long-term storage plan.
That plan has been "pending" since the 1950s. Yucca Mountain was going to be the plan, but that got canceled. There is no new site in development, because nobody wants it. Effectively, the waste stream costs are infinite because there is no plan.
If your solution is breeder reactors to recycle fuel, such recycling plants currently 1) do not exist, 2) cause problems with nuclear non-proliferation treaties, and 3) construction and operation must be factored into the cost of nuclear power, and your study does not do this.
Your source ignores waste disposal as "somebody else's problem" for nuclear, in a desperate attempt to make nuclear cheap. Yet it insists waste disposal must be considered for solar and wind. It's this kind of fraud that demonstrates your sources are not useful in this discussion.
As I recall the problems of disposing of solar panel waste has not been resolved just yet
Seriously? Your nuclear waste disposal plan is to say "the government will magically make it go away", and you're concerned about not having a detailed plan for solar waste disposal in your hands?
Please stop being this disingenuous.
As for actual disposal, it's as recyclable as any other silicon product. To sum up, "meh". Not all that great, not all that awful.
How much needs to be recycled isn't actually all that clear yet. The widely-used 20-year lifespan of panels was determined by accelerated wear tests and extrapolation. Now that we have actually run some modern panels for 10 years, we're finding those tests were far too pessimistic. Panels drop to 70% of rated power over many years, and then wear drastically slows down. A 20-year-old panel was thought to be useless, but it turns out it's still got 50-60% of rated capacity. So just leaving them up longer is turning out to be a possibility.
I've seen the studies on how people pretend to be able to provide the electricity we need from wind and sun and it is not a pretty picture.
You mean like the one that pretends nuclear waste will just disappear?
We can provide all the electricity we need from nuclear and natural gas, and do so wit
You can't help people who do not want help. Most countries do want help, and are already bringing their birth rate down.
There will always be outliers. They will "fix" the problem through famine and strife. About the only "good" news is so far it looks like that will be mostly contained within the countries that fail to fix the problem.
Wind and solar have far greater waste problems than nuclear.
Nuclear literally has no method for dealing with the waste stream right now. Reprocessing spent fuel is not an option because of nuclear treaty obligations....and even if we ignore that, "build a second nuclear plant" isn't exactly an inexpensive solution. Millennia-long storage is a political nightmare that is not going to happen, because politicians like not getting voted out of office.
So, your concerns about waste stream seem a tad myopic.
Wind does kill birds but birds are jerks
I love when people trot this out. Household cats kill 1000 to 10,000 times more birds than wind power generation. Yet I don't see the same people so worried about it in wind generation propose banning cats.
Also, your sources on solar are 1) funded by the coal and natural gas industries, or 2) citing reports funded by the coal and natural gas industries. There might be a wee bit of bias in their studies.
I think your post managed to get every single point wrong. That's an impressive achievement.
Storage also adds cost to energy sources that are already more expensive than nuclear power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Natural gas, solar and wind cost about the same per kWh. Natural gas is slightly cheaper, wind and solar obviously only work part of the time.
Then comes coal, more expensive than all three.
Then comes nuclear, more expensive than coal.
We've been building windmills and solar collectors for a very long time now.
Grid-scale wind and solar are still relatively new. Most have been built in the last 10 years. That's not a "very long time now".
Now that we've started building nuclear power plants again we can expect the prices to come down
Sorry, we stopped again. Turns out pretending nuclear is cheap is not an optimal strategy. And now Westinghouse is going bankrupt.
We saw something like this happen in Australia when a coal fired plant failed unexpectedly and a battery pack designed for storing wind power picked up the slack and likely saved the nation from a widespread power outage.
Um...no. There is part of a grid in Southern Australia grid that was rather unreliable, mostly due to the limited power generation on it. The battery is designed to 1) level out the brownouts and 2) allow wind-generated power to be used more often.
A plant in this area of Australia's grid failed, and the battery supplied power until other generators came on-line. It did not "save the nation", because the grid we're talking about serves a relatively small part of the nation. Without the battery, there would have been a brownout or blackout in that small population, but the rest of the nation wouldn't have cared - their grids would have disconnected from the shitty one as had happened many times before.
Wind and solar are expensive, more expensive than nuclear.
You're wrong on this. Nuclear is twice the cost of solar and wind. Citation above. There's also the non-trivial matter of the waste stream, which is not covered in the pricing in that citation.
One of the major problems we have is population control, people keep fucking and breeding, I don't see the solution other to impose some hardships, like China did with their one child policy
Actually we know how to solve this. Education, especially of women.
It results in women having far fewer children, to the point where many first-world nations are below replacement rate, 2.1 children per woman (1 to replace the woman, 1 to replace the man, and 0.1 for infertility and death before reproduction).
France is at 2.01, US is 1.84, UK is 1.81, Germany is 1.5, Japan 1.46. Their populations are stable or growing only because of immigration (except Japan, which shuns immigrants).
In Africa, programs to educate girls have resulted in many countries going from about 5 children per woman to about 2.
Just keep teaching, and it will work out.
The thing you're forgetting is it isn't one generation paying the retirement for their parents. Its the children, grandchildren and a small number of great-grandchildren.
While the pyramid is not as wide as it used to be, it's still workable.
considering that life expectancy at the time was 61!
The thing to remember with life expectancy is that children really hurt the average.
As an extreme example, we estimate life expectancy of stone-age people to have been in their 30s. That doesn't mean most people died in their 30s. It means lots of children didn't make it through their first year. Stone-age people who made it to adulthood generally lived to their 50-60s. Add a bunch of 0s to people living to their 50s, and the average goes way down.
It was not as extreme, but in the 1930s there were still a good number of kids who did not make it to adulthood. (I'm having trouble finding actual statistics for the life expectancy of a 20-year-old in the 1930s, because of all the authors ignoring the "at birth" part of statistics they cite.)
Most of the gains in life expectancy at birth in the 20th century were about kids surviving to adulthood, not making old people live longer.
The problem is most people want instant gratification and place absolutely no thought on retirement or a rainy day until they get old enough
The main problem is people wrap themselves up in comfortable statements like this instead of actually looking at what their fellow countrymen are doing.
I had a lovely savings going in my 20s....which got wiped out in all the layoffs from the dot-com crash. Started building it up again, and then had to hack another chunk of it off to support myself after the next crash. Started building it up again, had to take another chunk after the 2008 crash. Started building it up again, got laid off again...and now that I'm over 40 the job search is getting exponentially longer, resulting in eating more savings.
Boy, look at that instant gratification!
Fact is a stable job is no longer available for a large portion of the country. If you don't have stable work, it is difficult to build retirement savings because you can't let the money grow, and you can only invest in easy-to-cash-out things.
Those lazy, avocado-eating Millenials? They're getting paid 10-20% less than we did at their age. That's the 10-20% they should be saving but they simply aren't getting it in their paychecks.
Hypercapitalism had a good run, but it isn't the panacea it's adherents believe it to be.
Millenials are worse off as a group by their own individual choice
This is false, but it sure sounds good when you're really interested in not changing anything.
Millenials are getting paid less. That's not an "individual choice". Companies are paying lower salaries than previous generations, adjusted for purchasing power.
for example, many of them are swindled into taking on student loan debts
You realize that companies are now requiring receptionists to have a college degree, right?
We've made it so that college is 1) required for almost all office work, 2) made degrees really, really expensive, 3) destroyed manufacturing so we could buy cheaper stuff that breaks quickly, and 3) spent decades shitting on trades vs office work....but even then trades usually cap out below office work.
We made the world for our children. The fact that we made the world worse is not their "individual choice".
They mention this great process of pulling carbon from the air to turn into fuel but say nothing of where the energy to power it comes from. That says a lot to me. They can't bring themselves to admit that nuclear power is necessary to make this viable.
I want to use nuclear power. I just want to put the reactor 93 million miles away.
Producing fuel from the harvested CO2 is just delaying the actual release, as the fuel will be burned again and released as CO2 into the atmosphere
Um...no. It is recycling CO2 that has already been released. And yes, it will go back to being CO2 in the atmosphere again, assuming you burn the fuel.
I'm not a tree, nor a chemist, so I don't know how difficult the separation of CO2 to C and O2 is, but it seems obvious that solutions should be aiming in that direction.
Turning CO2 into directly into solid carbon is significantly more difficult than turning CO2 into methane or other hydrocarbons. Trees do the same - they make carbohydrates from CO2 and then "burn" the carbohydrates to power the tree.
If you want to reduce CO2 emissions, buying an EV presently doesn't help. When you replace an ICE vehicleswith an EV without changing the makeup of your electricity sources, all you've done is shift your CO2 emissions from the car's tailpipe to a fossil fuel power plant's smokestack.
Moving the emissions to that smokestack is still beneficial. Because it's a lot more feasible to replace that smokestack with a zero-net-emissions power source than to replace those ICE cars with a zero-net-emissions power source.
So where is all of that energy going to come from? My best guess would be burning fossil fuels.
If the actual plan was to artificially sequester CO2 this way, then we'd use something like solar or wind for the energy source.
Of course, if we somehow manage to get to a point where we can produce all of our energy needs without burning fossil fuels, then I suppose sequestering CO2 into gasoline might become feasible. Then again, if we get to that point, we won't need this technique
Remember energy density and weight.
There's some things where batteries are not going to be able to provide sufficient energy density at a low enough weight to be useful. For example, aircraft. The batteries to get sufficient range to replace a 777 or 787 or A380 are going to be too heavy to use in the plane. At least without some major advancements. OTOH, jet fuel has sufficient energy density. So use this kind of system to make jet fuel from sunlight and CO2.
There's also potential uses in energy storage and transportation. There's lots of work being done to try and move electricity sufficiently far to deal with some of the intermittentcy of solar and wind (ex. solar panels in the SW of the US powering stuff in the NE of the US in winter). We can't do it right now because of line losses.
What if you made a hydrocarbon fuel in New Mexico from atmospheric CO2 and solar panels, and then pumped that fuel to the Northeast instead? Yes, you'd lose a lot of energy in each transition (CO2 -> fuel, fuel -> other end of pipeline, fuel -> turbine, turbine -> electricity, electricity -> motor/light/etc). But you could actually get the energy there without inventing new/exotic electricity transmission materials and methods.
Problem is the claimed shortage is so severe that we have reached a point we have never reached before - ya know, the whole premise of the OP. You don't hit never-before-seen states without some ramp-up.
You must be forgetting the raise everyone got with the tax cuts
Nope. This is an entirely supply-and-demand issue.
Companies are claiming they can not find workers. AKA the demand is high and the supply is low.
If that claim was true, companies would be offering higher salaries to new employees in an attempt to out-bid the other employers. Because high demand & low supply means prices go up, right?
That happens even if existing workers do not ask for raises. Also, your claim requires workers to be so stupid that a very small increase in average take-home pay would magically make them not ask for more money.
It's not just code. Presumably Google would publish journal papers as they make new discoveries in AI. And defense contractors can read.
then at some point it is inevitable that the AI would realize that human beings are interfering with its overriding program to maximize profits
Whoa there, Sparky. What, specifically, is the thought process here?
The profits come from selling products or services. AIs aren't legal entities. They can't have bank accounts, and can't own property, and thus don't have the ability to pay for anything. An AI can only pay when linked to a human that owns the money.
So your escaped AI needs humans to fulfill it's goal.
And we are pretty easy to manipulate, so "forcefully extracting" purchases would be significantly more expensive than convincing us we need our clothes to be blue instead of red. Not to mention the loss of future purchases would hurt the AI's ability to profit.
Oh, it will be totally true. For Google. A wholly-owned subsidiary that "licenses" Google's AI technology on the other hand.....