It's a good path to take and regardless of regulations it's likely to happen naturally in the market -- oil will get more expensive to get out of the ground sooner or later.
The UK Government is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy because they are signalling to industry to tell them not to make ICE vehicles. If there are no new ICE vehicles to purchase then the public can't buy any of them even if they wanted one.
The cost of oil will decrease when the number of EVs increases which is counter-intuitive. This is because there will be an oil surplus with oil production facilities being slowly closed down. Oil will become too cheap to sell for profit due to lack of demand. Governments are likely to add more taxes onto the fuel to keep the oil price high to avoid people going back to using old ICE cars.
People calling for "clean emissions" as the reason just seem silly to me. We don't have the ability to generate "clean" power at any level necessary to power cars
Are you saying hydro power is not clean ? Nuclear fission is clean from an emissions point of view. In 40 years, clean nuclear fusion power might be here. There will be plenty of "clean" power for EVs. And don't forget wind and solar power.
With smart charging, EVs can level out the power peaks and troughs to act as grid storage in the home. This will eliminate the expensive on-demand natural gas power stations. This means when you return home from work and plug your EV in, the EV can power your home during the peak power loading in the evening and then the EV can charge overnight when the demand is lower.
Life on Earth has about 1 billion years left because the habitable zone is moving further out into the solar system because the sun's output is slowly increasing.
Unfortunately, the US did not get the Imperial measurement update in 1824, which was enacted in the Imperial Weights and Measures Act (British) due to US Independence of 1783. This is why the US gallon is smaller than the British Imperial gallon.
WW2 when the US government was NOT coming to Great Britain's aid until after Perl Harbour happened in December 1941 some 2 years after the start of WW2. Churchill had to pay the US to get the US to send supplies across the Atlantic whilst the German's sunk many of the convoys via their U-boats.
The Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 was the British Royal Air Force up against the German Air Force. Britain had a small number of air crews from other European and Commonwealth countries such as Poland, Canada and India. The US government was absent from the fight citing that it was a European war.
I agree that after WW2 there was the US Marshall plan in 1948 to help rebuild Western Europe however, the European governments had to pay back the US over decades. In addition, the US motives included pushing back communism to Eastern Europe.
The consequences of rapid climate change will include:
a) lack of fresh water resulting in "water wars" b) lack of fertile land for agriculture c) mass human migration from areas that no longer support human life all year round d) religious wars due to invasions of peoples with different cultures eg. Christians vs Muslims e) some human cultures dying off due to lower birth rates resulting in culture takeovers via stealth eg. Christian countries becoming dominated by Islam. f) reduction in meat production due to restrictions caused by animal methane greenhouse gas pollution g) sea level rises destroying highly populated areas on the coast such as New York
In addition the Earth's human population in 1971 was about 3.75 billion people. In 46 years, the human population has doubled. The Earth cannot sustain this massive increase in needed resources into the future for very long.
So basically we are doomed if no action is taken.
In late news: The sun's temperature is slowly increasing which will make the Earth uninhabitable in 1 billion years time. Best to book your flight to Mars soon...
Especially since the biggest polluters weren't on the hook for anything.
The US green fund was a compensation fund for countries that are affected by the CO2 pollution from the US. There needs to be a cost for polluting so that market forces can act to reduce pollution.
sigh, SSL is NOT in the Linux kernel! SSL is a cross-platform userland open source project.
Linux based distributions will include SSL userland components but SSL is not part of the Linux kernel. Just like gnome and KDE are not part of the Linux kernel but are included in Linux based distributions.
I am not too familiar with the exact conditions of the Paris agreement, but in case of being exclusively focused on CO2/climate change it wouldn't have any impact on the deaths which you are mentioning.
Indirectly the Paris Agreement will reduce the number of those deaths because electrification of transport will eliminate all the gaseous emissions from transport in the local area. Any gaseous pollution moves to the electrical power source which is usually in less populated areas. Therefore, exposure by the general population is reduced so the death rate will reduce.
Pollution is a world wide issue. Pollution from the US will affect other counties because we live in the same atmosphere.
The Paris strategy is:
1. Get governments to specify their own plans to tackle Climate Change for their own country. Periodically review the plan every few years to see whether more aggressive reduction targets can be reached such as due to better technology becoming available.
2. Recognise that Carbon Dioxide is a pollutant and create a Carbon Tax so that the pollutant becomes costed into the balance sheets of companies. This allows capitalist market forces to push towards cheaper and better solutions by reducing the amount of pollutant because now there is a cost for polluting.
3. Pay compensation to countries that are affected by the pollutant. Such as loss of land due to flooding due to sea level rises.
4. Provide clean technologies to developing countries so that their fossil fuel based solutions can be replaced.
Even if you are a climate change denier, you probably wish to live without breathing in Nitrogen Dioxide gas from car fumes. The Paris strategy will also fix car emissions.
I predict that various US state governments will defy the US Federal government and those states will continue to co-operate with the Paris agreement.
We are using systemd for our commercial Embedded ARM Linux system solutions for our customers. You have heard of Yocto, right ? https://www.yoctoproject.org/
Linux is the kernel and Linux is very successful in the embedded world on ARM. For example, Android is currently based on the Linux kernel. Many WiFI routers use Linux.. Linux is becoming strong in the automotive industry for Infotainment systems etc.
Linux is strong in web-servers. TiVo uses the Linux kernel. IBM is a big user of Linux in their super-computers.
The Linux kernel is not going to go away any time soon. It is much bigger than just Desktop Linux on a PC.
The success or failure of a Desktop environment project is independent of the Linux kernel because many of these projects are cross-platform. This cross-platform environment is helped by the use of GNU utilities and libraries which implement POSIX (and other standards). For example, you could use the free BSD kernel like Apple does for their iMacs.
Note that I am not a Ubuntu user as I prefer Mageia (Red Hat based) with a KDE Desktop environment. Mageia is a community run distribution so there is no corporate company behind it to muck things up.
A word of warning from history... do you remember the UNIX wars ? This was caused by commercial UNIX vendors introducing "diversity" to lock their clients into their UNIX systems.
The phrase you are looking for is the "convergence" of desktop environments. In fact, I would say that Ubuntu was using a divergent strategy which has now failed. This means the Desktop Linux systems become convergent again just like in the days before Ubuntu existed.
Today, the electric car revolution is bringing in cheaper and cheaper high energy density lithium-ion batteries. These batteries will be used in on-grid and off-grid energy storage units.
This disruptive revolution has already started. I think even Trump will have difficulty in suppressing this American technology and the thousands of American jobs that go with it.
It is only a matter of time. Probably in 10 to 20 years, and coal will be dead worldwide as being too expensive (and too environmentally damaging).
Solar power will probably be cheaper in some sunny places like California, Arizona, and Nevada. Other places are too far north or have cloud cover. Solar may never work in those places.
Old technology solar panels worked at specific light frequencies and these frequencies can be blocked by clouds, Modern solar panel technology is moving towards working with a spectrum of light frequencies. Clouds do not block all the light from the sun and therefore modern solar panels are being designed to work in cloudy conditions.
Also the efficiency of solar panels are steadily increasing as the technology improves. This means that the size of the solar panels will reduce to get the same power rating as the old panels. Therefore, for a given area of land, the power capacity of a solar farm will increase as the technology improves. Meaning the overall costs will reduce and more power is produced.
In other words, even in cloudy conditions, solar installations can be viable.
The next disruptive technology that is imminent is on-grid energy storage such as batteries. This will allow excess renewable energy to be stored in on-grid energy storage. Therefore, it will mitigate against the dark and calm winds.
Also domestic energy storage is now available in lithium-ion batteries so that solar power from your house can be stored for use during the night.
I think you will find that people get stuff done despite using Windows.
With the closed source code of Microsoft you have to put-up and shut-up with Windows. So Microsoft drains your life-force so you don't care about changing any OS defaults, you know it will be a futile experience.
Don't forget about embedded systems where the Linux kernel is a major player, such as Android smartphones, home WiFi routers, TiVo set-top cable TV boxes, automotive systems, flat screen TVs,..
Also don't forget super-computers as Linux is the main player there.
I bet there are more CPUs in the world running the Linux kernel than Microsoft's Windows.
However, don't forget that the Sun's habitable zone continues to move further out into space because the Sun's solar output is slowly increasing over millions of years. This triggered the thermal runaway of Venus due to the CO2 greenhouse effect. This means that as time goes by on Earth, the threshold level of the thermal runaway of the CO2 greenhouse effect slowly decreases. This means that for Earth to remain habitable, the CO2 level must be decreased to stay below the threshold. In others words, in the past a higher CO2 level was permissible as a bigger greenhouse effect (non-runaway) was needed to maintain global temperatures. We have 1 billion years left on Earth before the Sun is too hot and the Earth turns into a planet like Venus.
If you looked carefully into how governments are run, you will come to the conclusion that many business sectors are subsidised via tax breaks from governments. Many companies get tax breaks such as for the Oil Extraction and Exploration companies. Different business sectors use different accounting methods and tax rules.
"very skilled in mismanaging money on a massive scale" if this were really true there would be a fraud case but no such case exists, Mr Musk is putting much of this money into constructing infrastructure. I suggest you wait another 10 years to see how these investments bring success.
"exploding rockets" is part of the rocket industry and is calculated into the costs and insurance. It is sad when rockets fail. The important thing is that lessons are learned from the failures as this knowledge can be used to improve the rockets.
"building self-crashing cars" is a false premise. The driver is still in charge of the car when the auto-pilot driver assist is used. You should compare traditional car crashes with crashes of electric cars (EV's) to come to the proper conclusion that EV's are safer. There will always be some horrific car crashes.
EV's will be the dominant form of transport within 20 years from now, You need to get used to it.
Using computer modelling I suspect the location of the shadow of the eclipse is dependent on the spin rate of the Earth. Therefore, by knowing where people saw the eclipse and how much of the sun could be seen will be sufficient to calculate the rotational position of the Earth at the time of the eclipse. Then compare that position with the computer model. So knowing the exact time of the observations of the eclipse to the order of milliseconds is unnecessary.
To avoid killing plants due to a lack of C02 at ground level, this technique would have to be done in the upper atmosphere perhaps in aircraft ? Perhaps aircraft could manufacture their fuel as they fly along ?
The next wave of innovation is on-grid energy storage. This includes adding large scale battery storage but other techniques exist including pumped hydro. Battery based energy storage is already starting to appear in people's homes.
Therefore, the renewable power can be maximised by time shifting the power generation from the power consumption via use of on-grid energy storage.
On-grid energy storage will reduce the energy generation's swing between peak and troughs and will reduce the overall number of required power stations. This would also help nuclear power because excessive power could be stored so the nuclear power stations can run constantly at a higher generation level.
In other words, on-grid storage would eliminate the need for gas fired power stations.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a good path to take and regardless of regulations it's likely to happen naturally in the market -- oil will get more expensive to get out of the ground sooner or later.
The UK Government is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy because they are signalling to industry to tell them not to make ICE vehicles. If there are no new ICE vehicles to purchase then the public can't buy any of them even if they wanted one.
The cost of oil will decrease when the number of EVs increases which is counter-intuitive. This is because there will be an oil surplus with oil production facilities being slowly closed down. Oil will become too cheap to sell for profit due to lack of demand. Governments are likely to add more taxes onto the fuel to keep the oil price high to avoid people going back to using old ICE cars.
People calling for "clean emissions" as the reason just seem silly to me. We don't have the ability to generate "clean" power at any level necessary to power cars
Are you saying hydro power is not clean ? Nuclear fission is clean from an emissions point of view. In 40 years, clean nuclear fusion power might be here. There will be plenty of "clean" power for EVs. And don't forget wind and solar power.
With smart charging, EVs can level out the power peaks and troughs to act as grid storage in the home. This will eliminate the expensive on-demand natural gas power stations. This means when you return home from work and plug your EV in, the EV can power your home during the peak power loading in the evening and then the EV can charge overnight when the demand is lower.
Life on Earth has about 1 billion years left because the habitable zone is moving further out into the solar system because the sun's output is slowly increasing.
Check the tires from any car anywhere in the world. They will say some where R15 or R17 or R20 etc... guess what that number is measured in.
That will be British imperial inches.
Unfortunately, the US did not get the Imperial measurement update in 1824, which was enacted in the Imperial Weights and Measures Act (British) due to US Independence of 1783. This is why the US gallon is smaller than the British Imperial gallon.
WW2 when the US government was NOT coming to Great Britain's aid until after Perl Harbour happened in December 1941 some 2 years after the start of WW2. Churchill had to pay the US to get the US to send supplies across the Atlantic whilst the German's sunk many of the convoys via their U-boats.
The Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 was the British Royal Air Force up against the German Air Force. Britain had a small number of air crews from other European and Commonwealth countries such as Poland, Canada and India. The US government was absent from the fight citing that it was a European war.
I agree that after WW2 there was the US Marshall plan in 1948 to help rebuild Western Europe however, the European governments had to pay back the US over decades. In addition, the US motives included pushing back communism to Eastern Europe.
Please try to get your facts right.
The consequences of rapid climate change will include:
a) lack of fresh water resulting in "water wars"
b) lack of fertile land for agriculture
c) mass human migration from areas that no longer support human life all year round
d) religious wars due to invasions of peoples with different cultures eg. Christians vs Muslims
e) some human cultures dying off due to lower birth rates resulting in culture takeovers via stealth eg. Christian countries becoming dominated by Islam.
f) reduction in meat production due to restrictions caused by animal methane greenhouse gas pollution
g) sea level rises destroying highly populated areas on the coast such as New York
In addition the Earth's human population in 1971 was about 3.75 billion people. In 46 years, the human population has doubled. The Earth cannot sustain this massive increase in needed resources into the future for very long.
So basically we are doomed if no action is taken.
In late news: The sun's temperature is slowly increasing which will make the Earth uninhabitable in 1 billion years time. Best to book your flight to Mars soon...
Especially since the biggest polluters weren't on the hook for anything.
The US green fund was a compensation fund for countries that are affected by the CO2 pollution from the US. There needs to be a cost for polluting so that market forces can act to reduce pollution.
sigh, SSL is NOT in the Linux kernel! SSL is a cross-platform userland open source project.
Linux based distributions will include SSL userland components but SSL is not part of the Linux kernel. Just like gnome and KDE are not part of the Linux kernel but are included in Linux based distributions.
I am not too familiar with the exact conditions of the Paris agreement, but in case of being exclusively focused on CO2/climate change it wouldn't have any impact on the deaths which you are mentioning.
Indirectly the Paris Agreement will reduce the number of those deaths because electrification of transport will eliminate all the gaseous emissions from transport in the local area. Any gaseous pollution moves to the electrical power source which is usually in less populated areas. Therefore, exposure by the general population is reduced so the death rate will reduce.
You have missed the following points.
Pollution is a world wide issue. Pollution from the US will affect other counties because we live in the same atmosphere.
The Paris strategy is:
1. Get governments to specify their own plans to tackle Climate Change for their own country. Periodically review the plan every few years to see whether more aggressive reduction targets can be reached such as due to better technology becoming available.
2. Recognise that Carbon Dioxide is a pollutant and create a Carbon Tax so that the pollutant becomes costed into the balance sheets of companies. This allows capitalist market forces to push towards cheaper and better solutions by reducing the amount of pollutant because now there is a cost for polluting.
3. Pay compensation to countries that are affected by the pollutant. Such as loss of land due to flooding due to sea level rises.
4. Provide clean technologies to developing countries so that their fossil fuel based solutions can be replaced.
Even if you are a climate change denier, you probably wish to live without breathing in Nitrogen Dioxide gas from car fumes. The Paris strategy will also fix car emissions.
I predict that various US state governments will defy the US Federal government and those states will continue to co-operate with the Paris agreement.
We are using systemd for our commercial Embedded ARM Linux system solutions for our customers. You have heard of Yocto, right ? https://www.yoctoproject.org/
Linux is the kernel and Linux is very successful in the embedded world on ARM. For example, Android is currently based on the Linux kernel. Many WiFI routers use Linux.. Linux is becoming strong in the automotive industry for Infotainment systems etc.
Linux is strong in web-servers. TiVo uses the Linux kernel. IBM is a big user of Linux in their super-computers.
The Linux kernel is not going to go away any time soon. It is much bigger than just Desktop Linux on a PC.
The success or failure of a Desktop environment project is independent of the Linux kernel because many of these projects are cross-platform. This cross-platform environment is helped by the use of GNU utilities and libraries which implement POSIX (and other standards). For example, you could use the free BSD kernel like Apple does for their iMacs.
Note that I am not a Ubuntu user as I prefer Mageia (Red Hat based) with a KDE Desktop environment. Mageia is a community run distribution so there is no corporate company behind it to muck things up.
A word of warning from history... do you remember the UNIX wars ? This was caused by commercial UNIX vendors introducing "diversity" to lock their clients into their UNIX systems.
The phrase you are looking for is the "convergence" of desktop environments. In fact, I would say that Ubuntu was using a divergent strategy which has now failed. This means the Desktop Linux systems become convergent again just like in the days before Ubuntu existed.
...just turn off your SmartPhone's WiFi (and Bluetooth while you are at it)
Today, the electric car revolution is bringing in cheaper and cheaper high energy density lithium-ion batteries. These batteries will be used in on-grid and off-grid energy storage units.
This disruptive revolution has already started. I think even Trump will have difficulty in suppressing this American technology and the thousands of American jobs that go with it.
It is only a matter of time. Probably in 10 to 20 years, and coal will be dead worldwide as being too expensive (and too environmentally damaging).
Live the dream!
Solar power will probably be cheaper in some sunny places like California, Arizona, and Nevada. Other places are too far north or have cloud cover. Solar may never work in those places.
Old technology solar panels worked at specific light frequencies and these frequencies can be blocked by clouds, Modern solar panel technology is moving towards working with a spectrum of light frequencies. Clouds do not block all the light from the sun and therefore modern solar panels are being designed to work in cloudy conditions.
Also the efficiency of solar panels are steadily increasing as the technology improves. This means that the size of the solar panels will reduce to get the same power rating as the old panels. Therefore, for a given area of land, the power capacity of a solar farm will increase as the technology improves. Meaning the overall costs will reduce and more power is produced.
In other words, even in cloudy conditions, solar installations can be viable.
The next disruptive technology that is imminent is on-grid energy storage such as batteries. This will allow excess renewable energy to be stored in on-grid energy storage. Therefore, it will mitigate against the dark and calm winds.
Also domestic energy storage is now available in lithium-ion batteries so that solar power from your house can be stored for use during the night.
Live the dream!
For a country that supposedly has a secular constitution there seemed to be more words spoken by the religious representatives than the politicians.
It seems that Islam was not represented ?
In the UK church and state are not separate but the people would not tolerate that much religious representation at a political event.
I am dismayed by the number of times "God" was referenced, sigh.
Is that US gallons or imperial British gallons ? US gallons are smaller so in the UK the gas guzzler might get 6mpg !!
It is why vehicles in the UK have better mpg than the US ;)
I think you will find that people get stuff done despite using Windows.
With the closed source code of Microsoft you have to put-up and shut-up with Windows. So Microsoft drains your life-force so you don't care about changing any OS defaults, you know it will be a futile experience.
Don't forget about embedded systems where the Linux kernel is a major player, such as Android smartphones, home WiFi routers, TiVo set-top cable TV boxes, automotive systems, flat screen TVs, ..
Also don't forget super-computers as Linux is the main player there.
I bet there are more CPUs in the world running the Linux kernel than Microsoft's Windows.
However, don't forget that the Sun's habitable zone continues to move further out into space because the Sun's solar output is slowly increasing over millions of years. This triggered the thermal runaway of Venus due to the CO2 greenhouse effect. This means that as time goes by on Earth, the threshold level of the thermal runaway of the CO2 greenhouse effect slowly decreases. This means that for Earth to remain habitable, the CO2 level must be decreased to stay below the threshold. In others words, in the past a higher CO2 level was permissible as a bigger greenhouse effect (non-runaway) was needed to maintain global temperatures. We have 1 billion years left on Earth before the Sun is too hot and the Earth turns into a planet like Venus.
You do know that you are talking rubbish, right ?
If you looked carefully into how governments are run, you will come to the conclusion that many business sectors are subsidised via tax breaks from governments. Many companies get tax breaks such as for the Oil Extraction and Exploration companies. Different business sectors use different accounting methods and tax rules.
"very skilled in mismanaging money on a massive scale" if this were really true there would be a fraud case but no such case exists, Mr Musk is putting much of this money into constructing infrastructure. I suggest you wait another 10 years to see how these investments bring success.
"exploding rockets" is part of the rocket industry and is calculated into the costs and insurance. It is sad when rockets fail. The important thing is that lessons are learned from the failures as this knowledge can be used to improve the rockets.
"building self-crashing cars" is a false premise. The driver is still in charge of the car when the auto-pilot driver assist is used. You should compare traditional car crashes with crashes of electric cars (EV's) to come to the proper conclusion that EV's are safer. There will always be some horrific car crashes.
EV's will be the dominant form of transport within 20 years from now, You need to get used to it.
Using computer modelling I suspect the location of the shadow of the eclipse is dependent on the spin rate of the Earth. Therefore, by knowing where people saw the eclipse and how much of the sun could be seen will be sufficient to calculate the rotational position of the Earth at the time of the eclipse. Then compare that position with the computer model. So knowing the exact time of the observations of the eclipse to the order of milliseconds is unnecessary.
To avoid killing plants due to a lack of C02 at ground level, this technique would have to be done in the upper atmosphere perhaps in aircraft ? Perhaps aircraft could manufacture their fuel as they fly along ?
The next wave of innovation is on-grid energy storage. This includes adding large scale battery storage but other techniques exist including pumped hydro. Battery based energy storage is already starting to appear in people's homes.
Therefore, the renewable power can be maximised by time shifting the power generation from the power consumption via use of on-grid energy storage.
On-grid energy storage will reduce the energy generation's swing between peak and troughs and will reduce the overall number of required power stations. This would also help nuclear power because excessive power could be stored so the nuclear power stations can run constantly at a higher generation level.
In other words, on-grid storage would eliminate the need for gas fired power stations.