If you actually read Energy publications, you'd know that our historic projections of carbon emissions from large scale hydroelectric projects forgot to account for the carbon emissions from: agricultural runoff, rotting vegetation, and other bio-activity in large cachement areas.
Note that this observation does NOT hold true for either mini-hydro (those boxy buildings near small lakes and ponds with spillways) or run-of-stream micro-hydro (sticking a turbine blade in a cage near a small pond or seasonal stream. The effect only occurs with large-scale hydroelectric projects.
None of this includes the accounting for earth moving and dam construction, which has it's own carbon emission impact. Any concrete is by definition carbon intensive.
Not according to actual statistics. In states and provinces which adopted carbon taxes, there was a significant shift per capita towards lower emissions. Same in the EU and Asia. The problem is that people forget to allow for the cold hard facts that:
1. natural gas has emissions, including during fracking, that are not point source. 2. animals and rotting vegetation, and wildfires, create emissions. Just eat lower on the food chain for half your meals, problem solved, and stop being so picky about how your fruits and veggies look. 3. transportation, both ocean and land, creates emissions, much of which is effectively unregulated, as the VW emissions scandal shows.
The same capital used to support the mining, extraction, shipment, processing, security, construction, and removal and storage of nuclear fission plants could build 20-40 times as much in actual renewables which have longer lifespans and far lower negative impacts.
It's all about capital investment. As the capital flows into renewables, economies of scale force the market to replace older, less efficient, energy sources. The capital must flow!
Actually, while we are burning more coal, we are in fact replacing existing old style Soviet coal usage plants with 1970s tech coal co-generation plants which use the waste heat both for pre-heating water and providing heating and pre-heated air/water for various industrial, commercial, and residential usages. China in point of fact, has done a lot of that, but the conversion itself has caused them to take offline about 20 percent of their old style coal plants that could not be retrofitted.
Naturally they "borrowed" the tech for that, kind of like how MSFT "borrowed" the code you put in GitHUB and the old CP/M code we wrote using public dollars, without paying for it, and declared they "discovered" it.
The point is clearly that there are upfront costs in conversion from an old style inefficient fossil fuel economy to a modern efficient renewables based economy (and, yes, it's fairly simple using multiple renewable energy sources to achieve between 80 and 120 percent renewables inputs, providing you stop thinking Soviet style of a one energy source future and realize the answer is a multi-dimensional rainbow. Kind of like how I took menu systems that were hard-coded and rewrote them as public domain array loaded menu systems that are dynamic, back in the day.
The future is now. So is climate change. Pretending it isn't won't save you a penny.
Actually, global metrics show that carbon taxes are working (sources: Energy Policy, Environmental Policy, various energy studies, Economic Policy), but are most effective in the $20-$70 per metric tonne range at causing rapid change.
The problem is not the tax, it's where the taxes are spent. In BC, for example, the higher carbon tax is being used to finance carbon emission quadrupling giant hydro dams and LNG projects, and in Canada as a whole they are being used to buy pipelines to ship bitumen overseas, making it far far worse.
If you return the carbon tax to each citizen instead, and make it into a cheque (or single payment), it tends to get used to by more efficient household appliances and cars, which replace less efficient ones, so you get a net win for everyone except the greedy corporations and their lap dogs.
(caveat: I own many tens of thousands of shares in those corporations)
America will never abandon the coal steamers and paddlewheels, Britain's navy will always be paramount due to coal, The hamlets and small farm villages of America will always use kerosene for lighting and heating, and whale oil and balleen stays for girdles will never be replaced.
The emissions from making concrete are insane, and building 40 to 100 story towers on the West Coast and in China creates a lot of emissions, even if the new buildings are designed to self-power (solar/wind/heatreuse) and are vastly more efficient than the old 1-2 story single story buildings.
It's the upfront cost. That plus methane leaks due to gas fracking.
Even fabricating solar panels and wind turbines is intensive on the emissions scale at the front end, but they last for 20-100 years with minor repairs (blades for wind, new solar panels work even as they lose a small percentage of power production over the decades).
Think of how it was before we put gasoline vapor traps at gas stations - a lot of the gasoline went up in vapor in the atmosphere. As we improve the tech, and do this at scale, we get more efficient.
The capital must flow.
Renewables make the thoughts speed, the fingers type, it is through renewables alone that we control the future.
Look, I still don't think Snowden helping Russia is a good thing, especially the many attempts in the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK to interfere (which are still ongoing, regardless of my personal viewpoint that Scotland deserves to be it's own nation, as it has always been, and the Soviet-backed Brexit was atrocious).
But, the agencies (five of which you know about, others which you don't) that are actively spying on US citizens both at home and abroad, did in fact go too far.
That said, using clouds or any external non-controlled data stores always is insecure, just like the President's cell traffic which is easy to locate to within centimetres.
Well, they are cheaper than fossil fuel vehicles to maintain, cost less to refuel (something like 1/20th the cost of a tank of gas here), have faster acceleration, and don't wake up the neighbors as much, so there's that.
Adapt. The world ain't waiting for you to realize it's not 1955.
At most modern universities, and in many countries, we already have biodegradeable compostable utensils.
They're easy to use.
If you actually need a knife or fork, silverware works fine too: you just wash it.
They're only replacing the easily broken plastic garbage utensils with stronger ones that biodegrade. Many of us wash those and reuse them too, but you can literally toss them into the compost bin and they will be broken down over time, as opposed to plastic, which is forever.
And ever.
"But they're expensive!" say the luddites. So was plastic until it became mainstream. The invisible hand of the marketplace adapts to all inputs. Produce them at scale and they're not expensive.
The major difficulty is that, except for the EU (GDPR), UK, Scotland, and Canada, very few US states have privacy rights to any extent, but now that other countries are willing to enforce data protections for their citizens who may travel in, work in, or live in the US, everyone is having to get real about the devil's bargain FB presented.
One of the main problems is that we only use certain varieties of rice on large scales. There are many different varieties, and we need to encourage various wild and heirloom rice trails for rice that will store sufficient nutrients in a higher global warming environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, after a while, you realize he has no ideas, and 95 percent of what he says he'll do, he never does.
Now, China, they actually have a real AI program, with real funding, and real scientists.
Resist our Sloth Overlords!
Make sure you run counter to the Earth's rotation, so that it speeds up!
I stand by my statement.
If you actually read Energy publications, you'd know that our historic projections of carbon emissions from large scale hydroelectric projects forgot to account for the carbon emissions from: agricultural runoff, rotting vegetation, and other bio-activity in large cachement areas.
Note that this observation does NOT hold true for either mini-hydro (those boxy buildings near small lakes and ponds with spillways) or run-of-stream micro-hydro (sticking a turbine blade in a cage near a small pond or seasonal stream. The effect only occurs with large-scale hydroelectric projects.
None of this includes the accounting for earth moving and dam construction, which has it's own carbon emission impact. Any concrete is by definition carbon intensive.
Not according to actual statistics. In states and provinces which adopted carbon taxes, there was a significant shift per capita towards lower emissions. Same in the EU and Asia. The problem is that people forget to allow for the cold hard facts that:
1. natural gas has emissions, including during fracking, that are not point source.
2. animals and rotting vegetation, and wildfires, create emissions. Just eat lower on the food chain for half your meals, problem solved, and stop being so picky about how your fruits and veggies look.
3. transportation, both ocean and land, creates emissions, much of which is effectively unregulated, as the VW emissions scandal shows.
The same capital used to support the mining, extraction, shipment, processing, security, construction, and removal and storage of nuclear fission plants could build 20-40 times as much in actual renewables which have longer lifespans and far lower negative impacts.
It's all about capital investment. As the capital flows into renewables, economies of scale force the market to replace older, less efficient, energy sources. The capital must flow!
And those were provided by their own operatives, so they can't pretend they didn't know about them.
Actually, while we are burning more coal, we are in fact replacing existing old style Soviet coal usage plants with 1970s tech coal co-generation plants which use the waste heat both for pre-heating water and providing heating and pre-heated air/water for various industrial, commercial, and residential usages. China in point of fact, has done a lot of that, but the conversion itself has caused them to take offline about 20 percent of their old style coal plants that could not be retrofitted.
Naturally they "borrowed" the tech for that, kind of like how MSFT "borrowed" the code you put in GitHUB and the old CP/M code we wrote using public dollars, without paying for it, and declared they "discovered" it.
The point is clearly that there are upfront costs in conversion from an old style inefficient fossil fuel economy to a modern efficient renewables based economy (and, yes, it's fairly simple using multiple renewable energy sources to achieve between 80 and 120 percent renewables inputs, providing you stop thinking Soviet style of a one energy source future and realize the answer is a multi-dimensional rainbow. Kind of like how I took menu systems that were hard-coded and rewrote them as public domain array loaded menu systems that are dynamic, back in the day.
The future is now. So is climate change. Pretending it isn't won't save you a penny.
Actually, global metrics show that carbon taxes are working (sources: Energy Policy, Environmental Policy, various energy studies, Economic Policy), but are most effective in the $20-$70 per metric tonne range at causing rapid change.
The problem is not the tax, it's where the taxes are spent. In BC, for example, the higher carbon tax is being used to finance carbon emission quadrupling giant hydro dams and LNG projects, and in Canada as a whole they are being used to buy pipelines to ship bitumen overseas, making it far far worse.
If you return the carbon tax to each citizen instead, and make it into a cheque (or single payment), it tends to get used to by more efficient household appliances and cars, which replace less efficient ones, so you get a net win for everyone except the greedy corporations and their lap dogs.
(caveat: I own many tens of thousands of shares in those corporations)
America will never abandon the coal steamers and paddlewheels, Britain's navy will always be paramount due to coal, The hamlets and small farm villages of America will always use kerosene for lighting and heating, and whale oil and balleen stays for girdles will never be replaced.
Oh. Wait.
The emissions from making concrete are insane, and building 40 to 100 story towers on the West Coast and in China creates a lot of emissions, even if the new buildings are designed to self-power (solar/wind/heatreuse) and are vastly more efficient than the old 1-2 story single story buildings.
It's the upfront cost. That plus methane leaks due to gas fracking.
Even fabricating solar panels and wind turbines is intensive on the emissions scale at the front end, but they last for 20-100 years with minor repairs (blades for wind, new solar panels work even as they lose a small percentage of power production over the decades).
Think of how it was before we put gasoline vapor traps at gas stations - a lot of the gasoline went up in vapor in the atmosphere. As we improve the tech, and do this at scale, we get more efficient.
The capital must flow.
Renewables make the thoughts speed, the fingers type, it is through renewables alone that we control the future.
Look, I still don't think Snowden helping Russia is a good thing, especially the many attempts in the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK to interfere (which are still ongoing, regardless of my personal viewpoint that Scotland deserves to be it's own nation, as it has always been, and the Soviet-backed Brexit was atrocious).
But, the agencies (five of which you know about, others which you don't) that are actively spying on US citizens both at home and abroad, did in fact go too far.
That said, using clouds or any external non-controlled data stores always is insecure, just like the President's cell traffic which is easy to locate to within centimetres.
They can't consent just by clicking.
It has to be an active consent with clear terms and clear choices and have a method allowing EU citizens to opt out.
Same technically is true of Canadian consumers. You can't infer active consent without active informed consent.
Sounds descriptive.
Don't see what the problem is.
Get used to it!
Well, they are cheaper than fossil fuel vehicles to maintain, cost less to refuel (something like 1/20th the cost of a tank of gas here), have faster acceleration, and don't wake up the neighbors as much, so there's that.
Adapt. The world ain't waiting for you to realize it's not 1955.
That can also be tracked, but not by your spouse.
Salary tends to be higher as one ages, and they can pay younger hires much less.
Much
Much
Less.
Oh, wait, that's age discrimination on both sides.
Just a word to the wise, millenials are in their 20s and 30s and they are starting to demand action, not words.
Adapt.
Because this is just the start, and old people are old.
"Help, I can't put liquid dinosaurs in my plug-in electric car to drive to the high speed rail station that runs on renewable energy!"
At most modern universities, and in many countries, we already have biodegradeable compostable utensils.
They're easy to use.
If you actually need a knife or fork, silverware works fine too: you just wash it.
They're only replacing the easily broken plastic garbage utensils with stronger ones that biodegrade. Many of us wash those and reuse them too, but you can literally toss them into the compost bin and they will be broken down over time, as opposed to plastic, which is forever.
And ever.
"But they're expensive!" say the luddites. So was plastic until it became mainstream. The invisible hand of the marketplace adapts to all inputs. Produce them at scale and they're not expensive.
Look, we could all see this coming.
The major difficulty is that, except for the EU (GDPR), UK, Scotland, and Canada, very few US states have privacy rights to any extent, but now that other countries are willing to enforce data protections for their citizens who may travel in, work in, or live in the US, everyone is having to get real about the devil's bargain FB presented.
One of the main problems is that we only use certain varieties of rice on large scales. There are many different varieties, and we need to encourage various wild and heirloom rice trails for rice that will store sufficient nutrients in a higher global warming environment.
Adapt. Change is coming, you were slack.
Nessie never was DNA compliant ...
Seriously, why is he saying this?
GPDR this fool.
So you think the US Marines and the US Navy and the US Air Force don't enforce rights in international waters?
You sure about that?
Why do you think we created the Marines in the first place?
Seriously, don't any of you actually take any history or civics classes?
And who do you think created the British Navy and British Marines?
Each country can choose to do such things.
It's not the scooter that's the problem, it's that he's driving with a cell in his hand.
Most likely trying to find a location.
I've been to Venice, stayed a few weeks.
Better solution: realize why people are doing something and address the cause.