1. It is not possible for the UK to lose its freedom of speech because it has never had it. I think it would be worth thinking from first principles about speech and about freedom to understand this statement.
2. In the AI robotics section you imply that power and freedom are always good. I would make to same suggestion as I did in point 1, but substitute power for speech.
3. “Capitalism is the only way out of out climate emergency” sounds like a good example of solutionism and also of black and white thinking. I agree that capitalism may be an important part of the solution, but the world is grey and that does not preclude using other partial solutions as well.
4. The discussion with Bianca and your recent article on free speech are getting much closer to an understanding of The Problem so I feel more confident you will get there eventually.
5. It is obviously time I read and commented on some of your climate change articles.
"As long as we can pay for them with our non-existent jobs."
This is an enormous caveat. It was presented as an afterthought but may be worthy of an article in its own right. The future of work with AI is already the subject of a lot of writing but the economics of it haven't really been thought through. Robots are expensive to build, expensive to run and expensive to maintain.
On 12/07/23, James Hansen, et al. in ‘“A Miracle Will Occur” Is Not Sensible Climate Policy’, was succinct: “This reduced albedo [reflectivity] is a BFD (a big deal). It is equivalent to a sudden increase of atmospheric CO2 from 420 ppm to 525 ppm”.
He continues to explain their interpretation into January here:
‘Separating cloud feedbacks from aerosol induced cloud changes might be a Sisyphean task, if not for the “experiment” initiated by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) when it placed a constraint on sulfur content of ship fuels beginning January 2015 and tightened it in January 2020’.
The solar PV cost graph has 2 remarkable features in it.
There's a plateau in costs from mid 90's to ~2009. There must have been a fundamental change towards the end of the 200x decade which then allowed significant cost reductions from 2010 onwards. I don't think that was a wordlwide policy change, but rather a technological change (though I don't know what that might have been).
Since 2010 price is dropping like a stone and there is no sign of leveling out in a new plateau! Current technology seems to be good for even more reductions to come. Excellent news.
Would be interessting to see a similar graph for battery costs and whether one can see changes in technology there. Packaging seems to become denser by about 10% per year (at least for the battery of my car). Lithium batteries are evloving, but sodium batteries follow their path. Would be interesting to see a graph for both.
There's a great episode from The Happiness Lab on why our brains don't fear climate change enough. Don't want to spoil it for you, might be worth a listen.
In The dark side of environmental activism study you linked there were only snippets and I didn't want to fall down a rabbit hole but I wonder if it's not a chicken and egg problem. How much of this is nature (ie you're born with these traits) and how much is nurture (you tried the conventional routes to bring about change and resorted to more aggressive solutions when you realized nothing else works.)
Re solar: Utility scale solar power will become insanely cheap per kWh produced (system costs from transmission and backup/storage are and will remain expensive however imho). Will we find applications for extremely cheap but intermittent solar power directly next to the plant to use the low LCOE?
Re nuclear: As you said, data centres can be built next to nuclear plants, which provide continuous, autark energy supply with a multi-reactor plant. Which means that you completely avoid the transmission and distribution costs, which make up 30-70% of electricity costs. So data centres and nuclear are truly a match made in heaven, since data centres will only pay the LCOE of NPPs with >90% load factors!
Re. your governments-are-pretty-dumb statement. Whole heated agreement that frequently what they end up doing is not great. But they -- at least Democratic ones -- suffer from vastly more & worse constraints than corporations. I honestly doubt that very many German politicians personally thought shuttering nukes was wise.. Just like no literate pol in the US actually believes corn-ethanol makes sense or that a carbon-tax isn't a slam-dunk. But if you say those things out loud, you're no longer in "the room where it happens.". Cost of representative govt.
Actually it's not. In cars, like in cereal, there are cost savings in the manufacturing process itself that are separate from tech advantages that come from say learning how to make something smaller and fitting more on the chip itself. In semiconductors you can drive savings in both. In solar, is a panel today more efficient than a panel made 2 years ago - surface area being the same. If it were the same in solar as it is in chips, I would need smaller and smaller panels to get the same KwH of energy. Or for the same roof size, I could get more and more energy from the same area. So my original comment related to whether we are getting more and more efficiency from the same unit area of solar panel.
I think one issue for solar, as it strikes me as a home owner who is trying to decide when / if to jump in, is whether solar is getting cheaper because we are making more (supply & demand) or is the cost per KwH / area coming down too because the underlying tech is improving. Solar doesn't seem to message "Now get Solar 2.0" the way other tech does, so it keeps itself as a commodity. Even those like the Tesla roof it is hard to determine whether they continue to make the tech better - or just look better.
The UK guy done for being a horrible racist was found guilty of (from the crown prosecution service website):
"Publishing or distributing material intending to stir up racial hatred.
Encouraging or assisting the commission of the offence of racially aggravated criminal damage."
I'm all for freedom of speech but not unconditionally. There is a difference between challenging people with your speech, and singling them out for hatred because of their ethnic origin/colour of their skin. This idiot should be a lesson to others considering embarking on a career of racial hatred - it won't be tolerated.
BS. Nuclear energy only is cheap if you don't calculate long-term costs like storage of nuclear waste and damage to others and the environment.
The cheapest energy is renewable. The only problem now is that we're in what you could call stone age of energy storage. solve that problem and there'll never be a lack of energy.
When you have just had a melanoma removed what you need is a therapy, not a vaccine. Because it's safe to assume that the disease is not completely eradicated (i.e. there are still, invisible, surviving carcinoma cells that are continuing to reproduce, and which will manifest themselves as a new tumor mass in the future, even after years). Indeed it's very unlikely to get (a different) melanoma twice! (this would be if the cells of the new tumor were not clones of those of the previous one). A vaccination is a preventative action you take *before* you get sick. When you take an antibiotic for a tooth abscess you are not "vaccinating" yourself against the abscess, you are undergoing therapy.
They call vaccine everything nowadays, it's hilarious.
A few important points:
1. It is not possible for the UK to lose its freedom of speech because it has never had it. I think it would be worth thinking from first principles about speech and about freedom to understand this statement.
2. In the AI robotics section you imply that power and freedom are always good. I would make to same suggestion as I did in point 1, but substitute power for speech.
3. “Capitalism is the only way out of out climate emergency” sounds like a good example of solutionism and also of black and white thinking. I agree that capitalism may be an important part of the solution, but the world is grey and that does not preclude using other partial solutions as well.
4. The discussion with Bianca and your recent article on free speech are getting much closer to an understanding of The Problem so I feel more confident you will get there eventually.
5. It is obviously time I read and commented on some of your climate change articles.
"As long as we can pay for them with our non-existent jobs."
This is an enormous caveat. It was presented as an afterthought but may be worthy of an article in its own right. The future of work with AI is already the subject of a lot of writing but the economics of it haven't really been thought through. Robots are expensive to build, expensive to run and expensive to maintain.
https://x.com/keithwoodsyt/status/1767540099116360112?s=46&t=WPJ8oZ66knklCHaToeDvZQ
NOT Dutch. -> Belgium
Nuclear energy is also great for reducing crime rates. An irradiated spider bit Spiderman and the criminals live in fear
Re: SO2: Study or Act?
On 12/07/23, James Hansen, et al. in ‘“A Miracle Will Occur” Is Not Sensible Climate Policy’, was succinct: “This reduced albedo [reflectivity] is a BFD (a big deal). It is equivalent to a sudden increase of atmospheric CO2 from 420 ppm to 525 ppm”.
He continues to explain their interpretation into January here:
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/
‘Separating cloud feedbacks from aerosol induced cloud changes might be a Sisyphean task, if not for the “experiment” initiated by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) when it placed a constraint on sulfur content of ship fuels beginning January 2015 and tightened it in January 2020’.
The quote by Voltaire is not actually by Voltaire, but by Evelyn Beatrice Hall which describes his way of thinking, not making a direct quote.
The solar PV cost graph has 2 remarkable features in it.
There's a plateau in costs from mid 90's to ~2009. There must have been a fundamental change towards the end of the 200x decade which then allowed significant cost reductions from 2010 onwards. I don't think that was a wordlwide policy change, but rather a technological change (though I don't know what that might have been).
Since 2010 price is dropping like a stone and there is no sign of leveling out in a new plateau! Current technology seems to be good for even more reductions to come. Excellent news.
Would be interessting to see a similar graph for battery costs and whether one can see changes in technology there. Packaging seems to become denser by about 10% per year (at least for the battery of my car). Lithium batteries are evloving, but sodium batteries follow their path. Would be interesting to see a graph for both.
Great updates!
There's a great episode from The Happiness Lab on why our brains don't fear climate change enough. Don't want to spoil it for you, might be worth a listen.
In The dark side of environmental activism study you linked there were only snippets and I didn't want to fall down a rabbit hole but I wonder if it's not a chicken and egg problem. How much of this is nature (ie you're born with these traits) and how much is nurture (you tried the conventional routes to bring about change and resorted to more aggressive solutions when you realized nothing else works.)
Re solar: Utility scale solar power will become insanely cheap per kWh produced (system costs from transmission and backup/storage are and will remain expensive however imho). Will we find applications for extremely cheap but intermittent solar power directly next to the plant to use the low LCOE?
Re nuclear: As you said, data centres can be built next to nuclear plants, which provide continuous, autark energy supply with a multi-reactor plant. Which means that you completely avoid the transmission and distribution costs, which make up 30-70% of electricity costs. So data centres and nuclear are truly a match made in heaven, since data centres will only pay the LCOE of NPPs with >90% load factors!
Re. your governments-are-pretty-dumb statement. Whole heated agreement that frequently what they end up doing is not great. But they -- at least Democratic ones -- suffer from vastly more & worse constraints than corporations. I honestly doubt that very many German politicians personally thought shuttering nukes was wise.. Just like no literate pol in the US actually believes corn-ethanol makes sense or that a carbon-tax isn't a slam-dunk. But if you say those things out loud, you're no longer in "the room where it happens.". Cost of representative govt.
Actually it's not. In cars, like in cereal, there are cost savings in the manufacturing process itself that are separate from tech advantages that come from say learning how to make something smaller and fitting more on the chip itself. In semiconductors you can drive savings in both. In solar, is a panel today more efficient than a panel made 2 years ago - surface area being the same. If it were the same in solar as it is in chips, I would need smaller and smaller panels to get the same KwH of energy. Or for the same roof size, I could get more and more energy from the same area. So my original comment related to whether we are getting more and more efficiency from the same unit area of solar panel.
I think one issue for solar, as it strikes me as a home owner who is trying to decide when / if to jump in, is whether solar is getting cheaper because we are making more (supply & demand) or is the cost per KwH / area coming down too because the underlying tech is improving. Solar doesn't seem to message "Now get Solar 2.0" the way other tech does, so it keeps itself as a commodity. Even those like the Tesla roof it is hard to determine whether they continue to make the tech better - or just look better.
The UK guy done for being a horrible racist was found guilty of (from the crown prosecution service website):
"Publishing or distributing material intending to stir up racial hatred.
Encouraging or assisting the commission of the offence of racially aggravated criminal damage."
I'm all for freedom of speech but not unconditionally. There is a difference between challenging people with your speech, and singling them out for hatred because of their ethnic origin/colour of their skin. This idiot should be a lesson to others considering embarking on a career of racial hatred - it won't be tolerated.
BS. Nuclear energy only is cheap if you don't calculate long-term costs like storage of nuclear waste and damage to others and the environment.
The cheapest energy is renewable. The only problem now is that we're in what you could call stone age of energy storage. solve that problem and there'll never be a lack of energy.
When you have just had a melanoma removed what you need is a therapy, not a vaccine. Because it's safe to assume that the disease is not completely eradicated (i.e. there are still, invisible, surviving carcinoma cells that are continuing to reproduce, and which will manifest themselves as a new tumor mass in the future, even after years). Indeed it's very unlikely to get (a different) melanoma twice! (this would be if the cells of the new tumor were not clones of those of the previous one). A vaccination is a preventative action you take *before* you get sick. When you take an antibiotic for a tooth abscess you are not "vaccinating" yourself against the abscess, you are undergoing therapy.
They call vaccine everything nowadays, it's hilarious.