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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Nope, HS2 was cunningly designed to be completely separate from HS1 and the channel tunnel because why would anyone want to go to a place not london? If you are crazy and want to go to the mainland, you need to take HS2 to london, take the tube across town, and then go through customs and get onto the Eurostar.

    Also there is apparently no point in designing them to connect because customs checks are physically impossible to do outside of london, which is why there are no international airports or ferry terminals that exist outside of London, and you definitely couldn’t do them on the train like anyone else.




  • Because fossil fuel plants are a lot cheaper to build than renewables, though far more expensive to run, so if a plant is temporary and only expected to be needed for a few years than you have found the one place where financially fossil fuel power production is cheaper.

    Moreover, in this scenario the government is already spending basically all of its infrastructure money on the nuclear plants, while our friendly oil companies will give you the fossil pants for free.

    That being said, I would expect it to be less building new fossil fuel plants, though given the aging coal plant problem it might be some, and more keeping existing fossil fuel plants running because after all, ‘we just need it for a few more years’ and ‘natural gas is a great brige fuel to net zero’.


  • Because according to the coalition’s own report that came out a few days ago at best nuclear will cost about five times as much as wind and ten times as much as solar.

    This means using the same limited funding they would only displace one fifth to one tenth as much coal and gas, and doing so would take fifteen years instead of five.

    Nuclear was the answer when we discovered we needed to end fossil fuel use seventy years ago, it was the option when all the nations of the world agreed that fossil fuel use must end thirty years ago, and it may have been viable fifteen years ago, but there is a reason that the same fossil fuel companies that spent the last seventy years throwing billions at anyone who would say nuclear bad suddenly changed their mind, not coincidentally at about the same time battery backed solar and wind replaced coal and gas as the lowest cost of reliable electricity production.

    The other major advantage Nuclear has for coal and gas companies is that once funding is locked in and construction started, it is very easy for them to sue, delay, and give millions to any resident who wants more nuclear, but just not this specific plant, and to ultimately turn a ten year construction timeline into a thirty year one.

    That’s means they get at least ten, probably twenty to thirty years of selling coal and gas that they don’t get if the finding goes to solar and the same generation capacity is built in three to five years.

    This also is all before noting that the coalition’s report also expects that as cars, cooking, and heating go to all electric demand for electricity will shrink for some reason, so we better not build enough nuclear to even supply the Australia of today, much less the Australian of 2040 when these plants start to actually produce power, and as such it’s possible Australia could be burning just as much coal and gas in thirty years as we do today.

    By contrast, if Australia takes advantage of being the best country in the world for solar between its vast sunny desert and being the world’s largest lithium producer than the last fossil fuel plant is dead inside of ten years.


  • I do love a good old fashioned media panic where we extensively report on what people are saying without doing even the slightest research and hey look, now even more people are saying it so it must be true. Sure we could geolocate the footage and see that the grainy video of the drone with aircraft lights nearby is right where you would expect to see the passenger jet far away that’s flying towards you for landing, but some random blogger said it was a drone on social media so it must be a secret drone doing unspecified evil, while lit up with a bunch more lights than the FAA requires.

    Even better when it comes up on Fox News right before congress pushes though a bill they were already working on to make it even harder for anyone but cooperations and the police to do aerial photography because it might be a problem someday.

    I mean i’m sure that some of them are real drones statistically, you are in one of the densest areas on the continent at a time where everyone from wedding photographers to Amazon is flying, but could we please get some solid evidence about the situation before reporting instead of calling paraphrasing a few TikTok videos breaking news.




  • I mean you are pretty explicitly expecting people to buy a car just to go to work and groceries.

    More to the point NEVs in NA and quadracycles in Europe are already available, and indeed represented the majority of the EV market about fifteen to twenty years ago.

    They didn’t really find a market in the US and most of the companies that made them failed, but have remained semi-successful in Europe where their low cost and less strict licensing requirements made them popular with teenagers and seniors.

    Nevertheless, it was only with 250mi plus ranges that EVs actually stated to push gas cars off the road in any number.

    Generally, on the internet, it is helpful to at least lampshade when you are proposing an idea that is very far off and/or disconnected from both the context of the conversation and the way you think the world actually does work, especially when in a community that regularly discusses legislative and technical details and changes of the clean energy transition.

    When the conversation started from a news story about how a ok method of reducing emissions in the US is achieving more than technically better method because it’s seen slower adoption, passerby’s are going to assume given that context that you are talking about changes to be made in the few short years and decades we have to stop the destruction of civilization as we know it into account.



  • Firstly, you are the one who started from the premise you need to own a car to commute, and indeed that one should own a car capable only of commuting and other very short often bikeable trips.

    Secondly, while I do heavily support urban density, in the english speaking world we are generally woefully short of having enough urban housing for even the people who live there right now, much less relocate everyone who doesn’t.

    Because these places are so desirable, people can and demonstrably do pay a large premium to live in these areas, pricing out a large number of people from the start.

    Moreover, in a country where a solidly blue city in a solidly blue state can spend a decade and an obscene amount of money to try and so far fail to put in a bus lane, mass transit, as much as I love be it and want more of it, simply isn’t going to be built out to the point where it serves every house and farm in anything like the next ten years, which is already a painfully long time from a climate prospective.

    It is also completely disconnected from a country where some large cities have gone so far as to outright ban rasing taxes to fund mass transit, and a continent where Doug Ford is literally ripping out well used bike lanes to signal how much he loves cars. The people and places who elected him still need to decarbonize, and an easy drop in change like electrifying the the current system while expanding transit.

    To note the obvious, back before cars, trains, planes etc… when we walked, people still had horses and ships. It just meant that unless you were rich most people lived and died in the same small village as their family lived and died in, and is a rather silly goal for a world in which people talk and make friends with others on the far side of the planet, and where a day trip with nearby friends means less than 500mi and people regularly travel hundreds for work.

    We live in a vastly more connected world where inter-city travel is a routine thing, and a country where we have spent the lasr half century desolving and selling off every intercity rail line we could, a network which took nearly a century to build.

    Even in places like Swisserland or the Netherlands, places built before cars and with extremely prolific bike and rail infrastructure, about half the population own cars, they just don’t get used for short trips as often.

    This is a great achievement that represents a hopeful vision of the future that is worth working for, and one that took entire generations of advocacy. To suggest we are going to go so much further beyond it in a few short years in a far larger and more spread out nation with a hostile federal government is outright absurd.


  • Because you can’t fly everywhere, renting for a routine trip is an expensive, time consuming, and logistically difficult process, and if you’re going to spend so much to own a car it might as well be useful for all your trips instead of just some of them?

    Moreover, someone’s commute is often nowhere near the longest trip they make on a regular basis, as often one might need to drive several places, go into town multiple times in a day, travel to a neighboring city to meet with friends, etc… all of which can require several times the (hopefully short) work and back distance.

    This is ignoring that battery degradation is a direct consequence of the charge and discharge current, and as such a larger battery will degrade at a significantly slower rate.

    All this means you’re going to face an uphill battle trying to get people to sacrifice a bunch of capability for a few percent reduction in weight and cost.

    Their is almost certainly a market for short range city cars, but that’s likely to be eventually more than filled by the used market, where a decades old 200mi range car is still going to be more capable than a 50 to 100mi range car.



  • It also helps against what tends to be modeled and seen as the largest cause of injury during a nuclear scale explosion like that seen in Beirut, namely shards of glass, though it definitely helps survive falling beams in timber framed buildings.

    Remember, thanks to the wonders of the inverse square law you are statistically far more likely to be in the area that gets light to moderate blast damage from the pressure wave rather than core of the blast.




  • I mean either way, Fusion is such a long way off that it doesn’t really have much of an impact on climate seeing as we need to reach net zero decades before any significant number of plants could come online. While worthwhile from a scientific and long term perspective looking 50 to a 100 years into the future, but we built the first fission reactor in a spare room under some sports arena in Chicago and it’s still to complex and expensive to be cost effective compared to battery backed solar and wind, so a process that’s so much more expensive and difficult that we haven’t even done it yet probably isn’t going to change anything in the next few decades.

    Honestly, the place where I can see nuclear fission making the strongest case is when it comes to large ocean crossing cargo ships. The extra crew and tech make it more expensive than fuel oil, but not massively so, and as such it could work out as being cheaper for very large ships than any other method of decarbonization.

    Of course that only matters if we’re actually serious about forcing decarbonization in all sectors and not just the current method of just where it is cheaper than massively subsidized oil, so maybe we’ll see more pressure to do so in a decade or so. For now, when we’re limited principally from the amount of money we are willing to invest in building clean energy, the long wait times and low return on investment make it seem increasingly like a way to slow solar and wind’s growth, and thusly buy oil and gas a few more years of market share, which is probably why said oil and gas companies went from fighting nuclear with every add campaign they could muster in the 90s and 2000s to their current support for it.


  • The hard part is that there are places where hydrogen really is the best path forward for decarbonization, especially when it comes to making fertilizers or various other industrial processes, and even maybe for marine applications, but the conversation keeps getting pushed towards cars, buses, trains, and other small vehicles where it just isn’t practical.

    Given how involved oil companies have been in marketing it in those segments, and the willingness of certain car, bus, and train companies to be perpetually ‘trialing’ hydrogen instead of just using batteries or centenary, it is rightly often seen as just a way to greenwash and delay from electrification, but there are still things where hydrogen really is the better option for decarbonization and we should be pushing for more green hydrogen production and infrastructure there while calling out the organizations acting in bad faith.

    I’m admittedly uncertain that investing in new battery technology is really likely to help though. We just don’t have the decade or two required for said tech to be discovered, refined, put into production, and then scaled up.

    Between LFP for mass vehicles, Li-ion for space and mass critical applications, and Sodium ion for bulk storage, centenary and marine nuclear for bulk transport, along with solar, wind, and hydro for generation and long term energy storage, I think we already have all the tech necessary to scale up and decarbonize both the grid and overland transport. At this point the focus and funding should instead be put towards applying said technology as quickly and at as large a scale as possible as fast as possible.

    We know what we need to do, we know how to do it, now we just need to actually do it.