#does it really matter?? it’s using electricity which comes from fossil fuels

[sodacowboy]

okay yeah it’s offline hours

[nj-ayuk1]

NJ Ayuk Shares His Thoughts on How a New Energy Sector Can Help African Women

The world is currently grappling with climate change and how to implement policies that promote more sustainable forms of energy. But bestselling author and energy expert NJ Ayuk argues one topic that isn’t discussed enough is how the next stage of energy development can benefit women. 

As author of several books on energy, including his latest, A Just Transition: Making Energy Poverty History with an Energy Mix, NJ Ayuk understands the difficulties the energy sector faces when it comes to renewable sources of power. And, as chairman of the African Energy Chamber, he offers unique insight into the role Africa can play in expanding access to electricity and providing women with a better quality of life. 

“In Africa, there is that silent majority that nobody talks about. Right now, there are 600 million people without access to electricity. There are 900 million without access to clean cooking technologies. Most of them are women,” he said. “Nobody’s talking about their issues, and nobody is talking about their causes.”

Africa Caught in the Middle on Energy Issues

Right now, most of the world’s energy markets are facing a shakeup. Europe is transitioning away from purchasing Russian fossil fuels because of the war in Ukraine. On the other side of the globe, China is buying more fossil fuels from Russia than it ever has before. And caught in the middle is the continent of Africa, which is home to vast reserves of oil and natural gas — and massive numbers of people living in energy poverty. 

While some countries and businesses weigh the benefits of investing money in Africa to extract its fossil fuels, others are voicing environmental concerns. They argue that instead of pouring more money into polluting forms of energy, more effort should go into sustainable power, such as solar, electric, and wind. 

NJ Ayuk thinks there is a middle way. As he points out, hundreds of millions of Africans live without any access to electricity. The continent produces only 3% of the world’s carbon emissions, despite being home to nearly 17% of the planet’s population. 

He believes Africa should sell its fossil fuels, use the funds to expand access to electricity and build jobs, all while preparing the continent for a transition to more eco-friendly sources in the near future.

By leveraging Africa’s natural resources alongside smart policies, the continent will be able to lift the standard of living for millions of people — and solve some of its most pressing social problems, he said. 

“Let's be honest — the energy industry has done a horrible job when it comes to anything to do with women,” NJ Ayuk said. “It’s not even something we need to be proud of. We need to be ashamed. Women are still the last to be hired and the first fired in our industry. Women’s issues have just been very overlooked, and we really hope that when we are talking about a transition, this does not repeat itself, no matter if it’s with the grain economy or it’s the fossil fuel industry or green energy. We need to change that no matter where we go. We need to ensure that women have equal opportunities to benefit from foreign investments in the energy sector and have equal opportunities to benefit from the jobs creating by bringing industry to the continent.” 

He speaks from experience. As the son of a single mother who worked to provide for her children, NJ Ayuk has long noticed the gender gaps both in education and the professional world. And he’s worked hard to change them. 

“I was always told that, as a lawyer, you can be one of two things. You can be a social parasite or a social engineer,” he said. “That’s a choice. And I felt if you're going to really be a social engineer, you’re going to have to really understand energy, understand energy law. And be on the table and be in the room to really change things and improve things.”

Helping African Women Who Want To Become Lawyers

For his part, NJ Ayuk has already started helping the next generation of women through the firm he founded, Centurion Law Group. The practice helps place bright young African students into American law schools to give them access to a world-class education. 

“When you look at a lot of young Africans, especially the women, nobody gives them a shot. Nobody. Everybody looks down on them,” he said. But NJ Ayuk says that with the help of American law firms that work with Centurion, the firm has trained young Africans to become “amazing lawyers.”

“We have so many people who have come through our programs that today they are serving as prosecutors or serving as judges. Heck, some of them even serve as opposing counsel to us right now. But that's a beautiful thing. So we’ve had this slew and a great group of African female lawyers that have gone through Centurion and they are general counsels in corporations and taking on the world.” 

[dragonladyzarz]

This is a really interesting example of how fossil fuel propaganda tends to work - the original statement isn't untrue, but it's missing so much context it might as well be.

So, to start with, batteries do need to be charged, and EVs aren't an exception. There are EV chargers paired with solar panels, but in a lot of cases EVs are charged from the grid, which still has a distressing amount of fossil fuel generation.

Where the propaganda comes in is that a statement like this isn't a neutral statement of fact. In a politically charged world, it's implying that if EVs aren't zero-emission vehicles, then that means they're not as beneficial as advocates say they are, which is then designed to reassure people that actually it's okay to keep your giant gas-guzzler because, see, the EVs aren't actually perfect. Which of course is total nonsense.

The thing is, gas powered vehicles are incredibly inefficient. If you've ever touched the hood of a gas car after it's been running awhile, you can start to guess just how much of the energy from the gasoline is getting wasted as heat, rather than actually being used to turn the wheels. Yale Climate Connections has a great article about it using data from fueleconomy.gov:

This is how much energy you're getting out of that gas you paid so much for - only 16-25% is moving your car, and the rest is lost.

In comparison, take a look at an electric car:

Sure, there are still a few losses here and there, but 87-91% of the original energy you put in actually makes it to the wheels. A major improvement! (And considering the fact that electricity is cheaper than gas in the first place...)

And as awful as coal power plants are, and no matter how badly they all need to close yesterday, charging an EV with electricity produced 100% from coal (and no where in the United States, and I don't think anywhere else in the entire world, are we still at 100% coal) is still more efficient than burning gasoline inside a car.

(That's not even counting the health and safety benefits of reducing street-level pollution near major roads.)

Of course we absolutely do want to switch all of our power generation to renewables ASAP, but that leads to another point: however many emissions are produced for charging an EV today, that number will go down over time as the power grid gets cleaner. (And due to simple economics and the fact that renewables are actually cheaper than running fossil fuel plants, the grid will continue to get cleaner. Whether it will do so fast enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change is another question.) However, if you buy a gas car today, that car will still produce emissions for every gallon of gas it burns, from the moment of its assembly until it's finally junked.

And there's also the fact that we've run out of time to do things the slow, logical way. Thirty years ago, we could have decided to first convert all of our power generation to renewables, and then switch things like cars, water heaters, stoves, etc., to run off of electricity once we were all sure the electricity was 100% clean. We lost our chance to do that 30 years ago. Now we just have to do everything simultaneously, all at once, and pray that we can ramp everything up fast enough that within the next few decades, it all comes together neatly and efficiently, with everything electrified and all our electricity produced by renewables.

One final point, for all the people who I'm sure will pedantically argue that producing batteries does poduce emissions as well, so surely that's another way that EVs aren't actually as much better than gas cars as people claim they are. Spoiler alert: no, actually they are that much better than gas cars.

I found this perfect chart a couple days ago that illustrates the lifecycle emissions of gas vs. electric cars. (Side note, am I the kind of nerd who will read through the EV charging infrastructure plan of a city I don't even live in just to find interesting graphs to reference? Yes, yes I am.)

Figure 1. Life-cycle GHG emissions for global typical medium-size passenger cars registered in 2021.

I tracked down the original source of the chart here, from the International Council on Clean Transportation. Again, yes, there's a big difference between the lifecycle emissions of an EV charging from renewables vs. an EV charging from the current US grid, but I'll take either one over a gas car - including when one adds the battery manufacturing into the mix.

A quote from the end of the article: "In the end, this impartial evaluation of the technology options for passenger cars reveals that battery electric vehicles are the technology with the lowest life-cycle GHG emissions, today and into the foreseeable future. The electric car transition cannot happen fast enough."

Agreed!

[college-girl199328]

Canada's parliamentary budget officer says he is troubled by what he describes as the selective use of facts from his new financial analysis of carbon pricing.

Yves Giroux said the report has to be put into context alongside the costs of all other climate policies, including doing nothing will cost no matter what we do," Giroux said in an interview.

Giroux opened a political firestorm last week with a new report that concluded carbon price rebates are worth more than the direct cost of the carbon price for 80 percent of families he said when factoring in the carbon price's economic impact on job growth and incomes, 80 percent of families in most provinces might end up with less money.

The Liberals, who campaigned successfully on carbon pricing in 2019 and 2021, jumped on the first point to insist the strategy makes life more affordable.

The Conservatives, who have campaigned heavily on scrapping carbon pricing, latched onto the second part to insist the Liberals lied about the "sneaky carbon tax" when they said the rebates would be worth more than the cost.

Giroux said you can't pick and choose which part to discuss am concerned at times about looking at just one aspect of the report," he said.

"Looking at the big picture, the overall picture, is highly preferable we do concerning addressing or trying to curb climate change will have costs. It's either a cost to the carbon tax or regulations to reduce the use of fossil fuel also has a cost nothing would also have costs."

Carbon pricing is based on the idea that higher fuel costs will lead to lower usage and an overall decrease in emissions rebates is meant to mitigate the impact of those higher costs.

The premise may be simple, but the reality is complex, and the political spin and misinformation about the policy are rampant Ragan, founding director at McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy, said the Conservatives talk about carbon pricing without offering any glimpse of what they would do instead alternative, including doing nothing, isn't free, he said.

But the government, Ragan added, isn't making it easy to understand what carbon pricing really does think they've been quite bad at explaining it and communicating it."

The government focuses almost exclusively on the money people could save through the rebates or switching to electric cars less clear that carbon pricing does have a cost to it because that's the whole point — to make fuel cost more.

"It's almost as if they just choose not to engage in those discussions or they just aren't good enough to do that, and I'm not sure which it is," Ragan said.

Carbon pricing also doesn't provide instant gratification when it comes to lowering emissions separate report Giroux released last year concluded that raising the carbon price to $170 per tonne by 2030, as the government intends to do, would eliminate 96 million tonnes of emissions more than if the price remained at the current rate of $50 a tonne.

That's about what 21 million passenger cars emit over a year and more than 40 percent of the emissions Canada is seeking to eliminate by 2030 to hit its reduction targets.

But the government can't yet show people that the price they're paying is having an impact Minister Steven Guilbeault said that analysis is underway, but isn't ready yet was also honest in his assessment that the government's messaging about climate change and carbon pricing policies isn't always as sharp as it should be.

"I think we need to do a better job at communicating on climate change," Guilbeault said in an interview department has hired some outside environment communications experts to help craft a better message to launch what he described as "the largest climate change awareness campaign," likely by late spring or early summer.

That campaign will aim to paint a better picture of what climate change has already cost us, what it could keep costing us and what we can do to limit those costs.

"We want to help people understand," Guilbeault said the Liberals are frustrated with Giroux's report because it doesn't include the context he insists is required.

The most recent report explicitly states it "does not attempt to account for the economic and environmental costs of climate change."

Ontario Liberal MP Lloyd Longfield, who sits on the House of Commons environment committee, wrote to Giroux on Wednesday to ask him to take another crack at the analysis to include those factors.

He also wants Giroux to contextualize the carbon price alongside the costs of other policies to regulate lower emissions, as well as the economic benefits of investing in low-carbon industries.

"To ignore these things does a disservice to the discussion," Longfield said in an interview said critics argue the carbon price raises the cost of food, but contended climate change does too said the swath of droughts, wildfires and floods in California, from where Canadians get a lot of fresh produce, has raised the price of crops such as lettuce, strawberries and broccoli.

Giroux said it's up to those reading or discussing the report to put it into context caveats are clearly included in the report and the limitations are also to the best of our capacity included, as clear as possible," he said if some individuals or groups use the report and spin it a certain way, I think it's up to them to explain why."

The PBO did complete an analysis last year looking at what climate change itself is costing and said that in 2021, the gross domestic product was 0.8 percent lower than it would have been without climate change dollar figures, which amounted to between $20 billion and $25 billion less said the GDP will be 0.08 percentage points lower every year as a result of climate change going forward, even if the government implements every policy promised to slow it down.

Doing nothing would increase that cost said he didn't expand that analysis to show the cost to a family's budget because a social or cost-benefit analysis like that is tricky.

"Sometimes it can be straightforward, but sometimes it can be difficult, and it's typically not something that we are equipped to do or for which we have an explicit mandate."

He also said the economic benefits of investing in low-carbon industries will not be realized heavily by 2030, which is as far as this report looks ahead.

Last month, Clean Energy Canada said Canada could add 700,000 new energy jobs by investing in clean technology and renewable energy, but the analysis suggests that gain wouldn't be realized until 2050.

University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe said while regulations would dictate what one must do to cut back on fossil fuel use, carbon prices leave it to a consumer or a business to decide what works best for them to address carbon emissions, he said.

The cost of regulation is also much less transparent than the cost of the carbon price.

[w-ht-w]

Some might say this article woobifies Elon Musk. Regardless, it present an interesting reading on the man.

Passage from the article that I’ve been thinking about lately:

I understand now that Musk didn’t have me over to talk about his projects and vision. There’s nothing to be gained from talking about the problems of science with someone who doesn’t understand them. At the end of the day, he just wants to unwind and laugh about the world he’s trying to improve.

Full article:

IT’S MID-AFTERNOON ON a Friday at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and three of Elon Musk’s children are gathered around him – one of his triplets, both of his twins.

Musk is wearing a gray T-shirt and sitting in a swivel chair at his desk, which is not in a private office behind a closed door, but in an accessible corner cubicle festooned with outer-space novelty items, photos of his rockets, and mementos from Tesla and his other companies.

Most tellingly, there’s a framed poster of a shooting star with a caption underneath it that reads, “When you wish upon a falling star, your dreams can come true. Unless it’s really a meteor hurtling to the Earth which will destroy all life. Then you’re pretty much hosed, no matter what you wish for. Unless it’s death by meteorite.” To most people, this would be mere dark humor, but in this setting, it’s also a reminder of Musk’s master plan: to create habitats for humanity on other planets and moons. If we don’t send our civilization into another Dark Ages before Musk or one of his dream’s inheritors pull it off, then Musk will likely be remembered as one of the most seminal figures of this millennium. Kids on all the terraformed planets of the universe will look forward to Musk Day, when they get the day off to commemorate the birth of the Earthling who single-handedly ushered in the era of space colonization.

And that’s just one of Musk’s ambitions. Others include converting automobiles, households and as much industry as possible from fossil fuels to sustainable energy; implementing a new form of high-speed city-to-city transportation via vacuum tube; relieving traffic congestion with a honeycomb of underground tunnels fitted with electric skates for cars and commuters; creating a mind-computer interface to enhance human health and brainpower; and saving humanity from the future threat of an artificial intelligence that may one day run amok and decide, quite rationally, to eliminate the irrational human species.

So far, Musk, 46, has accomplished none of these goals.

But what he has done is something that very few living people can claim: Painstakingly bulldozed, with no experience whatsoever, into two fields with ridiculously high barriers to entry – car manufacturing (Tesla) and rocketry (SpaceX) – and created the best products in those industries, as measured by just about any meaningful metric you can think of. In the process, he’s managed to sell the world on his capability to achieve objectives so lofty that from the mouth of anyone else, they’d be called fantasies.

At least, most of the world. “I’m looking at the short losses,” Musk says, transfixed by CNBC on his iPhone. He speaks to his kids without looking up. “Guys, check this out: Tesla has the highest short position in the entire stock market. A $9 billion short position.”

His children lean over the phone, looking at a table full of numbers that I don’t understand. So his 13-year-old, Griffin, explains it to me: “They’re betting that the stock goes down, and they’re getting money off that. But it went up high, so they lost an insane amount of money.”

“They’re jerks who want us to die,” Musk elaborates. “They’re constantly trying to make up false rumors and amplify any negative rumors. It’s a really big incentive to lie and attack my integrity. It’s really awful. It’s…”

He trails off, as he often does when preoccupied by a thought. I try to help: “Unethical?”

“It’s…” He shakes his head and struggles for the right word, then says softly, “Hurtful.”

It is easy to confuse who someone is with what they do, and thus turn them into a caricature who fits neatly into a storybook view of the world. Our culture always needs villains and heroes, fools and geniuses, scapegoats and role models. However, despite opinions to the contrary, Elon Musk is not a robot sent from the future to save humanity. Nor is he a Silicon Valley savant whose emotional affect has been replaced with supercomputer-like intelligence. Over the course of nine months of reporting, watching Musk do everything from strategize Mars landings with his rocket-engineering team to plan the next breakthroughs with his artificial-intelligence experts, I learned he is someone far, far different from what his myth and reputation suggest.

The New York Times has called him “arguably the most successful and important entrepreneur in the world.” It’s an easy case to make: He’s probably the only person who has started four billion-dollar companies – PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and Solar City. But at his core, Musk is not a businessman or entrepreneur. He’s an engineer, inventor and, as he puts it, “technologist.” And as a naturally gifted engineer, he’s able to find the design inefficiencies, flaws and complete oversights in the tools that power our civilization.

“He’s able to see things more clearly in a way that no one else I know of can understand,” says his brother, Kimbal. He discusses his brother’s love of chess in their earlier years, and adds, “There’s a thing in chess where you can see 12 moves ahead if you’re a grandmaster. And in any particular situation, Elon can see things 12 moves ahead.” 

His children soon leave for the home of their mother, Musk’s ex-wife Justine. “I wish we could be private with Tesla,” Musk murmurs as they exit. “It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company.”

What follows is … silence. Musk sits at his desk, looking at his phone, but not typing or reading anything. He then lowers himself to the floor, and stretches his back on a foam roller. When he finishes, I attempt to start the interview by asking about the Tesla Model 3 launch a week earlier, and what it felt like to stand onstage and tell the world he’d just pulled off a plan 14 years in the making: to bootstrap, with luxury electric cars, a mass-market electric car.

The accomplishment, for Musk, is not just in making a $35,000 electric car; it’s in making a $35,000 electric car that’s so good, and so in-demand, that it forces other car manufacturers to phase out gas cars to compete. And sure enough, within two months of the launch, both GM and Jaguar Land Rover announced they were planning to eliminate gas cars and go all-electric.

Musk thinks for a while, begins to answer, then pauses. “Uh, actually, let me go to the restroom. Then I’ll ask you to repeat that question.” A longer pause. “I also have to unload other things from my mind.”

Five minutes later, Musk still hasn’t returned. Sam Teller, his chief of staff, says, “I’ll be right back.”

Several minutes after that, they both reappear and huddle nearby, whispering to each other. Then Musk returns to his desk.

“We can reschedule for another day if this is a bad time,” I offer.

Musk clasps his hands on the surface of the desk, composes himself, and declines.

“It might take me a little while to get into the rhythm of things.”

Then he heaves a sigh and ends his effort at composure. “I just broke up with my girlfriend,” he says hesitantly. “I was really in love, and it hurt bad.”

He pauses and corrects himself: “Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think.”

Thus, the answer to the question posed earlier: It felt unexpectedly, disappointingly, uncontrollably horrible to launch the Model 3. “I’ve been in severe emotional pain for the last few weeks,” Musk elaborates. “Severe. It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around. For most of that day, I was morbid. And then I had to psych myself up: drink a couple of Red Bulls, hang out with positive people and then, like, tell myself: ‘I have all these people depending on me. All right, do it!'”

Minutes before the event, after meditating for pretty much the first time in his life to get centered, Musk chose a very telling song to drive onstage to: “R U Mine?” by the Arctic Monkeys.

Musk discusses the breakup for a few more minutes, then asks, earnestly, deadpan, “Is there anybody you think I should date? It’s so hard for me to even meet people.” He swallows and clarifies, stammering softly, “I’m looking for a long-term relationship. I’m not looking for a one-night stand. I’m looking for a serious companion or soulmate, that kind of thing.”

I eventually tell him that it may not be a good idea to jump right into another relationship. He may want to take some time to himself and figure out why his previous relationships haven’t worked in the long run: his marriage to writer Justine Musk, his marriage to actress Talulah Riley, and this new breakup with actress Amber Heard.

Musk shakes his head and grimaces: “If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.”

I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence.

Musk disagrees. Strongly. “It’s not true,” he replies petulantly. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.” He hesitates, shakes his head, falters, continues. “It’s not like I don’t know what that feels like: Being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there – and no one on the pillow next to you. Fuck. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?”

There’s truth to what Musk is saying. It is lonely at the top. But not for everyone. It’s lonely at the top for those who were lonely at the bottom.

“When I was a child, there’s one thing I said,” Musk continues. His demeanor is stiff, yet in the sheen of his eyes and the trembling of his lips, a high tide of emotion is visible, pushing against the retaining walls. “‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say.” His voice drops to a whisper. “I don’t want to be alone.”

A ring of red forms around his eyes as he stares forward and sits frozen in silence. Musk is a titan, a visionary, a human-size lever pushing forward massive historical inevitabilities – the kind of person who comes around only a few times in a century – but in this moment, he seems like a child who is afraid of abandonment. And that may be the origin story of Musk’s superambitions, but more on that later. In the meantime, Musk has something he’d like to show me.

“If you say anything about what you’re about to see, it would cost us billions,” he says, rising from his desk. “And you would be put in jail.”

The most interesting tourist attraction in Los Angeles County is one that’s not in many guidebooks: It’s in the otherwise-untouristed southwestern city of Hawthorne, around SpaceX. If you walk along Crenshaw Boulevard from Jack Northrop Boulevard to 120th Street, what you will see is a city of the future that’s under construction. This is Musk city, an alternate reality, a triumph of futuristic imagination more thrilling than anything at a Disney park. On the west side of the street, a 156-foot-tall rocket towers above SpaceX headquarters, symbolizing Musk’s dream of relatively low-cost interplanetary travel. This particular rocket booster was the first in human history to be launched into space, then recovered intact on Earth after separating, and then fired back into space. On the east side of the street, an employee parking lot has been dug up and turned into the first-ever tunnel for the Boring Company, Musk’s underground-honeycomb solution to traffic jams and the future home of all his terrestrial transportation projects. Then, running for a mile beside Jack Northrop Boulevard, there’s a white vacuum tube along the shoulder of the road. This is the test track for the Hyperloop, Musk’s high-speed form of city-to-city travel. Taken together, the dreams of Musk city promise to connect the planet and the solar system in ways that will fundamentally change humanity’s relationship to two of the most important facets of its reality: distance and time.

But there is a particular building in Musk city that few have visited, and this is where Musk takes me. It is the Tesla Design Studio, where he’s slated to do a walkthrough of the Tesla Truck and other future vehicle prototypes with his team of designers and engineers.

Outside the door, a guard takes my phone and audio recorder, and I’m given an old-fashioned pen and paper to take notes on. Musk then continues into the building and reveals the Tesla Truck, which aims to help the trucking industry go green. (Musk has even been toying with creating a supersonic electric jet, with vertical takeoff and landing, in the future.) Four key members of the Tesla team are there – Doug Field, JB Straubel, Franz von Holzhausen, Jerome Guillen – and watch with anticipation as Musk explores a new configuration of the cab for the first time.

Guillen explains the idea behind the truck: “We just thought, ‘What do people want? They want reliability. They want the lowest cost. And they want driver comfort.’ So we reimagined the truck.”

This is a perfect example of the idea that Musk-inspired wannabe visionaries around the world worship like a religion: first principles thinking. In other words, if you want to create or innovate, start from a clean slate. Don’t accept any ideas, practices or standards just because everyone else is doing them. For instance, if you want to make a truck, then it must be able to reliably move cargo from one location to another, and you must follow existing laws of physics. Everything else is negotiable, including government regulations. As long as you remember that the goal isn’t to reinvent the truck, but to create the best one, whether or not it’s similar to past trucks.

As a result of this type of thinking, Musk is able to see an industry much more objectively than others who’ve been in the field their whole lives.

“I was literally told this is impossible and I’m a huge liar,” Musk says of the early days of Tesla. “But I have a car and you can drive it. This is not like a frigging unicorn. It’s real. Go for a drive. It’s amazing. How can you be in denial?”

An unfortunate fact of human nature is that when people make up their mind about something, they tend not to change it – even when confronted with facts to the contrary. “It’s very unscientific,” Musk says. “There’s this thing called physics, which is this scientific method that’s really quite effective for figuring out the truth.”

The scientific method is a phrase Musk uses often when asked how he came up with an idea, solved a problem or chose to start a business. Here’s how he defines it for his purposes, in mostly his own words:

1. Ask a question.

2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.


3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.

4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability?
5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.
6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then you’re probably right, but you’re not certainly right.

“That’s the scientific method,” Musk concludes. “It’s really helpful for figuring out the tricky things.”

But most people don’t use it, he says. They engage in wishful thinking. They ignore counterarguments. They form conclusions based on what others are doing and aren’t doing. The reasoning that results is “It’s true because I said it’s true,” but not because it’s objectively true.

“The fundamental intention of Tesla, at least my motivation,” Musk explains in his halting, stuttering voice, “was to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. That’s why I open-sourced the patents. It’s the only way to transition to sustainable energy better.

“Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI,” he continues. “I keep telling people this. I hate to be Cassandra here, but it’s all fun and games until somebody loses a fucking eye. This view [of climate change] is shared by almost everyone who’s not crazy in the scientific community.”

For the next 20 minutes, Musk examines the Tesla Truck. He comments first on the technical details, even ones as granular as the drawbacks and advantages of different types of welding. He then moves on to the design, specifically a driver-comfort feature that cannot be specified here, due to said threatened jail time.

“Probably no one will buy it because of this,” he tells his team. “But if you’re going to make a product, make it beautiful. Even if it doesn’t affect sales, I want it to be beautiful.”

According to Musk’s best guess, our personalities might be 80 percent nature and 20 percent nurture. Whatever that ratio actually is, if you want to understand the future that Musk is building, it’s essential to understand the past that built him, including his fears of human extinction and being alone.

For the first eight or so years of his life, Musk lived with his mother, Maye, a dietitian and model, and his father, Errol, an engineer, in Pretoria, South Africa. He rarely saw either of them.

“I didn’t really have a primary nanny or anything,” Musk recalls. “I just had a housekeeper who was there to make sure I didn’t break anything. She wasn’t, like, watching me. I was off making explosives and reading books and building rockets and doing things that could have gotten me killed. I’m shocked that I have all my fingers.” He raises his hands and examines them, then lowers his digits. “I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.”

Some of those books help explain the world Musk is building, particularly Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. The books are centered around the work of a visionary named Hari Seldon, who has invented a scientific method of predicting the future based on crowd behavior. He sees a 30,000-year Dark Ages waiting ahead for humankind, and creates a plan that involves sending scientific colonies to distant planets to help civilization mitigate this unavoidable cataclysm.

“Asimov certainly was influential because he was seriously paralleling Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but he applied that to a sort of modern galactic empire,” Musk explains. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one.”

Musk was around 10 at this time, and plunged in his own personal dark age. He’d recently made a move that would change his life. It was a wrong decision that came from the right place.

When his parents split up two years before, he and his younger siblings – Kimbal and Tosca – stayed with their mom. But, Musk recounts, “I felt sorry for my father, because my mother had all three kids. He seemed very sad and lonely by himself. So I thought, ‘I can be company.'” He pauses while a movie’s worth of images seem to flicker through his mind.

“Yeah, I was sad for my father. But I didn’t really understand at the time what kind of person he was.”

He lets out a long, sad sigh, then says flatly about moving in with Dad, “It was not a good idea.”

According to Elon, Errol has an extremely high IQ – “brilliant at engineering, brilliant” – and was supposedly the youngest person to get a professional engineer’s qualification in South Africa. When Elon came to live with him in Lone Hill, a suburb of Johannesburg, Errol was, by his own account, making money in the often dangerous worlds of construction and emerald mining –
at times so much that he claims he couldn’t close his safe.

“I’m naturally good at engineering that’s because I inherited it from my father,” Musk says. “What’s very difficult for others is easy for me. For a while, I thought things were so obvious that everyone must know this.”

Like what kinds of things?

“Well, like how the wiring in a house works. And a circuit breaker, and alternating current and direct current, what amps and volts were, how to mix a fuel and oxidizers to create an explosive. I thought everyone knew this.”

But there was another side to Musk’s father that was just as important to making Elon who he is. “He was such a terrible human being,” Musk shares. “You have no idea.” His voice trembles, and he discusses a few of those things, but doesn’t go into specifics. “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil,” he says. “He will plan evil.”

Besides emotional abuse, did that include physical abuse?

“My dad was not physically violent with me. He was only physically violent when I was very young.” (Errol countered via email that he only “smacked” Elon once, “on the bottom.”)

Elon’s eyes turn red as he continues discussing his dad. “You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done. Um…”

There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he can’t bring himself to utter the words, at least not on the record. “It’s so terrible, you can’t believe it.”

The tears run silently down his face. “I can’t remember the last time I cried.” He turns to Teller to confirm this. “You’ve never seen me cry.”

“No,” Teller says. “I’ve never seen you cry.”

The flow of tears stops as quickly as it began. And once more, Musk has the cold, impassive, but gentle stone face that is more familiar to the outside world.

Yet it’s now clear that this is not the face of someone without emotions, but the face of someone with a lot of emotions who had been forced to suppress them in order to survive a painful childhood.

When asked about committing crimes, Musk’s father said that he has never intentionally threatened or hurt anyone, or been charged with anything, except … in this one case, he says he shot and killed three out of five or six armed people who broke into his home, and was later cleared of all charges on self-defense.

In his e-mail, Errol wrote: “I’ve been accused of being a Gay, a Misogynist, a Paedophile, a Traitor, a Rat, a Shit (quite often), a Bastard (by many women whose attentions I did not return) and much more. My own (wonderful) mother told me I am ‘ruthless’ and should learn to be more ‘humane.'” But, he concluded, “I love my children and would readily do whatever for them.”

As an adult, Musk, with the same optimism with which he moved in with his father as a child, moved his dad, his father’s then-wife and their children to Malibu. He bought them a house, cars and a boat. But his father, Elon says, hadn’t changed, and Elon severed the relationship.

“In my experience, there is nothing you can do,” he says about finally learning the lesson that his dad will never change. “Nothing, nothing. I wish. I’ve tried everything. I tried threats, rewards, intellectual arguments, emotional arguments, everything to try to change my father for the better, and he… no way, it just got worse.”

Somewhere in this trauma bond is the key to Musk’s worldview – creation against destruction, of being useful versus harmful, of defending the world against evil.

Things at school weren’t much better than life at home. There, Musk was brutally bullied – until he was 15 years old.

“For the longest time, I was the youngest and the smallest kid in the class because my birthday just happens to fall on almost the last day that they will accept you into school, June 28th. And I was a late bloomer. So I was the youngest and the smallest kid in class for years and years. …The gangs at school would hunt me down – literally hunt me down!”

Musk put down the books and started learning to fight back – karate, judo, wrestling. That physical education, combined with a growth spurt that brought him to six feet by age 16, gave him some confidence and, as he puts it, “I started dishing it out as hard as they’d give it to me.”

When he got into a fight with the biggest bully at school and knocked him out with one punch, Musk noticed that the bully never picked on him again. “It taught me a lesson: If you’re fighting a bully, you cannot appease a bully.” Musk speaks the next words forcefully. “You punch the bully in the nose. Bullies are looking for targets that won’t fight back. If you make yourself a hard target and punch the bully in the nose, he’s going to beat the shit out of you, but he’s actually not going to hit you again.”

When he was 17, Musk left college and moved to his mother’s home country, Canada, later obtaining passports for his mother, brother and sister to join him there. His father did not wish him well, Musk recalls. “He said rather contentiously that I’d be back in three months, that I’m never going to make it, that I’m never going to make anything of myself. He called me an idiot all the time. That’s the tip of the iceberg, by the way.”

After Musk became successful, his father even took credit for helping him – to such a degree that it’s listed as fact in Elon’s Wikipedia entry. “One thing he claims is he gave us a whole bunch of money to start, my brother and I, to start up our first company [Zip2, which provided online city guides to newspapers]. This is not true,” Musk says. “He was irrelevant. He paid nothing for college. My brother and I paid for college through scholarships, loans and working two jobs simultaneously. The funding we raised for our first company came from a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley.”

Musk’s career history decorates his desk. There’s an item from nearly all of his companies, even a mug for X.com, the early online bank he started, which became PayPal. The sale of Zip2 resulted in a $22 million check made out directly to Musk, which he used in part to start X.com. With the roughly $180 million post-tax amount he made from the sale of PayPal, he started SpaceX with $100 million, put $70 million into Tesla, invested $10 million into Solar City, and saved little for himself.

One of the misunderstandings that rankles Musk most is being pigeonholed and narrowcast, whether as the real-life Tony Stark or the second coming of Steve Jobs. When, at a photo shoot, he was asked to wear a black turtleneck, the trademark garb of Jobs, he bristled. “If I was dying and I had a turtleneck on,” he tells me, “with my last dying breath, I would take the turtleneck off and try to throw it as far away from my body as possible.”

So what is Musk about?

“I try to do useful things,” he explains. “That’s a nice aspiration. And useful means it is of value to the rest of society. Are they useful things that work and make people’s lives better, make the future seem better, and actually are better, too? I think we should try to make the future better.”

When asked to define “better,” Musk elaborates, “It would be better if we mitigated the effects of global warming and had cleaner air in our cities and weren’t drilling for vast amounts of coal, oil and gas in parts of the world that are problematic and will run out anyway.

“And if we were a multiplanetary species, that would reduce the possibility of some single event, man-made or natural, taking out civilization as we know it, as it did the dinosaurs. There have been five mass-extinction events in the fossil record. People have no comprehension of these things. Unless you’re a cockroach or a mushroom – or a sponge – you’re fucked.” He laughs sharply. “It’s insurance of life as we know it, and it makes the future far more inspiring if we are out there among the stars and you could move to another planet if you wanted to.”

This, then, is the ideology of Musk. And though basic, it’s actually very rare. Think of the other names that one associates with innovation this century: They’re people who built operating systems, devices, websites or social-media platforms. Even when it didn’t start out that way, the ideology in most cases soon became: How can I make my company the center of my users’ world? Consequently, social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter use a number of tricks to activate the addictive reward centers of a user’s brain.

If Musk’s employees suggested doing something like this, he’d probably look at them like they were crazy. This type of thinking doesn’t compute. “It’s really inconsistent to not be the way you want the world to be,” he says flatly, “and then through some means of trickery, operate according to one moral code while the rest of the world operates according to a different one. This is obviously not something that works. If everyone’s trying to trick everyone all the time, it’s a lot of noise and confusion. It’s better just to be straightforward and try to do useful things.”

He discusses building a permanent moon base, and further funding SpaceX by creating passenger rockets capable of traveling to any city in the world in less than an hour, a form of transport he calls “Earth-to-Earth.” I ask if there’s anything that he believes works that surprises people.

“I think being precise about the truth works. Truthful and precise. I try to tell people, ‘You don’t have to read between the lines with me. I’m saying the lines!'”

On another occasion, I watch Musk at a weekly SpaceX engineering-team meeting, where eight experts sit around a table in high-backed red chairs, showing Musk a PowerPoint with the latest updates to the Mars spaceship design. And while Musk keeps pace on technical details with some of the most brilliant minds in aerospace, he also adds an element that goes beyond logistics and engineering.

“Make sure it doesn’t look ugly or something,” he advises at one point. Then, later, “The aesthetics of this one are not so great. It looks like a scared lizard.” And, in a characteristically wry moment, “When you land on Mars, you want the list of what you have to worry about to be small enough that you’re not dead.”

Overall, there’s a theme to Musk’s feedback: First, things have to be useful, logical and scientifically possible.

Then he looks to improve efficiency on every level: What are people accepting as an industry standard when there’s room for significant improvement?

From there, Musk pushes for the end product to be aesthetically beautiful, simple, cool, sleek (“He hates seams,” says one staffer) and, as Musk puts it at one point in the meeting, “awesome.”

Throughout this process, there’s an additional element that very few companies indulge in: personalization. This usually involves Musk adding Easter eggs and personal references to the products, such as making the Tesla sound-system volume go to 11 (in homage to Spinal Tap) or sending a “secret payload” into space in his first Dragon launch that turned out to be a wheel of cheese (in homage to Monty Python).

Beyond all this, most maddening or exciting for Musk’s employees, depending on which one you ask, is the time scale on which he often expects work to be done. For example, one Friday when I was visiting, a few SpaceX staff members were frantically rushing back and forth from the office to the parking lot across the street. It turns out that during a meeting, he asked them how long it would take to remove staff cars from the lot and start digging the first hole for the Boring Company tunnel. The answer: two weeks.

Musk asked why, and when he gathered the necessary information, he concluded, “Let’s get started today and see what’s the biggest hole we can dig between now and Sunday afternoon, running 24 hours a day.” Within three hours, the cars were gone and there was a hole in the ground.

On the other hand, one thing Musk is notorious for is setting ambitious deadlines that he often can’t meet. The Roadster, the Model S and the Model X were all delayed from his original timeline, and now the Model 3 – with its nearly half-a-million-person-long waiting list – is experiencing its own production delays. There are many reasons for this, but Musk summarizes: “Better to do something good and be late than bad and be early.” So expect Musk to get it done, just not on time. Because if he can’t do it, he won’t pretend otherwise.

“I expect to lose,” Musk says. He’s in a three-story building in San Francisco that has only recently been furnished. It used to belong to Stripe, the credit-card payment processor, but now belongs to Musk, who’s housing two of his companies there: Neuralink and OpenAI.

These are visions of what Tesla or SpaceX may have looked like when they first began. A small group of excited people working with limited resources to hit a distant, ambitious target. But unlike Tesla and SpaceX, there aren’t anything close to road maps toward these goals, nor are they so clear-cut.

OpenAI is a nonprofit dedicated to minimizing the dangers of artificial intelligence, while Neuralink is working on ways to implant technology into our brains to create mind-computer interfaces.

If it sounds like those are contradictory ideas, think again. Neuralink allows our brains to keep up in the intelligence race. The machines can’t outsmart us if we have everything the machines have plus everything we have. At least, that is if you assume that what we have is actually an advantage.

It’s an unusual day at the office: Musk is showing a documentary about artificial intelligence to the Neuralink staff. He stands in front of them as they sit splayed on couches and chairs, and lays out the grim odds of his mission to make AI safe: “Maybe there’s a five to 10 percent chance of success,” he says.

The challenge he’s up against with OpenAI is twofold. First, the problem with building something that’s smarter than you is … that it’s smarter than you. Add to that the fact that AI has no remorse, no morality, no emotions – and humanity may be in deep shit. This is the good son’s second chance against the remorseless father he couldn’t change.

The other challenge is that OpenAI is a nonprofit, and it’s competing with the immense resources of Google’s DeepMind. Musk tells the group he in fact invested in DeepMind with the intention of keeping a watchful eye on Google’s AI development.

“Between Facebook, Google and Amazon – and arguably Apple, but they seem to care about privacy – they have more information about you than you can remember,” he elaborates to me. “There’s a lot of risk in concentration of power. So if AGI [artificial general intelligence] represents an extreme level of power, should that be controlled by a few people at Google with no oversight?”

“Sleep well,” Musk jokes when the movie ends. He then leads a discussion about it, writing down some ideas and bluntly dismissing others. As he’s speaking, he reaches into a bowl, grabs a piece of popcorn, drops it in his mouth and starts coughing.

“We’re talking about threats to humanity,” he mutters, “and I’m going to choke to death on popcorn.”

It is 9 p.m. on a Thursday night, and I’m waiting in the foyer of Musk’s Bel Air home for our final interview. He walks down the stairs a few minutes later, wearing a T-shirt depicting Mickey Mouse in space. A tall blond woman follows him down the stairs.

He is, true to his words, not alone.

The woman, it turns out, is Talulah Riley, his second wife. They met in 2008, and Musk proposed after 10 days together. They married in 2010, then divorced two years later, then remarried the following year, then filed for divorce again, then withdrew the filing, then re-filed for divorce and finally followed through with it.

Musk suggests doing something rare for him: drinking. “My alcohol tolerance is not very high,” he says. “But I tend to be a fuzzy bear when I drink. I go happy fuzzy.”

He pours two glasses of whiskey for us, and the three of us adjourn to his living room, where there’s a mechanical Edison phonograph, an Enigma machine and a short-wave radio from World War I on display.

During the interview, Riley lounges on the couch nearby, half paying attention to the conversation, half paying attention to her phone.

Musk is in a different mood than he was at SpaceX, and that’s something that those who’ve come to know Musk observe. One moment, he may be reciting favorite lines from an animated TV show he just saw, the next he may be curtly giving detailed instructions, the next he may be ignoring you while lost in a thought, the next he may be asking for your advice on a problem, the next he may be breathless with laughter while riffing on a humorous tangent for five minutes, the next he may be acting as if you’ve both never met. And through it all, you learn not to take it personally, because chances are that it has nothing to do with you.

We start off talking, or at least with me trying to talk, about AI, because a few weeks earlier, Musk had tweeted, “Competition for AI superiority at national level most likely cause of WW3 imo.”

But when I ask him about that, Musk gets testy. “I don’t have all the answers. I’m not saying that I have all the fucking answers. Let me be really clear about that. I’m trying to figure out the set of actions I can take that are more likely to result in a good future. If you have suggestions in that regard, please tell me what they are.”

Riley chimes in: “I think just the way it gets couched is that ‘Elon Musk says we’re all gonna die,’ as opposed to ‘Hey, let’s have some regulation.'”

Musk, it soon becomes clear, is not in the mood to talk about his work. Instead, he has some advice he’d like to offer to the world from his personal experience: “I find one learns lessons in the course of life,” he begins with a wry half-smile. “And one lesson I’ve learned is, don’t tweet on Ambien. That’s on the record: Tweeting on Ambien is unwise. You may regret it.”

Musk grabs a coffee-table book published by The Onion and starts leafing through it, laughing hysterically. “In order to understand the essential truth of things,” he theorizes, “I think you can find it in The Onion and occasionally on Reddit.”

Afterward, he asks excitedly, “Have you ever seen Rick and Morty?” And the conversation bounces from that animated show to South Park to The Simpsons to the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

One of the lines from Hitchhiker’s, Musk says, ended up being Musk Family Rule Number One: “Don’t panic.”

“The boys were quite skittish about all kinds of things,” Riley explains.

“That’s our other rule,” Musk continues. “Safety third. There’s not even a Rule Number Two. But even though there’s nothing in second place, safety is not getting promoted to number two.”

We’re interrupted by Teller, Musk’s chief of staff, who informs him that as we were talking, the Hawthorne City Council ended an hours-long debate with a 4-to-1 vote allowing Musk to burrow his tunnel two miles into the city.

“Good,” Musk says. “Now we can dig past our own property line. Dig like fiends!”

He laughs at the expression, and I understand now that Musk didn’t have me over to talk about his projects and vision. There’s nothing to be gained from talking about the problems of science with someone who doesn’t understand them. At the end of the day, he just wants to unwind and laugh about the world he’s trying to improve.

I leave his home still hearing his chuckles in the doorway, and hoping that when the Mars colony builds its first statues of Musk, they’re not of a stiff man with a tight-lipped expression looking out into space, but of a fuzzy bear.

[sciencespies]

Researchers find a way to pull carbon out of the air and turn it into jet fuel

https://sciencespies.com/tech/researchers-find-a-way-to-pull-carbon-out-of-the-air-and-turn-it-into-jet-fuel/

Researchers find a way to pull carbon out of the air and turn it into jet fuel

The start of electric aviation is upon us, but it’s going to take many more years before the average environmentalist can fly guilt free on a fully electric long haul jet.

In the meantime, scientists are trying to make the commercial planes we already have more sustainable, and one of the best ways to do that is to change the fuel they consume.

Instead of spitting carbon dioxide (CO2) out into the atmosphere, researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge in the UK have now come up with a way for airplanes to capture this gas from the air and burn it for fuel.

Instead of creating a whole new fleet of electric planes, which would require huge leaps in battery storage technology, this new approach would allow the world to reduce its carbon footprint from flying much sooner. That is, if it proves to work on a larger scale.

In the lab, researchers were able to capture and convert gaseous CO2 directly into jet fuel using an inexpensive iron-based catalyst. 

The amount of liquid fuel produced is still far too small to power an actual airplane, but if fossil fuels can be captured from the air in high enough volume, converted into energy at great enough efficiency and then re-emitted, a plane could theoretically fly carbon neutral.

“This catalytic process provides an attractive route not only to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions but also to produce renewable and sustainable jet fuel,” the authors write. 

“The recycling of carbon dioxide as a carbon source for both fuels and high-value chemicals offers considerable potential for both the aviation and petrochemical industries.” 

Normally, when fossil fuels burn, the hydrocarbons they contain are turned into carbon dioxide and water, releasing energy. The new system essentially reverses this natural process.

By adding heat to the system, engineers were able to combine carbon dioxide with hydrogen, split from water, to produce a few grams of liquid fuel that the authors say could work in a jet engine. 

The catalyst responsible for this impressive chemical reaction is composed of iron, manganese and potassium, which are abundant Earth elements,  easier and cheaper to prepare than many similar candidates. The catalyst also combines easily with hydrogen and shows high selectivity for a range of jet-fuel hydrocarbons. 

The outcome is a little bit of fuel, as well as several petrochemicals that can only be obtained from fossil fuels.

The new system isn’t the first, nor will it be the last that converts our carbon emissions into desirable biofuel. In Canada, scientists have been developing a huge industrial complex to capture CO2 like the trees of a forest would, using it to form hydrocarbon fuel. 

But while a handful of studies have shown it’s possible to convert atmospheric CO2 into liquid fuel, it’s extremely challenging and expensive to produce more than a tiny amount. 

The new system looks promising, but whether or not its practical is another matter.

“This does look different, and it looks like it could work,” Joshua Heyne, an independent engineer who was not involved in the study, told Wired. 

“Scale-up is always an issue, and there are new surprises when you go to larger scales. But in terms of a longer-term solution, the idea of a circular carbon economy is definitely something that could be the future.”

Some, like Heyne, are hopeful, while others see ‘flying on air’ as mere hype. Last year, when a company in Europe announced they were working on a way to capture CO2 from the air to power future airplanes, critics pointed out the fuel produced each day would only allow for five minutes of flying.

Such tiny yields are not a solution to the climate crisis, and some environmentalists argue our only feasible option is to fly less. Especially because the reality of a circular carbon economy is still far off and the crisis of climate change is already upon us.

In the end, it all depends on how quickly we can scale up this promising technology, and the fact is, it might not happen fast enough.

Engineers want to ultimately hook up their new system to established carbon emitters, such as coal-burning power plants, and that would, of course, require continued fossil fuel production. It’s also really expensive, and might not be appealing to businesses even if it did work. 

Still, with climate change accelerating and aviation only set to increase in coming years, the team of engineers argue CO2 conversion and utilisation as “an integral and important part of greenhouse gas control and sustainable development.”

Other sustainable biofuels which rely on plants require vast amounts of cropland and don’t tackle our emissions at the same time.

“This, then, is the vision for the route to achieving net-zero carbon emissions from aviation,” they conclude, “a fulcrum of a future global zero-carbon aviation sector.”

We shall see.

The study was published in Nature Communications.

#Tech

[deniscollins]

‘Is Exxon a Survivor?’ The Oil Giant Is at a Crossroads.

Exxon, for decades one of the most profitable and valuable American businesses, lost $2.4 billion in the first nine months of the year, and its share price is down about 35 percent this year. In August, Exxon was tossed out of the Dow Jones industrial average, replaced by Salesforce, a software company. If you were an Exxon executive, would you spend (1) more, (2) the same, or (3) less on oil exploration and production? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Over the last 135 years, Exxon Mobil has survived hostile governments, ill-fated investments and the catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill. Through it all, the oil company made bundles of money.

But suddenly Exxon is slipping badly, its long latent vulnerabilities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic and technological shifts that promise to transform the energy world because of growing concerns about climate change.

The company, for decades one of the most profitable and valuable American businesses, lost $2.4 billion in the first nine months of the year, and its share price is down about 35 percent this year. In August, Exxon was tossed out of the Dow Jones industrial average, replaced by Salesforce, a software company. The change symbolized the passing of the baton from Big Oil to an increasingly dominant technology industry.

“Is Exxon a survivor?” asked Jennifer Rowland, an energy analyst at Edward Jones. “Of course they are, with great global assets, great people, great technical know-how. But the question really is, can they thrive? There is a lot of skepticism about that right now.”

Exxon is under growing pressure from investors. D.E. Shaw, a longtime shareholder that recently increased its stake in Exxon, is demanding that the company cut costs and improve its environmental record, according to a person briefed on the matter. Another activist investor, Engine No. 1, is pushing for similar changes in an effort backed by the California State Teachers Retirement System and the Church of England. And on Wednesday, the New York State comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said the state’s $226 billion pension fund would sell shares in oil and gas companies that did not move fast enough to reduce emissions.

Of course, every oil company is struggling with the collapse in energy demand this year and as world leaders, including President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., pledge to address climate change. In addition, many utilities, automakers and other businesses have pledged to greatly reduce or eliminate the use of fossil fuels, the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and have embraced wind and solar power and electric vehicles.

European companies like Royal Dutch Shell and BP have already begun to pivot away from fossil fuels. But Exxon, like most American oil companies, has doubled down on its commitment to oil and gas and is making relatively small investments in technologies that could help slow down climate change.

As recently as last month, Exxon reaffirmed it plans to increase fossil fuel production, though at a slower pace. The company is investing billions of dollars to produce oil and gas in the Permian Basin, which straddles Texas and New Mexico, and in offshore fields in Guyana, Brazil and Mozambique.

Exxon committed to its strategy even as it acknowledged that one of its previous big bets did not go well. Exxon said it would write down the value of its natural gas assets, most of which it bought around 2010, by up to $20 billion. The company is also laying off about 14,000 workers, or 15 percent of its total, over the next year or so as it seeks to cut costs and protect a dividend that it had increased every year for nearly four decades until this year.

But if this crisis is an existential threat, there has been no acknowledgment from Exxon’s executive suite, still known in the company as the “God Pod.”

“Despite the current volatility and near-term uncertainty, the long-term fundamentals that drive our business remain strong and unchanged,” Darren W. Woods, the company’s chairman and chief executive since 2017, said at a recent shareholders meeting.

Exxon is known in the oil world as an insular company with a rigid culture that slows adoptive, pivotal change. It has been that way since John D. Rockefeller founded the company in the late 19th century as Standard Oil, a monopoly later broken up by the government.

An accountant by training, Rockefeller instilled a deep commitment to number crunching that remains in the company’s DNA. Exxon is primarily run by engineers who generally work their way up to senior roles. Its executives project determination in their ability to navigate every imaginable hurdle like OPEC oil embargoes, war and sanctions. Such confidence is perhaps necessary to run a company that does business in dangerous or inhospitable places.

As a trained electrical engineer and 28-year company veteran, Mr. Woods speaks with the same cool self-assurance as his more famous predecessors. But he has kept a lower profile than Lee R. Raymond, who dismissed concerns about climate change in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Rex W. Tillerson, whose international wheeling and dealing between 2006 and 2016 helped him become President Trump’s first secretary of state.

While Mr. Raymond and Mr. Tillerson were dominant figures in the industry, they left Mr. Woods with many problems that were at least partly obscured by higher oil and gas prices.

Mr. Raymond’s public skepticism of climate change damaged the company’s reputation. Mr. Tillerson was slow to take advantage of shale drilling, which lifted the American oil industry. His foray into the former Soviet Union and Iraq proved to be expensive failures. When he bought XTO a decade ago for over $30 billion to acquire fracking expertise and prized natural gas fields, gas prices were at their peak. As the commodity price declined in the years since, the company lost money and wrote off much of the investment last month.

“Darren Woods has inherited a company that has made huge bets in recent years that were not successful,” said Fadel Gheit, a retired Wall Street analyst who was an engineer in research and development at Mobil before its merger with Exxon in 1999.

“Exxon Mobil is like a big cruise ship,” he added. “You can’t change course overnight. They can weather the storm but not go far. They will have to transform to stay relevant.”

Mr. Raymond declined to comment. Mr. Tillerson did not respond to a request for comment. Exxon responded to questions mainly by referring to previous public statements by Mr. Woods and the company.

Casey Norton, a company spokesman, said the acquisition of XTO had “brought people and technology in addition to potential resources” that helped the company be successful in shale fields in the Permian Basin.

In the first few years on the job, Mr. Woods followed the broad strategy set by Mr. Tillerson by borrowing and investing heavily to expand production. The pandemic forced Mr. Woods to change direction. The company now plans to spend one-third less on exploration and production through 2025 than it had originally planned.

Yet the changes Exxon is making, while big in absolute terms, seem like tinkering compared with what European oil companies are doing. BP has announced that it will increase investments in low-emission businesses tenfold over the next decade, to $5 billion a year, while shrinking oil and gas production by 40 percent. Royal Dutch Shell, Total of France and other European companies are making similar moves at varying speeds.

The only major American oil company that comes close to setting European-style targets is Occidental Petroleum. It recently pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions from its operations by 2040 and from the use of its fuel by 2050. It is building a plant in Texas to capture carbon dioxide from the air and use it to push crude oil out of the ground while leaving the greenhouse gas underground for perpetuity.

“We’ve moved from the shale era to the energy transition era, so there is a greater divergence of strategies among the companies, the widest it’s ever been in modern times,” said Daniel Yergin, an energy historian and the author of “The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations.” “Now the big debate is will oil peak in the 2020s or the 2030s or the 2050s?”

Exxon executives have said they recognize an energy transition is underway and necessary. But they have also asserted that it wouldn’t make sense for the company to get into the solar or wind energy business. Instead, the company is investing in breakthrough technologies. One such project involves using algae to produce fuel for trucks and airplanes. Exxon has been talking about that project for years but has yet to begin commercial production.

Exxon refineries might also someday become major producers of hydrogen, which many experts believe could play an important role in reducing emissions. The company is betting on carbon capture and sequestration. One project involves directing carbon emitted from industrial operations into a fuel cell that can generate power, reducing emissions while producing more power.

“Breakthroughs in these areas are critical to reducing emissions and would make a meaningful contribution to achieving the goals of the Paris agreement, which we support,” Mr. Woods said in a message to employees in October, referring to the 2016 global climate accord.

Energy experts said it was possible that Exxon could come up with new uses for carbon dioxide like strengthening concrete or making carbon fiber, which could replace steel and other materials.

“If Exxon and other major oil industry players crack those nuts, the entire discussion about hydrocarbons changes,” said Kenneth B. Medlock III, a senior director at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. “That kind of change is slow until it’s not. Think about wind and solar, which were slow until they weren’t.”

A big increase in oil and gas prices could also allay some of the concerns about the company, at least temporarily. In recent weeks, as oil prices have climbed on optimism about a coronavirus vaccine, so has Exxon’s stock.

Vijay Swarup, Exxon’s vice president for research and development, said in a recent interview that the company understood it needed to lower emissions and was developing better fuels, lubricants and plastics.

“As we are developing that pathway to get there, we can’t stop providing affordable, scalable energy,” Mr. Swarup said.

But John Browne, a former BP chief executive, said it was not clear that Exxon and the other big American companies would transform their businesses adequately for a low-carbon future.

“They may decide just to carry on and harvest and say, ‘Let’s see what happens in the long run,’” he said. “That’s quite a risky strategy nowadays.”

[electricbike17-blog]

Precisely what is an Electric Bike and How Can it work?

An electric bike is for just about all intents and purposes a standard everyday bicycle that has been designed with an electric motor to assist inside propulsion. These motors are usually, limited by Federal Law, to be able to 750 watts of electrical power and 20 miles each hour top speed.

Most electric power bikes are built to meet that will specification but some do go over them. Electric bicycles may be built from kits for about $500 to $800 us dollars or purchased new to get between $400 to $3500 dollars. As with any product and even a vehicle, you usually get what you pay for. Power bicycles are powered by the rechargeable battery(s), and the regular range is around 20 a long way. The range can vary greatly according to the weight of the bike as well as rider, wheel size, design of riding and terrain. These come in a wide variety of styles and sizes from tiny electric folding bikes together with 16 and 20-inch added wheels for commuters and house dwellers to 28 inch and also 700c sizes. Electric motorcycles require no licenses as well as insurance to operate but many declares do have age limitations. fat tire electric bike

The most frequent type of motor used in electrical bikes is a hub electric motor. These can be used on both the front or rear small wheels and do not require chains, devices or gears. Essentially the engine is the hub of the tire and contains two concentric wedding rings of opposing electromagnets. While power from the battery will be applied to the motor typically the opposing magnetic force will cause the wheel to spin and rewrite. This type of motor is almost entirely silent and requires no upkeep. The higher the wattage on the motor, the more power it gives you. One caveat however. There is not any standard for measuring wattage. Many marketers of these products make use of their peak output quantities as opposed to the operating output statistics. A motor rated from 1000 watts peak might be a 500-watt motor in its common operating output. Be sure to learn which. Only standard functioning output is truly comparable.

Electric batteries are also very important in regards to the products. The most common battery sealed prospect acid (SLA) is the most inexpensive and provides the highest amp several hours (ah). However , SLA power packs weigh three times what a lithium battery does and previous less than a third as long. Any Lithium LiFePO4 battery is one of expensive battery and has reduced ah, but is by far often the lightest weight and lengthiest lasting. You would have to obtain, install, and dispose of 10 12volt SLA batteries prior to deciding to come close to the life span of 1 48 volt LiFePO4 battery power. Nickel cadmium and other battery power fall somewhere in between. A light-weight lithium battery usually 35mm slides out of the battery rack with regard to easy recharge indoors as opposed to having to locate an outlet through which to plug the whole motorcycle. Lithium batteries are probably the most ecologically friendly of all the batteries obtainable.

The electric bikes created from kits are quite usually your best bet in terms of price and satisfaction. Most of the bicycles that people previously own are superior equipment to many of those that have been developed as electric bikes. If you occur to decide on your kit carefully you will enjoy a more powerful motor, far better battery, and many other features which you can not find on a factory constructed bike and your converted motorbike will often weigh less. An excellent kit should have the motor unit pre built into a controls (a front wheel equipment is much easier to install), twin brake motor cutoff, any twist or thumb accelerator, a motor controller, cabling harness, and a battery increasing rack with a lock device.

A really good kit will also have got wiring diagrams, mounting components, wire ties and complete guidelines. Very expensive factory built electric powered bicycles tend to look similar to motorcycles, are very heavy along with hard to pedal but move no faster or a greater distance than an inexpensive bike or even kit built bike. They certainly look cool though! Furthermore, you will want to purchase your set from someone who will be able to enable you to through the installation process inside the remote case that you have a matter or problem. If you are going to change your existing bicycle, ensure that it is good operating situation and if you are going to build a bicycle from a kit of five-hundred watts or more, use a cycle with a steel front pay. Very powerful front wheel motor can pull free from or perhaps damage aluminum and postponement, interruption forks. You do not require a lots of gearing in an electric bi-cycle unless you are going to use it as being a mountain bike. For avenue bikes, six or more effective gears are more than enough. If you choose to buy a factory developed bike, find one you capable of completely control, feel comfortable driving and that has all of the alternatives you are looking for.

With an electric motorcycle you can pedal independently with the motor, pedal with the generator for extended range in addition to exercise or use electric power alone. They are almost noiseless, require no fuel as well as tune ups, give off simply no emissions and can very often end up being ridden where other mechanized vehicles are prohibited. You could make an electric bike anywhere an everyday bike is allowed which includes on many subway and also bus systems, bike tracks, and bicycle lanes. Electric power bicycles can be stored in the house, something that cannot be done with water fueled vehicles.

Anyone that could ride a bicycle can certainly ride an electric bike along with anyone with basic tool expertise can install an electric motorbike conversion kit. For those who have difficulty with two wheeled bicycles, you can find adult electric tricycles in addition to conversion kits for grownup tricycles as well. These work the same way and can help supply excellent transportation options for older people and handicapped.

Electric mountain bikes are genuine green vehicles. They can provide very genuine alternatives to the automobile regarding short range use which help relieve traffic congestion, air pollution, reliance upon imported fossil fuels and give that you simply little exercise while practicing your daily life. It won't solve our problems but it's a practical first step.

References Bike

[classicalliberalleague]

What are your opinions on climate change?

What are your opinions on climate change?

Well that’s broad.  My general feeling is that both extremes are idiotic.

So are basically three questions dealing with climate change:

What causes it?  How bad will it get?  How to fix it.

So let’s take them one at a time.

What causes it?

If you ask one set of extremists then all climate change since the birth of homo- errectus is caused by man.  And on the other side it’s completely a natural thing.

In reality it’s more that yes nature has gone up and down over time, and yes the Medieval Warming Period went up faster than our current 150 year warming (http://www.co2science.org/articles/V16/N50/EDIT.php), and there are some warming patterns on other planets that mirror our own suggesting the sun’s influence (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/31/mars-also-undergoing-climate-change-ice-age-retrea/) ...but there is clearly some change caused by human interaction as when you pave a valley with concrete you’re going to have the local environment a lot hotter than it would otherwise be because concrete and asphalt trap in heat.  Now I think that the discussion about green house gases is overblown, as the extremists overblow everything, but you can’t push that much of something in the atmosphere and not expect some effect.  

In reality humans probably only cause like 30%-60% of the warming...probably more to the 30% side and it’s more on the local side than the global.  But that is a guess based more on history than modern science because right now the only people putting money in research are the ones who want to prove on extreme or the other, the truth be damned.  And before you critique that please remember that there have been studies in other fields like pharmaceutical research that find that when pharmaceutical companies pay for studies of their drugs they get studies back that say their drugs are wonderful more often than studies that are no funded by the pharmaceutical EVEN WHEN HE RESEARCHERS DON’T KNOW WHO IS PUTTING UP THE MONEY (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC156458/).  Now if money has that kind of an effect in a field where correlation and causation can be so clearly established...how much does it matter in a field where no actual experiments can be run?  A rational person would say a lot. 

(Also keep in mind that there is such a lack of predicted effects like rising oceans that you have people trying to come up with incredible bullshit like the melted water is putting more pressure on the crust that it’s causing the land to rise which is why we haven’t seen the oceans rise.  (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2017GL075419)Yes scientists are arguing that a pound of gram in liquid form weighs more than a gram of water in ice form.  I wonder why I can’ trust climate scientists.)

How bad will it get?

The ice caps will not completely melt.  The borders of nations in relation to the sea are not going be radically different, all the major cities will not be covered by the ocean.  Even if the seas did rise that much the Netherlands and New Orleans have long since shown how to push back sea from sinking land, oceans rising a few millimeters a year is not the end of the world.  It also ignores that areas of Asia and North America previously unhibitable due to cold will become productive food sources, (https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-could-make-siberia-an-attractive-place-to-live) and in all likelihood will be a far greater gain than the land which will become unusable and open for agriculture.

Added to the fact that Middle East nations are putting massive amount of money into finding out how to make it rain in the desert and/or desalinization programs we are talking about just insane amount of water being pumped out to the ocean in the coming years and possibly putting a vast sum of clouds in the air which will have the effect of reflecting a large portion of solar radiation (and has been listed as a way to combat global warming). (https://www.esquireme.com/culture/features/how-the-uae-is-making-it-rain)

Further while dollar amounts of damage is increasing for natural disasters like hurricanes, it’s not because the storms are all that much worse than previous eras.  It’s because idiot keep building in swamps and flood plains knowing the government will bail them out.  So while there may be greater damage from natural disasters it’s not because the planet is going crazy.  

So the actual effects are not going to be all that bad.  We have already passed so many deadlines for doomsday that it should be readily apparent that while changes will occur it’s not going to Waterworld, The Day After Tomorrow, or any other equally scientifically challenged vision of environmental disaster to worry about.  

And finally, how do we fix it?

For this question let’s assume for a moment that my more rational assessment of how bad it’s going to get is overly optimistic.  Let’s say the chicken littles are actually right (despite the fact that they’ve been wrong time and time again over the last 40 years.)  So what do we do?

Well, the first thing we don’t do is work to lower carbon emissions through caps. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/43734692?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)  It just won’t work.  Every intelligent economist who has looked at this has said just trying to reduce carbon emissions isn’t going to be enough to undo the effects global warming alarmists say will occur.

Just won’t work.

What can we do.  Well we have to look for cost effective alternatives.

First thing to do, get rid of ethanol.  Outright outlaw that shit.  It takes something like 1.1 gallons of fuel to produce a gallon of ethanol fuel. (https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/10/26/ethanol-bad-science-and-bad-policy-13498)  It’s a goddamn net loss.  Plus it adds problems of over water use, top soil erosion, fertilizer run off which is bad environmentally...and our use of corn for stupid fuel and not food is driving up global food prices which leads to suffering and a lower cost of living.  There is absolute no reason for ethanol.  It damages the environment and ruins the quality of life the world over.  It’s not just inefficient it is down right harmful.  Outlaw it.  Don’t just stop subsidizing it.  Outlaw it or at least outlaw the use of it by the government.

This means building nuclear power plants.  (https://www.city-journal.org/html/why-us-needs-more-nuclear-power-12846.html)Get over your hysteria they are the safest and cleanest form of electricity.  Yes you don’t use a reactor for decades after it should have decommissioned (looking at you Japan) and you probably shouldn’t build them on fault lines (looking at you California) but otherwise safe, cheap, clean.  Build a lot of them.

The next thing you should do is if you really believe in global warming you should push to find ways to make vat grown beef and chicken cost effective. (https://www.new-harvest.org/environmental_impacts_of_cultured_meat) If, and it’s a big if, greenhouse gases are actually a problem then the methane from a cow’s digestive track is far worse than your car.  Vat grown beef will produce none of those gases.  It doesn’t have to be great quality, just enough that fast food can use it for burgers and tacos.  This would also solve problems caused by the fact that you have to grow a huge amount of food for those cows, and see the above discussion of having to grow more crops than you need to.

After that there are a few things.

Put more funding into things like Lockheed-Martin’s fusion reactor (https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2018/08/01/will-lockheed-martin-change-the-world-with-its-new-fusion-reactor/#6ae57bf44c49) or MIT’s Arc reactor (http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-newly-formed-company-launch-novel-approach-fusion-power-0309).     They have the potential to produce even cheaper clean energy and cheaper clean energy is what you want.

Solar technology is getting remarkably close to being economically efficient (https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2018/01/13/renewable-energy-cost-effective-fossil-fuels-2020/#23e6b1464ff2) and investment in that field at this point to find a way to make it cheaper than fossil fuel would not be wasted.

Battery technology needs to be improved.  It may still be a bridge too far for us at this present time in science, but if you get more efficient batteries you make electric cars a better buy (right now they’re actually pumping more green house gases into the atmosphere than their internal combustion counterparts due to the fact that energy has to be produced in likely a fossil fuel burning plant).

Get rid of zoning requirements and price controls in housing. (https://fee.org/articles/zoned-out/)  This will allow more people to live closer to cities which will reduce commute times and you should be able to figure out why that’s a good thing.  

Self driving cars need to supported with investment and laws that allow for their use.  (https://blueandgreentomorrow.com/environment/self-driving-cars-could-impact-environment/) Self-driving cars will reduce drive times, will be more fuel efficient, lower the number of cars on the road.

Support GMO’s.  Genetically modified plants can grow in places others cannot, they can provide greater yields and need fewer fertilizers.  They’re a good thing for the environment.

And when I say invest in...I mean from private sources.  Public money should not be involved in research.  Why? Because it never goes where it should but rather to who has the best lobbyists.  

The actual solutions to this problem are the same ones we should take even if there wasn’t a problem, i.e. moving forward rather than trying to take us backwards to prior levels of technology.  

[powersyncenergy4-blog]

Solar Panels

Solar Panels

A Solar panel is a system that's used to absorb energy from sunlight so as to create heat or oftentimes electricity. It's also known as a photovoltaic cell as it's made of several cells which are utilized to convert the light from sunlight into electricity. The only raw material for all these solar panels would be the sun. It's created in such a manner in which the cells face sunlight so as to allow maximum absorption of sunlight rays. The larger the energy from sunlight is, the greater the energy that's generated. Solar panels are utilized in several homesteads on earth on account of their many experts which are much more than disadvantages. A few of those pros are mentioned below.

Solar Panels

One very important benefit of Utilizing solar panels is they don't emit any gases which are typical in green homes.   This is essential because carbon emissions are harmful and preventing their emission aids in protecting our existing and future atmosphere. Being surroundings friendly is important because the government is continually coming up with strategies to restrain global warming and the usage of solar panels is a terrific way to begin. The solar panels consequently maintain a fresh atmosphere and they depart the atmosphere fresh. More importantly they assist in prevention of several cancer incidences. This is because a few goods from several sources of energy such as nuclear energy are proven to cause cancer because of initiation of mutations in cells.

For people using it.  When the setup was completed the energy is liberated because the panel doesn't need routine maintenance or gas to operate it.  It functions as long as you will find sun rays that's a regular thing in many regions of the planet. In a universe where equal distribution of funds is always being hunted, this is essential since each and everybody has equal rights in regards to utilize solar power.  This is a great method to keep equality when compared with electricity from fossil fuel that low income homesteads don't manage oftentimes.

There's also the Benefit because, the usage of solar panels permit the decentralization of electricity. This is essential as it's quite affordable. This is principally because when electricity isn't decentralized, it needs to be shared with all and is as a consequence transported to a lot of locations. With this phenomenon, there are rather many costs which are incurred.  These prices are all integrated in the energy bills of people since the government doesn't provide for the expenses. It's therefore more valuable to utilize solar panels as a rescue strategy and also to create a feeling of equity because those in power have a tendency to make the most and utilize their ranks to embezzle funds. This isn't fair on the taxpayers' part. This is due to the fact that nearly all of them fight to make ends meet.

A solar panel may be Functioned off grid.  Off grid means the home isn't on the nation's electricity grid. This has the benefit of reduced cost since installation might be rather costly for people living in remote regions. These folks have their electricity lines disconnected in many cases because of the simple fact it is occasionally cheaper for many. Solar panels offer you a solution to this because they don't demand as much to be set up. But, those living in cities may also utilize the off-grid technique. An additional benefit of the is that there aren't any rules regulating whether one needs to run off- grid or on-grid in regards to utilize solar panels. This is a problem when using fossil fuel generated power.

Solar panels create job opportunities. This is of fantastic significance because there's a really large rate of unemployment in the world these days. These jobs have been come around in the shape of, production of their solar panels, study about additional developments, maintenance, growth and ethnic integration. Together with the continuing presence of sunlight, these tasks are ensured because there's continuing modification and improvements of the gadget. Jobs like installation and maintenance do not take a long-term coaching and are consequently more valuable for people who don't have lots of abilities and are jobless.

Use of Solar Power is secure from cost   The simple fact that there aren't any raw materials which are completely controlled by monopolies guarantees there is not any manipulation of costs as is the case with fossil fuels. With fossil fuels, the costs can grow as large as the monopolizing forces controlling them desire. There's less competitiveness using solar panels as there's not any fight over such matters as oil fields and other raw materials. Even though the government has begun addressing the dilemma of solar panels, there's very little influence they could have in cost manipulation. This is because nobody controls the key raw material.

There Can also be less ecological destruction with the usage of a solar panel. That is because there aren't any instances of extraction or mining of raw materials that finally cause destruction of forests and water catchment areas. By means of solar panels, there's less of the and consequently you will find stable rainfalls that greatly increase manufacturing and thus the national income of each country. Many states face problems of famine because of destruction of woods to acquire gas.

There's an Benefit of reliability in utilizing solar panels. This is because there's ability to forecast the amount of sunlight to anticipate each and every day. Hence one is has assurance of energy. The devices can also be manufactured in this manner they can absorb sunlight rays even if there a few clouds and sunlight rays aren't so powerful. The solar power is renewable. It may therefore be used on and off without becoming depleted. Though solar energy can't be used at nighttime, it functions full force throughout the day that is of fantastic importance. The power can also be saved in kind of batteries for use at nighttime.

Everyone enjoys some  This is something that you get when you utilize solar panels. This is as they're quite silent.  This is a great thing as it makes the surroundings calm when compared with water and wind generated electricity supplies that have moveable parts which are rather loud and destruct the serenity. Solar panels are so great to be used for individuals living in home where hoses are near one another. This is because of quiet, peace is preserved between the neighbors.

When installing solar panels, then There's no Large scale installation needed. They therefore require hardly any room to install. This is essential if it comes to rapidly growing areas and cities. The setup will mainly involve one cell to constantly generate energy. Hence a homestead demands one mobile. There's therefore no congestion along with a continuing supply to the high demand of electricity. This preserves a fantastic picture in a community because crowding may make the area less appealing which may prevent individuals from moving into the area since everybody would like to live someplace they believe beautiful, because of this, use of solar panels doesn't interfere with property sales.

Solar panels are lasting. This  This consequently reduces the prospect of being destructed. It's likely to utilize a solar panel for a lengthy time period without needing to buy another, research estimate it may last for over ten decades. This type of unit is valuable as it reduces the strain which comes about when a machine stops operating because something became worn or lose out. There's also decreased maintenance cost as it is not as likely to wear. This makes the machine very simple to manage for a individual with very little skills in managing a solar panel.

Many companies who  Purchase solar power get the benefit of greater gains. This is only because they cut down costs incurred in power and the remaining gains are ordinarily used to enlarge the company. This is extremely advantageous. Statistics demonstrate that the businesses using solar panels have higher returns in contrast to those who utilize other sources of electricity. This could possibly be due to how power can be quite costly and might make these firms not manage allot of resources. This is particularly evident in new or small businesses. There's also an advantage which customers get when they receive services from a business which utilizes clean energy. This is the simple fact which they can access government incentives which are made available to those businesses.

The use of  That is because in many areas of the planet, the taxes which are charged are approximately thirty percent less compared to utilizing different resources of energy. Considering all the taxes that one needs to cover each and every item bought, this is a fantastic chance to decrease spending taxes. As there's absolutely no monthly invoice when utilizing a solar panel, it gets it tax free. When utilizing fossil fuel power, this is not any alternative since one must pay their power on a monthly basis that ordinarily is significantly taxed.

The dimensions of solar panel systems needed per meter to provide maximum Energy little. Whenever there is full sunlight, one can acquire about 1 million watts per meter. This is equal to approximately 2900-watt hours every day. However this is dependent upon the region where you're finds, the period of the year along with also the power where sunlight rays get to the solar panel. Because of this, there are occasions where one has got more energy in contrast to other people. No matter how the energy provides the desirable effect even at reduced intensity and is still quite trustworthy.

It's highly  That is because there are only a few instances of electrical shocks which are extremely common when using different sources of power.  This generates fewer incidences of crises. However, careful steps must be taken as directed by the individual that does the setup as there are cases where wires are left bare and may lead to shock when touched. This is uncommon once the wiring is completed properly. Care also needs to be taken because the roof might be continuously emitting electricity.

Solar panels are  For this Reason, they're not readily destructed, this can be important because the Device is put out to be able to absorb sunlight rays. The Fantastic thing About this is the fact that it may be employed by men and women who reside in locations where the Weather is down and up generally.

[nickgerlich]

Unplugged For Now

A little more than a century ago, when Henry Ford was selling cars as fast as he could make them (in black, of course), when auto trails were being built, and gas stations were still few and far between, early autoists had to attach filled jerry cans to their vehicles. You never knew when you might run low on fuel in the middle of nowhere. And while that may be pretty rare by today’s standards, it happened a lot back then, especially in the west.

It’s easy to see the parallels between the early internal combustion engine (ICE) autos and early adopters of EVs today. After all, if you can’t find a charge, you are in trouble. Worse yet, you can’t attach a jerry can filled with electricity.

Which helps explain, in part, America’s reluctance to adopt EVs in large measure. It’s a problem the rest of the world has moved beyond, especially in Europe and China. With less than five--percent of current US automobile sales in the EV category, we clearly have a long way to go.

Our fears and concerns revolve around three primary factors: (a) Range anxiety, which is our worry about how far we can actually go on a full charge; (b) price, with EVs still costing considerably more than ICE cars; and, (c) charging time, with a minimum of 60-75 minutes for a supercharge.

As much as I applaud Cracker Barrel for installing Tesla superchargers at its restaurants across the country, I don’t want to eat there while my vehicle charges, and I sure don’t want to take a nap in their parking lot. The result has been huddled (especially in winter) EV owners sitting in parking lots, grabbing a few Zzzzzs while their car refuels. There’s no stopping at Buc-ee’s or Flying J for a quick pit stop.

But those concerns are really only the tip of the iceberg, because there are also a lot of people who simply do not understand the benefits of going electric. Furthermore, there is misunderstanding of the facts, and even disinformation being spread by naysayers.

I must come clean first: I do not presently own an EV, but I would consider one if it were available in the configuration I need for my travels. That means a minivan that can go long distances without a charge. I’ll wait, and when that happens, I’ll do it.

It’s the disinformation and misunderstandings, though, that present opportunities for marketers. Critics are quick to pounce on the fact that EVs and their batteries are all produced with precious metals, and leave behind a carbon footprint in the process. Furthermore, a lot of the electricity produced to fuel these cars was done with fossil fuels. Only if EVs are charged from non-fossil-fuel sources can we say they run the road guilt-free. Finally, there’s the matter of their batteries needing to be replaced about every ten years, even though that’s a far cry better than the batteries we put in our ICE cars.

But this is where their arguments break down. No one ever said that EVs were perfect. They’re just better than the alternative. It’s really little different from the anti-vaxxers howling their disapprovals during the COVID era. No one said the vaccines were perfect; they’re just better than doing nothing at all.

And this is where better marketing is needed, whether on social media or via traditional channels. The marketplace simply does not know or understand how all this works. Lastly, they need to do a better job showing us how EVs can fit into the American lifestyle. Need a second vehicle for around-town travel? An EV is perfect by default. And when they do get many more charging stations and batteries that can propel us for 500 miles or more, they need to tout this with horns blaring.

Because I’ll be in line to get one. If Henry Ford were alive today, he would be pushing these babies out the door just as fast and furiously as he did in the early-1900s. Even if they’re only available in black.

Dr “Charge It!“ Gerlich

Audio Blog

[battrixx]

An Electrifying Move

The world is choking! The world is dying! Not some doomsday prophesy but a stark reality that may be less than a decade away.

At a high-level United Nations meeting on Climate and Sustainable Development, participants were warned that the world had only eleven years left to prevent irreversible damage from climate change. And this was in 2019!

Meanwhile, the clock has run down further.

The forum went on to warn that ours may be the very last generation that can prevent irreparable damage to the planet. Dither any longer, and we will cross the point of no-return.

The Covid pandemic has since over-run us, and studies have hinted at a possible ‘association between long-term exposure to harmful fine particulate matter and Covid-19 mortality.’ Even without Covid muddying the waters, the relationship between pollution and respiratory distress had long been established.

The time to act is now. And urgently!

The New Green Revolution

One could curse the darkness or one could light a single candle to dispel it. Battrixx preferred to do the latter, albeit in a pollution-free and far more scaled-up manner. In fact, the brand has for some time now been doing its bit for a pollution-free world. It produces green energy systems and solutions with advanced lithium-ion battery packs to spur India’s transition to green energy storage and electric transportation.

In layman’s language – and of interest to the layman – Battrixx manufactures battery packs for a range of e-vehicles. Namely, lithium-ion battery packs for e-bikes, e-two wheelers, e-rickshaws, e-cars, e-buses… and even for specialized e-vehicles like golf carts, forklifts and marine vehicles.

In addition, Battrixx also has Energy Storage Systems for the residential and telecom sectors, amongst others. Battrixx is doing its bit to usher in a different kind of green revolution!

 Electric Vehicles: A Critical Reality

But if we are to save the world, the first thing to change is the way we move. Conventional transportation depends too heavily on fossil fuels which, besides severely depleting the earth’s finite resources, are turning our cities and towns into gas chambers. Vehicular emission is likely the biggest contributor to air pollution. And the surest way to reduce this drastically is by switching to electric vehicles.

Electric vehicles aren’t even a futuristic concept. They are already saving lives today. Saving lives by helping cut lethal carbon emissions. According to WHO, air pollution kills some seven million people every year. Electric vehicles aren’t simply a fancy, exotic concept, but fast becoming a critical reality.

Electric vehicles come in a wide variety of formats. Every gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing vehicle can be replaced by its green e-counterpart. Already concerned cities around the world are introducing e-buses, while e-cars and e-two wheelers are being spotted more often. Even the humble bicycle that really has a zero carbon footprint, can benefit from becoming an e-bike.

Of course, the first question that comes to concerned people’s minds is how does one charge such vehicles. Fact is, they can be charged at home, at work or at specially-set up public charging points, in much the same manner as one would refuel a petrol- or diesel-run vehicle at a fueling station. Maybe we still have a long way to go before charging points become commonplace – but until such a time there is the solution of hybrid vehicles that can run alternatively on gas or electricity.

 E-xciting Times Ahead

Nevertheless, Battrixx is showing the way with its range of lithium-ion batteries for various e-vehicles. Battrixx lithium-ion battery packs come fully configured with lithium-ion cells specifically chosen for the application after extensive testing. The integrated BMS ensures safe operation and cell balancing to maximise range and battery life, and protect the battery from unsafe operating conditions. They have been calibrated for performance optimization on Indian roads and under Indian climatic conditions.

As much as we live in scary times, we equally live in exciting times! Human inventiveness and it’s never-say-die spirit has always found solutions to even the most daunting problems. Although everything may seem bleak, hope and optimism will always shine through. Every dark cloud comes with a silver lining. Climate change and all its attendant issues may unwittingly be forcing humanity to accelerate the solution to a problem that may have been spiraling out of hand for at least half a century.

The concept of electric vehicles is an e-revolution simply waiting to happen.

[patriotsnet]

What Do Republicans Believe About Climate Change

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-do-republicans-believe-about-climate-change/

What Do Republicans Believe About Climate Change

Senator John Cornyn Republican Of Texas

Why Do Republicans Deny Climate Change Science?

Recently re-elected as Senate Republican whip

Cornyns view on a possible human role in climate change is insinuated for a Republican and doubly so for a Republican from oil country. Which is adamantly not to say he favors emissions regulations.

I am not one that denies that human beings have an impact on the environment, Cornyn said in a phone call with Texas reporters in May. But I am sure not willing to put the federal government in charge of trying to micromanage the environment for the United States of America, nor for us to drive up the price of energy for people on fixed income, like seniors and people of modest means, by putting restrictions in place that other nations are not.

New Caucus New Opportunity

Even broaching the topic with some political conservatives can be challenging, said U.S. Rep. John Curtis, a Republican from Utah.

He compared the reflexive reaction many conservatives have when it comes to climate change to how Democrats feel when they hear about former President Donald Trumps U.S.-Mexico border wall.

Their chest tightens, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

I think climate has been like that for Republicans, right? Just the word climate has all these agendas, the Green New Deal and Al Gore kind of associated with it, and I think thats turned them off.

Last week, Curtis launched the Conservative Climate Caucus – a group in Congress that already boasts a roster of more than 50 Republicans to try to educate colleagues and brainstorm ideas to deal with climate change.

Curtis said he envisions field trips to look at electric vehicle manufacturing or forest fire damage, a big worry in the western United States right now.

But hes not keen on virtually eliminating use of fossil fuels – something scientists say is crucial to limiting dangerous warming – instead preferring a switch to cleaner ones.

I think theres a role for fossil fuels, he said. If were able to export U.S. natural gas to China and it displaced coal, that would have dramatic impacts on worldwide carbon emissions.

Curtis acknowledged that among a certain set of conservative voters, winning heart and minds on climate change will take much more work.

Figure 9 Party Breakdown Of Opinions On Mitigation Policies On Which The Majorities Of Democrats And Of Republicans Disagree

On the other policies included in the survey, majorities of Democrats and of Republicans do not agree. Minorities of Republicans and majorities of Democrats favor carbon pricing policies and increased gasoline taxes. In general, majorities of Democrats and minorities of Republicans believe that federal stimulus packages should include provisions to invest in the development of new technologies and in maintenance to reduce future emissions.

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Same Problem Different Solution

Young conservatives like Smith and Diaz say the existence of climate change isnt up for debate.;Democrats proposed solutions to the climate;change;is where they begin to;diverge.;;

Republicans;say policies like the Green New Deal and the Biden Administrations climate plan are not effective or realistic methods to combat climate change.;

Theres a lot of enthusiasm to talk about it, Smith said. At the end of the day its really performative and it is pointless if the solutions theyre offering arent viable. They need to be ensuring that the United States makes the transition away from fossil fuels in a way that is fiscally viable for the American people.;

In line with Bidens climate plan, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a moderate Democrat,;signed an executive order in November 2020 creating the Climate Initiatives Task Force, aimed at making the state carbon neutral by 2050. But Smith called the task force;money down the;drain. He said the task force is funding research already conducted by other administrations and a;performative action.;

Its very much the case of John Bel kicking the can down the road. The task force is saying theyre going to show us the results in five years, Smith said. But itll be too late at that point.;

The House GOP recently;formed;a Republican-led group on climate change.;;

You think the guys driving a Lamborghini are getting hurt? he;said. Noits the person taking the bus.;

Senator Roy Blunt Republican Of Missouri

Recently re-elected as vice-chairman of the Senate Republican conference

Blunt has acknowledged that climate change exists and said we have a social responsibility to help the environment. He also has said, however, that the human role in climate change is unclear. understands that any energy policy aimed at reducing greenhouse gases should be carefully considered in the context of Americas already fragile economy, a spokesman for Blunt told the Springfield News-Leader in 2011. The worst outcome is that we pass policies so onerous that we drive jobs overseas to countries where they dont care as much about what comes out of their smokestacks as we do.

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Why Republicans Still Dont Care About Climate Change

Mary Nichols has been part of the struggle to prevent catastrophic climate change for about as long as anyone in American life. For years, shes directed Californias pathbreaking efforts to reduce carbon emissions as the chair of the California Air Resources Boarda position she held first in the 1970s before taking it up again in 2007. Nichols has also served at the federal level, working as the chief regulator for air pollution at the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. And yet even Nichols has never seen anything that crystallizes the dangers of climate change more clearly than the historic outbreak of wildfires scorching California and other western states this year.

Yes, absolutely, she told me earlier this week, when I asked her whether this years fires are the most tangible danger to California that shes seen from climate change. Its not suddenly going to reverse itself to years when theres no fire season, or its not going to happen until October. The changes are going to be real, and they are going to be long-lasting.

What we have now is the absolute environmental demonstration or evidence of just how dramatic the impact of climate change is going to be. This is not going to stop, Browner told me. There is going to be something next year, and the year after, if we dont get on it.

Fundamental Beliefs And Attitudes

For 14 out of 21 survey questions posed to American respondents about fundamental beliefs and attitudes regarding global warming, majorities of Democrats and Republicans alike hold green opinions in 2020.

For example, 94% of Democrats believe global warming has been happening, as do 67% of Republicans. 94% of Democrats and 56% of Republicans think warming will continue in the future if nothing is done to address it. 94% of Democrats and 69% of Republicans believe that if warming has been happening, human actions have been responsible for causing it.

Majorities of Democrats and of Republicans also agree about the likely effects of global warming98% of Democrats and 54% of Republicans believe global warming will be a very or somewhat serious problem for the US if nothing is done to address it. Some 97% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans believe that global warming will be a very or somewhat serious problem for the world if nothing is done to address it.

However, the partisans diverge on whether specific temperature changes have been or will be bad. Whereas 88% of Democrats believe that the warming that has happened over the past 100 years was bad, only 40% of Republicans believe that. And whereas 84% of Democrats believe that a 5-degree Fahrenheit increase in world temperature over the next 75 years would be bad, only 50% of Republicans agree.

Read Also: How Many Republicans Are Registered In The Us

Only 25 Per Cent Of Republicans Believe Climate Change Is A Very Serious Problem

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A majority of Republicans now admit that climate change does exist, according to a new poll.

The Monmouth University survey revealing a growing number of Americans acknowledge climate change is happening, and that most of them believe its becoming an issue.

Almost two-thirds of Republicans, 64 per cent, believe global warming exists. That number has increased from 49 per cent three years ago.

Climate Change Critics Lack A Consistent Message

Has Marco Rubio flip-flopped on climate change?

Those who have criticized climate change are all over the place. You have those who say were going through global cooling, or that theres nothing going on different with the weather at all, or that any changes occurring are natural, not human-made, or its the fault of other countries.

With such an inconsistent message, its no wonder that the AP-NORC poll showed only nine percent of Americans are climate deniers. While 19 percent say they are unsure, the remaining 70+ percent not only recognize the climate is changing, but most of them also trust the science that says human activity is contributing greatly to this. If climate change becomes an election issue in 2020, it doesnt look so good for the GOP and Donald Trump.

Read Also: What Year Did The Democrats And Republicans Switch

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Its All In A Name: Global Warming Versus Climate Change

More people believe in climate change than in global warming, according to a University of Michigan study published in Public Opinion Quarterly. Wording matters, says Jonathon Schuldt, a Ph.D. candidate in the U-M Department of Psychology who co-authored the study with ISR researchers Sara Konrath and Norbert Schwarz.

For the research, Schuldt, Konrath and Schwarz conducted a question wording experiment in the American Life Panel, an online survey conducted by RAND, with a national sample of 2,267 U.S. adults. Participants were asked to report their level of certainty about whether global climate change is a serious problem.

The good news is that Americans may not be as polarized on the issue as previously thought. The extent of the partisan divide on this issue depends heavily on question wording, says Schwarz.. When the issue is framed as global warming, the partisan divide is nearly 42 percentage points. But when the frame is climate change, the partisan divide drops to about 26 percentage points.

Congressman John Boehner Republican Of Ohio

Speaker of the House

Boehner reliably pleads ignorance to punt on climate change. Listen, Im not qualified to debate the science over climate change, Boehner said in May. But I am astute enough to understand that every proposal that has come out of this administration to deal with climate change involves hurting our economy and killing American jobs. That cant be the prescription for dealing with changes in our climate.

Boehner called the US-China deal the latest example of the presidents crusade against affordable, reliable energy that is already hurting jobs and squeezing middle-class families.

Also Check: How Many Registered Republicans In Texas

Figure 10 Party Breakdown Of Opinions On Federal Stimulus Policies On Which The Majorities Of Democrats And Of Republicans Disagree

Majorities of Democrats and minorities of Republicans favor three policies put into place by President Obama that have been rolled back by President Trump: a mandate to power plants to cut carbon emissions from the electric sector by more than 30% relative to 2005 levels; a plan for the federal government to reduce its own emissions; and a mandate to increase fuel efficiency standards of all new cars and trucks made in the United States to get at least 55 miles per gallon by 2025.

Climate Deniers In The 117th Congress

According to new analysis from the Center for American Progress, there are still 139 elected officials in the 117th Congress, including 109 representatives and 30 senators, who refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change. All 139 of these climate-denying elected officials have made recent statements casting doubt on the clear, established scientific consensus that the world is warmingand that human activity is to blame. These same 139 climate-denying members have received more than $61 million in lifetime contributions from the coal, oil, and gas industries.

Read Also: Why Do Republicans Want To Get Rid Of The Epa

Democrats And Republicans Divided On Climate Change

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, speaks as Senator Ed Markey, a… Democrat from Massachusetts, right, listens during a news conference announcing Green New Deal legislation in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Feb. 7, 2019. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

How serious an issue is climate change and what should be done about it? It is not surprising that Democrats and Republicans have different views about these questions as they do about so many issues today. But what is significant now is the depth of their differences on climate change and how much those differences have grown over time. In the April issue of AEIs Political Report, we examined partisans views in recent polls and trends.

When Quinnipiac University asked registered voters in December 2018 about the extreme weather events over the past few years, 90% of Democrats and 24% of Republicans said they were related to climate change. In a similar question asked by Economist/YouGov pollstersin March 2019, 76% of Democrats said the severity of recent weather events were the result of climate change, compared to 17% of Republicans. Seventy-four percent of Republicans said these kinds of events just happen from time to time.

And what about the Green New Deal? In the limited number of polls that we have at this point, most Americans are not very familiar with it. Among those who have an opinion, Democrats are more positive than Republicans.

Figure 11 Party Breakdown Of Opinions On Obama

Of the 24 policies, 17 are favored by a majority of Independents, including the 7 that are favored by majorities of Republicans and of Democrats.

Of the seven policies favored by a minority of Independents, two are also favored by minorities of Republicans and Democrats: tax breaks to encourage nuclear power plant construction and increased consumer taxes on electricity.

Four of the other five policies favored by a minority of Independents are: increasing consumer taxes on gasoline, helping companies prevent leaks and pollution from pipelines, spending stimulus money to advance manufacturing of all-electric cars, and installing charging stations for electric cars. For the proposed policy of helping companies make batteries that are smaller and last longer, 50% of Independents were in favor.

For two policies more Republicans than Democrats are in favor, by margins of 13 and 11 percentage points respectively.

Of the remaining 22 policies, more Democrats than Republicans are in favor by margins ranging from 18 to 58 percentage points and averaging 37 percentage points.

In sum, Democrats are generally more supportive of emissions reduction policies than Republicans, and Independents are generally in between those two groups. And although majorities of both Republicans and Democrats agree with one another about some policies, they disagreed on most.

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Young Republicans See Shift In Gop: ‘from Outright Denial To Climate Caucus’

Twenty-four-year-old Republican Danielle Butcher is watching with anticipation as GOP leaders move from outright denial to now having a climate caucus a move she sees as the first step in integrating climate action into formal party policy.

Butcher, the executive vice president of the American Conservation Coalition , spoke to The Hills Equilibrium on Tuesday, just a week after Rep. John Curtis ;launched the Conservative Climate Caucus and the same day that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy

The partys progress is huge, when you apply the context, Butcher said.; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;

This is an excellent first step, she continued. The first thing you have to do in achieving climate action is start talking about these problems.

To Butcher, integrating climate action into Republican politics speaks to her partys historic conservation core the GOP with a deep-seated, rural heritage, was responsible for creation of the National Park Service and the Environmental Protection Agency under former Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon.

I also see this as us reclaiming our heritage, she said.

But with two-thirds of Americans indicating that the government should do more on climate change a stance that Butcher observed is especially true among young people” she said Republicans need to be talking about these issues and involving the younger generation in the discussions.

The GOP has notoriously struggled with young people, she added.

Climate Insights : Partisan Divide

Meet the Conservatives Lobbying Lawmakers to Act on Climate Change

A breakdown of survey results by party shows that although the views of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents differ, they also converge in ways that may be unexpected.

Report byBo MacInnis and Jon A. Krosnick75 minute read Oct. 13, 2020

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Republicans Are Not A Monolith On Climate Change

Republican lawmakers have been attacking the Biden Administrations actions to address the climate crisis. However, not all Republicans align. The party is split and the recent mass power outages during a severe storm in Texas may drive a deeper wedge into the party as Republican lawmakers were seen as having failed their constituents. In Florida, the GOP recently released a $100M+ plan to address flooding caused by climate change, although nothing to halt or reverse climate change itself. Recent polls show the fissure among Republican voters is generational and there is a substantial chasm between Democrat and Republican voters when it comes to understanding the causes and risks of climate change.

No matter what direction the political winds blow, the planet continues on its dangerous path of warming as humans continue to burn fossil fuels at an alarming rate. Scientists are increasingly warning that to avoid catastrophic impacts from climate change, the worlds governments must implement massive reductions of warming emissions and begin a drawdown of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere over the decade ahead.

For a safe and healthy future for all, endorse the;Climate-Safe California Platform;to implement scalable solutions that can reverse the climate crisis.

To learn more about how to vote for the climate, or read below.

[robertdrozdzunit04]

Sustainability - Holiday Task

What Does Sustainability Mean to you?

Sustainability means about striking a balance between innovation and consumption. Being able to balance the different wants and needs of the environment and people. I believe that such a thing is completely achievable if everyone agrees to work on it, one person, group etc doesn’t help then its all for naught. Its not something im passionate about but its definitely something i think is important and I'm interested in.

United Nations Video

The beginning of the video shows us how the COVID pandemic has affect live for everyone around the world. It also showed us the inequality and cracks of the human civilization and the problems we have been ignoring have become blatantly obvious. It also shows how if human society goes into shutdown then nature and the environment thrive. Which tells me that we need to find a sustainable balance cause the planet will always find a way to return to life but we never will.The Next part of the Video, Discusses The Climate and the Planet, it shows the numerous videos of the Australian forest Fires, Locusts swarms in east Africa and the fast increasing temperature levels across the globe. It showing the consequences of our unsustainable actions of population and the damages it causing mainly due to the fossil fuel industry, which makes sense since most of our energy comes from coal burning smoke stacks, for example China’s electricity is 85% coal. adding to the fact that coal, oil and natural gas aren’t renewable resources and will run out someday it goes to show how much more we need to start investing in Green energy, especially places like Africa. Africa is a gold mine for the green energy industry, plenty of places where wind, solar and hydro electricity can be most effective, plus the excess power could fuel the economies of these African countries and help to kick start development, this is one way we can make sustainable development a reality. After these events the video shows a bunch of climate activists from all over the world. this shows us that climate change is a global problem and the only way we are going to fight it is with everyone taking a stance, cause not only is this a global issue but its an issue that will only get worse for future generations. Next the video outlines key objectives that have to be met. first is halving emissions by 2030 which can only really be done by switching to Green energy, another way is to also increasing Carbon taxes which would make stuff like fossil extraction and power plant building less profitable so companies would be less incline to go into those markets. Another Big Point is changing how we farm and produce and dispose of food since a lot of forests and green land is being repurposed for food production and there is many ways of combating this. A more radical solution would be to use GMOs we could engineer plants to output more food, be natural pesticides or be more nutritious in less quantiles. Next Chapter of the Video Describes the Poverty and Inequality of people around the world and what we need to do to tackle this huge inequality that we in the western world just don’t experience or will understand. it talks about how 10% of the human population is living in extreme poverty, which is just way too high of a number, its said that more people have access to a mobile phone then clean drinking water. this sort of inequality is mostly caused by the situation these people are born into, and cause of the inequality they don’t really have a way of getting out of poverty and are just stuck in a loop of barely surviving. the video also talks about the Hole in the Wall Experiment how a computer scientist in India 1999 made a hole in his office and attached a computer to it to let the children of the slum use it and in a day slums kids were teaching each other how to use the computer without any supervision. one story tells of the kids asking the scientists if the computer can be upgraded with a mouse and new processors, they didn’t even know English but they learned it to use the computer. It shows how computers can literally without any need of supervision or need of an educational instituted can help with educating these poorly developed areas, it shows how we can use these very new technology by human history standards to improve of lives of millions of people. Next Part of the Video Talks about Justice and Human Rights, more specifically the arrest and subsequent murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Officer, it talks about the rampant police brutality and the need for police reform. It also shows how the world came together to support the Black Lives matter movement and demanding that human rights should not be something that is demanded by should be as basic as water, food or breathing. Next the Video talks about Gender Inequality around the world, more specifically in the Work Place, Gender Pay and Cultural Norms. It also discusses the treatment of women in the Taliban controlled Afghanistan and other countries where women are treated like objects and not as human beings. It shows how basically half the human population lives in some kind of inequality just of how they were born, it makes you wonder if we actually do live in the “Free World” if half the population doesn’t really have the same rights.

1 example of sustainability in the Level Designer pathway

https://playing4theplanet.org/

Playing for the Planet is an Initative founded by developers and designers of numeros companies to quote “harness the power of their platforms to take action on the climate crisis” it was set up during the climate summit at the UN. It supports and commits to reducing the companies emissions and integrating “Green” events that result in planting millions of trees to reducing plastic. The Companies are mostly Mobile Game developers, which fits since most people that play video games are mobile causal gamers. but the actual big people leading this imitative are Ubisoft and Microsoft. Honestly i think its too little, like there is nothing forcing any of these companies to actually follow the initiative, it doesn’t really seemed unified either, its more like them saying “look we doing something” without really doing anything.

Your own Example to change the industry

my idea would be tackling the power consumption, since the job is entirely done with computers, servers and other electronics so i would think that targeting a more sustainable and efficient way of dealing with the amount of electricity used should be the goal. for example only getting electricity from Green Energy sources, like solar. even fitting offices with solar panels, or less radical ideas like, installing energy monitors or not leaving computers running constantly.

What we can do on this course

A very basic and cheap idea could be to put some plants around the classrooms. it would be a cheap way of reducing air pollution in an area and making the air healthy to breathe. Plants are also good for a persons mental health, it can brighten up an office and it helps in making people motivated and performing better at the tasks.

[dtechsavvy]

The Future Of Transportation

One of the things that we have seen wild developments in, in the past couple of decades is transportation. We are the species that a long time back invented the wheel. Today, we have accomplished simply mind blowing things because of that. Cars that could go 300 mph, trains that could annually take up to 1.7 billion passengers at speeds of up to 275 mph, and vehicles that could fly. With what we see the transportation industry doing today, it is pretty common to come up with questions like, "Is this it?", "Is this the future?". But really, let us take a look at what the future could be like.

Self Driving Cars

The name very well suggests what the car could do. The self driving car uses a lot of sensors to detect its surroundings and drive itself. This might seem like a magical thing when you hear about it, but our cars have already been doing some of the driving themselves. The anti-lock braking system or the ABS does the brake pumping which prevents the brakes from locking and leading to the car getting into an uncontrollable skid. Earlier, the driver had to do this and had a higher chances of error. A car could reduce engine power if it detects a crash and there is less time to prevent it through braking, and ultimately if the car detects that that the crash cannot be prevented, it prepares the airbags and tightens the seat belts. All that by itself. You can imagine how close we are to driver-less cars. In fact, they are already there, but there are some problems that the technology still faces. For instance, the maps have to be measured down to centimeters for the accurate functioning of the technology and also the cars cannot react at par with the speeds of sudden happenings, like a person appearing out of nowhere on a bike or a child running and accidentally ending up in front of the car. There is even a recorded case of a woman dying because of crashing with a self driving car, while she was walking her bike across the street. But hopefully, we can see these cars on the roads once the technology becomes even better and more robust.

More And More Electric Cars

Electric cars are cars run by electric motors and batteries instead of the common combustion engines and fossil fuels. On knowing this one can make out that these cars do not produce harmful emissions for the environment, which is exactly the thing. But why don't we still see more electric cars on the roads than the normal combustion engine cars. Electric cars were first produced in the 1880s and gained a lot of popularity back then. But the popularity fell with the production of cheaper gasoline and betterment in the combustion engine. But about a decade back from now, production of electric cars caught some speed due to increasing air pollution and awareness about it and other environmental issues because of emissions from vehicles. Also the technology of the electric cars was improved. But an electric car was still more expensive than most of the combustion engine cars. The Lithium ion batteries are the biggest expense for these cars. But in 2019, the costs of these batteries have drastically dropped from what they once used to be. Electric cars also faced the problem of catching fire really easily on crashing. Manufacturers worked and solved this problem too, they designed voltage systems to automatically stop in case of airbag deployment. 

The electric cars are heavier than the conventional cars because of the weight of their batteries. It is a good thing as it provides more stability while driving and also reduces the chances of the car rolling over. With the technology getting better by the day and the increasing environmental concerns, It is pretty safe to say that this technology is going to get cheaper and is going to make its way to more and more roads in the near future.

Maglev Trains and Hyperloop

Magnetic levitation, also known as Maglev, is the technique of suspending an object using magnets, with no support other than the magnetic field. This technique has been dominantly harnessed in trains. Magnetic levitation completely eliminates the train's contact with the platform over which it runs, what it does is it makes the ride frictionless and thus, faster, quieter and smoother. Though the train still faces drag due to air, limiting its speed to the highest recorded of up to 375 mph. But if the air is eliminated, which can be done by developing vacuum tunnels, the train could go up to 4000 mph, up to almost 10 times more. Yes, that is a jaw dropping speed. What it also means is that if an accident occurs somehow, things are going to be nasty.

Let us now talk about the famous Hyperloop. Hyperloop is nothing but Elon Musk's Maglev train in a vacuum tunnel, yep the insane speed thing. Though it has got a luringly thrilling speed, there are some drawbacks to it which might make you want to reconsider booking your tickets. Firstly, it is going to be really really really expensive, predictions show that it can reach up to $100 billion to construct the tunnels and they are going to be very difficult to maintain, any leakage no matter how small, is going to lead to fatalities. At this point one might start having second thoughts on whether it is going to be worth it or not. The tunnels are going to be highly vulnerable to earthquakes and other seismic activities, which could again lead to major accidents. The steel tunnels are also predicted to expand due to heat, which again makes it a bad idea. The Hyperloop is also argued to be very vulnerable to terrorism as the tunnels could be easily breached. Looking at all that, it gets clear that it is not all rainbows and unicorns just yet. Everything except for speed and Elon Musk seem to be against Hyperloop. It might or might not be a good idea. With Elon Musk, we can't quite say. The man is known to do the seemingly impossible. But, let's just hope for good and wait for the future.

Flying Taxis

It's not an uncommon thing to own a car anymore. We also know how densely populated our cities are and we all see how congested our roads are, of course. If you can go on the roads without cursing, congratulations you have attained inner peace. Keeping that in mind there is a concept of flying taxis, and the good thing is, it seems pretty feasible. A flying taxi is going to be a sort of a helicopter or a drone which would run on batteries and carry passengers. Well it seems like a revolutionary idea and the best one among the things we have talked about so far. The idea is simple, practical and does not show much drawbacks. The taxis are going to use electrical motors and batteries, which would make them cheaper, less harmful for the environment and mainly affordable for the people. Right now Uber is acting as the face of the development of flying taxis. Uber claims to test a flying taxi in 2020 and make the idea into reality by 2023. Uber has partnered with NASA for its air traffic control systems, and a lot of aircraft manufacturers to design models for its network. The prototype of the taxi has already been made by the Canadian company "Bell", and is called "Bell Nexus".

Conclusion

With so many ideas in the bucket, the future of transportation seems pretty interesting to talk about. Some ideas are wild, some are simple, some are quite impractical some are perfectly practical. I guess it is going to be really staggering to witness these ideas come to reality. One thing that is clear is that the future is fast and it's coming. Tell me in the comments which of these ideas, you think, is the best.

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Bay Area Cities Go to War Over Gas Stoves in Homes and Restaurants

This story also ran on U.S. News & World Report. It can be republished for free.

San Francisco restaurant owners, already simmering over covid-19 restrictions, are ready to boil over because of a city ban on natural gas stoves in new buildings that takes effect in June.

The ban, which also affects other gas appliances, is part of a statewide campaign aimed at reducing climate change-feeding carbon emissions as well as health hazards from indoor gas exposure. A similar ban went into effect in Berkeley in 2020; Oakland and San Jose recently passed similar measures, and other California cities are considering them.

Officials championing the bans say they’re responding to evidence that gas stoves emit dangerous levels of toxic gases such as nitrogen oxide, nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde, which can cause heart and lung problems, aggravate asthma and contribute to early death, according to federally funded research.

Restaurant owners say it’s an outrageous, unnecessary law that will make expansions and opening in new buildings impossible. It puts salt in the wounds of businesses agonizing over covid restrictions, they add.

“If you get rid of the gas element, I don’t think restaurants can do it unless you’re like a coffee shop with a panini press,” said Matthew Dolan, executive chef and partner of restaurant 25 Lusk in San Francisco. “Whoever cooked up this idea should be reprimanded.”

Many are skeptical that properly vented stoves pose any health problems. Restaurants in California are required to have state-of-the-art ventilation systems that remove byproducts of burning natural gas and circulate fresh air, Dolan said. “The average employee isn’t really in contact with those issues,” he said.

The California Restaurant Association sued Berkeley in 2019 over its ban, arguing that it makes it impossible to prepare flame-seared meats, charred vegetables and wok-prepared dishes, putting steakhouses, ethnic restaurants and others out of business.

“You cannot cook with an electric wok,” said Vice Mayor Chin Ho Liao of San Gabriel, a Los Angeles suburb with 200 restaurants, mostly Asian. “You can cook with them, but it won’t taste good.”

Defenders of the law say it’s a long-delayed recognition of the harm of indoor pollution, which isn’t regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, and is especially important since 87% of the typical person’s life is spent indoors.

Research shows clearly that gas stoves put out potentially dangerous levels of toxic fumes. Electric stoves also pollute, but at lower levels. While it’s difficult to prove gas stoves diminish health, studies have shown correlations between their use and higher rates of illness.

Buildings account for the second-largest percentage of San Francisco’s carbon footprint, next to transportation, and natural gas accounts for more than 75% of that. Roughly half of California homes use natural gas for cooking, according to the California Energy Commission. But health impacts are potentially a more immediate risk than climate change.

A study by UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health in June found that in modeled scenarios where a gas stove and oven are used simultaneously for one hour, concentrations of nitrogen dioxide usually exceed the pollution levels dictated by national and California air quality standards. Gas appliances also release carbon monoxide and particulates.

“All of those have been shown to be detrimental to human health,” said Yifang Zhu, lead author of the UCLA study and a professor in the school’s department of environmental health sciences.

San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, the sponsor of the city’s ban, said in a written release that building electrification is “a critical step in addressing the serious public health and safety hazards of natural gas, and of course the ever-intensifying climate crisis.” He also cited a report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy think tank, which found high levels of harmful emissions in homes and businesses with gas stoves.

In November, California’s air regulation agency adopted a resolution to curtail emissions from gas appliances in buildings and said pollution could exacerbate covid-19. Climate activists are urging the California Energy Commission to include a ban on gas hookups in its next building regulations update, a move that would affect the entire state.

There’s been a similar push in Massachusetts. The nation’s oldest medical society last December became the first to recognize the health impacts of gas cooking — though it also noted that ventilation mitigates such effects.

When caring for children with asthma, health care practitioners should ask, “‘What kind of stove do you have?’” said Dr. T. Stephen Jones, a retired former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who co-sponsored a resolution on the matter passed by the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Society members were taken aback by the data on how gas stoves could make children sick.

“This is not really out in the general public. It’s not out among providers,” said Dr. Heather Alker, chair of the society’s environmental and occupational health committee.

Low-income people are at particularly high risk because they tend to live in smaller residences where gases can concentrate; may use kitchen appliances for supplemental heat; and cannot easily maintain or replace older equipment, especially if they rent, according to the UCLA study.

A government-funded 2014 study concluded that residents of 62% of the Southern California homes it measured were routinely exposed to nitrogen dioxide through hoodless appliances at levels that exceed health standards. A 2012 study done at the behest of the DOE found particulate matter from indoor gas burning could hurt lungs and reduce life expectancy.

As outdoor air gets cleaner, policymakers are focusing more on indoor air quality, which was “under the radar previously” and generally not regulated by state or federal governments, Zhu said.

Critics of the bans argue that electricity is more expensive than natural gas and will drive prices up, making it especially hard for low-income residents. And not all cities are on board with the move away from gas.

More than 100 California cities, including San Gabriel, have approved resolutions, with language put forward by the Southern California Gas Co., calling for “balanced energy solutions.”

In addition to the near impossibility of properly stir-frying food with electricity, Liao is worried about making residents rely solely on the state’s overworked electrical grid, which was hit with rolling blackouts last year. He is pushing for the development of clean gas derived from methane captured from rotting food, a process called anaerobic digestion. Riverside has such a project. But the approach needs more funding and development to be scalable, the vice mayor acknowledged.

The gas ban could pose an extra burden on restaurants struggling to survive covid strictures, owners and chefs say.

“This is the last thing in the world we need right now,” said Dolan. “It’s an added burden on an already burdened industry.”

But advocates for the change say people need to look at the issue a new way.

“When you actually stop and think about it as ‘This is a gas-guzzling device that’s in the middle of my house,’ it is sort of like a mind shift,” said Brady Seals, a senior associate at the Rocky Mountain Institute. “I don’t think it’s unrealistic to think that, in a generation or two, we’ll come to a place where our kids can’t ever imagine why we would want to burn a fossil fuel in our kitchen that emits some of the same pollutants that come from tailpipes.”

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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