I doubted what you wrote, but everything you said is correct (for the last 10 years, at least). Over the time period, natural gas increased 740 TWh/year (to 1870) and coal decreased 940 TWh/year (to 650). Electricity production is up ~7%, but that's quite low compared to the growth of everything else.
> This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc
Biden's administration put on solar tariffs, but of course I'll grant the current administration is fucking up everything else possible.
Plenty of blame to go around, my understanding of the timeline is:
Trumps first administration put in solar Tariffs with China (25%), Biden administration increased them with China (50%), 2nd Trump administration increased those and applied solar Tariffs to other countries. Though honestly I’ve largely stopped paying attention at this point.
I think the issue is that the tarriffs just don’t really matter anymore because the panels are so cheap that they’re dwarfed by the “balance of system” costs — installation, racking, inverters, cabling, etc.
It matters because of opening up cheaper ways to install them. For example, in some Scandinavian country they're cheaper than fence panels, so they just use them for fences, and the power they generate is a nice bonus.
As a foreigner it just seems.so braindead that the administrations would tarrif solar panels. The US doesnt have a great manufacturing capacity for solar panels compared to established manufacturers. The high cost of new production ensures slow uptake.
From a place that embraced solar rebates, and has subsequently benefited from having in place solar battery rebates, we have a thriving industry of solar installers, electricians, and an ever increasing amount of local grid energy security in the event that storms or accidents cause supply disruptions. About 5% of households will likely not see an energy bill for the next 20 years. Another 40% have solar that covers daytime energy requirements.
The requirement for baseline coal.and gas has been decreasing - though will not completely abate.
I live in a state that produces abundant coal for power and steel. We have decreased our carbon emissions to 35% below 2005 levels.
Either you want to secure the full energy chain or you do not. There are many comments in this thread about how the solar panels come from China. If that bothers you, there needs to be some financial reason for a domestic factory to open.
> Either you want to secure the full energy chain or you do not.
Is every part of the fossil fuel production chain "secure"? All oil production and processing equipment, chemicals and so forth are produced domestically?
> One of the core tenets of system design is Availability. If your service is not available
The service won't be available to anybody because of overwhelming unwanted traffic. Now it's available for most potential users. You're speaking econ 101 when everyone else has played out iterated prisoner's dilemmas.
I am not GP, but I don't have a problem with a single contact. What I find really neat is after hours of just one, the vision in my other eye is improved for a while; I can actually see decently from the non-contact eye when I remove the contact.
I have/make rice starch glue. Can you put it on food? How are you supposed to know whether it's food safe?
Okay, so you don't trust LLM, so you go to a website instead. And... LLM-generated pages are SEO'd to get the top links. So you can't trust any website now (shoot, so much nonsense even before LLM, just more obvious to some of us). So basically everything on a computer is untrustworthy, directly from an LLM or not, unless you got yourself a copy of Encarta '97.
So you pick up a book at the local library. Librarians picked some books to order in subject matters they aren't expert in. How do you know those are accurate and safe? If the book says to use rice starch glue, how do you know the author didn't just copy that from an LLM? Or make it up?
Presumably you test some things and use common sense for others. Like if you search for "grain filling oak" using an engine like Kagi(because Google just sells you the same product repackaged over and over) then you'll get people telling you variously to buy this grain filler compound that worked on their particular project, or you get people telling you to use drywall patch compound, or watered down wood filler.
The thing is, these things do produce some kind of result that looks like what you want. But it is still up to you to test these things on a project before you rely on them for whatever it is you really wanted them for, and that requirement doesn't go away just because you sourced the information from some LLM, or a book at the library, or Nick Offerman, or whoever else.
Maybe ironically, but software and robotics should allow us to scale regenerative agriculture in a way that doesn't leave everyone in poverty. We already have lasers mounted to trailers doing precise weeding instead of broad herbicide usage.
Next innovation could be to scale succession planting, which keeps the ground from being exposed in between crops and lets you transition from nitrogen fixers to users quicker, getting more food out per acre while reducing fertilizer usage. But you can't do that with current harvesters and human labor is too valuable to spend on this.
Also take broccoli harvesting, typically you get a few big heads, then it keeps producing smaller heads, but it's not economical to harvest the smaller heads with human labor. Robotic harvesting lets the same plant produce more food per acre and uses the energy needed for new plants instead to keep producing food.
Masses will be unemployed, due to robots displacing them, but human labor will also be too costly. We won't be able to afford a person shepherding, but we will need to produce "meat" (substitutes) in plants, or in inhumane animal-jail, and we'll need robot-weedkiller lasers to produce the feedstock instead of letting animals graze... and we'll give the food produced this way to people on UBI...
This is where this is going, the whole industrialism is totally self-serving, and for every problem its answer is digging deeper in the rabbit hole, and creating 2 more problems in addition to solving the initial problem only half-way.
I don't want to say what you are suggesting is not possibly useful, I just want to emphasize how stuff works out in reality, in addition to doing some nice stuff like what you called out (the halfway solution to the problems). All we get is more alienation and humans getting depressed and feeling a lack of purpose... but somehow we cannot afford to pay fair prices for the agricultural work, and pay fair prices for the food, and not overproduce and overpollute... and the same thing is happening in every aspect of the human condition, not only food production, which is the most basic and ancient activity we have been doing.
Cattle grazing is helpful for fields left fallow, but succession planting is far superior in so many other ways. You can mix plants which repel particular pests with those susceptible to them (and other beneficial strategies), topsoil is grown instead of depleted, flowers are present for wide range of season so bees naturally thrive with food always available, you don't need a significant generator of greenhouse gas running around (cows), and it gets more vegetables per acre so it would be good if vegetables were cheaper because we don't eat enough of them.
I have done succession planting in my home garden, but it's definitely not worth the time investment for the food alone. But it's real neat to see your aphid problem disappear as the nasturtiums pop up without any pesticides needed. You can even feed the world with it, if most everyone wanted to be farmers... (as opposed to some Organic practices which is the same mass farming but the pesticides are "naturally-derived")
Not all tilled land is suitable for planting, as many are drained swamps. In my home this is a huge problem, as the water circle has been distrupted so much that we are on the way to becoming a desert with climate change compounding on top the the more than a century long draining megaproject nobody is willing to undo due to short term economic interests. Fuck the next generations, I guess...
There are other grazing animals in addition to cows btw, as temperate marshland forest can be grazed by pigs, for example. Also sheep, and goat exist for example.
Vegetable production is nice, but we don't need to work all land. We don't need to produce so much food that we cannot use up meaningfully, just waste or take to places to create overpopulation there also. Reckless industrialism and capitalism are the core barriers to sustainability. (the former includes socialist planned-economical models also, we've seen our part of that also)
I doubted what you wrote, but everything you said is correct (for the last 10 years, at least). Over the time period, natural gas increased 740 TWh/year (to 1870) and coal decreased 940 TWh/year (to 650). Electricity production is up ~7%, but that's quite low compared to the growth of everything else.
> This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc
Biden's administration put on solar tariffs, but of course I'll grant the current administration is fucking up everything else possible.
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