The reason to leave ex-twitter and the reason to keep using lesser platforms may not be the same reason.
Probably the reason EFF keeps using mastodon/bluesky is not for reach, but to support federated platforms.
As an activist organization EFF needs reach people, but also it needs to show people alternatives to surveillance capitalism exist and encourage their use.
Most definitely not true. Maybe enough area to cover current electric usage, but to truly decarbonize society a lot more renewable energy is needed - for transport, heating, iron industry, chemical industries, fetilizers etc. Massive amounts of electricity is needed unless you export your industries to china.
Heating with heat pumps is highly efficient and already the cheapest way of heating your home. The grids are ready for it - especially considering the amount of residential solar.
Yes but the major energy consumption of a household is heating than transport than utility.
Using ground heat (deep ones) reduces the electricity need sign.
Also if a heat pumpt creates 3-6 the energy from 1kwh, its even more efficient to burn oil and gas to make energy out of it and remote heat than just burning it locally in your burner.
Why not? Germany's total energy consumption is estimated to be around 1-2 TWh/y. This could be generated by photovoltaics covering less than 5% of its land surface.
There are significant problems around rolling out that much capacity quickly enough, and I also don't think nuclear should have been shut down that hastily, but I don't think "only nuclear can cover long-term energy needs" is true in any way.
Wtf are your numbers from, but they are wrong. It's over 2200TWh per year. And it you truly want to be renewable, the numbers go up. Upcycling waste to plastics or using hydrogen to make steel is more energy intensive than using fossil fuels.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/indicator-final-energy-con...
Those are total energy numbers, which includes fossil fuels, but those are famously misleading because replacing those with electricity reduces the number of Wh needed. An electric car needs roughly 15kWh for 100 kilometers, a gas powered car typically at least 60kWh for the same distance.
Electrifying reduces energy consumption only in selected use cases. Such as EVs yes. However other usescases such as making steel with hydrogen, plastic fromwaste or fuel for planes require vastly more energy when electrified.
Unsurprisingly the use cases where energy consumption is going down lead on electrification (because it's a cost advantage), so it may seem like electrification reduces energy consumption.
But if you really want to leave fossil fuels behind, the electric consumption will go up, up and beyond.
Electricity consumption will go up* but energy consumption will go down. You will not need 2200TWh of energy in Germany when all is said and done. Heating is one of the top reasons we spend energy and heat pumps are just tremendously more efficient than something like gas heating. You can get the same amount of heating for 3-4 times less energy with a heat pump than gas. So obviously you will not need 2200TWh of electricity like you do now with fossil fuels for energy.
* It's also debatable how much electricity use will actually go up. Logic says this must happen, but logic is not science. We have millions of EVs now in the EU and electricity production is less than it was 20 years ago. Efficiency is a source of energy. If you look at the US for example, it uses almost twice as much electricity per capita than Germany, and I would say they both get the same high level if living. If you look at it that way, Americans can cut their use almost in half and live the same standard of living. This can power a lot of EVs and heat pumps without adding a single GW of new capacity.
Energy consumption in total in Germany will only go down if you decide to export your steel and chemical industries to china. The high temperatures needed by industrial processes can't be achieved with heat pumps.
No. If you electrify residential heating and transportation it will obviously go down. If there are sectors where you can't do that, it will still overall go down because those other sectors will not go up to make up for the reduction. Not sure what your argument is.
The number Lxgr gave, 1-2 TWh/year, is simply completely wrong. Germany's annual electricity use alone is around 500 TWh/year. 1-2 THw/year would be the electricity use of 300-600k average German houses.
I have my doubts about short and medium term feasibility, and much more importantly storage and adapting carbon-based industrial processes.
But yes, if all it took was 5% of landmass (which also doesn’t get permanently unusable nor polluted), I’d say that would be a pretty good deal, yeah. This is significantly less than what’s used for livestock farming, to put it into perspective.
Realistically, I don’t think we’ll solve storage fast enough to be able to afford zero nuclear power in Europe.
And of course, you can combine those things sometimes - I've seen cattle munching on grass under solar panels in Baden-Württemberg (state just west of Bavaria).
You can install solar panels over areas that are already developed — rooftops (lol), parking garages, highways, and so on. Some agricultural land even benefits from being covered by solar panels. This has great potential and was first researched in the United States. China is covering water reservoirs with solar panels, which has the additional positive effect of reducing evaporation. And then there is the incredibly large amount of energy that the North Sea, far from any beaches or islands, could provide in consistent wind energy.
Rooftop solar is prohibitively expensive in Germany. My installation would only cover its costs if electricity becomes so expensive that it would lead to complete economic collapse.
No. In Germany, rooftop solar is usually economically attractive, not prohibitively expensive. Especially on a decent roof and if you use a fair share of the power yourself. Verbraucherzentrale(1) says PV systems for private homes are “usually worthwhile” economically, and that self-consumption is the key driver of profitability.
Over 40% of the German landmass is currently used to produce food for farm animals. The space requirement for solar is far off from that. And you can use rooftops etc.
Marginal pricing is not specific to electricity in UK, that's just how commodities end up priced.
Saudis pump oil at cost of $10 per barrel. Will they sell it to you at $10? Nope. The average oil price? Nope.
Saudis will sell the barrel at the highest price people are willing to pay - the marginal price. So if the most expensive oil needed to match the global oil demand is some super expensive arctic oil project, the oil will be priced according the marginal cost of that project even if only 1% is needed.
Indeed. For others who may wonder why this is the case, a simple example will explain it:
Suppose Saudi can produce 100 barrels at $10 (cost+profit) each, and Brazil can produce 100 barrels at a price of $50 (cost+profit) each, and John wants to buy 120 barrels.
- John will pay what is necessary for his Oil, but seeks out the cheapest price available.
- Sellers Brazil and Saudi will accept a sale of their own production if their minimum price of $50 and $10 is met respectively, but will sell to the highest bidder for their supply.
You'd think John will go to to Brazil to buy 100 barrels at $50, and then buy 20 barrels in Saudi at $10.
But guess what, Brazil could simply go to Saudi and buy their 100 barrels for $10, and then sell them to you for $50.
So now Saudi has demand from both John and Brazil at a $10 price. Who gets to buy? Well whoever decides to bid more to convince Saudi to sell their oil.
If John increases his bid to $15, Saudi will prefer that to Brazil's $10 bid. But Brazil would then increase its bid to $20, knowing they can sell it to John for $50.
This bidding keeps going up until the $50 point. For Brazil there is no longer any profit in buying Saudi Oil at $50, and selling it to John for the same price. For John there is no point in bidding more than $50 for Saudi Oil, because he can get a $50 price from Brazil.
Any point below $50 means a bidding war starts between John and Brazil, because at less than $50, Brazil has a cheaper source of oil (Saudi) than their own production cost.
And this is true for every commodity in a free market. It's not some 'UK system', it's just the consequence of free trade.
Of course in reality it's trading intermediaries that do the bidding, it's not Brazil buying from Saudi, but traders jumping in to arbitrage. But this is a simplified example.
There are like a half dozen cities with 100.000+ population at over 12k feet altitude. And towns and villages a lot higher. So right, 12k is no's dangerous per se.
The production shifts oil revenue from Islamic dictatorships to Christian dictatorship of USA. Maybe a hyperbole for now, but for how long? Independent media and education under attack, gerrymandering your voting rights away etc. Considering most of the population lives is solid red or blue state and thus their vote for president doesn't count, how much of a democracy is USA when the minority of independents live in swing states are the only who's vote counts?
Also USA us doing nothing relevant to reduce gas demand like CO2 cap and trade or CO2 based tariffs.
At this rate buy Chinese will be a more moral choice than buy American by next decade.
Voters in the US have the ability to actually change the course of their country.
Voters can say they want Obama or Trump in charge and the government has to obey that choice.
In Europe you only have the same parties/"uniparty" in power all the time. Many people never had a representative they voted for.
I understand the nuance about the US voting system. But when I look at the outcomes, the US seems way more democratic than Europe.
Re gas demand:
Renewables are cheaper than fossile fuels. They will obviously win out in a free market. No subsidies needed.
Well, maybe it was normal ~10 years ago, when that comic was published, but is now getting rarer and rarer, as each new generation consolidates itself on a single platform.
Nature would enjoy that. The economy not so much, depending on location. Around San Onofre (decommissioned now), a 30 mile Chernobyl-size exclusion zone would cover big chunks of Orange County and San Diego County. The US government recommended a 50 mile exclusion zone around Fukushima. 50 miles would cover southern Los Angeles and millions of people.
So The "worst case scenario" for nuclear power is creating a new wildlife park free from human interference [and emptying out half of Los Angeles]
Having grown up deep in the Bible belt, I can say that there's often a lot of overlap between the Jesus people and the various -ists
Bigotry has been a big part of the Moral Majority's platform for decades for a reason - it works on that demographic
I have an armchair theory about one possible contributing factor
These are two of the most fundamental beliefs of evangelicals and they don't make much sense when you put them side-by-side:
1. God is the ultimate progenitor and prototype of love
2. God wants to torture a LOT of people forever, some of whom you may know personally and may be all appearances be decent people
This creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance
Rather than reconsider those beliefs (which may result in your own everlasting torment), it's far easier to resolve that discomfort by dehumanizing non-Christians. Maybe they're actually really rotten people that deserve to be tortured
Probably the reason EFF keeps using mastodon/bluesky is not for reach, but to support federated platforms.
As an activist organization EFF needs reach people, but also it needs to show people alternatives to surveillance capitalism exist and encourage their use.
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