I wish the centrist pundits would just primary Biden instead of inconsolately blubbering about his age again, but if the libs who are wasting column inches on the centrist sob session want them to shut up all they have to do is primary him themselves and the centrists will stop their blubbering about age and go back to blubbering about how the Democratic party isn't bigoted enough to win re-election.
There's such a constant stream of what amount to penny stock scam press releases about clean tech that get passed off as "#climate news", with a cottage industry press passing it off to the public -- much like the bullshitters barreling into TED talks to console liberal guilt with their vaporware -- that it completely swamps out any good reporting on how solar panels or wind turbines or batteries have improved, and why, and who to credit for giving us a chance.
I keep looking for a history that might provide some insight into what the big hurdles were and how they were overcome, aside the hurdle of finding the investment, and it's weird how there's not long form articles plastered everywhere telling the story like there is for chip manufacturing, but they never cross my desk.
UNSW Sydney's Martin A. Green's brief "How Did Solar Cells Get So Cheap?" has some good leads I need to follow up on. Any others?
The US is expected to install 32GW of solar capacity this year, about... less than quarter the rate of China, which installed 62GW in the first five months. Pretty easy to believe we'll be capable of producing a global TW a year by the end of the decade.
Fossil firms are gonna run out of excuses for operating pretty quickly at that rate.
I suspect the answer to the book's title, "how did solar get so cheap?" is mostly efficiencies of scale, which means the lack of demand was the main thing keeping solar expensive, and the failure to keep buying more solar to make solar cheaper was a simple and epic failure.
Which jives with a story where the market-dominating tech hasn't fundamentally changed in forty years and "Leading companies in Japan, Germany, and the US lost their solar business in part by investing in alternatives."
Maycock's observation in '75 that silicon panel costs were a function of experience "has had a clear policy implication: R&D is insufficient. Policymakers could 'buy down' the cost of PV in the same way that Texas Instruments’ electronic products had used 'forward pricing' -- take losses early to scale up manufacturing and achieve cost reductions and profits later."
It's hard to read about Reagan administration energy policy -- which was considerably worse than this passage can adequately capture -- and not suspect they understood the risk of climate change, saw the numbers from Carter's program, and went on the war path against any possible future that wouldn't burn the world down. A powerful faction in that administration were just as nuts as the current goonsquad in the Freedom Caucus.
"The indictments [against 61 Cop City opponents in Atlanta] are clearly intended to... silence the protest movement... people arrested for handing out flyers, for serving as legal observers, for providing bail support... The indictment stretches back to George Floyd’s murder... despite the fact that Cop City was not announced until 11 months later. It attempts to render all mass protest against police violence... an “unlawful conspiracy” or “racketeering.”"
You know everybody in Washington is so glued to the cable news waiting to hear their names mentioned that they don't have time to watch normal television or they'd have already fixed what is a deeply trivial issue of letting streaming services write off their losses without dropping the content.
It's pretty iconic of Washington to create perverse tax incentives for companies to take programming off the market, effectively subscribing tax payers to a non-streaming disservice and then promising to prosecute them if they find a way to watch it.
Maybe the most lasting effect on society of the crypto bubble will be a unified, unshakeable conviction among conservatives and centrist libs that China invented COVID, which like the idea that Iraq had WMD will eventually transmogrify through the alchemy of ideological and physical violence into 20-something Atlantic Council interns acting as imperial viceroys over occupied mainland China.
@Gargron@taylorlorenz It doesn't make a whole lot of sense if that is not the assumption...
But the premise that disabled people are "effectively siloed out of view" comes from a retweeted argument about the ramifications of the quote tweet, which wasn't introduced until 2015, a year after Ferguson and five years after the Arab Spring protests were organized on a chronological Twitter. So that doesn't make any sense either.
"Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish."Profile picture alt text: Nelson Mandela Muntz Sr anchoring the news and armpit farting at camera one, then turning to camera two to fart with his armpit.