Notices by josh buermann (buermann@mastodon.social), page 5

@paninid @HistoPol

We are not remotely this dependent on natural gas to produce nitrogen fertilizers: you can inject green hydrogen near the end of the Haber process, skipping the methane cracking step by cracking water instead. Haber is only the dominant process because of its enormous externalities.

It is baffling how these peak oil guys can keep a readership when every other claim of fact is a howler. Like, are gas prices really "getting higher and higher"? Who has time for this stuff?

I feel like I am the only person who ever noticed the irony with which the Obama administration defended arming the Saudi et.al. invasion of Yemen on humanitarian grounds. The argument went that the Saudis would double-tap funeral processions far more inhumanely with unguided munitions if we didn't give them JDAMs, which was very funny because they were simultaneously denouncing Syria's barrel bombs while refusing to supply the regime with our humanitarian weapons.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/u-s-plans-to-send-weapons-to-israel-amid-biden-push-for-cease-fire-deal/ar-BB1ipyGu

Paxlovid is available for free but nobody knows about the program because it's some back office arrangement, like most of the American healthcare system.

https://archive.is/2024.02.18-112441/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/13/paxlovid-covid-cost-free-paxcess/

#covid

@mmasnick @WIRED

404 words to get to the introduction raised a 404. I beg your pardon.

After RTFA and your response I just have to marvel that anybody can think making publishers more responsible for what they promote could possibly sink the discourse any lower when the Cronkite of our age invites on recurring guests to promote bug-eyed conspiracy theories about how, say, it's the drugs that cause AIDs.

The fundamental disagreement might be that you think everything is fine.

@mmasnick @WIRED

do you ever get around to actually linking to the offending wired article cuz I can't seem to find my past the opening thesaurus entry for "incorrect"

The NYT's editors have made a choice to call "ethnic cleansing" an "evacuation", but I suppose they still can't stomach calling it an occupation, either.

There's no runway left for our inaction here:

"The temporary pause on pending decisions will have no bearing on projects already built, which constitute the planet’s single largest source of LNG export capacity. The U.S. will remain the world’s largest gas exporter and is due for a significant expansion over the coming years."

https://newrepublic.com/article/178503/media-biden-natural-gas-exports-ridiculous

"The war in Yemen is a full-blown crisis...This administration has demonstrated the folly of unconditional support... we must cease support altogether," commanded an open letter signed by much of Biden's national security staff in 2018, who are now demonstrating the folly of unconditional support anyway.

https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/yemen-statement-former-obama-officials-november-11-2018.pdf

The main culprit behind the loss of the Amazon, researchers say, was Obama's endorsement of Bolsarno's judicial coup.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03469-6

@SwiftOnSecurity

A vast everything-belongs-to-the-cloud conspiracy against private data so they can surveil it into the advertising industry's universal spyware.

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.

Every VOX "explainer" hand-waving away all the interesting odds and ends of engineering history with the phrase "learning-curve".

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?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511930090X

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.

https://www.pv-tech.org/china-adds-61-2gw-of-solar-pv-capacity-until-may-this-year/

If we do manage to stop burning fossils in time it will largely be because of contingent, uncoordinated developments.

The most optimistic story of human civilization is a Mr. Magoo cartoon.

#climate #solar

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."

#solar

Check out how successful Carter's tiny #solar demand subsidy program was before Reagan killed it.

The program -- a big multi-firm university-lab joint project -- brought costs down by a third in three years.

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.