WSJ: Quest for electric planes.
WSJ: Quest for electric planes.
Why must we entertain and finance blatantly stupid ideas? Nothing is going to make Greta Thunberg happy, so let’s stop trying. No government money or mandates should encourage the dumb ideas.
City Journal: Politics and Physics Collide
The legislature and unelected regulators enjoy magical thinking because the time frames are long, they will never be held responsible and perhaps engineers can meet the goals. Automakers have long been burdened with fleet economy standards that must be met. The Laws of Thermodynamics are problems for engineers, not legislators. Cars became lighter and less safe while also becoming more complex and expensive.
The idea that the United States can quickly “transition” away from hydrocarbons—the energy sources primarily used today—to a future dominated by so-called green technologies has become one of the central political divides of our time.
Cats and dogs have an outsize carbon footprint, mostly because of their carnivorous diet. If the pet food industry, which mainly feeds dogs and cats, were a country, it would rank as the 60th-highest greenhouse gas emitter, equivalent to the Philippines.
When I was an RA at Ohio State my senior year, me and a few other RA’s got a bunny. We named him Travis. I don’t recall how or why we got a pet rabbit. Lisa, an RA in Barrett, was very sweet and loved animals, so it was probably her idea. Scott and I liked spontaneous dumb ideas, so we were in, and Barb liked being in on the secret.
WaPo: What We Know About Aliens
It came from space, hurtling at tremendous speed: a mystery object, reddish, rocky, shaped like a cigar. Its velocity was so extreme it had to have come from somewhere far away, in the interstellar realm. The astronomers in Hawaii who spotted it in 2017 named it ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first.”
Don’t forget the unexplainable Wow! signal detected by Ohio State in 1977.
One would have to be incredibly naive or distracted to think that society is functioning properly. Very little of the federal government is operating in the best interests of the American people. On the local level, several cities have stopped enforcing laws and have gone quite feral.
Over the past 30 years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, and its failure to supply the needs of the people is discrediting it in the popular mind.
SciTechDaily: CalTech satellite beams energy from space.
A space solar power prototype, SSPD-1, has achieved wireless power transfer in space and transmitted power to Earth. The prototype, including MAPLE, a flexible lightweight microwave transmitter, validates the feasibility of space solar power, which can provide abundant and reliable power globally without ground-based transmission infrastructure.
This is one of those dangerous ideas that sound wonderful until you understand it.
Sunlight in space has much higher energy than the sunlight that reaches us. The atmosphere screens out gamma rays, x-rays, and most of the ultraviolet. That’s good because these high frequency waves of the electromagnetic spectrum would give us cancer and break down all organic molecules. Solar panels in space could capture much more energy than they do on the ground.
If that energy is captured and beamed down to the Earth, we are adding energy to our environment. The idea is analogous to putting mirrors in space to direct additional sunlight to ground-based solar panels. More solar energy would be added to our system, so the climate would warm up.
With only a couple of satellites, the warming would be negligible as a few power stations generate electricity and profit. When internal combustion engines were invented, nobody worried about adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Beaming energy from space is not a utopian solution, but a bad idea.
The energy beam coming from the satellite would be focused and powerful. When the beam hits the target, electricity is generated. When the beam hits something else, it’s a death ray. Tesla wrote about this, and his papers remain classified. Interlocks would be installed to terminate the ray if it wonders. Those interlocks could be removed when a target needs to be destroyed. That makes beaming energy from space a dangerous idea.
ATLANTA (AP) — The first American nuclear reactor to be built from scratch in decades is sending electricity reliably to the grid, but the cost of the Georgia power plant could discourage utilities from pursuing nuclear power as a path to a carbon-free future.
The federal government is nudging us toward an all-electric future. Gas stoves and wood stoves are being regulated to extinction and gas hot water heaters will be next. Wealthy people are given a $7500 incentive to buy electric cars with conventional cars to eventually banned. This is happening while the electric grid is getting less reliable. Wind and solar power are being subsidized while they are known to be intermittent, fair weather electrical generators.
If the federal government wasn’t actively trying to make our lives less secure and comfortable, we’d be building a new nuclear power plant every two years, like China is.
The third and fourth reactors were originally supposed to cost $14 billion, but are now on track to cost their owners $31 billion. That doesn’t include $3.7 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the owners to walk away from the project. That brings total spending to almost $35 billion.
That sounds expensive, but two years ago, the federal government spent $2 trillion on a Covid stimulus package, and we’ve got nothing to show for it. Biden’s college loan forgiveness plan was going to cost $30 billion per year, and again, we’d have nothing to show for it. Instead, build a new nuclear power plant every year so Americans could have cheap and abundant electricity. Nuclear power plants are one of the safest ways to generate electricity and produce no carbon dioxide (if you care about that sort of thing).
It is “virtually certain” that July is going to be the world’s warmest month since records began, according to scientists.
It’s a virtual certainty that this is all bullshit. You know that because they don’t say when records began.
Some researchers believe it might even be the warmest month in the past 120,000 years.
That is also bullshit because there is no attribution and they don’t even explain what type of researcher. This sentence would be true if it said that someone somewhere said that this was the warmest month in 120,000 years.
Man-made global warming may or may not be an issue, but we don’t know because they keep lying to us about everything by putting out these bullshit stories.
If atmospheric carbon dioxide is our fault and it’s warming the climate, then the US should be building 40 new nuclear reactors and enhancing the reliability of the electrical distribution system. If they don’t want to talk about that, then they are authoritarian assholes.
BBC: Summer temperature strain the grid.
Nearly 200 million Americans are under “dangerously hot conditions” alerts with temperatures expected to soar past 100F (38C) in several major cities.
Those major cities are places where it often gets above 100 F in the summer, so no real surprise.
PJM Interconnection, the company in charge of power supply in 13 states and Washington DC, warned that “extreme heat and/or humidity may cause capacity problems on the grid”.
“Temperatures are expected to go above 90F (32°C) across the footprint, which drives up the demand for electricity,” the company said in a statement.
Rather than give a $7500 rebate to rich people buying Teslas, banning gas stoves and portable generators and offering incentives to install wind and solar power, perhaps the federal government could try working for the benefit of the American people. The federal government loves burning money. How about spend enough to harden the electrical grid and build 30 new nuclear power plants.
If global warming and climate change are inevitable, wouldn’t it be great to have abundant and reliable electricity to provide air conditioning?
Electric motoring is, in theory, a subject about which I should know something. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems.
I never knew that Mr. Bean is an engineer.
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