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As a rule of thumb, greenhouse gas emissions are roughly equally split between electricity production, transportation, heating, agriculture and industry, about 20% each. Transportation is electrifying rather quickly in Europe, heating at a bit slower pace. So it's a bit better than "10% of the problem" - it's about 20% now, becoming ~40% in 10-15 years, eventually lowering total emissions by ~60% probably some time around 2050

Agriculture and industry are tough nuts to crack. With electricity, transport and heating, it's a problem of scaling out. With agriculture and industry - we don't even have a blueprint yet

This triggers some PTSD with Google Maps navigation in Finland

We have two official languages - Finnish and Swedish, neither of them big enough to warrant any Google effort for proper text-to-speech. Hence, the voice navigation first pronounces street names in Finnish, then again in Swedish, both butchered by applying English spelling rules, all voiced by an extremely robotic voice

I'm cautiously optimistic about SPARC, but I don't believe it's going to be more than a footnote in the overall energy storage

At a fundamental level, our lowest cost energy options are really simple - wind blows and makes stuff spin, dig a black rock and throw it into fire, inject gas into fire, let sun shine on a blue brick, chop wood and burn, make water flow and spin stuff

Now compare that to - keep superconducting magnets 250 degrees below ambient temperature, inject high precision beams of deuterium and tritium into a vacuum chamber, capture escaping neutrons in blankets of pure lithium and berylium. Eventually, capture the generated heat in a primary-secondary heat exchange loop of pressurized water, generating steam and spinning a turbine. All of which requires thousands of highly specialized scientists and engineers to design and operate

I doubt it will ever be cost efficient. And we're not even talking about the cost of fuel. Tritium is mind-boggingly expensive - we need deuterium-deuterium fusion, tritium is just an experimental stepping stone

The silver lining here is that it make energy storage economical without any subsidies. Looking at local Finnish spot prices - one could charge for 30e/MWh and discharge at 500e/MWh. Companies like GridScale tout 60% round-trip efficiency at a price of 60e/kWh. With such uneven prices, the installation pays for itself within a single year, which is crazy high ROI

This is where the narrative about personal responsibility falls apart - when it comes to electricity and energy, everything is better at scale, and it's not even close. All the meaningful action is to be done on state, corporate and industrial level, individuals are a rounding error

Even with solar, where one might reasonably think the transportation costs would favor decentralized deployment - no, utility-scale deployments benefit dual axis tracking, amortization of fixed costs, integration with energy storage and economies of scale. We would all be better off as shareholders of utility solar than deploying rooftop + batteries, but that takes away the bragging rights

And industry. And transportation. And commercial or public buildings. Taking into account only personal electricity consumption and disregarding all the rest that makes society work is deeply myopic

As a rule of thumb - electricity consumption in developed countries is about 1 kW per person, once everything is accounted for. Energy consumption is about 5 times as much

Physics will always heavily favor the attacker here. It's like a difference between throwing a stone at a target vs. throwing a stone to hit a flying stone mid-air with enough momentum to meaningfully change the trajectory. The second task is orders of magnitude more difficult to carry out

That's how urban warfare goes. Either prolonged Sarajevo-style siege waiting for surrender, or brutal block by block demolition until there's no place where defenders can fire from. The logic of urban warfare hasn't really changed since Stalingrad or Berlin

It's also likely the reason the Russian advance stalled. Neither party really wants to go through that hell

Propaganda mostly works by highlighting the convenient facts and omitting the inconvenient. Reading western media, one would get the impression Ukraine is a country inhabited by nothing but immaculate saints and heroes, who would never hurt a fly

In reality, every month of Zelenskyj's rule, the country moved further and further away from democracy and closer to autocracy. This is an annoying feature of western geopolitics - despite all the talk about democracy, we always prefer a western-aligned autocrat to any anti-western democratic outcome

Just an excerpt of Zelenskyj's rule:

* banned opposition's TV channels

* urged Apple and Google to remove apps related to those TV channels from app stores, as well as fairly innocuous Russian apps like Yandex (search engine) and vkontaktu (facebook-alike)

* an already atrocious state of minority rights turned even worse in many aspects

* refused Russian COVID vaccines despite having no alternative (this plummeted his approval ratings)

* after seeing Russia-aligned parties leading in the polls, he bypassed the judicial system and froze assets of his main political opponent by a presidential decree, and put him under house arrest

* casually throwing people to jail with accusations of treason, including previous president of Ukraine (democratically elected ethnic Ukrainian), opposition politicians, as well as diplomatic negotiators

and there's much more. As a citizen of a Western country, it's really difficult to get a good picture of the situation. Putin is lying lunatic directly responsible for this war. Zelenskyi is a lying lunatic indirectly responsible for this war. Why are we acting like one of them is a saint?

Average temperature in Oslo is colder than 90% of the planet - but average winter temperature in Oslo is a fairly normal winter temperature for nearly half the planet, especially for the more affluent parts of it. The hottest large city on Earth - Ahvaz, Iran - with a record high of 54C, still recorded a record low of -7C

I'm a supporter of nuclear, but this trope is overplayed. This winter Germany derived 5-10% of their electricity from natural gas - and even that is mostly due to cogeneration of heating, not for electricity needs. This cogeneration runs even if renewables provide a surplus. Calling Germany's electricity grid is "reliant on Russian gas" doesn't reflect reality

Not sure about South Korea, but Taiwan's democracy is kind of a joke. Since the end of the WW2, the grand total of the number of parties holding power is...two - DPP and KMT.

There are no differences between them in foreign affairs. Both favor wage suppression policies. Both favor currency manipulation to suppress consumption in order to help exporters. None of them is doing anything about the worst housing crisis in the world, leading to a demographic suicide of the country - fertility rate is below 1.3 for 20 years and counting. In many way, it's a choice between Pepsi and Coca-cola

Russia in the 90s wasn't a true democracy either. US press liked to depict Yeltsin as a democrat because he was weak and subservient, but his methods of power were deeply autocratic. Yeltsin ordered artillery shelling of the parliament in 1993, killing 140 people. Had elections in 1996 been fair, they'd highly likely mean the return of the Communist Party to power, so he rigged them in all sorts of grotesque ways (naturally, western leaders praised him for it). As his incompetence grew more and more untenable, he threw the hot potato to Putin and resigned

It's on the way to Kiev, the exclusion zone means there are no large urban settlements to fight over, and it's also using the West's weaknesses against itself - reality: topsoil has somewhat elevated levels of radiation compared to normal background radiation. The sarcophagus around the molten core is basically indestructible. public perception: radioactive cloud will make all Europe uninhabitable

Yeah, most people don't have a proper mental model of radiation - it tends to be discussed either as a virus, or as a poison. It's neither - it doesn't multiply, it is not transmissible, dilution works perfectly well; and as a bonus - it gets less dangerous on its own with time

Chernobyl sarcophagus is a massive pile of concrete - basically indestructible. Buildings made of concrete are ridiculously resilient to explosions - remember the Beirut explosion? That grain silo right next to the epicenter was still standing

Berlin has some flak towers from WW2, quoting Wikipedia:

The Soviets, in their assault on Berlin, found it difficult to inflict significant damage on the flak towers, even with some of the largest Soviet guns, such as the 203 mm M1931 howitzers. After the war, the demolition of the towers was often considered not feasible and many remain to this day

Because money, in the end, is just a proxy for labor, energy, land and raw materials. One can print money, but cannot print factors of production

The ferocity, speed and coordination of the invasion suggest it's not just Putin - this is exactly how a unanimous agreement of all political and military elites look like. Judging from history - we won't hear about the true reasoning behind the invasion and the events preceding it for another 30 years at least

Kosovo is a more apt comparison. There's no way of condemning annexation of the breakaway regions, while defending doing the same with Kosovo - without coming out as a hypocrite who bends the facts to fit his needs

Sanctions barely work on small countries. They're but a nuisance for mid-sized countries and do approximately nothing to big countries. Russian economy is mostly autarkic - consuming overwhelmingly goods and services produced within Russia. Their exports are energy commodities, not consumer goods - energy commodities are the bedrock of the modern world - they'll always find a buyer at market price or slightly below. Their national debt is negligible. China is not going to stop exporting their goods there, and I don't see corporations like Apple/Google/Volkswagen/Toyota giving up such a large market just to make a point. Token slaps on the wrist for the few selected oligarchs who haven't secured British citizenship yet are laughable

We should be honest to ourselves - short of Western citizens dying on the battlefield, there's nothing of consequence the West can do. Russia exploited our weaknesses really well - our irrational hesitance of nuclear energy, our greenwashing of natural gas, our love for petrol-guzzling SUVs, kowtowing of our financial system to ultra-rich, profit-uber-alles of our corporations, hypocrisy of our diplomacy, etc.

> insufficient gas buffers during the uptick of the economy after Corona

this is true

> Russia closing part of its huge gas supply to Europe

this isn't, afaik. Russia doesn't sell on spot market, they prefer long term futures contracts, on which they reliably deliver. They delivered on their 2021 commitments a bit earlier, hence they closed off the valves

Basically, the gas supplies were low during summer, but the spot prices were significantly above long term average, so energy companies delayed their purchases, hoping the price will come back down soon. It didn't, reserves dried up, and everybody was forced to buy at the same time

We fire up coal/gas/biomass plants. Nature doesn't care about the ideological purity of the electricity grid - all that matters is total cumulative emissions

People treat this question with religious mindset, as if burning fossil fuels is a sin that must be banished. In reality, there's nothing wrong with powering countries ~80% of the time with renewables + storage, and ~20% of the time with fossils - that's still a decently decarbonized grid

This was also the case in eastern Europe during the Cold war - some countries came quite close to being classless societies, but people there nevertheless made up a bunch of status symbols out of fairly ordinary items - like jeans. Young people didn't flinch at spending one-month worth of income for a pair of jeans, while scoffing at nearly identical non-denim trousers, at 1/20 the price

Book of Ecclesiastes (part of the books of wisdom of the Hebrew bible)

ancient era existentialism written in poetic form. Unlike the other suggestions here, it can be accessed for free and takes only ~20 minutes to read

US minimum wage reached $1/hour in 1956, or $10.25/h in 2021 dollars

Since 1956, inflation adjusted GDP per capita increased by +218%

All things equal, this would mean ~$66k / year for a 9-to-5 job paying minimum wage

> spread radioactive particles over most of Europe and Russia making them uninhabitable

JFC, this is the perfect capture of the level of debate surrounding nuclear

If it was true, don't you think every single country in the world would obtain such a world-destroying weapon?

If it was true, then a single nuclear reactor would be able to power the whole world for eternity

The problem with this line of argument is that there's no single "price for electricity". Either it's dirt-cheap when oversupplied, or eye-wateringly expensive when undersupplied. Within the past two months, spot price ranged from 3 cents to 1500 cents.

Renewables push down the cost when the price is already low, and do nothing when the price is high

There are also some "physics" reasons for this - the source of electric current in an ICE car is usually a 1kWh lead-acid battery - obviously not always at 100% state of charge. Even if the designers wanted to put an awesome infotainment system into such car, the battery won't be able to power it for long before jeopardizing driving-related critical functionality. As an example - keeping Tesla's sentry mode on (screen on and cameras recording), drains about 250W - enough to completely kill a classic car battery in 4 hours

Electric cars, with their batteries in 30-100 kWh range, lift this constraint - so designers have a field day

It's a manifestation of a much more sinister pattern - prioritizing first impressions over long-term considerations

To add heaps of salt to the injury - automotive functions like seat heaters, defroster, wipers, energy usage, etc. - those cannot be pinned to the quick access bar. Only apps like Spotify, Netflix, browser,...

It's a CAR, ffs! Tesla, please stop acting like it's a cell phone