They work basically unimpaired into zone 4b, which includes all of northern Michigan. This encompasses something like 98% of the entire human population of North America and even the vast majority of Canada.
They will need some support on the coldest days in up to zone 2b, at which point their efficiency drops to a mere 100%.
You're spreading fossil fuel industry-driven FUD. Stop it.
Those blades are way, way, way bigger than you think they are. They are moving extremely fast even at normal speeds. That 15ish rpm converts to around 1.5 rads/s. Modern windmill blades are something like 70m long -- so we're talking speeds of 100m/s or north of 350 kph / 220 mph.
Pretty comparable speeds to the windspeeds of the tornadoes in question during routine operation. Of course, there's a lot more intensity with a tornado, but windmills are actually designed to let most of the air pass them unimpeded because it makes them work more efficiently.
Of course, their energy production will be deliberately curtailed under high winds because the generators and infrastructure hooking them up can only handle so much -- they'll brake the blades, or rely on back-emf from the motors, or some combination of those factors to prevent them from over-generating.
Of course, unlike typical wind being harvested by the windmills, the tornado's airflow is far from laminar, meaning that even with their highest intensity, they will be losing a lot of efficiency in driving those blades.
...the tornado, of course, will simply knock them down.
Biden on climate is an A student. The inflation reduction act, according to basically every climate wonk, gives us a real chance at achieving necessary goals both under its regime and thanks to further future legislation it certainly unlocks. Things are looking less bad right now than they have for a long time in spite of all the worsening indicators. And it's written with intense virtuous cycles built-in that will make it VERY sticky policy once it builds up a couple of years worth of inertia. The fact that he got it past an overtly hostile senate that had at least 51 anti-science, anti-climate, fossil fuel shills turning up to vote is nothing short of a policy miracle.
Trump, on the other hand, has vowed to reverse everything that could still be reversed about the IRA (a frustratingly large amount, unfortunately, could still be undone by executive fiat thanks to its still-developing political base). He's vowed to double down on every kind of fossil fuel subsidy. He's vowed to restore coal power even though it's horrible for everyone involved and the most expensive kind of energy production. He's vowed to fight windmills just because he doesn't like their aesthetics -- literal quixotic shit.
I won't defend Biden on Israel for even one millisecond. His position is heinous. It's evil. And if he loses in November, it will almost certainly be the reason why and he'll deserve it. But it will probably also spell actual global war and apocalypse fueled by climate within all of our lifetimes. It may sound dramatic, but a Trump win will bring us from feast to famine and may spell the actual end of our civilization. We don't have enough time to be hit with another decade of policy setbacks in the field.
Jodie Whittaker was a fabulous doctor. I really liked her whole vibe, her personality, her presentation. I wanted to love that doctor so much.
But the stories were boring and the writing was lame.
An otherwise-mediocre show with great writing can still be a huge success, but even an otherwise-flawless show with bad writing will always suck. I'll never understand why all the TV producers think they can get away with cutting all the corners on writing.
It's actually a pretty natural consequence of their deregulated energy market that places very little priority on reliability. As someone who cares deeply about climate: there's a lot to be learned from the stupid Texas grid.
Solar is just flatly cheap. A fraction the price of other energy production. It has a huge competitive advantage whenever it is working, and the deregulated Texas market, in way over-simplified terms, gets rid of a lot of the most horrible nonsense related to interconnection that is probably THE biggest impediment to adding WAY more renewable energy to the American grid -- along with the related issues of underutilized and inadequate transmission infrastructure.
Of course, the other much-discussed obstacle is the reliability issue -- that is, that the sun doesn't isn't always shining. A hugely, hugely, hugely overstated issue by allies of apocalypse, but one that is reliable and useful to political monsters. But since Texas doesn't emphasize reliability in the regulatory design of their grid, it doesn't even matter; bad-faith politicians will say what they will but at the end of the day the market economics can trample all over the politics.
Wind isn't quite cheaper than natural gas, but it's quite competitive and has some operational advantages (IRA subsidies, operational/maintenance advantages, the advantage of not being fucking hated by the surrounding communities, and so on). And Texas has large tracts of extremely reliable wind, plus it forms an extremely complementary supply curve to solar.
The free market, in many ways, prefers renewables.
It's undeniably better practice. Better for the land, better for the animals, often even better for the farmers. But meat production will always be an ecologically intensive, extractive process. We will always be better off not doing it at all compared to even the best of the best regenerative practice.
...so no, it's not a climate-friendly solution. If you want climate-friendly meat production, we're probably talking about meal worms or some such, never beef.
I'd like to see all meat producers held to high standards of regenerative ag because it offers a LOT of benefits. It's better land utilization, it's better for drought, it's better for pollution, it's a thumb in the eye of the chemical corpos, and more even than that. And when you hear the stories produced by the regenerative ag advocates for the farmers, they aren't really talking about climate much at all. This is correct. The story of regenerative ag has nothing to do with preventing climate change and anyone claiming otherwise is either deluded or greenwashing.
Irrelevant to commercial. A reasonably big restaurant doesn't get enough amps in the panel to replace all their gas equipment with induction, especially in grid-strained California. Not unless it's new construction in an area with quality 3 phase electrical service.
It was a huge, huge, huge mistake that the places that banned new fossil gas installs made it ALL installs instead of just residential.
They made an enemy out of the national restaurant association for no reason and have faced huge setbacks in otherwise-good legislation as a result. It's all just so stupid and shortsighted. Especially since, as the other guy pointed out, commercial gas cooking is not a major contributor. Even just compared to the leaky, awful, terribly, idiotic residential fossil gas network.
Yeah, I run into it a lot in my smallish, somewhat historic town -- though I am not a developer. SO many places where all the staff constantly bitch about how they're always popping breakers and all that stuff. Or where they have to go around sharpie-ing faceplates where you must not plug in kitchen equipment.
Line cooks, in my experience, don't really give that much of a shit about the equipment they need to use. It works or doesn't. The comfortability of the space matters most, and as you said, electric's a huge winner for comfortability.
Chefs are sometimes VERY opinionated about the stupidest shit, and egotistical to boot. You can't really argue with the dude who tells you he KNOWS gas is better (but has never actually used electric). Fortunately, these are a dying breed. Even the NYC pizza joints are switching to electric because it's just plain better.
But if there's one universal truth above all others with the restaurant industry, it is that it is entirely allergic to ANY kind of capital investment. Rewiring a kitchen to switch from gas to electric is just a non-starter. Having to pay an extra however many thousands during initial build to get the utility to bring in 3 phase? Good fucking luck. They'd always rather MacGyver a sketchy solution than invest the money now to improve profitability and quality of life in the long-term. The flipside is, that means buying a $150 commercial induction hob is WAY cheaper than trying to add an additional gas burner -- the latter is usually a flat non-starter, the former means a guy can (lol health code) be sent to poach eggs in the break room.
We can't claim to know it left them with "bad" employees. I think there's vanishingly little evidence that recruiters actually go after the "good" employees effectively -- I'm pretty skeptical that a pro recruiter actually gets you better employees, they just make the process of getting employees way less stressful. We also have no reason to assume that a good or bad employee is correlated in any way with caring about not returning to office -- it's possible very bad employees are just as likely to quit as very good ones. How do you even tell good from bad, anyway?
What this "return to office" stuff definitely DOES do is preferentially retain the most obedient/desperate employees. Which may be part of the goal, along with low-key downsizing.
It doesn't add any cost to include a throttle on the ebike.
Regulate speeds, not mechanisms. Moving people to micromobility is a benefit regardless of the form of that micromobility. Speed is the safety concern, not any of this loophole-inducing nonsense.
Still, the issue isn't the presence of a throttle. It's the specs of the machine.
The idea that the law should be framed around whether or not the vehicle needs to be peddled is backwards. The relevant machine specs are what the legislation should address. Which is still, primarily, top speed. All incident evidence we have suggests that below ~20mph / 30 kph, even full automobiles see precipitous dropoffs in serious injuries, so that's the place to start. We see most places really serious about bike networks going reasonably further past that (25 or 20 kph). That's all reasonable. If you further want to have requirements on acceleration or weight, it's worth investigating that.
Having the legislation require peddling is just a way to create weird loopholes in the law. It's pearl-clutching and moral panic. And worse, it creates accessibility issues and can pressure people off the bikeped infrastructure who would've used it reasonably and safely back into cars.
The law should narrowly address the actual problem, not some tertiary smell the problem has created. The idea that a bike that has pedals is magically safer than an identical bike with an identical frame, motor, and everything which has a throttle is preposterous.
I am totally convinced an ebike with a throttle is safer and easier to use for its rider than one without one at any speed. I don't think they should be required -- because that's just silly -- but I think anyone the claiming opposite, that only peddled, throttle-less vehicles are safe, has fallen off the deep end.
Notable that the common european honeybee is an invasive species that tends to preferentially pollinate invasive flora, at least in North America. The likes of bumblebees and carpenter bees are the ones that really matter for conserving and supporting native ecosystems even if they get less love in public media. They're the bees that actually need saving.
It's worth looking up what you can do to support native pollinators -- including native bees -- in your area. Some of the stuff is surprisingly easy -- planting native wildflowers, for example, or setting up an insect hotel.
The worst part is, one of the "downsides" of renewables like wind and solar is curtailment. A "problem" that needs to be fixed is that they sometimes produce excess energy that you end up having to simply discard if demand isn't there. This is often invoked disingenuously by the allies of apocalypse as some major problem with the tech -- that building enough renewables to basically cover regular power requirements would entail having hugely excess production that gets curtailed, which is somehow wasteful.
DAC and green hydrogen are ways to eat up excess supply and reap benefit from it and should be categorized in similar veins to other forms of energy storage. They are both undeniably necessary technologies to achieve overall goals. Can either solve the problem on their own? God no. But who's saying they can?
There's lots of industrial uses for CO2 -- this style of DAC plant can be viewed as a green producer. That said, it's really easy to outpace industrial demands and we can expect any facility like this will need to be sequestering most of their "production". It's hard to overstate how much excess CO2 there is in the atmosphere compared to the sum total of all industrial carbon dioxide needs. Since CO2 is thermodynamicly very stable, splitting it up to get pure carbon would be quite inefficient.
It's part of the business model of every single DAC project pretty much without exception. Any way you can make back a bit of money selling that CO2 rather than sequestering it is an opportunity to offset costs. And no matter what you think of market economics, they're very effective at reducing costs.
One of the most interesting uses is with projects like e.g. CarbonCure, where they dope cement production with CO2 which has known effects to strengthen (or at least not weaken) concrete. They don't produce their own CO2 for their plants and so need to align themselves with renewable CO2 production facilities (which they do Heirloom Carbon).
Big issue is they it's hard to compete with fossil-based CO2 production. So the next step once tech like this is proven is to start regulating/banning fossil-based CO2 production.
I mean, they're not entirely wrong. Watch the cops throwing down Jewish Voices for Peace members and tell me there isn't a rising tide of antisemitism going on...
Of course, like all bigotry, antisemitism is on the rise. Those Charlottesville protests which had "very fine people on both sides" were fueled by Nazis chanting "Jews will not replace us". How many Jewish space lasers or similar right wing conspiracies have gotten national attention out of the unrepentant mouths of the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green in the last decade? It's VERY MUCH on the rise, antisemitism.
The problem is, being anti-genocide isn't antisemitic. Being anti-apartheid isn't antisemitic. Hell, being anti-Israel isn't necessarily antisemitic (regardless of what the ADL claims).
Do you know what's actually antisemitic? The american police state. Because those cops breaking up peaceful protests one day are the same ones that will be turned to sniffing and hunting out the tribal out-groups another. There's been a long history in our collective culture of antisemitism, but the worst offenses basically always flowed from abuse of the state. Anyone who sides with abuse of a state -- any state -- should think long and hard about what side they'll be on when the violence starts. Such as when peaceful protests are beaten up, tackled, run down by horses on the UT Austin campus at the direction of the mayor and blessing of the governor...
Your completely disingenuous use of verifiable numbers confirm that the Jan 6 riot was violent and only 20 out of 535 gaza protests could be called violent, based on this definition.
It does not, in any interpretation, conclude that Jan 6 was nonviolent. Jan 6 was undeniably violent.
Donald Trump offered to weaken climate regulations in exchange for a $1bn contribution from oil company bosses to support his return to the White House later this year. During a dinner for senior oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago club last month, Trump “vowed to immediately reverse dozens of president [Joe] Biden’s...
I don't care if anyone likes Biden. His stance on Israel has been pretty heinous, though it is showing signs of caving to public pressure, and there's lots of intensely milquetoast stuff coming from this term -- a predictable result of not controlling the legislature.
But on climate? Biden has a nearly spotless record. The Inflation Reduction Act has most climate wonks hopeful for the first time in a generation -- which is why Trump is so terrified of it. Industrial policy bills like this, when crafted as well as it appears to be, have a habit of becoming very sticky and transformational. Very hard to repeal or argue against. Future reforms in the sector can be expected to be doubling down on the investments and incentives it offers as more and more communities and industries, even ones backed by very slow capital, wake up and start entering the sector.
He managed to pass the IRA through an actually-hostile congress. I don't know how he got Mr. Coal Manchin onboard (who has since been vocally opposed to the bill, I guess once he realized that it was actually very bad for the fossil fuel industry). I don't know how he's so far avoided the corrupt SCOTUS making up some bullshit to strike it down. But the bill's killer. Certainly the most important piece of climate legislation from all of US history, possibly as important as the clean air and water acts, and it might even been the most influential piece of world policy in the field.
If you, like me, thinks that climate is a sine qua non issue, you ought to be able to feel pretty good casting that vote for Biden. Protest his bad foreign policy in the meantime, though, because I think the cracks in his relationship with Bibi have grown worse than most believe.
They are not worse for the environment than ICE vehicles. This is total FUD nonsense that is significantly fueled by right wing and auto astroturf campaigns. Their lifecycle emissions are vastly lower. It's so mundanely bad a talking point that even low-level sources like factcheck.org publish informers on it. Don't spread misinformation.
EVs aren't good for the environment. They're less bad. Auto-dominant culture remains a non-starter for longterm sustainability, both fiscal and environmental, for most communities around the world.
There are some situations where BEVs are maybe worse overall than ICE counterparts. Rail and busses, for example, where the BEV just makes no sense (put up a pantograph or third rail for a huge LCCA discount and massively lower emissions). Cargo trucking may also fall in this camp; trucks simply cannot be that heavy on modern asphalt design. But for regular passenger vehicles there is no question.
I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He's a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.
Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires -- pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.
MTG didn't entirely lose in this whole debacle, either. She now gets to point to Johnson and say "See, he's with the Democrats". That'll be super useful to her in campaigns and all that kind of shit.
I doubt that was her intention -- she doesn't strike me as a person having intentions beyond the most superficial ones -- but she's definitely enough of an opportunist to make hay with it now that it's worked out this way.
The dems backing Johnson was a cynical move. It was a nasty piece of business. But that deal was to get aid to Ukraine, and that's a deal I'll take. And hey point, it may be the end of Johnson's career, getting all those democratic "votes of confidence". Unfortunately, his replacement would doubtless be an even more creepy little gremlin.
Northern Michiganders are getting off propane — and on to natural gas (grist.org)
[Video] INSANE TORNADO PIPE intercept with windmills toppled near Greenfield, Iowa! (www.youtube.com)
Kristi Noem Said She Is Proud to “Support Babies, Moms, and Families.” Her Record Shows Otherwise, Critics Say. (www.propublica.org)
Joe Biden Condemns International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s Pursuit Of Arrest Warrant Against Israeli Leaders: “What’s Happening Is Not Genocide” (deadline.com)
Faster-than-light 'warp speed' interstellar travel now thought to be possible (www.earth.com)
Scientists have taken a significant step towards turning the sci-fi concept of "warp drives" into a feasible reality.
Fictional alien time travellers can’t be black, insist morons (newsthump.com)
Texas power prices briefly soar 1,600% as a spring heat wave is expected to drive record demand for energy (fortune.com)
Is 'regenerative farming' the climate-friendly solution to meat production (www.npr.org)
Transcript (and errors in it) are mine, as NPR is mainly a broadcast outlet....
The Surprising Force Stalling Climate Progress: California Restaurants [funded by the gas industry] (www.bloomberg.com)
The gas industry funded the whole thing:...
Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds (www.washingtonpost.com)
Without paywall: archive.ph/0KvTq
Gabe Newell, the Man Behind Steam, Is Working on a Brain-Computer Interface (futurism.com)
E-Bikes Should Not Require Pedaling, Proposes U.K. Government, Diverging From E.U. (www.forbes.com)
E-bikes could get faster, more powerful and not require pedaling, in a move announced today by UKGOV. Cycling organizations are opposed to the plans.
Trump campaign considering Nikki Haley for VP (www.axios.com)
Another threat to bees: Climate change-fueled rising temperatures | A study looked at heat stress in bumblebees and how that might affect their nests. (wapo.st)
The world’s largest direct carbon capture plant just went online (www.engadget.com)
Analysis Finds Nearly 100% of Campus Gaza Protests Have Been Peaceful (www.commondreams.org)
Trump told oil executives and lobbyists that he would undo Biden’s climate policies (www.carbonbrief.org)
Donald Trump offered to weaken climate regulations in exchange for a $1bn contribution from oil company bosses to support his return to the White House later this year. During a dinner for senior oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago club last month, Trump “vowed to immediately reverse dozens of president [Joe] Biden’s...
Climate Protestors Storm Tesla's Gigafactory in Europe (www.wired.com)
Archived copies of the article: archive.today web.archive.org...
An Interview With Jack Dorsey (www.piratewires.com)
Marjorie Taylor Greene fails to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson (www.bbc.com)
The House killed the far-right Republican's motion to remove Mike Johnson over support for Ukraine aid.