"It's crazy to shut down nuclear power" says @elonmusk. But crazy is the point. Anti-nuclear is not a pro-environment stance; it is an anti-human, anti-industrial stance. So crazy is a feature not a bug.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/86643

Having spent many years working in American academia, I learned that the “publish or perish” mentality (especially among “major” universities) is real. Government grant money is lusted for and is in no way insignificant. The problem is, politically correct articles are essential. There exists no chance of publication if orthodoxy is challenged; tenure might be denied and jobs might be lost. The pressure to conform is enormous.

“For many, hailing a fully autonomous ride with Waymo may be the easiest way to access an EV,"

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/86388

Let's start with his assets

They have already gone after gas stoves, gas cars, and even air conditioners. Now they are coming after incandescent light bulbs.

Anything that’s cheap, convenient, and liked by millions of Americans lands on their radar eventually. There is just no end to it.

While gas made up almost exactly 40 percent of U.S. electricity generation in 2022, the share of renewables just surpassed 20 percent, comparable to coal and nuclear - showing that there is a long way to go still for renewable energy.

The Berlin initiative to make the city climate neutral by 2030 was led by rich, upper class youths like Luisa “Longhaul” Neubauer. But Berliners, having been harassed for months by activists gluing themselves to the streets and blocking traffic, saw the folly of the initiative and the high costs it would entail politically and financially. They decided resoundingly they’d wanted no part of it.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/85570

A Norwegian arms manufacturer said that a TikTok data center is eating all the electricity in the region, meaning that the company cannot keep up with the surging global demand for ammunition.

Experts are increasingly commenting on the massive demands of big tech companies, and how energy usage by their data centers is causing issues for other industries.

"We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos," Morten Brandtzæg, the CEO of Nammo, said in an interview with the Financial Times.

Brandtzæg said that the demand for artillery rounds was 15 times higher than normal — a trend driven by the war in Ukraine, which has featured heavy artillery use.

Ukraine, for instance, would like to increase its daily usage of rounds from 6,000 to 65,000, he said.

Insider couldn't immediately establish whether Nammo shells are being used in Ukraine — its customer base, as described in a 2021 annual report, is overwhelmingly EU and NATO states, which have been making mass donations to Ukraine since Russia invaded.

However, in the area of Norway where Nammo operates, its defense work gets no priority over any other users of electricity.

Power is provided on a first-come, first-served basis, according to Elvia, the energy provider in the Raufoss region of Norway — an area around 120km north of Oslo.

The energy company told the FT that it has no spare capacity for Nammo to hike its output as it has already been promised to TikTok. A spokesperson told the FT that if Nammo does order more capacity, it will "take time" before that can be achieved because the network needs to be "strengthened."

The taxpayer's pay for his gas and jet fuel, so Biden does not care if prices are high

"That’s another problem—this is a regulatory program that’s very long in the tooth and you’re getting to the point where clothes washers—this might be the fifth time they’ve been regulated," Lieberman added. "So we’re really chasing after diminishing or nonexistent marginal returns."

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/85388

Our fuel companies will now be paying for fuels in Kenya shilling

MHe argued that the infrastructure around wind and solar will not only fail, “but will cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment and be entirely unnecessary”.

He shows that at a wind speed of 20mph, the power produced by a wind turbine is 600 watts per square metre at full efficiency. To deliver the same power as the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant – 3,200 million watts – it would require 5.5 million square metres of turbine swept area.

It is noted that this should be quite unacceptable to those who care about birds and other environmentalists. Of course, this concern does not seem to have materialised to date. Millions of bats and birds are calculated to be slaughtered by onshore wind turbines every year. Meanwhile, off the coast of Massachusetts, work is about to start on a giant wind farm, complete with permits to harass and likely injure almost a tenth of the population of the rare North Atlantic Right whale.

When fluctuations in wind speed are taken into account in Allison’s formula, the performance of wind becomes very much worse. If the wind speed drops by half, the power available falls by a factor of eight. Almost worse, he notes, if the wind speed doubles, the power delivered goes up eight times, and the turbine has to be turned off for its own protection.