Razib Khan on urbanization and infertility; Mark Mills on green energy skepticism; Dan Williams on group demonization; Gurwinder on playing the games of life
I am not sure I am following your logic here. It sounds like you are claiming that any thinking about any subject is the same as demonizing, which doesn't make sense to me. Could you please elaborate?
"meaning that the more urbanized a nation, the fewer children born per woman."
The correlation is indeed interesting and seems rather compelling but of course correlation is not causation. Anecdotally, it's my understanding that immigrant slums of roughly 1850 to 1920 included lots of children. Surely more children than the same cities of today. It makes me wonder what is going on today VS then. It seems like more than simply urbanization.
Mills doesn't mention it in his article but this, in my mind, bolsters the argument for nuclear, at least for the non-transportation slice of the energy consumption pie. When I ask Claude, transportation represents about 37% of US transportation consumption. The staggering costs to transition from hydrocarbons isn't something we ever hear policy makers talk about.
But if population density is the problem, then that is self-correcting.
Not in any easy way. The declining population coud continue to live in very dense places. This probably means that "density" is not exactly the right variable. Maybe something like cost of "family size" space/income near biologically optimum time for child bearing.
While the world would obviously be a much, almost incalculably better place if the interstate highway system as designed in 1956 had been completely left alone, and yes - frozen in amber - somebody who for example purposes, adduces the "cost" of it at $600 billion, and there's an end of it - has surely forfeited some credibility.
Which is rather cynical and silly, since obviously anything that substitutes for the bonanza of fossil fuels is going to be commensurately costly with what a bonanza it was, and will be, for years to come.
Energy is a subject not enhanced by politicization.
“While the world would obviously be a much, almost incalculably better place if the interstate highway system as designed in 1956 had been completely left alone.”
How am I going to get my cheap plastic stuff from China at the local Wally World without a sustainable trucking route? And my avocado dip from Mexico at my Trader Joe’s?
In other words, it seems like we would be a lot poorer and unhappy absent a robust and reliable transportation infrastructure system to facilitate specialization and trade. So, I’m not sure how the world would be “incalculably better” without it. Please elaborate.
I do not understand the controversy here? The least cost policy for optimizing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will imply evolution toward less use of foil fuel powered vehicles. So what? Growth continues. Goods continue to be transported
You would still get your dip - uugh - but the interstate would function as intended, an interregional transportation system, not a local one with thousands of entrances and exits and frontage roads. It's a complete mess in my region, and functions - on the days that it does, given wrecks, local congestion, and of course ten-and-twenty year-long road projects of all sorts - in essentially an opposite manner from that intended.
The reason it is probably a mess in your area is that Texas is too dang popular. In terms of population growth, it is consistently ranked in the top 5 and was numero uno in 2023 among the 50 states. It is very difficult for the infrastructure to keep pace with that.
I arrived in N TX in 2017. I’ve witnessed many a cow pasture converted into single family homes, apartments and strip malls. Cow gentrification is off the charts. Moo🐮!
I thought I was in agreement with Luciaphile until this last comment seems to have switch focus. While DOTs, politicians, and the public may have messed up, that's a little beyond the original scope. The point was an "if" statement. "if the interstate highway system as designed in 1956 had been completely left alone" As subsequently noted, this refers to it being an interregional transportation system, intended for transport between cities and regions, not as a local commuter route. You can agree or not but you are arguing different issues.
No. I of course hate to see what has happened to Texas, and I despair at the population growth, but in this case I blame TxDOT, bubba politicians, and greed. It has been this way all my life, compoundingly getting worse of course as everything is.
I think I see what you mean, although part of the problem also seems to be that the road capacity has not kept up with population density and transportation requirements. (Not to mention massive lack of maintenance.) Probably that is in part because localities could avoid building by relying on the interstates to provide transportation lanes, and it would have been more responsible to build what needs building to get the roads they needed instead of relying on it.
Apparently demand will also outstrip capacity in a stagnant or even shrinking community.
The difference between interregional and local transportation systems is also a lot fuzzier than theorists often think. Everywhere is X miles from somewhere else people want to go. The question then becomes one of trying to decide what places are important enough to justify exits/entrances to the interregional system. Markets are good at deciding that, because people can pay and places with enough demand can get what they need. Politics is a bad way to decide that, because places with political pull will get entrance while others will not, regardless of need.
I'm not sure what you think is fuzzy except maybe the obvious, "“It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”
Regardless, it's seems my point wasn't clear. In a growing metro area, if more capacity is added in some part of it, growth will accelerate nearby to take advantage of that added capacity.
On Gurwinder’s rules, “Choose goals” makes sense. “Choose games” does not. Better advice would be that if you start to suspect that your life choices are being made as a response to someone else’s games or incentives, take a moment to pause and reconsider.
Khan says of the Romans "this urban cultural ferment came with a punishing biological mortgage: the men and women with their fingerprints all over the world of ideas left no imprint on posterity genetically."
I say this seems to be the likely genetic future of college overeducated feminist "liberal" women who are, so often, 40+ and childless and starting to regret enjoying 20s DINK lifestyles while dating/ sleeping with lovers/ co-habiting but not having kids.
IVF won't be enough to save many, genetically.
Also no progeny to be expected by any trans folk who transitioned at or before puberty.
Demographic alarmism is far more real than climate alarmism, yet also far less catastrophic. Those who focus on marriage & having kids, will find sometime in the future, sooner or later, that society begins offering higher status, and govt offers them more bonuses.
Our culture gets more of what the govt rewards -- since the New Deal the govt has rewarded "need", which comes more often after some failure. The stupid woke exaltation of being a victim, rather than a successful, independent, empowered individual is becoming more clearly dysfunctional.
The govt should be rewarding marriage, at least to the extent that eliminate any penalty, rather than a tax paying benefit. The govt should be paying an increasing amount per child to married folks, so as to help them live more comfy middle class lives with multiple kids.
Like: $100/month per child for one child;
$200/ month per child for two kids. ($400)
$300/ m per kid for 3 ($900)
$400/ m per kid for 4 ($1600)
$500/m per kid for 5 ($2500) or more ($3k, 3.5, 4, 4.5, $5000 for 10 ).
For married folks, with their own biological kids. (Or also adopted? Foster kids?)
If we don't need more kids enough to pay for them, "we" don't need them -- but our society is better when we do have more kids AND when they are kids from married parents.
These payments seem more likely to be tried in the US than S. Korea, and they are mostly gov't carrots.
Govt sticks are also available -- after age 40, any promotion or increase in wage paid to an unmarried, childless employee is added as a company tax, to support more families.
Such a stick might well be even more important in S. Korea, where men's unwillingness to do housework or treat women well are a couple important reasons so many women don't want to get married -- as companies prioritize marred folk, there will be bigger pressure on women to marry, but even more pressure on men. This type of social pressure is the kind of thing that is most likely to support some Korean men doing housework, treating their spouse well, and getting promoted at work over the unmarried sexist grinds who thought that school was more important than getting married.
Sticks are cheaper than carrots, but more drastic - more individually costly to those feeling the lash.
In S. Korea, Seoul, Noah Smith has written a bit and it's hard to find family friendly housing, rather than 800 sq/ft small apartments. The govt can start increasing taxes on apartment owners of small only apartments, so that there is reconstruction that joins two or more small apartments into one larger family friendly place. Govt taxes can all be seen as fairly impersonal sticks against what ever is being taxed, including vices (booze, cigs, drugs) as well as income, property, even employment.
Previously I opposed such social engineering, but in small & medium doses, it seems worth trying to change behavior -- with more transparency being better than any secret loophole types.
Incentives matter. The govt should penalize bad behavior, and reward good behavior -- even more than reality already does so.
I’m was reminded of Bastiat’s seen vs. unseen when I read the Mill’s article.
What we see is carbon free solar panels on our roofs. That feels good and looks noble. What we don’t see is all of the carbon that it took to manufacture that power source.
I wonder about the carbon breakeven point for these power sources vs. their useful lives. Same goes for EVs.
“The last fact matters because of China’s 90 percent market share in producing solar silicon on its coal-fired grids. It is no exaggeration to say that the realities of solar silicon fabrication mean that solar subsidies and mandates have induced eager Californians to festoon their roofs with transmuted coal.”
"He claims that the cost of the “energy transition” away from fossil fuels has been greatly underestimated."
What was the "cost" of Apollo? Was it worth it?
How long did it take for the internet to gain widespread acceptance?
I don't think it matter how much money has been spent on energy transition to date. That's sunk cost. How much goverments should be spending on incentives is a better question but tells us very little about the future of renewable energy except how fast it might come. I don't know when or if renewables will be the primary energy source but they will surely increase in share. Prices have fallen precipitously and will continue to fall. Ignoring storage issues that only come at a much higher share, renewables are the cheapest new energy source. Rather than looking at market share, it really makes more sense to look at where new capacity is coming from. "in 2019 renewables accounted for 72 percent of all new capacity additions worldwide."
The cost of battery storage has also fallen precipitously and will surely continue to fall. It's still too high to be practical large scale but that's in part because it isn't needed as part of the grid anytime in the near future.
Cost of battery storage may be falling, but I don't think you can call it precipitously. Battery storage is still very expensive. The big problem is trying to mandate this transition to occur according to a rapid timescale. The desired transition depends on technical innovations, and you just can't schedule them. It's just not reasonable to mandate 60% electric cars by 2032, for example, because there is no way to know if the needed innovations will occur that quickly. Personally, I think it highly unlikely that they will.
"but I don't think you can call it precipitously."
Did you look at the links I included? Really?
"It's just not reasonable to mandate 60% electric cars by 2032, for example, because there is no way to know if the needed innovations will occur that quickly."
There are no needed inventions. That leaves the question of whether EVs (or plugin hybrid or something else) is something that should be mandated.
Having thought about it a little more, I think the battery price vs. time does not support what you want it to support. Eyeballing the chart, it looks like the price has gone down about a factor of 3 in the last 10 years. But the powers that be want to reorder our whole society in the next 10 to 15 years... another factor of 3, or even 10, is not going to get us there.
If "there" is energy that is carbon net zero, I would agree it's not clear we can get there. It's not clear to me how much prices need to come down but a factor of ten seems more than adequate to me for the economics to work. Either way, if the prices came way down it is still a huge job just replacing everything and it's not at all clear how quickly that could happen.
If prices don't come down I think we can still get close to halfway there in some areas, particularly the power grid and personal autos. Planes, trains, semis, and industry not easily powered by the grid may not see much change.
For what it's worth, I got solar panels on my roof last year. The Feds gave me a 30% credit and Illinois gave me almost that much. At current electric rates my payback is less than 10 years for a system warranted on parts for 25 years and the production capacity is also warranted with modest decreases. For many reasons that payback rate won't apply to every homeowner but it suggests a potential for a huge increase in solar power.
No, I hadn't. I did now, and I have to give that to you. I'm still skeptical that it will continue like that, but the graph of price over time is impressive. Thanks for that.
Do the WEF estimates consider the full cost of renewables, including storage costs? I doubt it. I wouldn't trust the World Economic Forum as a source for anything, especially with regard to energy. An evil entity.
According to a post at ZeroHedge (yes, I know some commenters here don't trust that source), Blackrock's Larry Fink talked about the future surge in power demand because of AI data centers at a WEF event (!) earlier this week and he warned that intermittent power like wind and solar cannot be used to power AI data centers and that 'dispatchable power' is required because they can't turn the data centers on and off. Now he tells us.
But if one wants to change outcomes -- faster growth, cost effective reduction of CO2 emissions, more "high quality" immigrants, more diversity of viewpoints in academia, -- why is demonizing people the best way to do that? Even where this means pointing out hypocrisy, X is giving a "good" reason for a bad policy when one believe that X's reason for favoring said policy is a "bad" reason, that need not mean daemonizing X. Or is claiming that X is motivated by a bad objective ipso facto "daemonizing?"
“I was hoping that students would remember something ten years ago, not just cram for a test.“
From a student’s perspective this could go really awesome or really awful. The above average student is having to juggle roughly 8 classes - many of which are at the AP level - in addition to those extracurriculars and having time for fun (what’s that?). It is extremely difficult to juggle all of that when each teacher wants to impart their special sauce or pet projects that won’t be on an exam.
So, how did Arnold take that into account and how did it work out?
Addendum: don’t get me wrong here. If Arnold is teaching it, then I’m in full stop. My TI-84 is booted up and ready to go. But, there are student time constraints that need to be considered as well.
Rarely do I have multiple distinct comments. Here, two.
First: Most species have population sources and sinks. They can be stable over time. This is not necessarily self-correcting or in need of correction. Typically the sources are local and sinks diffuse. In this case, we may have the inverse. It's an interesting puzzle; also because culture is running against biology in terms of sources/sinks.
Arnold
Your long term goal, a value that can’t be measured by mathematics- recalls this appeal by Solomon
“Happy is the man who finds wisdom
And the man who acquires discernment;
To gain it is better than gaining silver,
And having it as profit is better than having gold.
It is more precious than corals;
Nothing you desire can compare to it.
Long life is in its right hand;
Riches and glory are in its left hand.
Its ways are pleasant,
And all its paths are peaceful.
It is a tree of life to those who take hold of it,
And those who keep firm hold of it will be called happy.’’
Is wisdom, discernment available in the academy?
The ‘liberal arts’ so named in the middle ages to prepare for the duties of a ‘free man’.
Not for riches, status.
Looking for truth and glory of God.
Well . . . rejecting these goals hasn’t proved beneficial.
Thanks
Clay
Thinking and 'demonizing' are not different activities, really. Calling it demonizing is demonizing.
I am not sure I am following your logic here. It sounds like you are claiming that any thinking about any subject is the same as demonizing, which doesn't make sense to me. Could you please elaborate?
"meaning that the more urbanized a nation, the fewer children born per woman."
The correlation is indeed interesting and seems rather compelling but of course correlation is not causation. Anecdotally, it's my understanding that immigrant slums of roughly 1850 to 1920 included lots of children. Surely more children than the same cities of today. It makes me wonder what is going on today VS then. It seems like more than simply urbanization.
Mills doesn't mention it in his article but this, in my mind, bolsters the argument for nuclear, at least for the non-transportation slice of the energy consumption pie. When I ask Claude, transportation represents about 37% of US transportation consumption. The staggering costs to transition from hydrocarbons isn't something we ever hear policy makers talk about.
But if population density is the problem, then that is self-correcting.
Not in any easy way. The declining population coud continue to live in very dense places. This probably means that "density" is not exactly the right variable. Maybe something like cost of "family size" space/income near biologically optimum time for child bearing.
While the world would obviously be a much, almost incalculably better place if the interstate highway system as designed in 1956 had been completely left alone, and yes - frozen in amber - somebody who for example purposes, adduces the "cost" of it at $600 billion, and there's an end of it - has surely forfeited some credibility.
Which is rather cynical and silly, since obviously anything that substitutes for the bonanza of fossil fuels is going to be commensurately costly with what a bonanza it was, and will be, for years to come.
Energy is a subject not enhanced by politicization.
“While the world would obviously be a much, almost incalculably better place if the interstate highway system as designed in 1956 had been completely left alone.”
How am I going to get my cheap plastic stuff from China at the local Wally World without a sustainable trucking route? And my avocado dip from Mexico at my Trader Joe’s?
In other words, it seems like we would be a lot poorer and unhappy absent a robust and reliable transportation infrastructure system to facilitate specialization and trade. So, I’m not sure how the world would be “incalculably better” without it. Please elaborate.
I do not understand the controversy here? The least cost policy for optimizing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will imply evolution toward less use of foil fuel powered vehicles. So what? Growth continues. Goods continue to be transported
You would still get your dip - uugh - but the interstate would function as intended, an interregional transportation system, not a local one with thousands of entrances and exits and frontage roads. It's a complete mess in my region, and functions - on the days that it does, given wrecks, local congestion, and of course ten-and-twenty year-long road projects of all sorts - in essentially an opposite manner from that intended.
The reason it is probably a mess in your area is that Texas is too dang popular. In terms of population growth, it is consistently ranked in the top 5 and was numero uno in 2023 among the 50 states. It is very difficult for the infrastructure to keep pace with that.
I arrived in N TX in 2017. I’ve witnessed many a cow pasture converted into single family homes, apartments and strip malls. Cow gentrification is off the charts. Moo🐮!
I thought I was in agreement with Luciaphile until this last comment seems to have switch focus. While DOTs, politicians, and the public may have messed up, that's a little beyond the original scope. The point was an "if" statement. "if the interstate highway system as designed in 1956 had been completely left alone" As subsequently noted, this refers to it being an interregional transportation system, intended for transport between cities and regions, not as a local commuter route. You can agree or not but you are arguing different issues.
No. I of course hate to see what has happened to Texas, and I despair at the population growth, but in this case I blame TxDOT, bubba politicians, and greed. It has been this way all my life, compoundingly getting worse of course as everything is.
I think I see what you mean, although part of the problem also seems to be that the road capacity has not kept up with population density and transportation requirements. (Not to mention massive lack of maintenance.) Probably that is in part because localities could avoid building by relying on the interstates to provide transportation lanes, and it would have been more responsible to build what needs building to get the roads they needed instead of relying on it.
interregional transportation system vs local commuter.
In a robust and growing community, demand will always outstrip capacity.
Apparently demand will also outstrip capacity in a stagnant or even shrinking community.
The difference between interregional and local transportation systems is also a lot fuzzier than theorists often think. Everywhere is X miles from somewhere else people want to go. The question then becomes one of trying to decide what places are important enough to justify exits/entrances to the interregional system. Markets are good at deciding that, because people can pay and places with enough demand can get what they need. Politics is a bad way to decide that, because places with political pull will get entrance while others will not, regardless of need.
I'm not sure what you think is fuzzy except maybe the obvious, "“It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”
Regardless, it's seems my point wasn't clear. In a growing metro area, if more capacity is added in some part of it, growth will accelerate nearby to take advantage of that added capacity.
On Gurwinder’s rules, “Choose goals” makes sense. “Choose games” does not. Better advice would be that if you start to suspect that your life choices are being made as a response to someone else’s games or incentives, take a moment to pause and reconsider.
Khan says of the Romans "this urban cultural ferment came with a punishing biological mortgage: the men and women with their fingerprints all over the world of ideas left no imprint on posterity genetically."
I say this seems to be the likely genetic future of college overeducated feminist "liberal" women who are, so often, 40+ and childless and starting to regret enjoying 20s DINK lifestyles while dating/ sleeping with lovers/ co-habiting but not having kids.
IVF won't be enough to save many, genetically.
Also no progeny to be expected by any trans folk who transitioned at or before puberty.
Demographic alarmism is far more real than climate alarmism, yet also far less catastrophic. Those who focus on marriage & having kids, will find sometime in the future, sooner or later, that society begins offering higher status, and govt offers them more bonuses.
Our culture gets more of what the govt rewards -- since the New Deal the govt has rewarded "need", which comes more often after some failure. The stupid woke exaltation of being a victim, rather than a successful, independent, empowered individual is becoming more clearly dysfunctional.
The govt should be rewarding marriage, at least to the extent that eliminate any penalty, rather than a tax paying benefit. The govt should be paying an increasing amount per child to married folks, so as to help them live more comfy middle class lives with multiple kids.
Like: $100/month per child for one child;
$200/ month per child for two kids. ($400)
$300/ m per kid for 3 ($900)
$400/ m per kid for 4 ($1600)
$500/m per kid for 5 ($2500) or more ($3k, 3.5, 4, 4.5, $5000 for 10 ).
For married folks, with their own biological kids. (Or also adopted? Foster kids?)
If we don't need more kids enough to pay for them, "we" don't need them -- but our society is better when we do have more kids AND when they are kids from married parents.
These payments seem more likely to be tried in the US than S. Korea, and they are mostly gov't carrots.
Govt sticks are also available -- after age 40, any promotion or increase in wage paid to an unmarried, childless employee is added as a company tax, to support more families.
Such a stick might well be even more important in S. Korea, where men's unwillingness to do housework or treat women well are a couple important reasons so many women don't want to get married -- as companies prioritize marred folk, there will be bigger pressure on women to marry, but even more pressure on men. This type of social pressure is the kind of thing that is most likely to support some Korean men doing housework, treating their spouse well, and getting promoted at work over the unmarried sexist grinds who thought that school was more important than getting married.
Sticks are cheaper than carrots, but more drastic - more individually costly to those feeling the lash.
In S. Korea, Seoul, Noah Smith has written a bit and it's hard to find family friendly housing, rather than 800 sq/ft small apartments. The govt can start increasing taxes on apartment owners of small only apartments, so that there is reconstruction that joins two or more small apartments into one larger family friendly place. Govt taxes can all be seen as fairly impersonal sticks against what ever is being taxed, including vices (booze, cigs, drugs) as well as income, property, even employment.
Previously I opposed such social engineering, but in small & medium doses, it seems worth trying to change behavior -- with more transparency being better than any secret loophole types.
Incentives matter. The govt should penalize bad behavior, and reward good behavior -- even more than reality already does so.
I’m was reminded of Bastiat’s seen vs. unseen when I read the Mill’s article.
What we see is carbon free solar panels on our roofs. That feels good and looks noble. What we don’t see is all of the carbon that it took to manufacture that power source.
I wonder about the carbon breakeven point for these power sources vs. their useful lives. Same goes for EVs.
“The last fact matters because of China’s 90 percent market share in producing solar silicon on its coal-fired grids. It is no exaggeration to say that the realities of solar silicon fabrication mean that solar subsidies and mandates have induced eager Californians to festoon their roofs with transmuted coal.”
Is there a good summary of your TLP framework somewhere? (I did google it, found references to it but not really an explanation)
Brief summary and links to the free version (pdf, epub or mobi) are here:
https://www.cato.org/three-languages-of-politics
Another summary here:
https://www.whatyouwilllearn.com/book/the-3-languages-of-politics/
Thank you. Not sure why I didn't turn up that 2nd link which is obviously what I was looking for. I guess I missed the pdf at the bottom of the first.
Your assistance is much appreciated
"He claims that the cost of the “energy transition” away from fossil fuels has been greatly underestimated."
What was the "cost" of Apollo? Was it worth it?
How long did it take for the internet to gain widespread acceptance?
I don't think it matter how much money has been spent on energy transition to date. That's sunk cost. How much goverments should be spending on incentives is a better question but tells us very little about the future of renewable energy except how fast it might come. I don't know when or if renewables will be the primary energy source but they will surely increase in share. Prices have fallen precipitously and will continue to fall. Ignoring storage issues that only come at a much higher share, renewables are the cheapest new energy source. Rather than looking at market share, it really makes more sense to look at where new capacity is coming from. "in 2019 renewables accounted for 72 percent of all new capacity additions worldwide."
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/renewable-energy-cost-fallen/
The cost of battery storage has also fallen precipitously and will surely continue to fall. It's still too high to be practical large scale but that's in part because it isn't needed as part of the grid anytime in the near future.
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
https://www.statista.com/statistics/883118/global-lithium-ion-battery-pack-costs/
Cost of battery storage may be falling, but I don't think you can call it precipitously. Battery storage is still very expensive. The big problem is trying to mandate this transition to occur according to a rapid timescale. The desired transition depends on technical innovations, and you just can't schedule them. It's just not reasonable to mandate 60% electric cars by 2032, for example, because there is no way to know if the needed innovations will occur that quickly. Personally, I think it highly unlikely that they will.
"Battery storage is still very expensive."
Not sure your point since I said nearly the same.
"but I don't think you can call it precipitously."
Did you look at the links I included? Really?
"It's just not reasonable to mandate 60% electric cars by 2032, for example, because there is no way to know if the needed innovations will occur that quickly."
There are no needed inventions. That leaves the question of whether EVs (or plugin hybrid or something else) is something that should be mandated.
Having thought about it a little more, I think the battery price vs. time does not support what you want it to support. Eyeballing the chart, it looks like the price has gone down about a factor of 3 in the last 10 years. But the powers that be want to reorder our whole society in the next 10 to 15 years... another factor of 3, or even 10, is not going to get us there.
If "there" is energy that is carbon net zero, I would agree it's not clear we can get there. It's not clear to me how much prices need to come down but a factor of ten seems more than adequate to me for the economics to work. Either way, if the prices came way down it is still a huge job just replacing everything and it's not at all clear how quickly that could happen.
If prices don't come down I think we can still get close to halfway there in some areas, particularly the power grid and personal autos. Planes, trains, semis, and industry not easily powered by the grid may not see much change.
For what it's worth, I got solar panels on my roof last year. The Feds gave me a 30% credit and Illinois gave me almost that much. At current electric rates my payback is less than 10 years for a system warranted on parts for 25 years and the production capacity is also warranted with modest decreases. For many reasons that payback rate won't apply to every homeowner but it suggests a potential for a huge increase in solar power.
"Did you look at the links I included?"
No, I hadn't. I did now, and I have to give that to you. I'm still skeptical that it will continue like that, but the graph of price over time is impressive. Thanks for that.
Here's a recent useful critique of solar from economist Craig Pirrong, with a sub-link to a critical analysis of battery storage: https://streetwiseprofessor.com/learning-by-doing-in-solar-even-if-proven-would-not-imply-solar-was-subsidized-too-little-too-late/
Do the WEF estimates consider the full cost of renewables, including storage costs? I doubt it. I wouldn't trust the World Economic Forum as a source for anything, especially with regard to energy. An evil entity.
Thanks for the link. A piece referenced in that one has a useful discussion of electricity storage for renewables in the power grid: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/04/28/a-shockingly-inept-report-from-the-iea-on-battery-storage-of-energy/ . Among other things, it gives an idea of the sheer scale of the problem.
According to a post at ZeroHedge (yes, I know some commenters here don't trust that source), Blackrock's Larry Fink talked about the future surge in power demand because of AI data centers at a WEF event (!) earlier this week and he warned that intermittent power like wind and solar cannot be used to power AI data centers and that 'dispatchable power' is required because they can't turn the data centers on and off. Now he tells us.
But if one wants to change outcomes -- faster growth, cost effective reduction of CO2 emissions, more "high quality" immigrants, more diversity of viewpoints in academia, -- why is demonizing people the best way to do that? Even where this means pointing out hypocrisy, X is giving a "good" reason for a bad policy when one believe that X's reason for favoring said policy is a "bad" reason, that need not mean daemonizing X. Or is claiming that X is motivated by a bad objective ipso facto "daemonizing?"
On Mark Mills, significant research has been made in lowering the energy cost to produce photovoltaics and steel:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2024/03/how-to-escape-from-the-iron-age/ Electric arc furnaces use significantly less electricity (in the joules equivalent of combustion) than coal furnaces.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352484722008915 Selenium's melting point /annealing temp is 200 C, compared to 1414C for Silicon. Furthermore, manufacturing efficiency and solar conversion of Se is
improving: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsaem.3c01464
I am grateful to my teachers for playing long games. I continue to "learn" from think I heard 60-7- years ago!
“I was hoping that students would remember something ten years ago, not just cram for a test.“
From a student’s perspective this could go really awesome or really awful. The above average student is having to juggle roughly 8 classes - many of which are at the AP level - in addition to those extracurriculars and having time for fun (what’s that?). It is extremely difficult to juggle all of that when each teacher wants to impart their special sauce or pet projects that won’t be on an exam.
So, how did Arnold take that into account and how did it work out?
Addendum: don’t get me wrong here. If Arnold is teaching it, then I’m in full stop. My TI-84 is booted up and ready to go. But, there are student time constraints that need to be considered as well.
Rarely do I have multiple distinct comments. Here, two.
First: Most species have population sources and sinks. They can be stable over time. This is not necessarily self-correcting or in need of correction. Typically the sources are local and sinks diffuse. In this case, we may have the inverse. It's an interesting puzzle; also because culture is running against biology in terms of sources/sinks.