Democrat 2020

[Husar]

But I don't think you can meet 21st century earth's power needs on renenwables alone. Haven't done the order of magnitude calculations on latest efficiencies in wind turbine and solar cell technologies though.

I'f I remember correctly, you could power the entire US with solar plants in a fraction of the Nevada desert and Europe from the Sahara desert.

https://www.inverse.com/article/3423...-power-the-usa

Solar panels in the sense of ones that produce energy directly, aren't even the best method. If you just use mirrors to heat oil in pipes and then use that heat to generate energy, you can also store some of the heat in sand tanks for use at night, without requiring lots of batteries.
For europe, there was/is the idea of Desertec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec, this also includes a map for how much space you need to supply the world, Europe, etc (in 2005, but there is plenty of space for growth). The biggest issue appears to be finance because capitalists probably don't expect too many returns from energy that is basically available for free in the long term or just shy away from the huge investment in the beginning if they already have plenty of profitable power plants...

The idea to power Europe from the Sahara desert already existed before WW1, but was shafted during the war, when oil became the fuel of choice due to convenience in wartime...

The only thing stopping us in the end is the will to actually do it.

[Tuuvi]

I'f I remember correctly, you could power the entire US with solar plants in a fraction of the Nevada desert and Europe from the Sahara desert.

https://www.inverse.com/article/3423...-power-the-usa

Solar panels in the sense of ones that produce energy directly, aren't even the best method. If you just use mirrors to heat oil in pipes and then use that heat to generate energy, you can also store some of the heat in sand tanks for use at night, without requiring lots of batteries.
For europe, there was/is the idea of Desertec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec, this also includes a map for how much space you need to supply the world, Europe, etc (in 2005, but there is plenty of space for growth). The biggest issue appears to be finance because capitalists probably don't expect too many returns from energy that is basically available for free in the long term or just shy away from the huge investment in the beginning if they already have plenty of profitable power plants...

The idea to power Europe from the Sahara desert already existed before WW1, but was shafted during the war, when oil became the fuel of choice due to convenience in wartime...

The only thing stopping us in the end is the will to actually do it.

One problem with solar and other renewable energy sources is that they require rare earth metals to manufacture, and the mining and extraction of these metals is itself environmentally destructive and energy intensive. Then you have to factor in the manufacturing and shipping of the panels themselves which also uses a great deal of energy. Solar panels also only last 30 years or so before they have to be replaced, which means this process has to be repeated over and over again. Renewable energy technology as it currently exists just isn't enough to fully meet our energy demands.

I listened to a podcast yesterday that lays out the deficiencies of renewable energy sources that I thought was interesting:
https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-...wable-problems

[Husar]

One problem with solar and other renewable energy sources is that they require rare earth metals to manufacture, and the mining and extraction of these metals is itself environmentally destructive and energy intensive. Then you have to factor in the manufacturing and shipping of the panels themselves which also uses a great deal of energy. Solar panels also only last 30 years or so before they have to be replaced, which means this process has to be repeated over and over again. Renewable energy technology as it currently exists just isn't enough to fully meet our energy demands.

I listened to a podcast yesterday that lays out the deficiencies of renewable energy sources that I thought was interesting:
https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-...wable-problems

Well, well, well. What do we have here? Someone smearing all over MY idea (just kidding!).

Actually no, if you look at the Wikipedia article that I linked for Desertec, you might note that one of the maps further down shows a lot of power plants in the Sahara desert called "Concentrating Solar Power". These are not your standard photovoltaic panels with rare earth metals. They are far more...simple... They're basically just concave mirrors that concentrate the light onto a pipe with a fluid, usually some kind of oil. The heat in the oil is then used to generate electricity or it can be stored for use at night. Apparently this is one of the most often overlooked solar technologies that comes with few if any drawbacks when deployed in a sunny desert. It's probably not very useful when you deploy it in the nebulous, rainy UK, but nobody is suggesting that either.
https://cleantechnica.com/2013/06/14...aves-humanity/

When environmental and economic benefits are added, CSP’s superiority over fossil fuels and other renewables really come into focus. CAP notes that CSP plant components are largely sourced from common materials like steel and glass, unlike solar PV panels, which depend upon rare earths and volatile global supply chains.

[Montmorency]

Former Clinton Treasury official/"neoliberal shill" now in favor of leftward Democratic realignment

“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

We were certainly wrong, 100 percent, on the politics.

Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy. He’s all these things not because the technocrats in his administration think they’re the best possible policies, but because [White House adviser] David Axelrod and company say they poll well.

And [Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel and company say we’ve got to build bridges to the Republicans. We’ve got to let Republicans amend cap and trade up the wazoo, we’ve got to let Republicans amend the [Affordable Care Act] up the wazoo before it comes up to a final vote, we’ve got to tread very lightly with finance on Dodd-Frank, we have to do a very premature pivot away from recession recovery to “entitlement reform.”

A bunch of policies that depended on there being a political-economic consensus to support them, as part of a broad agreement about America’s direction, are a lot worse as policies if that political-economic underpinning is not there. There also are a bunch of lessons about how policies that we thought are going to be very effective are rather less effective.

That’s the political level and on the policy level. We tried to do health reform the Republicans’ way ,and what’s now clear with a Republican Supreme Court and with a lot of Republican governors, any attempt to do it the Republicans’ way is going to get shredded. We tried to do climate policy the Republicans’ way, and got nowhere.

Until something non-rubble-ish is built in the Republican center, what might be good incremental policies just cannot be successfully implemented in an America as we know it today. We need Medicare-for-all, funded by a carbon tax, with a whole bunch of UBI rebates for the poor and public investment in green technologies.

That’s the best policy given the political-economic context. If the political-economic context were different — well, I’m fundamentally a neoliberal shill. It is very nice to use market means to social democratic ends when they are more effective, and they often are.

I’d say we learned more about the world.

I could be confident in 2005 that [recession] stabilization should be the responsibility of the Federal Reserve. That you look at something like laser-eye surgery or rapid technological progress in hearing aids, you can kind of think that keeping a market in the most innovative parts of health care would be a good thing. So something like an insurance-plus-exchange system would be a good thing to have in America as a whole.

It’s much harder to believe in those things now. That’s one part of it. The world appears to be more like what lefties thought it was than what I thought it was for the last 10 or 15 years.

Loyal opposition