I too missed the transcript link. It's not exactly that noticeable. And I too find the current trend of "putting everything in a needlessly long, unskimmable video" highly annoying.

I personally feel the solution to the "exporting pollution to other countries" problem is PAT - Pollution-Added Tax, implemented in exactly the same manner as VAT except for taxing the pollution emitted during that stage of manufacturing (based on a standardized set of rates) rather than value added at that stage. "Pollution" being everything from arsenic dumped into rivers to carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere. Just like VAT, goods produced outside the PAT zone would get PAT levied upon import, and goods inside the PAT zone would get rebate upon export - hence, there's no "I can make goods cheaper by producing them somewhere with little environmental controls" advantage. And because we know that VAT is legal and functional in today's global environment, we can be comfortable that PAT would be as well.

That would be because the problem was by and large resolved.

Metal prices can fluctuate by several orders of magnitude in the short term. They can fluctuate to a moderate degree in the mid-term. But the long-term trend of metals as a whole is almost always downward (excepting "investment metals", which are inherently distorted by investors). There's no shortage of anything in the crust. The crust is unimaginably massive. It's always a question of what you've found, what extraction processes you've gotten mature enough to compete, and what infrastructure you've actually built. As a general rule, most resource "reserves" rise over time, not drop, because each tech advancement tends to put exponentially more resource into play.

Corr: That should read "more than that for mined coal", not less.

Until you can "STORE" the power the fucking windmills and solar shit are just subsidy milking machines.

You mean by, say, drawing more from Ontario's 8.5 GW of hydro capacity during low-renewables times times and less during high times? Something along those lines?

(and not to mention, those plants were designed for relatively constant use... you can upgrade the powerhouses without having to rebuild the dams (aka, at a very low cost per MW) to be able to give significantly higher peak outputs if you ever decide you need them)

Actually, FYI, nuclear only makes up 41% of Ontario's generation mix. And you have more than enough hydro to keep the lights on during still overcast days.

Think 24/7 heavy truck traffic, seemingly random road closures to move turbines/blades that were never communicated to the locals

Oh, you poor baby, you had to live near a construction zone! Nobody else on earth has ever had to deal with that hardship, clearly!

huge amounts of deforestation (nine thousand acres worth)

First off, this is a lie. The whole wind farm is 9000 acres, but the turbines and surface roads only take up a tiny fraction of that land. If you zoom out your linked map a couple clicks, you can't even make out a difference from the surrounding landscape.

But hey, let's just ignore reality and pretend that they marched in and bulldozed flat 9000 acres, ripped up all the ground and dumped it into the streams for 141 megawatts that will be maintained for, oh let's say 50 years with a 35% capacity factor. So about 2 GWh of electricty per acre of bulldozed land, which is less than that for mined coal. Except that coal fully bulldozes (nay, outright excavates to great depth) its land in reality, not fiction, and what they excavate either goes into overburden heaps, is purposefully dumped into streams, or is coal that is burned, creating massive amounts of fly ash and clinker to be retained (at great environmental cost) and massive amounts of emitted pollution into the air (at even greater environmental cost).

In reality, that wind farm and its access roads is taking up, what, perhaps 4% of that area? So something like 50 GWh of electricity per acre.

But oh hey, it's not in your backyard, so you couldn't care less! And hey, it has a few slowly blinking red lights at night, clearly that's so much more of an eyesore than a damn coal mine!

Let's contrast that to nuclear power, the cutting edge of 1950s technology: Nine Mile Point [wikipedia.org] occupies 10% of that footprint (900 acres), hosts a second power station [wikipedia.org] on the property and between the two can generate 2,599 megawatts 24/7/365 regardless of the weather.

First off, false. Nuclear power plants have higher capacity factors but they do not have 100% capacity factor.

Secondly, you forgot to account for mining. Uranium mining has a significantly smaller footprint than coal mining per unit generation, but it's still a significant area due to the fact that they're mining for a fuel found in ppm quantities - and of the uranium they mine, U235 is only 0,7%, even of that they don't get all of it, and of that that goes into the fuel rods, only part of it gets consumed. Wind still wins on a real-world footprint comparison.

Third, uranium mines, being mines targetted at heavy metal extraction, generally have a far more profound impact on their local environments than coal mines on an acre-per-acre basis (coal mines only win on destruction due to their sheer size).

Fourth, you didn't account for reprocessing / long term storage.

Fifth, you didn't account for the consequences on rivers for dumping nearly two gigawatts of waste heat into them.

Sixth, most studies pin nuclear at significantly more expensive than wind per kWh. And wind prices are falling while nuclear has been rising.

Lastly, most people's opposition to nuclear has nothing to do with any of the above, so you're not even started getting into the reason why many people don't like it.

I guarantee your share the distribution infrastructure and other capital/maintenance costs you're relying on to keep the lights on at night costs a *lot* more than $400 per year. If you live in town, your neighbors are probably subsidizing your decision to the tune of about $600 a year. If you're in the countryside, the subsidy is probably more like $1600.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I think solar deserves subsidy, to encourage the transition, and that the subsidy pays for itself with better air quality for all. But I think you should see it for what it is.

Second. I've twice visited a wind farms on a windy day out of curiosity. My findings were:

1) The whoosh is surprisingly little. In a video I took, the wind noise on the camera drowned out the whoosh of the turbine, you can't even hear it.

2) The things are rather awe-inspiring up close, like watching a jumbo jet rotate over your head

3) I can see why most farmers love the things, their footprint is tiny and they can keep farming around them (the access roads take up a lot more space than the turbines), so it's little financial lost but big rental fees.

Solar's not plug-and-play either. No matter how you set things up, when you're dealing with power to your home, you need a licensed electrician to make your connections. The only plug-and-play I can envision that wouldn't require an electrician would be a literal plug-in battery backup, which you plug into the wall and then plug a power strip into. But it'd only power the devices on that power strip, of course.

Or are you talking about a drop-in home solution that's plug-and-play except for the need to have an electrician make the final connections? There are some fairly simple home backup systems out there. But no matter how you slice it, home backup power is rather expensive.

How much is the connection fee compared to a typical electricity bill? I'm betting it's just some trivial bookkeeping thing, not a full infrastructure cost accounting. As a general rule, the distribution infrastructure is nearly as expensive as the marginal per-kilowatt generation cost - less in cities, more in the countryside. A person with a net-metering of zero should have an electricity bill in the ballpark of half that of a typical household (less in-town, more in the countryside).

Everything you wrote is irrelevant. If they're running your meter forward when you buy and backward when you sell, then you're getting the same price for purchase and sale. If you use X kilowatts and sell X kilowatts, in most places with net metering, your bill is free, or nearly so. THis should not be, because you're still moving a lot of power back and forth over a lot of expensive hardware, and relying on very expensive infrastructure to ensure that you stay powered at night. All of this hardware costs about as much in terms of amortized capital costs and ongoing maintenance costs as the actual generation of electricity at a power plant. You should be responsible for bearing your share of this cost.

People should agree to accept responsibility for their share of the infrastructure costs, infrastructure that they're clearly using just as much if not more than other customers, and instead argue on other issues that could benefit them, such as time-of-use valuation of electricity.

if something happens to the connection on my line I typically have to pay for it

I am, of course, obviously not talking about the couple dozen meters of wire from your house to the grid. I'm talking about the grid itself. If you want to disconnect your home's grid connection from the grid, by all means, you should then be under no obligation to pay for grid construction and maintenance. But as long as you want to use it, you should be paying for it.

Where are you getting wholesale vs. retail? I said "actual market price". Same price figure whether you're buying or selling. Or if you're talking about existing net metering implementations, perhaps there are some out there that charge different rates for buying and selling, but I've never run into such companies. The typical use case is simply a "run the meter backwards when they sell, forwards when they buy" calculation.

So since it's clearly no big deal, no different from working at MacDonalds, who's the last guy who bought your a** and what'd you think of the f***?

Prostitution is something by and large that people turn to when they're starving and they can't get that job at MacDonalds or in a coal mine. If they even had a choice in the matter, versus people who are trafficked (and yes, trafficking is a very big thing - especially in Europe, where I am).

See above. I live in Iceland. There is no relevant "conservative puritanical" element here. Our previous prime minister was a lesbian and it didn't even factor into the campaign. Gay pride is one of our country's largest annual festivals, attended by nearly a third of the population (big family event). There's pretty much no such thing as dating without sleeping with someone, it's an alien concept. The typical way people get together here is to meet (usually while drunk), sleep together, get to know each other while sleeping together more in subsequent days / weeks, and then they may actually start going out on "dates" and sleeping with others becomes frowned upon. When a couple has been together for a long time, people don't start asking "when are you going to get married", it's "when are you going to have kids". 80-90% of first children are born out of wedlock, 60-70% of children all together. Sex is a complete non-issue here - it's pretty much just expected that if you're an adult, you're sleeping with someone, and people really don't give a rat's arse.

And it's still a big f*ing issue for someone to decide to sell themselves. Yeah, come on over here and lecture my friend about how it's no big deal, no different from going to work. You think he hasn't been trying really f'ing hard to get regular work and doesn't really f'ing want a regular job instead? But oh no, going and whoring yourself to strangers is totally the same thing! Why, I'm sure you do it for spending money after work, right? Because it's totally no big deal, right? Who's the last guy who bought you? What'd you think of the f***?