Warmer earth = more icecap melt = more freshwater. Warmer earth = larger temperate zones = more food production. More CO2 = more vegetation growth = more food production.
The only thing stopping food production and access to drinking water is militaristic governmental controls. Free societies don't seem to have these problems.
Also, this year there is a proportional assignment of delegates based on the percent of vote received. Iowa has a total of 26 delegates, and 1,144 are needed to win the party nomination. At 1/26, there can be as much as 4% error in the vote and it shouldn't affect the delegate ratios.
CNN lists the following delegate votes:
80 percent of the earth's crust is underwater, and animal/vegetable live exists everywhere in the ocean at all depths. There may be more hydrocarbons under the ocean floor than all the oil ever drilled to date, it's just out of reach with current tech. As the tech improves, so does the oil supply, and that's why we won't run out of oil, period. Besides, the US is rapidly converting to natural gas, which used to be burned as waste from oil production. In 10 years, solar wind and storage will have matured to be cost competitive. We will be ok.
These people need to understand the technological revolution of the last 20 years has changed the value equation for content creators. When anyone can blog, the value of a journalist drops. When anyone can film on their phone and post it to YouTube, a studio has to work harder (competition), and the value of a movie distribution system drops. When anyone can write a story, make an ebook and sell it on Amazon or the Apple Store, then the value of a writer goes down.
"Everyone can be super! And when everyone's super, no-one will be." -- The Incredibles
No, they don't "leak" like transistor gate current or capacitor voltage. Googling around, NiCad batteries have a charge decay of over 2 months (full to empty), but my experience is that almost all electric car batteries are now lithium based, which doesn't appear to have this issue. The Chevy Volt, Toyota Prius, Toyota Highlander all use lithium-ion. Bulk-electric batteries that I've seen are lithium titanate, sodium sulfur, and some weird lead variants.
Battery charge is usually measured by efficiency, which for lithium-ion is about 90%. For every 1 W that you draw from the grid to charge the battery, on average 0.9 W can be discharged to do work (this ratio is actually temperature dependent, cooler = more efficient). The rate of charge (& discharge) / minute does decay over time because of impurities in the anodes, and the total capacity to hold charge decays over time.
The Free Market *always* works when all of the externalities are accounted for, i.e. how do you make the price of energy from coal and other forms of power include the "phantom" effects of pollution? Today, those costs are not priced into production, because noone knows how to value the impacts of putting CO2, SOX, NOX into the atmosphere... However, Solyndra noted there is a cost to production (cheaper to make them in China), and not enough demand (over-supply of solar panels).
Society is still arguing over what the "value to society" is for green energy production. If the value of green is "nothing", i.e. that global warming is heliocentric, then Solyndra and companies like them are peddling expensive products that noone wants to buy, and noone needs to buy. If the value of green energy is "nationalistic", then the value is getting off of foreign oil to local production, then the argument is still about what energy source is the cheapest, and solar loses. If the value of green energy is "lower polution", then you can get a lot more bang for the buck by getting rid of coal and moving to cheaper natural gas. If the value of green energy is "no polution", then we should be investing more money in battery technologies.
The information I have is that they did bring mobile generators to the site.
* Fukushima Dai-ichi units 1, 2 & 3 successfully shut down when the plant lost off-site power during the earthquake. Units 4, 5 & 6 were already offline for maintenance.
* On-site diesel backups successfully engaged to continue the cooling process, but the diesels were knocked offline when seawater from the tsunami flooded the fuel tanks. They got about an hour of cooling before these diesels were ruined.
* At that point, an backup battery supply engaged, and ran for about 8 hours before it was depleted. This is 2x the average capacity of the battery backup system at an American nuclear power plant.
* Meanwhile, they did get mobile diesels brought in, but the were only able to generate enough power to stabilize units 2 & 3. Unit 1 lost cooling water, and in 4 hours they were forced to vent the built up hydrogen gas.
* I found some discussion that the coolant pumps require 5 MW to power, which a generator at 100,000 lbs is above what even a US chopper could airlift. This is why the helicopters were focusing on transporting coolant (seawater).
* The issue then was they were physically leaking coolant water, and the rods were exposed at units 1 & 4. The exposed rods resulted in hydrogen explosions (which is what all the videos show).
* The transco's goal was to get off-site power restored, which was basically rebuilding the transmission line to a neighboring plant. It took 6 days to get it restrung.
Yes, it was that cut off.
This appears to be a very informative article. I did not know that the batteries were actually the 4th backup system:
http://www.backsidesmack.com/2011/03/explaining-the-fukushima-1-incident/
Larry Ellison of Oracle once told Netscape's board that his cat could write a web browser. Microsoft popped out Internet Explorer later that year.
Yes, and the combustion engine automobile was invented in 1862, but wasn't available to the general public at a low price point until 1903. Do we remember Lenoir, or Carhart, or the Duryea brothers? No, we remember Ford, who built the assembly line process that standardized and cheapened the production of automobiles.
The robotics field needs this jump to standardization of components, APIs and functionality. Yes, academia is coming up with designs all of the time, but each one is custom hardware & software, akin to Professor Carhart's steam-powered automobile in 1871. After that, it needs to move into the consumer markets, where the masses can tinker, hack and tweak the designs to add functionality, and truly innovate.
They were trying to fast-track the approval of the bill in the House, which required a 2/3rds vote. However, a handful of the Tea Party Republicans actually listened to their constituents and voted no. Now the bill goes back to the committee, where it will return to the floor for deliberations (which means actually discussing what's in the bill) then a simple majority (1/2 approves) vote to pass.
The public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble. -- Thomas Carlyle