Yeah. I couldn't help when I read the statement by the spokesperson talking back to them in my head to point out that they are talking about pesticides. i.e. substances that kill pests through ingestion or contact. Also known as poisons. Targeted poisons, sure, but poisons nonetheless. In fact, I can't help thinking about DDT and why that was such an issue. It was precisely the same potential problem as here, it persisted in the environment without breaking down easily. Of course DDT had Chlorine instead of Fluorine. They're both halogens though. So, the more I think about it, the more this seems like DDT all over again, but possibly worse.

Completely agree. Captain Planet is a prime example, but there are so many examples of fictional villains that I used to think of as childishly unrealistic. They were not just comically evil, but pointlessly comically evil. These days I have had to seriously rethink that opinion.

If you mean by drawing some geometric shape around all of the wind turbines in a farm and then dividing the total power output by the area of that shape, I've already pointed out that it's nonsense. You also ignored the "means what in real world terms" part. Maybe you're not just selectively editing that out and you didn't know what I meant. To elaborate, the point is what is the actual significance of that number? What is the real world relationship between that number and, for example, how densely you can pack the wind turbines, or how much total available energy you can practically harvest, etc.? Why and how is this meaningful?

MacKay uses plenty of numbers, some are pretty wildly off, some are ballpark, some are accurate. He could hardly get away with fudging absolutely everything. There are plenty of parts where he didn't really need to, for example where he talked about efficiency in transportation. I will note of course that, even in that section, his numbers on, for example, electric cars do not match the performance of modern EVs because, once again, his data is old. He was writing using data that was, at best, as recent as 2007. I tried to find some data on EV car sales over time going back that far, but the best I could easily find was back to 2014 when worldwide BEV sales were ostensibly 108X less than 2024, except that it appears the 2014 numbers were being rounded up to the nearest 0.1 million, so it's probably even more. He devotes plenty of time to hydrogen as a vehicle fuel. Critically, which maybe could be considered prescient, but the point is that today, hydrogen as a vehicle fuel is still a non-starter, so all of that is outdated. His estimate of world lithium reserves is a factor of 3X lower than current estimates. Overall, yes, the numbers, other data and understanding of the energy situation are out of date in his book since they are about two decades old

I explicitly pointed out though that the actual performance of wind turbines has not changed by a lot (although it has changed). My point about MacKay's book is that there are numerous reasons to avoid it as a source because of the outdated information and the errors, whether they are accidental or due to bias and intellectual dishonesty. If you need to use a source, use modern primary sources. You have already demonstrated that you can. You also have not addressed the question of whether the numbers have any meaning. Where his numbers were not wildly off, MacKay threw in a lot of "assumptions" that were pretty obviously cherry picked. He seems to arbitrarily decide how much land use is acceptable specifically to make it work out so that he could demonstrate in graphs that renewables are not able to produce enough power to meet the needs of the UK. How does that meaningfully apply to offshore wind today.

I will note also that you have not addressed the fact that you appear to have been conflating wind power per unit area in the vertical plane with wind turbine power generation by unit of horizontal area (whether or not you're basing that number on a method that is in large part arbitrary).

What are you talking about? In what way were they "fine"? Why are you pretending that you even addressed the fudged numbers? Current UK primary power needs work out to an average production of around 220 GW (164.4 million tones of oil equivalent per year at 11,630 kWh per ton of oil equivalent divided by 365.2422, divided by 24, then divided by 1 million to convert kW to GW). 195 kWh per person per day works out, with a population of 69.718 million to about 566 GW (195 kWh times 69.718 million divided by 24 hours, then divided by 1 million to convert kW to GW). MacKay's number is over by a factor of about 2.6X. How exactly is that "fine"?

As for the other factor that you say is "fine" that you have not actually addressed, it's the method of determining power density per unit of ground area for wind plants. Why is your crude geometric method of drawing a perimeter around the wind farm and dividing the total power produced by that method remotely valid given the confounding factors I have mentioned? You did not remotely address them, but you are acting as if you somehow not only addressed them, but as if you somehow proved their irrelevance? You seem to have skipped some steps.

Look, once again, you can make whatever argument you want about wind turbines and I can address it on the merits. If you use MacKay's book as the source though, you're going to end up having to defend your source. You should just use a modern primary source instead. MacKay's book is not academically rigorous (there's an extensive bibliography, for example, but next to no in-text citations), not properly peer reviewed, clearly biased (during the sections on nuclear power, he treats criticisms of nuclear power like personal insults). It has a pretension towards being neutral and factual to the degree that it puts on airs of being the only source that actually bothers using arithmetic and analysis to examine power issues. It is outdated. It has been critically reviewed with the numerous problems pointed out many times. MacKay himself, towards the end of his life, started abandoning the pretense and making his pro-nuclear bias abundantly clear.

Which is measured how and actually means what in real world terms? The point of using it in his book was to tell the reader that a renewable uses X amount of land and that nuclear only uses some fraction of X land, therefore nuclear is better while ignoring that the land can be used for multiple purposes at the same time. He may well have had reasonable numbers for some things, but he fudged numbers for a lot of other things, so he's not a reliable source. Also, it makes no sense whatsoever for you to have used his book as a resource in the first place when you have actual, up to date references.

What land area? Are you simply ignoring that the wind farm does not actually consume the land between the limited footprints of the actual towers? It can still be farmed on, lived on, have factories built on it, have a solar farm built on it, etc., etc., etc.

Ok....? If I build four nuclear 1 GWe plants and call it a nuclear farm and build them in a square configuration with one at each corner and the linear distance of the sides of the square is about 200 km, then the Watts per square meter is You need to leave space between turbines...

Uh, yeah, of course you do. The point is that the wind turbines don't consume that space. The thing is, I'm not sure anyone in this discussion is talking about the same thing. For example, earlier in the conversation, you note that you think the w/m^2 in that article are high and you then cite MacKay. The problem is, MacKay is talking about land area, whereas the article you were criticizing there was clear that it was talking about the area of the VERTICAL PLANE (not yelling, just for emphasis). You're comparing apples and oranges and citing an old and clearly biased source. MacKay may have been a good with computer science, but the details of his career indicate that he was intellectually dishonest when it comes to energy in order to push his own agenda. The book and other details make it appear, from my opinion, that his intention was always to give lip service to renewables, but only to develop a following that he could then steer to the conclusion that only nuclear energy could work. Citing his book hurts anyone's argument for me. Why even cite him when you could have gone with primary sources?

Well, there was quite a lot of hot air in there really, both figuratively and literally since he was clearly a closet nuclear shill.

Well, technically, it has changed at the Earth's surface due to reduction in certain types of pollution. For all intents and purposes I suppose we can say it has not though.

Well, the change you state there is a 25% increase, so that's nothing to sneeze at. The panels have also certainly become cheaper.

Anyway, in the end, I stand by what I said, you selected, quite unnecessarily, a biased source that many have held up to a rigorous analysis and found lacking.

Which figures? Land usage figures? Because that is mostly what he focuses on and he exaggerates the land usage of wind turbines to a fantastical degree, pinning it at 2 Watts per square meter. Obviously this is off by orders of magnitude and is a manipulated figure obtained by using the entire land area of a wind farm rather than just the land area that a turbine takes up, ignoring the fact that wind farms don't consume the land they sit on except at the very base of the tower. For a back of the envelope calculation, consider a 6 MW nameplate turbine that, with a standard capacity factor, produces 2 MW. Even if you consider the base to be as wide as the blades (which is not even realistic since you can pretty much use the land right to the actual bottom of the steel tower one way or another), that would be about 18,626 square meters for a 154 meter wide set of blades. That would be around 107 Watts per square meter even then, which is a good deal more than an order of magnitude larger than MacKay's numbers. If you use a realistic idea of the land area taken up, which would be inside the diameter of the blades, the number would be at least two orders of magnitude larger than MacKay's numbers.

At the same time, MacKay uses over-generous numbers to make the land footprint of a nuclear plant smaller than it really is when you consider external factors like the uranium mining land use, offsite processing facilities, watershed area, time issues, etc. MacKay is clearly using land area as the most important criteria in the first place in an attempt to favor nuclear and also clearly fudging his numbers to make it look as good as possible.

He also estimates that every person in the UK uses about 195 kWh per day. Then he stacks that up against his estimate of how much could possibly be generated in Britain and, oh no, the stack for renewable power generation comes up short. Now, this is primary power, not just electrical usage, to be clear. Even then though, that is too high. Going by current primary power figures for Britain of 164.4 tonnes of oil equivalent and a population of 69.718 million, it comes out for me to around 75 kWh per day per person. Now, maybe that's him being dishonest, or maybe it's just the fact that, as I mentioned, he is working with outdated information. Or, possibly the stats I can find on primary power usage in the UK are off, but I checked two sources and they seem to check out within about 10 kWh of each other.

As for technological changes, solar cells have become more efficient and much cheaper. While there is not a lot of room for improvement in the efficiency of turbines, wind turbines have improved in various ways. One of the changes is for them to trend larger so that they capture more wind in one spot. Basically there have been various changes that enlarge the stack of power that can be generated.

To re-iterate, the data in MacKay's book, aside from other problems, is simply outdated.

You were implying a repeating pattern, but not actually identifying any repeating pattern.

Average US household drives 14,200 miles per year. That's 37.88 miles per day. The average EV gets around 3.5 miles to the kWh. That's about 11 kWh per day (ugh, technically three time units that should be cancelling each other there, that's why I hate kWh as a measure). The average us household uses 30 kWh of electricity per day. So, the increase to power EVs would be about 36.7%. Sure, it's an increase, but it's not some fantastical number. Also, it's weird how you're acting as if power generation is some sort of zero-sum game. It's simple economics, if there is a demand, supply is increased to meet it. Also, that additional demand for EVs can also be met just from reducing wasted power from households. It is notable that power usage in many developed countries is more like 20 kWh per day per household. So just some basic increases in energy efficiency in the US would provide enough surplus to meet the EV demand.

For starters, people who want to electrify everything in order to be more environmentally sound tend to want to use renewables for power. Aside from that, if a combined cycle gas plant is 60% efficient and that power runs a 400% efficient heat pump, then that's a 2.4X reduction in the amount of natural gas that would otherwise be needed to heat the home.

That is clearly not what you said. You clearly talked about clear cutting forests for GE crops and data centers. In any case, you don't need to clear cut forests for solar farms, there are plenty of unforested areas to put them in, and climates that are good for forests are not always the best for solar farms anyway. Regarding your math with numbers pulled out of nowhere like 10GW, 500W per square meter of panel (pretty extraordinary since that would need to be a record breaking 50% efficient panel) and 20 billion panels... ??? 20 billion 500W panels would generate 10 TeraWatts. I mean, if you want to make a mathematical argument, use actual numbers and actual math.

Which, while bad, has nothing to do with EVs and fossil fuels.

Does it not ever occur to you that we in the US might actually LIKE/ENJOY the transportation system we have?

There seems to be plenty of demand for more transport alternatives in the US. For the project in California, that we're talking about here, two thirds of the population are in favour. The issue isn't that people don't want it, the issue is that you're seemingly incapable of building it.

You prioritize the 'state'. And we prioritize the person.

No you don't, you prioritise profits over everything. This is demonstrated by your incredibly weak worker protection, weak privacy laws, insane healthcare system that just funnels money into the insurance cartel, and numerous other things. You don't prioritise people at all.

Isaac Asimov wasn't trying to design a blueprint for the future when he wrote The Fun They Had.

We see these ideas that are obviously nonsense all the time. This one has been picked apart by multiple people with industry experience already.

What these things are is essentially the venture capital version of the scam mails you get in your mailbox every day. If you make it big enough and insane enough, someone with more money than brains will think he spotted an opportunity that everyone else missed and will invest.

Why is it, you think, that 99% of these things vanish without a trace after an initial storm of publicity?

NeXTStep did allow you to write image filters to add support for image formats to all applications. Mac OS X inherited this feature, although I think it stopped working at some point. I released free Mac OS X image filters for HP 49G GROB and Sony PlayStation TIM formats back in the day.

Because the US is either uniquely corrupt or uniquely incompetent.

High-speed rail was pioneered by France and Japan. Well, you can say they're both countries with proud engineering culture that felt they had something to prove. Then Germany got on board. Well they're another country known for engineering. Fair enough.

But now you have China, known more for bureaucracy and corruption than anything else, with the most extensive high-speed rail network in the world. Spain also has an extensive high-speed rail network, and they aren't one of the first countries you think of when it comes to capital works, either.

The US has no excuse. The only reason the US can't do it is corruption and/or incompetence.

Sure. So do fairy dust and unicorn farts. Just as soon as we have the fairy dust harvesting operations and unicorn fart extractors up and running - oh, and solve the pesky problem of capturing magical creatures - and actually establish even a basic baseline of the real cost, they will clearly outcompete renewables. That seems to be your argument in a nutshell.

So, you're not even hand waving away all the technical problems with fusion reactors (beyond the ones I myself ignored such as actually getting a stable, repeatable breakeven reaction to work in the first place), but simply completely ignoring that I even mentioned them? Name-dropping the concept of economy of scale does not explain how fundamental issues will be solved. If you're going to be honest about this at all, then you need to actually address how those problems will be solved. Just mentioning Helion and CFS and claiming that their existence proves that they have solved these problems is nuts. Seriously, Helion was supposed to have net energy 8/9 years ago and a working 50 MWe plant 6 years ago. Where are they now? CFS does not appear to be outright lying about their timeline in the same way as Helion obviously is, but they are clearly still overly optimistic. Their plan for shielding the gear used to generate the magnetic shielding is a "molten salt blanket". It seems like a pure fantasy to believe that electronics won't be burned out beyond repair every few months or less. It is hard to believe there could possibly be an operational cost per unit of heat that would be lower than a fission reactor and, once again, the rest of the plant will still need to be a giant steam engine.

Basically, you're just fantasizing about possible future technology. All well and good, but there are certain technologies we have now and for possible future technologies, there are varying degrees of probability of their success. Holding out for what is currently just science fiction will not help us now. Calling me -- the one advocating for basing energy policy on systems that actually exist in the here and now -- nuts seems deeply ironic here.

Well, to be fair, one of the reasons they maybe don't explain things so well is that their plan is basically to "blot out the sun". Basically, they plain to stain the sky so that less sun will get through. While, yes, this would reduce temperatures on Earth, it would also dim the sun, which means that, among other issues, agricultural land will become less productive. They obviously don't want to go into the consequences of that or who will pay for the damages to every farmer on Earth.

First, how is any of that the "same old song and dance"? When has this played out before in history?

As far as EV's go, there is no real issue with producing enough power to operate an EV. If there were, then there would be an equally as large or larger problem with fueling up an equivalent ICEV. There's no whining involved, it's just basic supply and demand economics.

As for natural gas, most people are not dumb enough to not realize it is a fossil fuel. Electric heating for homes using heat pumps is vastly more efficient than any form of fossil fuel heating, including gas. Electric cooking is also considerably more efficient than gas cooking with the right equipment.

As for the bit about clear cutting forests for genetically engineered crops and data centers.... You really lost me there. What does that have to do with the topic? How do you think in any way that there is any significant overlap between people who want renewable power and those who want to clear cut forests to plant GE crops and put up data centers?

No, no! Don't forget, they hand waved in "... combined with a type of fusion..." to the process, explaining where the extra energy comes from. I mean, it is complete and utter nonsense since there seems to be no conceivable way that human beings would ever need to be a mediator for the energy in that case. For me, I simply head canon that into the notion that nearly everyone, humans and machines alike simply believes a bunch of lies about what is really going on. I mean, it fits the general theme of reality not being what you think it is, and the rest of the movies have plenty of support for the idea that few really understand what is actually going on (for example the revelation that even the humans who have "escaped' the Matrix are still just pawns of a larger system and that the oldest escaped humans know it).