China is burning and mining more coal than the rest of the world put together.

Its emitting about 12 billion metric tons of CO2 annually. That is a bit under one third of the global total.

It is financing and building coal fired generation plants all over the world.

The US is emitting 5 billion metric tons of CO2 annually.

That is less than half what the Chinese are emitting.

Wake up!

"The results are a wake-up call, and its imperative that they be included in the next generation of climate policies," he added. "Failure to do so will make meeting the worlds climate goals less and less likely."

The world has no climate goals nor any policies either. You have the COPs, which most of the high emitting and fastest growing emitters attend with the sole purpose of preventing them from reaching any agreement on stopping growing or reducing. In which they have been very successful over the years.

Then you have some Western countries adopting what they try and position as national action plans. However these plans never address the total of even national emissions - the only thing they propose is to build wind and solar generation of electricity, which is a minority of emissions. The proposals also, while they are sold as net zero, in fact do not go near eliminating even all local emissions from power generation.

And even if they did, the countries doing this only account for a tiny percentage of total global emissions.

I read these pieces containing comments like the one quoted at the head of this comment and shake my head. These people are living in a dream world - the world in which sending tens of thousands of people to the COPs every couple of years to decide nothing is supposed to be making some difference to the worlds climate and weather.

In the real world the furthest advanced on thee national plan of moving to an electric society powered by wind and solar is the UK, and its failing. They are incurring huge costs to bring the generated wind power from the north coast of Scotland to where demand is, in the south and Midlands. They have no plans for dealing with intermittency of the resulting supply other than gas plants. The cost estimates for the transmission are rising ominously. People are not buying heat pumps anyway. Their latest effort to deal with the so called migration is to allow for the electricity companies to do rolling blackouts. Its beoming an election issue and net zero will not survive the next couple of elections.

As I keep saying, people need to wake up. If its really true that human emissions are going to bring about a climate crisis, get ready, because its coming. There is no realistic prospect of the world reducing its emissions. China etc are growing their economies as fast as they can, and letting the emissions go where they may. The UK is demonstrating that the plan of moving to wind and solar, and to EVs and heat pumps, will not happen and is anyway not affordable, and even were it to be afforded and done, it would only drop global emissions by a fraction of 1% - an amount China makes up by a couple months of growth.

The usual suspects will mark this post as trolling, but its not, its just the view any rational person will come to when looking at the facts of this matter. I am not persuaded there is any existential climate crisis from emissions. But suppose there is, there is certainly no rational global plan to lower them, and this is the point people need to start from. If you cannot get the Chinese to commit to lowering their emissions by 80%, which you cannot, then start preparing for whatever you think continuously rising emissions will lead to. Because its coming, and expensive programs which are no more than feelgoodery will not help.

Passkeys are by _definition_ moveable, so they can't be rooted in hardware. You can use WebAuthn to create device-rooted keys that never live the hardened secure enclave.

It will strike everyone as very puzzling. After all, everyone on slashdot and Ars Technica knows that wind and solar are far cheaper than nuclear and just as reliable. So why on earth is Google looking into nukes? Why do they not just build a huge wind farm, throw in a few batteries, and get unlimited cheap power?

Because the wind and the sun are free, after all. But instead they seem to be resorting to a ridiculously expensive nuke, and then on top of that, where you have to pay for the fuel, I mean, someone has to dig the stuff up and refine it. Whereas the wind just blows and the sun just shines, so they obviously are cheaper.

They have accountants and lots of MBAa, so they must see this, so the question is why they are going against what their analyses must show them. If it was coal or gas we would know, they were in thrall to the fossil fuel industry. But is there a nuke lobby, and are they not bigger than it anyway.

Help me understand this! Its a great mystery. Unless I have missed something. But what could that be? I mean, it cannot be that wind and solar plus a few batteries are actually more expensive, could it?

Are they making anything, anyway? Their food delivery website is a disaster, and it's been getting worse. The ride-hailing app has also not changed in years.

I like using less common English words. But now everyone just assumes that it's all Claude :(

Yes, but the study seems to be comparing two groups where there is no reason to think anything else changed. The British diet didn't change in other ways after 1953, the only real difference was that sugar rationing had ended. At least, that would be the claim.

Nostalgia is all very well, but it was not a very healthy diet, lots of white bread, margarine, overcooked and limited number of vegetables. It was eaten in a more disciplined way - before or after 1953 children would not go to the larder or fridge and help themselves. Meals were eaten at mealtimes, with minimal snacking.

There are not very many people alive now who remember those days, but if you can find one and talk to them you get a picture of life which makes it plausible that the change in sugar rationing was a key variable. Other things mentioned, like activity, yes they were very different from now, but they did not change much in 1953, whereas sugar did.

As always no numbers, and argument on an engineering topic which is at the level of literary criticism.

to make the case you need to take a specific system where there is data available, and show that your argument applies there.

The most accessible in a few clicks is the UK. Go to www.gridwatch.co.uk for graphics. If you want the csv data free get it from www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk. Do the work and you will see that in winter there is peak demand of a bit under 50GW and that solar is basically non-existent from about 22GW faceplate. A function mainly of latitude with a contribution from weather. You will also see that there are in most winters periods of a week or ten days when wind generates less than 3GW from faceplate installed base of about 32GW. So what we have here is peak demand with peak low output from wind and solar.

In summer on the other hand you have peak solar and long days, but summer is not when you get peak demand.

What's the result of all this? Its that if you want to supply 50GW peak you have to have more than 50GW gas generation. But having it, you then only use it for part of the time, because part of the time you have wind and solar peaking. Something else also happens, at peak production, which does not coincide with peak demand and often in summer coincides with low demand, you have to turn off the wind.

The UK, if government plans work out, is going to end up with around 200GW of generating capacity to supply about 60GW of peak demand. And in operational terms, its constructing huge amounts of generating capacity off the north coast of Scotland or similar inhospitable places distant from demand. Then it constructs hugely expensive transmission links to bring this generated power to where its needed. It also builds gas to cover calms and nights.

So the result is, it pays people to install wind, then it pays them not to generate from it. Then it pays others to install gas and generate from it in the timesa when the guys its paying not to generate comply and turn off. The result of this is the highest electricity prices in the industrialized countries - and no, I am not spoon feeding you numbers, llook it up for yourself!. And it is only getting worse. The more wind they install, the more they have to pay to turn off, and however much wind they install the lows are still going to need gas to cover. The same thing applies to solar. It doesn't matter how much you install, at 5pm on a January evening, its going to be producing zero.

What you can see from the UK is that the attempt to move to 'renewables' is an attempt to do the impossible. Its trying to run a country's electricity supply with technologies that are guaranteed to have peaks of production which coincide with lows of demand, and lows of production that coincide with peaks of demand. It is not working, and as the proportion of wind and solar rises its going to get worse.

All this is happening with the background of the program to move to EVs and heat pumps. And they also have the fantasy of a huge data center industry. Right, with expensive and unreliable electricity? Because they have also just empowered the network operator to do rolling blackouts, which they call 'demand management'.

This is what happens when you have people with degrees in literature or media studies or some kind of vague social subjects enthusiastically trying to run the power generation for an industrial economy, and having no idea how to plan and no concept of engineering. They just keep saying that the wind and sun are free - as if that had any bearing. And they keep applauding whenever wind and solar reach a peak of a day or a week or month, not seeing that that is part of the problem and not part of any solution.

Get some numbers and do some work. And read the Royal Society's report on electricity storage, which blows the idea that batteries are the answer into the air.

They don't need to be.

The thousand-men armies scanning books get the books by buying them by the pallet load. It's stuff that nobody really wants, like old technical books that are out of date, self-published books, etc.

If the book was actually valuable you wouldn't expect the seller to sell it for dirt cheap.

Except that App Store is now mandatory for any business app.

Agreed. It should be more like $25. $100 is _way_ too much.

Also don't forget having to use Apple hardware to do the development.

You would expect the same thing with tournament chess players who spend hours working hard at trying to calculate and visualize move possibilities. The process has something in common with navigation. It does involve pattern recognition also, but there is a strong element of navigation.

An interesting comparison would be with tournament bridge players who calculate but probably don't visualize in the same way. (Can't say for sure as I have only played bridge a few times, years ago.)

The hypothesis would be that spatial navigation effort safeguards, and the prediction would be that chess players will have lower rates of Alzheimers than bridge players.

I'm a citizen of a democracy, and vote on energy policy and the directors of it both locally and nationally and am in that role fully entitled to opinions on both. With or without a PhD.

And when I look at the data of wind generation in the UK what I see is blackouts coming towards the country. I do not see, and you do not explain, how a couple of GW of wind power generation during a calm is going to supply 10s of GW of demand. I do not see any plans in the UK for any measures that will fill the gap.

I am not alone. From the UK Telegraph today:
_________________________
Measures that came into effect this week give the National Energy System Operator (Neso) the authority to tackle electricity shortages with rolling power cuts around the country.
Each area would have its power switched off for three hours at a time. Neso would have to give just eight hoursâ(TM) notice to use the so-called demand control rotation protocol.
The new measures, first reported by The Guardian, are designed to bridge a gap between Nesoâ(TM)s current emergency powers and rolling-blackout plans that require government approval.
Currently, the UKâ(TM)s electricity supply emergency code, a national plan of energy rationing, can only be triggered by ministers and requires emergency legislation.
It is intended for prolonged national crises lasting more than 24 hours.
Neso, meanwhile, has the ability to disconnect up to 20pc of power at five minutesâ(TM) notice in the face of imminent system collapse, such as the nationwide shutdown seen in Spain in 2025.
Under the updated rules, Neso can activate rolling local blackouts without political approval.
___________________________

This post is not flamebait. Its sincerely held rational opinions based on the facts of the UK experience, backed up by the data readily available from gridwatch or gridwatch.templar, I understand that people would like desperately for wind to be a viable technology for industrial societies, but the verdict is coming in from the gigantic experiment, and it just isn't.

What dooms it is intermittency. Well, and high costs too.

Just look at the results of the latest UK wind auctions, and look at the estimates for building transmission capacity from the north coast of Scotland (where the turbines are) to the Midlands and South where demand is. Look at constraint payments. Look at gridwatch to see what all this is delivering. Read the Royal Society report to see what the best UK minds can come up with regarding storage.

It isn't working and it isn't going to work. Folks, you need to get out of denial and look at the facts of experience!

If they are trying to run the country on wind and solar, then on a winter evening when there is the usual blocking high and wind calm, and no solar generation, your UK friends will be trying to supply 45GW (or north of 60GW if they manage to convert everyone to EVs and heat pumps) while having only about 10GW generation. Assuming they manage to get around 100GW of wind installed, which is a real question also.

Don't believe me? Look at gridwatch. Lows from 30GW face plate wind can go as low as 0.5GW. Can be below 5GW for a week or ten days at a time.

And this is going to continue for a week or ten days, as it does almost every winter.

By day two they will not be discussing the difference between stocks and flows. They'll be discussing