The simple things like scrubbers and better controls bringing India's electrical generation plants up to 1990s western standards would be a start.

The big urban coal electrical generation plants have been upgraded with pollution controls that have been mandatory in the west since the 1990s.

The same scrubbers that were put on coal power plants in the 1980s in the west have been introduced to specific places in china.

Half off is expensive after a technology sector bust, my example is post 2000 and 2008 , expect 5 cents on the dollar on everything from Core Switches to $400 desk chairs. Getting the most supportable 2 or 4 U servers filled with DDR5 and rugged laptops are already on my doomsday shopping list. A 16 to 32 core server with 256G of ram is useful at almost any speed at the right price, lets face it the world is tied together with code that does not need ultimate performance. Unfortunately that used server was 500 bucks a year ago, now it is 2000 bucks. To be any sort of hotness the min price went from 2.5k to 10k.

What I cannot convince the local luddites is that we are on the same tune as 90 years ago. Tremendous investment in machine tools did wonders for the US economy 1942-1992, the further replacements revolutionized manufacturing across the western world. Last I knew RAM was not a consumable resource if not ran out of spec. It 95% likely those sticks will work next year. The hyperscalars knowing RAM is now expensive will make a point of harvesting ram of the technologies that roll off from 5 years ago and this era will fade away and price per performance will go back to the historical trend of cheaper and cheaper. SSD and Spinning HD lifetimes will be stretched, 3 year old drives still have insane densities in ways that were not true 20 years ago. Storage, Highly cached or in a frozen in stone state, if it be in the cloud or local is likely to get cheaper when our cloud friends discover they have to much of it and it is time to show cashflow of a few dimes per Terabyte Month. What we are discovering that instead of storing security video it might be cheaper for AI to filter only the interesting parts. There is no lack of datacenter rack volume, there is no lack of data center connectivity, power per compute is nosediving with every generation of AI, distributed, ARM, IOT. The only thing in technology seems to be cell towers that can hold barn door sized 5G arrays. That infrastructure seems to be limited by tower climbers calendars.

Thing about a coal plant, it is dirt cheap to convert into a NG fired plant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The spinning mass of multiple 200MW turbine is valuable to every power grid in being a giant very short term buffer to sag. The excuse for the plant, is the coal firing. You need 40 tons kept up to speed in sych with the power grid either way, and coal in the situations they build the plant are cheap and keep another group work. Same way as western PA has coal plants, it is just our politicians are more stupid and thought they did not need voters in western PA. Opps.

It would be put to the property owners insurance policy if it was non trivial to pursue damages unless the operator was also under a real estate lease agreement that covers Daman age to common spaces and things. The property owners insurance policy company many go after the drone operator, the drone operators insurance policy will offer a fair settlement because anything under 15k is not worthy of more than angry letters. The whole point of drone operations that the damage is always less than can be caused by a contractor on a e-bike and to keep the terminal velocity and kinetic energy about the same as a kicked soccer ball, hurts but isnt deadly.

A Tesla is Conservative Dog Whistle now, and I am putting a shot gun rack in mine.

With enough chips in enough data centers, the only electricity that is going to be used in mass is at the bottom of the price schedule. I don't know about you but low latency and AI are not something I think of in the same order of magnitude. As an AI power user, I want cheap reasonable results from wherever power is in surplus at that moment.

Without requiring solar plus storage this result was clear over 2 decades ago when photovoltaic generation was 5 times more expensive per watt and storage was 20 times more expensive per watt hour. What is the cheapest rapid response solution to keep the grid stable as you pull coal fired revisors of massive amounts of throttleable steam offline, simple gas fired turbine pants. The greens can complain that the rated capacity is increasing but looking at the EIA charts of the USA, your average gas fired plant is doing anything other than being reactive spinning mass for 240 to 700 hours a year. Don't make a perfect soliton the enemy of the good enough for now, coal in most markets is gone, unless your making steel at the same time.

You can see the results in the upper Midwest, large bodies of glacier water with a surface layer replaced by rain every year. If the globe is hotter their is more rain. This is southwestern city dweller USA problem, the rest of the USA needs to deal with flood water.

You mean a affordable rapidly reusable heavy lift craft with a range of 25 to 100 tons to LEO with a payload fraction about 5x larger than shuttle, and about 1/25th the program cost to the government, yeah the starship technology just might fit the bill.

Remember when this site was for nerds who knew the basics instead of re enforcement by repetition of "science" media. Doom and gloom use to sell advertising, now the echo's of past training continues on.

Be super productive and your energy use rises also.

A single sector as an example.

It is harvest time in the upper half of the united states, the average farmer burns about 5.2KG of fossils fuels to produce 50KG of corn from opening the field to the local sale point. Another 2.5KG of fossil fuels is burnt to deliver it to the ports, and another half KG to deliver to international markets, before similar amounts of energy are used on transport to get it to foreign end users.

For that effort the farmer is rewarded the cash ebullient of 9KG of fuel, with that they have to upgrade and maintain their land, pay taxes, machines and pay themselves for the effort. 83% of farming is direct or indirect fuel costs (fertilizer is just another fuel), add another 10 for source materials and seed IP that is also largely past fuel consumption. Some of the most productive food growing in the united states is counted as per capita fuel consumption by Americans when 15% is shipped away as grain and another 5% to 10% is shipped away as manufactured products. If there were a more efficient way to produce food, the corporate farmers would have already adopted it.

Think as you grow up and learn how the world works, you will find when people are paying the energy bill vs paying themselves they do typically make their efforts as efficient as they can. You will also figure out the marketing, logistics and local packaging has more to do with end user cost than what is immediately visible.