'number of EVs sold across Europe "fell by 3% to 3 million during 2024'
This was because Germany (roughly the EV largest market) ended subsidies in Dec 2023 causing a significant drop there.. Sales grew in many countries including France, UK, Netherlands.
Not only do batteries contain a minuscule amount of PFAS compared to the scale of the problem, but the PFAS are not released into the environment during use, recycling, or even landfilling. It's not like we grind them up and toss them in the nearest creek.
Unfortunately in the case of disposable single-use vapes, this is pretty much what happens, these use NMC Lithium ION - nuts as that sounds - I've literally picked up hundreds of these from the local area. The solution in this case is to ban disposable vapes (or introduce a mandatory significant deposit on them) and the EU and UK are doing this fortunately. Similarly for non-disposable vapes the battery containing parts may need a deposit).
Alberta electricity generation sources (2019): 9% low carbon
Alberta electricity generation sources (2023): 19% low carbon
source: electricitymaps.com (open source app showing realtime and historic data for global electricity generation).
BTW, the last coal plant on the Great Britain grid is scheduled to close in September.
GB electricity generation sources (2019): 52% low carbon
GB electricity generation sources (2023): 62% low carbon
Whether gas is actually better than coal is all down to relative amount of fugitive methane emissions (from extraction of both). e.g. Emission of unburnt methane from Australian coal and gas extraction has been estimated to account for over half of the country's total GHG emissions.
R290 (Propane) refrigerant air-cons and heatpumps are legal in the EU subject to certain air volume restrictions (ratio of total system gas to room air volume). In practise this limits its use to mini-splits, and monoblocs (the later all refrigerant is kept outdoors). Same goes for India I think.
A disposable vape ban is planned EU-wide in 2026. Member countries are free to ban them earlier e.g. France Dec 2023, other countries including Ireland are likely to bring in a ban sooner. Even the UK govt is making noises, but hasn't announced anything yet.
Fun fact - disposable vapes use fully rechargeable lithium ion battery cells. The battery cells contain fluorinated hydrocarbons (including yer good old PFAS "forever chemicals"), as well as metals like nickel and cobalt.
Lithium ion batteries are capable of 100s to 1000s of cycles. These get 1.
But the vape manufacturers ensure they only use batteries made from ethically sources cobalt, right?
I'd be amazed if 5% of them get recycled. In the past couple of years I have literally picked up hundreds of these off the ground.
They're happy to prosecute, but less quick to comply with the GPL. e.g. No GPL code (Linux kernel, Uboot etc.) is available for the Unifi 6 LR, and no answer to emails chasing them (just a single "I will provide the download links shortly" well over 30 days ago - which is the time limit in the GPL). This is by no means the first time that this has happened either...
"Do you have any idea how big of a generator you're going to need?"
That depends on how leaky your building fabric is.
I'm not in NY, but max heat demand for our house (retrofitted 1920s brick constructions with a family of 4) is 2 kW (-5C outside, 21C inside).
I know NY gets colder, but it should also be pretty easy to get better building fabric performance for a new build (which is what we're talking about here) than I get for our 1920s house.
Let's be pessimistic and say I heat it with a heat pump which only achieves a CoP of 2.0 under those conditions. Let's also ignore incidental thermal gains (100 watts per waking human).
Total electrical power to run the heat pump would be 1 kW.
Doesn't sound like a monster gen-set to me.
Don't want to maintain a genny? I could run that (vehicle to load) from an electric car battery for 3 days. If I drop the set point temperature, reduce the ventilation rate and decide to stop heating the lowest floor, I could stretch that to over a week.
That's assuming no other significant loads, but also assuming no generation from the 4kWp solar PV I have on site (if you're not fitting PV to a new build, then that seems nuts).
Next on the list should be single use lithium ion battery vape pens. These are disposable and non-rechargeable, but they include non-removable lithium ion or lipo batteries (you know, the type that contain rare minerals, and are capable of hundreds of charges).
These are sold in the UK by their millions are end up discarded as litter everywhere.
Toxic components include:
Lithiumhexafluorophosphate
Ethylene carbonate
Diethyl carbonate
Vinylene carbonate
Polyvinylidene fluoride
Bruce Schneier (author of many books on crypto and security - including "Practical Cryptography" and "Secrets and Lies") said a lot of the same things on The Changelog podcast a couple of days ago: https://changelog.com/podcast/...
In a set of comments starting at 17m 30s : e.g. "the whole blockchain is largely a myth for most users" "the notion that it's private isn't true, bitcoin is built on a whole bunch of lies".
A good write-up on this can be found on the Ember website:
There is a competing fusion startup called "Tokamak Energy", aiming to produce a similar high-temperature superconductor small Tokamak (but using a spherical tokamak geometry). The company is a de-facto spin-off from the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (Oxfordshire, UK).
Tokamak Energy announced a 24.4T field at 21K with a REBCO HTS engineering test magnet during September 2019.
They have some technical detail available in various videos on their YouTube channel.
Announcement video was titled "HTS progress announcement - 20T magnet", but there are other magnet videos on their channel.
That's fine, I have a 25 hour body clock anyway, and it'll eventually sync us up with the Martians.
At the moment the vaccine rollout is supply-constrained, so by not getting a vaccine when offered you are giving up your place in the line.
Once the vaccines are no longer supply-constrained, then you will mostly be putting yourself at additional risk by not being vaccinated, but you will also put others at a small additional risk by volunteering to be a host for SARS-CoV-2, with the associated risks:
. Passing it on to someone who is unable to be vaccinated (directly or indirectly via your onward infection chain).
. Acting as a host in which the virus gains an advantageous mutation.
If you don't get the vaccine then at some point you will very likely be infected with SARS-CoV-2, it seems pretty clear looking at the data which is more risky (by a large margin), so I decided to go for a vaccination.
rdedup supports encryption (including public key), compression and deduplication.
We are experiencing system trouble -- do not adjust your terminal.
