Unfortunately China's solar PV roll-out is is forecast to dramatically slow (and is already doing-so) due to elimination of a guaranteed buy-price for solar PV electricity on the Chinese grid about 6 months ago. Fortunately the PV already installed will keep generating for 20+ years, so that's not all bad, and PV module prices have already fallen on the world market as a result. PV+Battery combos will hopefully ramp up in the next few years in response to the policy change. Also hopefully China's massive PV manufacturing capacity will start flowing to the developing world to avoid increased emissions there. e.g. see "Redefining Energy" podcast episode 203.

This is due to natural systems not being able to absorb as much of human emissions as they did in the past. For the sake of argument, if we stopped all emissions today, then CO2 levels will still fall, just not as fast as if we stopped all emissions 10 years ago. We're not into "positive feedback" of CO2 levels, we are just into reduced "negative feedback".

'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.

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:

https://ember-climate.org/proj...

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.