Here’s an interesting piece on a land owner who has combined solar PV with vegetable farming. Obviously, every photon that hits a solar panel is one fewer that helps the plants to photosynthesize. But if you have a crop that doesn’t require full sun, and you don’t mind the inconvenience that may accompany planting, harvesting, and irrigation, you do have the advantage of requiring less water–by a factor of 50%, the author claims.
From this:
GLASGOW, Scotland — International negotiators approved a climate agreement at the COP26 summit Saturday that calls for reductions in coal and fossil fuel use and transition to renewables — a first in the more than 25-year history of UN climate talks. (more…)
A reader sent me the question above and speculates: Once you give that sick type of person attention they can’t live with less. They freak out without it!
That’s a solid answer, but there is another. At this point, Trump understands that maintaining popularity is the only thing that will prevent his going to prison. If he can return to the White House he may even try to pardon himself. At least he’ll have executive privilege and other kinds of power to protect himself and foil attempts to prosecute him. Even if he never wins public office again, the Justice Department might think twice about taking actions that will send tens of millions of hateful idiots into hysterics.
Another way to answer the question is to look at the media. If they would simply stop covering him, he’d become irrelevant more or less immediately.
Why does anyone care what Trump will say in a speech on Veterans Day? We already know that he’s a draft-dodger who has nothing but contempt for U.S. military personnel, that he bypassed the Marine Corps’ justice system and pardoned war criminals, and that he thinks our generals are incompetent. Do we really need to hand him a microphone and let him carry on about how much better a president he was than Biden?
Just shut him up.
We’d all like to think so. Merrick Garland has come under a great deal of pressure for his silence over these past few weeks, and most of America would love to believe that all this time was somehow required to indict Steve Bannon. (more…)
This isn’t impossible by any means, but it sure doesn’t seem likely. Think of all the trends that need to be reversed before something like that could come to pass.
Let’s start with climate change and its ramifications. Suppose we’re unable to curtail emissions because the oil companies ultimately prove unstoppable, more methane is released from melting permafrost, ocean acidification proceeds to kill all aquatic animals except jellyfish, the rise of sea-levels continues to accelerate primarily due to ice melting in Greenland and Antarctica, large masses of arable land become deserts, food and potable water shortages become common, and insect-carried diseases spread uncontrollably due to lengthening growing seasons and fewer killing frosts. (more…)
Here’s a conversation I have with my mom sometimes. As a Republican, she doesn’t think management should be forced to pay higher minimum wages.
That’s fine until you realize that the burden is then shifted from people like the Walton family (net worth $238 billion) to you and me, i.e., taxpayers.
Here’s a short BBC video that presents what the island of Eigg, in the Scottish Inner Hebrides, has done to establish a microgrid using hydrokinetics, wind, and solar PV. Prior to its establishment, each house had its own generator that ran on fossil fuels, and only at night.
Everyone’s thrilled with the new microgrid, so much so that they like to show it off to visitors from foreign countries, who may be trying to figure out how this can be done in their own lands. (more…)
You couldn’t invent a stronger criminal case for election tampering than what Trump probably did in Georgia.
Let’s roll.
Obviously, I don’t wish this kind of harm on anyone, and it would be best if these idiots would simply accept the science.
Having said that, 800 deaths per day means about 300,000 per year. That’s a significant loss of Trump supporters.
If taking up more space were the only negative influence that humankind was having on the planet, we’d probably be OK. There are ~25 billion square miles of land on Earth; that’s 3 square miles (1920 acres) for every man, woman, and child. Moreover, we could prohibit development in regions that are rich in wildlife.
Our issues are more about what humans are doing: emitting greenhouse gases, creating toxic waste, sending plastics into the oceans, and so forth.
And that’s on the physical side. On the political side, we’re electing would-be dictators. We need to cut that out.
