The EU had an 8% decline in emissions last year.

The US peaked at 23.1 tonnes of carbon emissions per capita in 1973. It came off that peak but stayed pretty flat through 2007 or so, at 20.2 tonnes per person. Since then, it’s steadily come down, and is now at about 14.9.

There’s still a long way to go, but the 35% reduction that the US has already accomplished shows that it’s possible to keep making progress.

Yeah, the IRA and Infrastructure Bill steer about $67 billion to railways, $80 billion to transit systems. And even though a lot of the other spending goes towards the status quo of car-based passenger transportation, electrifying that will go a long way towards reducing carbon emissions.

And there are some more ambitious ideas baked in, too: redesigning cities to require less car infrastructure and overall energy use, etc.

I thought it was a big deal when passed and honestly can’t understand why people who care about climate don’t acknowledge just how big of a deal it was (and how devastating that so much of the money authorized will now be in control of a Trump administration).

The Inflation Reduction Act included $65 million in research grants for low emission aviation and $245 million in development of biofuel based Sustainable Aviation Fuel (aka SAF). And the $3 billion in loan guarantees for manufacturing advanced vehicle technologies included certain aircraft.

There were also $5 billion in loan guarantees for shutting down our heaviest polluting power plants or retooling them to greener generation methods.

There was $3 billion in buying zero emissions vehicles and charging infrastructure for the postal service.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which inherited a lot of the stuff from the Green New Deal, was a lot of things, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called deeply unserious before today.

I haven’t combed through the data in a minute, but I want to also say that they’re also leading in fossil fuel deployment too.

Yup, China is also leading the planet on new coal plant construction. As of 2 months ago, it seemed to be on track to add 80GW of coal generation capacity in 2024 alone, and accounts for more than 90% of new coal construction.

By way of comparison, the US peaked in total coal plant capacity in 2011 at 318GW, and has since closed about 134GW of capacity, with more to come.

In context, what we’re seeing is massive, massive expansion of electricity generation and transmission capacity, both clean and dirty, in China. We can expect China to increase its total carbon emissions each year to be closer to the West, while the United States reduces its own from a much higher starting point. Maybe the two countries will cross in per capita emissions around 2030 if current trends continue, but there’s no guarantee that current trends will continue: will the United States continue to shift from coal to gas? Where does grid scale storage, electrification of passenger vehicles, demand shifting, or dispatchable carbon free power go from here, in a future Trump administration? What’s going to happen with the Chinese economy over the next 5 years? What technology will be invented to change things?

Clark Kent probably draws a salary, but I’m guessing he keeps that legal identity totally separate, with separate ownership of stuff.

But there are ways to make income without another person agreeing to payment:

• Lost, abandoned, or mislaid property may be claimed by the finder as their own in some circumstances.
• Certain types of buried treasure can be claimed by the finder, as well.
• Certain natural resources can be claimed by the people who extract them, especially from land or sea or even space that isn’t owned by anyone. For example, the Guano Islands Act authorized explorers to claim islands covered in bird shit on behalf of the United States, and bring back all that valuable bird shit.
• At sea, the law of salvage entities a rescuer to some reward for saving a ship or its cargo. There are other reward systems out there, too, including for tips that get criminals arrested/convicted, whistleblower rewards, etc. Maybe fighting crime can pay through those mechanisms.
• Once he actually has property in hand, Superman can also make it more valuable. Processed lumber is more valuable than raw timber, steel is more valuable than the constituent elements that went into making it. And, uh, he could always start a business and sell the stock.

And you don’t need an agreement to receive property as gifts after the fact. He might not charge people for his services, but if he’s willing to accept their thanks in the form of something valuable, maybe that’s something he can make money off of.

Alternatively, he’s just been stealing from Lex Luthor.

Watch him try to open this truck door. He looks frail and uncoordinated.

There’s been some reporting that Musk’s Super PAC has been paying its workers so well that it’s poached a bunch of the volunteers from the official campaign, and is so poorly run/audited that a lot of the workers are entering false data into the canvassing reports to qualify for bonuses. If that turns out to be true, then it will have been the case that Musk is burning his own money while hurting the Trump campaign.

I’m not ready to call the race, but stories like this at least reassure me that for Republicans, they’re not sending their best.

I made my own “cell phone service” but it only works within 10m of my home.

was in charge of the prison where he died

Technically the president delegates that to his Attorney General, who in this case was the son of the guy who first hired a totally unqualified Epstein (21 years old, no college degree) to be around high school age kids, where he was known for ogling girls and somehow showing up to student parties where there was underage drinking.

And some blame lays with the prosecutor back in 2008 when Epstein was first charged for sex trafficking and sexual assault, who decided to let Epstein agree to a secret plea deal for only 13 months in county jail (which is really weird for a federal prosecutor to let happen), who, oh wait, was then rewarded by becoming a cabinet official for Trump.

High voltage DC lines lose about 3% per 1000km, so this project with 4300km of lines could theoretically be set up to lose 12% in losses. There’s also some experimentation with ultra high voltages that would be more efficient, but probably more complex to engineer.

The “Stan Kelly” persona itself is a fictional satire. The work is actually done by cartoonist Ward Sutton, whose standard political cartoons under his own name criticize the right wing directly.

Yeah, evolving lungs ended up clearing the way to make use of the much more plentiful oxygen in the air compared to what is dissolved in water. Amphibians and reptiles have pretty low metabolisms, but birds and mammals basically evolved endothermy (aka warm bloodedness), probably in support of much higher muscular power output. Ectotherms (aka cold blooded animals) have metabolisms that are correlated to temperature, which means they can’t exert themselves as well when it’s cold. Endothermy allowed animals to be warm all the time, and therefore use higher muscular power output in any environment, especially sustained.

That means mammals and birds were able to cover more distance, and survive in places where reptiles and amphibians can’t, and all the advantages that carries.

This article estimates at a 40kg sailfish uses about 2.7 megajoules per day of energy when hunting. That’s about 650 kcal.

An 80kg human weighs about twice as much and needs about 3 times the energy, without even exertion.

Warm blooded animals spend a lot of energy just maintaining body temperature. Plus water doesn’t have very much oxygen in it, compared to the atmosphere.

There’s not enough oxygen in water to support our metabolisms, even if we had gills.

Fish are adapted to conserve and use less oxygen, from slower metabolic rates to more options for anaerobic respiration that doesn’t poison oneself from within.

One is something you choose to pay, the other you get shot if you don’t pay.

Contract claims and property claims are ultimately enforceable by government force, as well. A “no trespassing” or “no loitering” sign, or a “Copyrighted work, all rights reserved” notice is enforceable by men with guns, too.

If taxation is theft, the same reasoning would extend to property being theft, too.

40x the kinetic energy. Now consider the chemical energy stored in sufficient fuel for a coast to coast flight of that weight and speed.

Same vibes as Kim Jong Un touring a factory.

So even with those ultra unrealistic assumptions (100kg people, 1 step per second, 100% efficient energy capture), 9.8 watts just isn’t enough.

Lighting needs about 0.6 watts per square foot (6.46 watts per square meter) in an office. That means you need someone like that generating 9.8 watts every 16.3 square feet or 1.5 square meters.

There’s an inherent tension there, where sufficient density to make that work would require people to take fewer, shorter steps.

A basketball court is 4700 sq feet (436.6 sq meters). That means you’d need 288 big people stepping that fast, jammed into a single basketball court sized space, just to keep the lights on in that space. If any of the people stop moving even for a second, the system fails to keep up.

The numbers don’t make any sense.

A 100kg (220 lb) person whose steps compress the tiles by 1cm (0.01m) per step would be transferring 100 kg x 9.8 m/s^2 x 0.01m = 9.8 joules, or 0.00272 watt hours. That assumes 100% perfect efficiency in capturing that energy.

A watt is a joule per second, so someone who steps 1 step per second is generating 9.8 watts. That’s not enough to light the station, much less run the computers and signs and the fare gates and escalators and elevators.

And of course it wouldn’t come anywhere close to running the trains. After all, if it were easy to take people’s biomechanical power to run trains, that would mean that humans could push the trains effectively.

So they’re trying to put 2GW of dispatchable (can be dialed up and down on demand), carbon-free electricity by 2028. If you include the last year and a half of the exploratory drilling work they’ve done on site, that’s about 5 and a half years.

They’re also saying that each well is about $5 million, have about 30 wells planned for the 400MW project. Not sure how much going up to 2 GW would increase the cost, but that’s $0.33 per watt for the 400 MW plan.

In comparison, Vogtle added 2 nuclear reactors for 2 GW of capacity in Georgia, and it cost $35 billion and took 16 years. That’s $17.50 per watt.

Solar is somewhere between $1 to $1.20 per watt, but isn’t dispatchable.

Ongoing operational costs might be different between all of the different types of generation, but the up front costs are important enough to where they should be a significant part of the discussion.

So if they can pull this off in a few places, this will go a long way towards actually going to zero carbon on the grid.