Show me the calculation then. To me it is clear that we are heading towards 100% renewables now that batteries have reached prices that makes intermittence a solvable problem.

To me the switch to renewable, on the contrary, will remove many scarcity constraints from energy production. We will have peak production times where energy will have a negative cost. This will radically change the way we think about energy consumption.

There’s no way you can use the same amount of energy with solar and wind as you can with fossil fuels and nuclear.

Renewables keep reaching “impossible” milestones. Recently in many places, including places in the US, renewables surpass coal so to create an “impossible” milestone you need to separate wind and solar from other renewables and lump together fossils and nuclear (which is not a problematic source for the climate)

I mean, can you imagine telling people 15 years ago that even Texas, despite its toxic mentality of coupling fossil fuels and masculinity would produce more wind energy than coal energy by 2024? The trend is clear, the impossible thresholds are met one after the other and without electricity production dropping.

In the context of meeting the targets, I see little way to invest time in a more efficient way than switching to renewables. Changing mentality takes a magnitude more time and effort. I still think it is a worthwhile endeavor, but if we wait for that transition we will have destroyed most of the earth by then.

Space may not be completely renewable, some is lost

??? Square meters are square meters.

or the energy to remediate the space for use could be higher than the energy/utility we could gain from it.

In what scenario do you see the energy to recover a solar power plant’s space being higher than the energy gained from it?

I guess by “time” you mean “labor”. This is the first time I see this mentioned as a non-renewable resource.

How is “space” not renewable/reusable? You can destroy solar panels and put something else on its place.

All the materials used are abundant and in enough availability to multiply several times our current capacities, and as you point out, may even become reusable/recyclable at one point if it ever become economically profitable to do so. Or even before if we so desire.

Not when solar is generated. Creating and maintaining infrastructure, and using space for infrastructure.

So, what do you think gets exhausted when we are doing this?

What do you think gets exhausted when we generate solar energy?

The very point of renewables is to not consume resources to generate energy, but merely when installing capacities.

And our current problem is not of unmet needs, it is of climate damage done by fossil fuels. Climate-wise, the planet would be better off if humans used 10x more energy in a sustainable way rather than using half as much without changing their energy mix.

Renewable and abundant is what we are going full speed towards. No need to mention infinity but we will clearly end up with more renewable energy production than fossil energy we are using now. Renewables are going to actually end scarcity of energy.

There’s a difference between “renewable and abundant” and “infinite”.

The amount of energy required to heat bath water is not infinite.

More solar panels aren’t going to change that.

Well yes it will. That’s the whole point. To get out of fossil fuels. You get out of it by replacing things that require fossil fuels by renewable ones. You don’t get out of it by merely using less of it.

That’s the mentality I dont get.

Solarpunk is not about switching to a scrappy medieval lifestyle, it is about building a sustainable comfortable future.

Why do so many people always assume that energy uses are necessarily unsustainable or scarce? It is the first part of “SOLARpunk”. You can have renewable and abundant energy.

It was a Mexican who taught me to be careful with the word “American”

Most Europeans will accept that label, most Asians too. Countries like Russia or Turkey who are in-between are exceptions.

Not common but I hope it will become.

“Americans” can mean Canadians, Mexicans, Peruvians, etc. “USian” means citizen of the US.

Is it hard to solve?

“There is a public electricity provider that will refuse to disconnect a house who can’t pay”

o/ from France.

TIL. Thanks!

I see where this is coming from and I personally prefer Matrix because of that but I must recognize that while I disagree with Moxie on some things he has a more pragmatic approach that has merits and probably has this position for good reasons that do not come from an evil/corporate plan. He wants people to use secure communication and he proposes compromises between security and ease of use (without which no one will switch, making general communication worse).

I still recommend Signal. To my geekier friends I recommend Matrix. But all in all, I consider Signal is still fighting the good fight.

The deers of Nara show that giving them food and protecting them is an easy way to achieve that.

I had never seen deers as aggressive as monkeys towards humans!

Let me guess: open source?

That’s according to a peer-reviewed study funded by the Ford Motor Company, a company that makes most of its profits from gas-powered vehicles.

If you want to see if a tech is part of a renewable future, it is direct emissions that should be counted. EVs are at zero. They don’t emit CO2 when running, when being produced or when being disposed of. They use electricity and transport, two things that we can provide without emitting CO2. They are a piece of the puzzle of a sustainable society, something thermal cars will never be, and something these graphs hide.

Of course we will be better off without cars and trucks, but the road towards them being totally gone is long, and it is time we don’t have.

Been there, done that :-)

30 minutes of video is a lot of time to go a bit deeper, especially if you assume the audience knows half of the movies mentioned.

For me it stopped when it started getting interesting.

And “ghosts” are such a cop out to not talk about the hard questions.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love GitS which is a stunning piece of art, but it barely scratched the surface.

The subject deserves a better treatment than this relatively shallow pop-scifi video. This has been a question in science-fiction for more than a century. No, it did not start with Star Trek, Asimov dates it as far back as 1818 Frankenstein. If you are bold you can see this theme in the 2000 years old story of Talos, the bronze colossus that wanted immortality (ancient Greece was surprisingly full of automatons, Rhodes was known for them).

The question is what does imbue humans with what makes us see them as humans? Please don’t use the word “soul”. It is meaningless and religious, does not refer to any observable thing.

And don’t use “intelligence” as an interchangeable word with that undefined property, that most sci-fi authors have took to call “sentience”. That word is not human-centric and they typically apply sentience or the question of sentience to aliens or machines.

We have a hard time seeing as sentient something that has zero sense of ego. You can make an extremely intelligent machine with no ego, no sense of self. This is what you have in LLMs.

Giving them a sense of self and ego is probably feasible, but it is both useless and a huge responsibility. Maybe will happen first as an art project, but then you have to question the morality of creating something that does not want to die (or at least expresses it) but is not recognized as a person.

It also interrogates our notion of the linearity of the self. If such a sentient being can be forked, suspended, copied, have memories wiped out, fake memories implanted, personality changed, willingly or unwillingly, that opens a lot of philosophical questions.

I wish the community would embrace them, but so far all we have had are extremely superficial debates over “true” intelligence, usually defined as the difference between what humans can do and machines can do, an ever-shrinking territory.

It is a bit dangerous with lithium batteries but the industry is switching quickly to a safer tech that will make these DIYers a viable and safe option