It's a fascinating topic. It's top of my mind too - we have had very reliable power historically (Colorado) but in the last year had a major preemptive wildfire shutdown and a few other shutdowns (whereas literally less than 5 minutes of outage the last decade). I also got rid of my gas service last year and fully electrified. I have solar, but was waiting until battery prices dropped before going that route. Figured I'd yolo in the meantime, but that assumption has me increasingly on edge. From a climate perspective, I do hate to see a renewed interest in gas but I get why. We need cheaper batteries and standardized V2H/V2G asap.
My knowledge is probably even lower, but I do recall hearing that most of the US law is just copied from UK law as of the 1700's, with some divergence since then.
Right, but remember only like 60% of homes have gas anyway, so that's not necessarily the baseline from a resiliency perspective. And a huge chunk of those aren't actually prepared to operate without electricity either. So while I agree that resiliency is worth focusing on, we should also look holistically about what gas can/cannot do and the associated costs relative to electrification/solar/storage. A modern gas home will still need a backup generator to run condensing hot water/furnace and there's a significant cost to whole home generators, so it's not all fun and games just having gas appliances.
That's where local battery storage/EVs come in. Also passivhaus in and of itself is a form of resiliency - if the power goes out during a cold snap, the house will stay warm for quite some time, and the dozen kWh in a battery or the several dozen in an EV go alot further. Efficiency has a multiplying effect.
Are you looking at the same article as me? On both the NYT app and the website using this link, I see a heading that exactly matches the data displayed. It's a dynamic page that adjusts the figure as you scroll and the heading clearly matches the data. It says "abnormally hot nights" in every bar chart, and temperature for all of the line graphs. NYT has some really nice visualizations, with the notable exception of the potato graphic the other week with your states electric production sources - that was hot dog shit. There's a different baseline temp for the hot night graphs depending on the city - this clearly responds to a low level baseline pre-warming.
I showed this to my partner who isn't an engineer and she thought it made perfect sense too. Not that my anecdotes are special, but I truly don't understand the confusion.
What's this "radical change" and why haven't you made it happen yet? Like what are you actually doing other than shouting into the void about other people doing the wrong thing? Even if someone reads your post and is like "yeah that's right" what are they actually supposed to do next? What rules are we supposed to break?
You're going to do great. Keep the seat low and push with your feet to get the feel of coasting, just like kids learn. Small steps and you'll be riding in no time. Depending on where you live, see if there are community bike groups you can volunteer at - these are great for learning about bike maintenance, and some places will let you build a bike for yourself from donated stuff for your time. Bike shops are pretty much universally supportive too.
For what it's worth, I think you already did the hard part by coming here and expressing interest :)
"New generation of engineers" is a bit cringe. The old generation knew thermodynamics pretty damn well. All that's changed is they're using R290 refrigerants and variable speed compressors now, but those don't change anything from a physics perspective. COP is fun but it's not even the right metric to use from a policy perspective, just like MPG. And despite being unitless, COP suffers from the same exagerative effect as MPG numbers. What matters is the carbon associated with delivering BTUs to a home, so here you can have the ridiculous case of delivering more BTUs at a higher carbon cost achieving a higher SCOP than the same exact heat pump delivering fewer BTUs at a lower total carbon cost achieving a lower SCOP for a better insulated home, and the person with the higher SCOP bragging about it like a clown. At least when the government tests COP it's a standardized test so you can actually compared equipment (somewhat).
Regardless, nerds gonna nerd and no harm done (and I also track real time energy use of my heat pump, so I consider myself a nerd).
Are you just doing the thing where you cast doubt on journal articles because they feel wrong? You don't think humans can affect the natural environment in such a way? This sounds oddly familiar and a bit ironic for this community....
Meteors aren't made out of aluminum like satellites are btw. There will be more reasearch done and we will learn more. But for now, there's a potential issue.
https://phys.org/news/2024-06-satellite-megaconstellations-jeopardize-recovery-ozone.amp
Yes. Use stainless steel, cast iron, and carbon steel. You can cook everything with these just as easily once you learn some basic cooking skills.
Shiping represents about 10% of the 25% of global carbon emissions from transportation, so 2.5%, similar to aviation. Yes, it's a problem but it's not the boogeyman you seem to think it is.
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spidermanchild
joined 4 months ago
The problem is the roads are already there. Like sure we could redevelop the entire area over decades but we could also add some speed bumps like next week while we get around to the hard work.