>Sociologists do way more rigorous statistics than physicists do.
Whilst I agree that can be a science the amount of contradicting bs, ideologically driven stuff i've seen come out of one such department and their replication crisis kind of undercut their credibility on that front for me.
There's been similar cases in physical sciences. E.g. all the room temperature superconductor stuff a few years back, Avi Loeb claiming that an object hurtling thorugh the solar system was alien technology.
There's also more fraud in medicine or health sciences.
You make some very handwavy claims about ideology, do you mean economy by this? It's the most clearly politicized of the social sciences, qnd the one that has been most funded by political actors. This I can concede. But don't throw sociology under the bus just because economy has a bad rap.
Why continue with the increased migration that the majority of the population has generally opposed then? One could have avoided those discussion points.
Also what you group as the radical right doesn't tend to be supportive of this idea.
They full well know they are at times at the receiving end of web control legislation and drives atm. Same for 'radical left' groups.
It's the conservatives that at times make some fuzz about migration to draw votes from the former whilst keeping said migration going since it favours some of the companies they (and a load of other established parties) draw support from.
>co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks.
The insect population is down a ridiculous amount where I live and also in neighboring germany.
I could link the study and such but honestly it's not like these things aren't backed up by my own experiences and those of my parents and grandparents.
I do find a lot lot less insects than I did when i was young.
We no longer get much (if any) snow let alone the kneedeep stuff.
It's harder to catch certain kinds of fish. The fishing boats where I used to visit every year go quite a bit further nowadays because those fish stocks have collapsed.
I think no till makes most/only sense for intensive market gardening.
Where you're weeding by hand or in greenhouses and maybe applying a recurring layer of compost and maybe cover crops to prevent the soil from being bare.
You're already complaining about the price of food, when farmers are barely breaking even on it.
You won't pay ten quid for a sustainably-farmed chicken, and I bet you're really really not going to pay ten quid for one single hand-grown ecologically-neutral farmed carrot.
And if you are, I've got some carrots for you right here. Discount if you order them in multiples of ten.
Most sites are not going to implement this themselves.
I think they're in prime position to become a key broker of identity in the same way that a lot of people already log in with their meta or google account to unrelated websites.
They become very entrenched and get a ton of data that way.
As more and more people essentially lock themselves in with these identitybrokers tho I imagine it has a very stifling effect on speech tho. Imagine getting banned from those.
Isn't power to gas still ridiculously inneficient?
Last I checked it seemed like something pushed by gas companies since it upholds gas infrastructure and most of the intermittence is currently supported by gas.
It's very costly compared to normal gas but it's still marginally cheaper to use solar and roundtrip p2g to use on a cold, windless night than it is to use nuclear power produced on any day of the year.
There's just zero economic incentive while polluting gas is dirt cheap and maxxed out solar and wind rarely even covers 100% of current electricity demand.
How is it marginally cheaper? We don't even do it anywhere to a notable degree and it would make obvious sense to do so if it was cheap.
Also I suspect this presumes that these gas plants and gas infrastructure cost nothing since they already exist.
>There's just zero economic incentive while polluting gas is dirt cheap and maxxed out solar and wind rarely even covers 100% of current electricity demand.
It requires that we go beyond that 100% and as we do the incentives for it drop and the economic case for polluting gas goes up.
>Many national grids do not have enough renewable generation capacity to satisfy 100% demand at all times yet.
When will it make sense for many countries? Because the difference between peak production and a winter dip for germany in let's say Berlin is enormous.
First of all there is no alternative that makes sense. Climate change is real and its consequences are more expensive and catastrophic than any trade-offs we’ll have to make for a 100% renewable grid.
The good news is that going 100% renewable is probably less onerous than most people expect. If we get our act together politically, we can easily build the grids, generation, storage and intelligent loads required. With the exception of a few industrial processes, the technology is already existing and economically viable, but it also gets better and cheaper every year.
I never get why people are so opposed to renewables. In the past (and apparently present), we have spent multiples of what we’d need for 100% renewables on stupid wars. Now we could transform our economy with dramatic positive consequences even if we ignore climate change completely (think air quality and corresponding public health concerns, as well as political risks associated with fossil fuels).
It will be one of the breakthrough developments of human civilization and unlock tremendous potential, but people are concerned with the aesthetics of windmills and bickering about minor subsidies, while there is literally an economic crisis going on because some ships with liquified dinosaurs on boats can’t get to their destination on time …
For power plants, this is glacial. A power grid has to balanced perfectly on a sub-second level. Also, you can only do this down to about 50% of rated capacity. Below that you have to switch it off completely.
If you combine this with renewable generation, it all falls apart. A cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop generation much faster than nuclear plants will ever be able to follow (by increasing generation). So if you want to have a substantial share of renewable generation (which, remember, is the cheap stuff), you can't have more than a token nuclear capacity, because you need to invest the money you might want to spend on nuclear on battery and hydro storage.
The other aspect is the economics of nuclear itself. Nuclear power plants are the most capital intensive generation capacity you can build. Even when driving them at the maximum of their rated capacity, the have a levelized cost of electricity several times that of PV and Wind per kwh. Requiring routine load following for nuclear would basically guarantee that no one ever builds a nuclear reactor again.
There are reasons to build new nuclear, but it's not cheap/reliable power generation. You build it to have access to a nuclear industrial base, as well as the research and professional community to run a military nuclear program. Or you actually succeed in creating a Small Modular Reactor, which might be suitable for niche applications (i.e. power isolated communities in extreme remote locations). Or you are simply fascinated by the technology and want to invest a ton of money on the off chance that it will produce some unforeseen technological breakthrough (though arguably you'd do better with investing in nuclear fusion from my limited understanding of the research).
But as far as I know this is a non issue since we 've mostly been able to cover this where it props up. Especially since the grid's demand doesn't tend to go 0-100 or the other way around that fast. Even with a significant amount of nuclear there's multiple of those solar farms, wind farms, etc
For the small fluctuations the turbine's governor response can provide frequency stabilization and pressurised water reactors also provide moderate load following.
>The other aspect is the economics of nuclear itself. Nuclear power plants are the most capital intensive generation capacity you can build. Even when driving them at the maximum of their rated capacity, the have a levelized cost of electricity several times that of PV and Wind per kwh.
When I looked at actually honest comparisons this simply isn't true across the board. I mean it doesn't help that the west has built so few recently and managed some exceptional fuckups whilst also making a lightbulb in an unimportant sidebuildings toilet cost a couple dozen grand in a way that might as well be purposefull sabotage of nuclear but much of the world (read mostly china) does relatively fine with their costs and time frame. These comparisons also have a tendency to use absolutely unrealistic storage costs all the same or foresee continued storage costs of methods that are exhausted. (hydro over here)
Additionally it's the cheapest solar that often pulls this down but the vast majority in let's say here in Belgium is residential which is a lot lot more costly and less efficient. The solar farms are all way more south so a lot of these american reports don't make much sense in most of europe either.
> If you combine this with renewable generation, it all falls apart
Rubbish. Only true if the renewable generation is poorly integrated. Solar plus batteries can provide synthetic inertia if the incentives/regulations are correctly designed.
Australia has been adding oodles of solar, and they have been doing it surprisingly well.
> Solar plus batteries can provide synthetic inertia if the incentives/regulations are correctly designed.
Yes, but why build nuclear at all, if you are already building PV + batteries? Nuclear is much more expensive than that combination. And if you add nuclear capacity on a level that actually matters (i.e. 30%+ of peak load), you run into real integration problems.
As I've written elsewhere, a toke nuclear program can make sense if you want to keep the industrial base, institutional knowledge and expertise around, i.e. to guarantee independent access to nuclear weapons. But it is ludicrous to make nuclear a cornerstone of your energy policy. Not even China is expanding its share of nuclear in total energy generation. They keep it around as a strategic asset, but a subsidized one.
For countries like Denmark and Spain I'd be pulling my hair out if my government would start throwing money into the money pit that is nuclear power (and it is inevitably is government money, because no nuclear power plant has ever been built without government subsidies and/or price guarantees).
> Nuclear can load follow, within limitations
Yes, but it makes zero economic sense to do so. Nuclear is multiple times more expensive per kwh than PV + batteries, even if you run it at max capacity continuously. If you require nuclear to load follow on a regular basis, not a single reactor will ever be built again.
It's more cost efficient to keep them running all the time since most of the cost of nuclear is building the power plant, but power output can be adjusted if needed.
S&D voted even more for this than the conservatives themselves. ESN the least.
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