That's nice and makes a dent. 18,248,000 MWh/year so 49,994MWh per day. The batteries at this site are 3,287MWh, so they can store about 6.5% of the average daily Californian use. 875 megawatts peak power for maybe 5h per day is 437MWh almost 10% of CA daily consumption. And it's highest in summer, when the ACs are running, so that's nice. Please check my math! EIA

Years ago I learned that tribes people often create large herds (a sign of wealth) that then lead to desertification, famine and poverty. Seems like we do the same thing, but at a higher level.

I read somewhere that it is normal of humans to overestimate progress in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term.

That gives me hope, assuming we have a long enough term for all this progress to manifest.

:) This one is the monk and the robot book:)

Maybe for a long tail - but I think there were a few reports from other places that phaseout can happen faster than expected :) I am just worried that fossil prices drop because nobody buys them, making it super cheap again.

It is conceivable that unlike boats, autonomous airships may not need to be super big - they scale linearly. So a continuous swarm of small, lighter than air evacuated diamond foam devices could come, pick up stuff, and depart for local targets or far away targets via the jet stream. That also removes the need for the tower - they could pick stuff up right from the harvester.

I don't think anyone questions that humans will survive. It's just unlikely that the complex global supply chain that gives us complex tools like microchips etc will survive. And may be massive famine etc after just a few harvest failure, or after the grain can't go down the rivers to the sea any more. Naturally not for the very rich, you can probably buy a bag of rice at a price. It's not survival that's at stake, its civilization and all that.

Or, combined with the other idea to move the harvester; grain pirates! The small airship swoops down at night and picks up a some strip worth of grain, and is gone in the morning.

Maybe this will change once the insurance tables update their pricing to include the new risks?

I love it, this is really nice. Thank you!

The rest of the world always follows. It's been weird. Catalytic converters, efficiency standards and all that.

Is this moral stance somehow correlated to skills and capabilities of the people? Will there be more spills because only the incompetent are left or is there no such link?

Charm Industrial likes Switchgrass I think. To make oil to pump back under.

That movie came out in 1986. How could he possibly have known about Elon Muska and Twitter, and the violent takeover and ensuing disintegration of the platform?

It's quite the relevation. It's all right there.

Solution is a maybe an overstatement, but

• destroy the methane. That's energetically favorable, so it can be done more easily. Makes some CO2 but it's 50x less bad that way.
• get the carbon back out and stick it into the ground. We'll be on our way when the Mauna Loa CO2 curve bends and goes down for a year or two. That's energetically expensive, but we'll figure out a way (hopefully) to do it wherever we have solar overproduction.

Trees are nice, but it's nowhere near enough to do that.

I suppose it helps to qualify what you say. But then it may become quite unreadable.

Even "Today is Thursday" is questionable. Where is it today? Do you mean right now, right here? What calendar? Somewhere it's already Friday. The "day" is just rolling around the earth, etc. It's more defensible to say at the time of posting this it is Thursday in California.

The philosophy people have a thing where you posit a thesis and then present counter arguments, and then counter these again (and, in medival time, counter the ones that are non-dogmatic once again to make sure you don't get burned alive).

The Chinese had a seven legged essay, I think it went back and forth 7 times, and the conclusion was left up to the educated reader, in contrast to scientific paper standard today where we explicitly state the conclusion.

Exploring and to some extent preempting counterarguments may be helpful in any case.

What is that? Like, carbon emissions stop because of general supply chain collapse? Or we all get together and figure out a way to make massive diamond blocks from the CO2 in a hurry?

Two obvious things: China has 2-3 x the people. Maybe adjust to a per person basis? Or a per GDP ratio if you are so inclined. Also, most of the stuff for sale comes from China - so we just moved our emissions there. This is super hard to adjust for, but should be considered a bit.

I suppose that's pretty much guaranteed. I am worried that the supply chains stop working before we get serious about climate repair. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the fossil fuel companies when the "proven resources" in the ground become worthless because there are barely any buyers anymore and borrowing against it is no longer possible. I don't know how much they do that - but it would have implications for the finance people.

I read that a long time ago, and it seems still quite spot on. That was amazing work.