Tag: climate

Africa powering Europe

Not a bad start. With DC all the way to Norway, they could of course play a colossal game of battery charging across the continent.

Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5b on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East. More than 100 of the generators, each fitted with 1000s of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations, including Britain.

2017-06-19: Off-grid solar is making inroads in Africa.

Many Western entrepreneurs see solar power in Africa as a chance to reach a large market and make a substantial profit. This is a nascent industry, which, at the moment, represents a small % of the electrification in the region, and is mostly in rural areas. There’s plenty of uncertainty about its future, and no guarantee that it will spread at the pace of cell phones. Still, in the past 18 months, these businesses have brought electricity to 100Ks of consumers—many of them in places that the grid failed to reach, despite a 100-year head start.

2018-09-10: It would also green the Sahara

Canada sized Solar and wind farms could make the Sahara Desert green again with 2x the rain. With enough solar panels, albedo increases enough to cause lots of extra rain.

2023-05-13: If solar is so cheap, why hasn’t it scaled in Sub-Saharan Africa? Because do-gooders are lying.

Scaling Solar continues to be paraded as an example that the MDBs can use billions of dollars of ODA to catalyze trillions of private sector investments needed to fund sustainability goals. The facts tell a different story. Every $1 of concessional financing catalyzed only 28 cents of private sector financing. Scaling Solar’s official messaging masqueraded a heavily subsidized development finance program as a private sector driven solution. Governments canceled existing solar contracts citing Zambia’s purportedly unsubsidized low tariffs. Developers left the space because the deal economics no longer made sense.Beyond distorting market signals, the messaging perpetuated the myth that solar can be funded by the private sector in lower-income countries. Solar isn’t scaling in poor countries. The cost of capital is too high.

The IFC could take 3 actionable steps to return to the original vision of the Scaling Solar initiative:

  1. Acknowledge that expanding clean power access will continue to rely heavily on concessional DFI lending and guarantees to reduce the cost of capital.
  2. Transparently report explicit and implicit subsidies.
  3. Innovate to enhance power contract transparency, empowering market participants to scrutinize pricing drivers and prevent the accumulation of large undisclosed public debts.

Google Climate

If Google’s can come up with a way to make renewable energy cheaper than the fossil-based alternatives, lowering the cost of just about everything, while reducing environmental externalities, then, by God, each and every one of them deserve to become rich

2007-12-21: I love Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-01-25: Google attitude

the cultural difference between the movement and Google: Google has the positive message of the potential for change through technology. The other unspoken divide is about economics: Gore and Friedman favor raising the cost of CO2. Page and Brin see a victory in reducing the price of the clean energy. Tax versus investment.

Climate Change Escapism

Of course, such thinking is absurd; thinking that flooded cities and continent-spanning droughts and forest fires will simply be a convenient way to escape your mortgage payments is ridiculous. Viewing famine, mass extinction, and global human displacement into diarrhea-wracked refugee camps as some sort of Outward Bound holiday – on the scale of a planet – overlooks some rather obvious downsides to the potentially catastrophic impact of uncontrolled climate alteration. Whether you’re talking about infant mortality, skin cancer, mass violence and rape, waterborne diseases, vermin, blindness, drowning, and so on, climate change entails radically negative effects that aren’t being factored into these escapist thought processes. But none of those things are depicted in these images.

he makes the good point that it is better to scare breeders with “your kids will drown” than to show them submerged manhattan for them to use their SUV less.

Is Zipcar revolutionary?

The founder of zipcar on how mesh networking leads to radically transparent transportation economics, which is what makes people turn on a dime. We need this now.

If we’re going to spend out oodles of money for wireless infrastructure for our transportation systems for congestion pricing and for road pricing, we should be making those open networks using open standards, i.e., things that consumers and businesspeople have devices that hook up to. We’d actually do an open source communications platform. And we can transform this required investment in transportation wireless infrastructure into something that’s an economic development boon and that makes information ubiquitous and very, very low cost, while we’re making CO2 — the old economy — high cost.

Florida Real Estate

The state is exposing itself to tremendous financial risk in the event of a large-scale disaster. Unlike private companies, which can seek reinsurance on the global market where risk is less concentrated, the state would have to go to its own taxpayers if a huge storm struck.

moral hazard on the scale of a state. florida is totally fucked.

Mammoth deextinction

by inserting this modified DNA into an elephant’s egg cell, and implanting it in an elephant’s womb, you could create a modified elephant that’s nearly identical to the original mammoth

The far north could probably handle the mammoth deextinction.

2021-09-29: Colossal

The company, named Colossal, aims to place 1000s of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, 1000s of years after they went extinct. “This is a major milestone for us,” said George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, who for 8 years has been leading a small team of moonlighting researchers developing the tools for reviving mammoths. “It’s going to make all the difference in the world.” Today the tundra is dominated by moss. But when woolly mammoths were around, it was largely grassland. Some researchers have argued that woolly mammoths were ecosystem engineers, maintaining the grasslands by breaking up moss, knocking down trees and providing fertilizer with their droppings. Russian ecologists have imported bison and other living species to a preserve in Siberia they’ve dubbed Pleistocene Park, in the hopes of turning the tundra back to grassland. Dr. Church argued that resurrected woolly mammoths would be able to do this more efficiently. The restored grassland would keep the soil from melting and eroding, he argued, and might even lock away heat-trapping CO2. Initially, Dr. Church envisioned implanting embryos into surrogate female elephants. But he eventually soured on the idea. Even if he could figure out in vitro fertilization for elephants — which no one has done before — building a herd would be impractical, since he would need so many surrogates. Instead, Dr. Church decided to make an artificial mammoth uterus lined with uterine tissue grown from stem cells. “I’m not making a bold prediction this is going to be easy, but everything up to this point has been relatively easy. Every tissue we’ve gone after, we’ve been able to get a recipe for.”