I wonder if there's a good reason painting Orban as any more important Putin ally than those leaders of far more important countries who outright worshipped Putin, such as German Reichskanzlers and French presidents, consistently visiting Russia on May 9th, and then after annexation of Crimea, on May 10th instead. Merkel did not end up as bad as Schröder, but - yup, Schröder, there's an important Putin ally. And Francois Fillon, Paavo Lipponen, Wolfgang Schüssel - many ex-leaders and highups of EU countries who accepted Putin's money.
Orban is not even close to that. Orban is really nobody's ally, particularly not in terms of foreign politics. And domestically, if all that's said about him is true, how can he possibly lose?
He more likely than not won't. But the EU doesn't have a foreign or security policy at the moment, it is for most purposes outside the EU remit. So any one country can in effect veto, be it Estonia, Malta or Hungary. In other words Putin only needs one ally, the most likely are Hungary, Greece and Cyprus. Italy and Germany have large trade with Russia, a double-edged weapon. I suspect France has considered Ukraine to be an inconvenience, and Russia an opportunity, but also a distraction.
Putin having crossed the Rubicon changed that equation (no 2014 didn't quite qualify, but set other wheels in motion). Schröder is a bit of a persona non grata, the others jumped ship in time.
It would be NATO by any other name, Western European Union as an example. And this assumes some kind of negotiated settlement, and in any case this would be a Ukraine protected in a way Russia could no longer be a military or hybrid threat. Russia would remain a threat to Europe that we would have to manage somehow.
Ukraine would not be fit to be a member of either NATO or Europe, but would be fit to be on a path to membership (with the above security guarantees). The guarantees could be extended to Ukraine and Moldova, but not to Georgia unless Turkey is on board, or at least Russia loses control over the Black Sea. Otherwise this would be a security guarantee that can't be held, which turned out badly for Georgia in 2008 and might turn out badly in the future.
Sweden and Finland on the other hand will be NATO members a year from now. As much based on game theory as on security and politics. Classic prisoner's dilemma.
Sweden and Finland have now prepared to be able to join on very short notice. If one of Sweden or Finland joins NATO and the other one doesn't, the one that does will be far more at risk than the one that doesn't in the transition period, while the other country will be worse off than it were ever after. With Putin slinging threats nuclear as non-nuclear several times a day, now would be a sensitive time to join. So:
Sweden and Finland will be safer during a Russian crisis inside NATO than outside
while they would be far less safe during the transition period than before
thus they should join when Russia is distracted
Sweden and Finland are separate countries usually at different states politically
There is a high risk for further Russian crises, and when the next arrives, whether under the wise leadership of Putin or someone else, it would be too late for (1-4).
So the right time to join would be after Russia calms down, but before Russia recovers. Which in the case of Sweden likely coincides with the autumn election, but as mentioned the election will matter less and the timing and security situation will matter more.
Hungary also has an election in a week. If Orban/Fidesz loses it, Putin will have lost an important ally, one of the last remaining.
Germany is a NATO country, but Ukraine is not (not for lack of trying). Russia made that point quite clear with the invasion of Georgia in 2008. NATO is not in the position to defend Georgia, so a Georgian membership is not an option. The only way Ukraine would be joining NATO would be in the aftermath of a Russian invasion.
Fair point. I was thinking of Putin biting over more than he could chew. The blowback could quite possibly lead to Ukrainian NATO membership further ahead.
The former United Socialist Soviet Republic is littered with Moscow-friendly separatist entities, Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and more recently the Free and Happy State of Donbas. (Nagorno-Karabakh predates the Russian Federation, but has been useful.) Basically you're with Putin or in trouble.
And now you are in trouble if you are with Putin, which is exactly how it should be.
Will Ukraine join NATO? I guess in the end the answer will be no, but that there will be consolation prizes that will be more useful to Ukraine for security and economy. Unless the Kremlin keeps escalating, in which case Ukraine might end up in the bona fide NATO too.
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here. "Good for the environment" always means something closer to "neutral to the environment." If you supply your winter heating needs by cutting some branches from your local trees which regrow it's neither "good" nor "bad," but that's exactly what makes it "good."
In a way. The ultimate in environmentally friendly is a full self-erasure, "take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints" style. Any attempt to better nature is to make it worse, and unnatural.
I am not sure about that, I think there should be a place for augmented nature. However, neither are what I meant, it was just a shorthand for avoiding environmental harmful externalities like habitat destruction and fragmentation, pollution, or resource abuse. And defragging nature is an environmental positive, if we take the current state as the baseline. Likewise rewilding is likely to be a positive.
Utrecht (where I've never been) has gotten a lot of positive press lately. I suspect in good part because of that humongous central station bicycle parking house, though it seems it is doing a lot of other things right as well.
Things tend to get conflated. What's good for the environment needs not be good for the climate and vice versa. What's good city life need not be positive for either climate or environment. Bicycling/(assisted) human-powered vehicles cuts the diagonal. It doesn't really do much for the climate, except that it discourages sprawl and encourages efficient cities. It doesn't do that much for the environment, except negatively by reducing the need for cars and roads. But done right it can do much for liveable cities. Done wrongly, it's another thing for pedestrians to worry about and reduce the life expectancy of bicyclists. Oslo used to be quite awful, it's better now.
Fair point. I was thinking of Putin biting over more than he could chew. The blowback could quite possibly lead to Ukrainian NATO membership further ahead.
The former United Socialist Soviet Republic is littered with Moscow-friendly separatist entities, Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and more recently the Free and Happy State of Donbas. (Nagorno-Karabakh predates the Russian Federation, but has been useful.) Basically you're with Putin or in trouble.
Germany is a NATO country. So, either NATO works or it doesn't.
Germany is a NATO country, but Ukraine is not (not for lack of trying). Russia made that point quite clear with the invasion of Georgia in 2008. NATO is not in the position to defend Georgia, so a Georgian membership is not an option. The only way Ukraine would be joining NATO would be in the aftermath of a Russian invasion.
This is what always struck me as the utmost idiocy about Obama and Trump's nonsensical claims. Germany isn't spending 2% of its GDP on its military? Gee, who'd have thought, that's exactly how we wanted it! Suggesting that Germany should spend more than France in absolute numbers is just ignorant madness, at the very least until we have European army.
Germany will still hold a low profile, though this is gradually changing, decade by decade. The 2%/GDP goal for 2024 is some sense (if you are a member of a mutual defence organisation you should be able to provide some of that defence) and more nonsense (a higher defence budget doesn't necessarily mean an increased ability to provide that support).
That is how the weapons control system works, when it works. If the rules say that weapons cannot be delivered to a country, they cannot be delivered through a third country either, in this case Estonia.
Swedish weapons (with similar weapons controls) on the other hand are on the way to Ukraine via UK. Germany also disallows airspace for military flights, which doesn't matter as Denmark and Sweden allow them. In short Germany has a hard neutrality that doesn't really matter, while Denmark and Sweden have the neutrality of looking the other way.
Germany has gone further in economic pressure than I expected, which will matter more than German arms. That Germany doesn't want to be visibly engaged in a confrontation with Russia doesn't really weaken Ukrainian position.
The proxy war between Turkey (Azerbaijan) and Armenia (Russia) in 2020 was a decisive victory to Turkey. Russian tanks are not invulnerable. The Russian air force pretty much is though, if at a high political cost.
What are you doing, mocking everyone's most beloved genius.
There is definitely a market for better, primarily cheaper, tunnels, and then it is disappointing with a hype brand rediscovering tubes.
Volume extracted is a huge component of tunnel costs, mind you, but it is hard to come up with a less efficient transport concept than Teslas in tubes.
There are good reasons for double-bore tunnels, they may be practically mandated in the EU by now, but those are safety and ventilation. Cars function like pistons moving the air out of the tunnel, and ventilation is a major part of tunnel running costs, and very energy consuming. The risk of head-on collision is also minimised. But service tunnels and turns are necessary in case of cheese fires, so all in all these are more expensive tunnels.
I'll grant that a train traveling at 300 km/h isn't quite as comfortable as one traveling at 130-200 km/h,
Not in my experience. The 380 Beijing-Shanghai trains are smooth. Classic coin test; you put a coin on its end, it shouldn't fall down. I don't think I have traveled 300+ trains in Europe. The trains I have taken in Germany, Spain, Italy were below 300, the Swedish barely 200. Have travelled in France, but not high-speed.
Anyway, the highest speed tracks are dedicated, while lower speed are shared. If those are good, then good. If not, then we have a little turbulence. Can't say I have experienced that lately, but then again I haven't travelled much by train (or at all) lately.
As it happens, the best night train ran Amsterdam-Prague. The compartments were practical, comfortable, and convenient without being excessively so, but more importantly the schedule was perfect. The ride needs to be right length, a full night's sleep, plus cleaning and (un)packing, plus an hour or two to relax in evening, wake up and have a breakfast. But not more, or you waste your time and risk getting bored. While daytime trains are (should be) home offices on wheels, night trains fail in that.
The Amsterdam-Prague train did that perfectly, in both directions impressively. The route just restarted, unfortunately with a less perfect (but still good) schedule. That is the challenge with night trains. Done well they are far less stressful than a morning plane run (especially those that you have to get up at 4AM to reach), but done badly they are useless. Paying premium for half a bad sleep is not attractive, or arrive at 6AM to a town that doesn't wake up until 8AM.
There are tricks for those not-10 hours rides. Short rides don't have to be too short if route is terminus to terminus. You can get on train an hour or so early and/or the train can stay on the track another hour. Whether that is an option depends on the terminus, many don't have spare tracks. (You could have trains ending central station – terminal station, where the latter is slightly less central, but still good for early/late sleepers, but not a usual configuration.) Breakfast can be served in station lounge instead of on-train.
If the trip is longer, the excess time should be in evening, not morning. Trains should arrive no earlier than 7 AM, no later than 9 or 10 AM. Here in Scandinavia we had an interesting three-way setup for coordinated night trains between Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen. At about 10 PM all three trains left the station for Gothenburg. There the cars from Stockholm headed for Copenhagen joined with the Oslo-Copenhagen train, likewise Oslo and Copenhagen to train going to Stockholm and Copenhagen and Stockholm headed for Oslo. Quite clever, if you didn't mind being woken up by huge clangs in the middle of the night. Modern sets might do that smoother.
Yes, solar panels can share and often enhance the area they occupy. They impact their environment in controllable ways. They generally have low albedo (the intention is to capture sunlight after all), creating an often undesirable heat island effect. But they also provide shade, and they can retain moisture. When not in the form of panels, but films, they can further adapt, e.g. by being semitransparent and/or flexible. They can be combined with indirect light.
So the trick is to combine the effects that are locally desirable and reduce those that are not. Generally sunny regions are hot regions, and PV panels work better where it is cool, so cooling effects are more desirable than heating effects. For similar reasons deserts are not ideal. Not only are they usually hot (or not providing solar energy), they are dusty. The usual way to clean off solar panels are with water, not something deserts tend to have a lot of.
However they combine nicely with hydroelectric (and other) dams. Not only are the dam surfaces unused and mostly unusable surface, panels reduce the issue with evaporation, often solved with rubber balls or some such. Furthermore the water cools the panel, and since both are power plants the hydroelectric plant provides balancing power to the solar plant, and the solar plants extends the longevity and utility of the reservoir in places with irregular water supply.
Intriguingly they also work well with fish farms. The fish seems to prefer the shade from the panels. This indicates they may have a useful role with #aquaculture, floating windfarms, refugia and other sea installations. Offshore windfarms seems to have an incidental effect as artificial reefs, so platforms, floating or fixed, may become multipurpose.
Anything marine is implicitly more expensive to build and maintain. But panels also play well with farming, #agrivoltaics. Different types of solar cover do well with different locales and types of farming (and many will be better off with pure farming or pure solar farms).
Cities are literally getting greener, with more vegetation, in part to reduce consequences of climate change, in part because they make city living more comfortable. Solar panels and films are likely to take some of the surfaces not appropriated by plants.
There are no land-use issues with solar or any other form of power generation. The land spent on energy is miniscule. Half the land mass of the planet is, mostly inefficiently, used for agriculture. We use a lot more space on roads, and you Americans on parking lots, than we will ever use on energy.
Renewable energy produces very little pollution, and as the energy sector bootstraps the carbon emissions decrease as well. Furthermore the required recycling rate (in the EU) is at minimum 85%, likely to increase to 98%+. Try to recycle solar panels in space. Or repair them for that matter.
This is a classical case of "how can I promote product/technology X?", you have a product that It solves problems nobody have, to a much higher cost than benefit, to cause problems nobody need.
Space has no economic value to Earth, now or for the rest of this century. All projects are because we can, because we want to or because we're curious. All valid reasons, but no profitable venture (except for the middlemen in the space industry). But we can think of it as a (very) long-term investment for when not only we, but everyone we know are all dead.
I like to see it as growing an economy. Space doesn't have the resources we had and have, but still the space economy can grow to be self-sufficient, and when it is self-sufficient it can grow to become comparable to Earth, and when comparable it can transcend. Not in millennia, but in centuries. Assuming no OakdaleFTL drive by then, centuries is also what it would take to arrive at other star systems. However, assuming space sufficiency around this star system, shifting to some other shouldn't be too hard, though interstellar space is bleak. But all that is the far future for space machines and those humans who have converted into machines.
It's great, if you're already in space. To supply the terrestrial grid makes no sense, even if it were feasible. Similar with the old SF trope of asteroid mining, it makes no financial or engineering sense. The energy to accelerate the minerals to the Earth is higher than the energy expenditure to mine them on the planet.
All other power sources on Earth are way cheaper, way more convenient than orbital lasers.
A Hollywood/China divorce would be a good thing. The Hollywood blockbusters have largely been miserable last decade, and the Chinese adaptations even worse. And the commercially successful Chinese movies mentioned are all trash.
The "Is there an anthropogenic climate change?" mock debate was never climate science, at least not in this century. It is about as relevant as discussing phlogiston theory. Even those funded by the fossil economy have moved on to other delaying tactics. That leaves those still to this day insisting on "climate hoax" or similar left behind. In the words of the late Douglas Adams: Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.
So not a very interesting or fruitful topic of discussion.
Scenarios for 2050 or 2100, now you get me interested. Global average temperatures are guesstimates based on policies and promises, neither of which are very reliable, but we may course correct as we go.
Climate Action Tracker have an update based on the most recent batch of promises and policies (mainly connected to COP26),
Now, this is as mentioned a promise tracker. As a rough estimate half the promises are held, half are not.
From these baselines it is possible to construct actual scenarios.
Again: What generates the electricity? Some areas maintain hydro facilities, but they are increasingly disfavored. Where is the push for nuclear generation?
Oil is not used much to generate electricity, though the relative share might increase if other uses decrease. Our global use of energy including electricity is likely to increase, though not necessarily by a lot. There are large efficiency gains to be had, so the richest countries are likely to continue on their current path, getting wealthier while using less energy.
The very process of electrification is in itself a huge efficiency gain. While electric vehicles take energy from the grid, the energy used is far lower than the energy consumed by ICE. Emerging "middle-class nations" also have a huge efficiency potential. Poor nations, that use very little energy, don't. Their energy consumption will grow with growing wealth, as will the consumption of middling countries. All of this indicates a modest total global increase in power consumption the next 30-50 years.
In the same period we need to phase out fossil fuels completely, which today provides the most of the energy supply. So we have a major global shortfall over the next 50 years.
In "bang for the buck" in this coming period, there is a clear winner. There is a Moore's law for photovoltaic cells that will not end any year soon. For almost half a century solar PV has gotten dramatically cheaper per kWh, and this will continue for decades more. Other power sources will not be able to compete on this measure. Not coal, not gas, not wind, not fission or fusion.
However, this leaves us with a problem when – and here in Sweden where – the sun doesn't shine. As a Californian you know the duck curve. This, the electricity grid, production and logistics issues, and the economics of a rapidly improving products (if you build a solar farm today you will soon compete with newer farms having lower costs) will constrain the ever-higher rise of the sun.
Coal power plants and nuclear power plants can't really perform that well in such an environment, because they provide flat output of energy. Same output at midday when energy is very cheap as in morning and evening when it is expensive. (That incidentally als makes nuclear a fine replacement for coal power plants, where conditions are otherwise suitable, they have very similar characteristics)
This is a reason hydroelectric is back in vogue. They can provide balancing power, and have a built-in energy storage as well. However they have a large environmental impact, and there's a limited selection of available rivers. Gas power plants (fossil gas or not), and garbage incinerators can provide balancing power too.
Here in Europe, the northernmost continent, the energy profile is different. Here wind is the greater power, fortunately at the time of year when the need is greatest. But wind is more unpredictable than sun, so the need for balancing power is just as great.
Climate science was politicized for decades by science denialists, but it doesn't matter that much anymore. There were dozens of those threads on old D&D, but the world has moved past that now.
The substance you mean is -of course- petroleum, usually called oil. (But coal is also a form.) And its uses are myriad, as I'm sure you know. With what would you replace it? For heating and fuel, there's electricity -- and the obvious source is nuclear power. (I'll let you explain why it hasn't caught on...) For chemical manufactures, there's what, exactly?
Fossil fuels to be exact, so petroleum, coal, fossil gas and peat. The last one is fairly marginal, and kind of proto-fossil anyway, the other three are splitting the total climate emissions fairly evenly between them. And agreed, oil is the odd one out of the three, as it is used less for energy/industry like the other two, and more for transport and petrochemicals.
Petrochemicals aren't really the primary concern for emissions. The extraction, refinement and transport of oil have significant emissions, as have the production of plastics, but still relatively small compared with the emissions from burning fossil oils. And the largest use of petroleum is as fuel for fossil (ICE) cars.
As batteries get better fossil cars are disappearing from the new car market. In Norway 3 of 4 new cars sold today are electric, 1 of 5 are hybrids, leaving only 1 out of 40 cars diesel and 1 out of 40 cars gasoline. EU used to be well behind Norway, but is catching up, with 1 out of 4 cars now electric or hybrid.
Here in Sweden 1 out of 4 is electric, 3 out of 10 are hybrid. leaving fossil cars the minority. China is close behind the EU, 1 out of 6 cars are electric/hybrid (13%/3%). The US is lagging, but as roughly speaking the percentage of EVs doubles each year, fossil cars are turning into legacy. Not on the road though, fossil cars remain the majority for many years to come. Even in Norway 5 out of 6 cars are fossil, but as almost all new cars are electric and almost all scrapped cars are fossil, the proportion will change.
The "program", as you call it, is ending a century of substance abuse. This did not happen at the speed it rationally should have, so there will be adverse consequences.
Those consequences will be there for us all, whether or not subgroups are "convinced". And yes, as a "program" we have moved on from science to engineering.
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