Sometimes it's hard to understand the causes of climate change. While the basic idea -- we emit greenhouse gases, which warm the planet -- is well known, it's easy to get lost in the details.
But here's a summary with some more detail -- showing the fundamental sources & sinks of warming pollution.
Treesearch gives me a smile every time.
That's a thing. Getting the safety bits wrong, like permits, notice, cutting in the wrong spot and on the wrong days is the first sign they figured out how to use their new toy.
Seems we're making the same old mistakes before we set out after new ones (PG&E here from a late 2021 incident).
Since all the Enron docs became public via discovery, they formed the starting point for much LLM training. Those tools were trained on the kind of insight that made Enron what it was; I am never surprised by their simultaneous confidence and confusion.
Start making plans now if you live in a fire area or some place where smoke settles.
🚨JOB ALERT🚨
Heya friends -- I'm looking for a postdoc! This time we're looking at the ethics of technology deployment for climate change mitigation. Full description in the link!
Quick details: CVs and cover letters to me by 1 April; $75k/year for up to 21 months; remote within the US is ok.
Their switch from shrink-wrap to subscription (in 2013?) was held out as an example of how to do it correctly; making all the numbers go up in just the right way. The subsequent hollowing out of the value proposition and introduction of predatory billing is par for the course.
As a community service with a monthly membership, like a co-op, you have people buy into the group and that cuts down on a lot of the outside risk. Kind of time share vs. open market rental. As a community service you can get options tailored to local uses/needs: cargo bikes and delivery carts.
They have a lot of utility use cases, including as a place to grab a quick nap, take a phone call, or store stuff while you are hitting multiple places on foot. Can kinda do this with Home Depot or Uhaul ($). App based solutions tend to live off public parking and take up space when not in use.
The key is an important thing, as one regularly hears about app-based rentals getting stuck at hiking trailheads where they don't have cell service. Operating rights by jurisdiction will be another problem because users don't see those boundaries but the vehicle will try to enforce them.
In 2019 I used the Lime car-share trial in Lynnwood. The car smelled like sex and crime, tried to enforce city by city access permissions, gave up geofencing on the freeway, and otherwise served as a useful service. Reservation was app based, but the key was locked into the ignition.
I was once asked to evaluate moving into that market for an app-based mobility company, the operational challenges (how do you provide a safe, functional, and clean service everywhere someone might ask for it) were daunting. We didn't go there. Community based solutions are super interesting.
Thanks for this write up!
It is hard to square public power for true believers in public-private partnerships and the wisdom of markets.
Should probably just set those aside and get back to expecting collective government to accomplish useful things for its people.
I think it is better to do it than not. Change is hard, though, and one cannot do it alone (or risk chaos and uncertainty without improving outcomes while materially degrading the things we mean to improve).
It is a peril of living in an imperfect world, the "first, do no harm" maxim comes to mind.
Reconciling reality to practice is unpleasant, raking one's assumptions over the coals and potentially upsetting tradition and standard practice. The added angst here is that the project development process can run 20x as long as the project execution phase.
Projects have rules for implementation (prescriptions) and those are created with an assumption of measurement. Directly measuring canopy spacing would break the prescription. It would also expose the quality of the assumptions of working against DBH as a proxy.
Landscape view of Sierra Mixed Conifer forest, post treatment in the foreground and untreated as a solid mass of vegetation in the background. Species here are: Ponderosa Pine, Sugar Pine, White Fir, Douglas Fir, Incense Cedar, and Black Oak. There is a blackened black oak in the near right, several burn scars on trees further back, and widely spaced trunks throughout the treatment area - intended to help fire get to ground and produce a survivable burn in the future for this forest. Marked in blue are horizonal lines at 4.5' above the ground on the uphill side of stems - the canonical Diameter at Breast Height. Much further up are red lines noting the distance between branches - a canopy closure measurement. In practice we work towards basal area (diameters) but are attempting to hit a specific canopy spacing - during a project we measure the available and easy thing instead of directly measuring the thing we really care about - and it drives me a bit batty because we have the technology now to do something better.
🌲🔥
Going a little nuts looking at this treatment because it breaks a number of assumptions. Here I've marked the thing we measure against in blue and the thing we want to control in red.
They are different things. Their relationships are not fixed across time, species, or growing conditions.
One can hope!
I look at what that free time turned into (Friedman and late-stage capitalism and all this rushing about) and wonder if perhaps it wasn't such a great idea to leave so much free time for everyone.
Until they start building power (generation, transmission, storage, etc.) at airports it "can't" happen, even after the science and engineering have been sorted.
When it does have the infra in place we'll get even more effecient long-haul flight because those battery advances will keep on coming.
Fast charging a 747 is going to take electrical infra that current (hah) airports just don't have. Now try to charge 2 dozen at the same time. And charge at every airport everywhere that you might land at.
It'll all come together eventually, but there is a lot of support missing.
There is work to do in all 3 domains, but some form factors relax the constraints. You can do long haul on batteries today in an airship, for instance, if you are willing to go slow and neutral buoyancy.
The recharge/battery swap bit is going to hold commercial flight electrification back.
For batteries to win out they need to achieve:
- Power per kg
- Power per m³
- Ubiquity in replacement/recharge
That last one is going to catch people out. Even Ford moving to aluminum bodied pickups was stalled to retrain mechanics, liquid refueling is understood and supported.
There is a real hype fatigue in this (especially flights), as it has been right around the corner since <2010.
When the royal navy did their jetpack boarding in 2021 that was a "was that battery or fuel?" moment for me (fuels still had a 5-8x system advantage).
Hype always faster than reality.
Startup ecosystems (or focus or chatter or whatnot) are big on the former and not so great for the latter.
The step up to the loan programs office is a big one, you need to be able to supply a $1M for the vetting for that program.
I go back to this write-up on valleys of death from 2020 often.
There is a distinction between FOIK, pilots, and demonstrations and doing the work of taking those early efforts and outputs and turning it into a repeatable process.
You can't skip the R&D on modularity and identifying the unit of modularity, but it doesn't live apart from establishing demand.
It is something dumb like how we build roads (ROW not serviceable)?
From what I've seen there is a lot of drilling and when they cut and cover the roads are out of service for very long periods of time (6-9 months per section). Manned temp 1-way road traffic lights in the middle of nowhere stuff.
PG&E has undergrounded 1,000 miles and reduced costs from $4 to $3.1M per mile. This is (probably) high voltage in rural areas rather than distribution lines to individual homes. Prioritization from wildfire liability.
CPUC reports underground wires are 2.4-10x as expensive as overhead wired.
For your consideration, this local classic.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0Va...
And broadband!
That's nominally a communication service directly aligned to the original mission.
One of the newer jerseys from my closet, a French Rugby Sevens jersey circa 2016. This is an Adidas jersey, so the three stripe motif over the shoulders and low collar (no fold down) that was popular a decade ago. The jersey is red overall, with a darker red detail in the three stripes on the shoulder and sublimated feather pattern up the sides, extending around the back like upturned feathers. The adidas logo and Le Coq are in gold stitching.
The gold piping and collar? Reminds me a bit of the French 7s away jerseys from 2016. I like the Italian collar and the older French sublimated detail, which looked like feathers up the back for France and like someone spilled their drink for the Italians.
Why yes, I'm a back, why do you ask?