While I totally concur with the basic tenet that environmentalism is dead, I think that near energy is equally short-sighted and destructive, especially in view of ever rising temperatures, water (for cooling) shortages and leaking facilities and unsafe waste disposal. The ONLY answer is to dramatically reduce energy demand, by foregoing AI development and deployment, and stopping HAARP programs which pump untold energy into the ionosphere, creating artificial borealis, movi g jet stream and so much more!
All of your complaints about nuclear power are a result of govt regulation not the technology itself. Modern nuclear reactors, the ones we are not permitted to build, are dramatically smaller, safer and produce less waste and we have always had workable solutions to nuclear waste (go ask France how they have been doing it for decades). BTW, what does rising temperatures have to do with nuclear power? All of these issues have been addressed from a engineering and technology standpoint but the powers that be are anti-technology other than low energy density, environment destroying, and highly unreliable solar and wind solutions.
What fantastic news. So proud of the Biden government. It's time the people in companies stop ignoring reality and work for society rather than seeing the public as impediments for profit. Most of us weren't even adults when climate change was recognized as a potentially chatistraphic problem. But it has been ignored and companies have misled us all to allow for the illusion of business as usual. The fact that some corrupt lawyers, capitalists and politicuons continue their selfish push for profits over people should make you angry. It makes me angry, and sycophants who pretend climate action is a problem to be ignored deserve our disdain.
It would be helpful to present the case for solar (really, the case against) and wind in the context of land use, given the low capacity factors. So, if solar at utility scale has a 25% capacity factor on average, the simple math overbuild with battery storage would be 4x. Assuming 10 acres per MW, you could back into the land use/footprint that would require. Anyone done that already?
Ugh. I hate the overlap of politics on this, but this threat to our grid is almost worth tolerating the sturm and drang of another OrangeMan presidency if the payoff is to put the EPA back in its box!
Thank you, Robert for another excellent article. The February 24, 2024 John R. Bear (MISO CEO) quote is spot on. The summary is that neither solar nor wind contribute significant synchronous grid inertia (SGI.) SGI is critical for grid stability to prevent grid blackouts. To learn more, please see my March 4, 2024 Substack article, "Why is Grid Inertia Important?"
The EPA is going to ensure that people will die in peak cold and peak hot seasons. If this regulation is allowed to stand it will have lasting permanent effects not just on the quality of life bit being able to maintain life itself. It’s hard to watch America become a second rate country. No reliable energy, no reliable democracy. Yes, it’s really that simple.
well written and clearly stated. makes you wonder how business, government, and the energy industry can be so misaligned as to a better future. thanks for your work Robert.
Robert, your charts are a terrific resource. Have you considered creating hard copies so we can still understand & explain what happened when we're all sitting in our dark & cold homes?
Why all or nothing? I think k we can be quite selective where and how we want to to use energy. After AI, I would cut out HAARP! No one has ever told us how much energy is being pumped into the ionosphere from how many HAARP facilities every day! We shouldn't ways assume that little people must save what big corporations and the military wastes.
This is all compounded by the fact FERC issued order 1920 on Monday that will push the expenses for new open access transmission onto the consumer and grant wind and solar unfettered transmission access.
First, why do you think all these data centres are necessary and just take them as a given without question, when the Internet was far superior in quality of its content, users, and developers before almost all of these centres' existence? They are used for gimmicks like "cloud storage" by people who prefer to store their computer files on someone else's computer, training irresponsible user habits to make someone else some money. If storage lots needed this much infrastructure and government welfare, they would be told to get lost since nobody needs them that much anyway when they can have their own storage.
Clearly, the Internet has been consolidating for many, many years and is mostly garbage and spam with ever declining quality across the board, and most of the data could stand to be destroyed, since the most valuable kind doesn't take much storage to begin with and isn't in these centres. Not to mention all the AI-generated garbage polluting the Internet now, which doesn't concern you one bit, does it? The data centres can be easily argued as wastes of energy and limited resources, if not harmful to the Internet and society as a whole outright.
Second, if AI, by which you mean LLMs which are one form of it, can be strangled in the crib, then what problem is there with that other than it will have been killed in infancy when it could have been aborted? LLMs have limited benefit and usefulness, other than to states and global surveillance networks of the kind Julian Assange wrote a book and white paper about warning such surveillance systems would ultimately mean the Internet would be used as a means of control to enslave and control us. Not to mention the state disinformation networks (mostly all originating from the US, of course).
Read from some AI sceptics like Gary Marcus for a change, and delve into the other literature and research: the real stuff, not whatever the latest hype is for investors. The limitations of LLM are well understood, as are the limitations of neural net and deep learning going way back. At their most benign, all LLMs stand to do is distract investors and take funds that could go to research that had a chance greater than zero of leading to AGI, and put it toward horrifically bad and fundamentally flawed systems that work using statistics and next-token prediction, whose hallucinations cannot and will not ever be solved.
Third, the prospect of "growth" and its perpetuity and necessity as you speak of them in the market serve only to discredit you as a thinker who is not interested in facts, data, or even simple arithmetics, but one only interested in beliefs. Read physics, study math, look at the data, and you will realise quite quickly most economists are not at all serious people in any way. Infinite growth is not possible in closed systems, end of conversation really, or it should be.
Thinking energy growth should continue for completely worthless causes like AI is not only irrational, but suicidal. A few hundred more years of even modest 2-3% growth in energy will boil the planet no matter which kind of energy production it is we know of, be it nuclear of any sort, oil, solar and other green energy scams, because of waste heat and the laws of thermodynamics. Selling people the idea that the potential we've got should be used up and wasted on useless hallucination machines that only understand data statistically and will never be able to even read times on a clock that aren't statistically likely (on advertising photos) is pure madness!
It's not sustainable, and precious rare earth minerals and other resources like copper are being thrown right into the trash (on a large scale, quite literally so) by the profligate cultists of Silicon Valley, whose idea of "progress" seems to be to destroy us all while they try to "usher forth" AI out of some sort of religious insanity professed by those like Yudkowsky, who think their beliefs in AI are scientific in spite of professing their own religious motives and desire for an afterlife and so on. Never trust any AI optimist, every one of them is a pseudosceptic, pseudorationalist, who doesn't care for what the research and data shows, but for abstract theory not dictated by or following logic of any kind.
Articles like this are proof that independent media largely serves, like the corporate press, to serve people information and points of view they already know and agree with with back to them, and make them think they're wise and smart for having what they already know and believe affirmed. They are proof that those who have been betrayed by the mainstream media and lost their confidence in institutions and systems will struggle to be any more discerning elsewhere, when there are so many people willing to lie to them for views or deceive them unknowingly out of ignorance.
Boil the planet? You have been reading too many apocalyptic novels, although I agree with your argument that many applications of AI are a waste of effort or totally counterproductive, from the point of view of the citizen on the street.
Mark Jeftovic has some interesting observations on how unlikely AI is to produce artificial conciousness - or host an existing one, because the prevailing paradigm/world view is deficient.
Thank you Robert! I recall reading an economist (writing on import restrictions): "Why do to yourself in peacetime what an enemy would do to you in wartime?". Seems relevant here.
I suspect the Chinese and Russians have expended a lot of hacking effort in attempting to cripple the grids of Western countries. Now they can watch in astonishment while elected governments do their work for them.
Thanks for another well documented and enlightening (pun intended) article! Cheers from Canada.
While I totally concur with the basic tenet that environmentalism is dead, I think that near energy is equally short-sighted and destructive, especially in view of ever rising temperatures, water (for cooling) shortages and leaking facilities and unsafe waste disposal. The ONLY answer is to dramatically reduce energy demand, by foregoing AI development and deployment, and stopping HAARP programs which pump untold energy into the ionosphere, creating artificial borealis, movi g jet stream and so much more!
All of your complaints about nuclear power are a result of govt regulation not the technology itself. Modern nuclear reactors, the ones we are not permitted to build, are dramatically smaller, safer and produce less waste and we have always had workable solutions to nuclear waste (go ask France how they have been doing it for decades). BTW, what does rising temperatures have to do with nuclear power? All of these issues have been addressed from a engineering and technology standpoint but the powers that be are anti-technology other than low energy density, environment destroying, and highly unreliable solar and wind solutions.
OF COURSE, rising temperatures and excessive heat, as well as drought and resulting water shortages, can threaten the safety of nuclear power plants!
So true
What fantastic news. So proud of the Biden government. It's time the people in companies stop ignoring reality and work for society rather than seeing the public as impediments for profit. Most of us weren't even adults when climate change was recognized as a potentially chatistraphic problem. But it has been ignored and companies have misled us all to allow for the illusion of business as usual. The fact that some corrupt lawyers, capitalists and politicuons continue their selfish push for profits over people should make you angry. It makes me angry, and sycophants who pretend climate action is a problem to be ignored deserve our disdain.
Look, a real live climatard!
It would be helpful to present the case for solar (really, the case against) and wind in the context of land use, given the low capacity factors. So, if solar at utility scale has a 25% capacity factor on average, the simple math overbuild with battery storage would be 4x. Assuming 10 acres per MW, you could back into the land use/footprint that would require. Anyone done that already?
Ugh. I hate the overlap of politics on this, but this threat to our grid is almost worth tolerating the sturm and drang of another OrangeMan presidency if the payoff is to put the EPA back in its box!
Thank you, Robert for another excellent article. The February 24, 2024 John R. Bear (MISO CEO) quote is spot on. The summary is that neither solar nor wind contribute significant synchronous grid inertia (SGI.) SGI is critical for grid stability to prevent grid blackouts. To learn more, please see my March 4, 2024 Substack article, "Why is Grid Inertia Important?"
https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important
The EPA is going to ensure that people will die in peak cold and peak hot seasons. If this regulation is allowed to stand it will have lasting permanent effects not just on the quality of life bit being able to maintain life itself. It’s hard to watch America become a second rate country. No reliable energy, no reliable democracy. Yes, it’s really that simple.
well written and clearly stated. makes you wonder how business, government, and the energy industry can be so misaligned as to a better future. thanks for your work Robert.
THere seem to be a lot of A.I. haters in the chat (
fine by me to ditch it,
so then - forget A.I.,
but then forget electric cars, stoves, water heaters, dryers, heat pumps,
everything
Robert, your charts are a terrific resource. Have you considered creating hard copies so we can still understand & explain what happened when we're all sitting in our dark & cold homes?
Good. I hope it will cripple AI. Last thing we need is more energy demand, when we should be conserving all things!
Alright - forget A.I., but then forget electric cars, stoves, water heaters, heat pumps, everything
Why all or nothing? I think k we can be quite selective where and how we want to to use energy. After AI, I would cut out HAARP! No one has ever told us how much energy is being pumped into the ionosphere from how many HAARP facilities every day! We shouldn't ways assume that little people must save what big corporations and the military wastes.
This is all compounded by the fact FERC issued order 1920 on Monday that will push the expenses for new open access transmission onto the consumer and grant wind and solar unfettered transmission access.
First, why do you think all these data centres are necessary and just take them as a given without question, when the Internet was far superior in quality of its content, users, and developers before almost all of these centres' existence? They are used for gimmicks like "cloud storage" by people who prefer to store their computer files on someone else's computer, training irresponsible user habits to make someone else some money. If storage lots needed this much infrastructure and government welfare, they would be told to get lost since nobody needs them that much anyway when they can have their own storage.
Clearly, the Internet has been consolidating for many, many years and is mostly garbage and spam with ever declining quality across the board, and most of the data could stand to be destroyed, since the most valuable kind doesn't take much storage to begin with and isn't in these centres. Not to mention all the AI-generated garbage polluting the Internet now, which doesn't concern you one bit, does it? The data centres can be easily argued as wastes of energy and limited resources, if not harmful to the Internet and society as a whole outright.
Second, if AI, by which you mean LLMs which are one form of it, can be strangled in the crib, then what problem is there with that other than it will have been killed in infancy when it could have been aborted? LLMs have limited benefit and usefulness, other than to states and global surveillance networks of the kind Julian Assange wrote a book and white paper about warning such surveillance systems would ultimately mean the Internet would be used as a means of control to enslave and control us. Not to mention the state disinformation networks (mostly all originating from the US, of course).
Read from some AI sceptics like Gary Marcus for a change, and delve into the other literature and research: the real stuff, not whatever the latest hype is for investors. The limitations of LLM are well understood, as are the limitations of neural net and deep learning going way back. At their most benign, all LLMs stand to do is distract investors and take funds that could go to research that had a chance greater than zero of leading to AGI, and put it toward horrifically bad and fundamentally flawed systems that work using statistics and next-token prediction, whose hallucinations cannot and will not ever be solved.
Third, the prospect of "growth" and its perpetuity and necessity as you speak of them in the market serve only to discredit you as a thinker who is not interested in facts, data, or even simple arithmetics, but one only interested in beliefs. Read physics, study math, look at the data, and you will realise quite quickly most economists are not at all serious people in any way. Infinite growth is not possible in closed systems, end of conversation really, or it should be.
Thinking energy growth should continue for completely worthless causes like AI is not only irrational, but suicidal. A few hundred more years of even modest 2-3% growth in energy will boil the planet no matter which kind of energy production it is we know of, be it nuclear of any sort, oil, solar and other green energy scams, because of waste heat and the laws of thermodynamics. Selling people the idea that the potential we've got should be used up and wasted on useless hallucination machines that only understand data statistically and will never be able to even read times on a clock that aren't statistically likely (on advertising photos) is pure madness!
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/can-modernity-last/
It's not sustainable, and precious rare earth minerals and other resources like copper are being thrown right into the trash (on a large scale, quite literally so) by the profligate cultists of Silicon Valley, whose idea of "progress" seems to be to destroy us all while they try to "usher forth" AI out of some sort of religious insanity professed by those like Yudkowsky, who think their beliefs in AI are scientific in spite of professing their own religious motives and desire for an afterlife and so on. Never trust any AI optimist, every one of them is a pseudosceptic, pseudorationalist, who doesn't care for what the research and data shows, but for abstract theory not dictated by or following logic of any kind.
Articles like this are proof that independent media largely serves, like the corporate press, to serve people information and points of view they already know and agree with with back to them, and make them think they're wise and smart for having what they already know and believe affirmed. They are proof that those who have been betrayed by the mainstream media and lost their confidence in institutions and systems will struggle to be any more discerning elsewhere, when there are so many people willing to lie to them for views or deceive them unknowingly out of ignorance.
Alright - forget A.I.,
but then forget electric cars, stoves, water heaters, dryers, heat pumps,
forget everything else too
Boil the planet? You have been reading too many apocalyptic novels, although I agree with your argument that many applications of AI are a waste of effort or totally counterproductive, from the point of view of the citizen on the street.
Mark Jeftovic has some interesting observations on how unlikely AI is to produce artificial conciousness - or host an existing one, because the prevailing paradigm/world view is deficient.
Thank you Robert! I recall reading an economist (writing on import restrictions): "Why do to yourself in peacetime what an enemy would do to you in wartime?". Seems relevant here.
I suspect the Chinese and Russians have expended a lot of hacking effort in attempting to cripple the grids of Western countries. Now they can watch in astonishment while elected governments do their work for them.
I saw a Tesla today in Sun Valley, ID. License Plate "RIP OIL". Thought, why not an even as absurd "RIP GRAVITY" or "RIP FRICTION"