I haven’t watched the movie. So I don’t know what he’s saying specifically.
I used to work in a solar power lab, I have a masters specializing in the physics of designing and manufacturing solar cells, along with other semiconductor devices, and I’ve broadly kept up with issues relating to our energy economy since I moved to a more lucrative and stable industry than solar.
I think we could plausibly build enough storage to get to about 80% intermittent renewables (solar and wind). It would probably cost $10-20 trillion, though that doesn’t include major grid upgrades. (Note that that figure is for the storage, not including all the other infrastructure upgrades that would be required, like switching to electric vehicles, etc.)
I think it is not at all plausible to get from 80% to 100%, in the foreseeable future. We will still need ~20% non-intermittent base load power.
The only carbon-neutral source of baseload power that we can deploy everywhere is nuclear. I think people who have a problem with using nuclear for base load mostly don’t really viscerally understand how bad climate change is likely to get. It’s not that nuclear is without danger, or problems, it’s that the danger is much lower, and more localized, than that from carbon emissions.
In case you were at all concerned that this revelation may have cowed her rabid stupidity individualism, rest assured it has not.
In Whitlock’s post, she wrote about how the restrictions put in place amid the COVID-19 pandemic are violating her First Amendment rights as well as her 5th and 14th Amendment rights.
She said she was “forced” to quarantine which violated her First Amendment rights.
“The reality is that modern society has not been able to eradicate contagious viruses. A typical public health quarantine would occur in a medical facility. I have been told not to participate in public or private accommodations as requested by the government, and therefore denied my 1st amendment right of freedom of religion,” Whitlock wrote.
She went on to say that “It has been insinuated by others that if I go out, I could be arrested for denying a quarantine order.”
She says an arrest in that situation would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act .
That would come as a major surprise to me and any number of lawyers in the UK. The NHS has a whole division dedicated to fighting lawsuits.
Granted claimants face the usual problems of funding a claim but clinical negligence is one of the few areas where it’s still relatively easy to find some way of doing it.
And that willingness often seems to exist only as lip-service.
Most people who end up suing the NHS do it because they can’t get any sort of acknowledgement or apology out of the NHS. The NHS doesn’t apologise or admit mistakes because it’s scared of being sued. And round and round we go.
It is my understanding that the payouts are generally negligible, whereas in the US they can be punitive (i.e. theoretically enough money to make the medical group consider making changes to not go out of business, practically this doesn’t happen because of malpractice insurance and other issues).
she’s using her supposed test results to get further attention from the media, and is now able to claim “it’s all no big deal.”
Only those who meet the following criteria should ask their doctor or local health department about being tested for COVID-19:
Have fever or lower respiratory symptoms (cough, shortness of breath) and close contact with a confirmed COVID-19 case within the past 14 days; OR
Have fever and lower respiratory symptoms (cough, shortness of breath) and a negative rapid flu test
While everyone and their cat seem to think the worst is over, we are moving away from traceable outbreak clusters to a background-type infectiosity which will hit us when measures are relaxed. Is it fucking 1918 again or what?
War impacts non-combatants to a MUCH greater extent than combatants.
Yet when we look at these wars in the media, or study them in school, we tend to focus only on the casualties of “our side’s” military. Which gives a very skewed perception of the reality.
More on topic – having a COVID-19 casualty rate that meets or exceeds the casualty rate of a war is a travesty and tragedy (kind of like which ever war is being compared).
