I took a stroll recently through the countryside around Swindon, UK, where there’s a massive new solar farm on formerly arable land. One thing I only just realised was how the view from the ground is so badly affected when you’re down amidst the endless rows of panels - they reach well above head height.
It’s basically like walking through a industrial estate, just with more grass in between. Really very bleak.
So much spare land in flat roofs in industrial and warehouse space but solar installations there, if they are there, seem to be limited to covering utility bills for the building over generating surplus for the grid. Much of the roof will remain uncovered, along with all the periphery lot, parking, truck yard, and access roads. No one would be complaining about any view there...
TIL shadows from trees only project down directly under the tree and never project away from the tree itself. My entire life experience has been rendered useless.
Ultimately, everything we build we build for ourselves, and people will generally prefer something that's nice to look at, if slightly inefficient, over the thing that's optimal at the cost of every other parameter.
It's obvious from the scale of it that the fact of how shadows move over the course of a day isn't going to make much difference, even if they go much above the height of the panels, which they don't need to in order to hide them from people at ground level.
Ok, but why are you down among the panels? We have solar farms near my house and I don't hang out in them. You only see it when you drive by the place. I would much less prefer a giant windmill obstructing an otherwise scenic view.
Guess why those aren't common? Largely because the same people vehemently opposing these solar parks, have already been blocking onshore (and even near-coast offshore) wind for more than a decade.
Would be nice if we started with the actual marginal land and not the marginal land in real estate terms. Roofs for a start. Parking lots next. Really no reason why any and all industrial land shouldn't look like a pure sea of solar from orbit. Every square inch is low hanging fruit no one would complain about a solar panel going in there.
I would actually phrase is a "fossil fuels are an existential threat" - regardless on how climmate change will impact us, it is IMHO enough to see the destructions people are capable due to fossil fuel money & it makes 100% sense to get ridd of any dependency on fossil fuels ASAP.
It's hysterical claims like this that cause so many problems for climate researchers and policy makers when the doomsday scenario fails to materialize. And then that's when you get newspaper clippings about the melting of the arctic sea ice by the year 2000 and everyone laughs and then discounts the whole thing.
Please don't do this. It is not an "existential threat" outside of various fundraising pamphlets and political organizations, and they exploit science for political gain at the cost of the credibility of the whole enterprise.
I don't think you're qualified to make this assessment. If a large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat, I'm tempted to agree. In fact, I think most widely held scientific stances on this are meant to be balanced and as agreeable as possible, so I personally believe it's likely to be worse than the mainstream opinion.
Climate migration is already an issue. Extreme climate events are already increasingly problematic. Will civilization collapse in the next 50 years. Almost certainly not, but will we be better off then than we are now? Unless we rapidly increase the rate at which we address this issue, I don't see how that happens either.
Of course I'm qualified to make the assessment, as the respectable scientific community has been warning people to not make such bombastic statements, and similar warnings were in the IPCC. You really aren't doing yourself any favors by pushing hysteria into scientific disciplines. This is exactly why the climate movement has lost so much credibility and suffered so many policy setbacks.
No, the world is not ending. The clouds are not burning. There is no risk to life on earth. These are technical discussions about whether sea levels will increase by 2mm per year or 3mm per year.
> large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat
I haven’t seen evidence of this. What I see is scientists making measured predictions about massive costs in human life, economies, refugee crises, and wars. Extinctions. Like, horrible stuff. But not extinction or even civilisational collapse.
We will go from 8 billion humans to maybe 1 or 2 billion humans, but that is probably going to happen either way. Poor countries will be obliterated, rich countries are likely to see tanking living standards. Long term humans go extinct (or are superseded by some sort of singularity successor) and the earth recovers in a few thousand years as if we never existed.
RCP8.5 is pretty much ruled out by people as unlikely for some reason, even as we have the major super power on the planet pulling out of the Paris agreement on climate change.
There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature if we don't change course and reach net zero.
Saying its not an existential threat is just wild to me.
> There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life
Yes, but that temperature isn't going to be reached by fossil fuels.*
The reduced brain function from the extra CO2 (if we burned all of it) may make us unable to adapt to the higher temperature, however.
* Ironically, unbounded growth of PV to tile all Earth's deserts could also raise the planet's temperature by 4 K or so, and 6 K or so if tiling all non-farm land.
Deserts are huge, this by itself would represent an enormous increase in global electricity supply; but also, current growth trends for PV have been approximately exponential (in the actual maths sense not just "fast") for decades now, so this could happen in as little as 35 years give or take a few (both scenarios are within the same margin for error, because exponential is like that).
> There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature
There is such a temperature. We are not getting to it in half a century at current emission rates, even with zero curtailment. If you have a source that shows the opposite, I’d be happy to read it.
You literally said “the existential threat happens in 100 years.”
And to your questions, we don’t know. I’d love to see the data. I’m still sceptical we hit “existential” levels for human survival. That wouldn’t even happen if we went back to dinosaur levels of CO2.
I've never been able to decide whether it is or not. I'm still vaguely scared of the clathrate gun, permafrost releasing extra CO2, and phytoplankton shrinking under ocean acidification so we can't have as much oxygen as we're accustomed to.
Edit: one of those crossfire situations where the downvotes could be coming from either direction. I'm going to assume they mean "don't be scared".
I don't know who downvoted you, people treat this topic with religious zeal. Yes, basically all the arguments trying to claim that the influence of CO2 has positive feedbacks relies on cascades of things amplifying warming.
And that's certainly something to discuss, whether there exists a type of rube goldberg machine where higher levels of CO2 cause the permafrost to melt which cause even higher levels of CO2 which cause something else to release even more CO2, etc.
I certainly wont deny that such a sequence of events is possible, and it's worth studying. But on the other side of that you have basic physics, which shows that the warming effects go with the log of CO2. That really slows things down by quite a bit. It turns a doubling into an additive factor.
Now, could it be that the cascade of events is such that it overcomes the logarithm? E.g. that it is an exponential or super-exponential chain of events that would release exponentially more CO2. Uhh, maybe, but this is not something to try to terrify the population with. And it sounds extremely unlikely. So you need an extremely precarious set of assumptions -- or just deny physics outright -- to overcome Arrhenius' Greenhouse rule. Logarithms cover a multitude of growth sins.
It's 2071. James Dyson, now 124 and in better health than ever, thanks to the AI-fuelled nanorobotic revolution, has just lost control of the last of the company's Dyson Swarms. What started as a fleet of cleaning-nanites, a dirt and dust-eating squadron-for-hire, has gone rogue; all of Earth's organic matter is now on the menu. People still haven't forgiven him about Brexit.
The first time I ever saw a PC it was running Sopwith. Must have been 1989. I loved the game, but it was this exotic new machine that really interested me. It had 5.25” floppies, probably a 286 and quite an old machine by then.
I had only used Z80/128k machines up to then. My dad had an Amstrad 6128, with those 3” “hard” floppies, sturdy, with a decent thick metal gate.
This PC was a very different beast. I remember being confused about the disks. They seemed weak and unprotected ! you could literally see that delicate magnetic surface through the opening. I had always been told never to touch it, but there it was, just asking to be touched…
Oh but the 3" disks have the window with the gate on the INSIDE of the disk... While it's much harder to break it than on the 3.5", once it does... Big sad.
I remember these disk from my Spectrum +3 . Indeed more hard and resistant that the 3.5" . Sad, that the format was on the losing side and never evolved beyond the 128k (or was 256k?) that could store on a single side.
Is this grid-scale solar ? It can’t be rooftop - there is nobody in the UK who will install a 5kW rooftop system for £2k. The quotes I’ve had recently have been closer to £10k.
> The cost assumptions assume utility-scale solar panels and batteries in large parks. Smaller-scale rooftop solar and home batteries would cost 2-3 times more.
I've installed domestic solar several times. The main cost isn't the panels or the inverters - it's the scaffolding, labour, and wiring improvements in the home. If you have a tall or complicated house, it'll cost more.
They did. I worked in telecommunications from the late 90s until 2016. The death of the landline and dominance of mobile was a genuine surprise to the industry. The iPhone was the knockout blow.
People have been speculating on future returns since forever.
The East India company (an example of capitalism gone very very wrong) was speculatively founded with £4m (in today’s money) and went on to corner half of global trade.
This rose-tinted past of honest capitalism did not exist.
I like your term "honest capitalism". I'm putting that in my back pocket for later.
Capitalism breeds monopolies by rewarding first movers with economic advantages via feedback loop. This is how the system is designed to work, always has been, always will be.
Who else “played a role” in Falcon 9 reducing the cost of mass to orbit, exactly ? I guess some public money went their way ?
Also which jury is still out on starship ? I haven’t read any serious criticism that suggests there are insurmountable technical obstacles to it working. Timelines and the exact final cost-to-orbit are still debatable I guess ?
The achievements of the program so far and the infrastructure currently under construction in Starbase and the cape are seriously impressive. This is no speculative, skunkworks endeavour.
I don't think anyone can say there are insurmountable obstacles, but it's still a hard problem they haven't solved yet. Bits of the rocket are still melting on reentry, and they have to fix that to achieve rapid reusability. Plus they haven't demonstrated a heavy payload yet. We can't be sure they'll actually achieve extreme low cost until they've done both of these things.
For anything beyond Earth orbit, they also need to demonstrate orbital refueling.
I've seen articles raising technical concerns about all of these, but I'm not enough of an expert myself to have an opinion.
> Also which jury is still out on starship ? I haven’t read any serious criticism that suggests there are insurmountable technical obstacles to it working. Timelines and the exact final cost-to-orbit are still debatable I guess ?
There are also other space companies outside of SpaceX who have innovated and reduced the cost of mass to orbit.
Just trying to add the perspective that while yes, SpaceX is impressive, there are also other companies and this hero-like worship of SpaceX (or any other company/person) is not great.
So far everybody's playing catch-up, but there are some innovative rocket companies out there. Blue Origin is finally getting to orbit with partial reusability, Rocket Lab and Relativity Space are doing some cool stuff, and Stoke Space is working on full reusability, evaporative cooling for reentry (using hydrogen fuel for the second stage, which works much better for this than methane), can steer for landing without gimbaling the engines, and has a full flow staged combustion engine like Starship.
If you’ve got even a passing interest in the UK energy market you’d know this is because of the wholesale price of gas, not the actual wholesale cost of solar and wind.
If you really want to pay less for green energy, which is cheap when it’s plentiful (like anything) get on a variable tariff and install some storage.
> In the UK, the marginal unit is almost always a gas-fired power plant. As a result, one widely cited academic analysis found that gas set the price of power 97% of the time in the UK in 2021.
Because nuclear. Which is a great 20th century French achievement !
If the EPR2 doesn’t spiral into costing £17.5bn per unit as the UK-PWR has, perhaps we can get them in to “rustle me up a nuclear power station” or two, in the words of Tony Blair.
The subsidies for the EPR2 fleet is a 10 euro cents per kWh CFD and interest free loans. With the first reactor coming online in 2038 at the earliest.
That sums up towards 20 cents per kWh in total.
It’s an absolutely horrifyingly expensive boondoggle before they have even started, and it won’t deliver any electricity in the relevant timeframes for electrifying industry and society.
On top of this EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for their existing paid off nuclear fleet. Let alone new builds.
And that is France which has been extremely protectionistic shielding their nuclear fleet from renewable
competition, and even then its already leaking in on pure economics.
A 10c€/kWh CfD is not strictly speaking a subsidy, at the government will recover the average market price.
That being said, the total cost per kWh could well reach 20c/kWh, which is ridiculous. It's not only not competitive against renewables, but also not competitive with natural gas (CCGT are probably around 10-15c€/kWh).
The average day ahead price in France in 2025 was 6 cents per kWh.
This is with carbon trading starting to make fossil production very expensive, on top of LNG fossil gas. Which will quickly start to diminish as more renewables and storage comes online.
While the CFD runs for 40 years so into the 2080s for all but the first reactor.
I think you could choose to believe that “the industry’s priorities have fundamentally changed” or you could choose to believe in the economics of supply and demand.
It’s basically like walking through a industrial estate, just with more grass in between. Really very bleak.
Give me an onshore wind farm over this.
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