What makes you think that card comapnies/steam scandal wouldn’t happen with digital euro. EU could easily put some constraints on money usage and they wouldn’t need to justify it to anyone…
And the hostility probably come from experience with EU that makes decisions solely in interest of politicians and corporations instead of EU citizens in my opinion.
We could have had nuclear airplanes and clean nuclear energy decades ago but here we are burning coal to power our EVs and acting like air traveling is something to be ashamed of…
Jokes aside, I don’t see how this should work, people with lowest income wont be able to travel yet everyone else will
Pay the ticket and go on their marry way. People pay 20$ to select the seat, they will pay 20 more in some made up tax to get where they want to go…
> people with lowest income wont be able to travel yet everyone else will Pay the ticket and go on their marry way.
I was discussing with an older friend the other week, we stumbled on the realization (maybe it's obvious) that progressing up the well-being ladder means consuming more energy and CO2, compare living in an unelectrified village with bathing in the river, and just sitting around with your friends for entertainment; with a villa with a hot shower, TV, and food flown from all over the world.
We were also discussing about how sad it is that when he was a travelling young man, he could still visit the "authentic" places, i.e. places with huts and no electricity, paved roads, or cars, but as time goes on those places now have brick buildings, TV, air-conditioning and asphalted roads, which is what the people living there wanted and got.
Now the poorer people of the world are screaming about the rich west saying "You've enjoyed all the luxuries and now you want to make it more expensive because 'save the planet', the one you ruined gaining all those luxuries? Not with us!". Even the working class French screamed about proposed increase of gasoline taxes...
It’s normal to enjoy development if you come from a less privileged country. But it sometimes happens that consumers in those countries specifically demand examples of development that are more polluting than others, purely for the sake of social status. Think being able to buy a perfectly decent modern, fuel-efficient car, but instead buying a low-gas-mileage SUV because that lets them look like a big man to their community.
Suggesting to those consumers that they avoid the mistakes that the West made, and just leapfrog straight to the modern, efficient tech, is a bit like suggesting average Americans take public transportation: “What, you want me to do something poor people do?”
I'm fortunate to live in a place with ubiquitous excellent public transport and I've not driven a car in 5 years. I don't miss it at all, in fact it's amazing not having to deal with parking, maintenance, damage, cleaning, insurance, road tax, fuel prices.. 20€ a month covers all my travel needs now <3
I zealously shill the values of nuclear power 7 days a week, but unless we discover a physics revelation nuclear airplanes are a horrible concept.
There are no forms of nuclear power production existing or theoretical which don't involve health-hazardous amounts of radioactive material. Even hydrogen fusion reactors activate the housing walls with neutrons. Miracle on the Hudson would have been much less miraculous if it meant terabecquerels of activity floating downstream.
As far as I know, in the 50ies the molten salt reactors where researched exactly with long range airplanes in mind.
My point is that for decades we didn’t invest enough into nuclear research in fear of nuclear weapons that all we are doing now is trying to put a band aid on the severed hand.
An extra $200 a flight is not going to have a massive impact on the average middle class American who goes on an international vacation once every 5 years or so.
None of this will have an impact on the average American because the average American doesn’t fly. More than half of all Americans don’t get on a plane in any one year.
Nuclear power is a great idea. With heavy heavy heavy shielding that is. Maybe even worth using it to synthesize fuel for airplanes. But don't stick it on a plane.
Because ostensibly global warming and climate change is of far more existential threat than localized turbines. Wind power could possibly save all birds, at the cost of some birds. It’s similar to when a self driving car gets into an accident - all hand wringing and no looking at broader statistics.
Bird death from turbines small-scale and highly predictable. Deaths from nuclear can range from zero to regional catastrophe and it's basically impossible to predict when it'll happen and how bad it'll be.
I'm not anti-nuclear, but the risk profile is SO different from wind.
The worst case is worse, but nuclear disasters are so rare and reactors produce so much power that nuclear is safer than wind in terms of deaths per TWh.
As is the power generation profile. Wind/solar/tidal are important to develop, and the risk profile should include whatever peaker or storage backs up the variability in generation.
Because solar and wind are a fraction of the capex and opex, have none of the risk or security headaches, more easily distributed (meaning less grid infrastructure) and don't generate nuclear waste.
In my opinion and experience, which might not mean much, people react well to addiction therapy while undergoing it. Usually cos they are engaged in non usual processes in their life.
As soon as they return they their usual life old habits kick in.
Only way to have similar lifestyle and drop addiction from it is to dig deep and understand why you have those habits to start with.
You have to replace the triggers for usual behaviour and this is extremely hard for learned behaviours.
To the extent that those who do it, let’s say by doing sport, actually become addicted to sport if they manage to change their original behaviour.
Sadly I think addiction is a psychological process induced by ones state of life.
Most addition therapies work well while a person is engaged in it but as soon as the person comes back to their old life style it comes back.
You need to change your life to change the habits otherwise is near impossible unless you have very strong willpower, which most people with addiction don’t.
On the other hand there are the majority of people living under the same circumstances and are not getting addicted.
I think there is another way of getting rid of addictions:
I heard of multiple people that quit smoking form one day to another which usually has a very low chance of success (~3%). One thing they had in common: They pursued their addiction and one day got so horribly sick that something changed. I think the Sinclair method follows a similar approach. Give alcohol addicted people naltrexone which blocks the rewards from ethanol but keeps the nasty side effects and then let them drink as they like.
This is completely wrong. Nuclear is more expensive. The optimal strategy going forward likely involves no new nuclear construction.
Solar/wind and nuclear do not play well together. The former will push the latter completely out of the market unless nuclear becomes considerably cheaper (and that is a forlorn hope, given the history of the technology.)
You assumed wrong. I was talking about history of nuclear's economics. It has failed to show good learning effects (that is, getting cheaper as more units are built.) If anything, it has shown negative learning effects -- getting more expensive as more units are built.
Contrast this to photovoltaics, which have declined in cost by something like a factor of 300 since they came on the market. PV has shown a robust learning rate of 20% cost reduction per doubling of cumulative production.
It should be no surprise that nuclear is sputtering to extinction with such poor cost trends. In contrast, all the competing technologies -- solar, wind, storage -- are showing excellent learning. So, it's only a matter of time until nuclear dies.
So it cheaper and faster to build, however I still see no solution for base loads and land usage, which as far as i can tell nuclear is a minute fraction of land usage as opposed to solar and specially wind. Some estimates put this at 1/400 for nuclear vs solar and 1/2000.vs wind where nuclear produces constant power supply as opposed to “renewables”.
So there seems to be natural bounds as to how much these can grow and how much land surface they take and thus damage.
Plus, we haven’t put as nearly as much time last 30 years coming up with better nuclear devices as we did in renewables.
So even if you are right about the current prices I don’t see that as a nuclear problem but populist problem, since people are scared of nuclear waste but seem to be ok with destroying the marine and land habitats.
Hey, let’s wait for another decade and see where it takes us.
Land usage is not a problem at all, if you do the arithmetic. That you bring this up tells me you're parroting anti-renewable talking points in bad faith rather than presenting reasoned objections.
As for base load, we can estimate the cost of covering for intermittency of renewables to produce synthetic baseload. It ends up cheaper than nuclear. A key part of this in some locations (such as Europe) is to use hydrogen in addition to batteries for storage.
> Plus, we haven’t put as nearly as much time last 30 years coming up with better nuclear devices as we did in renewables.
We've spent much longer than 30 years trying with nuclear. The first nuclear power plant on the grid was in the 1950s. Huge investment was made in civilian nuclear back in the day. If less is being invested now it's because nuclear has demonstrated it's unattractive, not because we didn't give it more than enough chances.
The "oh poor nuclear is just misunderstood" argument is common nuke bro defensive thinking. No, nuclear's problem is $$$. The people with money are negative on nuclear because they see scammers trying to sell them crap all the time (in nuclear's case, via grossly lowballed cost projections), and they've learned to say no.
