Can I get a ‘fuck spez’
Can I get a ‘fuck spez’
Sure, but nevertheless they’re burning a lot more coal than they would be if they hadn’t pointlessly shut down their nuclear plants.
“We were able to grow enough soybeans to replace half of the whale meat we were eating, but we can’t replace the other half yet because even though we have plenty of lentils, we hate lentils and don’t want to eat them anymore”
Nuclear output 12.2021: 5599.8 GWh
Brown coal output 8.2023: 5422.0 GWh
Black coal output 8.2023: 2049.2 GWh
So if you, y’know, hadn’t shut down those nuclear plants, you’d be burning 1/4 as much coal as you actually are.
Germany of course is the country that recently shut down a bunch of nuclear plants + temporarily (we hope) replaced them with coal.
Gee, I wonder if the cost might go down if we built more of them, as is the case with, y’know, basically every other complicated thing that humans build.
But building new plants uses a shit ton of concrete. So we’re paying the carbon cost up front, and it can take years or even decades to break even.
That’s not remotely on the same scale, carbon-wise. Global output is like 4 billion tons of concrete per year, a nuclear plant uses like 12 tons per megawatt; an all-in nuclear buildout would use a tiny, tiny fraction of global concrete production and the carbon costs aren’t even remotely equivalent.
(also, wind power uses way, way more concrete)
Hah, if this happened nowadays you’d have to sign up for a $1000/month subscription for 100 words a month on a 5-year contract, pay a $35/word overage fee, and if you didn’t use all 100 words in a particular month, you could pay $5/word to roll over up to 10 of them to the next month. And if you try to cancel your subscription after those 5 years, they put you on hold for 3 hours and then accidentally hang up on you.
Paraphrasing an old meme:
Fahrenheit - how hot humans feel
Celsius - how hot water feels
Kelvin - how hot atoms feel
All-time classic Verge article on this subject:
https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine
I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.
(I think the reality is that they’re mining that data to identify a small number of people susceptible to high-value scams - like getting addicted to an F2P mobile game and spending $1000s on it - and the rest of us just get generic infill)