Energy

Electric cars are being artificially bolstered by government mandates and subsidies and are doing little to reduce emissions because the electricity they need is overwhelmingly not solar, nuclear, or hydroelectric. What would help are batteries that aren't stuck in the 20th century, like lithium-ion, which cost so much to replace that one Tesla owner blew up his car with dynamite rather than a cost for new batteries that was 50 percent of the original purchase price. And they can be dangerous. Lithium-ion explosion risk Solid-state batteries, like lithium-ion, create energy as lithium ions…

Utility customers in California are being exploited by a special class of grifters. Those who live in apartment buildings or rental homes or live in poor neighborhoods are forced by law to subsidize million-dollar solar installations on homes in Malibu. The poor are exploited in the form of a direct rebate which depletes funds that could be used for social services for all Californians, plus a special tax levied on their utility bills. It not only pays wealthy people to install solar panels, it pays them to sell any electricity back to the power company on bright days for the same price they…

Riding a wave of government mandates and subsidies, and ignoring that fossil fuel usage to create electricity is identical to what it was before a trillion dollars in additional subsidies for solar and wind alternatives, electric cars are now everywhere. One problem has been largely ignored: the batteries. They are environmentally intensive to make, expensive and ironically need enormous amounts of energy to recycle, and then only a fraction of the material can be recovered. Taking a different approach from selling the cars - mandating that companies produce them, paying companies to produce…

Today’s global energy inequities are staggering. Video gamers in California consume more electricity than entire nations. The average Tanzanian used only one-sixth the electricity consumed by a typical American refrigerator in 2014. Globally, the top 10% of countries consume 20 times more energy than the bottom 10%. And 1.1 billion sub-Saharan Africans share the same amount of power generation capacity as Germany’s 83 million people. At least half have no access to electricity at all. The majority of the Congolese population doesn’t have access to electricity. Eduardo Soteras/AFP…

Just a few weeks ago, Sri Lanka underwent a meltdown. The price of food had skyrocketed and it was all because instead of believing scientists they believed Russia or Pesticide Action Network or whoever claims the organic process "is ready" to feed everyone and switched.  After a whole lot of people who have never farmed made the decision, its collapse was sudden. They switched to organic in May and by August exports were down because yields plummeted. People hoarded food because they knew what was happening and then the government had to create police units to raid homes and steal it so…

I am not running for President so I don't have any need to cater to Iowa corn farmers and voters, as former Vice-President Al Gore admitted he was doing when he broke a tie in the Senate and forced ethanol mandates on Americans. Gore's move was not just cynically motivated - it sure wouldn't be the last time a politician wrapped themselves in the flag of science to further their career - it was bad policy, terrible for cars, and despite claims that government mandates and subsidies would counter-intuitively set off a chain of free market technology enhancements, those never happened. Instead…

Smartphones tout 'dark mode' as an energy-saving feature, because darker-colored pixels use less power than lighter-colored pixels. It's mostly an intellectual placebo, finds a new study, because of the way most people use their phones on a daily basis. The study looked at six of the most-downloaded apps on Google Play: Google Maps, Google News, Google Phone, Google Calendar, YouTube and Calculator. The researchers analyzed how dark mode affects 60 seconds of activity within each of these apps on the Pixel 2, Moto Z3, Pixel 4 and Pixel 5. Dark mode only made a noticeable difference to…

New York's Indian Point nuclear power plant was banned on April 30th of this year - because the ruling political party and the environmental lobbyists who guide decisions convinced themselves that solar was ready to fill the gap. Now the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, has told residents they need to shut off their air conditioners during a heat wave, because they don't have enough electricity. At the state level, alleged serial sexual predator Governor Andrew Cuomo is deflecting from his scandals by appealing to his base with another ban on energy - making the state one on natural…

In lab tests, solar often seems to work great, yet in actual use its efficiency drops sharply. A phenomenon known as singlet fission can help but it is hindered by unexplained energy losses during the reaction. Basic research is needed because solar energy could grow to be one of the most important fossil-free and eco-friendly sources of electricity. Unless it doesn't work as advertised for taxpayers who fund it. Silicon-based solar cells currently in use have a hypothetical upper limit of approximately 33 percent of the energy in sunlight that can be converted to electricity, known as…

At the turn of the 20th century Carrie Nation smashed up a saloon in Kansas, gold was discovered in Alaska, and New York City's boundaries became set with the inclusion of Queens and Staten Island. America had five new states and they had a big problem.(1) Water.  Homesteaders wanted to move out west, and government wanted to help, but there was a water issue. When rain was happening things were fine but nature is fickle. Weather was less predictable then and even if you lived near a river, there was no guarantee you'd have water. President Teddy Roosevelt knew the problem…