We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – the physics that demolishes energy policy There is far more heat energy in a swimming pool than in a pan of boiling water. You can boil an egg in the pan. You can’t boil an egg in the pool. And if you doubled the size of the pool, you’d double the energy available — and still have a cold, raw egg.
This is not a riddle. It is the single most important concept in the energy debate, and almost nobody making energy policy understands it.
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The proposal to replace gas and nuclear with wind and solar reverses the direction of every successful energy transition in human history. It moves down the density ladder, deliberately, and hopes for the best.
That is what I mean when I say current energy policy is in a head-on collision with physics.
– Richard Lyon
Read the whole thing.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Yes, the “energy transition” (to wind and solar) is anti science.
P.S. there is no energy transition. Only pouring of tons of money and irons on false pretenses.
The Guardian recently published a heading: “The ban on transition treatments for minors is anti science”. This “transition” is also nonsense.
I do wonder how long a wind turbine or solar panel has to operate before it has repaid the energy used to manufacture and install it. As I understand it biofuels produce less energy than it takes to produce them.
To play the cynic here, you can build renewables within the lifetime of a Parliament, and thus take the credit, but you can’t build a nuclear plant (in Britain) in that time.
Three sayings that ring true:
“If wind turbines / solar panels were economical, they’d be using wind turbines / solar panels to make wind turbines / solar panels.”
“If biofuels were economical, they’d be using biofuels to make biofuels.” And,
“Wind turbines – a fourteenth-century solution to a twenty-first-century (non-) problem.”
Two words: Diffuse and intermittent.
The explanation is so simple, it just cannot be misunderstood. It can only be wifully ignored.