Monday, August 30, 2021
Fusion Future
First, put aside the issue of whether stopping carbon emissions should be a societal priority: If anyone actually wanted to decarbonize electricity production, they could do so now, using nuclear-fission reactors. The French have already done so. The Malthusian movement — a.k.a., “Greens” — opposes this vigorously, because nuclear power threatens to solve a problem they need to have. As soon as fusion power becomes practical, they will oppose it too, for the exact same reason, as in fact the Sierra Club already does.
No, the reason we need fusion is to destroy the Malthusian belief system, which, in my estimation, is the preeminent threat to human civilization today. If one accepts the idea that resources are limited, then all nations are fundamentally enemies, and the only issue is who is going to kill whom in order to claim what’s available. At bottom, this was the source of the major catastrophes of the 20th century. It could cause far worse in the 21st. This mindset, however, is false. We are not threatened by there being too many people. We are threatened by people who think there are too many people.
Fusion power can save us by utterly refuting the limited-resource thesis. The amount of deuterium fusion fuel present in one gallon of water contains as much energy as that produced by burning 350 gallons of gasoline. That’s all water on earth, fresh or salt. A gallon of water from Mars contains deuterium with the energy content of 2,000 gallons of gasoline. Other planets or asteroids may offer more still. So what we are talking about with fusion is unlimited energy. With enough energy, you can do anything. In the entire history of human civilization we have not used up a single kilogram of iron or aluminum. We have just degraded some matter from more convenient to less convenient forms. With enough energy, we can rearrange it back, recycling it faster and faster from one form to another. We will never run out of anything.
War on Modernity
The Green New Deal and all variants of it are sheer fantasy. They won’t happen; the laws of physics guarantee that. But the damage that will be done in the meantime, in lives as well as destroyed wealth, is incalculable.
Labels: party of science
Take a Physics Class
Then there’s the question of adding billions of cars to our electric grids, which almost no one talks about. This will demand not more unreliable and expensive wind and solar, but a lot of reliable nuclear power, and if we’re being honest, more natural gas. Almost no one discusses this. EVs run on power of some kind, which is generated not by burning gasoline in the onboard engine, but by burning something else somewhere else. Almost no one discusses this either.
Then after that, there’s the question of whether EVs are actually cleaner to make than gas-powered cars. EVs require toxic heavy metals and chemicals and elements such as lithium, which are mostly produced in Chile and China, not the United States. We have abundant, cheap, and clean-burning natural gas, which is what the activist left wants us to stop developing and using in favor of lithium, which, as noted, we don’t have a lot of, and the production of which is mostly done away from the EPA’s prying eyes in countries with much lower environmental standards than ours. You are, essentially, burning a lot of coal in China and using up a lot of water in Chile to make EVs for America and Europe at this point. The EV batteries remain toxic after they’re used up. Producing EVs is about as dirty if not dirtier than producing gas cars, but with the added bonus of benefiting China at America’s energy expense.
Labels: party of science
Sunday, August 22, 2021
Under-Incarceration
Any honest discussion of incarceration levels must start with the acknowledgement that the majority of crimes committed in America are never reported or solved. In 2019, only 41 percent of violent crimes, 34 percent of sexual assaults, and 32 percent of property crimes were reported to the police. Of the crimes that are reported, only 61 percent of murders, 46 percent of violent crimes, 33 percent of rapes, 24 percent of arsons, and 14 percent of burglaries and auto thefts result in an arrest. Such low reporting and clearance rates ensure that any incarceration number flowing from them will be definitionally too small.Careful, Senator Cotton. Math is racist.
And:
Democrats are also working to close and defund state prisons because they appear to believe that the prison system operates like the field of dreams: "If you build it, they will come." But criminals go to prison for one reason: committing crimes. Refusing to build prisons does not reduce crime. In fact, it increases crime by letting criminals remain on the streets.
