Then please explain, to me he brought up an unrelated point about ethanol (which is often poorly understood and mischaracterized anyways) consuming a portion of agriculturally productive land. Which BTW this agricultural land that produces ethanol is probably not even close to the best place in the country for industrial scale solar from a LOT of perspectives.
My "try to understand" take: We subsidize corn, then use it yo make a less efficient fuel. The money involved in this process likely takes away from subsidies to other forms of energy. There are a great many activities we do not subsidize, but solar is one that if we did, would produce an outsized benefit to society. And the more we do, the better. Redirecting an ethanol subsidy to solar would be a far more beneficial long term strategy for energy independence and overall standard of living in the US. Going all in on Solar would be a transformative and likely relatively short investment period that would last and benefit a long time. We have done many large scale infrastructure projects in the US, and it is frustrating to see the resistance to this one, being both less disruptive and more "all around win" than any other i can think of.
- Redistribution of food (both for livestock and human) production
- Environmental impacts of PV vs livestock vs depletion of native prairies
Point still stands...if you replaced all of the land used to produce ethanol with PV, you would create a surplus of energy that is higher than anything we could imaginably consume today (hint - China is essentially already doing this)
No no, that argument is pretty old now. The amount of fuel you GROW on your own continent at any single or double digit percentage during wartime-anytime is probably a good long-term research project that shouldn't be interrupted by people online.
The problem is corn requires a lot of fossil fuel energy input, mostly in the form of fertiliser. The net energy output is only around 1.3 so an acre of corn produces maybe 400 gallons of gasoline equivalent output requires 300 gallons of gasoline equivalent in energy inputs.
Ethanol from sugarcane makes a lot more sense. Corn ethanol is just a wasteful subsidy for farmers paid for by drivers.
>The net energy output is only around 1.3 so an acre of corn produces maybe 400 gallons of gasoline equivalent output requires 300 gallons of gasoline equivalent in energy inputs.
What is the problem, that sounds great? 30% free output out of your input is staggering honestly. Thank you sunshine and atmospheric CO2. You don't have to use fossil fuel for this. You can potentially run the farm equipment off ethanol if it were designed as such.
You can also only grow sugarcane well up to usda zone 8. Some people can do it as an annual but I guess it is tricky. Corn you can grow all the way into Canada.
Opportunity costs essentially. The effort that goes into growing and refining corn ethanol could be better spent on reducing fuel consumption instead of dedicating five acres of land to provide the equivalent net yearly fossil fuel consumption of a single average car using 500 gallons of gasoline to drive about 15000 miles.
Again opportunity costs. It almost always makes sense to spend the money on the most efficient means to achieve the goal. Money spent paying farmers and ethanol refiners to inefficiently produce 25% lower carbon fuel could instead be directed at other endeavours that for the same cost reduce carbon emissions more.
The difference is we already grow corn at scale beyond market need. Probably less has to be paid in that effort than starting up some other industry. Which still can be done along side the corn shouldering the load until that industry reaches the scale of the corn industry's waste product.
Very nice. I have my eyes on Lithium-Titanate cells for my house, I can't wait until they go down in price enough. Weight and energy density are not an issue, but safety is and those cells are very good in that sense.
The next generation of home batteries will be a game changer. It will do for home energy storage what Lithium-Ion has done for laptops, phones and vehicles and it will be a lot safer too.
House heating does not require massive amounts of energy. What it requires is efficiency. I've seen a house in Canada that was heated with a single candle when not occupied. Triple wall, reflective foil in between the wall layers, vertical movement of air in the walls interrupted every 30 cm or so. Absolutely amazing. And it still had sizeable windows. If your house doesn't leak energy like a sieve you don't need to replace as much either. Between passive solar and some augmentation you can do fine on an extremely modest energy budget.
And Canada is not exactly the warmest country on the planet.
A bit of both. You became more attuned to what really does and does not make sense and they rotted a bit further. But 10 years ago it was pretty visible for both Musk and Andreessen.
These terms are all pretty flexible - blue collar in 1950 is extremely different than blue collar in 2026.
What category would you place the following 99% of human people:
You you will lose your ability to eat and have housing if you do not show up to a place (even if it’s at your rented apartment) and spend hours doing on what someone else wants you to do
Having your body worn out before you can retire assumes retirement as a concept exists, which it doesn’t in the US. “Retirement” aka living without working, as a blue collar worker, was a middle class fantasy that only existed for an extremely small minority of people from 1949-1985. Even the ones who had their bodies worn out dealt with years of asbestos poisoning black lung all these other externalities that corporations did not care about and so arguing about this concept of retirement is moot because it’s never really a real thing.
For the majority of working people in the world they never had any type of retirement like this and for anybody who did it was a very temporary period in western society.
So while it might’ve been true in the past that the body was the first thing to break, now it’s just “can you maintain your own financial status in the future given your previous work history.”
Everybody at this point understands that there is no possible job you could as an 18-year-old in 2026 that you will be able to retire from and live comfortably in your twilight years from 65-80 with the earnings and “investments” made in the preceding 50 years of work.
Beyond that if I look around at least the “western” world there are very few of those jobs left that totally destroy your body - military, mining, construction etc… still have a lot of that (My body is ruined from 17 years of military) but it’s a shrinking group
For example most of agriculture is being done mechanically compared to 100 years ago, similarly for manufacturing lines humans are a minority in a manufacturing line at this point
I remember back in the 1990s it would take a work party of three families to cut and bail hay in Texas. I was on one of those crews for at least a couple years as a kid. Literally nobody does that anymore it’s all mechanical bailers and silege wrapping machines
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