Category Archives: Web Article Review

you can charge electric vehicles while they are driving

As the title of the post says, you can charge electric vehicles while they are on the move.

The solar panels are on one side of the facility’s service road and will ship power up the hill to the maintenance and trades area. That pad also has the generator; a system for converting direct current from the solar panels to alternating current for the buildings and street lights; a system for capturing radiant heat from the generator; and an IT setup to keep everything running…

Utah State’s ASPIRE center will begin installing a 50-meter demonstration section at its Logan, Utah, test track in the next two weeks, said Tallis Blalack, the center’s director. Working with California wireless provider Electreon, the center intends to install a one-mile electrified section of road surface in central Detroit next year in conjunction with the University of Michigan.

The center also is working with another provider to design a segment of electrified highway for Disney World in Florida over the next four years. 

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I like this idea because there is a lot of real estate out there along highways, and installing solar panels that can charge vehicles as they go by would seem to make a lot of sense. Maybe this could also replace some or all of the gas tax revenue we are going to lose as we convert to solar. The money could be plowed back in to road maintenance and safety upgrades.

ideas for improving Amtrak

Amtrak needs tens of billions of dollars in capital investment to get its trains up to the standard of middle income countries in the rest of the world (let’s not aspire to the European or Japanese standards of 50 YEARS AGO just yet). However, this (Philadelphia Inquirer, paywalled) article has some low-hanging-fruit ideas for how Amtrak could move more people at lower cost. Amtrak has apparently rejected all of them.

  • Instead of running old and new trains and different speeds and with different classes of cost, run just the new trains with two or three different class compartments. This would allow them to run more often and move more people at lower cost. It would also be safer because the newer trains are less likely to derail and more survivable if they do derail.
  • Maintain public ownership of the lines and stations, but consider competitively contracting some of the operations and support services. These would be for fixed time periods, so if it didn’t work out you could go back to status quo.

Okay, actually that was a list of only two. They also need to upgrade or replace many curves, bridges, and tunnels that limit speeds. My big, naive idea has always been to start laying high speed rail lines along the interstate highway system. This already connects our population centers. It would automatically connect with buses and other forms of local transporation. You already have the public right of way and at least some of the crossing, utility, bridge and tunnel issues worked out. Autonomous vehicles maybe/should/could decrease traffic and free up capacity and width requirements at some point. You can double deck them where needed. We might be able to build out a modern electric grid this way too. Expensive? Sure, it’s an investment in the long-term future of the economy and country.

Puerto Rico

Another serious hurricane has hit Puerto Rico, and the response is inadequate. I continue to see this as an indicator of U.S. decline as a competent modern nation. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the response was incompetent, and we were horrified. Our collective reaction to the inadequate response (can we say incompetent when there wasn’t even much effort) in Puerto Rico last time around was more of a shrug. This time, it gets maybe half a day of national media coverage and we barely notice. (Or maybe it was because I was listening to BBC World to find out about the world, and they were somewhat understandably focused on their queen’s passing? A significant historical figure to be sure, but Mikhail Gorbachev just passed away for crying out loud and even THAT only got a couple days of coverage.) We are coming to just accept mediocrity and incompetence as disasters keep hitting us, and our complacency will lead to decline as we do not demand anything better.

Speaking of horrific hurricane disasters, I was perusing this article about Myanmar, where things are pretty awful, and was then struck by the figure (nice tree map!) near the bottom showing the number of displaced people in the Philippines. That seems like a really bad situation, and it has gotten very little media coverage in the U.S., at least that I noticed.

bathroom cleaning robots

Just a quick note on my business plan to invent bathroom cleaning robots. As soon as I invent a truly effective and inexpensive bathroom cleaning robot, everybody in the world will buy one and I will be the richest person in the world.

The Philadelphia Inquirer had a recent article called Why household robot servants are a lot harder to build than robotic vacuums and automated warehouse workers. Granted, cleaning a bathroom is really hard on a human body, especially one that is getting older. But why would you assume a robot that looks or acts like a human would be the way to do this. I picture something more like a swarm of ants that can pick up individual pieces of yuck, drop them in a pile somewhere, and then go back to their charger pad. Or maybe spiders. Too creepy? Well, just make them look like little seashells or something not creepy. Why is this so hard?

You could also approach the problem from the other end – designing bathrooms and kitchens that are more appropriate and accessible for robots. Come to think of it, bathrooms and kitchens are not all that appropriate and accessible for humans as it is. This whole thing could use a rethink. All surfaces should be completely impermeable and able to be hosed down. Instead of moving dishes from dishwashers, to sinks, to cabinets, and back again five times a day, all these things should just be one thing. You put dirty dishes in a cabinet, shut the door, open the door next morning, and you have clean dry dishes. Every dish would go in the same spot every time, and robots could handle this. Robots could also reorder peanut butter when the jar is half full, and eggs when they are half gone. For that matter, packaging could be completed redesigned to make more sense for robots as well as humans. Packaging is a big part of our environmental and waste problems in our so-called modern world.

Paraphrasing a cartoon I saw making fun of Elon Musk (but can’t seem to find again), “I come up with the brilliant ideas, and all I ask you idiots to do is make them happen!”

Audubon native garden designs

For people like me with limited artistic sense (visual anyway, and you don’t want me to dance in public, although I was once upon a time a well-trained and active musician), these visual garden designs from Audubon are helpful. Basically, you put the tall plants and flowers in the middle and shorter ones more toward the edges, I think, and then you can consider colors and timing of the flowers. Easy to think about, harder to do.

retrofitting retiring coal plants with advanced nuclear reactors

I find this idea of retrofitting old coal plants with nuclear reactors appealing. We are told the new generation of nuclear reactors is safe, and that our fears of nuclear accidents are based on half-century-old obsolete designs. These fears have held back the entire industry for decades, and you can imagine an alternate world where intensive use of nuclear power for all those decades has staved off the climate crisis the world now finds itself in.

The risk of nuclear accidents is objectively much lower than the risk of climate disaster we face. And yet…I have to ask myself if I would want a nuclear reactor a few blocks from my house. There is in fact a very old fossil fuel (oil and gas in this case) power plant a few blocks from my house. There have been accidents both at that plant, at the very old (and now closed) oil refinery nearby, and with the trains that carry oil past our neighborhood. Then there is whatever the air pollution from the plant is doing to my family’s lungs and cancer risk. All these things tell me that rationally I should welcome a nuclear reactor a few blocks from my house. And yet…it is so hard to separate emotions and be purely rational. And I tend to think I am more coldly rational than most people in the neighborhood would likely be if this were proposed. So this would be a tough road. But our power plant is also in a very densely populated urban area, and there would probably be much more out-of-the-way places where it could be tried (and hopefully the handful of people who lived there would be treated fairly).

eeney miney mini max

This article talks about using “mini max regret” in climate planning. Basically this sounds like a form of cost-benefit analysis incorporating uncertainty of key inputs including the discount rate. They conclude that 2% is a reasonable intergenerational discount rate.

Note that discounting is one way of handling that issue of the needs of the present population vs. all the teeming trillions who might exist in the future. It doesn’t quite work for existential risks though, because if no humans are around there are by definition no costs or benefits until the cockroaches develop economics.

what is going on in the UK?

The energy and inflation situation sounds pretty bad in Europe and particularly in the UK. Now, these are definitely political opinion articles so I would take them with somewhat of a grain of salt. But if the facts and figures quoted here are even roughly correct (which I haven’t independently verified), if sounds like the UK is losing its middle class.

Let me back all that up with…well…the statistics coming out of Britain are mind-boggling, and I mean that. Consider just a few. Inflation’s projected to hit 18%. 18%. Meanwhile, in the rest of the rich world, it’s peaking — at least for now. I quoted you the one about 70% of households living in fuel poverty already, but consider it again. What would you say if 70% of people in your country had to choose between food and energy? But it hardly ends there. There are more food banks than McDonalds in Britain. Raw sewage is washing up on beaches. Entire villages are running out of water, and soon enough the country will be water poor, yet there’s no plan or agenda to fix any of this.

eand.co

HM Revenue & Customs, on the other hand, suggests that average earnings were £26,000 before tax and £23,500 after tax in 2019-20, but it forgets national insurance, which might reduce this by £2,000, and almost compulsory pension contributions that might deduct another £800 after tax relief, leaving £20,700 to really spend. What that means is that the average household requires two working adults to make it work. It also suggests that having average earnings in the UK means earning less than £15 an hour.

Can such a household now have a decent lifestyle on this level of income? Given that this household is very unlikely to be able to afford a mortgage, rents matter here – and average rents in the UK are now over £1,100 a month, or over £13,000 a year…

What is obvious in all this is that a person on the average income in the UK is already struggling to make ends meet. Frankly, every person and household in this situation is likely to be in financial difficulty. They will already have to make difficult choices. Anything that tips the balance against them now literally leaves them beyond their limits.

Independent

Some of this is certainly due to the pandemic, the Ukraine war, etc. But maybe food, energy, and water prices are also sounding warnings that our unsustainable treatment of the natural environment is finally having consequences. While the underlying trends of pollution, degradation, and resource overuse accumulate slowly and gradually, our society may be able to make small adjustments to adapt to them as long as conditions are relatively stable and predictable. But then random shocks happen to the system, and we are not able to recover back to the trend, and our quality of life can suddenly erode and never quite get back to where it was.

Don’t forget to worry about volcanoes!

Amid all the many choices of things to worry about, we sometimes forget volcanoes! But actually, they can be quite dangerous and are not as uncommon or far away as one might think. This article from Cambridge has some numbers on how common and damaging they actually are, and how we seem to pay them less attention than some other types of disasters that are actually less disastrous.

“Data gathered from ice cores on the frequency of eruptions over deep time suggests there is a one-in-six chance of a magnitude seven explosion in the next one hundred years…

Mani compares the risk of a giant eruption to that of a 1km-wide asteroid crashing into Earth. Such events would have similar climatic consequences, but the likelihood of a volcanic catastrophe is hundreds of times higher than the combined chances of an asteroid or comet collision…

“The last magnitude seven eruption was in 1815 in Indonesia,” said co-author Dr Mike Cassidy, a volcano expert and visiting CSER researcher, now based at the University of Birmingham.

“An estimated 100,000 people died locally, and global temperatures dropped by a degree on average, causing mass crop failures that led to famine, violent uprisings and epidemics in what was known as the year without summer,” he said.

Cambridge University

So we are not necessarily matching our money and effort to the greatest risks. Then again, I’ve heard it suggested that a small-ish nuclear winter would not be as damaging in the future as it could have been because the cooling effect would be partially offset by climate change.