From my youtube understanding the 737-800 doesn’t have a RAT, instead using a battery system to power the DC bus, some controls, and minimal avionics. Also for some reason the FDR and CVR are powered only from the AC buses, and so would not have power in a two engine out scenario until the pilots manually started the APU and it came online. It also predates the requirement for said systems to have an independent backup battery.

This means things are still consistent with a staggered double bird strike or with a single bird strike followed by the pilots shutting down the wrong engine as well as some of the more out there theory’s.

Investigators might still be able to recover enough switch positions to figure out what happened in the air, but it’s going to be a hard investigation.

The major takeaway and factor that turned this from a major incident into a catastrophic one however is still that putting the localizer on a concrete reinforced berm for typhoon resistance is a major safety hazard.

Yes, the article was generally pretty clear that energy is synonymous with electricity, which is why it’s core thesis that renewables fundamentally cannot replace fossil fuel energy is such a wild assertion.

Yes we need to provide a decent quality of life, and that can be done with far less than north amarican standards of energy consumption, but the massive increase in energy consumption we’re seeing in India and China arn’t due to western levels of decadence, but rather the proliferation of things like air conditioning in places with fatal heat waves and the like.

Indeed illustratively these places are known for their abundant, frequent, and highly used mass transit systems and walkable cities. Their energy demand is still growing at an significant pace, not shrinking. As given their sheer size these are the nations which have a far larger impact on climate change, these are the places where degrowth needs to have the largest impact.

It’s also worth noting that even if you just want to apply degrowth to US cities in the method you suggested, well we know from examples like the Netherlands that it can be done and car centric cities converted into a place with just half of all residents own a car. We also know from that example that it took fifty years of dedicated government support and heavy local support to get that far. Meanwhile even L.A can take a decade and millions of dollars to not build a bus lane.

To note the obvious, we don’t have 50 years to get the US to moderately decrease emissions, and when accounting for things like construction emissions the gains are pretty small when compared to say electrifying Amaricas railroads or steel foundries.

This is not to say that things like walkable cities and such arn’t really nice things we should be doing, just that like many degrowth ideas they are both too slow to implement, to marginal an impact, and two specific to certain areas to really move the needle on weather we hit 2C, 2.5C, or 3C.

This is all of course tangential to the topic we’re actually talking about, which is wether or not electrification and building renewables is pointless when it comes to fighting climate change because they are apparently incapable of ever replacing fossil fuels.

When it comes to comes to climate change, energy and electricity are largely synonymous as outside of semantics like primary energy vs useful work we need to replace fossil energy with electricity, and that is not degrowth.

Although not as fast as I would like, I also would not call the growth of renewables in the last decade extremely slow, especially when the rate of that growth has been accelerating so quickly.

Fossil fuel energy is growing because globally energy demand has been growing even faster, and this has been driven first and foremost by more equitable access to energy. While poorer nations still have far lower per capita energy demand, they do have a lot of people who want the energy to protect themselves from the effects of climate change.

This growth in demand will however will level out as the poors get acess to sufficient energy, aided in no small part by the lower overall cost of green technologies, however I and most of the energy analysis I’ve seen don’t expect the buildout of renewables to stall with it but rather rapidly eat into fossil fuel generation.

Is this happening as fast as it could be if we all worked together, no. Is it still well on its way to happening, well it arguably already has for an increasing portion of the world. This is all in direct contrast to the articles thesis that green energy cannot ever actually replace fossil fuels.

Which also means we’re down 17 percent since the peak in 2005, most of which has come from electrical generation despite the article’s insistence that renewables did not and fundamentally could not replace any fossil fueled generation.

No one is saying that just deploying renewables is going to solve anything, but rather that a massive rollout of green technologies is going to result in a massive increase in electricity demand as everything from heat pumps and EVs to rail electrification and industrial production involves replacing everything we currently do with fossil fuels with electricity.

As this article in particular is saying over and over again that we cannot generate enough clean electricity to power even our current grid and thusly must shrink our electric demand, it is arguing not for an massive rollout of green technologies but rather that we massively reduce demand for things like heating and cooling our homes or transporting food long distances.

I am saying that not only is this far harder to achieve than rolling out green technologies, but directly at odds with a world full of lethal heat waves and extreme weather destroying crops and supply chains.

I am not debating ‘degrowth’ as a whole, but rather the explicit position this author takes that it’s fundamentally impossible to replace fossil fuels so the only approach can be to somehow eliminate demand for food, transport, heating, etc…

Obligatory note that if you think moving to renewables is difficult and thusly unlikely, than degrowth is straight up not happening until civilization collapses. Like pure degrowth is a straight up harder, less supported, and less likely to happen option than expanding the renewable build out that has been replacing fossil generation in many countries.

Both decarbonization by moving things like heating and transport to electricity and the increased occurrences of extreme weather due to climate change inherently result in more electricity demand, and if people are apparently unwilling to cheaper energy than why do you thing they will instead choose to go without?

Moreover, this argument neglects the fact that over the last ten years overall emissions in both the US and EU have been steadily, if far to slowly, falling, which means that fossil fuels are demonstrably being replaced, and why even among the managers of BP and Shell the discussion is not are they going to be replaced by solar and wind but rather can they drag the process out to fifty years instead of twenty years and how much can they export to the third world before that happens.

This is also why said companies are moving from ‘climate change isn’t real’ to ‘it is real but there is just nothing you can do about it so please stop replacing us’.

“High Speed”, as in just about makes the minimum threshold along one section, something standard British intercity services did routinely in the 70s.

Can we please stop calling every north american passenger line High Speed to make up for the fact that we only have one line that actually meets the standard, and it still has auch a poor right of way that it’s average speed is slower than the highway.

Like, in most of the world we differentiate between high speed rail lines and snail rail because they behave very differently with high speed lines being significantly faster than driving, meanwhile in the US we don’t have any proper high speed services but try and market all of our trains as high speed.

Don’t forget also being the number one lithium producer in the world, but completely unwilling to do anything with it but export it.

Well i’m glad to see that locusts and aphids are on the list of insects that benefit, since otherwise our efforts to inflict biblical plagues on ourselves might have struggled for the full set.

I don’t have a problem, I’m just explaining why when you start talking about the far future in reply to a problem in the here and now without any mention that’s what your doing you shouldn’t be surprised someone might think you were talking about a reasonable solution to that problem and explain some of the barriers to that solution.

Still it’s getting late, and we are off topic from off topic and dominating the comments on something completely unrelated to the conversation, so we should probably leave things here.

I apologize if I was to snarky in response to the rhetorical questions, and I do hope you have a lovely day/night.

It would be funny though if some environmentalist managed to make the tax properly technology agnostic though. Mostly if you can keep them from being exempted anything that hurts EVs goes double for pickups.

Of course we both know gas cars get exempted whenever this sort of thing passes because it’s never actually about vehicle weight and road wear so much as how can we slow the decline in gasoline demand for a few years, but it’s nice to imagine that silver lining.

I mean you are pretty explicitly expecting people to buy a car just to go to work and groceries.

More to the point NEVs in NA and quadracycles in Europe are already available, and indeed represented the majority of the EV market about fifteen to twenty years ago.

They didn’t really find a market in the US and most of the companies that made them failed, but have remained semi-successful in Europe where their low cost and less strict licensing requirements made them popular with teenagers and seniors.

Nevertheless, it was only with 250mi plus ranges that EVs actually stated to push gas cars off the road in any number.

Generally, on the internet, it is helpful to at least lampshade when you are proposing an idea that is very far off and/or disconnected from both the context of the conversation and the way you think the world actually does work, especially when in a community that regularly discusses legislative and technical details and changes of the clean energy transition.

When the conversation started from a news story about how a ok method of reducing emissions in the US is achieving more than technically better method because it’s seen slower adoption, passerby’s are going to assume given that context that you are talking about changes to be made in the few short years and decades we have to stop the destruction of civilization as we know it into account.

And I live in a country which As a Society just decided, by popular vote, to elect someone with the explicit goal of devolving what little remains of our sorry little public transport, and which promises a fight for our communities to hold one to what little we can, so yes, I gave an individual answer, because as a Society the answer is demonstrably“Drill baby, Drill” and “climate change is a hoax”.

Firstly, you are the one who started from the premise you need to own a car to commute, and indeed that one should own a car capable only of commuting and other very short often bikeable trips.

Secondly, while I do heavily support urban density, in the english speaking world we are generally woefully short of having enough urban housing for even the people who live there right now, much less relocate everyone who doesn’t.

Because these places are so desirable, people can and demonstrably do pay a large premium to live in these areas, pricing out a large number of people from the start.

Moreover, in a country where a solidly blue city in a solidly blue state can spend a decade and an obscene amount of money to try and so far fail to put in a bus lane, mass transit, as much as I love be it and want more of it, simply isn’t going to be built out to the point where it serves every house and farm in anything like the next ten years, which is already a painfully long time from a climate prospective.

It is also completely disconnected from a country where some large cities have gone so far as to outright ban rasing taxes to fund mass transit, and a continent where Doug Ford is literally ripping out well used bike lanes to signal how much he loves cars. The people and places who elected him still need to decarbonize, and an easy drop in change like electrifying the the current system while expanding transit.

To note the obvious, back before cars, trains, planes etc… when we walked, people still had horses and ships. It just meant that unless you were rich most people lived and died in the same small village as their family lived and died in, and is a rather silly goal for a world in which people talk and make friends with others on the far side of the planet, and where a day trip with nearby friends means less than 500mi and people regularly travel hundreds for work.

We live in a vastly more connected world where inter-city travel is a routine thing, and a country where we have spent the lasr half century desolving and selling off every intercity rail line we could, a network which took nearly a century to build.

Even in places like Swisserland or the Netherlands, places built before cars and with extremely prolific bike and rail infrastructure, about half the population own cars, they just don’t get used for short trips as often.

This is a great achievement that represents a hopeful vision of the future that is worth working for, and one that took entire generations of advocacy. To suggest we are going to go so much further beyond it in a few short years in a far larger and more spread out nation with a hostile federal government is outright absurd.

Because you can’t fly everywhere, renting for a routine trip is an expensive, time consuming, and logistically difficult process, and if you’re going to spend so much to own a car it might as well be useful for all your trips instead of just some of them?

Moreover, someone’s commute is often nowhere near the longest trip they make on a regular basis, as often one might need to drive several places, go into town multiple times in a day, travel to a neighboring city to meet with friends, etc… all of which can require several times the (hopefully short) work and back distance.

This is ignoring that battery degradation is a direct consequence of the charge and discharge current, and as such a larger battery will degrade at a significantly slower rate.

All this means you’re going to face an uphill battle trying to get people to sacrifice a bunch of capability for a few percent reduction in weight and cost.

Their is almost certainly a market for short range city cars, but that’s likely to be eventually more than filled by the used market, where a decades old 200mi range car is still going to be more capable than a 50 to 100mi range car.

To answer the question, because a lot of people don’t want to or can’t afford to buy a second car just for when they need to drive longer than their daily commute.

I agree that you could go smaller than the average of 300mi, but the minimum necessary range for say interstate travel around here is 150 to 200mi.

The answer is to focus on the smaller sedans and such we lived with for generations instead of just the largest and highest markup suv or pickup out there. While EVs are heavier on average, it’s worth noting this difference is a lot smaller than the difference in weight between say a sedan and a crossover, or a crossover and a SUV.

It also helps against what tends to be modeled and seen as the largest cause of injury during a nuclear scale explosion like that seen in Beirut, namely shards of glass, though it definitely helps survive falling beams in timber framed buildings.

Remember, thanks to the wonders of the inverse square law you are statistically far more likely to be in the area that gets light to moderate blast damage from the pressure wave rather than core of the blast.

Plants that take ten years to build don’t seem like a very good response to a boom that measures dataceneter build time in months and will probably collapse in a year or two as hype is replaced by the reality of the technology. Battery backed solar and wind on the other hand are both cheaper, and can be built faster than the ‘AI’ datacenters they are ment to power.

Don’t get me wrong, I think nuclear power is important to the energy transition, and will find its use in certain use cases like large scale marine transport or places near the artic circle, but the window to build it was 1970 to 2010. At a point when the biggest thing slowing down green energy if finding financing for it, it makes sense to go with the lowest cost option available, which is battery backed solar.

So you think after decades of wage stagnation, the 2008 financial crash, and multiple recessions demonstrably didn’t have this effect, a short spike in inflation where the poorest workers actually saw the first real wage gains in decades was all it took to suddenly develop a new form of previously nonexistent class consciousness?

I guess Amaricans really do hate moderate inflation more than high levels of unemployment.

So why do you think this empathy not exist before the last few years? Why are people now so worried about the people who themselves say they are doing well when they weren’t before?

Except the same surveys that show that people think that the economy as a whole is doing terrible also show that the same people report they themselves are doing great economically, their friends are doing good, and their state is doing ok. If everyone thinks that themselves and their friends are doing well but the economy as a whole is doing terrible, that is a large disconnect between people’s perceptions of the economy vs the actual economy as a whole.

While a lot of things are going to depend on area and experience, for instance real energy costs have gone down since 2020 for me and wages in the lower quarter of workers have at the very least kept pace with inflation if not grown beyond it, that does not explain why this perception of the economy doing horrible even when you and your friends are going well did not exist five years ago despite everything you suggested as being new having been the case then too, often to an even larger extent.

Similarly, the cost of rent and food literally is the primary economic measure of inflation, and demonstrably has recovered from the supply chain shocks of Covid. It’s indeed the principle measure that where people’s perception of it no longer has any correlation with measured reality.