yungchin

I'm not sure this is bad news for Tesla, I'd say it's mostly bad news for the rest of us.

Tesla has reached enough scale to be more or less sustainable (in the sense that they don't need to be posting losses anymore), and I'd imagine they can continue to grow, if more slowly, without the rapid expansion of battery production capacity that this story is about.

But the great aim behind the gigafactory (at least, how I read it) was to drive battery cost down very aggressively, that is, working on the supply-side economics. This would then make EVs (not just Teslas) accessible to more people sooner, without all the subsidies (which have been a demand-side hack that didn't even work very well). If this means a slower clean transition (and I think it does) that's a sad outcome.

Yes, we've got this on our shower drain. In this configuration it does better than a degree or two, recovering some 50% of the heat, in fact.

I think when I did the numbers for our heat pump, a catastrophic leak that would release all its refrigerant would result in a GHG contribution equivalent to a year of emissions from our (previous) natural gas heating. Can't find the figures now so do check before quoting me on it ;)

Alternatively, Mitsubishi has been selling a first-generation product that uses CO2 as the refrigerant (the QUHZ model). It posts a COP of 3 for producing domestic hot water (that's pretty good) - I'm not sure why they don't post the COP for room heating, maybe it's not great. But I'm curious what the second-generation product will do!

> Enriching the soil with compost also helps increase fertility. As a result, the overall size of vegetables increases, diluting the amount of lead they contain. The effects of using compost can be striking. In the study, addition of compost cut the available concentration of lead by as much as one-half.

This is a statement that's technically true, and at the same time practically wrong. If the context is that I'm going to be eating tomatoes from my garden, what's likely to happen is that if my yield doubles, my consumption doubles (unless I have a massive garden and can't eat everything I grow). So now I'm eating the same amount of lead, just in a bigger package!

Yes but going by these numbers, even 1 hour of use a day would produce a marginal profit on every scooter added. An hour sounds attainable. And coming up with clever operations hacks that push utilisation towards two hours a day sounds like the sort of challenge that most startup founders would love to be dealing with :)

(edit: another comment in this thread mentions the current batteries only last one hour, so that probably limits daily usage.... taking the long view that's ok I think, because at this point it seems a safe bet that batteries will be a lot cheaper in a few years time.)

They limit themselves to only those solutions which have been vetted by the scientific process, and that could be readily implemented with currently available technology. In a way you're right that that's not an optimistic take, but in another way there's a lot of optimism there: they show that adding up the impacts of only that limited set of solutions could already achieve drawdown!

I'd recommend reading The Procrastination Equation. It sets out a simple model of how your brain makes these choices, and makes it clear what all the levers are to help you "game" your brain. It explains why shorter productivity cycles are so powerful, for example. It also sets out that there's a lot of variability in how sensitive individuals are to changes in the parameters - this is just a fact of life: you - and I! - may be more predisposed to it than most other people, so we have to work harder to battle it.

One very interesting parameter is how valuable - to your mind - the outputs of your labour are to you. It's of course not an easy parameter to change, but it's good thinking about it. Is your procrastination telling you something about your work?

The context for that quote was missing I think (that is, missing from the original article, not your comment), but it makes more sense if they're talking about turning rock into fertile soil.

You would have had a whole succession of different types of plants to slowly work the rock surface. Then humans show up, rip out all the trees that kept that hard-won top soil in place, and it all runs off out to sea in no time. Basically it's about places like Iceland, not Iowa, I guess.