I don't get it. 20 minute charges with regular battery swaps? How could you ever get enough foam/water on the fire? and that water stream doesn't seem like it would reach very far into the building where the fuel (office papers, furniture, etc) are...

Why not just power the drones of a power umbilical paired with the hose (yes, it would have to be really light) Why bother with a battery pack?

No. It would take years for the undergrowth to become a significant fuel source again. That is the least of the issues with using goats as a realistic method of fuel management. It might be suitable for creating firebreaks on private land but it's useless in the wilderness.

Yes, California could export more solar and wind power, but would be forced to stop removing fossil fuel plants, stop creating new renewable energy generation, and would have to buy dirty electricity from it's neighbors. We also would, as mentioned, lose all control over our energy production to the federal government, which is owned by the oil industries.
If it was as simple as selling our excess electricity, it would be great, but it's simply not. Joining an RTO would mean California would not be able to go 100% renewable ever, because our neighbors don't and the Fed doesn't want to.
If our neighbors want to make an agreement outside of the Fed to share our cleaner power, we would likely jump at it, especially if we could insist they agree to strive for 100% clean renewable energy production. If the Fed is involved, it's a non starter. We've spent billions on making our state cleaner, fighting the federal government tooth and nail the whole way. There's no way in hell California is going to toss that investment and the freedom to regulate our own energy production in the toilet just to sell our excess to our dirty neighbors. We would rather secede.

*promote

Funny, but would've really tickled me fully if it ended with them helping him out or at least maybe yelling out the window an offer to assist, human to human.

Reminds me of that lady who was at a gas station trying to figure out how to fuel up her Tesla. The guys filmed and laughed and laughed and filmed... but finally they got out and explained her folly, and that tiny bit of kindness is really what allowed me to enjoy that video.

Maybe for average cars, but that's not true when it comes to old Broncos or Jeeps. In the early 70's, they built them like tanks (heavy and slow), especially with the roll bar option properly installed, Broncos even had a thick full tube frame, not just a C channel, not unibody, and definitely no plastic.

Granted, the safety systems were lap belts and nothing more and the steering column would spear through your chest in a head on crash while the bare metal dash cracks your passenger's head, even stock they tend to roll, the fuel economy is non existent, and top speed is well under 2/3 what modern cars can produce (good thing since the brakes are sub par), but the cars themselves are nearly indestructible (I have one of each). I've dropped my jeep frame 3+ ft onto solid rock, it chipped the rock (and maybe my spine). ;-)
Late 70's early 80's that all changed, mostly for the worst.

I was thinking about car safety and how the biggest variable is likely the driver...how specific cars are driven on average, and it struck me that the best way to promote public safety would be to make your maximum speed limit variable based on gvw (gross vehicle weight). This is already done for vehicles with more than two axles or those towing trailers because it's obvious they take longer to stop. The same logic should apply to every car. It's a no brainer that a Humvee takes longer to stop than a Miata, and is far less controllable under emergency braking. For the safety of both those in such larger vehicles and the general public, they should not be allowed to go as fast as cars weighing 1/4 their weight with better brakes.
A side benefit of such a system would be greater average fuel economy, because bigger cars have greater wind resistance (on average) so become less efficient at higher speeds.
Of course, I wouldn't expect that kind of reason to ever fly in America where the most popular car is a heavy truck that's never used for hauling and could be replaced with a Honda Civic with no loss of functionality for >75% of owners....but everyone wants to drive a tank so they're safer, with no thought about what that means for the other cars on the road.

*quality explanation of why crash testing is only a tiny part of real life safety in cars
*promote

Seems Eucalyptus trees are made to create firestorms..

Fallen eucalyptus leaves create dense carpets of flammable material, and the trees' bark peels off in long streamers that drop to the ground, providing additional fuel that draws ground fires up into the leaves, creating massive, fast-spreading "crown fires" in the upper story of eucalyptus forests.

Additionally, the eucalyptus oil that gives the trees their characteristic spicy fragrance is a flammable oil: This oil, combined with leaf litter and peeling bark during periods of dry, windy weather, can turn a small ground fire into a terrifying, explosive firestorm in a matter of minutes. That's why eucalyptus trees — especially the blue gums (Eucalyptus globulus) that are common throughout New South Wales — are sometimes referred to wryly as "gasoline trees."
https://www.livescience.com/40583-australia-wildfires-eucalyptus-trees-bushfires.html

Eucalyptus do extremely well after fires. Fire and Eucalyptus make good partners it seems. https://wildfiretoday.com/2014/03/03/eucalyptus-and-fire/

--Hot summer with global warming (no moisture in anything)
--Drought for years in California (tinder)
--House in the urban/brush/wild zone probably because--it's pretty and they want seclusion--but---lots of fuel nearby that's dry and uncut.
--Building site at the top of a ridge (for the views--but flames propagate up hills)
--That house isn't going to last out the full duration of its mortgage, most likely

How do you easily solve something thats going apeshit in another country, big or small? There is next to nothing the west can do to help other than alleviate the symptoms. Remember the cold war? What could the west do to help the people beyond the dividing line in countries that used to be democracies before WW2? Next to nothing.

Hong-Kong is currently part of the largest... just kidding.

What is her impact in China? Russia? India? Brazil? Indonesia? On people who make decisions? This is a real question.

I dont doubt her content, she seems well prepared and I have nothing to point out as obvious propaganda. Her delivery is off-putting. unpleasant, distracting and weird. Petulant child. Also she is pointing out the obvious without thinking of implementation. Normal millenial, just wants something.

The Republican party has been a good marketing tool for the fossil fuel industry so far, yes.

Adults tools in her hands? Seriously? I havent considered that and it frightens me.

I totally disagree. Hong Kong and Ukraine are 1) issues that would be easily solved with comparatively little effort and mostly just the will to stand against our enemies and with our allies, and 2) are both issues that directly effect only a small human population.

She's a marketing tool in the same sense that the entire Republican party is nothing more than a tool of the fossil fuel industry, except their science and tears are totally fraudulent and only self serving.

Have you considered that the adults around her may be tools in her hands?

@newtboy,

"bankrupting the global economy isn't the only way to plan for asteroids, now is it? What we have done is put some money towards developing solutions that could be implemented in time, with minor exceptions for super fast unknown asteroids we likely couldn't do much about if we did have a planetary defense system."

That's precisely my point though, bankrupting the global economy to reach negative net emissions tomorrow isn't the only way to plan for climate change either.

"the probability of disastrous climate change is near 100% if you take historic human behavior into account. For many it's already hit. It's only the severity and speed that are in question, and those estimates rise alarmingly with every bit of data we use to replace guesses in the equations.

And the odds of a catastrophic asteroid hit sometime in the future is near 100% too, it's just a question of how many millions of years Earth's luck holds out. Nor has every prediction or projection underestimated future warming so far, your flat wrong on that.

More to the point, the timing and severity of the changes we face is ABSOLUTELY relevant to the actions we need to take. Similarly, knowing the benefit of reducing our emissions by X% by a particular date is also extremely relevant to the actions we need to take. Unfortunately, it must be acknowledged that we have a lot of gaps and uncertainty in our knowledge on those points.

At minimum base level, we know changing global temperature on the whole will impact us negatively, that our CO2 emissions will make things warmer than they otherwise would be, and thus can easily conclude with certainty that the science dictates policies to reduce emissions are a good idea.

Now, you seem to be hell bent on demanding those policies take the shape of staring down the face of disaster 2-3 times worse than the IPCC AR5 reports absolute worst case scenario. I've got to tell you, that the uncertainties involved with that kind of prediction are too great to warrant an honest dictate that the facts support a need for economically devastating action being taken today. It's just not the case.

Even if green tech never takes over, if the next century sees us final solve fusion power and adoption of electric cars, we already get our emission outputs off the worst track scenario the IPCC projected in AR5. I honestly do believe that we will see non-fossil fuel electricity generation and electric cars as the norm in my lifetime, so I'm hopeful for a future that tracks better than the IPCC worst case. That doesn't mean we should do nothing, but it's more like we should take a similarly rational/practical approach to it like you see us doing with asteroids.

Almost as stupid as holding the producers of the toxic product AND the misleading or outright false information about it's hazards blameless. Because they actively misled their customers, I give them the vast lions share of blame, but maybe not 100%. There's plenty to go around.

You don't have to live in poverty to abandon fossil fuels.
Not.
Even.
Close.
I bought solar 10+- years back...it paid for itself in 8. It's lifespan is 20+-. I get 12 years of free electricity for abandoning that portion, with no blackouts, no brownouts, and no rate increases.

True, the video could be better at sharing the blame, but it stayed on topic instead, that topic being major polluters greenwashing their mage. I didn't take it as assigning ALL blame to one source, just not allowing the worst offenders to shirk all responsibility for their products.


Every one of these is the likely outcome of any anthropogenic rise over 2-3C because of feedback loops that drive us to 6-12C rise. Only the wars are likely this century, but I didn't put a timeframe on those outcomes. 140 million + will be displaced by just a 3' rise, which is all but guaranteed by 2100 under the most optimistic current projections.
That wipes out mangroves and other fish nurseries, further impacting the struggling ocean food webs. All the while it accelerates as our ability to cope erodes like the shorelines....it doesn't just halt at 3' rise.
The natural food webs on land are also struggling, and are unlikely to survive ocean collapse.

Not just from deforestation, but diatoms are near a point of collapse from ocean acidification. https://diatoms.org/what-are-diatoms. That's over 1/2....and the base of the ocean food web.


Since the IPCC (again, known for overly conservative estimates) now says at current rates we could hit as much as a 6C rise by 2100, and rates of emissions are rising as fast as carbon sinks are shrinking, they're not just a possibility, they a likelihood in the near future....but granted the hydrogen sulfide clouds are far in a worst case scenario future, far from guaranteed.

@newtboy,

Walking backwards to simplify, my main point is that simply blaming ALL fossil fuel usage on the company providing the fossil fuel is stupid and misleading in the extreme. We don't see millions of people willingly abandoning fossil fuels and living in abject poverty to save the world, instead they are all very willing and eagerly buying them and this video lets all those people off the hook. This video lets everybody keep using fossil fuels, and at the same time pointing the finger at Shell and saying it's all their fault. It's an extremely detrimental piece of disinformation.

"explain what, specifically, I claimed that's not supported by the science."
-Complete collapse of the food web
-Wars over hundreds of millions or billions of refugees
-Loss of most farm land and hundreds of major cities to the sea
-Loss of well over 1/2 the producers of O2
-Eventual clouds of hydrogen sulfide from the ocean covering the land
-Runaway greenhouse cycles making the planet uninhabitable for thousands if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of years

Yes, we're overpopulated. That doesn't invalidate my arguments.

I gave examples of multiple cultures that do what you claim is impossible. I never implied Americans would accept a lower standard of living, only that it's the right thing to strive for, and coming like it or not.

I grow 75% of the produce for two people on 3/4 acres.

Masses of people are going to die unnecessarily. Period. This could be avoided, but won't be. Our choice is accept less now, or have nothing later.

The dependence on fossil fuels for agriculture could be quartered with some minor changes with little drop in output. The western world won't make the investment needed to make that a reality. Also, the fossil fuel needed to make fertilizers is not a significant amount....maybe as little as 3%of natural gas produced.

There are millions of hungry people now without access to the artificially supported agriculture system who relied on natural sources that no longer exist. Aren't you concerned about them?

Name one I listed not supported by science.

Food shortages are preferable to no food.

The 3' estimate is old, based on estimates already proven miserably wrong. Like I said, Greenland is melting as a rate they predicted to not happen until 2075.

When tens of millions must flee low lying areas, and all low lying farmland is underwater, and much of the rest in drought or flood, what do you think happens?

By 2100, all estimates show us far past the tipping points where human input is no longer the driving force. Even the IPCC said we have until 2030 or so to cut emissions in half, and we are not lowering emissions, we're raising them. 50 years out is 75 years late....but better than never.....but we aren't on that path at all. Investment in fossil fuel systems continues to accelerate thanks to emerging third world nations like China and India making the same mistakes the Western world made, but in greater quantities.

The IPCC report said if we don't immediately cut emissions today, by half in 11 years and to zero in 30, then negative emissions for the next 50 that we're on track to hit 3-6C rise by 2100 and raising that estimated temperature rise daily....4C gives the 3' sea level rise by 2100 with current models, but they are woefully inadequate and have proven to be vast underestimation of actual melting already.

We may develop the necessary tech, we won't develop the will to implement it. Indeed, we're at that point today....have been for decades.

Yep, sure, no sacrifices needed. You can have it all and more and let the next guy pay the bill. What if we're the last guys in line?

Funny, isn't that what the Paris climate accord is? Sane leaders giving such stupidity serious consideration, because they understand it's not stupidity it's reality. Granted, they don't go nearly far enough, but they did something more than just claim it will be fixed in the future by something that doesn't exist today and ignoring human behavior and all trends, because using/having less is simply unacceptable.

We need a nice pandemic to cull us by 9/10 and a few intelligent Maos to drive us back to sustainability. We won't get either in time.

For some idea of how much energy could conceivably be extracted this way, see:

https://www.withouthotair.com/c16/page_96.shtml

In a nutshell, the numbers in this video sound extremely bogus. It's unlikely that anything like our current fossil fueled lifestyle would be possible using only geothermal energy.