Concern over the risks of enabling nuclear weapons development is usually focused on nuclear fission reactors, but the potential harm from more advanced fusion reactors has been underappreciated
Fusion reactors could allow a country to accelerate its development of nuclear weapons, producing the necessary radioactive ingredients in as little as a few weeks.
Nuclear weapons need specific radioactive isotopes, normally uranium-235 or plutonium-239, that can be easily split and start a chain reaction. This so-called fissile material is rare in nature, but can be produced artificially by a source that produces a lot of neutrons, such as a nuclear fission reactor of the kind in use today.… (Subscribers only) more https://www.newscientist.com/article/2430012-fusion-reactors-could-create-ingredients-for-a-nuclear-weapon-in-weeks/
Note: The following are remarks I delivered on Saturday, May 4, 2024 at the 55-year reunion of the Stanford University antiwar movement, in which I participated. On April 3, 1969, an estimated 700 Stanford students voted to occupy the Applied Electronics Laboratory (AEL), where classified research on electronic warfare was being conducted at Stanford. That spawned the April Third Movement (A3M), which holds reunions every five to 10 years. The sit-in at AEL, supported by a majority of Stanford students, lasted nine days. Stanford moved the objectionable research off campus, but the A3M continued with sit-ins, teach-ins and confrontations with police in the Stanford Industrial Park.
his reunion comes at an auspicious time, with college campuses erupting all over the country in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Once again, 55 years later, Stanford students are rising up for peace and justice. They have established a “People’s University” encampment and they are demanding that Stanford: (1) explicitly condemn Israel’s genocide and apartheid; (2) call for an immediate ceasefire, and for Israel and Egypt to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza; (3) immediately divest from the consumer brands identified by the Palestinian BDS National Committee and all firms in Stanford’s investment portfolio that are complicit in Israeli war crimes, apartheid and genocide.
At this moment in history, there are two related military occupations occurring simultaneously – 5,675 miles apart. One is Israel’s ongoing 57-year occupation of Palestinian territory, which is now taking the form of a full-fledged genocide that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians. The other is at Columbia University, where the administration has asked the New York Police Department to occupy the school until May 17. Both occupations are fueled by the Zionist power structure. Both have weaponized antisemitism to rationalize their brutality.
The students at Columbia are demanding that the university end its investments in companies and funds that are profiting from Israel’s war against the Palestinians. They want financial transparency and amnesty for students and faculty involved in the demonstration. Most protesters throughout the country are demanding an immediate ceasefire and divestment from companies with interests in Israel. More than 2,300 people have been arrested or detained on U.S. college campuses.
Israel has damaged or destroyed every university in Gaza. But no university president has denounced Israel’s genocide or supported the call for divestment.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement was launched in 2005 by 170 Palestinian civil society organizations who described BDS as “non-violent punitive measures” to last until Israel fully complies with international law………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
On April 3, 1969, 700 Stanford students voted to occupy the Applied Electronics Laboratory (AEL), where classified research on electronic warfare was being conducted at Stanford. That spawned the April Third Movement (A3M), which holds reunions every five to 10 years. The sit-in at AEL, supported by a majority of Stanford students, lasted nine days. Stanford moved the objectionable research off campus, but the A3M continued with sit-ins, teach-ins and confrontations with police in the Stanford Industrial Park.https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/07/students-demanding-divestment-youre-on-the-right-side-of-history/
The report came after Israel captured the border crossing in an operation that was approved by the Biden administration. The private American firm was not named, but Haaretz said that it employs veterans of elite US Army units and has been employed in several Middle Eastern and African countries to guard sensitive sites.
State Department spokesman Matt Miller was asked about the report and said he wasn’t aware of any plan for Israel to transfer control of the border crossing.
Under the reported arrangement, American mercenaries would take responsibility for overseeing the border crossing, which would include monitoring goods coming into Gaza and preventing Hamas from taking control. Vital deliveries have been cut off since Israel took control of the crossing early Tuesday.
The Haaretz report said the arrangement was part of an effort by Israel to “win agreement” from the US and Egypt for a Rafah operation. The report said Israel had given assurances that it would limit its attack on Rafah to securing the border crossing, although Israeli bombs have been pounding the city.
More than 100 students have occupied Ghent University in the first European protest to fuse demands about Gaza and the climate crisis.
Ghent’s centrepiece UFO building was peacefully taken over by students calling for concrete action to meet the university’s 2030 climate plans, and asking the university to cut ties with institutions connected to the Israeli military.
Tents were erected inside the building, which contains all of the university’s administrative functions. Its 1,000-seater “guillotine wall” lecture hall was given over to an impromptu workshop on “how we can find hope in a world full of genocide and global warming”.
More than 200 Ghent students were expected to join the three-day protest as anger rose ahead of an expected Israeli assault on Rafah, while students at Amsterdam University also staged an occupation.
A spokesperson for the Ghent students who gave her name as Joelle said their action had grown out of an occupation last year by End Fossil Gent, and student rage over events in Gaza. A joint mobilising leaflet with Gent Students for Palestine used the theme of “free Palestine is a climate justice issue”.
“We realised that both our struggles were against the university’s failure to commit to values they claim to hold,” Joelle said.
“We can see that the struggle for Palestine is also a struggle for climate justice. The Israeli occupation force is committing an ecocide in Gaza, destroying all elements of life and nature.
“Israel’s settler ‘green colonialism’ destroys indigenous land and plants non-indigenous trees over ethnically cleansed villages.
“There are also issues of toxic pollution by settlers and the allocation of water and land. The two struggles are interconnected so climate activists are in solidarity with us on Palestine, and we realise that this is also a climate issue. Our demands go hand in hand.”
An open letter from the students says they want the university to publish a time-linked action plan for cutting ties with what they call “Israeli institutions complicit in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”.
Ghent University has links to a number of Israeli institutions that are said to provide “material” support to the war in Gaza or Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
Tel Aviv University, with which Ghent has most partnerships, has drawn particular ire from students due to its role in Israel’s defence against genocide charges at the international court of justice in The Hague, and its academic support for soldiers in Gaza.
Equally, the students want “effective and binding action” to urgently implement the university’s 2030 climate transition plans, which they say would mean putting sustainability goals at the heart of budgetary and educational decisions.
Ghent University is committed to becoming progressively fossil fuel free, cutting its energy consumption by 2.5% each year and becoming climate neutral by 2050.
It also has a policy to achieve 80% “sustainable mobility” by 2030, in part by boosting bicycle infrastructure on campus. But students say that too little has been done.
The university did not respond to a request for comment but its director, Rick Van de Walle, posted a statement saying it had decided that its ethical policies would not change and that “no deviation from the existing human rights policy will be used with regard to one particular country, in this case Israel”
President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed Israel’s plans to capture the Rafah border crossing in southern Gaza before the Israeli military launched the operation, Axios reported on Tuesday.
The report said that the operation didn’t cross Biden’s “red line,” although it’s unclear if the US has actually set red lines for Israel. US officials have said they’re opposed to a “major operation” in Rafah since it would incur huge civilian casualties. But the capturing of the border crossing will have a devastating impact on civilians since it cut off vital aid deliveries, and it’s unclear when or if they will resume.
A senior Israeli official told Axios that during the call with Netanyahu, Biden didn’t “didn’t pull the hand break on the capture of the Rafah crossing during the call.” Two US officials said Biden didn’t view the current Israeli operations as a “breaking point” in relations.
“We’ve been very consistent about our concerns of a major ground operation in Gaza that would put at great risk the refugees that are still there, and nothing’s changed about that,” Kirby said. “The Israelis have told us … that that’s not what this is.”
He said that Israel assured the US that the operation was “of limited scope, scale, and duration, and aimed at cutting off Hamas’ ability to ship arms across the Rafah border.”
Israeli tanks and soldiers took the border crossing as Israeli strikes pounded the city of Rafah, killing at least 23 Palestinians, including five women and six children.
Fuelled by climate change, the world’s oceans have broken temperature records every single day over the past year, a BBC analysis finds. Nearly 50 days have smashed existing highs for the time of year by the largest margin in the satellite era. Planet-warming gasses are mostly to blame, but the natural weather event El Niño has also helped warm the seas. The super-heated oceans have hit marine life hard and driven a new wave of coral bleaching. The analysis is based on data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Service. Copernicus also confirmed that last month was the warmest April on record in terms of air temperatures, extending that sequence of month-specific records to 11 in a row.
Electricite de France SA got regulatory approval to start up its new nuclear reactor 12 years behind schedule after the utility faced construction problems ranging from concrete weakness to faulty pipe welds. The green light for commissioning of the Flamanville 3 nuclear plant located in Northwestern France allows EDF to load the fuel in the reactor, proceed with trials, then begin operations, the Autorite de Surete Nucleaire said in a statement on Tuesday.
Further approvals will be required when reaching key milestones during the trial phase, the regulator added said. Once connected to the grid, the 1.6-gigawatt plant called a European Pressurized Reactor will join EDF’s fleet of 56 reactors in France, which accounted for about two-thirds of the country’s power production last year.
A short answer to this question might be, it depends who you ask. Ask Australia’s Opposition leader Peter Dutton, for instance, and he will tell you a federal Coalition government under his leadership could have a nuclear power plant up and running in Australia within a decade.
Ask the highly experienced French state-owned nuclear power giant EDF, which manages 56 reactors in the world’s most nuclear dependent country, and you would get rather a different answer.
Bloomberg reports that EDF this week got regulatory approval to start up its newest nuclear reactor, the 1.6GW Flamanville plant in France’s north west – a milestone that is 12 years behind schedule and more than four times over budget, thanks to a range of construction problems including concrete weakness and faulty pipe welds.
The green light allows EDF to load the fuel in the reactor, proceed with trials, then begin operations, the Autorite de Surete Nucleaire said in a statement on Tuesday. Further approvals will be needed upon reaching key milestones during the trial phase, the regulator said.
According to other reports, EDF said last month it hoped to connect the Flamanville pressurised reactor to the national grid by the European summer and reach full power by the end of the year.
But it will not be smooth sailing from there. A faulty vessel cover still needs replacing at the plant, with reports suggesting this has been pushed out to 2026, when the plant would be shut down for up to a year.
Meanwhile, EDF in March raised its cost estimate for the construction of six new nuclear reactors to €67.4 billion ($A102.5 billion), Reuters has reported, up from the company’s first estimated their cost of €51.7 billion.
So, how long does it take to build a nuclear reactor?
Kobad Bhavnagri, Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s energy expert and global head of strategy says the long delay and cost blowout at Flamanville 3 is not an isolated incident.
“Very similar delays and multifold cost blowouts have occurred with recent reactor builds in the UK, Finland and USA,” Bhavnagri writes on LinkedIn.
“Countries with well established nuclear industries.
“The lesson here? Don’t believe anyone who says they know how much it will cost and how long it will take to build a new nuclear plant (unless they are in China).”
All decent Israelis must ask themselves the following questions: Is their country committing war crimes in Gaza? If so, how should they be stopped?
How should the culprits be punished? Who can punish them? Is it reasonable for crimes to go unprosecuted and criminals to be exculpated?
One may, of course, reply in the negative to the first question – Israel is not committing any war crimes in Gaza – thereby rendering the rest of the questions superfluous.
But how can one answer in the negative in the face of the facts and the situation in Gaza:
about 35,000 people killed and another 10,000 missing, about two-thirds of them innocent civilians, according to the Israel Defense Forces;
among the dead are around 13,000 children, nearly 400 medical workers and more than 200 journalists; 70 percent of homes have been destroyed or damaged;
30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition;
two people in 10,000 die each day from starvation and disease. (All figures are from the United Nations and international organizations.)
Is it possible that these horrific figures came to be without the commission of war crimes?
There are wars whose cause is just and whose means are criminal; the justice of the war does not justify its crimes. Killing and destruction, starvation and displacement on this scale could not have occurred without the commission of war crimes. Individuals are responsible for them, and they must be brought to justice.
Israeli hasbara, or public diplomacy, does not try to deny the reality in Gaza. It only makes the claim of antisemitism: Why pick on us? What about Sudan and Yemen?
The logic doesn’t hold: A driver who is stopped for speeding won’t get off by arguing that he’s not the only one. The crimes and the criminals remain. Israel will never prosecute anyone for these offenses. It never has, neither for its wars nor its occupation. On a good day, it will prosecute a soldier who stole some Palestinian’s credit card.
But the human sense of justice wants to see criminals brought to justice and prevented from committing crimes in the future. By this logic, we can only hope that the International Criminal Court in The Hague will do its job.
Every Israeli patriot and everyone who cares about the good of the state should wish for this. This is the only way that Israel’s moral standard, according to which it is permitted everything, will change. It is not easy to hope for the arrest of the heads of your state and your army, and even more difficult to admit it publicly, but is there any other way to stop them?
The killing and destruction in Gaza has gotten Israel in way over its head. It is the worst catastrophe the state has ever faced. Someone led it there – no, not antisemitism, but rather its leaders and military officers. If not for them, it wouldn’t have turned so quickly after October 7 from a cherished country that inspired compassion into a pariah state.
Someone must stand trial for this.
Just as many Israelis want Benjamin Netanyahu to be punished for the corruption of which he is accused, so should they wish for him and the perpetrators subordinate to him to be punished for much more serious crimes, the crimes of Gaza.
They cannot be allowed to go unpunished.
Nor is it possible to blame only Hamas, even if it has a part in the crimes.
We are the ones who killed, starved, displaced, and destroyed on such a massive scale. Someone must be brought to justice for this.
Netanyahu is the head, of course. The picture of him imprisoned in The Hague together with the defense minister and the IDF chief of staff is the stuff of nightmares to every Israeli.
And yet, it is probably warranted.
It is highly unlikely, however. The pressure being exerted on the court by Israel and the United States are enormous (and wrong). But scare tactics can be important.
If the officials actually refrain from traveling abroad in the next few years, if they actually live in fear of what may come, we can be sure that in the next war, they’ll think twice before sending the military on campaigns of death and destruction of such insane proportions. We can find a little comfort in that, at least.
INTERNATIONAL DARK SKY ASSOCIATION vs. FCC AND SPACEXOn December 29, 2022, the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) sued the U.S. Federal Communications Commission over its decision to approve SpaceX’s application for up to 30,000 more low-orbit satellites, in addition to the 12,000 already approved and in process of filling our skies. This is Case No. 22-1337 before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and has not yet been decided by the court.
American plasma physicist Sierra Solter implored the FCC to “please save our night sky… Please, please, don’t take away my stars. To feel that my place of comfort and calm — a starry sky — is being taken away and given to billionaires is suffocating.”
On December 18, 2023, Ms. Solter published a scientific article detailing her fear for our planet. Each of the 42,000 planned Starlink satellites, she wrote, has a design lifespan of only 5 years, after which it will be de-orbited, burned up in the atmosphere, and replaced. She calculated that this will require 23 satellites per day — each the size of an SUV or truck — to be burned up in the atmosphere forever into the future, leaving an enormous amount of toxic chemicals and metallic dust to accumulate in the air we breathe and in the ionosphere.
This is already happening, she wrote, and should be stopped if we value our lives. “Since the beginning of the space industry, approximately 20,000 tons of material have been demolished during reentry… This is over 100 billion times greater than [the mass of] the Van Allen Belts.” She estimated that if 42,000 Starlink satellites are deployed and regularly demolished — let alone the 1,000,000 satellites planned by other companies and governments — “every second the space industry is adding approximately 2,000 times more conductive material than mass of the Van Allen Belts into the ionosphere.”
“Unlike meteorites, which are small and only contain trace amounts of aluminum, these wrecked spacecraft are huge and consist entirely of aluminum and other exotic, highly conductive materials,” she explained in an April 16, 2024 article in The Guardian.
Much of the metallic dust will settle into the ionosphere where, she says, it could act as a magnetic shield, reducing the magnitude of the Earth’s magnetic field in space. If that happens, the atmosphere itself could eventually be destroyed, because the Earth’s magnetic field — the magnetosphere — is what deflects the solar wind and prevents it from stripping away Earth’s atmosphere, as she told Teresa Pulterova in an interview on Space.com.
Other astronomers involved in the litigation before the FCC and now the Court of Appeals include Meredith Rawls with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile; Gary Hunt with Action Against Satellite Light Pollution in the UK; Samantha Lawler at the University of Regina in Canada; Graeme Cuffy of Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Mark Phillips, President of the Astronomical Society of Edinburgh; Roberto Trotta of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology in London; Carrie Nugent, Associate Professor of Computational Physics and Planetary Science at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts; and Cameron Nelson of Tenzing Startup Consultants in Virginia.
Other issues are also mentioned in the appeal. For example, the burned up aluminum produces aluminum oxide, which destroys ozone and contributes to climate change. So does the water vapor, soot, and nitrogen oxides in rocket exhaust.
Cameron Nelson told the FCC that “Humans, not to mention all other animal and plant life, have not given our consent for SpaceX to send the signals it is proposing into our bodies and irrevocably alter us.”
The BroadBand International Legal Action Network (BBILAN) mentioned “RF/EMF radiation from linked base and earth stations” in comments sent to the FCC. Starlink earth stations, also called Gateways, are far more powerful than the Starlink dishes that people are putting on their homes. The (as of March 2024) 2.6 million Starlink dishes each send one signal up to the moving network of satellites above them. All of this traffic is coordinated in space by thousands of lasers linking the satellites to one another, and on the ground by Gateways, which relay the thousands of signals in a large geographic area to and from the satellites. This is what a Gateway with 5 antennas (“radomes”) looks like:
Some Gateways have up to 40 radomes. Each of those domes weighs 1750 kilograms. Each aims a narrow beam at moving satellites. According to FCC filings by SpaceX, each beam can have an effective radiated power of more than 1,000,000 watts, which it can aim as low as 25 degrees above the horizon. If you are a bird you do not want to fly anywhere near a Starlink Gateway. And if you are a human you do not want to live near one either. When a satellite aims its beam containing thousands of signals at a Gateway, that beam is about 10 miles in diameter by the time it reaches the Earth.
At last count there were 277 Starlink Gateways in operation or under construction in the world: 181 in North America and the Caribbean, 26 in South America, 2 in Africa, 26 in Europe, and 42 in Asia and the Pacific.
The FCC maintains a webpage listing thousands of licenses that it has handed out to hundreds of companies to operate both fixed and mobile satellite earth stations in the United States. Some of these stations are far more powerful than the Starlink Gateways. SES’s earth station at Bristol, Virginia emits up to 1,900,000,000 watts of effective radiated power, and it is allowed to aim it as low as 5 degrees above the horizon. SES’s earth station at Brewster, Washington is allowed to emit almost 1,000,000 watts in the actual direction of the horizon! SES owns O3b mPOWER, which is the satellite system that had its first radomes on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the ship that had the famous outbreak of disease blamed on COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic.
“we are helping Ukraine while at the same time investing in our own industrial base.”- Joe Biden
the Biden Administration to sign a ten-year security agreement that would lock in US funding for Ukraine for the next two and a half US Administrations.
The ink was barely dry on President Biden’s signature transferring another $61 billion to the black hole called Ukraine, when the mainstream media broke the news that this was not the parting shot in a failed US policy. The elites have no intention of shutting down this gravy train, which transports wealth from the middle and working class to the wealthy and connected class.
Reuters wrote right after the aid bill was passed that, “Ukraine’s $61 billion lifeline is not enough.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell went on the Sunday shows after the bill was passed to say that $61 billion is “not a whole lot of money for us…” Well, that’s easy for him to say – after all it’s always easier to spend someone else’s money!
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, was far from grateful for the $170 billion we have shipped thus far to his country. In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine as the aid package was passed, Kuleba had the nerve to criticize the US for not producing weapons fast enough. “If you cannot produce enough interceptors to help Ukraine win the war against the country that wants to destroy the world order, then how are you going to win in the war against perhaps an enemy who is stronger than Russia?”
How’s that for a “thank you”?
It may be understandable why the Ukrainians are frustrated. Most of this money is not going to help them fight Russia. US military aid to Ukraine has left our own stockpiles of weapons depleted, so the money is going to create new production lines to replace weapons already sent to Ukraine. It’s all about the US weapons industry. President Biden admitted as much when he said, “we are helping Ukraine while at the same time investing in our own industrial base.”
This is why Washington Is desperate to make sure that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, the “Ukraine” gravy train cannot be shut down by his – or future – administrations. Last week news broke that the Ukrainian government was in negotiations with the Biden Administration to sign a ten-year security agreement that would lock in US funding for Ukraine for the next two and a half US Administrations. That would unconstitutionally tie future presidents’ hands when it comes to foreign policy and would leave Americans on the hook for untold billions more dollars taken from them and sent to the weapons industry and to a corrupt foreign government.
The US weapons industry and its cheerleaders in Washington DC are determined to keep Ukraine money flowing…until they can figure out a way to gin up a war with China after losing the current war with Russia. That, of course, depends on whether there is anything left of us when the smoke clears.
When President Biden signed the $95 billion bill to keep wars going in Ukraine and Gaza and to provoke a future war with China, he called it “a good day for world peace.” Yes, and “War is peace.” Debt is good. Freedom is slavery. We are living in a post-truth society where billions spent on pointless wars are “not a whole lot of money.” But the piper will be paid and the debt will be cleared.
The co-organizer said that they are making the rally a weekly event
CBC News · May 01, 2024
A small group of students and residents gathered near the University of Waterloo on Wednesday in solidarity with American students occupying parts of university campuses across the U.S. in protest of the Israel-Hamas war.
Tamara Lorincz, the co-organizer of the local rally and a PhD candidate at Wilfrid Laurier University, said that the rally will be a weekly event, meeting at University Avenue where it crosses the Laurel Trail.
“This is why I’m doing this action today, is to just try to be very public and visible, that there are people in Waterloo, there are students like myself in Waterloo that are standing in solidarity with the American students and with the people of Gaza,” said Lorincz.
Lorincz explained that she would support an encampment in Waterloo reigon similar to those in the U.S.
Amory Lovins says energy efficiency is a continuous spectrum that keeps rapidly evolving, and better design is twice as efficient as the gains from just dropping fossil fuels.
Amory Lovins has been writing and talking about energy efficiency for over 50 years but he says the need to use energy more productively and efficiently is now more acute than ever.
At the same time, the scope for saving energy is also bigger than ever.
Lovins views have been crucial to our understanding of energy efficiency. He’s advised major firms and numerous governments, authored hundreds of papers and books, and taught at several universities most recently Stanford. Time magazine named him one of the world’s most influential people.
“We’ve barely scratched the surface of how much efficiency is available,” Lovins told the SwitchedOn podcast. “It’s about two to four times what I thought in the 70s, and as we learn more about it, especially what we can do with design, the potential just keeps getting bigger and cheaper.”
Whilst enormous gains have been made in energy efficiency through better operational practices and technical improvements – turning off appliances, insulating, plugging cracks and gaps, etc – Lovins says that energy efficiency is a continuous spectrum that keeps rapidly evolving.
He believes the key to better efficiency now is better design.
“What we haven’t yet really tackled is how to design buildings, factories, processes, equipment, vehicles, as whole systems for multiple benefits. That’s what we call integrative design,” says Lovins. “That is twice as powerful as the factor two or three efficiency gains that we can get just by switching from burning fossil fuels.”
In 1976 Lovins predicted that over the next 50 years the US could nesarly quadruple overall energy
“That’s now looking conservative as we learn more about integrative design…. the current evidence shows you could about quintuple end use efficiency by about 2060, or treble it by about 2040.”efficiency, but by 2010 in a study he called ‘Reinventing Fire,’ he found the savings were twice what he’d previously thought, but at a third of the cost.
A passive solar house in the middle of Colorado……………………………………………………………………………..
Making energy efficiency great again
nergy efficiency has been regarded as the poor cousin of renewable technology, which is more likely to grab the headlines in stories about the energy transition.
“Energy is invisible and the energy you don’t use is almost unimaginable,” says Lovins. “So even though in the US the energy savings since 1975 add up to 25 times more than the increase in renewable supply, the renewables get practically all the headlines, because you can see them there on the rooftop and the skyline.”
Thinking about energy efficiency is also hampered by a belief that we can’t get more efficient, that “we must already have wrung out all the work from our energy that’s worth doing.”
The growing electrification movement is however enabling many more people to realise the importance of efficiency gains – it’s unlocking people’s understanding that what makes these electrification technologies superior is their greater energy efficiency.
We see it with electric vehicles that are two to four times more efficient than the internal combustion engine, and the heat pump that is three to four times more efficient,” Daan Walter, Principle of Strategy at the Rocky Mountains Institute, told the SwitchedOn podcast.
Walter argues that electrification is the gateway into efficiency thinking – by encouraging us to move away from just thinking about the upfront costs of appliances, it provides an opportunity to change the narrative about efficiency.
“To turn fossils into something useful, you need to turn heat into something useful, and that is an incredibly inefficient process,” says Walter. “We lose about two thirds of the energy that goes into our system before we can turn it into something useful, like moving a car or creating a litre of hot water to shower.”
He says this is the ‘design fault’ of burning fossil fuels.
“If you convert it into a dollar value, that’s almost $5 trillion per year that we spend on energy that subsequently goes up in smoke, I mean, literally goes up in smoke because it’s fossil fuels that you’re burning. That’s 5% of global GDP.”
But Walter argues that “the arc of energy history bends towards efficiency.” He’s confident the greater energy efficiency inherent in renewable energy will win out over fossil fuels.
“Efficiency is not a topic that sits next to technology change – efficiency sits within technology change. The successful technologies are more efficient, and more efficient technologies are successful.”
Walter says this is a trend that can be seen over the past 150 years in energy history.
When gas boilers came into the British heating system, for example, they replaced coal, because they were about three to four times more efficient than the standard coal stove.”
“Even though gas was more expensive than coal, it didn’t matter, because you use much less of it.”
“Time and again in history, we see this shift where an efficiency gain leads to a technology change, and it goes to the core I think of how important efficiency is.”
You can hear the full interview with Amory Lovins and Daan Walter on the SwitchedOn podcast
The Israeli military said it ordered the evacuation of about 100,000 people and suggested they go to the al-Mawasi refugee camp on the coast. Aid groups have warned that an evacuation of civilians from Rafah, which is sheltering an estimated 1.4 million Palestinian civilians, is not possible because there’s nowhere to go due to the sheer destruction in Gaza.
In response to Israel’s evacuation order, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said al-Mawasi did not have the resources to take in the evacuees. The NRC warned that the “forced, unlawful” evacuation order could lead to “the deadliest phase of this conflict.”
The international charity Oxfam also strongly condemned the Israeli evacuation order and noted that Israel has repeatedly bombed areas it claimed were safe. “Oxfam condemns this forced evacuation order, the potential Rafah offensive, and the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel that has helped bring us to this point,” said Abby Maxman, CEO of Oxfam America.
“There is nowhere safe to go: for over six months, Israel has routinely killed civilians and aid workers, including in clearly marked ‘safe zones’ and ‘evacuation routes.’ The notion that the 100,000 civilians being evacuated by Israel will be safe and protected is simply not credible,” Maxman added.
US officials have claimed they’re opposed to Israel invading Rafah without a clear plan to protect civilians. But there’s no sign the Biden administration is putting any real pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel appears to be going ahead with the attack and US weapons shipments to Israel continue to flow.
Israeli bombs pounded Rafah before the evacuation order was issued, with reports of at least 22 civilians, including eight children, being killed in the strikes. Rafah residents said fresh Israeli strikes hit the city after the evacuation order as well.
Russia’s tactical nuclear weapon drills are a response to statements from the West about sending troops to Ukraine, the Kremlin said on Monday.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov cited comments by the French President Emmanuel Macron on possibly sending soldiers to Ukraine, as well as statements from the British and US Senate representatives.
Military and other special services are verifying reports about deployment of France’s foreign legion in Ukraine, Peskov added.
Coming soon: Get the latest news and expert analysis about the state of the global economy with Reuters Econ World. Sign up here.
nuclear-news 