I wholeheartedly agree. As Hannah Ritchie made the point well: to raise the world up to the living standards of, say, Denmark, the economy has to grow fivefold: we need vastly more concrete, steel, and energy raise that standard of living.
"The Global South’s workforce provides a staggering 90% of the labor to power the world economy, yet gets only 21% of global income."
The conclusion you could get from this is that the Western working class "earns too much" or, worse, that it's depending on the exploitation of the third world for its livelihood. This is what Maoists Third-Worldists say.
A proper class analysis would point to the vast capital investment funds and, crucially, this international picking order being a result of the fundamental mechanism in capitalism where workers work for a wage, but get none of the surplus labour.
The solution is to dissolve the wage labour system.
#Cybernetics
https://www.science.org/content/article/rich-countries-drain-shocking-amount-labor-global-south
Beyond parody.
There's a joke going on in the Australian nuclear vs renewable debate: let's take a state with less than 2 million people, with barely any industry, and claim it has been a great success at running on renewables.
The joke is that people seriously think this is a model.
Of course they don't want to talk about the fossil that still backs up this part of the grid in South Australia.
And let's also forget about the (very) high kWh prices in this part of Australia. I found this website a useful tool in comparing them: https://www.canstarblue.com.au
#Australia #EnergyTransition
"Although most of this hydrogen is likely to be impractical to recover, a small fraction would supply the projected hydrogen needed to reach net-zero carbon emissions for ~200 years."
If this amount of "white" hydrogen turns out to be true and if it can be economically extracted, the energy transition will probably move in a very different direction, very quickly, with a big redeeming role to play for the fossil industry.
I know quite a few people that are NOT going to like that 😅
🌿 Fun fact: Finland quietly proved the "nuclear vs wind" debate wrong.
Instead of choosing sides, they built both, achieving a much faster clean energy growth than similar-sized Denmark who went all-in on wind. Excluding nuclear does not make your transition faster
🇫🇮⚛️🌬️
🇬🇧 Britain increases funding for new nuclear reactor at Sizewell C, a plan to power 6 million homes with 24/7 clean energy. The total has been raised to 5.5 billion pounds for the project.
These units get built for 80 years service or more. Together with Hinkley Point C and Sizewell B (a single unit PWR which has been delivering since 1996) the total would be around 60 TWh annually, or around 17% of the UK electricity consumption.
The UK has several legacy nuclear sites, which could be repurposed for these new safe units. I hope the new Labour government goes ahead and pushes forward.
#Nuclear #EnergyTransition #UK
