Miliband parades UK clean energy deal with Trump's worst enemy Gavin Newsom
Ed Miliband has ricked [sic] triggering the wrath of Donald Trump by signing a clean energy deal with his arch American enemy.
The desperation of a weak man is, of all desperations, the most unscrupulous and the most unmanageable—when it is once roused.
Wilkie Collins – Poor Miss Finch (1872)
Miliband plots solar farms in space in quest to hit net zero
Solar farms could be deployed in space to help Britain hit net zero targets, according to a new report published by the Energy Department.
Nations, like individuals, cannot become desperate gamblers with impunity. Punishment is sure to overtake them sooner or later.
Charles Mackay - Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)
11 comments:
Those afflicted with madness probably feel lonely too.
Gavin just committed a CLEAR, DIRECT, PRECISE VIOLATION OF THE LOGAN ACT. Has he been arrested yet? If not...why not. AOC has also just committed the same crime herself. Has she been arrested yet?
Does Miliband not realise Gavin Newsom is a busted flush?
DJ - yes he may be feeling lonely if he's desperate enough to make deals with Gavin Newsom and enter such an obvious science fiction realm as space-based solar farms.
BigJymn - yes he has, a cut and dried violation. I'm glad he's on your side of the Atlantic.
Tammly - he doesn't seem to care, he just needs support wherever he can find it.
Solar farms in space? Someone will just nick the copper out of the Earth to space cable
Bucko - and they will use a big winch to wind down as much cable as possible, bringing the solar farm crashing down on the nearest town.
How heavy would a solar farm be?
Even if you can reduce launch costs considerably ($200 is considered the breakeven point) and use 'robots' to assemble all the pieces you will still need many launches to lift everything into space. Each launch carries an environmental cost.
And then once the solar farm reaches end-of-life you have to de-orbit the installation safely.
So even if it can be done, can it be done quickly enough or cheaply enough to be anything other than some politicians grasping at straws?
DJ - have a care, damaging technical analysis like that could demonstrate that a senior Cabinet Minister is bonkers. This could imply that the person who appointed him is bonkers too.
I notice that the Earth-based rectifying antenna to reconvert the microwave energy has been dubbed the ‘rectenna’. I can’t help feeling there’s a joke in there somewhere…
While we’re on the subject (of solar reflectors, that is), I thoroughly recommend the short story ‘Sun of China’ by Liu CiXin (author of ‘The Three Body Problem’) in his excellent collection ‘The Wandering Earth’.
Macheath - I've always assumed that the solar farms in space idea is a hoax. Beaming megawatts of microwave power from the sky seems so demented that I've never looked into it. Perhaps the ‘rectenna’ is a clue to that, but I don't know.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I see there is a Kindle version so I'll take a look.
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