People forget that the natural landscape of Britain is forest. The enclosed fields people think are natural countryside are in fact an entirely human creation.
The "natural landscape" is a pretty meaningless concept in Britain. Are moors not natural landscapes because they were formed hundreds or thousands of years ago? Is it natural when animals do something but not when humans do it? Or is it natural when hunter gatherers do something but not when agriculturalists do it? Or is it natural when non-industrial people do it, but not when industrialists do it? And why does your chosen definition matter? Is the natural landscape better than human-modified landscapes? Is a change always fine if the starting point was created by humans?
If you replaced the ancient figures carved into the chalk in England with wind farms would that be fine because they arent natural features?
> The "natural landscape" is a pretty meaningless concept in Britain
It's quite simple: there is none. Moors are created by farming and logging. All woodland has either been planted and managed by humans, or self-seeded on land cleared by humans. Aside from a handful of tiny patches (which are questionable) there is no primeval forest in Britain.
It's unclear what point you're making with reference to the blanket ban on onshore wind. I wouldn't like to see turbines on Cerne Abbas or Dartmoor. Nobody wants that, as far as I'm aware?
I would like to see more of them on the generic grass/wheat/rape fields that cover much of England. That was prevented by the blanket ban.
Yes. The gently rolling fields of grass, sheep, rape and wheat are considered a national symbol of our natural environment in need of protection from dastardly human creations such as wind turbines. This is the 'green and pleasant land' that William Blake wrote about.
Lighthouses have only become aesthetic because of their rarity rendering them as quaint or nostalgic. Modern versions and their impacts would be largely protested.
I suspect the real reason behind objections to technology being visible is basically "It makes me feel old by highlighting that I came from a time before X and now everyone will just become accustomed to X!".
Where do you think coal and oil comes from? It's ok as long as other people's environment is destroyed for non-renewable energy but not your environment for renewable energy?
Lol, they used to mine coal under that very mountain (until it was outsourced). It's not like we have some insular life. The region is economically depressed. People would rather have jobs while destroying the environment than not have jobs while destroying the environment and recreational value simultaneously.
Also people who need jobs. And that's just the case you personally know of. Maybe people should retrain instead of pining for jobs of the past. And we should support them in the transition as much as possible .
> only generates reasonable numbers of jobs during initial construction
We're gonna need a lot of initial construction though.
Have they ever used that technique in the UK? I don't think the UK has mountains suitable for mountaintop removal - they are famous for their underground operations.
I've always filed mountaintop removal mining as one of those "weird things Americans do" approaches. Probably associated with unusual geology or something.
I think the UK had the none-mountainous version of strip mining - open pit mines. I think there aren't any in operation currently, and I'm unsure if they were for coal or just other commodities.
Maybe it's a geographical/cultural difference, but there are so, so many mountains in the western US. it's a good part of why the game Oregan Trail was made. Before carving roads around and through mountains it was a truly treacherous journey.
US also jury has so much land to begin with. We can certainly afford to retrofit a few mountains without fundamentally disrupting the ecosystem. We're very bad at moderation, sadly.
To this day I still attempt never to click inside a running cmd / powershell console. Too many times script execution has been halted by this. It is probably something that has been fixed long time ago but I am still a bit paranoid about it.
It isn't a bug, you could actually toggle this behavior. Don't know how the option was called and cannot find it in Windows 11. But it certainly was still there in the latest Win10 build.
I think it was called something like quick edit or similar.
Yes, and there are different points along that money axis where a reasonable society might choose to place regulations and restrictions (in the absence of a decree from the courts that it’s illegal to do so).
Yeah, I've heard all those official talking points a thousand times.
I've also seen Israeli officials openly dehumanizing and calling for the mass murder of Palestinians, and theft of their land. And I've seen the graphic results.
There's an undeniable reality here and sadly it doesn't align with your official government talking points.
Otherwise, one has to reckon with the fact that Netanyahu's party's founding document doesn't look great, either, as it uses "from the river to the sea", which we're now told is a genocidal saying.
Musk claimed they were on a path to profitability (i.e. not currently profitable) and that was before he scared off more advertisers by claiming that Jews were scheming to replace white people with immigrants.
Increasing usage does not magically increase capacity by the same amount. Even if it did, the increased capacity resulting from the increased demand would not make electricity cheaper, since the corresponding demand would already exist.
In general, increasing demand for a resource increases the price for that resource.
Increasing usage trivially and obviously increases capacity by ~the same amount. A toddler could understand this, because obviously the lights are still on. We use more and more energy every year (except 2020, for obvious reasons). There aren't rolling blackouts. Thus, capacity responds to usage.
I don't know why you're reaching for the word "magically". There's nothing magical about the mechanism of how this happens. Its just market dynamics. If explaining it by calling it "magic" helps you understand it better, though, then that's fine.
> Increasing usage trivially and obviously increases capacity by ~the same amount. A toddler could understand this, because obviously the lights are still on.
It may increase capacity over time, if someone thinks they can profit from bringing new supply online. This is known as supply elasticity, and it’s pretty well-studied. It’s not trivial, and it’s not instant. In the meantime, demand from crypto may also reduce demand from other consumers, who now have to pay more for electricity. Electric usage is more nuanced than “are the lights on or off”—families can and do decide to keep the house colder in the winter if prices are up because some people decided to waste a bunch of electricity on crypto in a data center somewhere.
You’re missing the point, though: the thing that absolutely does not happen when you increase demand for a resource is that resource becoming cheaper, unless that demand goes away later, after the supply has increased. This is a called supply glut—also pretty well-studied.
Now, given that the entire cryptocurrency sector is a con and will eventually vanish like a turd down a toilet, there may very well be a period later on where the result of all this nonsense is that we have lower electricity prices for a while. Until that happens, though, you aren’t making electricity cheaper by using more of it.
I'm not so sure – I don't think it'll impact it positively or negatively. Personally, at least, it's never impacted my willingness to watch a movie. Seven Samurai is an all Japanese cast, but it's still my favorite movie of all time.
