Citation count has been and continues to be the defacto measure of research importance.

This type of analysis and process needs to be carried out before I, an I assume others, will be comfortable participating.

We don’t need Shell to install solar arrays. Thinking that the companies that are causing the problem will fix it for us is what will delay indefinitely any solution. Being able to synthesize methane has no or not has no influence on whether or not a carbon tax is appropriate. Greenhouse gass emission taxes are appropriate under either circumstance.

If it can’t be cost effective it won’t happen. It won’t slow down solar or other green house gas emission neutral options. I’m not rooting for that scenario.

If it can be done cheaper this way than extracted via drilling (fracking) wells, then it’s a pure win because it will displace the activity that increases CO2 and the vast majority of Methane leaks while the transition to other technologies occurs. It would be a tremendous benefit in terms of eliminating the acceleration of greenhouse effects.

This project utilised 50 ACT government-owned Nissan LEAF electric vehicles and chargers across Canberra.

the results also highlight the need to be smarter about how all electric vehicles charge, especially during such emergencies.

In February, once the vehicles had discharged power for ten minutes, nine vehicles started charging. This is because their default behaviour is to charge when their batteries are below a certain level. It’s the last thing the power system needs while trying to stabilise.

The six vehicles that switched to an idle state after ten minutes must have still had enough energy in their batteries. That one vehicle kept discharging for ten more minutes was due to a software bug. What’s more, when we looked at data from other ACT government vehicles parked in these properties, we found 23 were charging throughout the event. Again this directly obstructs power system recovery.

There would have been absolutely no inconvenience or cost for the vehicles to delay charging for an hour or two.

electric hot water heaters could also make a big contribution without causing inconvenience.

This is great for short term outages, but they aren’t considering multi-day outages. I lost power in NJ for 11 and 13 days on separate occasions in one year. I wouldn’t want my vehicle to be drained of energy as an event like those started. But shutting off hot water heaters is a pure win.

Let’s go!

Also, has anyone figured out good uses for old wind turbine blades? Seems that the current popular solution is to bury them.

Academic fraud is in no way a thing that is limited or even disproportionately prevalent in China. Perhaps the flavors of it are biased to one form or another in different cultures, but don’t mistake that for more or less fraud in that culture. Perhaps you notice more from China simply because there are simply more Chinese people in the world than any other nation behind Indian people in India.

Incentives matter in any system. The incentives are perverse right now.

There was a whole season of The Wire that was dedicated to the theme of news publications demanding that more be done with less as budgets were cut. Craigslist was a major factor in the trend as it cut revenue severely for local publications.

It would be great if corn got that feature

There’s a variety of maize that does fix nitrogen:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/amaizeballs/567140/

There are some political and technical hurdles to adapting it more broadly to the agricultural industry.

Relevant information:

GovTrack.us posted about the bill in question:

Appropriations legislation covering a bit less than half of the overall funding needs of the federal government was passed by the Senate 75-22 around dinner time on Friday 3/8. The bill was signed the next morning by the President. Even though technically Biden did so after the Friday midnight deadline, the government never shutdown for even a few hours.

The Science section of the bill contains the majority of the Science related appropriations.

GovTrack.us also provided links to summaries of the bill from The New York Times by Catie Edmondson and The American Prospect by David Dayen.

The Devils should fire their coach.

Oh… look at that.