teutonic
1yr ago
The safest way is to stick to well researched legal psychedelics. Legal supply chains are generally more reliable than black market supply chains. The specific psychedelic legality varies depending on your location so there is no general answer. In the US you can join one of the legal psychedelic religions and get reliable access you hallucinogens. In Oregon and Colorado many commonly illegal psychedelics are now legal. You could also order mushroom spores and grow your own. Failing any of that you can go to the darknets and do direct testing yourself or send away testing.
Could you tell me specific critiques you have of Handmer's analysis? Or even better can you steelman his position?
teutonic
1yr ago
I suppose the sneering tone can trigger some people. But I think his analysis is one of the better ones I have read. The learning curve for solar means it will be a large part of the energy future. At this point as far as I can tell the debate is about the minority of power that is baseload or long term seasonal storage. Has anyone looked at just over building batteries?
teutonic
1yr ago
DO you have a citation for peaker plant expansion? What I read indicates that used to be the case. More recently and likely a long term trend, batteries are winning the race for rapid on rapid off energy that peaker plants used to dominate. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/us-will-see-more-new-battery-capacity-than-natural-gas-generation-in-2023/
I would be interested to see a dispassionate reading of the studies on decarbonizing the grid. From my limited reading major build outs of renewables are likely to continue well past 50% of the grid. The combination of increased capacity factors for renewables, national grids, and cheap storage will give us several more doublings of installed renewables. I am not sure what technology will take us to 90-100% renewable penetration. I wouldn't be surprised if some nuclear baseload is kept online to achieve a fully decarbonized grid.
teutonic
1yr ago
Is his thesis not fundamentally that we don't have a viable replacement for fossil fuels in the next fifty years so we should increase fossil fuel use? If the argument against his thesis is that solar plus batteries follow exponential curves that will be able to match government mandates for taking over transport and the grid how does that not obviate his hypothesis?
Fossil futures seems to make several arguments.
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Fossil fuels help humans live a better life so we should increase their use.
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There is no good replacement for fossil fuels that will be available in the next 40 years.
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The global warming caused by 40 more years of emissions is not an existential threat.
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Any threat from global warming can be mitigated by increased fossil fuel use, what he calls "climate mastery".
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Replacements for fossil fuels should be developed.
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The best candidates for replacing fossil fuels are nuclear and enhanced geothermal.
I think he is being misleading or is ignorant. In the next 40 years there are obvious candidates for powering a decarbonized economy. Namely solar and batteries. New Solar is rapidly becoming cheaper than existing coal generation in large areas of the world. Battery production is scaling exponentially. While nuclear is the safest power option, it is never going to be the cheapest. Its technology iteration cycle is too slow. Solar power and batteries on the other hand both have fast iteration cycles. This makes them drop in price faster than nuclear. Even if you got rid of the unnecessarily burdensome nuclear regulations, its slow development cycle means it will not beat solar in cost per unit of electricity in the next 40 years.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-power-a-solution-to-climate-change/
Nuclear power plant technology is iterated roughly every 25 years, or twice in the lifetime of a plant. Many first generation plants are still operational, while few third generation plants have been commissioned, and fourth generation plants are still in the planning stage. Even if every design iteration was a factor of 10 better than the previous one, solar, iterating 50 times faster, could outdo this improvement over the same timescale with a mere 5% improvement per iteration. Since this is roughly the solar learning rate, we can now ask if each nuclear design iteration is 10x better than its immediate predecessor. Obviously not.
Dissentient argues most people are probably eugenecists.
https://dissentient.substack.com/p/eugenicist
I think they are using the term eugenics in a way I wouldn't. I have generally thought eugenics as a top down phenomenon. Central control/influence of the gene pool. From that perspective, attempts at regulating conception technologies like preimplantation genetic diagnosis with polygenic risk scores are a form of eugenics.
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