Right, but Trump has stated he can accept working with the regime without consequence, like in Venezuela, as long as they cooperate on key issues e.g. oil and Israeli security concerns. He couldn’t care less that the regime is killing its own people. Like he couldn’t care less about Israel’s illegal occupation and murder.
To think Trump did this war to save Iranian lives from its own government is hopelessly naive. It was not at all a leading factor.
> Drones have a limited range and limited capacity to inflict damage. Yes, they are effective at hunting infantry, but you can't reach across an ocean and strike the US with "millions of drones".
I've had various arguments online and got literal responses from an LLM after the second or third message. It's extremely disrespectful, instead of engaging with a human acting in good faith, I'm now conversing with a bot with a prompt 'prove him wrong'.
It explicitly undermines the foundation to the only debate I am willing to entertain which is: (1) I enter into the debate in good faith, that both parties intend to seek truth and understand.
And it replaces that with a different debate: (2) I enter into the debate to win, its is adversarial, and I will use a prompt to seek to win regardless of truth or understanding.
That second conversation is pointless for me, I refuse to engage in it. Yet it is obfuscated. The human using a bot to engage secretly in debate (2) while pretending he's a human engaging in debate (1).
Are you just drawing from today's figures? Or annual figures?
I just checked for NL and in the past 12 months it's 50/50 for electricity (fossil/renewable), with about 10% of the renewables being biomass which isn't particularly renewable.
For NL for example we import wood pellets from North America and then burn them. Yeah, not great. Essentially it's releasing emissions by burning 30-40 years of American forests, which might be replanted, and will have soaked up the Co2 around 2065. Therefore it gets to count those emissions as zero (renewable), despite having a full effect on climate change in the next half century which is critical. Not to mention there's a 15% roundtrip loss from logging, shipping etc.
Agree there's real momentum but these are misleading figures.
Even if ship displacement wasn't an observable thing, there's no real reason that empty oil ships enter the strait, and then again leave empty, after having obviously docked at an oil terminal, on any regular basis.
Public and observable information makes it trivial to make high-accuracy assessments about the veracity of the claim.
And $2m is sufficient budget to finance spot checks, especially given you'd have to apply them to an exceedingly small percentage of ships. A year salary of an average Iranian police guard is about 5k, for context.
Plus you can create a scenario where fraud being detected is prohibitively expensive, and may even result in the captain being imprisoned in Iran. I wouldn't expect a lot of lies.
Indeed. For others who may wonder why this is the case, a simple example will explain it:
Suppose Saudi can produce 100 barrels at $10 (cost+profit) each, and Brazil can produce 100 barrels at a price of $50 (cost+profit) each, and John wants to buy 120 barrels.
- John will pay what is necessary for his Oil, but seeks out the cheapest price available.
- Sellers Brazil and Saudi will accept a sale of their own production if their minimum price of $50 and $10 is met respectively, but will sell to the highest bidder for their supply.
You'd think John will go to to Brazil to buy 100 barrels at $50, and then buy 20 barrels in Saudi at $10.
But guess what, Brazil could simply go to Saudi and buy their 100 barrels for $10, and then sell them to you for $50.
So now Saudi has demand from both John and Brazil at a $10 price. Who gets to buy? Well whoever decides to bid more to convince Saudi to sell their oil.
If John increases his bid to $15, Saudi will prefer that to Brazil's $10 bid. But Brazil would then increase its bid to $20, knowing they can sell it to John for $50.
This bidding keeps going up until the $50 point. For Brazil there is no longer any profit in buying Saudi Oil at $50, and selling it to John for the same price. For John there is no point in bidding more than $50 for Saudi Oil, because he can get a $50 price from Brazil.
Any point below $50 means a bidding war starts between John and Brazil, because at less than $50, Brazil has a cheaper source of oil (Saudi) than their own production cost.
And this is true for every commodity in a free market. It's not some 'UK system', it's just the consequence of free trade.
Of course in reality it's trading intermediaries that do the bidding, it's not Brazil buying from Saudi, but traders jumping in to arbitrage. But this is a simplified example.
Even 20 years is much below what most studies show. Panels tend to keep functioning well beyond 30 years, with degradation at 86%. It might be true that economically in 30 years they're so much cheaper that it's worth replacing them with new panels, but that's an optimisation, not a question of replacement need.
Essentially it's not an isolated market, but part of a bigger whole.
As an example imagine a village that constituted 1% of the population of a country. The village was 100% renewable, and the country was 0% renewable. If the village disconnected its grid, in isolation its prices would be dictated by its renewables. But if its connected, its renewables just get traded on a market with marginal prices. If a person elsewhere in the country has more expensive generation, they'll but your cheap renewables at their price level. Thus the village will experience high prices like everyone else.
Now suppose Germany is that village in an interconnected EU market. Of course the numbers from my example are exaggerated, but the point remains: Germany's renewables aren't enough, if pricing is set at a much larger market, with fewer renewables.
Today about 20% of Germany's electricity was exported. While only about 6% of its demand came from gas. In other words if Germany was disconnected, it'd have needed no gas, and thus prices would've been lower.
Of course disconnecting isn't a good idea for other reasons, as on other days Germany imports. And Germany's ability to export its renewable excess generates significant revenues, creates incentives to build more renewables, and offsets emissions and pollution in other countries, too.
But long story short, it'll take more for one part of the whole to go renewable. As the EU is generally transitioning towards renewables we see a decoupling happen.
To think Trump did this war to save Iranian lives from its own government is hopelessly naive. It was not at all a leading factor.
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