If China stops selling us solar panels, the ones we already have will keep producing power and we'll be just fine.
I feel like you're making an analogy here to 1973 when Saudi Arabia cut off the supply of oil or 2022 when Russia cut off the supply of fossil gas, but the analogy doesn't work.
Quite right old chap! Surely no reasonable consumer would interpret terms like "Autopilot" or "Full Self Driving" to mean that the car autonomously drives itself!
The article referenced mentions of goitre in Switzerland from Victor Hugo in 1839, Mark Twain in 1880, a medical survey in 1883, and Roman authors like Vitrivius and Pliny the Elder. It also mentioned that the iodine idea had been going around for a hundred years before the activities of the heroes of our story.
Iodine had not been seen as a successful cure before because excess iodine causes a horrible condition. The key difference here was that Hunziker proposed regular use in minute quantities, and then Bayard tested the hypothesis with careful measurements and convincing evidence.
Construction of the lithium mine at Thacker Pass began in June, and it is expected to start producing lithium by 2026.
There is a (super nutty) environmentalist group and some Native Americans protesting and trying to delay the mine, but it looks like they have so far been unsuccessful at convincing judges, and blockers have been getting cleared out.
I consider myself an environmentalist, so I'm a bit sensitive about descriptions like "nutty environmentalist", but... the group protesting the Thacker Pass mine is weird and I think largely repudiated by other environmentalists. I mean, they're trying to stop the transition to clean energy. These guys advocate for total deindustrialization, return to a pre-agriculture way of life, only as many humans as the hunter-and-gatherer lifestyle can support, and they're... deeply anti-trans?
Is this Deep Green Resistance? If it is, the anti-trans thing is a combination of things, one of them being that they view hormone replacement therapy as an unnatural "big pharma" thing that can't survive in their idyllic future where the Earth has a population of 100,000, just like insulin for diabetics. The other is just that they had significant factional splits with thin voting margins, and the faction that kept the name was fighting against another faction that had some transgender members, so "Transgender people are industrialised freaks and/or rapists" was a convenient way to try to expel enough voting members of the opposing faction to seize control of the faction. A lot of the time when you see a random extreme political organisation that's nominally left-wing have a strongly anti-transgender stance, it's because at some point in their organisational past transgender people were casualties in some larger factional dispute.
The Texas grid has been buckling because of extreme weather events and rapidly increasing load. Texas broke electricity demand records 11 times last summer [2022] and 9 times this summer.
The rapid deployment of renewables and grid-scale batteries is saving the Texas grid from brownouts and blackouts.
Grid-scale batteries have also been saving California from blackouts. Back in 2020, the California grid wasn't able to handle the peak demand of 46.8 GW during a heat wave and resulted in blackouts. But in 2022, thanks to the rapid deployment of several GW of additional batteries, California weathered a peak of 51.4 GW without issue.
California's utility batteries can supply 5GW for a few hours. In the morning today they were charging at about 2.8GW and then early evening output peaked at 3.5GW.
They're basically competing with natural gas peaking plants. You could argue they're buying natural gas power in the morning for cheap and selling it in the early evening when it's expensive.
