Social media is playground politics. Cancel culture doesn’t really shut people up since most of those complaining about it are heard loud and clear and have far greater access to privileged media positions than most.
Social media is a case of loudest voice wins which is more of a mob rule thing.
The real Cancel Culture is the use of lawyers to shut up individuals including investigative journalists who actually should be heard in the public interest.
I actually find the right-wing whinging about ‘cancel culture’ hilariously hypocritical. They basically invented the tactic in the late 80’s and early 90’s, and it became a robust part of their repertoire (remember the Dixie Chicks?). The Moral Majority’s targeting of Disney in particular comes to mind.
As usual, when it comes to climate change, the complaint about ‘cancel culture’ is really the fact that the proponents of an argument don’t actually have one, or a basic grasp of climate science or energy economics. The two cheapest forms of electricity in the world today are wind and photovoltaics, they are already there. The claim that we should just wait for ‘technological breakthroughs’ is very much ‘jam tomorrow’. The forms of energy that clowns like Kisin are de facto advocating for the continued use of took three generations to deploy. There won’t be a magic wand that suddenly makes a transition to clean energy cheap and easy.
It is now looking more and more like the Rideau Canal in Ottawa will not open for skating in 2023. High today is 9 deg C, in a month where it was once very unusual to see positive temperatures. More significant than the high is the long run of averages between -2 and +3, nowhere near the stretch needed to freeze the ice solidly.
For context, this has never happened before. The Canal has always frozen. Since it became a managed linear skating rink in 1971, the length of the skating season has ranged from a high of 95 days in 1972 to a previous low of 18 in 2016. The average has declined from 61 days in 2005 to 46 in 2021. The previous latest opening date was February 2, into the 90’s it was usually open for Christmas. We are now approaching some of the earlier closing dates, when the ice is no longer reliably load-bearing. The warm weather over the next week takes it to within a week of the average closing date
It’s interesting that there are actual records on that. When I was walking in Scotland I used to see lots of curling ponds which were usually overgrown with vegetation. I didn’t really think that much more about them - people who went curling would use the local ice rink. It was only after a while that I realised that the reason they went to the ice rink is that the curling ponds no longer froze over reliably.
Records go back only to the point that a government commission started managing the ice, but the practice of skating on the canal goes back at least a hundred years prior. I have not heard any suggestion that there were years before 1971 where it did not freeze over. Undoubtedly, there were normal variations in the duration of the period where the ice was thick enough to be safe. But it appears to have frozen over every year since 1832.
I guess the Dutch have similar records for their outdoor skating surfaces, but have long since left behind dramatic milestones like ‘never before’
It’s quite interesting to see proxy records like this. I remember reading an article in New Scientist which was a series of gardening records (flowers blooming, grass cutting etc) going back decades.
I did a piece of research in the early 2000s about the effect of loft insulation on energy consumption. I had some statistics in from energy companies but I also had some data from the Met Office relating to night time temperatures so that we could account for weather variation.
They sent far more data than the ten years or so that I needed. Being a bit of a data nerd I mapped out the full set. It shot up at the end, so much so that I actually queried whether there was a fault in the data. It was accurate - effectively this was Al Gore’s hockey stick graph. It’s not just global data - it shows up locally as well.
the message is 08:00 and onwards. the rest is fluff.
Ongoing issues with EV’s and their batteries. Really believe we’d be better off with continuing down the path of the hybrids
Interesting, what makes a full BEV different in this regard compared to hybrids?
I’m not sure that there is any significant difference other than battery size.
It got me thinking, though. Is there a separate electrical system for drivetrain and the 12v auxiliary system in all electric vehicles? I know that in ICE vehicles, electrical faults are one of the leading causes for fires. I’m pretty sure that hybrids treat the systems as separate. I’d assume that all.electric does as well but the power source is, presumably, ultimately the same?
smaller battery, smaller electric range supplemented by a small petrol engine.
Toyota Prius, as an example.
I’m not sure how that answers my question?
Surely, if this is a battery fire, then it would be something that could easily occur in hybrid vehicles as well, which could have even more catastrophic consequences since they carry combustible fuel with them?
then maybe you’re not answering the right questions…
So do some research into why the older-style hybrids are still being run by taxi countries around the world, and why these newer style battery-powered cars are having problems with fires…
I suspect you’ll find your answer in that research.
You aren’t being exactly helpful here. I did a quick search and the first link that came up was this:
A major insurance company in the United States recently conducted a study. Electric cars, according to the study, are in fact the least likely to catch fire. 25.1 out of every 100,000 electric vehicles sold caught fire. For the same number of combustion engine cars, 1,529.9 caught fire.
However, hybrid cars are certainly the ones that catch fire the most often. 3,474.5 out of 100,000 hybrid cars sold caught fire. This is more than double the number of cars using internal combustion engines.
According to these figures, hybrid cars burn most frequently, electric cars the least, and combustion engine cars fall somewhere in the middle.
Now that doesn’t have links to the research and I don’t know how reliable that website is. However, that would seem to indicate that the electric drivetrain in cars isn’t that much of a problem.
I posted this two days ago, in this thread. LOL
I found the original report if anyone is interested: Gas vs. Electric Car Fires [2024 Findings] | AutoinsuranceEZ.com
Thanks, I’m not sure why I didn’t see that the last time I read this about electric vehicles and tried to look around on hard evidence.
The only thing I would caution with that is that the fleet of electric vehicles will tend to be newer than the ICE or hybrids. Given that fires may be caused by wear and tear to the vehicles there is a greater chance that they could occur on older cars all being equal.