This is one common strategy to fool people. Fool people by saying they will plant more trees etc., and when push comes to shove they will simply turn their head and probably claim for bankruptcy. These sort of Shenanigans happens so often I really don't trust big companies.
It's so annoying. There is an option to change the language, however I have to change it every time I search for something, because the language doesn't get saved
Fossil fuels are cheaper because nature did the energy intensive "turn dinosaurs into oil" part (i.e creating the hydrocarbon molecules) for us over the span of millions of years and we just extract it from the ground and do some chemistry magic to make it into useful stuff.
The "create the useful hydrocarbon out of atmospheric carbon" step needs to necessarily be cheaper than getting dead dinosaurs to a refinery and refining them.
Screeching about externalities adds nothing to the discussion. Burning synthetic hydrocarbon fuel would also release carbon. A CO2 tax would hit it just as hard as it hits traditional hydrocarbon fuels unless you do stupid "craft the tax to pick and choose winners" crap that a carbon tax is explicitly supposed to avoid.
PV is so cheap the efficiency is the least important part of this.
PV without batteries is the cheapest power source on earth, bids in the order of single US ¢ / kWh, but last I saw batteries had LCOE comparable with nuclear reactors (about 15¢/kWh in 2020).
I’m certainly hopeful that batteries will improve, but right now even a mere 10% efficient process for turning electricity into gasoline and then burning it is still useful as both heating and aviation fuel, and just about on the edge of useful as strategic diversity for nations that don’t want to limit strategic energy storage to just batteries.
PV needs physical resources that aren't for free or unlimited. PV needs space. Most energy used has still an high negative impact on the atmosphere. Low efficiency somewhere is energy potentially wasted that could reduce carbon emissions somewhere else.
Heating is waaay more efficient with heat pumps. Aviation... Well who can still afford it...
There are other forms of storage as well, e.g. hydro, heat storage, and many more
I'm not saying it doesn't have it's uses, but efficiency is important
> PV needs physical resources that aren't for free or unlimited. PV needs space.
We have about 10,000 times as much space as we need for a pure-solar economy at current power use, 1,000 times what we need if we raise everyone to the power use of the average American, but still better than 100 times what we need if we want to do that while having a 10% efficient storage system because most energy is used while the sun is up anyway.
> Most energy used has still an high negative impact on the atmosphere.
Yup, and will do until it’s renewable. If it was already renewable, using that power to make more renewables has no impact whatsoever.
> Low efficiency somewhere is energy potentially wasted that could reduce carbon emissions somewhere else.
Sure, but the ideal is a global superconducting grid, and even if you do that the easy way [0] we’re a long way from the necessary industrial base to get it done.
This option is sufficiently good to be interesting in the meantime.
[0] a ballistic superconductor, specifically a charged non-conductive ring in orbit.
Second best option: a few square meter cross section HVDC cable encircling the planet, which needs quite a big investment in mining to get the materials for but has the advantage we can get most of it done gradually just by continuously upgrading existing grids until the very last step of crossing the Atlantic and/or Pacific.
> Heating is waaay more efficient with heat pumps.
Absolutely.
With electricity you can power heat pumps (which are say, 5x more efficient than resistive heaters), but by synthesizing fuels with electricity, you can get strictly less than a resistive heater's equivalent energy.
Oddly enough (but not really that odd) it seems to be affordable to a lot of people who jet around the globe to tell each-other and the media that people need to fly less, for the climate. It used to be for the environment but that trope seems to be worn out.
C++ has more features than Rust but you can limit yourself pretty severely and use "simple" features to get far more safety and convenience than C without having to wrap your mind around Rust.
True for your new project from scratch when you already sucked up C++ such that you know what&when.
But at this point you know C++ pretty well (including all what you don't want to use, take a look at the CPP Core Guidelines), and using Rust is almost trivial, since Rust doesn't really introduce anything really new you wouldn't be already familiar with.
This is irrelevant in practice because the SPA's code is also loaded from the server - if the server is malicious it'll just serve you backdoored JS, unless you load from a separate domain and have the main server allow cross-origin requests.
If you want to defend against a malicious server you need to make sure your client doesn't load & execute code from said server - it needs to be distributed as a stand-alone application instead of in a browser.
