No-till agriculture solves the anthropogenic erosion problem, and can have yields equal to or higher than conventional agriculture. The main reason more people don’t do it is because you can’t monocrop on it year after year.
Yes, the reactionary movement has been very successful at abusing real criticisms and frustrations to motivate their supporters, while doing nothing to actually address those problems (and often even shamelessly leaning into exploiting them for personal gain). It's a one-two punch of directly making the problems worse, while arbitraging away the political capital that had built up around trying to reform them.
There's a documentary, "The Last Mountain", about the sister and father of Tom Ballard, who died on Nanga Parbat, going out there to see where he did his final climb. It gives an idea of what it is like to visit.
Incidentally, Tom Ballard was the son of Alison Hargreaves, who died on K2.
Bittersweet. Because the reason all those dams are able to be sold is because the textile industry and paper industry that used to rely on them has all moved to Asia and Canada, decades ago, and now these mill towns are depressed drug dens
We also shouldn't really be removing hydropower at this point in time from a net zero/global warming perspective. It is orders of magnitude less environmentally harmful than generating electricity with fossil fuels, and one of two carbon-neutral sources of significant amounts of baseload power at scale along with fission nuclear.
a ~5HW hydropower is insignificant and can be replaced by a handful of wind turbines and solar panels. Not sure if it's worth sacrificing local biodiversity for that.
I did some quick napkin math on the net economic benefit, including carbon pollution and local economic benefit, of 3 scenarios:
1. Keep dam: -$2M to -$10M
2. Dam removal with 5 MW capacity replaced/absorbed by natural gas plants (no solar/wind/BESS): -$28.3M to -$249.8M, depending on whether you use the EPA's $190/tCO2 cost of damage or $1000/tCO2 DAC remediation.
3. Dam removal with 5 MW solar/wind/BESS replacement: -$3.5 to -$25M
In other words, removing the dam without equivalent solar/wind/BESS immediately in place is a net negative for society (and even then, keeping the dam might be neutral or still better).
You did not calculate the impact on the salmon population since dams were added to the Kennebec since 1837. Both the impact on the salmon themselves as well as all of the other animals and people who relied on that salmon fishery.
It's certainly a lot larger than the benefits of the dams in my calculation.
Ok, I found a study estimating a net willingness to pay per citizen for this type of ecological restoration at ~$72.31/per person/year. If we assume 100,000 people derive this level of benefit over a 30-year time horizon (same as I used for the previous numbers) that yields $21,693,000 which brings the removal WITH immediate solar/wind/BESS replacement scenario on par or marginally better than keeping the dam as is.
But even then, I believe that is being overly generous to the dam removal because electricity demand has been rising steeply recently and is projected to continue doing so. Until we are meeting 100% of current and future demand with new renewable energy, every existing carbon-neutral source that gets removed is creating a gap in future demand that will be partially filled by new fossil fuel generation and therefore incurring many of the same associated negative societal costs.
I would flip the question on its head and ask why the response to uncertainty is to default to an assumption of zero. Environmental benefits are notoriously hard to calculate and it's unfair to weaponize that difficulty as if it confirms the default assumption should be zero. I also don't think the calculation needs to hinge on one-for-one timed tradeoffs in the form of "this windmill exists to replace power from that dam" or assume that backfill is 100% fossil fueled, given that solar is now arguably the most rapidly deployed form of new generation.
It's not that the cost never matters but I think if the cost is really just $25MM for a transformatively beneficial environmental impact that has equivalent no alternative, in exchange for scaling back a fungible resource, is a no-brainer.
Most of those small and medium hydropower plants generate near insignificant amounts of electricity, even if you damn all the non major rivers you can (and destroy all the surrounding ecosystems) it would be hardly noticeable.
My napkin math disagrees. Small/medium hydro (<100 MW) appears to account for ~1.7% of annual US grid energy output. If we replace that with fossil fuel generation and account for the cost of dam decommissioning, account for estimated benefit of ecosystem restoration in terms of quantified dollars willing to pay by benefiting citizen, and net annual CO2 cost I come up with an annual cost to society of removal of small/medium hydro dams between $1.7B/year on the low and $41.7B/year on the high end. Happy to show detailed assumptions and calculations if desired. But tl;dr fossil fuel generation is very, very bad and replacing even comparatively small amounts of carbon-neutral generation with it results in a significant societal net negative.
These dams are in the north east, those industries moved to the south long before moving to Asia. My grandmother worked in one of those mills that moved south during WWII. Many moved even deeper south after legally enforced segregation ended.
TVs returns came with a hefty restocking fee though, and designer clothes could be returned only with tags on (must be PRISTINE tags) for store credit or not at all. You may be too young to remember?
Oh wow, my bluff has been called. Boy do I have egg on my face. How can I subscribe to your newsletter of these old fashioned anecdotes of the distant aughts? Do you actually have gray hairs? Do you remember what malls were? Hey, I heard someone mention Heelys, were those real?
The way you are thinking about this makes me think the eventual solution will be a black box label on the gas pump that says “Studies have shown that burning gasoline increases the risk of climate-change related weather events”
> lawsuits assert that oil companies should help pay the escalating costs being imposed on the public by climate-fueled extreme weather because they knew the risks their products posed
How would one even begin to adjudicate that? How do you determine which storm or what portion of a storm was caused by climate change, and how do you determine what portion of climate change was caused by Exxon’s CO2 emissions or whatever?
I don’t understand how anyone can say market data is continuous. It’s an aggregate of discrete orders and transactions. It may look continuous if you squint, but it’s not.
The article mentioned this at the beginning and end:
"But what kind of data is market data? ... is it continuous or discrete? Market data seems to have features of both. An order book evolves via a series of turns as market participants put on, or take away, resting orders; there is no doubt a discrete action space. And yet, many of the most important parameters of a given order, like its price, have such a high cardinality that they basically appear continuous. ...
One way to explore these complications is to treat your data as if it’s continuous and see how that breaks down. "
"Most of the project was spent grappling with a fundamental problem: market data is neither fully continuous nor fully discrete."
I think it is continuous because it is an emergent property of the market system. There is a video where the guy tried to see if market structure was "real" by modeling it. He had trouble in the beginning but when he added an order book the structures and patterns (Head and Shoulder, Bull Flags, Double Tops) appeared. It's called:
"I made a Market Simulation to see if Patterns are Real" by Krafer
I’m still not seeing it. A model can approximate it in a continuous way, sure, but an actual orderbook will always be discrete. And emergence doesn’t change that either.
Yes, you are right. I agree with that. The additional thing is that the orderbook can be looked at like (similar, not exact) molecules of water. A single molecule of water is not wet. And a single molecule of water can't be modeled by fluid dynamics. You can think of the orders in the orderbook as molecules of water. When there is enough of those discrete orders and transactions then what "emerges" is something greater that the individual parts. At a certain volume or mass the molecules of water form drops of water and those form masses of water that can be modeled with fluid dynamics and treated continuously.
You do say this as well:
"A model can approximate it in a continuous way, sure, but an actual orderbook will always be discrete."
Which is the same as saying (I might be wrong though, and I am not "quoting" to indicate you said it):
"An actual orderbook is discrete AND can be modeled in a continuous way."
I think that means we agree and arrive at the same place even if I think it's due to emergence in the market system and you think it is just something that exists in that market system.
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