A very snowy hill

Meanwhile, in Texas...

"We didn't winterize any of our power plants, all of them including the gas, coal and nuclear plants failed, so it must be the fault of the wind turbines in spite of them making up only 1/4 of the electricity in the state! Also, we refuse to be connected with the rest of the country's power grid, because that'd mean we'd have to *gasp* follow a few rules! More importantly, being connected means being able to buy electricity as well as sell it; we are Texas dangnabbit and we won't ever let anyone sell us energy!"

@CorruptUser ... I thought wind was only 11% in Texas?

@Sigart

It was. Then they built more...

@Sigart Well, that was sort of the entire point. Renewables give such a small part of the Texas energy grid, but the right wing spin machine has successfully manage to control the narrative about renewables and the Green New Deal. It's an obvious lie, but for those that have bought in to the narrative, it's an easy scape goat to make.

@CorruptUser And you're forgetting that there are 10K wind turbines in Texas and only about 300 of them failed. So if the entire electrical grid is dependent upon 300 turbines, my god those must be the most efficient turbines ever and we should build more of them and put in the work of maintaining them. Those same turbines are used in Greenland and Sweden and Norway and Germany and they don't seem to have so much trouble with cold temperatures.

This isn't the first time the electrical grid of Texas failed. Same thing happened in 2011: The moisture in the NG pipes froze, meaning the NG-powered electrical plants couldn't generate electricity. Same thing happened in 1989. But somehow, the Green New Deal, which doesn't even exist, is so powerful that it can warp time and space and cause blackouts decades in the past.

@Rrhain

The ones in Texas were not winterized, whereas the ones elsewhere are. It was a cost-saving measure that made sense at the time, because what are the chances Texas get snowed over like this? Pretty good, apparently.

@CorruptUser



This one is too good to be true, and indeed it is a phony post. Still funny, though.

@CorruptUser Can we give the US a collective bitch slap?

@LuxVertas The whole country isn't this stupid, in fact large parts of the country deal with winter snow, ice and low temperatures like Texas is experiencing every winter and don't lose power or water. So save the bitch slap for Texas, especially since their state politicians are lying to try to shift blame from themselves.

@LuxVertas I'd rather prefer it have wide spread deprogramming. Spin and narratives are so deeply planted in narratives, it is very similar to cult brainwashing. There's such a refusal to look at anything resembling actual reality or facts that I'm pretty sure the bitch slap would only just feed more alleged justifications for persecution complexes.

@LuxVertas If you are asking if it is within your power, that's gonna depend a lot on how invested y'all are in acting as one united voice.

On the other hand, if you are asking for our permission... I'm pretty sure if it's consensual, that makes it more of a kink than a bitchslap, at which point, I think you might be a month or so too late for that.

@CorruptUser
I think my favorite part is how basically the entire State of Texas is just officially, openly admitting that they're not even close to being as tough as the State of Iowa. I mean, just looking at the factual comparison:

1.) 42% of our power up here already comes from wind (plus 2% other renewables);
2.) On temps, we get every single year what Texas got this past week, and we never have any problems;
3.) Even looking at just this past cold snap, what were we getting? We were getting -30 temps with -40 wind chills (-35 and -40 for you C-users out there), and yet, the only ones of us who lost any power were a few voluntary rolling blackouts in the western part of the state, for customers who literally *opted in* for that;
4.) Our highest-profile senator is literally 87 years old (and was also a major part of why Iowa even has windpower), yet he didn't feel the need to take a trip to Cancun just because the weather got cold.

And that's before we even really dig into the *rich* irony where the same guy who thinks an insurrection at the Capitol, fomented by lies about the election, is too political to hold anyone accountable for... that same guy now wants to use the weather as an excuse to push his own political agenda, consisting of lies about a technology that his own northern Republican neighbors are currently experiencing zero problems with.

Turns out, the problem with electing people who don't believe in having a functioning government, is that as soon as they get in office, they suddenly have the power to turn their beliefs into the reality.

@CorruptUser Yeah, Texas and Denmark are sort of weird mirror opposites in this regard. Either way, they can't handle a winter storm and are looking ridiculous.

@CorruptUser

Which is why you always should vote in every election and never ever vote for a right-wing politician or party (unless you're a billionaire and don't give a shit about your country or anyone else besides yourself).

@Nisse_Hult

It doesn't matter which party, but when you get people who are all but guaranteed to be re-elected without a fight, that's when they turn to absolute crap.

Meanwhile, America is freezing his Texas off.

@ShoggothOnTheRoof Man I miss functioning indoor plumbing

@txag70 oh yes it SUCKS

Denmark is the one acting like an addict.

Sigh. Look, to the degree that you need to get exercise for your health, doing something productive with it (such as transport) rather than non-productive (such as going to the gym) is a very good thing [but see the caveat at the bottom]. I do reforestation, for example.

But transporting yourself with physical labour *beyond* your minimum exercise needs is *NOT* helping the environment; it's *hurting* it. Exercise burns calories. It's unavoidable; that's what drives your muscles; and no, a reduction in basal metabolism doesn't come close to compensating. Literally, the act of elevated breathing is the act of consuming oxygen and exhausting CO2. Now, if food production and human labour were efficient and clean, that would be one thing. But they're not. They're *terribly* inefficient processes (particularly if there's meat in the diet, but even if it's all plants). Even with the low energy needs to walk or propel a bicycle, there's a massive environmental footprint to walking or biking. Literally half of the planet's arable surface has been converted to food production already - creating massive water shortages and runoff problems in places and eliminating huge amounts of habitat, including driving many species to extinction. A quarter of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions come from food production (https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions) - more than mechanized transportation as a whole. Increasing your food consumption is a *terrible* thing to do.

This is not to excuse cars. Rather, it's to encourage people to electrify their transportation, because that has a dramatically lower environmental footprint when combined with clean power. And indeed, bikes can play a part because:

* Electric car: good
* Electric bus: better
* Electric bike: best

The environmental footprint of an E-bike, both in terms of manufacturing and consumption is *tiny* (note: the environmental footprint of using a vehicle is almost always far higher than the footprint of its production). An electric car may get 150Wh/km or more while an E-bike on throttle alone may get 20Wh/km. For a 12km average daily travel distance, that's 240Wh. By contrast, fixed solar panels at 15% average daily capacity factor and 20% efficiency yield 720 watt hours per square meter per day. But to do 12km per day cycling with human power would take about 400 calories. That's nearly a kilogram of CO2 per day on an average diet in *direct* emissions alone - the equivalent of burning 2/5ths of a litre of petrol. If you "eat healthy" - e.g. if you eat lots of vegetables and protein rather than grains, plant-based fats and sugars - your CO2 footprint per calorie is *significantly higher*. In addition, you need an extra 300 square meters (a square 17 meters on each side) of farmland/ranchland to produce those calories - with all of the fertilizer / pesticide / herbicide inputs and runoff that entails. Vs. 1/3rd of a square meter of solar panels on a roof. It's a *dramatic* difference.

So *by all means* get an E-bike and use that pedal assist! But don't burn more calories than you *need to* for your health, unless you hate the planet.

** Caveat: when "doing exercise for your health", also consider adverse health consequences... specifically, injuries. Pedestrians and cyclists are far more likely to be injured per unit distance than car or bus passengers. Indeed, they're so much more likely to be injured per unit distance that even if you removed all passenger vehicles from the roads and had only buses and freight, they'd still be significantly more likely to be injured per unit distance.

** Additional caveat: the same note about the environmental footprint of food applies to anti-packaging-waste drives. BY ALL MEANS, we should cut down on packaging waste, particularly plastics, where we can. But it's critical that at the same we don't encourage a greater degree of food wastage, as most packaging is designed to help the product arrive at its destination in-tact and unspoiled. You shoot yourself in the foot, environmentally, if you significantly increase food waste in order to save a couple grams of plastic.

@Karen

Some very interesting points there that I would never had thought of. Thanks. It won't affect my car use as I don't have one ;) but then as a lazy sod anyway I'm never likely to be over-exerting myself.

@Karen I get what you are saying, but
1) I believe things are not that simple. There are several more things to take into consideration, first electrecity isn't clean in most countries (and especially, contrarily to common belief it's not that clean in denmark, it's more clean than in certain countries due to wind power, but less clean than in France for example, because of that same wind power). Second, batteries are not environmentally neutral either. They imply some particularly bad mining activities.
On the other hand, agriculture could be cleaner than it is. You can't suppose that everything is green when you produce electricity (when it's not the case in most countries) just because it could be the case (which is debatable anyway) and compare it with our current agricultural system which could certainly be upgraded to become way more clean than it is (getting into details would require a lot of time, but let's just agree with the fact that not everything is perfect the way our agriculture model is).
I see the point you are trying to make that we should always treat this problem with rationality and avoid acting on belief that "natural" activities are always better but I'm not sure you chose your example very well.
2) Physical activity is not only health related, some people do it because they enjoy it (crazy eh ?), so now there is a whole new philosophical debate wether you should stop enjoying your life so the planet can live but well, once you go down that road you are one step away to justify mass killing in order to save the planet...
3) More importantly, I think this is not the point of the comics, she said she knew she was acting silly and the justification Denmark gave might be seen as denmark rationalizing his silliness (especially while he's saying this to Sweden and Norway who are probably two of the top countries in terms of environmental conscience and actual environmental practice).

@Isdaril "electricity isn't clean in most countries" - EVs even on *average* grids are far cleaner than ICE vehicles. Furthermore, it's not the current mix that matters, but the average mix over the vehicle's ~15 year lifespan. And grids are getting much cleaner, fast.

"They imply some particularly bad mining activities" - Not worse than anything else. Sun-drying lithium brine in a salar is certainly vastly cleaner than producing, say, phosphorus fertilizer from rock phosphate. You've probably seen some people share a "this is a lithium mine" picture. Next time you see that, reverse image search it - they're almost all mislabeled (usually copper mines). Here's what salar lithium production actually looks like.

https://inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/01/Mine-to-Energy-2.jpg

Here's what rock phosphate production looks like:

https://www.google.com/search?q=rock+phosphate+extraction&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwjDnZnQ9Y7vAhWVq6QKHTFZBfoQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=rock+phosphate+extraction&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzoECCMQJzoECAAQHjoGCAAQCBAeOgQIABAYUMDdAVi26AFg5ekBaABwAHgAgAFbiAHgBpIBAjEwmAEAoAEBqgELZ3dzLXdpei1pbWfAAQE&sclient=img&ei=YcY8YIPpApXXkgWxspXQDw&bih=1008&biw=1920

(Also if you want to bring up cobalt, I'll point out that (A) half of EV batteries (LFP) don't use it at all, (B) nickel-based cells are heading in the direction of eliminating it altogether from them as well, (C) oil refining *does* use cobalt, for desulphirization, (D) most cobalt mines produce it as a byproduct of copper mining anyway, (E) the surge in artisanal mining (which at its peak was only about 10% of the world's supply) collapsed when the 2018 cobalt price spike collapsed, and (F) artisinal mined cobalt primarily found its way to China, where it was primarily used in the production of small consumer goods (such as smartphone and laptop batteries).

We'll ignore the fact that anything that goes into making a vehicle - electric or not - gets recycled. All EV makers have recycling partners. We'll also ignore the fact that 4/5ths of the energy of an average vehicle is in its *operation*, not its *production*.

I'll note that the above pictures really don't do justice to the impacts of ag, so let's add some. Here's a map of dead zones:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Aquatic_Dead_Zones.jpg

They're dead only to higher life, as the ag runoff creates bacterial blooms that consume all the oxygen.

https://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/images/microbelife/topics/Sat_image_deadzone.v2.jpg

Sometimes they cause red tides as a result, which are toxic to people as well.

https://www.wmbfnews.com/resizer/mf8xuD4pOebXRiEU_OTd784CcnQ=/1200x0/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-raycom.s3.amazonaws.com/public/4MRAROVYRVAWPIJTFI74V5ZP2A.jpg

The amount of water consumed is mind-boggling. Here's what used to be a rich forest environment, even hosting animals like jaguar, where the Colorado River emptied into the sea - something it no longer does *at all* most of the time.

https://www.google.com/search?q=colorado+river+delta&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwjHs-HL9o7vAhXI0aQKHa05C5YQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=colorado+river+delta&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzICCAAyAggAMgIIADICCAAyAggAMgIIADICCAAyAggAMgYIABAFEB4yBAgAEBg6BAgjECc6BAgAEEM6BQgAELEDOggIABCxAxCDAVDQiwVYzZoFYMubBWgAcAB4AIABe4gB2w6SAQQxNy4zmAEAoAEBqgELZ3dzLXdpei1pbWfAAQE&sclient=img&ei=ZMc8YMfxCsijkwWt86ywCQ&bih=1008&biw=1920

Here's what an example of what Russia sacrificed in the name of getting water for ag:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UZwLTJroLpE/hqdefault.jpg

Where I am, the overwhelming majority of our marshlands were drained for ag. Guess what's happening now? All that peat locked up at the bottom, no longer protected by anoxia, is rotting away, causing more greenhouse gas emissions than *every other source combined* in my country.

Your notion of "electricity is dirty and will stay that way, but agriculture will rapidly clean up its act" is precisely the opposite of reality. Electricity is rapidly becoming clean, while ag is only changing slowly. And it's already at devastating scales, and responsible for an even larger share of global greenhouse gas emissions than all mechanized transport. Again, I'll reiterate: literally half of the planet's arable surface has been converted to ag land, and the carbon stored therein lost, the soil therein eroding, and insane amounts of fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides washing into waterways. Eating more food to move yourself around *extremely* inefficiently is *not* helping the planet.

@Karen Your notion of "electricity is dirty and will stay that way, but agriculture will rapidly clean up its act" is precisely the opposite of reality. Electricity is rapidly becoming clean, while ag is only changing slowly.

Nah, my idea is not that ag is becoming cleaner, it's that the electricity mix isn't becoming cleaner either at a large scale. So you can't say "if someday the electricity mix is clean, then we can solve all of our poroblems with EV" because it is just not really happening if you look at the world as a whole. Maybe the global mixture of electricity is improving a bit, but we are still building more and more power plants powered by fossil fuels every day. Also, the current downward trajectory of the electricity mix greenhouse emissions in the world has more to do with gas replacing coal in the mix than with renewables development. But overall, the greenhouse emissions due to electricity are currently rising, not decreasing (even though the quantity of Co² by kWh produced is decreasing) because we are still producing more and more electricity (and fast-growing economies tend to build cheaper gas and coal plants).

Also agriculture is not changing fast (I would say it's not changing at all but let's suppose it is changing a bit), but there are a lot of things that could be done to make it way cleaner very fast, like changing the way people feed themselves, I've already mentioned becoming vegan, but there are more ways, like stopping with the megalopolis nonsense and start to live close to where the actual food is produced. With the veganism alone, you can reduce agriculture emissions by 60% and the soil usage by at least 50%. With both those things you come close to a 80% decrease in greenhouse emissions. These are certainly not easy things to do, but I believe they are doable in a decade worldwide should we make big efforts towards that goal.
All the while if you want to reduce electricity emissions, you have to either build a shit load of Hydroplants (which is not without its wild life destruction either, even if it's widely considered the best way of producing electricity), nuclear plants (probably the best bet), or windmills and solar panels which are very problematic for several reasons.
If you were to suddenly need a lot more electricity (because I don't know, 8 billions people were suddenly buying electrical vehicles), the urge would most likely be filled by building either coal or gas plants depending on where you live (if you have domestic coal, you might use coal plants, otherwise you'd probably use gas) because they are the easier to build on a large scale (nuclear plants would probably fit in that category, but they are not easy to finance in a liberal market unless you've got a strong state).

"Where I am, the overwhelming majority of our marshlands were drained for ag. Guess what's happening now? All that peat locked up at the bottom, no longer protected by anoxia, is rotting away, causing more greenhouse gas emissions than *every other source combined* in my country."
Now if your flag is accurate and you are indeed from iceland, what you are saying is probably true but it is true where you live. And you should not assume that every country is like Iceland. Because Iceland is very very special while considering electricity: because of your special geography you are one of the few countries able to produce electricity for your entire population without any greenhouse emission. But your case is not really transposable to every other country. First because Iceland is very big compared to its population and second because you have a lot of hydro and geothermal power potential (and third because of politics: you are a nordic country, and you guys seem more interested in saving the planets than our lazy asses over there, and at least you are able to make your government do stuff in that direction). You can compare your situation with France, France is very close to its maximum potential considering geothermal and hydro power and it fulfills only a measly 10% of our electricity needs (and no the average french doesn't use more electricity than the average icelander, if anything, it's quite the opposite, but that's not really transposable either, you are not necessarily more wasteful of energy because you use more, because our conditions of living are quite different).

NB: Also the underlying idea other that electricity production is not really becoming cleaner is that nothing really is changing (be it agriculture, industry, electricity, transportation...) in a way that is noticeable in the grand scheme of things and that we are completely screwed.

@Isdaril - The power production is also a complex issue. Combustion engines are, by themselves, not that different from electric ones when it comes to environmental issues and might be even better because they do not generate losses on energy transfer (from power plant to substation to charging station to car) and oil drilling is arguably less damaging that coal mining (especially open-pit mining and especially that of lignite). Electric vehicles only start to be environmentally friendly when the electricity is produced in an environmentally friendly way, i.e. from renewable or at least cleaner resources.

Thus, in my opinion, a pressure to shift from gas cars to electric ones makes completely no sense, if it is not accompanied by the pressure to shift from fossil fuels to renewable or cleaner sources of electric energy. And the latter is quite difficult, because you can only use wind, sun and water when you have it in abundance (good luck using solar power in areas with arctic nights). We all need more and more electricity anyhow, so starting from greener power plants is where we should focus.

@Kartupelis Well, electric vehicle are globally less wastefull than thermal ones. I once thought like you because I thought something along those lines: "Ok so to use an electric vehicle, you have to first transform coal/oil into heat then heat into movement then movement into electricity, then transfer that electricity into your vehicle then transform that electricity into movement again. To use a thermal vehicle, you just have to convert coal/oil into heat then heat into movement. So less transformation = less losses right ?"
And actually it's wrong for one simple reason, in all those transformation, there is one particumlar conversion that is particularly wasteful and that is heat into movement. The other losses are quite negligible in front of this one. And the difference between electric vehicle and thermal vehicle is that when you transform that heat into movement in a power plant you are doing it in the best way possible, because the only job of your power plant is to do that. But with a vehicle it's quite different, first this has to fit into your car, and though well designed, you can't build your combustion engine as you like. But the major problem comes from the pace at which you are running your engine, while a power plant can maintain the optimal pace in which it was designed to work, the car has to work in several different paces, from urban conditions to highways hence the transformation is always suboptimal. To turn this into numbers, the efficiency of modern coal power plants is around 40% while the efficiency of an average modern combustion engine in a car is around 20%.

"so starting from greener power plants is where we should focus"
Actually it really depends on the country. In a country like Iceland, Norway, Sweden or even France where electricity is already mostly "green" (i'd prefer the term "carbon free", "green" gives the impression that everything is flowers and rainbows, but in reality it's not, every way of producing electricity carries his own form of pollution, from dams to nuclear plants...), starting to tackle the transport, agricultural, housing and industrial issues should be the focus, but for countries like Poland, China, India or even USA, yeah, the focus could be electricity. That being said, the clock is ticking and I'm not sure we have the luxury to tackle the problem one issue at a time (again, I'm pretty pessimistic about our chances and I do believe in a global collapse of civilization in the century to come).

@Karen You forgot electric scooter. Though yes, those are less manageable if there's snow on the ground.

@Karen Excuse me, there is nothing bad for the environment about excessive exercising, and that is only bad for you. this was completely random. This is about riding a bike to get to work. Also, guys please stop this is a webcomic.

@Karen well that makes me feel better about using an e-bike to cycle to work. It's not laziness at all! Probable confirmation bias at work.

*meanwhile in Texas*

Uh... yeah... I'd like potable water please....It's been a week... boiling snow on a woodburning stove sucks...

@txag70 TBF, the problem in Texas isn't the renewable production. It's separating the grid from the rest of the country.

'@bananaforscale' Texas is a big state, it wouldn't of been a problem if they were just using Nuclear

@bananaforscale It really isn't....

ERCOT was not responsible for the power outages. The failure of Natural Gas turbines to not have lines freeze was the main culprit. ERCOT does not own the powerplants and in fact, it was some of the operators that saved the entire grid from going under in a way that would have mirrored something out of a dystopian film.

Ugh, I hate upright bicycles. The only thing I can ride without pain is a recumbent the upright seating. Problem is those are $3000 bicycles and there's no way in hell I would ever leave it where it is subject to theft or vandalism.

I think bicycle theft belongs in the category of "this is why we can't have nice things".

Meanwhile in America:
School is in another town
Work is in another town
My town is not bike friendly

When I was a teenager, I was something of a bicycling nut, and I had a good lightweight bike for fun, and a heavier bike with fenders and thicker tires to commute to work in bad weather. And yeah, I'd be doing this all winter (in southern New England), much to the amusement of my co-workers. If the roads were clear enough for cars, they were clear enough for me! All this changed when I got my own apartment. Now I was living ten miles from work instead of three; I had no place in the building to conveniently store a bike, and nowhere to set up a bike rack for doing maintenance; and last but not least, I bought a car, and subsequently did a lot less bicycling. Although I have to say, my first car, a Ford Escort, was not all that much better in the snow than my bicycle was.

@uktana i was wondering if u look like Denmark's face in that comic when u were riding a bike

@RusA And that's also the face I made driving my Ford Escort in the snow, determined to get to work.

@uktana

Well, in Northern Norway, many of us (me included) still take the bike in snowstorm
I have to confess I usually hate myself everytime I do it... ^^"

@DJon51 Same goes for Sweden! I'm from southern Sweden where it's sort of acceptable to take the bike during winter. But I was shocked to find out that some people do that in Kiruna too... awfully admirable tho!

@DJon51 I live in Tromsø and i love biking in the snow ... when it is done by others and I'm sitting in my warm cozy car. I mean, it doesn't look even remotely safe - why would you do it?

I'm not a fan of driving myself but in America it's almost mandatory to own one since there are moments where it takes 3 hours or more just to get to your job, honestly I wish I could have the luxury of things being close enough to ride a bike or walk and no car needed.

@ScissorLuv12 Pretty much all my doctors are an hour away by car, and most of that is a stretch of interstate allowing high speeds. Biking to and from them would be damn near impossible, and take up most of the day.