this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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I've been very critical of - well, not so much China or Chinese people as the current regime, but credit where credit is due - they have made an phenomenal effort on the environmental front, and there's plenty the rest of us could learn from that.
Truly shameful for the US. Green energy should have been reframed as national defense long ago. Maybe then some of these fucks would get out of the way.
Heh. I'm reminded of the story of what happened when Donald Sadoway was pitching liquid metal batteries to the US Army. He was asked what would happen if a sniper were to put a .50 BMG into one of them. His response? "Well, it'll leak a little inert non-toxic metal and then self-seal whereupon it'll just keep working".
...We still don't use those for reasons I cannot fathom, despite them being literally cheap as dirt and perfect for grid-level storage.
Every time somebody talk about renewables, some twat also goes "but what about storage?" and has me screaming "WE'VE HAD THE PERFECT SOLUTION SINCE 2009, GOD DAMN IT!".
Because they are not feasible. I don't know how many battery stories I have heard over the years and none of them have ever been mass produced. Discovering something in a lab is not the same as mass producing stuff.
Maybe you should look into the operating principles before you declare them 'infeasible'. They're a vessel filled with antimony, magnesium and a liquid salt electrolyte that self-separates according to specific gravity. Since both the anode and cathode are made of liquid metal, there's no structural degradation over time. They can be trivially scaled to just about any size you like and are made exclusively from Earth-abundant cheap elements. Just about the only tricky thing is that the operating temperature of a working cell is 600C, but that's hardly an issue for a grid-level storage facility.
It is actually even more insane then that. We know how to built electricity grids. The US is a large country, so it is pretty much a given, that it is windy somewhere in the US. Somewhat similar story with solar as well, but of cause nights cause a bit of a problem. The storage needed to run a well connected grid is fairly low. More so the US has a lot of hydro. The water reservoir can be used as a form of power storage, by changing how much water is let out. Obviously there are limits to that, but the potential is massive.
Their emissions per capita are up like 200% in the past couple decades. Meanwhile the UK and most of Scandinavia (not Norway) have cut it in half.
I'm not sure who downvoted you, but China's carbon emissions p/c have more than tripled this century, and for only two years (up to 2022) in that period have they been less than the year prior, and even then, by tiny amounts.
Plenty of countries have worse figures (including the US, Canada, and Australia), but unless the trajectory has changed notably since 2022, it doesn't paint a pretty picture. The US has dropped by a third in the same period, though it's much too high.