I don't recall that they were against (in fact they were in favour) of the removal of the 30% tax rules intended to attract expats in, among other things, tech businesses. I don't recall that they've ever done or said anything to make the country a more attractive place to start or grow a business of any kind, let alone the kind of venture capital funded technology startups that would allow us to move a substantial fraction of our tech consumption to homegrown alternatives.

Maybe they're at least in favour of permitting for data centres so that we can at least host our own services... oh wait, they don't want those either.

The study is here: https://ijbnpa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12966-024...

The data was collected during the 2018/2019 academic year and then during the 2019/2020 academic year (but before the Covid school closures).

First, some context: -The original ULEZ, which the referenced study looked at covers central London and should not be confused with the much larger recently expanded ULEZ which covers the whole city. Nor should it be confused with the much smaller congestion charging zone or the larger and older Low Emission Zone which covers freight vehicles. -The ULEZ rules are designed around penalising the driving of the oldest and most polluting vehicles only. In 2019 this was 80% of cars, the expanded ULEZ has overall vehicle compliance of 95%+.

As as result of the second point, it would not be expected that it would have a substantial effect on the number of vehicle journeys since 80% of passenger cars in the zone were already compliant anyway, therefore any effect at all is actually surprising. The paper notes a drop of 9% in total vehicle counts.

"Four in 10 London children stopped driving and started walking to school a year after the city's clean air zone went into effect."

This little quote heads the article. It seems like quite a result, right?

It isn't.

Let's look at the baselines here, something which immediately anyone who lives in London would be suspicious about because like me their first question would be: "who was driving their kids to school in central London in 2019? Are there enough for there to be four in ten at baseline to switch?". It turns out not many people do, and no.

Let's look at table 2 from the paper: (there were about 1000 kids in both the Luton and London samples) At baseline, 856 kids in London travelled using active modes and 105 using inactive modes In Luton that was 599 and 364 respectively

So first, we can say that "four in ten children" has to be interpreted pretty carefully here since 85% of kids were already walking to school (note that if they just took the bus the whole way this also counted as walking).

At most, we must be talking about changes to the minority of kids who weren't using active travel before, in other words maybe it's that "Four in 10 London children (of the minority who were being driven) started walking to school.

But, if we look at the changes, that doesn't quite stack up either.

In London: 47 kids switched from active to inactive (all measured based on travel "today" and in many cases there will be variation in modes across days) 44 switched from inactive to active 61 inactive/inactive 809 active/active

In Luton:

124 active/inactive 74 inactive/active 290 inactive/inactive 475 active/active

It doesn't look like, ignoring the Luton control for the moment, there was any modal shift at all for London!

Luton has proportionally shifted away from active transport and only in relative terms to the control has there been a modal shift.

This is already a much less positive message. "Kids in general less likely to walk to school, except in London where (potentially due to a low emissions zone) their behaviour didn't change." Where's my four in 10 gone?

The "four in 10" comes from the 44 kids who were inactive in the first sample but active in the second (out of 105 total inactive in first sample). Of course that is a much larger % of children from that group who switched in that direction than the 47 who switched the other way from much larger number of first sample actives. If your transition probabilities from A to B are much higher than B to A, but B is much larger group, you can end up in this situation here where you have impressive sounding % changes which nonetheless mean nothing and don't change the population behaviour at all.

It's a very fine thing, no doubt, to run multilevel binomial logistic regression models on data and come up with statistically significant odds ratios but I don't think these results remotely justify the news article headline and subhead.

Do you mean Drax? That's nowhere near London.

>And those subsidies exist because of fossil fuel industry lobbying and very willing politicians

Why would the fossil fuel industry lobby in favour of wood-chip biomass?

The electricity system has done most of its decarbonising under either the coalition or Conservative governments, they used quite a lot of the machinery (the CfDs, capacity market, etc) setup at the end of the last Labour government but it has been the subsequent governments that have chose the annual budgets for the auctions as well as setting up the carbon budget system.

There have been only two things that I would regard as material mistakes in this time:

First, not adjusting the max strike price for offshore wind in AR5.

Second, changing the planning rules to make it very hard to build onshore wind.

Everything else, including things like the offshore bootstraps / HND which are now receiving FID (like EGL2 which was just approved), the upcoming decision on zonal pricing, and most of all the massive buildout of solar and offshore wind generation and battery storage has happened under previous governments.

It's arguably the only area of policy which has gone quite well over the last decade, so I'm intrigued which damage you have in mind.

I wouldn't want to make that bet for an encyclopaedia published in 2027 though.

In a well insulated property, the greater efficiency from operating at low output temperatures outweighs the additional heat loss from no / a low overnight set-back. In a poorly insulated property, the optimum set-back is higher and the efficiency at that optimum point is also much lower because the heat pump has to operate at higher temperature in order to ramp up the temperature.

I don't know if they are available in North America, but in the UK we have hybrid systems available that use heat pumps for 80% of the annual heat load and gas for peaking / ramping. OpenTherm gas boilers can be retrofitted to be controlled in this way so you only add the heat pump. An air source heat pump driving a hydronic / radiator system in this climate can serve 80% of the annual load with a unit sized at 55% of peak heat load. Different climates will have slightly different numbers but it shows the power of a hybrid system as you save a lot on HP capex and also maintain redundancy.

The advantage of this system is that the failure-mode of an incorrectly sized system is an efficiency penalty rather than not being warm enough, the same as an incorrectly commissioned or sized gas system. (Most gas systems are not optimally sized or configured and are delivering 5% to 10% less efficiency than they could).

I don't know if these systems are available in ducted air configuration for the US market though.

Same reason, all infrastructure was either already there or usable after (the Olympic stadium was sold to a football team).

Generally the larger a city is, the better able it is to host an event like this for obvious reasons.

The majority of tidal flow is during relative short periods of only a few hours. In order to harvest tidal energy, truly enormous volumes of reinforced marine concrete have to be deployed. The environmental consequences are massive.

I find that it is quite good at answering textbook type questions and giving background on things. Basically a kind of supercharged search engine.

So for example, if I knew nothing about water treatment technology, I could ask it "what are the typical stages of water treatment for groundwater from a borehole?" and it will give me a good answer. Sometimes when you ask more specific questions, it will give some weird answers. It was convinced that desalination was already the main source of drinking water in a particular country, probably because there have been a lot of new desal schemes proposed and so the input corpus has a lot of associations between that country and desalination.

I just asked it a question on whether you could use nitrogen to cool a nuclear reactor (correct answer is yes, if it's enriched heavy nitrogen) and it gave an ok answer but didn't mention that N14 absorbs neutrons. This is pretty obvious but there is very little written about this idea in the likely input corpus so ChatGPT doesn't know this.

It cannot (and in fact, standard LLMs cannot because of how they architected) answer questions that require constructing counterfactuals or hypotheticals outside their input base. To note, from the point of view of an LLM, something which is covered in its input corpus is neither a counterfactual nor a hypothetical even if they are relative to the real world. So if nobody has ever written anything on the use of a particular technology for a particular purpose, no pure LLM will be able to answer questions relating to it. Other emerging AI technologies look like they will be able to do that though.

One, the evidence for it being a carcinogen remains relatively weak compared to many other substances we know of. It's in that category of chemicals where possible effects show up at the limits of detection for very high dose exposures. It's either weakly carcinogenic or that's just noise. Of course many chemicals, quite a few of them natural, are in that same class. There remains regulatory disagreement between the WHO and many other bodies on whether the evidence justifies a label as "possible carcinogen".

(toxicity to aquatic life is much better evidenced)

Second, it is indisputably much less carcinogenic and less toxic than almost every alternative wide spectrum herbicide.

It would seem disproportionate to me to entirely ban such an incredibly useful substance while we continue to live in a world with so many natural and artificial carcinogens for which we have much stronger evidence of danger and to which we are much more exposed. Nonetheless, it also seems reasonable to put additional controls on its use, restrict it to food production and other essential uses and discourage use for home gardeners and keeping city paths clear of weeds.

>The recent nuclear plants constructed in the west requires something like $5-15B above the market price in subsidies, of course depending on size, EPR at 1600 MWe or AP1000 at 1000 MWe. Would be interesting to know how they intend to solve that.

I'm not really clear what this means? All power plants require financing for their construction cost which is pretty definitionally the market cost of construction. If you mean how this will will interface with the Polish electricity wholesale market, well that market is already pretty dominated by a few large vertically integrated players settling trades with themselves. Presumably PGE will buy the electricity and treat it the same as their other electricity, they may receive a subsidy per MWh as well or maybe just avoiding the ETS costs of their current coal emissions will be enough to make the economics stack-up.