The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)’s official projections assert that “large amounts of annual waste are anticipated by the early 2030s” and could total 78 million tonnes by the year 2050. That’s a staggering amount, undoubtedly. But with so many years to prepare, it describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat. The threat is hidden by the fact that IRENA’s predictions are premised upon customers keeping their panels in place for the entirety of their 30-year lifecycle. They do not account for the possibility of widespread early replacement.

Our research does. Using real U.S. data, we modeled the incentives affecting consumers’ decisions whether to replace under various scenarios. We surmised that three variables were particularly salient in determining replacement decisions: installation price, compensation rate (i.e., the going rate for solar energy sold to the grid), and module efficiency. If the cost of trading up is low enough, and the efficiency and compensation rate are high enough, we posit that rational consumers will make the switch, regardless of whether their existing panels have lived out a full 30 years. //

If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model, they can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than IRENA anticipates. That figure translates to around 315,000 metric tonnes of waste, based on an estimate of 90 tonnes per MW weight-to-power ratio.

Alarming as they are, these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger. //

The industry’s current circular capacity is woefully unprepared for the deluge of waste that is likely to come. The financial incentive to invest in recycling has never been very strong in solar. While panels contain small amounts of valuable materials such as silver, they are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material. The long lifespan of solar panels also serves to disincentivize innovation in this area.

As a result, solar’s production boom has left its recycling infrastructure in the dust. To give you some indication, First Solar is the sole U.S. panel manufacturer we know of with an up-and-running recycling initiative, which only applies to the company’s own products at a global capacity of two million panels per year. With the current capacity, it costs an estimated $20-30 to recycle one panel. Sending that same panel to a landfill would cost a mere $1-2. //

The same problem is looming for other renewable-energy technologies. For example, barring a major increase in processing capability, experts expect that more than 720,000 tons worth of gargantuan wind turbine blades will end up in U.S. landfills over the next 20 years. //

Compared with all we stand to gain or lose, the four decades or so it will likely take for the economics of solar to stabilize to the point that consumers won’t feel compelled to cut short the lifecycle of their panels seems decidedly small. But that lofty purpose doesn’t make the shift to renewable energy any easier in reality. Of all sectors, sustainable technology can least afford to be short-sighted about the waste it creates. A strategy for entering the circular economy is absolutely essential — and the sooner, the better.

It is hard for humans to wrap their heads around the fact that there are galaxies so far away that the light coming from them can be warped in a way that they actually experience a type of time delay. But that is exactly what is happening with extreme forms of gravitational lensing, such as those that give us the beautiful images of Einstein rings. In fact, the time dilation around some of these galaxies can be so extreme that the light from a single event, such as a supernova, can actually show up on Earth at dramatically different times. That is exactly what a team led by Dr. Steven Rodney at the University of South Carolina and Dr. Gabriel Brammer of the University of Copenhagen has found. Except three copies of this supernova have already appeared – and the team thinks it will show up again one more time, 20 years from now.

Finding such a supernova is important not just for its mind bending qualities – it also helps to settle an important debate in the cosmological community. The rate of expansion of the universe has outpaced the rate expected when calculated from the cosmic microwave background radiation. Most commonly, this cosmological conundrum is solved by invoking “dark energy” – a shadowy force that is supposedly responsible for increasing the acceleration rate. But scientists don’t actually know what dark energy is, and to figure it out they need a better model of the physics of the early universe.

Speaking at a recent CAPA Live event, Executive Chairman of Air Lease Corporation (ALC) Steve Udvar-Hazy commented on the impact that COVID has had on the industry. //

“The airline industry as a whole on a global level has lost everything they’ve earned since World War II. I mean, everything, all the profits that were hard-earned are gone.

“If it was not for government support, either in the forms of guarantees, equity, loans, all kinds of medicine government agencies have put forth, the airline industry would have been crippled.” //

IATA estimates that the industry’s debt burden as a whole has ballooned by $220 billion to a total of $651 billion. //

“The balance sheets of airlines today compared to where they were, say, 18 months ago is vastly different. And many, many airlines have mortgaged everything, their planes, their slots, their airport terminals, their ground facilities, their frequent flyer programs. They’ve borrowed against every possible asset or even virtual assets that they don’t even have.” //

“At the end of last year, we crossed that threshold where more than 50% of the aircraft are leased, either on an operating lease or a finance lease or on a sale-leaseback. That is a huge change from where we were even five years ago,” said the ALC boss.

For the last year or so, virologist and infectious diseases expert Dr. Steven Quay has been at the forefront of questioning the narrative of COVID-19’s origin, conducting studies, and analyzing the genetic properties that make up the viral strain that has sent the world into panic for the last 18 months. In Sunday’s Wall Street Journal Quay and UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller make an extremely strong, scientifically-based case that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 infection, is a lab-created viral strain. //

There are 35 different two-word combinations that could be spliced into the site, but scientists have had the most success with one particular combination – one which is suppressed naturally – the CGG-CGG, or “double CGG” sequence. And, the authors explain:

An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.

So, this combination is suppressed naturally, but does that mean it can’t happen naturally? Yes, that’s exactly what it means, the authors argue:

If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.

“In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.“ //

“[COVID-19] appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral ‘improvement’ took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England.” //

“When the lab’s Shi Zhengli and colleagues published a paper in February 2020 with the virus’s partial genome, they omitted any mention of the special sequence that supercharges the virus or the rare double CGG section. Yet the fingerprint is easily identified in the data that accompanied the paper. Was it omitted in the hope that nobody would notice this evidence of the gain-of-function origin?” //

Since the data accompanying the paper made it easy for scientists to identify the fingerprint, why didn’t anyone do so? It stands to reason that if this sequence was the one universally used for double arginine in lab-manipulated viruses, all of those “experts” who signed on to letters in Lancet and Nature would have known exactly where to look to see if there was evidence that this virus didn’t originate in nature.

They didn’t look – they did the exact opposite, in fact, apparently “encouraged” by Dr. Fauci and Peter Daszak – but other scientists did. Those scientists found the sequence and published their findings, which were ignored by US scientists and the media.

RedState has exclusively reported since June 4 that a high-ranking member of the Chinese government we now know to be Dong Jingwei, the country’s top counterintelligence official, defected to the United States. Multiple sources within the US intelligence community who receive briefings on the matter told RedState details about Dong’s defection (as reported here) and that officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency have high confidence in the information Dong has provided, including information showing that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is in fact a military bioweapons research lab completely controlled by the People’s Liberation Army and that the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in the Wuhan lab. Information from that defector was used by an expert virologist and a scientist formerly with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in conjunction with previously available public information about the virus’s genome, to independently determine that the virus was engineered.

https://redstate.com/scotthounsell/2021/06/09/expert-virologist-claims-scientific-evidence-points-to-the-conclusion-that-the-virus-was-developed-in-a-lab-n394006

Just today, in another big victory for Trump and Barr, a federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs (ACLU, BLM, etc) in various lawsuits against Trump, Barr, and other former administration officials over the incident could not provide sufficient evidence that there was a conspiracy to deny protesters their First Amendment rights. The judge also ruled that Trump and Barr “are entitled to qualified immunity as the plaintiffs have not plausibly alleged a violation of law”:

useful tools for the instrumentation engineer, such as the measurement of Normal, Current and Standard flow or the calculation of the amount of product that leaks through a pipe. We will gradually add more tools to this section. The results of all calculators are exportable in spreadsheet format.

Two Viking Age warriors from the same family died hundreds of kilometers apart.

Granted, it hasn’t been the standard operating procedure for defectors to be handled by DIA or for the information to be kept from other agencies or the White House for a time. But, as I said in an editor’s note at the end of my first post, I stand by my sources.

RedState’s website felt the reaction about 12 hours later, though, experiencing a DDOS attack.

As the story has progressed, though, the reactions are an interesting and disturbing insight into how those with their own agendas attempt to shape the narrative and marginalize those who won’t go along with that narrative.

Justice Barrett’s concurring opinion — joined by Justices Kavanaugh and Breyer in a show of “solidarity” from both sides of the Court — comes down to the issue that if Smith is overturned, 30 years of federal court cases upholding laws and ordinances “incidentally burdening” religious practices will all be up for being re-litigated. Federal courts will be inundated with “religious freedom” challenges, with the Court divided on how new cases seeking to re-litigate settled issues should be resolved. She preferred to put off the question of what to do about Smith to another day.

But conservatives recognize that this is the front-line of the cultural battle being fought in the courts and at the ballot box. This is a clash between a fundamental right provided for by the Founders, and “civil rights” being extended by political processes to various groups who claim an entitlement to be treated in ways that don’t offend them.

I think we should call it what it is — the right to be free from conduct by others that makes me feel bad about myself. I don’t remember studying that in Con Law, but maybe I was sick that day. //

In the same way that the cultural battle over Roe was guaranteed to continue as a result of the “wheeling-and-dealing” with votes behind the scenes in Casey, it appears that the cultural battle over religious liberty grounds will continue through “wheeling and dealing” behind the scenes over Smith. It will only end when Kavanaugh or Barrett takes a stand and decide the question at the center of the debate.

On Friday, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops voted by a 168-55 margin to proceed with drafting a document on “Eucharistic coherence” to be debated and voted on at the November meeting of the USCCB. This document, as currently discussed, would encourage priests to refuse Communion to Catholics who they know to be in a state of mortal sin.

This is a battle that has been brewing for a couple of decades, and it is only the insertion of Joe Biden into the presidency that has brought it to a head.

The significance of 75% of US bishops agreeing to move forward on an issue vehemently opposed by the progressive caucus is hard to overstate. The hard work to develop such a statement remains ahead, but the fact that a body that is usually timorous at the mere mention of anything that is not consensus is little short of amazing.

Image Composite Editor (ICE) is an advanced panoramic image stitcher created by the Microsoft Research Interactive Visual Media Group. Given a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location, the app creates a high-resolution panorama that seamlessly combines the original images. ICE can also create a panorama from a panning video, including stop-motion action overlaid on the background. Finished panoramas can be shared with friends and viewed in 3D by uploading them to the Photosynth web site. Panoramas can also be saved in a wide variety of image formats, including JPEG, TIFF, and Photoshop’s PSD/PSB format, as well as the multiresolution tiled format used by HD View and Deep Zoom.

Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry were wealthy landowners in South Carolina’s Colleton District in the 1830s, in what is now Charleston County. The couple owned 84 slaves each for a total of 168, at a time when most of their peers owned a handful. Their slaves worked their plantation and made them rich. Angel and Horry also traded slaves for profit, showing no regard for dissolving slave families. They were no kinder or crueler to their slaves than anyone else. They were considered “slave magnates” because of the number of slaves they owned. They were referred to as the “economic elite.” They were also black.

Black people owned black people in all 13 original colonies and in every state that allowed slavery. Frequently, freed black people would go on to own more slaves than their white neighbors. In 1830, nearly a fourth of the free black slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves, and several owned more than 30, far surpassing their white slave-owning neighbors.

Yes, black people, frequently former slaves themselves, owned slaves. While it can be said that many black people owned family members to protect them and keep them close, black slave owners also bought and sold slaves for profit. Renowned African-American historian and Duke University Professor, John Hope Franklin, wrote “The majority of Negro owners of slaves had some personal interest in their property. There were instances, however, in which free Negroes had a real economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status.” Franklin also wrote that roughly 3,000 free black people in New Orleans alone owned slaves. //

Why don’t history teachers include this in their curriculum? You know why! How can they demonize white people and divide us racially and if they taught the truth? What reason would they have for teaching the commie Critical Race Theory? How can black people demand reparations if you know thousands of black people owned slaves as well? How can they propagate the myth of “systemic racism” if we were all just allowed to get along?

Remember, it’s no longer about equality in our country, it’s now about equity. YOU need to pay for what other white, and black, people stopped doing over 155 years ago.

A Boston professor created an invention that reflects the heat off of rooftops and even sucks the heat out of homes and buildings - and the real kicker is that it is 100 percent recyclable.

Yi Zheng, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, created "cooling paper" so that a building or home could essentially keep cool on its own, with no electricity required, according to Northeastern University's blog.

The paper can cool down a room's temperature by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit - a game-changing alternative to air conditioners that require a lot of electricity and money from home owners. //

Zheng's invention works through the "porous microstructure of the natural fibers" inside the cooling paper, which absorbs warmth and reemits it away from the building. The cooling paper itself is made out of common paper.

The light-colored material is part of Zheng's studies into nanomaterials. His idea was first sparked after seeing a bucket full of printing paper. //

Zheng and his team used a high-speed blender from his home kitchen to turn the paper into a pulp and mixed it with the material that makes up Teflon.

The product can coat buildings and homes, reflecting solar rays away from the interior and even absorbing heat from cooking, electronics and human bodies out of the indoor space.

Even when the paper is recycled, it still performs as well as the original. ///

Nice, but saying that it cools buildings is somewhat misleading: it can cool buildings below the temperature they might otherwise be without it, but it can't cool it below ambient temperature, which is half the point of air conditioning. The other half is reducing humidity, and it does nothing for that.

What this could well do is make existing air conditioning more efficient, and that is a worth doing.

John Solomon’s site “Just The News” has obtained what is said to be a 29-page memorandum prepared by an Atlanta firm called “Seven Hills Strategies” (SHS) which identified — in real-time — problems observed by representatives of the firm as it provided logistical support to Fulton County election workers on Election Day 2020 and the days following. The memo is written in the form of a timeline of events and observations as they happened, laid out in chronological sequence, with the date and time entries of the events described. //

Let me begin with this caution: I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this document. It surprised me — to put it mildly — that this document exists, yet has remained secret for this long. Until its provenance is better known, and we know more about the company that created it, I would say let’s be interested in its contents, but not adopt them uncritically without more information about where it came from. //

uplateagain
17 hours ago edited
If Raffensberger's change in attitude two weeks ago is related to this document, it's only because he realized two weeks ago that John Solomon was onto him about it. In other words... his attitude changed because he got caught. He has had this document since November 12th.

California will spend $500 million to thin forests to prevent fires
dailymail.co.uk //

This is long overdue. When you look at the historical trends of California fires, it was clear that a lack of proper forest management and suppressing of natural burns had caused the last half-decade of carnage. Now that Trump is out of office, California can admit he was right without having to admit he was right. It’s all very convenient, but it’s also deeply cynical. How many people suffered because Democrats wanted to play politics with forest fires? Never mind that in some cases, the fires were man-made, which meant that blaming climate change was even more farcical in those instances.

In the end, Trump was right and his detractors were wrong, again. But they weren’t just wrong by chance. They purposely lied at the expense of people’s lives and homes in order to avoid having to agree that a Republican president was right.

While the 46th president talked about grave unspecified threats to global peace, word seeped out of his administration that he was actually cutting – as in reducing — U.S. defense spending amid a ubiquitous panoply of threats.

It’s a familiar Democrat tactic, seizing funds from national defense spending to finance the freebies that Biden and his party are so fond of doling out. //

Here’s a chilling observation: “America is rapidly piling up debt past 100% of GDP while shrinking its defenses.” That will make it extremely difficult to compete in the future with authoritarian countries that might have aggressive intentions but no foible-filled Congress to address.

Take China, for instance. It now has more than 350 ships in its military fleet. The U.S. but 300. While the U.S. intends to retire nearly $3 billion in older ships to save money in coming months, China continues building apace.

It commissioned three new warships on the same day recently, a nuclear submarine and two for amphibious operations in the nearby South China Sea.

Since building new ships takes years of designing and construction, today’s decisions to cut back the Navy’s fleet and arsenal will determine American capabilities to counter any Chinese aggression in 10 years’ time.

By then, of course, the same crowd will be running China. Joe Biden will be long gone and the repercussions of any unpreparedness will be left for others to face.

The Daily Wire reports that the Western Conservative Summit found that for those who attended, “The top five candidates, in order of most approval to least, were: Ron DeSantis (74%), Donald Trump (71%), Sen. Ted Cruz (43%), Mike Pompeo (39%) and Sen. Tim Scott (36%),” //

John Cardillo
@johncardillo
People want action and DeSantis has proven he’s willing to act.

Anecdotally, those I speak to trust DeSantis FAR more on personnel. //

Indeed, it’s no secret that personnel staffing problems plagued President Trump’s administration from the get-go.

GOP hacks from the Republican National Committee and other D.C. swamp creatures took advantage of the new president’s inexperience dealing with the government, and, rather than appointing those who supported President Trump, folks like Reince Priebus saw it their duty to fill his administration chock full of Paul Ryan, George Bush-type appointees.

Last week, Schilling explained the group in more detail to Buck Sexton.

“It hit me about a year and a half ago that everyone in D.C. has a special interest arm that’s fighting for them, that’s getting the bad guys unelected and getting their allies elected — except for the American family,” Schilling told Sexton. You have, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Tech, you know you get all these “bigs” but there’s no big family.

“So we wanted to found the Big Family an NRA style membership organization to get families active and engaged in politics. So, if you’re opposing school choice or if you’re fighting for critical race schools or any of this crazy stuff, we’re going to come after you just as you know the NRA puts gun owners after you, we’re going to come after you. We’re going to get you unelected for hurting our kids,” Schilling continued.