Week 17
Zeihan: "[T]he absolute lowest grade for silicon as an actual industrial input is 99.95 percent pure. Getting there requires a blast furnace, which typically requires a lot of coal. Overall, the process isn’t all that complicated—you basically just bake the quartz until anything that is not silicon burns away—which means some 90 percent of this firststep processing tends to be done in countries like Russia and China, countries with a lot of surplus industrial capacity that don’t [care] about environmental issues...
The 99.95 percent purity of 'standard' silicon isn’t anywhere enough [for solar panels]. A second round in the blast furnace gets the silicon up to 99.99999 percent pure. Round two is far more sophisticated than round one’s bake-it-pure. China’s GCL Group is the only Chinese entity that can manage such precision at scale, making it responsible for one-third of global supply. The rest comes from a smattering of developed-world companies. This pure silicon is incorporated into the solar cells that make solar panels do their thing"
CleanTechnica: "China’s coal-fired electricity generation took an unexpectedly sharp turn downward in the first quarter of 2025, signaling a potentially profound shift in the world’s largest coal-consuming economy. This wasn’t merely a seasonal dip or economic distress signal; rather, it represented a clear and structural turning point. Coal generation fell by approximately 4.7% year over year, significantly outpacing the overall grid electricity supply decline of just 1.3%. However, electricity demand, a better measure, went up by 1%. What gives?...
China put in place a Whole County Rooftop Solar Promotion Program. Developers had to bid on an entire county’s rooftop solar at once, committing to putting solar on 50% of government buildings, 40% of public institutions, 30% of commercial and industrial rooftops, and 20% of rural homes. That’s paid off massively in the densely populated southeast of the country where demand is highest and free space is lowest...
As a result, tens of terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity generated by these rooftop systems are effectively invisible when interpreting China’s national grid-supplied electricity data. This has profound implications: the reported 1.3% decline in grid electricity generation does not represent true reduced consumption, but rather a substitution effect—electricity generated behind the meter directly displacing grid-supplied power... Given that China’s reported 1.3% drop in grid-delivered electricity in early 2025 equates to roughly 30 TWh less generation, it’s reasonable to conclude that this hidden solar growth alone might account for much, if not all, of the decline"
BBC: "US sets tariffs of up to 3,521% on South Asia solar panels"
"@luckytran@med-mastodon.com
From the first #EarthDay: Students in St. Louis marched wearing masks to protest smog and air pollution.
The inaugural 1970 protests drew millions, and led to the creation of the EPA and clean air standards"
Firstpost: "Far-right Reform UK to beat Labour to be largest party if elections are held today: Survey"
YNet: "The Houthi rebels were positioning landmines around the port of Hodeidah and other populated areas in anticipation of a ground offensive by Yemen's government forces, with the support of the United States, the Saudi-owned Asharq Al-Awsat reported on Saturday"
Left to their own devices businesses will become monopolistic, globalize, employ slave labor, destroy nature while doing so, cheat, steal, tax-evade.. It is in their nature.
Scared of being in the "kill zone" - I believe that is the definition of monopolistic power.
Kurt Andersen: "[2020] Google does more than 90 percent of all Internet searches, forty times as many as its closest competitor. As far as venture capitalists are concerned, digital start-ups looking to compete with the Internet colossi, no matter how amazing their new technology or service or vision, ultimately have two alternatives: to be acquired by Google or Facebook, or to be destroyed by Google or Facebook. If the latter seems likelier—being in the 'kill zone,' in the Valley term of art—the VCs tend not to invest in the first place"
Politico: "This week marks a moment of truth for Washington’s push to rein in Big Tech — a yearslong and often fruitless battle to curb the power of the world’s richest companies... After years of empty threats from Congress, two major antitrust cases have landed two companies in court at once"
Dems need to ditch Clinton and Obama as examples to be followed and stop pretending they were good Presidents.
Politico: "Doug Sosnik is a longtime Democratic strategist best known for being a top adviser to Bill Clinton. He’s a self-described member of the party’s centrist wing. But he says it’s now time for Democrats to take a page from the progressive left’s playbook.. 'We’re out of power. We can’t get anything done,' he said. But at least we need to be able to articulate a coherent narrative about the future that can appeal to the middle class.'"
CNBC: "China vows retaliation against countries that follow U.S. calls to isolate Beijing"
Arab News: "China on Monday hit out at other countries making trade deals with the United States at Beijing’s expense, promising countermeasures against those who 'appease' Washington in the blistering tariff war. While the rest of the world has been slapped with a blanket 10 percent tariff, China faces levies of up to 145 percent on many products"
Ledbetter, Unwarranted Influence: "The last years of [Ike's] presidency were marked by deep, often bitter conflicts with Congress over the military and national security... These conflicts came to a head in the fall of 1957, with the one-two punch of the Soviet Sputnik launch and the near-simultaneous release of a report arguing that the United States would soon fall behind the Soviets in the production of atomic weapons...
The launch of the Sputnik satellite on October 4, 1957, hit the Eisenhower White House like a targeted missile. Whether it represented a scientific breakthrough for the Soviet Union is a matter that can still be debated. But as a public relations coup, it unsettled the administration more than any other event...
While the public was focused on the two Sputnik launches, Washington’s elite was arguably more devastated by the release of an exceptionally well-timed panel study — delivered four days after the second Sputnik orbit — that appeared to show the Soviet military threat was even greater than the administration thought. Entitled 'Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age,' it was known informally as the Gaither Report, after its panel chairman, H. Rowan Gaither of the RAND Corporation. The report —classified top secret— cited 'spectacular progress' in Soviet military development after World War II. The Soviets, the authors claimed, had enough fissionable material for fifteen hundred atomic weapons and had 'probably surpassed' the United States in the production of nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles. They proposed a massive military spending program that would... match the alleged Soviet offensive capabilities..
The period following the Sputnik-Gaither crisis demonstrates Eisenhower’s military-industrial-complex critique in its early stages. [W]ho was behind the faulty intelligence and calls for military buildup in the Gaither Report? The leadership consisted of known and trusted Eisenhower advisors, but there could be no hiding the fact that the billions in increased military spending called for by the panel would benefit many of the very people making the recommendations. Two of the report’s principal directors were Robert C. Sprague, who headed his own business of military electronics, and William C. Foster of the Olin-Mathiesen Chemical Company, a producer of gunpowder and ammunition"
The supposed Tishrin Dam handoff (from SDF to HTS) is not yet visible.
#Frontlines #Syria - 03/24 - 04/19