Keep dreaming, hoping and advocating for renewables, but it's just not the solution. Nuclear is the only viable solution.

They've been around for longer.

Solar and wind are crazy cheap but they haven't been cheap for that long.

"""

At this point the Spanish focused on the people of the Inca Empire. [..] Citizens were divided into encomiendas, with one going to each of the conquistadors [..]. The encomienda was the main institution used for the control and organization of labor in the early colonial period, but it soon faced a vigorous contender.

In 1545 a local named Diego Gualpa was searching for an indigenous shrine high in the Andes in what is today Bolivia. He was thrown to the ground by a sudden gust of wind and in front of him appeared a cache of silver ore. This was part of a vast mountain of silver, which the Spanish baptized El Cerro Rico, “The Rich Hill.” Around it grew the city of Potosí, which at its height in 1650 had a population of 160,000 people, larger than Lisbon or Venice in this period.

To exploit the silver, the Spanish needed miners [..]. They sent a new viceroy [..] Francisco de Toledo, whose main mission was to solve the labor problem. [..] To find the labor he needed, de Toledo first moved almost the entire indigenous population, concentrating them in new towns called reducciones — literally “reductions” — which would facilitate the exploitation of labor by the Spanish Crown. Then he revived and adapted an Inca labor institution known as the mita, which, in the Incas’ language, Quechua, means “a turn.”

Under their mita system, the Incas had used forced labor to run plantations designed to provide food for temples, the aristocracy, and the army. [..] In de Toledo’s hands the mita, especially the Potosí mita, was to become the largest and most onerous scheme of labor exploitation in the Spanish colonial period. De Toledo defined a huge catchment area, running from the middle of modern-day Peru and encompassing most of modern Bolivia. [..] The Potosí mita endured throughout the entire colonial period and was abolished only in 1825. Map 1 shows the catchment area of the mita superimposed on the extent of the Inca empire at the time of the Spanish conquest. It illustrates the extent to which the mita overlapped with the heartland of the empire, encompassing the capital Cusco.

Remarkably, you still see the legacy of the mita in Peru today. Take the differences between the provinces of Calca and nearby Acomayo. There appears to be few differences among these provinces. Both are high in the mountains, and each is inhabited by the Quechua-speaking descendants of the Incas. Yet Acomayo is much poorer, with its inhabitants consuming about one-third less than those in Calca. [..] In Calca and Acomayo, people grow the same crops, but in Calca they sell them on the market for money. In Acomayo they grow food for their own subsistence. These inequalities, apparent to the eye and to the people who live there, can be understood in terms of the institutional differences between these departments — institutional differences with historical roots going back to de Toledo and his plan for effective exploitation of indigenous labor. The major historical difference between Acomayo and Calca is that Acomayo was in the catchment area of the Potosí mita. Calca was not.

[..] Throughout the Spanish colonial world in the Americas, similar institutions and social structures emerged. After an initial phase of looting, and gold and silver lust, the Spanish created a web of institutions designed to exploit the indigenous peoples. [..] Though these institutions generated a lot of wealth for the Spanish Crown and made the conquistadors and their descendants very rich, they also turned Latin America into the most unequal continent in the world and sapped much of its economic potential.

Just a random result from searching for "bolivia coup": https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/the-u-s-supported-coup-i...

California also generates a really large amount of its power geothermally. We don't hear much about the many mature geothermal projects.

The tech is still at pilot stage, but with no fundamental problems to solve. The important question is whether it will be able to compete commercially with solar and wind, which costs are still in free-fall.

Are heat pumps / electric heating widely used in Quebec yet? When I lived in Ontario, despite having a very clean grid (nuclear, hydro, wind) and relatively low electricity prices, pretty much every house/building had oil or gas heating. Seems like Scandinavia and Northern Europe are a bit further along in electrification of heating.

I'm getting a little older and have a tough time keeping up with the climate-change alarmism dejour.

Edit: fixed acronym. Thanks

FWIW I currently live in Norway which is ~100% renewable but that's mainly hydro and a very different situation with the amount of potential energy that hydro gives the 5M population.

Care you explain where I'm wrong or present any arguments to substantiate your point of view?

Otherwise you comment is equivalent to just "I disagree", which contributes zero to the discussion.

Tensions between government and the opposition, supported by the CIA, caused the short-lived Costa Rican Civil War of 1948 that ended Calderón's government and led to the short de facto rule of 18 months by José Figueres Ferrer.

Conceivable, but a massive undertaking at a scale having inevitable significant problems ($66T price tag for starters).

My house doesn’t have any heating but does have mini-split AC units in the bedroom that we usually run for 3 hours in the afternoon if someone is going to sleep in that room.

There is a concept of having a ceiling fan next to some windows at the top of the wall near the roof. The idea is to have the fan pull the hot air up and out that window, creating a nice draft. Usually you have this in the main living area. They have a name for this that escapes me at the moment.

For the Mexican case specifically, the revolution did not replace the landowning political elite, but installed a different subset of them. A succession of presidents from the landowning class slow-walked land reform (we're talking single-digit percentages of land redistributed per decade), mostly motivated by the fear of Zapatista rebels rather than commitment to equality.

Cárdenas was probably the first seriously pro-reform president (mid- and late-30s), but the old landowners remained wealthy and preserved a good chunk of their holdings. (For political reasons, he focused on foreign landholders.) This meant that the next landowner-friendly president a few years later created a land-leasing system that de facto returned control of large collective farms to the landowning class.

See also how the (non-revolutionary) emancipation of serfs in the Russian Empire didn't change much, since serfs had to take out loans to compensate their former masters. Social hierarchies and power balances remained, despite a change in form.

Ultimately, Mexico has suffered significantly from the government granting monopoly rights to particular businesses (friends of the government) and by not respecting property rights. Both of these trends have spanned governments and go all the way back to the Spanish colonialists.

There is little incentive in Mexico to innovate and invest, because if you are too successful, you will likely run afoul of some wealthy friend of a politician who will use his power to ruin you. From the point of view of the political elite, this makes sense, because they are all rich and in charge. But this behavior impoverishes society on average.

Concrete examples in the book include the banking industry, which was effectively monopolized by 2 banks with government support in the 19th century. Contrasted with hundreds of banks with fierce competition in the US in the same time period. This resulted in high interest rates in Mexico (and thus little incentive to invest) and low interest rates in the US (which was rapidly industrializing).

A more modern example is comparing Bill Gates vs. Carlos Slim, who were vying for the title of the world's richest person when the book was written. Bill Gates made his fortune by founding an incredibly successful company. When it was engaging in monopolistic behavior, it was successfully prosecuted by the government. Contrast this with Carlos Slim who made his fortune largely by being granted favorable monopolistic deals by the Mexican government.

For example, the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment freed the slaves, but included an exception on forced labor for those convicted of a crime. Surprise surprise, former Confederate states make up crimes (like loitering) that are only enforced on Black people, and the cheap, no-choice labor force is back at work, even if under a structure that only barely resembles prewar chattel slavery.

Drugs across the american border is very lucrative giving power and money to alot of bad people in Mexico. Watch Narcos Mexico to get a wiff of the proximity to the US creating cartels.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861739/

The same director's documentary Bus 174 (2002) is even much more intense and unforgettable.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0340468/

He also created the amazing series The Mechanism (2018-), based on the Operation Car Wash investigations, during the last 10 years, into corruption in Brazil.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6873658/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Car_Wash

Everyone would prefer to not have an army, because most of the time you don't need them but they're still expensive to maintain and when you do need them they're even more expensive. But if nobody has an army then the bad actors can form an army and take over everybody else. So everybody needs to have an army unless and until you can get global coordination working to the point where everyone de-militarizes and the moment anyone starts militarizing everyone else does the same and joins together to absolutely crush that violator. You just gotta hope they weren't able to massively militarize in secret.

The seems unlikely to ever happen, so until then you have a couple countries that get to live in the sweet spot of not having their own army but still being covered by someone else's.

despite that you're okay with it, most heavy users of power aren't

the reason they're omitting this from the reporting is that the reporting just isn't true

And it's worth pointing out that bioweapons are not a problem that can be fixed with a standing army. (Again, not touching the fact that a BSL4 lab specializing in weaponized agents is not something that just escapes notice). And I'm terribly sorry, but the idea that you can vaccinate an entire population without anybody noticing is just flat out ridiculous.

And I think it's worth calling out that Britain and France deliberately slowed down as a result of appeasement policies, not because they missed that Germany was rearming. That's what I meant in the GP post when I said "people willing to stand by and ignore obviously bad actors"

1. https://www.propertiesincostarica.com/homes.html

If the world's culture is strongly set against having armies, and one country effectively threatens them by breaking that taboo, then I would at least expect the world to instantly cease all trade and transport links with the arming country.

That may not be enough on its own to force the taboo-breaking country to disarm, but I don't see any contradiction in a world culture which is against having armies while also ruthlessly dedicated to temporarily re-arming and exterminating the first country that breaks the taboo.

There are hard coordination and rule of law / presumption of innocence questions to solve there, but I don't think we can necessarily assume that this world culture will stand idly by while their enemy works to undo the very thing that defines the culture.

One might go so far as to say that not having a strong standing army for an extended period of time actually proved militarily advantageous for the Germans in 1940 when their new army outmaneuvered an obsolete one.