Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities [LWN.net]

Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 11, 2023 15:10 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities by khim
Parent article: Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

The problem is journalists ...

A couple of days ago we had an article about Drax in one of our daily newspapers - so we're talking maybe 20-30% of newspaper readers reading this article.

A major part of the story is about the power station shutting down and avoiding having to pay rebates to consumers - some government subsidy that had to be repaid if they were generating and selling electricity above a certain price. So they shut down and sold their fuel elsewhere instead.

That fuel being woodchip. So a second, large, part of the journalist's story was about how Drax was one of our biggest greenhouse gas emitters and polluters in the country! The eco-friendliness of shipping the wood from Canada is certainly up for debate, but burning wood? That's one of the greenest fuels we've got!

When journalists - who are supposed to inform the public! - get their facts so badly out of kilter, what hope do the public have?

Cheers,
Wol

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Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 11, 2023 15:26 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

Way OT now, but using wood for power, on the back of a highly oil based system to grow, process and transport (over massive distances) that wood is not that green.

Particularly if that wood is coming from old wood forests that are being cleared. I don't know the details of Canadian wood pulp, but IVR a lot of their wood is from clearing old woods.

A final issue is that commercial forestry (least in UK and Ireland) is from dense pine forestry plantations, which is kind of a disaster for the native ecosystem. Really, we need to reforest our denuded countries (UK and Ireland) with natural, long-life forests - really good carbon capture and storage!

Which means we need something else for power. Something that is a lot more space efficient than covering the country in dense commercial and largely dead pine forests (which probably still won't give us enough fuel). The answer is obvious, but greens have irrational dogma.

Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 11, 2023 16:14 UTC (Fri) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (1 responses)

It's good to see some pushback on the remarkably common but simplistic idea that since biomass sucks up CO2 when it grows and releases it when it burns, all is ok, and we can just burn wood as much as we want with no ill effects. In addition to climate change, the other big environmental crisis is biodiversity loss, largely driven by land use changes. Such as turning native forests into cropland, or for that matter biomass plantations.

Burning biomass is, in the end, a very inefficient way of turning sunlight into usable energy. There just isn't enough arable land on the planet to replace the energy we currently get from fossil fuels. There are other very low carbon energy production technologies that are much more area efficient, like wind, solar and nuclear energy.

Anyway, this isn't the correct forum to debate this. ;)

Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 14, 2023 8:35 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Nuclear power is the only option that is compatible with a modern lifestyle, AFAICT.

I consider myself pretty green, but I abhor the common the "green" stance on nuclear power. Which is completely at odds with having both a) A biodiverse and sustainable planet b) A modern way of life ("modern" implies high energy use in many many ways, and only nuclear can reliably replace fossil fuels to provide this). If you make society choose between A and B, society will choose B. Sigh sigh sigh.