The Death Of Fossil Fuels

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Woodchopper
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Woodchopper » Sun Sep 26, 2021 7:44 am

Grumble wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 7:11 am
bjn wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 6:18 am
I’ve never had a power cut back in my 30 odd years of living in the UK. Sample size N=1.

Regardless, continuing to burn stuff is not compatible with with mitigating climate change. Electrification of everything is the only way to achieve CO2 reductions needed not to cook ourselves.
Most power cuts are very short. Running rigs that shut down when there’s a power cut I’m more aware than most of a blip, they happen a few times a year at least around here. Never to the extent that you’d notice it affecting heating or whatever.
Lengthy power cuts can be caused by severe weather if overhead cables get blown down, washed away or collapse due to a buildup of snow and ice. It can take days to repair the damage.

https://metro.co.uk/2013/10/28/uk-storm ... g-4163447/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... nk-hits-uk

Those kinds of power cut tend to affect rural areas more than urban because in the latter power cables are more likely to be buried. So people living in cities may not have been affected. Rural areas don’t have gas mains anyway, but a lot of houses have solid fuel heating so those would probably be able to keep warm.

A winter storm that left thousands of homes without heating would be a big problem. But I hope that people could be taken to shelters or alternative accommodation before they suffered from hypothermia.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by plodder » Sun Sep 26, 2021 8:02 am

monkey wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 6:43 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:51 am
One handy thing with solar panels is that you can just stick them on the roofs of buildings, and cover car parks, and so on.
Bit of an aside here, but one of my favourites that I read about is covering irrigation channels. You get solar power and you use less water because you lose less to evaporation.
irrigation channels aren't typically close to the mains supply so are hard to connect. Farmers tend to plow fields which is bad for buried cables. Weeds grow in ditches which reduce irrigation capacity - these will be hard to cut with a solar panel in the way. Not saying it's impossible but there are difficulties with this idea.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by bjn » Sun Sep 26, 2021 8:40 am

Grumble wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 7:11 am
bjn wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 6:18 am
I’ve never had a power cut back in my 30 odd years of living in the UK. Sample size N=1.

Regardless, continuing to burn stuff is not compatible with with mitigating climate change. Electrification of everything is the only way to achieve CO2 reductions needed not to cook ourselves.
Most power cuts are very short. Running rigs that shut down when there’s a power cut I’m more aware than most of a blip, they happen a few times a year at least around here. Never to the extent that you’d notice it affecting heating or whatever.
Depending on where the blip originates, batteries on the local grid would help with that. You can site them right next to the transformers that step down the voltage for local distribution

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by bjn » Sun Sep 26, 2021 8:45 am

plodder wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 8:02 am
monkey wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 6:43 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:51 am
One handy thing with solar panels is that you can just stick them on the roofs of buildings, and cover car parks, and so on.
Bit of an aside here, but one of my favourites that I read about is covering irrigation channels. You get solar power and you use less water because you lose less to evaporation.
irrigation channels aren't typically close to the mains supply so are hard to connect. Farmers tend to plow fields which is bad for buried cables. Weeds grow in ditches which reduce irrigation capacity - these will be hard to cut with a solar panel in the way. Not saying it's impossible but there are difficulties with this idea.
It's a thing they are thinking of doing to the irrigation canals in California (pdf), where losses due to evaporation is more serious problem. Not sure about the utility of it in the UK. Possibly in Southern European irrigation canals.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by bjn » Sun Sep 26, 2021 8:51 am

bjn wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 6:18 am
I’ve never had a power cut back in my 30 odd years of living in the UK. Sample size N=1.

Regardless, continuing to burn stuff is not compatible with with mitigating climate change. Electrification of everything is the only way to achieve CO2 reductions needed not to cook ourselves.
I've had much more problems with our gas heating, it tends to break down every other year, but that is the kit and not the supply. Whether a heat pump is more fragile I'm not sure.

We almost moved out one Christmas as we had a new baby, no heating, but we did have hot water due to an immersion heater on the tank. It was a bitterly cold Xmas with no English plumber to be had for weeks, saved by our Polish plumber, who was back in Poland, sending one of his mates around.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by plodder » Sun Sep 26, 2021 8:57 am

bjn wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 8:45 am
plodder wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 8:02 am
monkey wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 6:43 pm


Bit of an aside here, but one of my favourites that I read about is covering irrigation channels. You get solar power and you use less water because you lose less to evaporation.
irrigation channels aren't typically close to the mains supply so are hard to connect. Farmers tend to plow fields which is bad for buried cables. Weeds grow in ditches which reduce irrigation capacity - these will be hard to cut with a solar panel in the way. Not saying it's impossible but there are difficulties with this idea.
It's a thing they are thinking of doing to the irrigation canals in California (pdf), where losses due to evaporation is more serious problem. Not sure about the utility of it in the UK. Possibly in Southern European irrigation canals.
only skim read the first few pages but they don't appear to have taken my points into account or the biodiversity impacts. reservoirs etc are viable but not sure about ditches. sounds like a nightmare to maintain.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by bjn » Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:10 am

There is practically no biodiversity in a California irrigation canal beyond the odd bit of algae. They are concrete lined where they clear all plant life etc…

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by bjn » Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:15 am

This sort of thing….

Image

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:51 am

IvanV wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:30 pm
Correcting my post for the error shpalman spotted, which makes it 5 times worse than my first attempt.
IvanV wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:13 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:51 am
One handy thing with solar panels is that you can just stick them on the roofs of buildings, and cover car parks, and so on. They're technologically compatible with mixed land uses, rather than requiring virgin land or needing to be situated away from dwellings like wind. That also cuts down some of the need for long-distance infrastructure, as those places are already on the grid and using power. (The grid itself would still need adapting, unless there were also lots of local, small-scale storage - though again that's currently what often happens with batteries, and lots of such places are going to have BEVs plugged in all day.)
All this is correct. But let's make some order of magnitude calculations.

Currently the average electricity output of the UK is about 30GW. Now let's suppose all our heating and transport is electrical. This will probably require our average electricity output to be about 75GW. Note that our total energy use at the moment is something like 120GW-equivalent, but electricity enables more efficient power usage, such as heat pumps for buildings and battery cars. So I have only increased it by a factor of 2.5 rather than a factor of 4.

Now let us suppose that something like 50% of electricity usage has to be time-shifted, because renewables are not very good at being there all the time. In particular, solar doesn't work at night, etc. So 37.5GW - equiv is time-shifted. Let us further suppose that the round-trip efficiency of time-shifting by electrolysis and burning the hydrogen is 50%. I think it's probably worse than that, but this is back of an envelope. So actually we need 75GW to supply the 37.5GW that is time shifted. So actually we are now into needing about 110 GW overall.

Typical solar panel is, conveniently, insolation is about 1kW per square metre, and typical solar panels about 20% efficient. Whilst solar panels might get a lot cheaper, somehow I don't expect they will beat that one very much. And a million square metres is conveniently 1 square km. So at 100% capacity factor, 110 GW is 110 550 sq km of solar cell. But in average UK conditions capacity factor averages about 9%. So actually the amount of solar cell required in Britain (assuming it is our main electricity source - a useful assumption to assess these things) is of the order of 1,200 6000 sq km. That compares with a total area of the country of 243,000 sq km, ie, about 0.5% 2.5% of it.

About 6% of the UK is "built-up". But in fact only about 20% of "built-up" land is actually covered over with structure or surfacing. So you are talking about currently only about 1.2% of the UK's land having some kind of surfacing on it now - including road, car parks, footways, buildings, and other non-natural surfacings. 1200 6000 sq km of PV cells is an enormous amount to put in a crowded country like Britain. And that's before you take into account any space between the cells for access, etc. I remember after the Puerto Rico hurricane disaster a couple of years ago, Elon Musk was saying he could replace it with solar cells and batteries. Using some actual land areas of actual solar farms and actual large scale battery sites, I reckoned he'd need about 7% of the land area of Puerto Rico.
...
And that is before we think about how much land is required for the electrolysis and batteries on that scale.
Thanks for the calculations - I'm actually surprised by how little area that is.

Obviously the UK will never be generating 100% of its power from solar, or anything close. But something like 10-20% is probably imminently achievable, as part of a diversified energy mix (Germany is at 8% already, for instance, though it's a bit sunnier).

That would be a mere 0.25-0.5% of the country, which is less than half of the built-up area. Suggests that rooftop solar could be pretty viable compared with building new large-scale installations.

The key issue is timing. Large reductions to emissions are needed by 2030. What's the quickest option for the UK out of
A) lots of rooftop solar
B) fewer, larger installations
C) building solar in sunny places plus long-distance interconnectors.

My guess is that C is probably too slow for immediate reductions. But would be a good thing to get moving on, for when other projects reach the end of their life.

A) has the advantage of making people less dependent on the grid, reducing vulnerability to power cuts. Could be especially popular in rural areas, where the roof area to occupant ratio is conveniently higher. Especially as domestic solar tends to be bundled with battery storage.

B) would probably be more efficient in terms of economies of scale, depending on who's in charge. The UK doesn't always do large infrastructure projects super efficiently.

Of course, large installations could also be situated on large roofs, combining A and B.

Thinking in lpm's resource terms, trained solar installers are probably the limiting factor. While the government are organising a training program and the fine-tuning policies to help accelerate these installations, are they better off being used on decentralised A-type projects, or concentrated on B?

I assume the number of fitters per unit area of panel is much higher for rooftop solar.

OTOH neither the government nor industry is working fast enough at the moment. The advantage of A is that sensible entities can get on with things without waiting for the big boys to catch up.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:52 am

bjn wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:15 am
This sort of thing….

Image
Doesn't look likely to get ploughed, either.

I wonder how economically worthwhile it would be just to cover them with something cheap. Solar panels seem like a very high-outlay way to reduce evaporation, but obviously you get a decent return on that investment. Probably a better return than farming, tbh.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by shpalman » Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:02 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:52 am
bjn wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:15 am
This sort of thing….

Image
Doesn't look likely to get ploughed, either.

I wonder how economically worthwhile it would be just to cover them with something cheap...
Like shade balls?

Image
having that swing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for it meaning a thing
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by bjn » Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:09 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:52 am
bjn wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:15 am
This sort of thing….

Image
Doesn't look likely to get ploughed, either.

I wonder how economically worthwhile it would be just to cover them with something cheap. Solar panels seem like a very high-outlay way to reduce evaporation, but obviously you get a decent return on that investment. Probably a better return than farming, tbh.
If you are installing industrial scale solar panels anyway, it's supposed to be a win-win. You get somewhere to put them that is not otherwise being used, it cools the panels because of the proximity to a body of water (even not if in contact), you get to reduce evaporation and inhibit plant growth. It's not just about reducing evaporation.

Shade balls wouldn't give you that and would also go with the water flow.
Last edited by bjn on Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:11 am

That does seem like a neat win-win. A good example of joined-up thinking, which is very welcome.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Woodchopper » Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:16 am

shpalman wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:02 am

Like shade balls?

Image
Thanks, that was really interesting.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:23 am

It was. I hadn't heard of "bird balls" either.

So savings from evaporation and chlorination combined amount to half the cost of shade balls. Suggests that evaporation-reduction alone would be a fairly minor contributor to the cost of panels (though water is probably dramatically underpriced in the CA market, as they're still imagining it to be an unlimited resource). Increased efficiency via cooling the panels might be more significant.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by shpalman » Sun Sep 26, 2021 12:15 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:16 am
shpalman wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:02 am

Like shade balls?

Image
Thanks, that was really interesting.
Seems they also stop the water flowing out when the lake is on a slope.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by lpm » Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:01 pm

On Friday, the share of renewable energy on Australia's grid hit an all-time high: 61.7%. Some 31% of that was rooftop solar; 12% was ground-mounted solar. https://t.co/7yxcggwVVw
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Millennie Al » Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:09 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:51 am
The key issue is timing. Large reductions to emissions are needed by 2030. What's the quickest option for the UK out of
A) lots of rooftop solar
B) fewer, larger installations
C) building solar in sunny places plus long-distance interconnectors.
I think you first have to address the question of what should we be trying to achieve? Do we want a smug feeling that the UK has done well, or do we want to do what's best for the world? It's a bit like vaccine rollout - do we deploy solar panels wherever in the world they will make the most difference, or hoard them for UK use?
OTOH neither the government nor industry is working fast enough at the moment. The advantage of A is that sensible entities can get on with things without waiting for the big boys to catch up.
Indeed. Would you trust your future to our government?

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by plodder » Mon Sep 27, 2021 8:00 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:52 am
bjn wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:15 am
This sort of thing….

Image
Doesn't look likely to get ploughed, either.

I wonder how economically worthwhile it would be just to cover them with something cheap. Solar panels seem like a very high-outlay way to reduce evaporation, but obviously you get a decent return on that investment. Probably a better return than farming, tbh.
Don’t know if they’re all like that, or just the big ones, but you’d likely get far better results in terms of carbon from renaturalising the channels flooding the fields and having researched changes to agriculture which don’t involve what is clearly an unsustainable status quo.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by bjn » Mon Sep 27, 2021 8:59 am

They pretty much are all like that from what I know. So there's not really much to 're-naturalise' as they are entirely artificial water courses flowing through arid/semi arid regions. Flooding surrounding fields would just lose you most of your water and introduce water into places that normally don't see much water.

But yeah, western US water use and rights system is totally nuts, it killed the Owens Valley.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by plodder » Mon Sep 27, 2021 9:02 am

bjn wrote:
Mon Sep 27, 2021 8:59 am
They pretty much are all like that from what I know. So there's not really much to 're-naturalise' as they are entirely artificial water courses flowing through arid/semi arid regions. Flooding surrounding fields would just lose you most of your water and introduce water into places that normally don't see much water.

But yeah, western US water use and rights system is totally nuts, it killed the Owens Valley.
I mean those canals are designed using equations the British Army came up with in India. I bet Carbon losses from the surrounding soils and the opportunity cost of not having wet soils promoting plant growth hugely outweigh the energy you'd get from solar panels. Demolish the channels, stop trying to control the water, make agriculture sustainable. System change innit.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by bjn » Mon Sep 27, 2021 9:07 am

But the soils the canals have been cut through weren't wet in the first place. The locations the water is abstracted from are an ecological disaster though.

Water use in the Western US needs a systemic change to make it sane, but that simply isn't going to happen given the power structures in the US. You'd need to get multiple States and Mexico to renegotiate a complex agreement, and the ones that would lose aren't going to do that.

This is getting off topic however.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by plodder » Mon Sep 27, 2021 9:16 am

Is it though? These complex interdependencies (and water is a classic) are at the intractable root of many of the problems faced by our attempts to decarbonise. Otherwise it's just a series of b.llsh.t techno-fixes that won't result in the change required.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by IvanV » Mon Sep 27, 2021 12:15 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:51 am
Obviously the UK will never be generating 100% of its power from solar, or anything close. But something like 10-20% is probably imminently achievable, as part of a diversified energy mix (Germany is at 8% already, for instance, though it's a bit sunnier).
Remember, that is 8% of current electricity production. When you decarbonise, electricity production needs to increase by a factor of 2 to 3. Maybe more in Germany given their relatively high coal dependence relative to us.

PV production can get very large in Germany on a clear sunny day. Germany has a lot more pumped storage than Britain, because run-of-river hydro-stations, such as Germany has many of on large continental rivers like the Rhine, Elbe, etc, are easy to retrofit pumped storage. Nevertheless its system can be overloaded on a clear sunny day. Installing very much more PV in Germany is problematic. Already it is a problem to absorb the supply during the brief high peaks of supply.

Yes, we need a diversified energy mix. But if it is true, as that paper suggests, that PV and electrolysis will get order of magnitude cheaper, while wind only gets a bit cheaper, then PV and hydrogen for time-shifting kicks wind out of room, for bulk energy requirements. It will become profitable to pave the countryside with PV cells when they are cheap enough, even in dull Britain.

And importing either hydrogen direct from sunny places, and/or electricity by interconnector, will get cheap vs lots of wind turbines in Britain. Unfortunately getting electricity imported in large quantity via France from places further south will not be easy.
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:51 am
That would be a mere 0.25-0.5% of the country, which is less than half of the built-up area. Suggests that rooftop solar could be pretty viable compared with building new large-scale installations.

The key issue is timing. Large reductions to emissions are needed by 2030. What's the quickest option for the UK out of
A) lots of rooftop solar
B) fewer, larger installations
C) building solar in sunny places plus long-distance interconnectors.

My guess is that C is probably too slow for immediate reductions. But would be a good thing to get moving on, for when other projects reach the end of their life.

A) has the advantage of making people less dependent on the grid, reducing vulnerability to power cuts. Could be especially popular in rural areas, where the roof area to occupant ratio is conveniently higher. Especially as domestic solar tends to be bundled with battery storage.

B) would probably be more efficient in terms of economies of scale, depending on who's in charge. The UK doesn't always do large infrastructure projects super efficiently.

Of course, large installations could also be situated on large roofs, combining A and B.
I think you might be over-estimating how much of built-up area is suitable roof. They are a small fraction of built-up area, remembering that built-up includes roads and hard-standing around houses. The hard standing around my house - drive, garden paths, is as much as the area of roof. And on top of that there is public road, etc. Then only a fraction of roof is suitable for installation.

I didn't even think about roof-top solar after the council turned down the large south-facing roof, which would have made it very attractive. But now that I know that W & E facing roofs are also valuable for solar - because electricity is more valuable nearer sunrise and sunset than at midday - then I kind of regret it a bit that we didn't think about it at the time of putting the roof on, when it would have been cheaper easier. Though I did feel somewhat morally averse to the idea of taking the government's subsidy for solar, which I knew was unaffordable in the longer term and PV panels were a lot more expensive in 2007. But now they've gone the other way, and solar installations have stopped because there aren't even economic.

So, to get rooftop solar going again, we have to make it economic for people to do it. And it ought to be required on new buildings, including commercial, with a suitable aspect, though that will be resisted if it is not economic.

Unfortunately making solar panels commercial runs opposite to one of the other changes we need to make for decarbonisation, and that is electrifying heating. Currently electricity is burdened with taxes, and gas isn't, so a heat pump is always more expensive to run than a gas boiler for a given level of insulation.

It becomes a no-brainer to put PV on when it gets cheap enough. But how do you drive it towards cheapness? As a nation with a dull climate, I rather suspect this is something that has to happen elsewhere first, where it is much more economic in the short-run. Massive extension of PV panels in Britain is unlikely to happen just yet in Britain, certainly not in time for the artificial deadline of 2030.
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:51 am
Thinking in lpm's resource terms, trained solar installers are probably the limiting factor. While the government are organising a training program and the fine-tuning policies to help accelerate these installations, are they better off being used on decentralised A-type projects, or concentrated on B?

I assume the number of fitters per unit area of panel is much higher for rooftop solar.

OTOH neither the government nor industry is working fast enough at the moment. The advantage of A is that sensible entities can get on with things without waiting for the big boys to catch up.
People to implement it is a huge issue in all of the kinds of large infrastructure changes we need to decarbonise. PV panel installation is but a small side-issue in comparison to insulation, heat-pumps, nuclear power stations, etc. It doesn't help that the largest construction project in Europe, HS2, is sucking up so much of our construction resource to so little benefit.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by sheldrake » Mon Sep 27, 2021 1:30 pm

The bits of California I've seen consist of weird imitations of European vegetation in heavily sprinklered patches, on top of what is obviously supposed to be a desert. With all travel via 5 lane motorways rammed to capacity. It's no wonder everybody who lives in Hollywood is an environmentalist.

I did see a beautiful 'desert garden' of cactii and boulders that would never need to be watered artificially, in the back yard of somebody who cared about the environment.

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