December 21, 2017

Report: Global Coal Demand Drops Second Year in a Row

12/18/2017 | Abby Harvey

Global coal demand fell nearly 2% in 2016, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Coal 2017 Analysis and Forecasts report, released December 18. “Demand for coal has now dropped by 4.2% since 2014, almost matching the fall of 1990-1992, which was the largest two-year decline recorded since the IEA started compiling statistics more than 40 years ago,” the report says.

Coal demand varies in different areas, of course. However, while demand in places like India increased, it was not enough to offset significant declines in the United States and China.

http://www.powermag.com/report-global-coal-demand-drops-second-year-in-a-row/

December 16, 2017

THE HARD MATH BEHIND BITCOIN'S GLOBAL WARMING PROBLEM

https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-global-warming/

In a report last week, the cryptocurrency website Digiconomics said that worldwide bitcoin mining was using more electricity than Serbia. The country. Writing for Grist, Eric Holthaus calculated that by July 2019, the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network—remember BitTorrent? Like that—would require more electricity than all of the United States. And by November of 2020, it’d use more electricity than the entire world does today.

That’s bad. It means Bitcoin emits the equivalent of 17.7 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, a big middle finger to Earth’s climate and anyone who enjoys things like coastlines, forests, and not dying of mosquito-borne diseases. Refracted through a different metaphor, the Bitcoin P2P network is essentially a distributed superintelligence utterly dedicated to generating bitcoins, so of course it wants to convert all the energy (and therefore matter) in the universe into bitcoin.

December 13, 2017

Black Democrats kicked it up a notch in Alabama

Click the tweet to open the thread

https://twitter.com/AlGiordano/status/940657094050615297

December 5, 2017

Has anyone made scrapple?

I made some turkey scrapple and it was tasteless and a lot softer than I expected. I just used a cup of regular cornmeal to 4 cups of liquid. Is there some other product that might give a better result?

December 5, 2017

Council approves Key Arena deal

https://twitter.com/SeaTimesSports/status/937841251726053377