France's government has announced new environmental measures, including a ban on heated terraces for cafes and bars.

Ecology Minister Barbara Pompili said outside heating or air conditioning was an "ecological aberration"...

Some of the world’s largest financial institutions have stopped putting their money behind oil production in the Canadian province of Alberta, home to one of the world’s most extensive, and also dirtiest, oil reserves...

... Alberta, meanwhile, has fought back hard against the divestment. ... in December, Alberta opened what it called a war room to attack anyone perceived as criticizing the industry...

... Oil has made Alberta one of the wealthiest regions in North America, but the process of extracting petroleum from oil sands releases an unusually large volume of greenhouse gases...

... It wasn’t just financing that suddenly seemed at risk. Some of the world’s largest insurance companies, including AXA, Swiss RE and Zurich Insurance, announced they would stop providing [insurance] coverage to projects in the oil sands...

... The latest blow came in December, when the rating company Moody’s downgraded the creditworthiness of Alberta’s debt to its lowest level in 20 years, citing, among other concerns, the province’s dependence on the oil sands and the environmental costs of extracting the oil.

In response to that pressure, Alberta has only increased its support of the oil sands...

Last week, French energy giant Total, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, announced that it has withdrawn from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) because of a “misalignment” between the organization’s public positions and those expressed in Total’s climate ambition statement announced in May. Total attributes this unprecedented move to concerns around the lobby group’s regressive stance on climate ambition – and reflects the distance between CAPP and major global oil companies, who are increasingly aligning themselves (at least publically) with the need for decarbonization.

For more than a decade, CAPP has worked to undermine a host of federal and provincial environmental policies. And in the midst of a global pandemic, the lobby group has only increased the ambition of their demands for deregulation...

... Now that Total has made the bold decision to distance themselves from CAPP, other companies who claim to take the climate crisis seriously must follow in their steps...

... The tar sands are among the world’s more expensive and carbon-polluting sources of oil – meaning they are the first to lose out when crashes happen and as countries transition away from fossil fuels. In the same announcement, Total announced it is writing off $9.3-billion worth of tar sands assets in Alberta...

My back of the envelope calculation says that isn't possible even assuming solar panels are perpendicular to the sun at all times in Texas.

Do the calculation yourself.
US annual consumption 4400 TWh
Solar power in Texas 1000w/sq m in Texas on average 8 hr/day.
And I have personal experience of rain in Texas for over a day, I've had dryer days in Manchester in February.

And if generated in sunny parts of the US there will be significant losses getting power to the North.

Researchers estimate that in 300 years, digital production will require the equivalent of planetary power consumption today.

Researchers estimate that in 300 years...

Researchers estimate that in 300 years...

Some technological trends can be extrapolated, some cannot.

For example, I can imagine nineteenth-century "researchers" predicting that in 2020, fully half of the urban workforce would be employed keeping the streets cleaned of horse poo, based on the assumption that the following nineteenth-century realities would continue:

1) There would be no street transportation but human-powered and horse-powered.
2) Only half the adult population (men) would be available to do this.
3) The job would have to be done manually ie with a shovel.

Someone actually did make a similar prediction, namely that a similar fraction of the population would be employed as telephone operators. They did not foresee automated calling.

"Assuming a 20 percent annual growth rate, we estimate that after [approximately] 350 years from now, the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth," Melvin Vopson, physicist at the University of Portsmouth in Britain, wrote in a new paper published Tuesday in the journal AIP Advances.

Oxford PV says tech based on perovskite crystal can generate almost a third more electricity

At the moment, a lot of the energy we produce is wasted because of electrical resistance, being lost as heat.
It is superconducting, which means electrical current flows through it with perfect efficiency - with no energy wasted as heat.

At the moment, a lot of the energy we produce is wasted because of electrical resistance, being lost as heat.
It is superconducting, which means electrical current flows through it with perfect efficiency - with no energy wasted as heat.

1 potential solution?

... The material then transforms into something that can superconduct electricity: its electrical resistance vanishes as its electrons are free to move unhindered. Before this substance can be used in real-world applications, the team needs to figure out, among other things, how to make the powder at larger quantities.

“The next challenge will be to produce these materials that are stable at ambient pressure so they will be economical to mass produce,”...

Well, I think we're as far away from room temp superconductivity now as we were before this new discovery.
Before this discovery, the extreme low temperature required was the problem. With this discovery the extreme
pressure is the problem. 267 billion pascals - about a million times higher than typical tyre pressure.

No, that didn't change anything IMO in the race towards room temperature superconductivity...

• It actually exists;
  
• We have an example that works as wished;
  
• We can now examine the material structure for the required structural effect(s) to next be replicated for more practical pressures.
  

That really is a big leap.

The question as always for scientists is that of available resource and 'fair play' for exploiting the results...


All on our only one planet,
Martin

Geothermal springs are usually at 100F. Probably the springs at bath are the most famous but are mainly a tourist attraction as are those at Rota Rua in New Zealand. At Tunbridge Wells it has a Chalybeate spring which contains a significant level of dissolved mineral salts, with iron and manganese contributing to its characteristic flavour. Basically the Spa towns contained mineral springs not geothermal springs. The very fact that people travelled out of dirty London in the 1700's into the fresher countryside air, most likely did more for their health than a few cups of spring water.

The potential of the resource needs to be promoted to government and commerce to encourage investment in this form of low carbon energy.