The last few days of interesting things

[andrewducker]

(i.e. some of the links from andyduckerlinks, with more details/thoughts).

Court victory for pregnant sex auction woman - purely for the marvellousness of the headline. Although the article is interesting insofar as it spreads light on practices in countries other than my own. In this case Germany, where people can auction themselves on a website.

Britain third worst in EU for use of renewable energy - The scale of the renewable energy challenge facing Britain was revealed yesterday by figures showing Britain installed about 270 solar photovoltaic (PV) systems on houses in 2007, compared with 130,000 in Germany. On the one hand, this is happening in Germany because the people are being paid more to install them - they aren't actually economical yet. On the other hand, they won't become economical until they're mainstream and there's sufficient scale to make investment worthwhile.

Play.com to sell DRM-free music in the UK - and as I swore in the past, once I can buy MP3s I'll stop downloading them. And so I shall. Next time I want music I don't have, I'll be off to play.com to download it!

Britain powerless over Saudi threats - which is entirely unsurprising. We're as stuck in realpolitik as the next person, and it does look like one of those situations where idealism just wasn't going to help. Of course, the answer is to dig ourselves out of the kind of situation where we're beholden to countries that are enmired in corruption...

Comments

[dragonscholar.livejournal.com]

The Prince Bandar thing is, of course, disturbing - and worse when you realize he's a buddy of the Bush administration. It's going to take some real work to dig us out of this relationship, either via science, subtlety, or diplomacy.

[drplokta]

But that makes Germany's record in photvoltaic cells worse than the UK's, not better. In northern Europe, they use more energy to make than they produce during their lifetime, so whoever has the fewest is doing best, environmentally speaking.

[andrewducker]

That was my point (a). Which goes handily with my point (b) :->

[andrewducker]

Oh - and I believe that the statistic about solar panels using more power to create than they produce over their lifetime was only true back in the 70s, when they were harder to produce, and less than 25% as efficient.

The Wikipedia article here indicates that the payback time is around 1.5 years nowadays.