Low battery alert and very cold weather

Not a good mix. I decided (now that I can drive again) to go to Walmart after the gym and see if any of those snazzy CD/FM/AM clock radio players that I saw online were in stock, but they weren't so I bought a few items and went to the car. I have one of those automatic key fob thingies and it wouldn't let me in the car. I had seen a warning (but only one) on the dash a few days ago that the battery in the key fob was low, but had done nothing about it. It quit on what could be one of the coldest days this winter, and I'm standing in the parking lot with groceries. I figured out how to get the hidden key out, even with cold fingers. Then realized that after opening the door, there was no place to put it in the starter button. Then the dash told me it couldn't recognize the fob, so I got closer to it, and it started. And I took off for Auto-zone to buy a battery. They only come with 2, so I then went back with the other one and had the guy change that one, too.  It took several tools and his smacking it on the counter to get it replaced.

Tech was not my friend this week (old CD player was electrocuted and died). What I was looking for is one of these.  Mine was a 1998 model that fried when a light bulb blew.  Some of the new ones look like 1960s or 1950s radios.

How the Greens gaslight us all . . . but especially the poor.

How the Greens gaslight us all . . . but especially the poor.

 
"According to the World Bank, between 1990 and 2019, as emissions surged, the proportion of the world’s population in extreme poverty fell from 38 percent to 8.4 percent. Food production similarly soared from 2000 to 2020, with global primary-crop production rising by 52 percent, meat production by 45 percent, and vegetable oil production by 125 percent. Those figures well outstripped population growth and resulted in the daily caloric intake rising in every region of the globe. At the same time, the real global economy nearly doubled in value."

https://www.city-journal.org/article/climate-reactionaries?

"Solar and wind are incapable of delivering the power needed for industrialization, powering water pumps, tractors and machines — all the ingredients needed to lift people out of poverty. As rich countries are now also discovering, solar and wind energy remain fundamentally unreliable. No sun or wind means no power. Battery technology offers no answers: today there are only enough batteries to power global average electricity consumption for one minute and 15 seconds. Even by 2030, with a projected rapid battery scale-up, they would last less than 12 minutes. For context, every German winter, when solar is a

its minimum, there is near-zero wind energy available for at least five days — more than 7,000 minutes."

Opinion: The rich world became wealthy by exploiting fossil fuels | Financial Post

"It Is often reported that emerging industrial powers like China, India, Indonesia and Bangladesh are getting more power from solar and wind. But these countries get much more additional power from coal. Last year, China got more additional power from coal than it did from solar and wind. India got three times more electricity from coal than from green energy sources, Bangladesh 13 times more and Indonesia an astonishing 90 times more. If solar and wind really were cheaper, why would these countries not use them? Because reliability matters.

The usual way of measuring the cost of solar simply ignores its unreliability and tells us the price when the sun is shining. The same is true for wind energy. That does indeed make them slightly cheaper than other electricity sources: 3.6 US¢ per kWh for solar, just ahead of natural gas at 3.8 US¢, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But if you account for reliability, their real costs explode: in 2022, one peer-reviewed study showed an increase of 11-42 times, making solar by far the most expensive electricity source, followed by wind."

Bjorn Lomborg: Why solar and wind power aren’t winning (yahoo.com)

"Smartphones, computers and electric vehicles may be emblems of the modern world, but, says Siddharth Kara, their rechargeable batteries are frequently powered by cobalt mined by workers laboring in slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Kara, a fellow at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health and at the Kennedy School, has been researching modern-day slavery, human trafficking and child labor for two decades. He says that although the DRC has more cobalt reserves than the rest of the planet combined, there's no such thing as a "clean" supply chain of cobalt from the country. In his new book, Cobalt Red, Kara writes that much of the DRC's cobalt is being extracted by so-called "artisanal" miners — freelance workers who do extremely dangerous labor for the equivalent of just a few dollars a day."

'Cobalt Red' describes the 'horror show' of mining the element in the DRC : Goats and Soda : NPR

Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara

"Kara, a fellow at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health and at the Kennedy School, has been researching modern-day slavery, human trafficking and child labor for two decades. He says that although the DRC has more cobalt reserves than the rest of the planet combined, there's no such thing as a "clean" supply chain of cobalt from the country. In his new book, Cobalt Red, Kara writes that much of the DRC's cobalt is being extracted by so-called "artisanal" miners — freelance workers who do extremely dangerous labor for the equivalent of just a few dollars a day.

"You have to imagine walking around some of these mining areas and dialing back our clock centuries," Kara says. "People are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions. They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain.""

'Cobalt Red' describes the 'horror show' of mining the element in the DRC : Goats and Soda : NPR

The author doesn't call this slavery, but I do.

"Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced because their villages were just bulldozed over to make place for large mining concessions. So you have people with no alternative, no other source of income, no livelihood. Now, add to that the menace in many cases of armed forces pressuring people to dig, parents having to make a painful decision, 'Do I send my child to school or do we eat today?' And if they choose the latter, that means bringing all their kids into these toxic pits to dig just to earn that extra fifty cents or a dollar a day, that could mean the difference between eating or not. So in the 21st century, this is modern-day slavery. It's not chattel slavery from the 18th century where you can buy and trade people and own title over a person like property. But the level of degradation, the level of exploitation is on par with old-world slavery."

Review from Daily Mail online, January 30, 2023

• Images from the Shabara mine and others in the Democratic Republic of Congo show young children mining 
• They dig for cobalt, the chemical element that is used in almost every tech product, including mobile phones, on the market today
• Apple, Tesla, Samsung and Microsoft are the other end of the complex supply chain

Devastating photos of cobalt mines in Democratic Republic of Congo that power Apple, Tesla and more | Daily Mail Online

Cordless phones

When we moved here, the kitchen had what is probably second generation cordless phone--lots of heft, ugly as sin. Probably from the early or mid-90s. But we sort of got used to being able to walk around, or keeping it in the living room in the evenings. So I bought a GE 900 cordless phone for my husband's office about 5 years ago. I had to use the laundry room to dock it since you need a phone outlet and an electric outlet side by side, but that wasn't much of a problem. (I have no idea why the previous owner had both a phone jack and cable connection in the laundry room, but maybe she ironed more than I do.) Lately, it's been dying after an hour or two off the docking station, and he's been keeping the kitchen phone in his office (it no longer rings), and that's not handy or conducive to good marital relations. So today I looked up the cost of buying a new battery, Sanik 3SN-AA60-S-J1. Seems it is about the same cost as the phone was ($14-15.00). So he bought a new phone.

Watermelon gum, or why I hate coupons

You just can't win with a coupon. I received a plastic, looks-like-a-credit-card coupon from Staples for $10. (Paper coupons are the size of a dollar bill; the original coupon was a wooden nickle--it's inflation.) First I went to the wrong store--it was store specific and apparently they were only sent to certain zip codes. Then the item I wanted, rechargeable batteries, was $19.99, and the minimum amount was $20. I asked the floor clerk about that, and he said Yes, it would count because of taxes. Nope. The check-out clerk said I had to buy something else. So I grabbed a pack of gum, which turned out to be $1.49 watermelon flavored, sugar free, with pieces so small it will get lost in my ample mouth. (I have all my wisdom teeth.) But I did win, in a way. I left the store with only what I came in to buy. Coupons aren't about reducing prices; they are about bringing you in. Or taking you in. Who, but the government, could stay in business by giving stuff away?