Wow, you mean Avery Pennarun and Havoc Pennington aren't really the same guy? Who knew? (Has anybody actually seen them in the same room at the same time?)
There are plenty of idle shipyards. Turn them to building 100-meter diameter spherical, floating pressure vessels. Power generated anywhere at sea, whether by wind, solar, tides, deep currents, or ocean-thermal can go to pumping air into them. Pumped to capacity, they can be towed cheaply by tugboat to any coastal city to operate turbines there.
Oil (supplied by an offshore platform on-site), methane (extracted from solid deep sea-bed deposits), or even coal may be burned far out to sea without climatic consequence, if the resulting carbon dioxide is pumped deep under the sea, there to condense to solid form, or to dissolve far from vulnerable coral.
For cheaper transport, put a loose membrane through the middle of the sphere, dividing it in half, and fill with hydrogen on one side. When the sphere is fully pressurized, the hydrogen is pressed between the membrane and the wall; when the pressure is released, the hydrogen-filled tank is nearly weightless.
Given efficient electrolysis (e.g. using the new MIT process), put your power generation sites in oceanic dead zones caused by fertilizer runoff. Pressurize the tanks throughout with hydrogen which may be delivered the same way to turbines on shore, and dissolve the waste oxygen into the water to restore fish habitat.
Perhaps the most efficient of all possible energy storage media is ammonia. It's needed everywhere, as fertilizer, so conversion loss is effectively zero. Transport costs are minimal because it doesn't need to go very far. It can be produced any time power is available, and then not when there isn't.
Whoever develops a self-contained fertilizer production module that may be plugged into any variable-output generator will do more for the planet than anybody developing clean power generation.
Such a module would be immediately usable attached to wind generators in places with wind but no transmission grid, and next to oil wells that presently flare off natural gas as too expensive to condense and transport. It could be attached to solar power towers in deserts far from population centers, and operate directly off the high temperature in the tower without first converting to electricity.
Anybody who gets their account deleted can just sign in again and behave less spammerishly next time, so there's no reason to use kid gloves.
I have altered the "s_t" and "c_t" ligatures in my copy of the Linux Libertine font so the loops are higher. They look really good in Firefox, when it uses them. (I haven't discovered yet how Firefox -- really, libpango -- decides whether to substitute ligatures; sometimes it does, sometimes not, sometimes both in one paragraph, e.g. this one.) Now I need to fix the italic, bold, and bold-italic versions, and get them all accepted upstream. I'd still like to find a better way to get them used by default.
I just changed my linux-libertine typeface to make Firefox use the looped ligatures for "st" and "ct". I don't know what would be the "right" way to do it; I just added those ligatures to the default set. Unfortunately, they're kind of ugly (not loopy enough), and there's no ligature for "sc". To fix.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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