Tiresia

It’s probably because it’s safer as an experimental proof-of-concept.

Hydrogen leaks extremely easily, and there are large amounts of electricity going through it because of power generation, static electricity from wind in certain conditions, and, in case of hydrogen, electrolysis. All of this can be managed safely, but it takes a lot of blind faith in the engineers to assume it will all be managed safely on the first go.

If this one burned down in the most predictable way imaginable, the bureaucrats that greenlit it will look bad and the project will likely be delayed or canceled.

But if this one works, they can (request state permission to) develop a second design that uses hydrogen, and when that design works well they can start mass producing those without dependence on natural gas extraction.

You could go the SpaceX route and build multiple designs that you expect to fail catastrophically so you can get to building ones that work faster, but that takes a lot of faith from the people funding you, and a lot of willingness to generate pollution.

There is real political will behind it - from the Chinese Communist Party. It’s their subsidies/planned economy that is driving this.

Trans rights, and any minority rights, can turn on a dime if rich people decide to assign them as public scapegoat.

If inherent commonality of experiences was enough, then a bunch of WASP cishet male gamers studying physics should have a very easy time making friends.

Laws suck at catching cheaters. That’s why they are incomprehensibly complex now while cheaters still keep exploiting loopholes.

Practically no honest person obeys the law. They don’t have time to consider all the legal intricacies, and even if they did people would rightfully call them assholes for following some legal duty to rat someone out for failing to do something unjust that is an unintended consequence of how multiple laws interact. Good people find just loopholes, break unjust laws where they can, and find social ways to hold harmful law-obeyers accountable. That’s the anarchic reality known as “common decency”.

Even the practical mechanism by which the current system tries to catch cheaters - by having a judge or jury of their peers judge whether they did anything wrong and treating that judgment as the truth for everyone to be enforced with cops and prisons - does not require laws.

Laws exist to project the opinions of a central authority without that central authority’s need to understand the situation. They are a successor to people having to see the king to settle a dispute because a king who lets his subjects settle a dispute without him is barely a king at all.

Billions of people have existed without laws. If we want to stop living in a world where all law enforcement are bastards, we’ve got to get rid of the laws. Judgment on morality doesn’t take fine print.

Isn’t metal fully recyclable already? Much more so than wood?

Speaking from experience, EU government green innovation grants are often wasted on ill-considered “solutions”. There’s a whole ecosystem of corporations specializing in convincing bureaucrats with no scientific education to give them grant money rather than trying to build stuff that makes sense.

Wooden wind turbine blades are exactly the sort of thing that makes an EU green tech bureaucrat salivate. Visible but inoffensive, cute but grand, natural but industrial, a rustic solarpunk-aesthetic without actually requiring any sort of social restructuring.

Billions of people live in climates where they regularly get more sun and heat than this heat wave.

Look into tropical fashions. Maybe a kurta would work for you.

They slow down the flow of water a bit but for areas that are somewhat steep that is probably more of a benefit than a drawback.

Slowing a river down raises the water level, which can risk flooding. Every section of river has to let through a certain amount of water per second, and slowing the water down means you need a bigger cross-sectional area to get the same throughput so the water level rises. This can create a feedback spiral because a higher water level slows the river down further because there is less height difference with further upstream and thus less force driving the water downstream against the friction of the riverbanks.

Luckily it seems these turbines can be removed quickly, so unless the engineers fuck up they shouldn’t increase flood risk.