> There were more than enough trees until we developed the technology to clear cut in expeditious manner.
Unless you mean 'an axe', way before that there were deforested areas where the need for trees was larger than the supply and there were enough humans to fell them.
> A few hundred years ago or less, a squirrel could get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground.
Yes, but that wasn't possible in other parts of the world much sooner.
You may not care about fancy bells but you will care about loud honking close to your ears in my very recent experience from the streets of Shanghai. You don't have absolute priority just because you are a pedestrian.
> Why can't the cyclists slow down when they see that there's a human obstacle in front of them?
Because if the space is limited and they actually want to get somewhere, they just don't have time for that? And slowing down often means stopping and causing a traffic jam.
Note that I mostly agree with what you wrote (and I give priority to pedestrians when I'm riding my bike) but there are different situations that have to be taken into account.
There is a number of differences between a car and a bike, including how pedestrians react to them. Also you probably (hopefully) don't drive your car on narrow sidewalks which in some cases is unavoidable for bikes in cities.
That someone else still has military bases there, the expectation was until recently on a solid ground. I'm actually not sure that someone else disengaging from that region was the plan, but maybe it will be the result after all.
Going up from what date exactly? Construction start is when you already have all plans approved, permitted and financed, so 4 years from construction start is far from "putting up a plant in 5 years". So, some examples for 5 years all in?
There is a trick, you can multiple build simultaneously. Or better with a slight delay, so that construction crews (which do separate phases of construction) can move between projects and use experience gained in one build in another build.
Nuclear construction requires highly skilled workers doing very high quality work. One of the biggest problems with nuclear construction in U.S. and Europe is that last significant builds have been done around 1985, companies doing nuclear construction closed or moved to other products, or moved to maintenance, upgrades of power plants.
> There is a trick, you can multiple build simultaneously.
That trick does not work for smaller countries which can't afford/don't need to build a big number of reactors. Or you have to outsource to a foreign builder which does not seem to be a best idea in today's world.
Anyway, the original claim was "You can put up a plant in 5 years without erroneous regulation". It's simply not possible to do that. If you depend on continuous availability of highly skilled workers, you also have to account for their (initial and continuous) training. In addition you also have to maintain the staff which does the planning and permitting.
Which is never, because even then you are still paying some sort of taxes on top of the spot prices and also network fees.
The price of electricity from the network also has to include the price of delivery, while homemade electricity only has to recoup initial investment.
Of course this means given enough home installations (in places with enough sun) the price of electricity from the network will rise, more people will install their own stations, some will even disconnect, rinse and repeat. I read somewhere this exact situation is already playing out already in Pakistan.
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