There's a strong clue in TFS : they talk about running a cable from Morocco around to make landfall in "SW England".

Not "SE England", where the government and a significant part of the population live, who'll be using the power, But "SW England". Because it is cheaper to move megawatts over high voltage lines on pylons than to move the same number of megawatts the same number of kilometres using HV sub-sea cables.

It's actually a lot cheaper to move megawatts over land than under-sea. At work, we'd do a megawatt or two for 5 km sub-sea, rather than building generators and 4 * RB-211s on glorified poles above sealevel ; but for a 10km stretch the balance shifted to building a bigger platform (artificial land) and dropping the jet engines and generators onto that.

For any Morocco/ North Africa solar farm, the logical way to proceed is to export the power across the Strait of Gibraltar (e.g. Ceuta to Algeciras), or Melilla to Almería ; include appropriate load balancing into the Spanish and French on-land grids, and then jump the power From Calais to Dover, or Dieppe to Hastings.

But that would mean talking to our neighbours, which is as radical as the US and Canada continuing to have a demilitarised border.

UK doesn't need more Solar as much as it needs more storage.

Listening to the foaming-at-the-mouth of the NIMBYs, that's not going to happen any decade soon.

They have sufficient geothermal for their needs. If they build (surely the verb should be "mine"?) more, they'll most likely use it locally to generate higher-value exports (say, BioJet-A1, or $cryptocurrency-du-jour$) than waste money and maintenance on thousands of km of sub-sea power cable.

... it's servers in the US (and therefore, rooted by the NSA), then why haven't they moved the EU branch of their services to local servers?

The obvious inference is that the NSA won't let them - or will require them to root such servers for NSA surveillance. And the obvious next step would be that the NSA then gives this data to US corporations that bribe the Executive appropriately.

Other nations regularly poach in the Georges Bank? That's pretty crazy.

You're really triggering Poe's Law here for me.

It doesn't need to change the total catch. You can lower the minimum size if you impose a maximum size. Same fraction of the total fish allowed to be caught. Large fish tend to be much better reproducers than small ones, so you may actually be able to allow an even larger fraction of the fish to be caught each year.

You better put the word "findings" in quotation marks. This "study" is a preprint, has not been peer reviewed, and it's being widely mocked for its bad methodology. But the media is just loving to run with it. Even the lead author is complaining about the media's "LLMs cause brain damage!" hot takes.

(BTW, that's the reason why "Saran Wrap" is no longer made of Saran. Saran is a far better barrier polymer than the polyethylene that Saran Wrap is made of today, but Saran is polyvinylidene chloride, aka chlorinated - and almost invariably ends up in the trash, where it will get burned. The decision to switch to inferior polyethylene wrap was so that it would burn cleaner)

People usually assume that all the plastic they see around food is "waste", when in reality it's usually carefully engineered to maximize shelf life, and thus minimize food waste. And the energy / resources needed to make that miniscule amount of plastic and the issues with its disposal are well worth offsetting wasted energy producing, processing, and transporting a larger fraction of food that just goes to waste.

Plastic around fresh fruit? That's maintaining it at an optimal humidity and/or reducing the risk of scratches that lead to spoilage. Metalized plastic wrap around your cookies in a box? The alumium is applied to that plastic to decrease water and oxygen transport by orders of magnitude, veritably eliminating the main ways in which food goes bad. On and on. And you know what the alternative is to maximize the shelf life of foods? Preservatives. You want more preservatives in your food? No? Then be happy with better-protective packaging.

And we all would love all of the plastic to be "biodegradable", but the problem is that waste doesn't come with a switch that says "Okay, now I'm done with you, fall apart". There's a steady process of biodegradable polymers becoming weaker and weaker, and letting orders of magnitude more oxygen and moisture through them. Basically, by the time they're at your supermarket, if it's at all easy to biodegrade, it's already doing a crappy job. Some products reduce (but not eliminate) these problems, but usually via requiring special conditions for quick decomposition, such as particularly high temperatures - but most landfills don't reach those conditions. And again, we're talking about generally grams of plastic, or even milligrams. This just isn't the big issue people make it out to be. Just burn it. Have good pollution controls on the incinerator, and just burn it. Just avoid chlorinated and fluorinated polymers that tend to produce more problematic combustion products.

Sorting plastic is useful even if most of it is going to be burned.

  * Some types of plastic are much easier to recycle than others
  * Some types of plastic can't be easily recycled, but are good for downcycling (such as use as filler materials)
  * Most types of plastic are fine to burn, but you don't want to burn chlorinated or fluorinated plastic (at least not with very strong pollution controls)

So sorting your waste is good. In our system, we have four types: "hard plastic" (which is probably manually or automated sorted for things that are readily recycleable and to remove PVC, etc); "plastic packaging" (probably burned); "plastic foam" (probably densified and not burned); and "large plastic film" (such as from greenhouses, row covers, construction plastic, etc; I'm not sure what they do with it).

Also:

The low price of wind and solar allow them to be overbuilt while still being affordable - and if you do that, with a mix of wind, solar, and battery storage, you can affordably build a grid that provides e.g. 90%, 95%, 98%, even over 99% of your electricity - but you never get to 100%. You still need some sort of peaking, which needs some sort of bulk storable energy medium. Well, one possibility for that is waste - it's storable and can be burned. Waste / biomass commonly provides a couple percentage of nations' total power needs - which, in a high-renewables grid, may be most or all of your peaking needs.

The suggested regulations I've seen to counter these evolutionary pressures are IMHO pretty clever: you impose both minimum *and maximum* sizes on your catch. You can only keep fish that are between the minimum and maximum sizes. So growing fish have a certain size where they're in the "danger zone", but if they get bigger than it, they can keep spawning to their heart's content with no danger from humans.

** near that size

Evolution works regardless of whether you think it should or not.

If you stand a high chance of being killed if you exceed a given size, that is intense evolutionary pressure to stop using your energy resources on growth as you near that height, and instead focus it on reproduction.

Whether you think that evolution should just stop working and cod should just keep growing the same as before regardless of whether it gets them killed (and thus unable to reproduce further), it will continue to work on the species.

It doesn't always work the way you want; there may not be a commercial interest in what replaces the fish you remove. For example, globally, jellyfish populations are soaring - because we've been (A) removing their predators, and (B) leaving more food behind for them.

Some people eat jellyfish, but they're comparably a tiny market.

(That said, due to the low cost, maybe their popularity will increase. Lobster used to be seen as poor-people's food after all, disgusting bottom-dwelling crustaceans, before the general population got a taste for them)