2 climate bets: Results are in China and World Coal in 2025

 I made a bet early in 2025 that China would reduce its coal usage for electricity in 2025.

The bet is here and I blogged about it before here

A bet has been accepted between u/TrueCryptographer982 and u/cavedave for $10. That according to Ember Energy statistics China will create less electricity from coal in 2025 than it did in 2024. David taking the prediction that it will be less. And we can settle when the results are in.'

The Ember energy data can back with 

Year Coal_TWh

2024 5851.81

2025 5781.19

Which is a tiny reduction but still meets the bets wording.

The other side of the bet said they would not pay the bet and got abusive.

The other bet made was that Coal usage in the entire world for electricity would drop from the previous year in any year 2025-2026

This happened last year according to ember energy statistics.

There are 11064 Cars in Luxembourg

I was in Luxembourg recently and saw 4 cars when I was there. Their registration plates were 1396, 1871, 2383 and 8852

This made me wonder if I could estimate the total number of cars in Luxembourg. 

This is the German Tank problem where the British in WW2 found some serial numbers on German tanks in north Africa and wanted to use those to guess how many tanks had been produced. If you are sure the serial number on tanks goes up by one each time and they started with number 1. Then if you have seen the highest number 100 in looking at 3 tanks of after looking at 50 you can have a better estimate to the highest number of tank made.  Also if you see a tank with number 1000 you know at least 1000 have been made. 

A formula to estimate the total number based on seeing k serial (registration) numbers where m is the highest number seen is the MVUE (Minimum Variance Unbiased Estimator) N ≈ m + (m/k − 1)

Which gives an estimate of 11064 total cars in Luxembourg.