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Blueprints For Taming the Climate Crisis
mdsolar sends this story from the NY Times:
Here's what your future will look like if we are to have a shot at preventing devastating climate change. Within about 15 years every new car sold in the United States will be electric. ... Up to 60 percent of power might come from nuclear sources. And coal's footprint will shrink drastically, perhaps even disappear from the power supply. This course, created by a team of energy experts, was unveiled on Tuesday in a report for the United Nations (PDF) that explores the technological paths available for the world's 15 main economies to both maintain reasonable rates of growth and cut their carbon emissions enough by 2050 to prevent climatic havoc. It offers a sobering conclusion: We might be able to pull it off. But it will take an overhaul of the way we use energy, and a huge investment in the development and deployment of new energy technologies. Significantly, it calls for an entirely different approach to international diplomacy on the issue of how to combat climate change.
I look forward to the enlightened, reasonable debate to follow. Please chain down your chairs and pop some popcorn.
I live in Montana and I'm rather looking forward to global warming. This place is gonna be even more amazing when it gets warmer. I might even have to buy a summer home in the Yukon.
On a slightly more serious note, as Winston Churchill once said, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."
----- obSig
How about we just use nuclear power for most cases because it's more efficient, safer, etc.?
How about we just use electric cars for most cases because they're simpler, more efficient, etc.?
How about we just stop using coal because it's fucking terrible all around?
Why do we need a climate change bullshit bogey man to get politicians to stop blocking natural progress?
Did you bother to note the rather important fact that none of our modern crop foods were alive during that time period. Adaptation of plant and animal life to major geologic changes doesn't happen in a century.
The problem we face isn't one of extinction of life on earth, but the inviability of meta-stable ecosystems we and our economies rely on.
I have a crazy proposition for you:
There are multiple human beings who identify themselves as environmentalists, and not all are as informed as others. And not all are as spirited as others. And contradictions can arise within a community, as ideas struggle for dominance.
Because the real benefit of the fossil fuels is the high density of the stored energy.
Give me the technology to build a battery that can power an electric car for 500 miles, and ...
Electric cars can now work for 99% of the population - all running on power they store overnight/while at work.
Solar can now store enough to last not only through the night but also through a cloudy day.
Wind based energies can now store enough to get through some calm days
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Oh great...that means we're fucked.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
Let's just pretend for a moment the answer to that question isn't yes
That wasn't even the point being made. It's the temperatures that are the threat to modern forms of plant, not CO2 concentration. Any farmer will tell you about the importance of climate to growing a particular crop.
With computers it's better yet to use a phone or tablet instead of opening a laptop.
A big one is to turn your cable box off when you're not using it. Ever notice how bloody hot most of them get? It's because they're horrendous power guzzlers. People who aren't nerdy enough to program universal remotes properly just turn off the TV itself when walking away, leaving the cable box to run like a little electric space heater.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Fifteen years for a dramatic ramp-up of nuclear power anywhere outside of China?! Not possible. I believe the United States long ago lost the ability to manufacture key components to even make a nuclear reactor and its containment vessel.
Got it. The jurassic plants like CO2, but the ones we eat and use today dont. Sure. Right. Yeah, you nailed it Al Goreleone.
The misrepresentation, half truth and putting Al Gore in there are all signs of vapid Talk Radio propaganda.
I know because I used to be in that environment.
Let's examine the parent's statement.
1. State a fact: "jurassic plants like CO2" - which sucks in people.
2. "the ones we eat and use today dont" - complete lie in this case (not even a half truth which is usually the case). Now the typical unsophisticated talk radio listener will think, "Well 1 is true so 2 is true."
"Sure. Right." - sarcasm to suck in them in.
" Yeah, you nailed it Al Goreleone" - bring in the talk radio's environmental symbol. Which by the way, Al Gore is only an environmentalist in talk radio's eyes.
See folks. That's how they do it basically. It's the same formula that used in advertising. Here's Sean Hannity's:
1. Tell a truth.
2. Usually there's a half truth.
3. Outright lie.
4. Blame Liberals.
5. Tell audience that they listen to him because they are smarter than average people. No really, listen to his show sometime.
This is just a question. Transmission losses are significant. Why would you want to transmit small amounts of power over long distances anyway? Why not use it locally?
As much as I agree that we need to reduce carbon emissions, these recommendations are a recipe for disaster. The USA research team, for example, recommends something like a 50% reduction in per capita energy intensity by 2050. That is flat out incompatible with human nature in a healthy economy and society. I neither want my children to live in a world ravaged by carbon pollution, nor do I want them living a life of energy poverty. Any sensible solution would avoid both outcomes by greatly expanding the availability of clean energy generation. The fact that no one seems to be willing to chart a course of clean energy abundance makes me suspicious that other motives are at work here besides saving us from global warming.
The French team starts with the only healthy and clean energy infrastructure in the world and _completely_dismantles_it_. Apparently their current administration has recommended that the country phase out nuclear power by 2050, and the team takes this as gospel, replacing it with biofuels. The projected results are predictably disastrous.
The only team to make reasonable recommendations here was China, but they also had the easiest job since China has the most low-hanging fruit and the only serious build-out of clean energy generation.
We need to do several things in the US to help ourselves, as well as push other nations.
We would be better off stopping subsidies on solar, and allow wind to expire in 2 years. Instead, we should now focus those subsidies on nuclear power (our own), along with electricity storage.
Then require that all new construction below 5-6 stories will have on-site AE that will equal or exceed its HVAC usage.
In addition, we need to put a tax on all consumed goods (including those shipped from overseas), based on the MAX CO2 that went into make it. The tax should start low and raise every 6-12 months. This will give time to all nations and states to make long-term choices.
Basically, the tax is applied to all goods, unless you register where it and its parts come from. Then if you get the parts from nations/states where the CO2 is lowest, you get lower taxes.
To make sure of the CO2, rather than the wild estimates that we have, we use the OCO2 which will show emissions production, along with movement, around the world.
Finally, to normalize it, we use $ GDP / tonne of CO2. The higher the $GDP, the better.
The above is all that is needed to force us to change, and give us time. Not just America, but all nations since America is the world's largest importer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We can do it and in fact, are doing so.
We have switched over our house to LEDs (which I bought most of the bulbs for less than 10 each) and now see our electric usage has dropped by about $5-10 / month (about 50-100 KWH savings each month).
In addition, we have Solar on our roof and sell back our excess to the grid.
We are now getting ready to buy a Tesla Model [XS].
There is no doubt that my family's usage is going down.
What is needed is for us to get all of the nation's usage down, and it is easier than you can believe, if we use economics.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Which is why we need energy storage. The utilities really need to be more about grid/storage, than about general production. With storage, and smaller grids.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Most delivery fleets can go electric, they have predictable routes, a home base, time to charge and the range is not very critical to them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When I see something which says "In 15 years the world will be like this", I think "My, what drivel", and move on.
From what I've seen in my lifetime, futurists and prognosticators are usually dead wrong, clueless, and writing little more than fiction.
In other words, it will require the impossible, need huge sums of money, depend on a level of consensus and cooperation unlikely to happen, and a near complete re-tooling of societies.
Blah blah blah.
Especially since it takes 15 years+ to get a Nuclear plant off the ground in the US... In order for this to happen, every single power provider in the US would have to submit plans to build Nuclear reactors this year. It's not going to happen, especially with large natural gas reserves and low natural gas prices.
Yes fusion is the energy of tomorrow. And the best fusion reactor we have is called the sun. And we can begin harnessing it whenever we want.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Germany gets 2.3% of it's power from solar electric.
Not even for a moment did they get half their power from solar. The headline was wrong/,misleading times two.
More like 6%, unfortunately. That's nice and all, that when the sun is shining really bright, for five minutes you can get a significant amount of power from solar.
Then, within three hours, it's no longer 10AM-2PM and solar energy drops dramatically. (Our eyes see brightness roughly on a logarithmic scale, so what we perceive to be not quite as bright as bright is actually 90% less energy). For example, the moon looks to be maybe 5% as bright as the sun. Actually, the sun is 400,000 times brighter.
So yeah, solar is a great way to REDUCE the demand on your base sources during lunch time. Kind of like regenerative braking REDUCES the demand on the engine. Neither is, or ever can be, a primary energy source.
Your post is based on a slight misunderstanding of radioactivity, a misunderstanding that guys like Patrick Moore of Greenpeace purposely created to trick you. Since founding Greenpeace, Moore has realized he was foolish to BS people and he's changed his tune. Moore now says:
Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind.
Moore skipped the fundamental lie / misunderstanding though. There ARE substances that emit radiation very slowly, over a long period of time (trees are an example of this type). There are also substances that emit radiation quickly, quickly enough to harm you. What Moore didn't tell you is that THESE ARE TWO DIFFERENT TYPES OF WASTE. If you think about it for a minute, it makes sense. A candle burns for a long time. Gunpowder burns quickly, releasing its energy all it once. All that energy being released at once is dangerous. Gun powder dangerous BECAUSE it is fast. The energy from the candle isn't dangerous BECAUSE it's being released so slowly. The release of nuclear energy is just the same. There are some materials that take 4,000 years to release their energy. Since it's so slow, you'd need to sit next to it for 800 years to be affected. Then there is the waste that releases enough energy to affect you in only one year. In four years, it's released most of its energy and it is safe to have around the house.
the longer we wait, the more expensive it becomes.
If energy complains and religious fundies where pushing a false debate with lies, we would have been making small changes for 20 years.
Switching to cleaner technologies will not bankrupt America, don't be stupid.
China and India are also putting money into clean energies.
IF America would stop listening to denier and start a big project, it would BOOST our economy, and drive new technologies developed by american companies.
Remember, big project do not literally burn money. Changing the grid to something 21st century? Yeah, that would cost a lot/. which goes to American workers, who then buy things and everyone pays taxes. The circle continues.
Spending money to develop small Solar furnace project, say 5MW, on farms mean workers making money cheaper at cleaner energy.
spending the billions on have a 10K sqr miles solar farm moves money through the economy, provides cleaner energy.
The idea the moving to cleaner energy will bankrupt America is complete nonsense.
If 8 years ago people actually starting being rational about the science and started actining, the burst bubble would have had a much SMALLER impact.
It's funny., developing a pipeline the will provide a 100 jobs for a short time is good for the economy, but switching to a clean energy that will create many thousands of long term jobs is some how bad for the economy.
And this doesn't even get into the fact that it means less dependence on other countries.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There is an omission in the summary, that is a build out by 2050. But, their fig. 8 does have substantially more nuclear power in 2020 than in 2010 and that seems quite unrealistic.
I think it's too late anyway. With scientists figuring out we need crash programs to change basically everything in just 15 years to avoid major climate disruption, it's pretty much game over. People don't have the motivation and the cause and effect link is too removed for most dullards to understand what's going on. I think it's obvious from the postings here that the API has done their disinformation job very well. There is no way to mobilize the support we need to make this all happen in 15 years.
What it will take is these deniers finally realizing that in spite of setting new heat records every year and many months for the last decade, it really is getting hotter. It's going to take more major floods, more tornado swarms, more hurricanes, more droughts, and more weather disasters of scales never seen before these folks finally figure out they have been duped and used to enrich the few living out their last hurrahs.
But really, it's been to late for a decade. There is also too much infrastructure, too many IC cars, too much totally dependent on fossil fuels to roll things back in just 15 years. A lot of newly-installed infrastructure is designed to last 30 years and is amortized out over those time periods. These people make fun of him, but the time we should have really been working hard to fix this was when Al Gore popularized the alarm.
The term "dead man walking" comes to mind here. We're now just along for the ride. I am glad I am the age I am and have had a chance to live my life and won't be seeing when the real climate issues hit. When people can't feed themselves is when things will get really nasty and it's sad that kids today will likely get to see it. The earth is quickly headed to a time when it can't support anywhere near the life on it now. That means die offs. Big ones. Humans won't take that laying down though. They start wars. They steal. They kill. They basically go insane.
It will take a while but it's coming. These unthinking drones can deny it all they want. Make Al Gore jokes. Hockey stick jokes. Whatever. It's all simple physics and chemistry. Anyone with an undergraduate degree and any knowledge of infrared spectroscopy can understand the concept of greenhouse gases, trapping heat, and temperature increases. Throw in a bit of decaying formerly-frozen peat bogs, methane clathrates melting on the ocean floors, and the atmosphere's ability to hold more water vapor as it heats up, and we are making a mighty fine thermal blanket for this planet.
We just can't get out of this kitchen. We're stuck here.
The radioactive cesium released by Fukushima has a half-life of about forty years. That's short enough to be a real problem and long enough to take centuries to mostly go away. (Heck, radium's about sixteen hundred years, and nobody wants to handle that directly.) The radioactive iodine has gone away, every single atom of it. While there's a certain amount of truth in what you say, there are radioactive substances that are quite dangerous for long periods of time.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes