Slashdot Mirror
China Cancels Over 100 Coal-Fired Power Plants (reuters.com)
In an effort to improve air quality, the Chinese government has canceled over 100 coal-fired power plants in 11 provinces -- totaling a combined installed capacity of more than 100 gigawatts. Reuters reports: In a document issued on Jan. 14, financial media group Caixin reported, the National Energy Administration (NEA) suspended the coal projects, some of which were already under construction. The projects worth some 430 billion yuan ($62 billion) were to have been spread across provinces and autonomous regions including Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Shaanxi and other northwestern areas. Putting the power projects on hold is a major step towards the government's effort to produce power from renewable sources such as solar and wind, and wean the country off coal, which accounts for the majority of the nation's power supply. To put it in perspective, some 130 GW of additional solar and wind power will be installed by 2020, equal to France's total renewable power generation capacity, said Frank Yu, principal consultant at Wood Mackenzie. "This shows the government is keeping its promise in curbing supplies of coal power," Yu said. Some of the projects will still go ahead, but not until 2025 and will likely replace outdated technology, he said.
I never believed China would be up to this. Great!
Turns out the climate is quite big and complicated and trapping more energy in the system doesn't lead to perfectly distributed warming all over the planet, at all times.
First world skeptics ready with hard data to prove how miniscule this effort is compared to what developing countries need to do.
Go talk to northern Canadians and Alaskans. The frozen sea. Ice which should show up in October didn't show up until December and January.
In the US our winter is currently 20 degrees above normal.
And always. https://xkcd.com/1732/
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I live in Europe near the arctic circle and the drastic changes in climate are very much visible here too. The winters are warm and summers are very cold. 20 years ago there was consistency in weather and now that consistency is somehow gone. It can be literally -25C one day and +5 the next.
To put it in perspective, some 130 GW of additional solar and wind power will be installed by 2020, equal to France's total renewable power generation capacity, said Frank Yu, principal consultant at Wood Mackenzie.
France has nowhere near 130 GW of installed renewable power generation.
Currently we're running near peak demand at 92 GW due to the horrible cold, we've got about 55 GW of nukes running flat out (5 reactors are off line for maintenance) and about 15 GW of fossils, 13 GW of hydro, 2.6 GW of solar and 2.6 GW of wind.
How many of the other figures in this article are bullshit?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
You seem to take issue with corruption in particular. Authoritarian regimes are rather prone to this and China is no exception.
Because apparently last year was the 'hottest year on record', even though it was a very mild summer in the U.K.
Aaaaand what percentage of the earths surface is covered by the UK?
And nothing like the drought of 1976.
Was there a worldwide drought in 1976?
And 'since records began' means 'in the past 150 years', and the planet has existed for millions of years.
Aaaand for how many of those millions of years have we been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and disabling carbon sinks?
What's your problem really?
We know how humans affect the climate and we know it's affected.
What's the reason to disbelief?
Interesting that the article makes no mention of China's plans to build more nuclear power plants.
Found this with a quick Google search:
http://dailycaller.com/2016/09...
China intends to bring 58 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity into operation by 2020, up from the current capacity of roughly 27 gigawatts, according to World Nuclear News. China plans to follow this by getting about 10 percent of its electricity from 150 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2030, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?
There is a bias in all news. The bias is in not only what they choose to report but what they choose to leave out. I've begun to seek out news from places that wear their bias on their sleeve, that way at least I know what they likely chose to report and leave out.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
What's your problem really? We know how humans affect the climate and we know it's affected. What's the reason to disbelief?
Some people don't want to have to give up a few luxuries or profit-making concerns on the off-chance that it'd force our descendants to live on an Earth that will resemble what Venus looks like today. The believe that if climate change is a thing, they can deal with it.
If it can be dealt with.
Trump will build the 100 plants in the US.
Aaaaand what percentage of the earths surface is covered by the UK?
Speaking as an Englishman: 100% of the important parts, plus Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This is going to be awfully complex so pay close attention.
"I don't like it therefore it is not true"
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The idea of a tax isn't as silly as you make it sound. The problem with most forms of pollution (from a purely economic standpoint) is that one person or company gains the benefits from polluting, but everyone pays the costs. This is known as an externality. Taxing pollution fixes this and means that the polluting technology becomes more expensive to operate and makes the barrier to entry for non-polluting technologies higher. If something is producing a lot of carbon dioxide but costs $5/widget, and you add a tax that amounts to $2.50/widget, then a replacement technology that doesn't emit any CO_2 but costs $7/widget is now cheaper to use. This means that you can bring it to market before you've got the economies of scale to push the price down below $5/widget.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The weird thing about racists is the way they need to inject their views into unrelated topics.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
The yearly frost has been killing vermin for ages in North America and Europe. As the frost line moves upwards, as USDA "zones" creep northwards, so do these creatures.
Often these creatures are "invasive" the native plants have no defense against these bugs. For example stink bugs have existed 200 miles south of Mason-Dixon line for centuries without serious issues. When the climate became pleasant enough to inhabit pockets north of PA-MD border, they found many delicious plants and nesting places to winter over, and they are becoming serious pests.
Such changes have taken place repeatedly in the past. We know that. If it happens slow enough, the plants will develop resistance. What is alarming is the rapidity of the change. The life cycle of a tree is in decades. Bugs have life cycles measured in days. Bugs would have several hundred generations to go against an existing tree which has no way of defending itself. It takes centuries or even a millennia for a forest to assimilate, integrate and thrive as new bug species infest them.
Creating doubt is easy. Asking questions is easy. Finding answers is difficult. Accepting uncomfortable answers, is even more difficult.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
China owns something like a third of the total foreign held US debt
The amount of US debt China owns is less than 10% of the total amount outstanding. Currently around $1.3 Trillion which is a big number but only a single digit percentage of the total debt. Most of the US debt is actually held by Americans. Of the $12.9 trillion chunk of debt owned by Americans, $5.3 trillion is held by government trust funds such as Social Security, $5.1 trillion is held by individuals, pension funds and state and local governments and the remaining $2.5 trillion is held by the Federal Reserve. Basically most of the debt is IOUs to the American people.
Interestingly Japan owns almost as much US debt as China does at $1.1 Trillion. But Japan isn't so scary so people gloss over that fact.
Although China needs the US as badly as the US needs China, if we try to bluster our way into something stupid, just calling the debt will make for a rather unpleasant time as the world economy topples.
China has no ability whatsoever to "call" the US debt. Treasury bonds don't work like that. China bought those treasuries to keep their currency exchange rate under control. Furthermore even if China wanted to get rid of their US denominated debt, they have absolutely no one else they can sell it to. There simply are no buyers for that much US debt at anywhere close to face value. If they hold a fire sale they absolutely screw their own economy in the process.
China's renewable energy sector is growing faster than its fossil fuels and nuclear power capacity. In 2015 China became the world's largest producer of photovoltaic power, at 43 GW installed capacity. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Perhaps, perhaps not. Venus is still very poorly understood. In its high temperature environment its conditions are largely self-sustaining (preventing the sequestration of CO2 in rock), although it's also unstable, prone to broad temperature and pressure swings. It also appears to have undergone a global resurfacing event about 300-500mya, if that gives a clue as to how unstable the planet as a whole is. ;) We don't know what caused it, or really anything about it. Part of the planet's properties are now a result of it having lost its water rather than being a cause, such as its hard crust. Obviously its lack of a magnetic field is responsible for its loss of water, but we don't know exactly when or why it disappeared (there are of course theories... I had always just assumed it was the slow rotation rate, but the last research I read suggested that not enough to account for it). Other issues as to how Venus ended up as it did may be related to size - although it's only a bit smaller than Earth, that may be the initial factor that set its fate in motion - for example, its lithosphere in general appears to be thicker and higher viscosity on Earth, which could have hindered or prevented plate tectonics, and thus subduction of carbonates.
Either way, it's a mess now at the surface (though rather comfy ~55km up ;) ). And I'm not so sure I buy into some of the proposed ways to fix it (terraforming). For example, some have suggest mass drivers ejecting the atmosphere. Let's just say you can pull it off, and then you start building oxygen in the atmosphere - what happens next? The crust is something like 7-9% FEO; it's going to rust away whatever oxygen you make in short order.
Interestingly, I'd argue that this is possibly the salvation to Sagan's airborne-microbe concept for terraforming Venus. The main criticism is that if you engineered some sort of carbon-sequestering microbe on Venus (or artificial equivalent), you'd end up with a deep surface layer of graphite surrounded by some hugely hot, dense oxygen layer, and the atmosphere would explode. But that would never happen; at Venus surface temperatures and pressures, the surface rocks would rust away the oxygen as fast as it was created, even in tiny quantities, with the wind blowing the dust around to collect at low/eddy areas. So you're laying down bands of carbon and iron oxide as you burn through the planet's iron buffer. Where have we seen this before? Right, Earth, ~2,3 billion years ago, banded iron formations. Just like on Earth, you'd eventually burn through the iron and start to accumulate oxygen. But by then the graphite is already underground, buried in iron dust.
It's not a fast process. But it has precedent. Microbes already rusted at least one planet, and that planet's surface conditions weren't nearly as favorable for rusting as Venus's.
"Who the hell is Nietzche? It's a question stupid people are asking." -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
It's winter! Why is China covered with smog in winter and not summer? Warm and fuzzy environmental types would like to blame Big Business and Government, but is there another explanation?
The primary reason is that high sulfur coal is used to heat homes in winter. "Homes and small businesses that burn coal in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei contribute up to half of the air pollution in the region every winter, said Zhao Yingmin, chief engineer at the Ministry of Environmental Protection." http://english.caixin.com/2016... - but note that burning coal is generally outlawed in cities. The bulk of home consumption is in rural areas, and in the North where it is cold.
"In rural areas coal is still permitted to be used by Chinese households, commonly burned raw in unvented stoves. This fills houses with high levels of toxic metals leading to bad Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). In addition, people eat food cooked over coal fires which contains toxic substances." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Linfen, a city in northern China's Shanxi province has suffered greatly from unbreathable air. Citizens were told by the local environmental minister that "70 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions comes from citizens' coal use." There is skepticism, yet it is clear that industrial pollution is not entirely responsible. http://www.sixthtone.com/news/...
The seasonal differences in air pollution cannot be explained by the rather constant industrial use of coal. Large scale power plants are able to mitigate the offensive emissions somewhat. The difference that we see right now is due to millions of individual homes producing the worst kind of pollution.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Shouldn't you Birts be using solar, anyway, as I was taught in school that the sun never set on the British Empire?
How could anybody think there was a racial component to random mention of "refugees" who like warmer weather? Really these could be refugees from Norway or Finland! I was shocked!
Hint,
"refugees"
wasn't referring to UK asylum seekers
Speaking of, every time you post to slashdot you are using air conditioning in hundreds if not thousands of facilities across the globe. All those servers, switches, routers, require vast amounts of cooling.
Man, you really need that seminar!
It's possible to impose a revenue-neutral carbon tax, by reducing other taxes. (I'd recommend reducing the taxes that affect the poor, since they'll be hardest hit by a carbon tax.) A revenue-neutral carbon tax would leave just as much money available for investment, and would make investment in renewable energy more profitable.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Plants consume CO2 and H2O so of course you'll have more plants. Fuck this "citation needed" Wonkypedia shit. I
I asked for citations because I'm skeptical of your ideas. If you don't want people to accept your ideas, why post them?
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-...
You obviously didn't read your citation, which contradicts your assertion.
I'm still to hear one big negative factor of increased CO2 levels and global warming.
Explain how your ignorance is our problem.