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We Still Have No Idea How To Eliminate More Than a Quarter of Energy Emissions (technologyreview.com)
Climate discussions typically center on the need to replace fossil-fuel power plants with technologies like wind turbines and solar panels. But a new paper in Science offers a stark reminder that there are still huge parts of the global energy system where we simply don't have affordable ways of halting greenhouse-gas emissions. MIT Technology Review: Air travel, long-distance transportation and shipping, steel and cement manufacturing, and remaining parts of the power sector account for 27 percent of global emissions from the energy and industrial sectors. And the authors say we need much more research, innovation, and strategic coordination to clean up these sources. "If we're really ambitious about meeting our climate targets, we need to be tackling these hard sectors now," says the paper's lead author, Steven Davis, an earth system scientist at the University of California, Irvine.
Bullshit. We can power all those items with nuclear power. We are just too scared to develop it from the point of "highly dangerous" to "very safe".
All technology is dangerous at first. But if we let that scare us, we are screwed.
If the headline is correct, that means we can eliminate 3/4 of energy emissions. That sounds like a win to me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Put the companies executives in a dome that is over their production facilities. /s
I'm sure they'll figure it out quickly.
With an alarming 68% of all energy produced going to waste regardless of how it was generated it makes more sense to improve how the energy is used.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The solution to the problem is simple enough in concept, but it's also the pink-and-purple-polka-dot elephant in the room; everyone knows that ICEs are grossly inefficient, even if they are powerful, but let's face it: they're over 100 year old technology at this point. We, as a civilization, need to establish a timeline by which we systematically obsolete and replace ICE technology with something else.
Stop paying people to drive everywhere. Stop telling businesses how many parking spaces they have to provide for their own customers. Stop making poor, compact neighborhood subsidize urban sprawl. And then internalize the negative externality of burning fossil fuels, perhaps with a revenue-neutral carbon tax and dividend so it isn't a burden on the poor.
I think the market can solve the problem, if we would let it.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
How'bout we do the 3/4 that's doable first, instead of, you know... not doing it because the last 1/4 is hard.
Aviation is already looking at creating electric motor planes that run on batteries.
I go one further and suggest using microwaves emitted from high locations (above most birds) that top off the batteries periodically, maybe even making the batteries essentially a backup for emergency landings (huge weight and efficiency savings).
That of course is just one idea as opposed to "We Still Have No Idea"
Letter To Iran
Hydrogen can be used as a drop in replacement for anything running internal combustion or just combustion for heat (smelting or kilning). The hydrogen can be produced via electrolysis of water and any form of clean power can run that process.
However, where CO2 emission is part of the actual industrial process such as converting iron to steel (adding carbon via coke is the entire point) or kilning cement (CO2 is part of the chemical reaction for some types of cement), there really isn't a good means of reducing CO2. Certainly you can reduce the CO2 from the power supply end with alternative energy sources, but not as a direct by-product of manufacture.
Yes, nuclear has the potential to offset a lot of energy use today that currently emits carbon, and it should be investigated in realistic ways. Especially thorium. However, keep in mind that nuclear, just like solar, still has waste products - environmental waste products, and social waste products. There's never a free lunch, and trash comes in many forms.
Also keep in mind, anything nuclear, just like solar, is a terrible energy carrier. You are not likely to power airplanes, cars, houses, medium sized ships directly with nuclear. At least not in a responsible way.
However, with an abundance of sustainable energy, we can economically convert, store and transport it in all kinds of ways. Batteries have a niche market. Biofuels (Butanol & oils from algae) can and should have a broader niche market, especially since they can be constructed by extracting carbon from the air, thus they can be carbon neutral. And, they can used by our existing infrastructure - cars, airplanes, and distributions systems, with little or no change. This is huge. We don't need to replace trillions upon trillions of dollars of human engineering and infrastructure to be sustainable. Really.
Let me re-state this: we are not on a path to ruin, unless a path to ruin is all we choose to see. We have so many options that avoid and prevent death on a massive scale.
There is not likely to be any one answer, and we must all keep an open, objective and scientific approach to energy. And we must all be especially diligent to recognize special interest forces at work to preserve a status quo. Coal, nuclear, oil - all have entrenched and evil lobbies that need to be rooted out from their dark corners and recognized and dealt with. If they bring something to market that is economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable then great.
But please, no more oil wars.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
You know what would reduce shipping emissions? Less shipping.
Making more products local to the market and not having to transport them long distances is how you do that.
We're going to have to start removing CO2 from the atmosphere, so really all we need to do is put a tax on 100% of emissions. This may raise the cost of certain technologies but the tax can then be used to remove the emissions. This will create a fantastic incentive for companies to find alternatives that give off fewer emissions.
The problem we really face is people that are unwilling to adjust to a new system because they are stuck in their ways.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
If we're really ambitious about meeting our climate targets...
Who "we"?
The target emitter sources mentioned here are a small part of the problem for developed nations. Unless you can imagine giving up a lot of the lifestyle perks enjoyed in the West, you really cannot find a way to shift something like 75% of current greenhouse gas emissions. That's why the IPPC recommendations and Paris Accords rely on this thing they call "negative emissions" never quite spelled out. Basically, a kind of magic that will remove CO2 not being removed already by the ocean or by land plants. There are a few theoretical ways to accomplish that, but they won't scale without either massive global coordination, or novel sources of non-carbon-based energy inputs to drive them, or both. And even then, you have to "make it work" for nearly longer than the human world has existed, something on the order of 5-10,000 years. The US couldn't even stay signed onto the (almost meaningless) Paris Accords for more than a single election cycle, hard to imagine coordinated global effort spanning thousands of years, isn't it? Actually, it's not hard it's impossible to imagine. LSD works here. Without the copious consumption of LSD I don't see how we imagine a way to reduce even 25% least of all 75%, and let's not even start in with 100% reduction, being the only thing will save us.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Governments should create bicycles's lanes between towns as a new enforcement law.
"Air travel, "
In a couple of years all the malls and shopping centers will have closed, because Amazon brings us everything home (No real reason to fly to London anymore) and it will be nice weather in most cold places from where people fly to the south, so no problem there either.
"long-distance transportation and shipping,"
In a couple of years the North-West passage will be open and China is building a railway from China to Europe right now.
"steel and cement manufacturing,"
In Europe most Steel is melted electrically since many years, also scientists are working to replace Portland cement with the Roman variant, which lasts 2500 years instead of 25 and not reinforced on top.
"and remaining parts of the power sector "
Germany is talking on how to stop coal power right now as I'm typing this, the rest of the world will follow, China and India are also hard at work.
There is no global pollution problem that could not be solved by allowing the human population to drop back to 1 or 2 billion. In a closely related story, there is no technology that can overcome the inevitable results of unfettered population growth.
Can't we fix this by just suing and/or taxing someone or something?
I am not sure we want to. A full halt could send us rocketting back down into an ice age, known to come on in as little as a few years -- you just need a good summer with snow pack to keep the planet from summer warming, and then it plunges the second winter into a true frozen hell.
Unlike sea rises and warm temps, which are a financial inconvenience, this will kill billions.
So take it easy.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Climate change is absolutely real, and the median forecast for the harm caused is significant.
As a purely empirical matter, the world does not appear likely to greatly curb emissions. Lament this all you want, as a scientist confronted with the need to make a prediction, this is undoubtedly the case. We don't have all the means, the means we do have are expensive and there is not the political will in a number of important countries to do it, nor the geopolitical or diplomatic strength to force it upon them against their wills.
What's more, we are already at the point that negative carbon emissions are physically necessary to limit warming. That is to say, not only do we need the means and will to reduce emissions greatly, we need to as-yet-undeveloped (let alone economically scaled) ways to have gigaton-range negative emissions.
We are well past the point where we need to start researching active climate engineering as an alternative to reducing emissions. To those that say there are dangers associated with climate engineering, I would argue that the sooner we start focus on it, the better a handle of those dangers we will have before the shit hits the fan.
And while I applaud the scientific rigor and dedication of those trying to reduce emissions, I am baffled by how people that are scientifically inclined can see our repeated failure to meet each carbon target and predict that somehow next time, it will be different.
My only carb is potatoes. It is paired with eggs, cabbage, cheese and beans.
You Don't Need Them. Whole countries get by with orders of magnitude less. Even where you do you want to force businesses to pay for high rise parking, and centralize into a walk-able zone. This is not just a problem with businesses, for suburbs you have, wide parking zones, on wide midsection roads, with wide verges, with only single story construction, to the extent that more than half the housing land is wasted possibly much more. All of this wasted space makes you spend more time and money driving, makes walking to the shops impossible, and makes community impossible too, your cities are designed in a subtly dystopic anti-human pro-car fashion.
Which is not to say you don't need some parking, it's just not helpful to have too much to the extent that you have to drive because of the distance.
No, there isn't serious talk about electric airplanes. There's serious greenwashing and serious siphoning from taxpayers wallets. The energy density of batteries is shit. Nothing resembling today's "green" technology can possibly work for commercial air transport. The possibilities that *might* work include hydrogen fuel from electricity (huge problems remain, like generating hydrogen without cracking hydrocarbons). liquid fuels from plants (ethanol is a terrible fuel, and will energy reduce aircraft efficiency, at best, by about 20%), and taxing aviation sufficiently to ensure only the richest fly (with severe risks to national security by destroying aviation industries). While a fission-powered aircraft engine was demonstrated in the 60's, everything about it demonstrated that it was infeasible for military risk tolerances, and is a non-starter. This is a world where the difference in energy density between gasoline and kerosene is significant enough that only hobbyists and the smallest of aircraft use gasoline instead of jet fuel (a kerosene). Liquid hydrogen has the mass density to be plausible, but everything else about it seems to be sketchy. Fine for a stratospheric UAV but not likely to succeed.
1. We can use biofuel from trees (WSU, UW research), from forestry waste (UW, UO, UBC, UCalgary) to literally cut waste. This traps emissions from burning and organic breakdown.
2. We can use biofuel from animal and vegetable waste (similar sources, many firms) that removes methane releases.
3. We can use shellfish farms and seaweed to literally trap carbon in shells, and store the shells, or use them as components to replace concrete - concrete is a MAJOR source of carbon emissions.
4. We can convert all commercial and industrial and government fleets of cars and trucks to plug-in electric or biofuel (water) from sources 1 and 2, traffic emissions are up to 50 percent of emissions in most of the US and Canada.
5. We can replace inefficient high emission suburban single family housing with wasteful lawns to local shrub and flowers and efficient multi family housing near work and transit. Cuts emissions in the residential sector by a factor of between 10 and 40 times.
6. We can literally build warehouses and buildings to generate their own energy.
Look, you just mean you don't "want" to. Not that we "can't".
Oh, and 1-6 all SAVE MONEY compared to prior tech versions.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The article is talking specifically about CO2 sources which cannot be replaced by grid power, whether nuclear, solar, wind, or other.
Either because a grid connection is impossible, or because the CO2 is being generated for a reason other than energy production.
Nuclear-powered airplanes have been tried. Unfortunately, the weight of the shielding makes the minimum size of a flyable aircraft unreasonably large.
Nuclear-powered container ships are more practical, but still challenging. Given the very cost-competitive nature of the industry and its reputation for both avoiding (through the complexities of international and admiralty law) and ignoring (when the former doesn't suffice) health, safety, and environmental regulations, do you trust them to operate a few hundred nuclear reactors? (Remembering that naval reactors are a lot finickier than terrestrial ones.)
Iron smelting involves combining Fe2O3 and Fe3O4 (iron ore) with C (coke) and heating it to make Fe (iron) and CO2. Clean sources of heat are available, but a practical alternate way to reduce the ore to metallic iron is not.
Others have mentioned concrete. To make cement, you heat limestone to drive off the CO2. Reabsorbing CO2 from the atmosphere polymerizes the cement so it hardens. (Unfortunately, it's not a net-zero operation: you never absorb as much as was originally lost, and even approaching that takes decades.)
Of course every kg of battery you host costs energy to lift and energy in induced drag, so the not burning of the battery costs more than double the mass of the jet fuel that burns.
Batteries are a non-starter.
It is a bit disingenuous to combine cement manufacturing which is all about long term infrastructure in the same list as instant gratification things like air travel and such which really aren't necessary.
That still means a 75% reduction. So go do it.
No nukes will NEVER be cheaper even than gas. Not even biogas or collected farmyard emissions (say from a chicken coop). Solar will drop to the price of rooftiles.
A person replacing their outdoor lighting does not replace with a "LITERAL" 200W LED. Thatwould be a kw or two incandescent. Are they growing pot outdoors??? And they didn't swap a 60W bulb either: they either swapped it for a 12W bulb that was brighter, 6W bulb that was good enough or they had a 200W halogen spot and replaced it not at all.
YOU whitey are the one whining about how you're not gonna do it and evading even being asked to do anything by going "whattabouthtefurriners!?!?!?". YOU are going to have to do something. YOU.
Yes, they will too.
But they are. Their population growth is due to the birth rate not falling as fast as the mortality rate. That is all.
Get rid of 25% of the people, get rid of 25% of the emissions. In fact, get rid of 95% of the people, and we could all be roasting endangered elephants over coal fires, and both the elephants and the environment would be just fine. I'm rapidly coming to believe that Thanos was an underachiever who set his sights far too low (though he did get rid of many annoying minor characters).
actually it reduces it by a third. You have to get it from the chinese warehouse to the port, from port to port, and from port to the UK warehouse. If all three produce the same amount of emissions, then it is reduced by a third if you only go from the warehouse to your shop.
This is the reason we need to able to mod articles up or down. Who-ever did this 'study' obviously didn't study very hard, seriously, did they even try to google the subject???????????
Concrete:
https://www.google.co.uk/searc...
Airplanes:
https://www.google.co.uk/searc...
Steel:
https://www.google.co.uk/searc...
Shipping: Fucking obvious.
Power: Power storage - a zillion ways to store power.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
...how to build ocean-spanning bridges, and give up flying as an ultimately bad idea.
Vehicles can be powered by electricity by loading them onto rail transport. Friction on rails is much less. A vacuum tube for the train to travel in would also cut down on drag, while providing a "pumped hydro" approach to energy storage by generating a current from the difference in cubic miles of space within the tubes of maybe 0.1 PSI. Use wind and solar to evacuate the tubes when the wind and solar is available, and allow the atmosphere to rush in when it is not available and turn turbines to generate electricity while the tube goes from 0.1 PSI to 0.2 PSI. Something like that. No need for airplanes, no need for ships. Just run everything thru the tubes at high speed and little drag and no fossil fuels.
So how do we build a bridge when the supporting base is under 10,000 feet of water?
Nuclear power is just a giant boiler, so lets replace it, let`s do this:
1. Fetch a low boiling point liquid.
2. Dig 2 kmts under the earth, the temperature is constantly high enough there.
3. Make a circuit, place a turbine.
4. Shut down all those damn radioactive boilers. Listen to Kraftwerk`s Radioactivity.
The X-15 was fueled by liquid oxygen and liquified ammonia. Jet airliners get their oxidizer from the air, but they can be fueled by ammonia.
Yes, there is hazard with it, but liquified anhydrous ammonia is widely used in farming as nitrogen fertilizer.
There is a limited amount of fossil fuel.
Global warming is caused by humans. Therefore, there are too many humans on the planet. All else is vanity.
...does not care about this nonsense.
Your previous "free market" would see fossil fuels used all the way through the clathrate gun hypothesis, while chopping down every last redwood tree and hunting multiple species to extinction. Fuck you free market. Fuck it up its stupid ass.
Daily emissions of cruise ships same as one million cars
https://www.euractiv.com/secti...
Casteism