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We Still Have No Idea How To Eliminate More Than a Quarter of Energy Emissions (technologyreview.com)

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

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.

6 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Bullshit by MikeMo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      BUT, if we used nukes for everything everywhere it makes sense (like almost everything except transportation), we'd be way better off than we are now. Imagine only using fossil fuels for transportation. Even that will be decreasing and cars and trucks go more and more electric.

      One could almost say nukes are REQUIRED for a fully electric vehicle fleet.

    2. Re:Bullshit by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is already serious talk about electric airplanes.

      Electric planes may work for short hops, like Boston to NYC, or London to Paris. But there is no way they can go from SFO to Shanghai without some profound breakthroughs. Long haul is where most aviation energy consumption occurs.

  2. Three quarters is good by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  3. Let's work on energy efficiency! by ArhcAngel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  4. Simple: Sunset all internal combustion engines by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.