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California Governor Says 100 Percent Clean Electricity Not Enough, State Must Go Carbon Neutral (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill mandating that the state's utilities move to 100-percent zero-emission electricity generation by 2045. Brown also issued an executive order today requiring the state to become carbon neutral by 2045, that is, mandating that the state remove as much greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as it puts into the atmosphere. One of the most interesting aspects of the zero-emissions bill signed today is that it also specifies that California can't increase the carbon emissions of another state to get cheap electricity. It appears that buying electricity from a coal plant in Nevada is fine if that electricity had been supplied prior to the bill's passing, but seeking out new out-of-state natural gas-fired plants to buy from would not be allowed. The bill's ambitiousness is compounded by the executive order that Gov. Brown signed today. The order requires California to become carbon neutral by 2045. "The achievement of carbon neutrality will require both significant reductions in carbon pollution and removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, including sequestration in forests, soils, and other natural landscapes," Brown's executive order states (PDF).
Nah. California has a budget surplus. Their educational system isn't that bad once you take out some outlying mismanaged districts. Their public university system is decent to good.
Cost of living isn't actually that high, especially if you chose wisely when to buy a house (i.e. 2008-2012). Low property taxes, low energy costs in many areas (minimal need for heat and A/C). Fuel is expensive, but you can buy an efficient car or go electric -- no need for most people to commute to an office job in an F-250.
Time to build more nuclear power plants, re-open San Onofre, and extend the life of Diablo Canyon. Nuclear energy is both clean and reliable, especially when combined with renewables.
That San Onofre heat generator is truly ruined beyond what current regulations will allow. It isn't economically viable to fix it.
Source: EPRI turbine generator conference presentation by San Onofre engineer
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Meanwhile the conservative states are insolvent and living off of State scale welfare. It really is funny/ironic that the group who champions that they are the economically informed tribe have 3rd world levels of GDP per population.
Imports represent ~29% of total electrical energy for 2017. Only about 20 GWh of what was imported was carbon (coal + gas) sources. This represents just 7% of all their electrical energy for that year.
http://www.energy.ca.gov/alman...
Cleaning this up is relatively easy; since electricity is fungible, you can specifically pay for renewable energy to make sure your money goes towards those sources. Nobody is forcing anyone to burn coal (except the coal industry and the Trump administration) and if everyone insists on buying renewable energy, then that's what providers will invest in and develop.
=Smidge=
Kinda like how all of the major hikes in the ACA were timed to happen a month or two after elections. Weird.
Why would neighboring states laugh? They begged California to help pay for the power plants in their communities and are desperate to avoid those utilities pulling out now that the contracts are expiring.
They've been deathly afraid ever since Enron that California will cut the wires.
Even the carbon neutral goal has a lot of implications to land use, construction, food production and such. Fortunately low carbon concrete and other materials are already in the labs and maybe ready to be used on the wide scale by 2045.
I think they're hoping for a slightly less... flammable solution.
Trees are fine if you plan [for] them correctly. The [Northern] Californian natives set back fires every year to clear out the understory. Any residences in the trees today need to be mobile, AKA trailers or RVs, and removed yearly to permit us to do the same, or be otherwise fireproof. (Earth bag homes with metal roofs and adequate clearings, subterranean dwellings with metal shutters on the skylights, etc.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My evidence is observable reality. In a bid to save coal and nuclear power plants - which are unable to stay in business against cheaper alternatives - Trump has asked the DOE to force utilities to buy a certain amount of their power from these sources.
https://www.powermag.com/repor...
The DOE thankfully seems to be dragging their feet a little, and to my knowledge has yet to actually issue a formal order to enforce this. There is no active directive, but there is probably a draft one (the DOE's website for browsing draft directives is not working at the moment so I can't check). I suspect that the draft directive includes the 24-month investigation and temporary purchasing requirements mentioned in the articles.
=Smidge=
It's only "clean" in terms of carbon dioxide. Nuclear waste isn't "clean".
Waste is inevitable. There's waste from coal power, wind power, solar power, all power has waste. The definition of waste is it is not "clean". We know what to do with spent nuclear fuel. We can reprocess it into new fuel, and the stuff left over from that can be processed further into industrial and medical isotopes. The stuff left over from that is, again by definition, "waste" which we know how to dispose of safely.
The problem is that we, as a nation, had picked a number of sites to dispose of this waste but the Democrats have been holding up the funding to open these sites. Yucca Mountain as a waste disposal site has been in the planning for perhaps 60 years. It should have been opened in the 1990s for permanent storage of waste. It's 20 or 30 years beyond that now and the site still has not opened.
Any problems of nuclear waste are all political. These problems only exist because politicians created them. The bulk of these politicians are in one political party. That party is the Democratic Party.
The nuclear waste problem is a construct of the Democrats. Get them out of the way and we don't have a nuclear waste problem.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
That's not a random from-my-ass number, that's the level of CO2 that was in the atmosphere before the industrial revolution. The -correct- global average temperature is one that fits well with our established civilization and gives good crop yields, which is one that results from pre-industrial CO2 levels or slightly above.
Bullshit. No it isn't. In pre-industrial times, we had the Little Ice Age. Whole villages in the Swiss Alps were destroyed because of glacier growth. Famines caused by cold-induced crop failures in France in 1693-94, Norway in 1695-96, and Sweden in 1696-97 killed 10% of the populations of each country. In China the Ming dynasty fell because of the droughts and subsequent famines caused by the cold. The city of Timbuktu was flooded at least 13 times by the Niger river because of unusually high snowpack on mountain peaks in North Africa that hasn't happened before or since.
The correct global average temperature is a good deal higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution because cold weather kills people.