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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).
State must go Paleo.
Then stop burning all your forests.
No, that would just increase the methane emissions from all that bullshit.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's planned for long after he is out of office. This is one of those glory grabbing bills
If you want to live forever, with a fixed set of resources, you by defition need to recycle ALL of them.
Th
Build a bunch of solar powered CO2 collectors. That way you can still drive your car around LA.
Enron,
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...
Seeing as they are already importing a quarter of their electricity.
Look on the bright side all you people that want solar, will finally have it. It will be the only power anyone can actually afford in California. Of course anyone that actually needs reliable power at reasonable prices is going to be out of there.
If they don't balance their state's carbon neutrality against what they import, then it's a shell game. Let someone else have the burden of using massive amounts of carbon to create their "neutral" infrastructure.
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.
You have a state that is headed for fiscal bankruptcy, the cost of living is so high the middle class is leaving in droves and you have one of the worst K-12 education systems in the nation.
The bottom line is that California is on a path to duplicate the failures of Venezuela and they are working on energy emission plans for 2045.
Why is it crazy to require minimally environmentally costly energy sources? Moving to nearly 100% nuclear and renewable electricity is a damn good idea. We have the technology -- it's just an engineering problem at this point.
False dichotomies are fun!
"Old man yells at systemd"
With such cynical thought, nobody need to try to do any long term planning because it is automagically "glory grabbing bills".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Agriculture is a huge source of carbon emissions in California (both directly and indirectly through transportation and processing), a major source of environmental destruction in California, a big strain on limited water resources, and a magnet for unskilled illegal migration. To go carbon neutral, California would have to shut down much of its agriculture, which would not just result in much lower carbon emissions from the state but also address all those other problems. What a win-win solution for California and the world!
Want to know if people are moving out of California?
Cost to rent a one-way 10' U-Haul truck from Las Vegas to Los Angeles: $89
Cost to rent a one-way 10' U-Haul truck from Los Angeles to Las Vegas: $401
Which way do you think more people are moving?
I have to give him credit for pushing an ambitious agenda, but how's he gonna get the world's fifth largest economy there? Maybe he'll ban out-of-state gas-powered cars from crossing over CA state lines? Ban most forms of manufacturing in the state?
The only way CA could possibly get there is a huge expansion of nuclear power, and they're an earthquake prone state full of anti-nuclear NIMBYs.
More importantly, IMO: He's missing the real problem on CO2 emissions. If he really wants to make a difference for CA and the world in the long haul, he should get on the horn to China and get them to slow down their coal-fired plants. Maybe really go nuts and say that he's not going to allow any Chinese imports into CA ports? Setting a good example for the Chinese with arbitrary CO2 bans isn't going to get them to have a change of heart alone.
> Technological change cannot happen in a vacuum. It takes years of planning, research, development, and funding to implement the change.
Which is why the target date is 2045.
A requirement like this is more or less the kind of pressure that is required to drive the investment of time and resources to make it happen. It should not be the legislator's job to dictate "the plan" - they set the requirement, and it's up to those who actually generate and distribute the power to figure out how to meet that requirement.
That said, I'm sure the bill was not written in a total vacuum and the target date was not chosen arbitrarily. There was probably lots of meetings and discussions with engineers and industry representatives to determine what the range of realistic goals could be, and the requirements based on that.
=Smidge=
Why do politicians always set such far off goals? Are they doing it to simply make the appearance of doing something? By the time 2045 rolls around, it's already going to be too late to effect any meaningful change. It starts right here, right now ... today.
Financial aspects have nothing to do with the issue?
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I mean this sincerely. Simply because you 'must' do something doesn't mean it is physically possible.
I do not know of any fully carbon neutral nation. You basically have to fake the inputs and outputs to even show that such a system is possible. Why sequestering carbon takes energy, where to you get that energy?
To be carbon neutral you would have to:
1 ) sequester carbon ( is there a way of sequestering Carbon that does not require more energy then the energy produced by creating the carbon emission in the first place? )
2 ) virtually ban all internal combustion engines.
3 ) Generate all your electricity from clean sources
4 ) Somehow control where you source every item entering your territory from ( cars, lumber, solar panels, computers) so they were produced with only green power , or have some rule that requires you sequester carbon equal to the carbon cost of producing those items.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
won't supply and demand solve the cost of living thing all by itself? I mean, assuming there aren't external forces working against supply and demand. But that never happens, right?
Oh, as for CA turning into Venezuela, is the United States Federal Government going to lock them out of external banking systems and foreign aid via sanctions? No? Then I think they'll do just fine. And that's before we factor in that their economy is much, much stronger. Nice straw man though. You guys are really getting a lot of mileage out of Venezuela's misery. Plus the US got to seize all their overseas assets when they defaulted on the loans. Kind of a win-win for those sanctions and it didn't even cost all that much.
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That's nice for benign instances. But even a relatively small organization like a state can do horrific damage. The population of Italy before WWII was about the same as California is now, 40 million. Should California follow Italy's example, just because it would be a state initiative and that makes it OK?
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People should be forced to pay for the true environmental (and military, for that matter) costs of their energy use.
I call this a case of double bullshit.
First, the governor is making a plan so far in the future that he will not be responsible for making it happen. No politician can make such a promise because their actions cannot dictate the actions of a future executive or legislature. A goal in 2045 is, by my math, 27 years in the future. Unless he plans on staying in office that long I don't believe him in having any intention to attain this goal. On top of that the guy is 80 years old, so even if he thought he could stay in office for 25+ years then he must also have a plan to live well beyond his 100th birthday.
Had he made an energy plan for the remainder of his term, or even to the end of being re-elected on more time, then I'd take him seriously.
Second, he's shutting down all the nuclear power plants. No other energy source we know of has a lower CO2 output per energy produced than nuclear power. By shutting down the last of the nuclear power plants, and having no plans to build more, makes this plan of 100% carbon neutral power a load of bullshit. If he was serious about this plan then he'd include in the plan nuclear power, as unpopular as it might be to do so. Saying he'll do everything in his power to lower CO2 but use nuclear power tells me that he sees nuclear power a greater threat to the state, nation, human species, or whatever, than nuclear power.
If nuclear power is a greater threat than CO2 then I have to wonder just how much of a threat CO2 is to anyone. Someone explain this to me. How much of a threat is CO2? How much of a threat is nuclear power? How can nuclear power be a greater threat? If we can't have nuclear power to solve the problem of our CO2 emissions then why should I take any threat of global warming from CO2 seriously?
This is bullshit for a politician to make any promise of government action beyond the end of their term. This is bullshit to make any plan of lowered CO2 from energy production that does not include nuclear power. This is double bullshit to make both promises at the same time.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
As an alternative we simply need to announce that Trump solved all the warming issues by personally designing and insdtalling some magical technology and at least 35% of Americans can sleep tight firmly knowing that the orange lunatic has saved them completely.
He is not running for re-election.
Once the economy crumbles... producing less carbon will be easy.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Gov Brown is an excellent administrator; if not the best in the USA in the last 50 years. You may not agree with his opinions but he has an exceptionally good understanding of how government can work. He is politically way too far ahead of his voters and that is his biggest problem... proven by his 1st term as gov decades ahead of his voters who thought he was a bit nuts-- but now have caught up to him. He LISTENS to science and reason and applies them and does not get stuck down to a position like a normal person.
As far as long term planning, that is done often; it might be news to YOU. It is not done enough with most politicians not thinking past an election cycle and many US administrators also not thinking even shorter term.
As far as tying them to policies and laws; they go forever unless stated otherwise - which is just fine because the system has ways to repeal them if necessary (otherwise lacking peaceful change violent change does it. ) FYI, the constitution allows for amendments. If you are SERIOUS about making something important CHANGE you entrench it as much as possible so future people have to deal with it.
Global Warming is physical reality no matter what you name it or believe; doesn't matter, it WILL happen. Using LAW to make the crisis real in the near future is artificial but a great administrator works AHEAD of a disaster instead of merely reacting to disasters which were foreseen. This such common sense that most administrators are amazingly good at BS excuses of about them being unprepared or unaware of disasters.
It's going to be much harder if you wait. Necessity is the mother of invention. Hell, look at all the progress major wars produce. This is bigger than WW1, WW2... but it's slow moving and subtle with decades long attacks.
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Oh, wrong politician. This one just keeps raising taxes and and the Californians keep asking for more.
1. Financial/Real Estate * Real Estate- Which has value due to Resource extraction by farming
2. Manufacturing * Low skill (Texas is to the North as Mexico is to the U.S.)
3. Professional / Business Services * Consulting services around resource extraction
*4. Mining/Oil/Gas Extraction
Yeah. They don't have anything else going on in texas.
100 percent is for wimps.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Quite frankly, a mix of renewables is far cheaper than fossil fuel energy. Building a system designed to handle 120 percent of the projected load would allow you to flood the energy market, crush the fossil fuel deadenders with cheap Califfornian solar wind and hydro, and then dominate the remaining market.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You could make that argument if the delta was 25-75%, but when the price is 400% higher, something else is going on.
And it is.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/169420-supply-and-demand-in-action-the-u-haul-indicator
Apparently it is true.
So you're saying the revenue generated by the #4 industry in Texas is enough to cover the top industry AND the third largest industry?
More or less. Yes. I like your reference though.
Fucking uneducated hippie. Stop being part of the problem hippie and open a book. Maybe you will learn something.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Time to build more nuclear power plants, re-open San Onofre, and extend the life of Diablo Canyon.
Got any other fantasies since that one isn't going to come to pass? Nuke plants aren't going to get built in the US any time soon so get over it. That's just the political reality of them.
Nuclear energy is both clean and reliable, especially when combined with renewables.
Nuclear energy is only clean in the sense that it doesn't produce significant carbon and particulate pollution. But it still generates substantial amounts of rather nasty waste products for which we have no proper means of disposal. Saying nuclear is cleaner than fossil fuels is the very definition of damning with faint praise. I actually agree that I'd rather we use nuclear than fossil fuels but I'm not about to get ridiculous and claim it is clean.
are you going to enforce it on products and make sure car/phone/etc is produced out side of the state with zero carbon emission (... in China)?
If the SF Bay Area really had a high outward migration rate compared to influx, property prices would be cratering. This is not the case. As far as law enforcement, G-d bless lax law enforcement. I for one don't want to live in a fucking police state.
Our newest senator fucked her way into her career. Willie Brown's main squeeze.
The SF homeless industrial complex spends over 40k$/(bum * year). It doesn't go to the bums.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
He still gets an _allowance_ from a trust his parents setup. Never had an honest job in his life.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The US Seized their assets because they defaulted on loans. It was _not_ done in retaliation for Venezuela seizing US company assets. And perhaps Venezuela would stop seizing US assets if we'd stop meddling in their affairs and attacking them with economic sanctions because we disagree with their politics...
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this is not to say Venezuela's gov't is all sunshine and kittens. Venezuela was a third world hell hole who inexplicably became a first world nation almost overnight when their populist government took their oil profits and spent them on the people instead of handing them over to multinationals like most of the rest of the world does. When that oil money dried up they were bound to have problems. Having the most powerful country in human history hitting them with sanctions like a ton of bricks cinched it.
The United States has been fucking with South America for hundreds of years. Always at the behest of corporations and against the interests of South American people. 30 seconds on google will tell you as much. My country's behavior on the national stage has been abhorrent in everything except WWII (and there's some nasty examples around that war too...). As a result a more than half of my tax dollars go to fighting the wars we caused and I don't get guaranteed healthcare, advanced education for my kids or any of the other things a civilized country with this much wealth should have.
It's always cheaper to drop food than bombs. You'd think we'd 've learned that in post WII. Damn, but we never learn a god damn thing in this country.
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Oh well then you must be an expert then. ;-)
Not an expert but I probably know more than 90% of the people on /. about the subject. IEven yourself. Just from a quick look I would say you are 10 years out of date.
I've read and watched a lot of material about the subject over the years. The new design that was on the latest documentary doesn't use any active cooling systems, water provided by pumps, to keep it from melting down. The system suspending the reactant material, nuclear fuel, in a salt solution. If the system get out of control it heats up. The heat causes the solution to expand increasing the distance between the atoms. At a point the system breaks critical mass by the distance between the atoms being to great to sustain fission. The whole process grounds stops as dictated by the laws of physics.
There is a second safe guard in the system. There is a plug in the bottom of the reactor. If the solution does get to hot, the plug melts and dumps the entire contents in a special chamber at the bottom of the containment building. The chamber is designed to store a runaway reaction.
As for one of your other comments. Yes, humans agreed decades on a place to store waste. Just the hippies started barking and not allowed us to move it their. Besides storing waste is wasteful. It would be fare better to reprocess it and reuse it. Except again, there are those smelly hippies causing problems.
By the way, incase you haven't figured it out, hippies is just a catch all name I use to designate any anti nuke kook.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Gov Brown is an excellent administrator; if not the best in the USA in the last 50 years.
He LISTENS to science and reason and applies them and does not get stuck down to a position like a normal person.
I might be able to find this believable if Gov. Brown supported nuclear power. He is stuck on an anti-nuclear position in spite of science and reason. We are going to have to decide which is the greater threat, nuclear power or global warming. If nuclear power is the greater threat then I have to wonder just how much of a threat global warming truly poses. If global warming is the greater threat then we must build more nuclear power plants.
Don't give me bullshit over a "false dichotomy". I'm merely asking which poses a greater threat. If you want to tell me that nuclear power poses a greater threat then I'll simply move along in my gasoline powered 4x4 truck. If you believe global warming is a greater threat than nuclear power then I'd be quite pleased to buy a new electric vehicle once that nuclear power plant comes on line. As I'm quite confident that people would rather choose global warming over nuclear power then I have no fear in having to scrap my truck.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I'll just step over the poop. At least it keeps more Midwestern/suburban milquetoasts from moving into the city and raising prices further.
Mod parent up -- a poster who gets it. Except the 4x4 truck. If I can't have an electric car powered with nuclear power, I'd rather sip fuel in an Insight, Prius, or on a Vespa.
We have the greatest unicorns here in America. Tremendous unicorns whose ratings are going up.
Key words: DOMESTIC OUT-MIGRATION. Foreign immigration (legal and otherwise) more than makes up for it. The coastal states have always been gateways for immigrants, nothing new here.
That sounds like what most police departments would do with a stolen car.
As far as assault, if there's a mutual fight and no one gets seriously hurt, I'd rather not pay to jail the combatants. Many states have a "mutual combat" exception to assault laws.
...where everyone is a fruit, a nut, or a flake...
nothing to see here - move along
cost
nothing to see here - move along
Time for the public to start paying for the true costs of their energy use to Gaia.
too bad we live in a democracy not an autocracy...you can't order people around...good or bad in the long term, but it's what we have...
nothing to see here - move along
in all techs, there are many paper designs that are awesome, but then in real live tests they face a never ending material, process and implementation problems.
Yes, molten salt is probably the best solution for future nuclear fission reactors, but they are very hard to implement, to contain and need special material... some alloys are even referred on paper, but do not exist yet. There are many lab tests and test plans, but no real world working station exists yet. Even if the reactor itself is simpler, you still need a chemical plant next to it to process and cleanup the molten salt. Everyone is also testing different materials to sustain the salt and neutron flux without breaking up. All this is slow, each test take years, that is why we listen about molten salt reactors for years and no real working design is here yet. Basically, it will take a long time to get a working design, that will then be refined to reduce costs.
Adding more safeguards to nuclear reactors is always a good idea, but that also adds costs. Lab tests have less safeguards and look "cheap", but then real world and size, those costs quickly scale up. But most of the accidents where caused by humans, either by errors or cutting corners to cut costs and we still didn't had a terrorist attack on a nuclear central. Nuclear accidents are always a huge problem.
Finally, you may blame hippies, or whatever, but there are huge problems in storing nuclear waste. Just because someone accepts money to store nuclear waste, do not make it a good place to store it. Remember that it will have to store all nuclear waste without leaking for several thousand of years... it is easy to dump it somewhere, but even only after 40 years the current containers are already leaking.
Recycling nuclear waste!? everyone agrees, but that is hard, cost a fortune and you still have a very dangerous waste, that either store it - dump it in a good mine - or again try to recycle it - another huge amount of money. Basically all this need lot of waste refining and a nuclear reactor (that eats lots energy) to try to destroy those waste.
Even with lot of money, there still no tech to recycle everything
Finally, all this and wind and solar is already cheaper than nuclear... gas is also cheaper, but also have the CO2 waste, yet MUCH better than coal
Higuita
forgot this, check the latest USA energy expert report for energy cost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Higuita
Lol what a retard. "Reality has a liberal bias" just another southern moron pretending to know better than experts. Also you completely misquoted your own source. Nothing in that article said anything about lying. Only that an estimate was raised by 20%. Unless you've never worked a day in your life you should know, project estimates often creep up.
"Reality has a liberal bias"
So sad.
Nothing in that article said anything about lying. Only that an estimate was raised by 20%.
what's 10- 20 billion amongst friends.
Trump inherited his money.
But Brown's parents knew he _couldn't_handle_ the money, so they left it in trust with an adult trustee to supervise their useless spawn.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
WTF is an honest job?!
This is a man who DOES NOT HAVE TO WORK hard at all. He not only works but his work IS HIS LIFE; the obsessive kind of worker that no normal person can compete with because they have a life.
So you dismiss a man who works hard completely by his own choice when he is free to do jack shit. Not only that he picks arguably the hardest job of all. Being an elected public servant who is honest and actually does what they think is best for the public despite the voters not thinking longer term is NOT easy. Those types never quit to become lobbyists they find another way to make a difference. Yes those types can be righteously annoying as hell sometimes but they are not corrupt evil pricks and are motivated by selflessness. The ones who can CHANGE based upon reason are not so common either. But simply because some people think nuclear power is the greatest thing ever and his disagreement is not a good enough reason to oppose him. It's a reason to convince him because these types are powerful allies.
Somebody who needs money or works to survive is supposed to be a great leader? All that gives you is some perspective which you are greatly overvaluing.
Mostly, I find such attacks are by insecure people trying to bring somebody down because they themselves only work because they are forced to do what they do; probably they'd be doing jack shit if they could, they resent people who work just as hard due to more ideal motives. They don't have the chance to prove their character in that way; maybe they feel they wouldn't match up?
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Our newest senator fucked her way into her career. Willie Brown's main squeeze.
The SF homeless industrial complex spends over 40k$/(bum * year). It doesn't go to the bums.
Yep. And if you point that out it means you hate homeless people.
Do you have ESP?
Always a coward and a liar.
Per capita Americans use more coal than just about anyone. More than India, even more than China.
You are not even CAPABLE of logic. China consumes over 1/2 of the consumed coal on this PLANET EACH YEAR for the last 10 years. .31
BUT, they are 1/6-1/5 of the worlds population or ~19%.
America consumes 15-8% of all of the consumed coal for the last 10 years. Yet, population of 5%. It is obvious that with MINOR knowledge that America's coal per capita can not even be FUCKING CLOSE.
So, here are some REAL numbers.
What follows is 2017 coal consumption equivalence in million metric tons of oil equivalence| population in millions | coal consumption per million capitia.
China: 1, 892.6|1,409| 1.34
India: 424| 1,339|
USA: 332| 324| 1.02
Russia: 92.3|143|.65
S. Africa: 82.2|56| 1.47
Germany: 71.3|82|.87
While China is not the highest in per capitia, it is one of the highest.
And America is not even CLOSE to China in terms of per capita.
Porky, you keep speaking of per capita, and yet, you constantly lie, rather than simply face the facts.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Again random AC's are me. Again you accuse me of lying with no evidence whatsoever. When will you learn Windy?
You are still yet to show a single lie, yet you claim it all the time. You like to also claim any random AC is me, it's probably you. You are dishonest enough to pull that shit.
I often point out your lies and lies more lies more lies even more lies lies and lies When you aren't lying, you are just making shit up that is in no way believable, and lying.
I've showed you numerous times Windy. here here and here at least 3 times just recently and many more previously. Don't pretend you don't know you are being dishonest.
Each time the discussion was about coal used for eletricity.
Even now everyone has been talking about electricity and you throw in a number (with a paywalled link, step up from no link at all I guess) that is including industrial coal use as well. Then claiming people are lying. (quite deceitful of you)
Strange that you would claim for the last 10 years. When even your own data shows 10 years ago in 2008 America consumed 535.9 and China consumed 1609.3
It's obvious even using total coal and not just electricity, per person America is way way higher. You can find the year it crossed over if you like. But why did you have to lie about it in the first place?
So you move the goalposts, claim falsely that other people are lying, and then with your moved goalposts you still have to lie anyway to make it seem even worse. You just can't help yourself.
China consumes over 1/2 of the consumed coal on this PLANET EACH YEAR for the last 10 years.
And then there is this blatant lie. You can clearly see the red line is under the black one. Why lie all the time?