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Natural Gas is Now Getting in the Way; US Carbon Emissions Increase by 3.4% (arstechnica.com)
AmiMoJo shares a report: "The US was already off track in meeting its Paris Agreement targets. The gap is even wider headed into 2019." That's the dire news from Rhodium Group, a research firm that released preliminary estimates of US carbon emissions in 2018. Though the Trump administration said it would exit the Paris Agreement in 2017, the US is still bound by the agreement to submit progress reports until 2020. But the administration has justified regulatory rollbacks since then, claiming that regulation from the US government is unnecessary because emissions were trending downward anyway. But it appears that emissions have increased 3.4 percent in 2018 across the US economy, the second-largest annual increase in 20 years, according to Rhodium Group's preliminary data. (2010, when the US started recovering from the recession, was the largest annual increase in the last two decades.)
This reversal of course -- the first increase in emissions in three years -- came from a few sources. Carbon emissions from the US electricity sector increased by 1.9 percent, largely because the installation of new natural gas plants has outpaced coal retirements. Cheap natural gas has been credited with killing coal, which is a dirtier fossil fuel in terms of emissions. But natural gas is a fossil fuel, too, and burning more natural gas than is needed to simply replace coal will result in more carbon emissions. But electricity wasn't the main culprit. Transportation was.
This reversal of course -- the first increase in emissions in three years -- came from a few sources. Carbon emissions from the US electricity sector increased by 1.9 percent, largely because the installation of new natural gas plants has outpaced coal retirements. Cheap natural gas has been credited with killing coal, which is a dirtier fossil fuel in terms of emissions. But natural gas is a fossil fuel, too, and burning more natural gas than is needed to simply replace coal will result in more carbon emissions. But electricity wasn't the main culprit. Transportation was.
Climate change is more about redistributing money than about our planetary weather conditions. Paris was just another attempt to suck money out of the U.S. economy and move it to less developed countries. Breathe in, breathe out. I love the smell of good clean coal in the morning!
As noted in TFS and TFA, much of the increase comes from the transportation sector, and increased demand for diesel (and jet fuel, but I repeat myself.) What's needed to make immediate improvements in transportation efficiency and emissions is electrified rail. The specifics of what that would look like vary from place to place, and situation to situation, but in general getting rid of rubber tires and adding electric motivation are things which we not only could be doing now, but could have been doing already.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Thank you Mr Trump.
Yes, Thank you. Why? Because instead of suppressing our economy and lowering emissions by making us all poorer in actual standards of living, he has got the economy growing faster than inflation and our population for the first time in at least a decade.
Now I'm all for being careful with the environment though conservation and technological means to reduce emissions as much as we can, but I'm for a strong economy that keeps us competitive with the rest of the world as it's of strategic importance. We cannot unilaterally disarm, either militarily or economically if we wish to preserve both our freedoms and a reasonable standard of living for ourselves and our posterity.
China would be more than willing to sacrifice their environment to rule us, Russia would to. Do you really believe that the fall of the USA would be a good thing for the world? That death and wide spread destruction would not follow our demise? What's worse then?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
> And thank you for understanding that no amount of taxes and regulations on the United States will cause the biggest polluters in India and China to reduce their output
"Well those guys over there are pissing in the pool, so why should I stop?"
That's the logic here, in a nutshell.
=Smidge=
China would be more than willing to sacrifice their environment to rule us, Russia would to. Do you really believe that the fall of the USA would be a good thing for the world? That death and wide spread destruction would not follow our demise? What's worse then?
Apparently you haven't been paying attention. There is a large and growing segment of society that believes the US is the source of all evil in the world, and that the downfall of the US is the best thing that could possibly happen. It would be funny in a dark, twisted way, if it wasn't so tragic.
Talk about burying the lede:
While we don’t expect a repeat of 2018 this coming year , the data provides some important insights into the emission reduction challenges facing the US.
The reasons they don't expect a repeat are sprinkled through the article, e.g.:
1. The winter was extremely cold. People used more energy staying warm.
2. The economy was roaring. People traveled more. More goods were shipped. More buildings were built.
On top of this, and somewhat amazingly for what purports to be an independent research group, they chose to put a negative spin on the fact that, as they put it, "a record number of coal-fired power plants were retired last year" and replaced with natural gas (which our friend AmiMoJo then further spun into the sensationalist title of this article).
At bottom, this is just more of the unfortunate stream of SlashClickbait that is gradually swamping what used to be a useful tech blog.
Before pointing your finger in an accusatory manner, perhaps you should consider what their targets are first.
China and India are still on the up side of the curve, no one expects them to be decreasing yet. They expect them to be slowing the rate of increase, which they are.
Remember all that whining about how emissions targets would force the US back to pre-industrial levels of civilization? That's the reason why China and India aren't expected to immediately halt their increasing output.
And despite all that they are still at just a fraction of the per capita emissions of the US anyway, around half.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nuclear can supply all of our energy needs for the foreseeable future. Climate bed-wetters always frame our current situation as solar/wind or nothing.
We've run very old Nuclear plants well past their design lifespans safely. We would be on 3rd or 4th gen reactors by now - if we could just get some Nuclear deniers out of the way.
"There is a large and growing segment of society that believes the US is the source of all evil in the world" Well, ya think there may be a reason for it, cherub???
If nothing else comes from trump's idiotic reign it will show that the constitution needs to be idiot proofed because they've just handed it over to a group of idiots.
It was supposed that the other two branches would stop the idiot in the executive from fucking things up, but republicans are idiots and proved that you cannot rely on it unless you make it necessary for politicians to back the USA rather than their party (very stalinist, really: party before country and people) and the courts cannot do anything if they've been partisan picked by the legislative branch idiots who, lets remember, put party before country.
There will be a lot less "gentlemen's agreement" in the constutution because the current pile of rightwing fuckwits have shown that there aren't any gentlemen on the rightwing.
China would be more than willing to sacrifice their environment to rule us, Russia would to.
China's per capita carbon emisions are about one third of the USA. Russia's per capita emissions are about 4/5 of the USA. It's pretty disingeneous to demand that China, which still has a long way to go in terms of economic development, slashes or freezes its emissions while the USA continues having one of the highest emission rates in the world. We on par with Saidi Arabia.
Are you trolling or do you actually believe that protecting the environment for future generations requires harming the economy?
Hanlon's Razor says I should assume the latter, so this will probably go over your head, but people smarter than you and I agree that correcting market failures such as negative externalities makes the market work better, not worse.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Utilities are trying to get ready for EVs, as well as deal with the CO2. Problem is, they might pull out a 120 MW coal plant and put in a 500 MW nat gas. Considering that nat gas emits less than 1/2 of the CO2 of coal (per BTU) means that you can double, even come close to 3x increase and still emit less. But this is 4x up. Way too much.
We need to replace those old coal plants with nuclear power.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The environment doesn't give two fucks about per-capita emissions.
Science can be used to explain why the developing world is polluting more in spite of doing more to reduce pollution. You're correct that the total is what matters, but it's not reasonable to expect those nations to change overnight — especially given that the rest of us aren't exactly doing all we can, either. And if we really want them to improve rapidly, maybe we should help them do it, because after all,
Total is all that matters.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Come on, America, it's time to be the adults, look under our own beds, and assure ourselves that the Nuclear Boogeyman is just our imagination.
We need nuclear power. Safe nuclear power isn't 'theoretical', it's a reality; there are safer reactor designs on the drawing board right now, but since everyone seems to lose their bladder containment whenever the subject comes up, no money gets allocated into developing them.
Of course none of this can even begin to happen until 2020; we need to get the current bozo out of office, because his geriatric obsession with dragging us back to the 1940's, trying to resurrect the coal industry, prevents any progress in nuclear power from happening. Hell, I wouldn't put it past the guy to 'executive order' all information to-date on reactor design be destroyed, just to ensure that ass-backwards coal mining is brought back from the dead.
Once we get past that hurdle and back into a sane energy policy, new reactor designs can be developed and implemented. That'll take at least 10 years though.
Meanwhile continuing development and deployment of solar and wind power, in conjuction with large-scale energy storage strategies, should tide us over, and as capacity in these technologies increases, old-fashioned outdated filthy fossil-fuel-based power plants can be shuttered. Tear them down and build solar farms, so we can reuse the grid connections to them.
In order to facilitate faster adoption of plug-in electric vehicles, there should be new government programs to promote them. Rebates, credits for decomissioning ICE vehicles, grants to municipalities to fund change-over from diesel buses to electrics, ad campaigns promoting electrics. Get as many people as possible off ICE-based transportation and into electrics.
Meanwhile continue funding development of practical fusion technology, to eventually replace fission technology.
Also, for all we know, if we, as a species, manage to survive another hundred years or so, we might even have antimatter reactor technology (or something more exotic than that, even), and never have to worry about energy ever again.
The takeaway here is that we have to stop dwelling on the past and move forward, stop being scared little rabbits, use what we've got that's better than what we've been using, and stop sabotaging ourselves.
lolz, we're not going to go nuclear, get it out of your head. spouting idealistic nonsense that won't cut it in the real world is waste of time.
Replacing coal with natgas does reduce emissions.
Agressive pursuit of totally non-polluting alternatives will take decades to implement, that's reality.