Slashdot Mirror
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.
Last time I checked, we're done with the Paris agreement in 2020 (specifically on Nov 4). By trying to slip it through as an executive thing (to skip Senate ratification as a binding approval), Obama allowed the next President (Trump) to kill it, and kill it he did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_the_Paris_Agreement
> 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=
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
The post (suspiciously) left out the most important explanatory part of TFA:
"The transportation sector held its title as the largest source of US emissions for the third year running, as robust growth in demand for diesel and jet fuel offset a modest decline in gasoline consumption," Rhodium wrote. Industrial emissions from various types of manufacturing as well as emissions from buildings both saw significant increases in their carbon emissions in 2018.
...
In 2018, gasoline demand decreased by just 0.1 percent. But growth in the US trucking industry increased diesel demand by 3.1 percent, and demand for air travel increased jet fuel demand by 3 percent.
Except that coal is more expensive - even if you pay less per kWh at best you are just pushing the cost onto someone else's lungs.
Trying to use India and China as an excuse is ridiculous. They are doing massive amounts to reduce their output, and if 2.5 billion people all adopted your lifestyle you would be completely screwed. China's emissions per capita are half of yours.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
China has already installed over 165 GW (equiv to about 200 or NG plants), 40 of which was installed this year. The original target was 105GW, which they blew past and now are considering a 210-270 GW target by 2020. Also, due to gov. incentives, China has the largest EV market in the world, with over 1 million sold to date and they're just maturing. Shenzhen, with 13 million people, runs 100% electric buses. https://www.pv-magazine.com/20...
The narrative that China and India are polluting to gain economic advantage is just RW radio garbage. They realize that fossil fuels are a dead end and the country with the most advancements in growing renewable energy market will prosper. We should be leading, but instead we're falling further behind and ceding the lead to China.
Trump has no agenda - any fool can see. He only cares about his "ratings" and "brand" (his words). He just regurgitates whatever Fox News, Hannity, and Limbaugh say, which reinforces what that audience saw on TV or heard on the radio. Just as Pruitt set out to destroy the EPA and hand it over to the regulated, this administration has sold the government to the highest bidder. Many of those companies that lobbied for tax cuts used those profits to buy back stocks, pay executives bonuses, then they continued to lay off and outsource workers. https://www.theguardian.com/us... https://www.techdirt.com/artic...