For all the harping of the issue, lets pretend for a min that 100% of everyone agrees, AGW is real and it is a problem.
Now what?
What I do NOT see is anyone putting fourth solutions that will prevent it from becoming a massive problem over time.
I see numbers that are "safe" from 300 up to 450 PPM CO2, but the problem is, even the White House Council on this says that to keep CO2 at 450 PPM that every nation must cut at least 60% CO2 and every industrial nation must cut by at least 80% by 2050.
The US put out over 5 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2015. So by 2050, with a larger population, we have to somehow cut that to 1 billion metric tons or less.
And so does EVERY OTHER NATION on Earth...
That doesn't strike me as very likely to happen.
Not only are we going to sail right by 500 PPM, I expect 600 PPM will come and go without much of an issue. We might slow the rise, but the picture isn't going to change.
In order to stabilize CO2 concentrations at about 450 ppm by 2050, global emissions would have to decline by about 60% by 2050. Industrialized countries greenhouse gas emissions would have to decline by about 80% by 2050.
Exactly. It's a lot of solar panels and wind turbines. And a non-gridded paradigm.
1970 called and thanked you for the support.
There is "a lot", then there is "a lot lot".
You should try the math and see how many solar panels and wind turbines would be required to make a difference.
It is something on the order of one million panels... per day, every day, for the next 35 years... 10,000 wind turbines a week, and a nuclear reactor every other day, for 35 years...
That is what it would take to cut CO2 output by 80% in 35 years.
You're missing a few orders of magnitude with your plans...
I think the problem is you are stuck in a paradigm from maybe 1970. Solar power is for satellites, wind doesn't exist, and battery technology is zenithed out at ni-cads.
I'm not, but I can understand why you might think so...
Solar and Wind are fine, we will continue to build them out until they are perhaps 30% of our total power mix. They may run into problems at 25%, or may extend to 35%, but beyond that you run into dependability issues.
Batteries are nice for your home, but your home is not the primary energy user in the US.
But time doesn't stand still. I already use a lot less electricity than I used to. Everything in the house is as efficient as you can get, lights are LED, and I've increased the quality of life by doing so.It isn't just solar becoming cheaper and more efficient, the generation/use equation has the parts moving toward each other.
I too have gone to LEDs and I also now make purchase decisions based partly on power consumption.
However, not everyone can make a massive difference in their total power usage. There is little that I can economically do to my home to get my power usage down much further. The windows may be next, but it'll cost over $10,000 to replace them all and the savings, while real, takes time to add up.
As soon as the battery technology gets to the right price point, I'm cutting the power company completely off.
First, residential power consumption is only part of it. Commercial power use is far higher than home use, so even if every home got off the grid (they won't, but lets pretend), you wouldn't cut power use as much as you think.
Second, you likely won't be allowed to leave the grid. Already in some parts of the country laws are being passed to force people to stay connected. As more people try and leave, this will only continue.
Times aren't just a-changin, they have changed.
Not that much... Renewables in 1998 were just over 11% of US power generation. In 2015 they were 13.44%. It is a nice increase, but not THAT much.
At the end of the day, it doesn't actually matter what you do. To stop CO2 at 450 PPM, the whole planet needs to cut CO2 output by 80%. That might not be possible, no matter how much money everyone is willing to spend (and lets be honest, a whole lot of people aren't even willing to try).
I'm not telling you CO2 is good, it isn't... I'm telling you what reality is...
We can use the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert the coal to more usable forms. We aren't going to just let all those delicious hydrocarbons go to waste.
People probably read my posts and think that I'm against Wind and Solar. I'm not.
I'm simply against bad math. Wind makes up about 5% of the power in the US. I can see this increasing to 10% over the next 10 years.
Solar makes up nearly nothing, but it will likely increase to 5% over the next 10 years.
In 20 years, the two of them combined may well be 20% of our total power production. Maybe 30% in 30 years. But it will hit a wall somewhere around there, they are not dependable enough to be our primary power sources.
To have 24/7/365 power, you need something that runs all the time. Wind and Solar aren't it.
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The above is just the US, the situation is better in Europe, but far worse in the rest of the world. The total numbers are just ugly and everyone loves to talk about percentage changes and "cuts from prior levels", but no one wants to talk about total numbers and math.
The US output over 5 billion metric tons of CO2 last year. To simply stop the rise of CO2 at 450 PPM would require an 80% cut to 1 billion metric tons of CO2 by 2050. And it also requires EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD DO IT AS WELL.
I would argue the same for oil and nat gas. The idea of burning all this is just.... horrible.
I agree... but every time I offer to build more nuclear, everyone goes all ape at me...
The sad thing is that people who love the environment (and for the most part, I think they do), miss the choices on offer.
While I'm happy to have Wind and Solar be a larger share of the energy mix, there will come a point where they are hard to increase further due to the inability to store large amounts of power for any length of time.
So it really comes down to: "Do you want to burn dead dinos, or build nuclear reactors?"
50 years from now the only people burning hydrocarbons for energy will be die hard nutjobs who put smokestacks on their electric cars so they can "burn coal" at people.
That is easy to type, hard to make happen.
Oh, it might happen in Denmark or Sweden... but world wide?
Not likely...
Most cars will be electric
They will? Maybe... Considering that out of 75 million cars sold last year, 540,000 were plug in of something or other (things like the Prius Plug In Hybid), that is a steep hill to climb.
most electricity will be from wind, solar, tides
How do you plan to store it? Laptop batteries?
The math says that isn't going to happen, the size and scale of the problem far exceed what can be done today.
some exotic source not yet invented, possibly fusion.
Ahh Fusion... in the 80s I was promised Fusion was only 20 years away... now it is 2016 and Fusion is only 20 years away!:)
Advanced Coal - $95.10 Advanced Nuclear - $95.20 Natural Gas - $75.20 Wind - $73.60 Solar (PV) - $125.30
The problem with wind is that you cannot store it. Not really anyway. Texas is flat, pumped storage isn't an option here and not in the volumes that would be required. We already get 9% of our power from Wind. That might go to 20%, but without storage, it will have trouble going higher.
Nuclear is the one that interests me the most. Reasonable cost, works 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no wind.
Put the plants out in West Texas where there isn't anyone anyway and have at it... Water cooling becomes the primary issue, due to a lack of water out there, but beyond that issue, no one would notice or care if one melted down out there.:)
For us to really stop this, requires that ALL nations, esp. China, cut their emissions.
Yes, but by how much?
That is the question and answer that no one wants to actually hear or talk about.
Allow me to share the answer... To stop the rise at 450 PPM and hold it there (not even to speak of dropping it to 350), we'd have to cut CO2 output from industrialized countries by 80% by 2050.
The US is putting out over 5 billion metric tons of CO2 per year. This means that we'd have to cut output to below 1 billion metric tons. All while our population continues to increase, and we have to do it within the next 35 years.
Coal had it's day and natural gas is currently the top dog but renewable energy sources have drastically increased lately and will eventually take the cake.
I would tend to agree with you...
The problem is the use of the word "eventually". We are now past 400 PPM CO2. 500 PPM will come and go without issue, the more interesting question is 600 PPM.
Can we stop before we hit that? I have my doubts. Part of the problem is the oceans are stuffed full of CO2 and there is a limit to what they can absorb. We keep putting more CO2 out each year.
China is aware that 60% of their power can't come from coal, the smog is too bad.
As it is, their coal imports are down a bit, but have a long way to go. I don't doubt they will keep dropping, but they will still be using coal for a long time to come.
India is investing 1.2 billion in solar
$1.2 billion isn't exactly a lot of money...
The problem is math. People love to post stories like you did, without understanding the size and scale of the problem.
You assume that if that keeps happening, then all will be fine. It won't be. The problem is larger than a solar plant here or a closed coal plant there.
The irony is that the above was written in 2009, when CO2 levels were 386 PPM, now they have passed 400 PPM and show no signs of stopping.
Two viewpoints:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the causes, magnitude and impacts of global warming, said in 2007 that "currently available" technologies and those on the cusp of commercialization can bring enough zero-carbon energy online to avoid catastrophic climate change. And I regularly get reports from renewable-energy and environmental groups arguing that off-the-shelf technologies, fully deployed, can get us there.
And on the other side:
In the opposite corner is the Department of Energy, which in December concluded that we need breakthroughs in physics and chemistry that are "beyond our present reach" to, for instance, triple the efficiency of solar panels; DOE secretary Steven Chu has said we need Nobel caliber breakthroughs.
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In short:
That is also the view of energy chemist Nate Lewis of the California Institute of Technology. "It's not true that all the technologies are available and we just need the political will to deploy them," he says. "My concern, and that of most scientists working on energy, is that we are not anywhere close to where we need to be. We are too focused on cutting emissions 20 percent by 2020â"but you can always shave 20 percent off" through, say, efficiency and conservation. By focusing on easy, near-term cuts, we may miss the boat on what's needed by 2050, when CO2 emissions will have to be 80 percent below today's to keep atmospheric levels no higher than 450 parts per million.
Worth noting is that 450 PPM is 100 PPM higher than the Club 350 people want to keep it at and say is the "safe level".
So is that possible? Here is a 12 step program from someone who says it could be done. And perhaps in a fantasy world, it could. Most of this list is completely silly stuff.
1. Mandate net zero energy (NZE) residential and commercial buildings. - Well that sounds nice for new construction, but what do you plan to do with existing buildings? People don't tear down and rebuild stuff every 10 years. This will also raise the price of new buildings making it harder to afford them.
2. Design walkable, bikeable communities - That works for future communities, but not the ones already built. It also really only works for places that have expensive land or are boxed in by mother nature to small areas. In places that have lots of cheap land, it simply makes no economic sense.
3. Stabilize the population - Talk about a political minefield. Go see if the Pope is going to start supporting birth control.
4. Put a price on carbon - You can do this, but in the short term it will just push a billion people into poverty. Do it enough to actually matter and you may end up with riots. You ALSO have to do it world wide, or it doesn't matter.
5. Capture CO2 - This is an easy suggestion to give, I'd like to see the worldwide pricetag for paying for it. Technically possible things are not always affordable.
6. Electrify transportation - Even if you banned gas car production tomorrow, at current car production rates it would take nearly 15 years to replace the gas cars in the world with EVs, and that assumes that people will have the money for them, have a place to charge them, and that power plants can somehow produce enough power for a billion cars cleanly. Since you can't actually ban gas cars tomorrow, you might phase this in over a decade or two, at best, but in reality you're looking at multiple decades before even half the car fleet is EV.
Worth a look, the percentage of electricity production in the US by renewables is indeed at an all time high, but not as much as you'd think.
In 1998, it was 11.06% of all electricity produced. In 2015 it was 13.44% of all electricity produced.
Yes, an increase, but it has been mostly Wind and Solar picking up for the loss of hydro. Hydro is down 28% since 1998, while Wind and Solar are up massively.
Overall, the US produced 150 billion KWh more electricity in 2015 than in 1998. Nice, but in real terms, nothing to jump up and down about.
CO2 levels in the air are past 400 PPM, in order to get them to stop climbing and actually FALL, will require efforts far beyond all this in a timeframe that is highly unlikely to happen.
The safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million. The only way to get there is to immediately transition the global economy away from fossil fuels and into into renewable energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable farming practices.
The primary problem with this is that what would be required to do it may well start WWIII and lead to massive revolts worldwide. The math just isn't there.
In many ways, the time to change direction was 30 years ago. The ship has sailed, so we now must prepare for the future that is so clearly coming.
But as Newsweekreporter Sharon Begley points out, just to limit atmospheric concentrations to 450 ppm, nations would have to build 10,000 new nuclear power plantsâ"one every other day from now until 2050â"plus a mind boggling 1 million solar roof top panels per day from now until 2050. Even then, 450 ppm is attainable only if global energy efficiency improves by a whopping 500%, population grows only to 9 billion (instead of 10 billion or 11 billion), and global GDP grows at an anemic (near recession) rate of 1.6% per year.
The problem with people like the 350.org group is that they encourage action without saying how MUCH of that action would be required.
What would it take to lower CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm? According to Begleyâ(TM)s source, Cal Tech chemist Nathan Lewis, global CO2 emissions would have to drop to zero by 2050.
Absent revolutionary changes in energy production, distribution, conversion, and storageâ"Nobel-caliber breakthroughs that nobody can plan or predictâ"lowering CO2 emissions to 350 ppm is impossible without draconian cutbacks in population, economic output, or both. Whether they realize it or not, the Climate 350 Club is asking us to go back to the caves.
In other words, there is ZERO chance of this happening...
So we need to prepare for a world of 500 PPM CO2, and frankly should prepare for 600 PPM, since 500 PPM will sail right on by and I doubt we'll stop before 600 PPM either...
Most of these are going in as chap 11. IOW, they are simply dropping their debt and then being allowed to go back to mining coal.
That is a fair point, they aren't going out of business and the coal is still coming out of the ground.
Yet, the real issue is that the coal burning plants are closing left, right, and sideways. Last year, Coal accounted for around 30% of America's electricity.
33% to be exact... a few years ago it was 39%, indeed the percentage is dropping. But the question is: "What is it being replaced with?"
The answer is natural gas, which to be honest I was shocked to see is also now at 33% of America's power generation. That used to be MUCH smaller.
OR they are developing uses for coal
Coal can be turned into synthetic fuel, it has many uses besides power.
At home, the U.S. shale boom of the past few years made natural gas competitive with thermal coal, and the Obama administration's environmental regulations raised operational costs.
At the end of the day, this is really the problem.
Natural gas has grown in volume while going down in price over the past few years. Since electricity in the wire doesn't care about the source, as soon as gas becomes cheaper than coal, it is really hard to keep the coal plants running.
Combine this with lots of environmental regulations that make it hard to turn a profit, and things like this are to be expected.
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The above being said, some people will say they WANT coal to cost more, because it is dirty and because they want a switch to wind and solar. While that is a lofty goal, it has to be balanced against the increased price of electric generation for your average citizen and against what might really replace coal.
If coal is replaced by natural gas, that is "cleaner", in the sense that per KWh of power, you do emit less CO2, it isn't exactly a switch to green power.
If you run the coal plants out of business too quickly, you simply end up with a shortage of electricity, leading to brownouts and blackouts. Wind and solar are being installed, but it will take many years before they approach the volume required to replace the 39% of electricity the US generated from coal in 2015.
You can't cap wealth or income, unless you control the whole world.
Such people would just leave. France is dealing with this right now, having raised the top tax rate to 75%, over ten thousand wealthy people have left the country.
People in general will simply not turn over more than about a third of what they make. Even in the 50s when the tax rates were much higher, almost no one ever paid them due to endless deductions.
--Well, unless you're using an older version of Ubuntu Unity or something, LINUX DOESN'T SPY ON HER... Can't say the same for Win10.
Meh, I suppose you could call it that...
I rather see it otherwise... Windows 10 is recording how it is used, what programs are run, and such so that Microsoft can make it better in the future...
Frankly, I have no issues with that.
Microsoft is not spying in the way a lot of people like to complain about, "oh no, they are all laughing at our silly facebook posts". Yea, they really aren't. And those are public anyway.
Our phones track us and provide information to Google and Apple, our PCs now do the same. Welcome to 2016.:)
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Note: You might consider that to be a problem, and if so, fair enough. But I think you'll be forever losing that battle and I just don't have enough care to fight it. I also think I'm in the majority there, but time will tell.
That's what a lot of people tell themselves, that way they don't have to feel bad about what they did.
Yea, yea, safe space and time out and such...
Allow me to point you to ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY as why you're mistaken...
So when is somebody going to do that to the US?
The odds are almost 100% that it will happen, at some point.
But nope, nope, you just HAD to do it, had to do it. No choice.
What, fight against Germany and Japan in WWII? Yes, largely we did. It would have been rather foolish to let those two nations take over half the world.
Or did you mean the nukes? Because at the end of the day, their use is trivial compared to the overall carnage of WWII. People get quite emotional about them, but their effects and use was but a footnote.
I think the firebombing of Dresden was by far more a "war crime" than the nuking was. Dresden had no military value whatsoever, it was pointless.
Of course even the British at the time started to feel uneasy about the whole thing, starting to come to the conclusion that such efforts were now past the point of usefulness to defeating Germany and that they were just pointless slaughter.
However... and this is a BIG HOWEVER... Germany was largely complying with the Geneva Conventions on the Western Front... Japan was not in any respect doing so...
The one grand mistake that the German military made was in missing Hitler in the bomb plot in 1944, and of course the General's plot of 1938...
Slashdot Mirror
For all the harping of the issue, lets pretend for a min that 100% of everyone agrees, AGW is real and it is a problem.
Now what?
What I do NOT see is anyone putting fourth solutions that will prevent it from becoming a massive problem over time.
I see numbers that are "safe" from 300 up to 450 PPM CO2, but the problem is, even the White House Council on this says that to keep CO2 at 450 PPM that every nation must cut at least 60% CO2 and every industrial nation must cut by at least 80% by 2050.
The US put out over 5 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2015. So by 2050, with a larger population, we have to somehow cut that to 1 billion metric tons or less.
And so does EVERY OTHER NATION on Earth...
That doesn't strike me as very likely to happen.
Not only are we going to sail right by 500 PPM, I expect 600 PPM will come and go without much of an issue. We might slow the rise, but the picture isn't going to change.
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https://www.climatecommunicati...
Page 4...
In order to stabilize CO2 concentrations at about 450 ppm by 2050, global emissions
would have to decline by about 60% by 2050. Industrialized countries greenhouse gas
emissions would have to decline by about 80% by 2050.
the question is when will our representatives admit that the situation is dire.
When they aren't running for reelection. :)
The problem is that the solutions involve pain, and people don't like pain.
You won't change anything until the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the course. Sadly, it will be FAR too late by that point.
Exactly. It's a lot of solar panels and wind turbines. And a non-gridded paradigm.
1970 called and thanked you for the support.
There is "a lot", then there is "a lot lot".
You should try the math and see how many solar panels and wind turbines would be required to make a difference.
It is something on the order of one million panels... per day, every day, for the next 35 years... 10,000 wind turbines a week, and a nuclear reactor every other day, for 35 years...
That is what it would take to cut CO2 output by 80% in 35 years.
You're missing a few orders of magnitude with your plans...
I think the problem is you are stuck in a paradigm from maybe 1970. Solar power is for satellites, wind doesn't exist, and battery technology is zenithed out at ni-cads.
I'm not, but I can understand why you might think so...
Solar and Wind are fine, we will continue to build them out until they are perhaps 30% of our total power mix. They may run into problems at 25%, or may extend to 35%, but beyond that you run into dependability issues.
Batteries are nice for your home, but your home is not the primary energy user in the US.
But time doesn't stand still. I already use a lot less electricity than I used to. Everything in the house is as efficient as you can get, lights are LED, and I've increased the quality of life by doing so.It isn't just solar becoming cheaper and more efficient, the generation/use equation has the parts moving toward each other.
I too have gone to LEDs and I also now make purchase decisions based partly on power consumption.
However, not everyone can make a massive difference in their total power usage. There is little that I can economically do to my home to get my power usage down much further. The windows may be next, but it'll cost over $10,000 to replace them all and the savings, while real, takes time to add up.
As soon as the battery technology gets to the right price point, I'm cutting the power company completely off.
First, residential power consumption is only part of it. Commercial power use is far higher than home use, so even if every home got off the grid (they won't, but lets pretend), you wouldn't cut power use as much as you think.
Second, you likely won't be allowed to leave the grid. Already in some parts of the country laws are being passed to force people to stay connected. As more people try and leave, this will only continue.
Times aren't just a-changin, they have changed.
Not that much... Renewables in 1998 were just over 11% of US power generation. In 2015 they were 13.44%. It is a nice increase, but not THAT much.
At the end of the day, it doesn't actually matter what you do. To stop CO2 at 450 PPM, the whole planet needs to cut CO2 output by 80%. That might not be possible, no matter how much money everyone is willing to spend (and lets be honest, a whole lot of people aren't even willing to try).
I'm not telling you CO2 is good, it isn't... I'm telling you what reality is...
We can use the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert the coal to more usable forms. We aren't going to just let all those delicious hydrocarbons go to waste.
Link for anyone interested...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The trajectory is important though.
Yes it is, but so are the total numbers...
People probably read my posts and think that I'm against Wind and Solar. I'm not.
I'm simply against bad math. Wind makes up about 5% of the power in the US. I can see this increasing to 10% over the next 10 years.
Solar makes up nearly nothing, but it will likely increase to 5% over the next 10 years.
In 20 years, the two of them combined may well be 20% of our total power production. Maybe 30% in 30 years. But it will hit a wall somewhere around there, they are not dependable enough to be our primary power sources.
To have 24/7/365 power, you need something that runs all the time. Wind and Solar aren't it.
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The above is just the US, the situation is better in Europe, but far worse in the rest of the world. The total numbers are just ugly and everyone loves to talk about percentage changes and "cuts from prior levels", but no one wants to talk about total numbers and math.
The US output over 5 billion metric tons of CO2 last year. To simply stop the rise of CO2 at 450 PPM would require an 80% cut to 1 billion metric tons of CO2 by 2050. And it also requires EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD DO IT AS WELL.
That is not going to happen.
I would argue the same for oil and nat gas. The idea of burning all this is just .... horrible.
I agree... but every time I offer to build more nuclear, everyone goes all ape at me...
The sad thing is that people who love the environment (and for the most part, I think they do), miss the choices on offer.
While I'm happy to have Wind and Solar be a larger share of the energy mix, there will come a point where they are hard to increase further due to the inability to store large amounts of power for any length of time.
So it really comes down to: "Do you want to burn dead dinos, or build nuclear reactors?"
50 years from now the only people burning hydrocarbons for energy will be die hard nutjobs who put smokestacks on their electric cars so they can "burn coal" at people.
That is easy to type, hard to make happen.
Oh, it might happen in Denmark or Sweden... but world wide?
Not likely...
Most cars will be electric
They will? Maybe... Considering that out of 75 million cars sold last year, 540,000 were plug in of something or other (things like the Prius Plug In Hybid), that is a steep hill to climb.
most electricity will be from wind, solar, tides
How do you plan to store it? Laptop batteries?
The math says that isn't going to happen, the size and scale of the problem far exceed what can be done today.
some exotic source not yet invented, possibly fusion.
Ahh Fusion... in the 80s I was promised Fusion was only 20 years away... now it is 2016 and Fusion is only 20 years away! :)
Thanks for the link, that was interesting...
Cost per MHh
Advanced Coal - $95.10
Advanced Nuclear - $95.20
Natural Gas - $75.20
Wind - $73.60
Solar (PV) - $125.30
The problem with wind is that you cannot store it. Not really anyway. Texas is flat, pumped storage isn't an option here and not in the volumes that would be required. We already get 9% of our power from Wind. That might go to 20%, but without storage, it will have trouble going higher.
Nuclear is the one that interests me the most. Reasonable cost, works 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no wind.
Put the plants out in West Texas where there isn't anyone anyway and have at it... Water cooling becomes the primary issue, due to a lack of water out there, but beyond that issue, no one would notice or care if one melted down out there. :)
For us to really stop this, requires that ALL nations, esp. China, cut their emissions.
Yes, but by how much?
That is the question and answer that no one wants to actually hear or talk about.
Allow me to share the answer... To stop the rise at 450 PPM and hold it there (not even to speak of dropping it to 350), we'd have to cut CO2 output from industrialized countries by 80% by 2050.
The US is putting out over 5 billion metric tons of CO2 per year. This means that we'd have to cut output to below 1 billion metric tons. All while our population continues to increase, and we have to do it within the next 35 years.
I simply don't see that as likely to happen.
Wind is MUCH cheaper than coal.
I keep seeing people say this, do you have a source?
In Texas (the leader in Wind in the US), we have the choice to buy power from many different companies, and can choose the source for our power.
If I buy coal power for my office, my price is just over 7 cents per KWh. Wind? 10 cents per KWh.
Oil and natural gas won't be cheap forever...
The smart play is to develop factories that can take all three as a feedstock, so that you don't care which one is on top in any given year...
Coal had it's day and natural gas is currently the top dog but renewable energy sources have drastically increased lately and will eventually take the cake.
I would tend to agree with you...
The problem is the use of the word "eventually". We are now past 400 PPM CO2. 500 PPM will come and go without issue, the more interesting question is 600 PPM.
Can we stop before we hit that? I have my doubts. Part of the problem is the oceans are stuffed full of CO2 and there is a limit to what they can absorb. We keep putting more CO2 out each year.
http://www.economist.com/blogs...
Even if we hold CO2 to current levels, that doesn't actually help. Lets say we cut them by 20%! Yea us! Except that also doesn't actually help.
So what do we have to do? What would it take to drop CO2 levels in the air to 350 PPM?
We'd have to cut 90% of CO2 worldwide.
Even if we all wanted to, I don't think that would be possible and keep anything remotely like our current standard of living.
China is also dumping coal.
I wouldn't put it quite that strongly...
China is aware that 60% of their power can't come from coal, the smog is too bad.
As it is, their coal imports are down a bit, but have a long way to go. I don't doubt they will keep dropping, but they will still be using coal for a long time to come.
India is investing 1.2 billion in solar
$1.2 billion isn't exactly a lot of money...
The problem is math. People love to post stories like you did, without understanding the size and scale of the problem.
You assume that if that keeps happening, then all will be fine. It won't be. The problem is larger than a solar plant here or a closed coal plant there.
http://www.newsweek.com/begley...
The irony is that the above was written in 2009, when CO2 levels were 386 PPM, now they have passed 400 PPM and show no signs of stopping.
Two viewpoints:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the causes, magnitude and impacts of global warming, said in 2007 that "currently available" technologies and those on the cusp of commercialization can bring enough zero-carbon energy online to avoid catastrophic climate change. And I regularly get reports from renewable-energy and environmental groups arguing that off-the-shelf technologies, fully deployed, can get us there.
And on the other side:
In the opposite corner is the Department of Energy, which in December concluded that we need breakthroughs in physics and chemistry that are "beyond our present reach" to, for instance, triple the efficiency of solar panels; DOE secretary Steven Chu has said we need Nobel caliber breakthroughs.
---
In short:
That is also the view of energy chemist Nate Lewis of the California Institute of Technology. "It's not true that all the technologies are available and we just need the political will to deploy them," he says. "My concern, and that of most scientists working on energy, is that we are not anywhere close to where we need to be. We are too focused on cutting emissions 20 percent by 2020â"but you can always shave 20 percent off" through, say, efficiency and conservation. By focusing on easy, near-term cuts, we may miss the boat on what's needed by 2050, when CO2 emissions will have to be 80 percent below today's to keep atmospheric levels no higher than 450 parts per million.
Worth noting is that 450 PPM is 100 PPM higher than the Club 350 people want to keep it at and say is the "safe level".
So is that possible? Here is a 12 step program from someone who says it could be done. And perhaps in a fantasy world, it could. Most of this list is completely silly stuff.
http://sustainabilityadvantage...
1. Mandate net zero energy (NZE) residential and commercial buildings. - Well that sounds nice for new construction, but what do you plan to do with existing buildings? People don't tear down and rebuild stuff every 10 years. This will also raise the price of new buildings making it harder to afford them.
2. Design walkable, bikeable communities - That works for future communities, but not the ones already built. It also really only works for places that have expensive land or are boxed in by mother nature to small areas. In places that have lots of cheap land, it simply makes no economic sense.
3. Stabilize the population - Talk about a political minefield. Go see if the Pope is going to start supporting birth control.
4. Put a price on carbon - You can do this, but in the short term it will just push a billion people into poverty. Do it enough to actually matter and you may end up with riots. You ALSO have to do it world wide, or it doesn't matter.
5. Capture CO2 - This is an easy suggestion to give, I'd like to see the worldwide pricetag for paying for it. Technically possible things are not always affordable.
6. Electrify transportation - Even if you banned gas car production tomorrow, at current car production rates it would take nearly 15 years to replace the gas cars in the world with EVs, and that assumes that people will have the money for them, have a place to charge them, and that power plants can somehow produce enough power for a billion cars cleanly. Since you can't actually ban gas cars tomorrow, you might phase this in over a decade or two, at best, but in reality you're looking at multiple decades before even half the car fleet is EV.
7. Create a national, smart elect
Natural gas is cleaner than coal in a lot of ways other than CO2. It's still a net positive change for the environment.
Sure, I'm not objecting to that change at all.
Coal is probably better used for synthetic fuel, plastics, and chemicals, than it is for burning into fuel anyway...
Since someone will bring it up, might as well be me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Worth a look, the percentage of electricity production in the US by renewables is indeed at an all time high, but not as much as you'd think.
In 1998, it was 11.06% of all electricity produced. In 2015 it was 13.44% of all electricity produced.
Yes, an increase, but it has been mostly Wind and Solar picking up for the loss of hydro. Hydro is down 28% since 1998, while Wind and Solar are up massively.
Overall, the US produced 150 billion KWh more electricity in 2015 than in 1998. Nice, but in real terms, nothing to jump up and down about.
CO2 levels in the air are past 400 PPM, in order to get them to stop climbing and actually FALL, will require efforts far beyond all this in a timeframe that is highly unlikely to happen.
http://400.350.org/
The safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million. The only way to get there is to immediately transition the global economy away from fossil fuels and into into renewable energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable farming practices.
The primary problem with this is that what would be required to do it may well start WWIII and lead to massive revolts worldwide. The math just isn't there.
In many ways, the time to change direction was 30 years ago. The ship has sailed, so we now must prepare for the future that is so clearly coming.
http://www.globalwarming.org/2...
But as Newsweekreporter Sharon Begley points out, just to limit atmospheric concentrations to 450 ppm, nations would have to build 10,000 new nuclear power plantsâ"one every other day from now until 2050â"plus a mind boggling 1 million solar roof top panels per day from now until 2050. Even then, 450 ppm is attainable only if global energy efficiency improves by a whopping 500%, population grows only to 9 billion (instead of 10 billion or 11 billion), and global GDP grows at an anemic (near recession) rate of 1.6% per year.
The problem with people like the 350.org group is that they encourage action without saying how MUCH of that action would be required.
What would it take to lower CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm? According to Begleyâ(TM)s source, Cal Tech chemist Nathan Lewis, global CO2 emissions would have to drop to zero by 2050.
Absent revolutionary changes in energy production, distribution, conversion, and storageâ"Nobel-caliber breakthroughs that nobody can plan or predictâ"lowering CO2 emissions to 350 ppm is impossible without draconian cutbacks in population, economic output, or both. Whether they realize it or not, the Climate 350 Club is asking us to go back to the caves.
In other words, there is ZERO chance of this happening...
So we need to prepare for a world of 500 PPM CO2, and frankly should prepare for 600 PPM, since 500 PPM will sail right on by and I doubt we'll stop before 600 PPM either...
Most of these are going in as chap 11. IOW, they are simply dropping their debt and then being allowed to go back to mining coal.
That is a fair point, they aren't going out of business and the coal is still coming out of the ground.
Yet, the real issue is that the coal burning plants are closing left, right, and sideways. Last year, Coal accounted for around 30% of America's electricity.
33% to be exact... a few years ago it was 39%, indeed the percentage is dropping. But the question is: "What is it being replaced with?"
The answer is natural gas, which to be honest I was shocked to see is also now at 33% of America's power generation. That used to be MUCH smaller.
OR they are developing uses for coal
Coal can be turned into synthetic fuel, it has many uses besides power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The irony is that 50 years from now, our cars might not run on gas derived from Petroleum, but rather from Coal. The irony... :)
At home, the U.S. shale boom of the past few years made natural gas competitive with thermal coal, and the Obama administration's environmental regulations raised operational costs.
At the end of the day, this is really the problem.
Natural gas has grown in volume while going down in price over the past few years. Since electricity in the wire doesn't care about the source, as soon as gas becomes cheaper than coal, it is really hard to keep the coal plants running.
Combine this with lots of environmental regulations that make it hard to turn a profit, and things like this are to be expected.
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The above being said, some people will say they WANT coal to cost more, because it is dirty and because they want a switch to wind and solar. While that is a lofty goal, it has to be balanced against the increased price of electric generation for your average citizen and against what might really replace coal.
If coal is replaced by natural gas, that is "cleaner", in the sense that per KWh of power, you do emit less CO2, it isn't exactly a switch to green power.
If you run the coal plants out of business too quickly, you simply end up with a shortage of electricity, leading to brownouts and blackouts. Wind and solar are being installed, but it will take many years before they approach the volume required to replace the 39% of electricity the US generated from coal in 2015.
You can't cap wealth or income, unless you control the whole world.
Such people would just leave. France is dealing with this right now, having raised the top tax rate to 75%, over ten thousand wealthy people have left the country.
People in general will simply not turn over more than about a third of what they make. Even in the 50s when the tax rates were much higher, almost no one ever paid them due to endless deductions.
You can't do that because people at that wealth level are mobile, they would just leave.
France recently tried this, raising the tax rate on the rich to 75%, thousands of super wealthy have left France.
The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that all treaties may not sign away and rights in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Which exist no matter where you reside, in or out of Canada.
Perhaps, but the Canadian Supreme Court has no jurisdiction in the US, so their opinions don't count for much.
This might be "a thing", but the challenge is going to get it enforced without spending a lot of money.
--Well, unless you're using an older version of Ubuntu Unity or something, LINUX DOESN'T SPY ON HER... Can't say the same for Win10.
Meh, I suppose you could call it that...
I rather see it otherwise... Windows 10 is recording how it is used, what programs are run, and such so that Microsoft can make it better in the future...
Frankly, I have no issues with that.
Microsoft is not spying in the way a lot of people like to complain about, "oh no, they are all laughing at our silly facebook posts". Yea, they really aren't. And those are public anyway.
Our phones track us and provide information to Google and Apple, our PCs now do the same. Welcome to 2016. :)
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Note: You might consider that to be a problem, and if so, fair enough. But I think you'll be forever losing that battle and I just don't have enough care to fight it. I also think I'm in the majority there, but time will tell.
Pearl harbour was a legitimate military target
It was? The US and Japan were at war at the time?
That's what a lot of people tell themselves, that way they don't have to feel bad about what they did.
Yea, yea, safe space and time out and such...
Allow me to point you to ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY as why you're mistaken...
So when is somebody going to do that to the US?
The odds are almost 100% that it will happen, at some point.
But nope, nope, you just HAD to do it, had to do it. No choice.
What, fight against Germany and Japan in WWII? Yes, largely we did. It would have been rather foolish to let those two nations take over half the world.
Or did you mean the nukes? Because at the end of the day, their use is trivial compared to the overall carnage of WWII. People get quite emotional about them, but their effects and use was but a footnote.
I think the firebombing of Dresden was by far more a "war crime" than the nuking was. Dresden had no military value whatsoever, it was pointless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Of course even the British at the time started to feel uneasy about the whole thing, starting to come to the conclusion that such efforts were now past the point of usefulness to defeating Germany and that they were just pointless slaughter.
However... and this is a BIG HOWEVER... Germany was largely complying with the Geneva Conventions on the Western Front... Japan was not in any respect doing so...
The one grand mistake that the German military made was in missing Hitler in the bomb plot in 1944, and of course the General's plot of 1938...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Overall, war sucks, bad stuff happens, not all of it justified, welcome to the human race...