Things to Know About China in the Paris Climate Agreemen
americanprogress.org
americanprogress.org
Uhuh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_American_Progress
Founder: John Podesta
Uhuh.
As someone who lives in China, in what must be the world's center for hydropower (the south-east Himlayan region), where a huge number of people get around on e-bikes and you never see a Tesla, I remain skeptical of US commitment to clean energy. So should you.
China makes most of everything for everyone, including solar panels. Residential energy consumption per-capita is rising but still far beneath western levels. Industrial consumption frequently has a significant export component and thus that pollution is essentially outsourced... any direct comparison is therefore flawed.
> Founder: John Podesta
> Uhuh.
> As someone who lives in
> ... world's center for
> hydropower ... you never see
> a Tesla ... skeptical of US
> commitment to clean energy
Is it attempt to say that - despite your view that we should be concerned that the CAP was founded by John Podesta - what they are saying is correct?
Because it appears the article entirely agrees with your point?
So if the US did withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, which is what the article is warning against, would you become more or less sceptical about US commitment to clean energy?
It's biased to refer to a system that expects countries with far less per capita emissions to reduce at the same rate as countries with two or three times their rates as "bifurcated." "Bifurcated" could just as easily refer to the rate of the reduction, or to the per capita targets of that reduction. The system can't help but be bifurcated when dealing with polluters as bad as the United States.
It's a paranoid work of art to both make China out to be a threat because it could pollute too much, and also a threat because it could develop green technology and apply it too quickly, in the same document.
I know it may sound far fetched for a country that hosts the most renown universities in the world but it is what it is.
But surely, they don't "believe" it. They must be somewhat educated to get elected to office. Surely they see the evidence of 97 scientists saying "yes" and 3 saying "no" who all have ties to big oil.
There is no debate about it any more, the scientific is as close to unanimous on the answer as it is possible to get.
How can they possibly deny it? Is it purely political? Is it bribes - sorry lobbying - money that blinds them? Is it religion? Is it just ignorance. I just cannot get my head round it.
There is no other comparable country with the same view that I am aware.
1) "The climate is not warming" — obviously false, unless you believe in dramatic conspiracy theories and falsification of evidence on a grand scale.
2) "The models are wrong" — this is on slightly stronger footing, since at least it's not attacking empirical evidence, but rather is discounting the extrapolations one can make from a highly simplified model of forcings and feedback effects.
3) "Warming is not chiefly caused by human activity, and thus we should not restrain our economy to stop it" — given the timing of recent warming this seems to go against the evidence, but there is also no counterfactual case against which to do real science. Once you get into the causal domain, things get muddier, leaving room for interpretation.
4) "Warming is happening, humans are causing it, but energy technology improvements + mitigation efforts will mean that ROI on carbon cutting measures today will be negative" — this is the most sophisticated argument I believe, and the hardest to refute. It comes down to how willing one is to roll the dice on the chance for catastrophic "runaway warming" in exchange for better quality of life today.
One reason I believe you see these arguments emerge chiefly in the US is the fact that most global warming reduction schemes seem, by necessity, to involve international cooperation and the ceding of national sovereignty to some minor degree. Many Americans find this idea to be an absolute non-starter, generally disliking things with a whiff of globalism about them.
What's the solution? Man, if I knew I wouldn't be sitting here commenting on a web forum...
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425232/climate-change-...
Personally, my perception is that it is much, much, much warmer now than when I was a child 40 years ago, and I can't think of anyone I've ever talked to on the subject that disagrees.
And yet:
https://globalclimate.ucr.edu/resources.html#q3
Averaged over all land and ocean surfaces, temperatures have warmed roughly 1.33°F (0.74ºC) over the last century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (see page 2 of the IPCC's Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers (PDF)).
We can probably stop philosophizing about 'when I was young' etc.
I could also imagine quite well that the perception gets distorted. One may be much less likely to notice a change from 24°C plus or minus 1°C in summer than to notice that there is less time with snow because the temperature that used to be just below freezing point got pushed just slightly above it.
Especially in places where the temperature used to hover just around freezing point for a long time, even a pretty small increase in temperature might easily shorten the perceived duration of winter as indicated by snow lying around by weeks.
I also wonder whether growing up on itself makes a difference. Time speeds up as we grow older and a meter of snow looks certainly very different to me today than it look to me when I was a small child.
To be nit picky, the belief is no longer in global warming, but climate change. Those who promoted global warming got their predictions terribly wrong, and that's why we refer to it as climate change today. They got it right this time I'm sure.
In some places that change results in a wetter (and perhaps cooler) climate, so climate change is easier to talk about. But I guess here we all understand the difference between local and global effects, and between climate and weather, right?
Right, but only 0.74ºC in the last 100 years, which may very well be a normal variance. So original projections were wrong, and they had to change the claim being made.
The majority of the 0.74C is in the second half of that 100 years, just like one would expect.
I am fairly sure no high ranking official is blaming it as a "US hoax"
Without any touch of irony.
Nuclear green and renewable? But Ok, this sentence you can understand in another way but not together with:
"China has committed to build a renewables-only system that is equivalent to the entire U.S. electricity system by 2030. This nonfossil fuel target is the deepest hook in China’s Paris commitments. It is already creating massive demand for new clean energy technologies"
All talking about green, renewable energy and specifically in the context of the 1000 GW from before, what INCLUDES nuclear.
And even though I prefer (proper) nuclear plants over coal, I think you can't really put wind and solar energy together with nucleaer in the same bag and label it as green and renewable. So the article is either intentionally missleading, or dumb.
(Yes, there's a huge stack of CO2 emitted during concrete production)
Still better than coal, yes. But not green.
Especially not, if you consider this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
As for the list of 'nuclear accidents', given all but one of the accidents listed have a fatality count of 0, I'm not sure what it is that alarms you. To be fair, the WHO projects a total of ~4000 deaths to occur as a result of Chernobyl (increased rate of cancer, using the linear no-threshold hypothesis).
For Fukushima, the number seems likely to be either 'small' or 'none' based on WHO projections, although two TEPCO workers died at the time of the incident (they drowned, I believe) and a significantly larger number were killed as a result of the (perhaps overly cautious) evacuation of the surrounding populated areas.
And the worry is exactly that there will be no more humans in 5000 years, because someone in charge might decide Who cares, makes careless decisions, and in the end more groundwater gets contaminated and though not immeaditely killing everyone, but damaging the genes so to produce more retards, leading us in a nice downward spiral.
So what I am saying is, it is not about the immediate death rate, it is about radiation. Cancer and so on ... it might not kill you, but can cripple you. The children born after chernobyl in my area, exposed to the toxic rain, had much more birth diseases.
If a windturbine falls down, you remove the debris, if there is a meltdown you have to evacuate for a long time?
See the difference?
So again, I am not saying nuclear power should be banned. The alternatives are simply not ready yet. But labeling it as green is bs.
Those WHO projections, for both Chernobyl and Fukushima, include deaths from future cases of cancer. In Fukushima's case, the WHO specifically examined the effect that the increased radiation exposure would have on children. From their 2015 update:
"Given the exposure to radioactive iodine during the early phase of the emergency, WHO specifically assessed the risk of thyroid cancer. The greatest risk was found among girls exposed as infants (i.e. < 1 year old) in the most affected area in the Fukushima prefecture. Even if those levels of risk might not be clinically detectable, WHO anticipated that the thyroid ultrasound screening programme being conducted in Fukushima prefecture was likely to lead to an increase in the incidence of thyroid diseases due to earlier detection of non-symptomatic cases.
There have been recent reports about thyroid cancer cases being diagnosed among children exposed to low doses of radioactive iodine as a result of the Fukushima accident. These reports should be interpreted with caution. A large excess of thyroid cancer due to radiation exposure, such as occurred after the Chernobyl accident, can be discounted because the estimated thyroid doses due to the Fukushima accident were substantially lower than in Chernobyl. Nevertheless, the highly-sensitive thyroid screening of those under 18 years old at the time of the accident is expected to detect a large number of thyroid cysts and solid nodules, including a number of thyroid cancers that would not have been detected without such intensive screening. Similar or even slightly higher rates of cysts and nodules were found in prefectures not affected by the nuclear accident. The substantial number of cases that have already been observed in the Fukushima Health Management Survey have been considered likely due to the sensitivity of the screening rather than to radiation exposure."
2015 update: http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/a_e/fukushima/faqs-fuk...
2013 report: http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/pub_meet/fukushima_ris...
People are afraid of radiation. That makes nuclear energy seem much more dangerous than it really is.
As for Fukushima, from what I read, radiation-reduced deaths and health issues will probably never be greater than the deaths and injuries caused by unnecessary evacuations of some of the areas there...
This silly if it runs out in a million years you can't call it renewable is just that, silly.
As long as it lasts a 100 years it's renewable. If we don't have solar etc up and running by then we never will.
Not really, a good option for now, yes, but not renewable, so nothing sustainable in the long run.
Which is why I disagree to put it together with solar and wind, because as long as the sun shines, there will be energy.
So yes:
" If we don't have solar etc up and running by then we never will"
Nuclear as transition and backup, but not propagate it as green and awesome. And with progress on medicine, many people on earth now can hope to live 100 more years. (or even 1000 years)
I don't get it, why not just use the big fusion reactor right out there? There are plenty of deserts out there and enough storage technologies avaiable, which does not need a breakthrough. Improvements, yes, but renewable technology is allready good as it is.
Also, the question should be reversed. Is irrational fear of nuclear energy a good reason to abandon it and instead pave over the Sahara desert?
I dont think it is that much space. Plus last time I checked, not so much space in the desert was used by agriculture.
And given what happened allready, I don't see what is irrational fear about it, when there is a safe alternative.
There are many reasonable criticisms of renewables, but this isn't one. For example the largest aggregate solar deployments are rooftop solar in cities. Wind and geothermal are both much smaller than non-renewable sources.
Land use for power sources is still an important metric.
The lack of complete efficiency, while keeping it sustainable, is a driving force behind a lot of the innovation in the energy sector.
If climate denial in the United States results in them ceding energy innovation to China, then ultimately those parties in China who are building the efficiency gains will gain the most from it. They won't just be manufacturers of the end products anymore. Their companies will potentially dominate the market for various technology as efficiency further improves.