Chinese companies building numerous overseas coal plants
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent. "The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit."
I've been watching some lectures on climate change recently, all of the climatologist I've seen in the lectures were claiming that staying below 2℃ is impossible to achieve anyway. Staying at 2℃ or less, requires around 2050 the world going into negative carbon emissions, which nobody know yet how to do exactly.
That certainly seems to be what most people are doing even if they are saying something different.
No, I don't think so. We have a pretty good idea of what kind of things are going to happen - if we were serious about trying to withstand them we'd be putting more efforts into flood defences, desalination plants, disaster-relief type stuff - and on a longer-term level maybe food-supply work. Even if you believe what's needed is industry, in the long-term the scientific uses of oil and plastics are far more vital than burning it moving people between the office and the suburbs. But no-one really believes at a visceral level that the oil supply is limited, because we've spent our whole lives living with abundant oil. Add in a dose of classic tragedy of the commons - reducing carbon emissions makes things better for everyone, while building up your own economy/industry and ignoring emissions hurts the common cause but is profitable for individual nations.
And then you said: "if we were serious about trying to withstand them we'd be putting more efforts into flood defences, desalination plants, disaster-relief"
These are the same.
That's what I took from it too. Grab everything we can and dig in.
We could put the earth into an ice age for under 1% of global GDP. Discussing geo-engineering is generally seen as a moral hazard, though, so western commentators act like no such possibility exists.
The real threat is ecosystem collapse.
That said, if you try googling geo-engineering and climate change for a few minutes, you'll almost certainly find some of the techniques people have evaluated, their trade-offs and how the issue of moral hazard adds a cost to discussing them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening#Costs
That said, sulfate aerosols are one of the oldest proposed plans and our technology has advanced considerably since then. Perhaps some people working on or funding work on a better solution are on reading this thread.
I sure hope someone is quietly tackling it because the political efforts around CO2 emmissions agreements of the past 50 years are not working very well despite a great deal of activism.
It's something that does not cause acidification, and seems to be very easy to start or interrupt if a problem arises. It's also toward economical gains, as it can be done around ocean farming to increase yelds.
Maybe not the most optimistic crowd, though :)
> We could put the earth into an ice age for under 1% of global GDP. Discussing geo-engineering is generally seen as a moral hazard, though, so western commentators act like no such possibility exists.
Yes it exists, but taking this road is the same road that took is to the point where we are right now. I am not very certain it will help at all.
Pretty sure planting a lot of trees is a good start
I'm totally for it, I love having trees everywhere, especially as I walk to most of my destinations.
But trees won't give negative carbon emissions unless industry cuts emissions dramatically. And also, the other problem with trees is you might have to convert farmlands back to forest, what happens to the food production then?
Malawi? Don't develop electricity generation in Africa! You might make them less poor!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-01/cheaper-s...
Natural gas is cheaper than coal in the US:
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/article...
SolarCity is experimenting with batteries powered by intermittent power supply in small islands but nothing at scale really exists a practical proven tech.
Natural gas requires high security LNG terminal infra if you're not a producer
You would need some backbone before you can add solar on top (e.g. what happens at night?)
In any case, even if there aren't any, the question still stands. Being poor is no defense against the effects of climate change.
Coal is non explosive, easily carted around safely
And being poor means that my primary problem is "What will I eat tomorrow". So "What might happen in 50 years" is really secondary. I'll solve it after solving my primary problem.
But Pakistan is borrowing money for coal plants that will be used for 40 years, while solar+gas will be cheaper within a decade.
But being wealthy is a fairly good defence against the effects of climate change. Reliable affordable electricity is a prerequisite to wealth.
As you said, the developed nations did the exact same thing (including to less developed ones they also stole resources from), and now they expect the rest of the world not to do the same?
People won't give up on a 'modern' lifestyle or better conditions just because it's bad for the environment. Even less so because a bunch of people living in better conditions say it could be bad for them in the distant future.
The only fix is to figure out how to make renewable energy cheaper and easier than non renewable energy worldwide. So it wins on a financial level rather than a moral feel good one.
But we have a small population and our economy is stable, there are other places where we can not expect to do this.
Now it is all changed. Oh, and by going for coal now, developing nations are going to make their electricity more expensive for the next 40 years than it would be if they went with renewables. Is that smart for economic development. And besides that they are going to be promoting climate changes that will be very damaging, including economically, to their own countries.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the developing countries are buying all these coal plants from China at least partly because the people making the decisions got bribed. From what I understand, that is the norm when it comes to China.
Building a powerplant that is supposed to operational for 50 years when it may only be economically viable for 5 or 10 leads to a warping of the per-unit economics, even before taking into consideration public health and environmental damage.
Pakistan should ask the west for a zero interest after inflation loan to install green alternatives.
What makes you think coal only has a 5 to 10 year viable economic life span? If the world starts moving toward green(er) alternatives won't coal become cheaper?