CO₂ and Other Greenhouse Gas Emissions
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
This is true though. If you're concerned about absolute fairness, then yes, it makes sense that China should be able to emit as much as the US and Europe does per capita.
But if you care about the environment, then this is a disastrous idea.
The US needs to continue to reduce its carbon output, and China needs to dramatically slow it's increase in carbon output.
Remember, when the US and Europe industrialized, renewables were nonexistent (other than hydro) -- so I think it's fair to expect China and India to leapfrog fossil fuels as much as possible. They've leapfrogged the west on many other technologies -- like telecom and transportation -- so why not energy?
The Green New Deal: The enormous opportunity in shooting for the moon. https://medium.com/otherlab-news/decarbonization-and-gnd-b8d... (electrifying everything with clean generation will reduce energy needs by half even without any changes in lifestyle)
How do we decarbonize? https://medium.com/otherlab-news/how-do-we-decarbonize-7fc2f... (A fairly balanced take on how realistic various solutions are, from engineering, policy, and economic perspectives)
This is pretty cool
The problem is that most people will look at them, quickly find "another" large source of CO2 emissions (be it another country, another industry), point fingers and say "it's them!" without doing anything else. Which in the long term (as in, our children and grandchildren will suffer) will destroy our planet.
It's interesting to step back and consider how the current Climate Change narrative is similar to the universal theme of "We offended God, so now he is punishing us."
Not really sure what the implications of that are, but seems like something that could be harnessed either for good or ill.
And the vast majority of it comes from energy production! Electric cars don't solve the problem if we are switching from high-efficiency gas engines to coal-fired electric.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/17/bitcoin-e...
>Bitcoin’s electricity usage is enormous. In November, the power consumed by the entire bitcoin network was estimated to be higher than that of the Republic of Ireland. Since then, its demands have only grown. It’s now on pace to use just over 42TWh of electricity in a year, placing it ahead of New Zealand and Hungary and just behind Peru, according to estimates from Digiconomist. That’s commensurate with CO2 emissions of 20 megatonnes – or roughly 1m transatlantic flights.
Beyond parody.
This is actually why people argue for nuclear. Not because they (we) want to replace renewables, but we want to replace fossil fuels. They compete in different areas. The more renewables you have (and battery tech) the less nuclear you need. But there still has to be something in the system to load balance and scale to demand. Because renewables currently can't tackle this problem we end up building more coal and natural gas plants (which are cheap! But they get much more expensive than something like nuclear once you price in emissions and health effects).
This makes economic sense because renewables are FAR FAR cheaper than new-build nuclear, and the big businesses who supply electricity to EVs, heating, cooling, and industry are going to continue to encourage flexibility of demand.
For all the software and tech we have, you think we can't shift our electricity demand? It's laughable in the USA to imagine new-build nuclear coming online anywhere near as fast as the scenario I outlined above. It's simply far easier to shift demand than to build new nuclear.
I was trying really hard NOT to do this. How can I better rephrase it?
I tried mentioning that we should continue to support battery research. I tried using qualifiers like "yet" and "currently". I tried very hard to stress that the issue is with CURRENT technology. Every time I try to talk about this problem it seems to either be dismissed or pushed off as "we'll get there". Which I do believe we'll get there, but it is an unknown time frame and we need to act 2 decades ago.
How can I better rephrase my message? Because I don't think my message and yours are at odds.
Is this polite data analyst-speak for "We're fucked"?
Global warming is here to stay: better learn to cope with it!
Stopping it should at the top of our priorities along with renewable energies.
We either find technological solutions to this problem - both on the emission end and on the sequestration end - or climate change starts killing people (and making more people kill even more people). It's that simple.
The best solution for the planet and our quality of life is to make population growth stop, and ideally see population decrease.
Let's not forget that emissions are only a tiny part of the pressure we put on the environment.
What I wrote should have started at least 30 years ago. As the saying goes, the next best time to start is now.
Most of the environmental damage is down to our growing population gobbling up resources.
Of course we should do things to get results quickly but we also have to look longer term if we want to see sustainable results.
Vaccines, and reducing child-mortality (and other health care), for example, are not inherently energy-intensive. Neither is massive computing power and storage (data centers are ripe for being carbon-neutral).
What might happen is that we'll have 1 farmer supporting 100 people, instead of 1000, so we'll end up having a larger agricultural population, but not as large as at the end of 19th century. Consumption WILL go down whether you like it or not, even though you might find it politically unpalatable at this point in time.
This might have the additional benefit of slowing down population growth even more, resulting in sustainable levels. It might also result in a healthier population as we embrace reduced consumption and maybe slightly more physical labor.
They may not be that emission-dependent in principle, but their supply chains might. Remember that for any technology we want to keep through changes, we also need to keep its entire supply chain in some form - from raw material through all specialized processing steps, plus populations and transportation required. These may not be so easy to decarbonize, though I do have high hopes, especially if and when electric vehicles finally take over.
> This might have the additional benefit of slowing down population growth even more, resulting in sustainable levels.
Or it may have the exactly opposite effect - accelerating population growth. So far the only thing that seems to solidly correlate with population growth is the development level, and that correlation is negative. I.e. as countries become wealthier and consume more, their population growth rates decrease.
Population growth is not conveniently forgotten, it's brought up constantly in any discussion. It just isn't the cause of our current situation and won't be significantly adding to it in the time frame that the west needs to adjust
For now.
Developing countries like China and India are the ones adding the most because that's what happens when a huge population is brought out of poverty.
Emissions are far from being the only environmental problem.
Population is obviously the main cause of the pressure we put on the environment and of our current situation.
As I said top priorities are both cutting emissions and putting the brakes on population growth and aim at reducing population.
Focusing on reducing population is literally preemptive optimization on something that may or may not be a problem depending on the trajectory of energy/production over the next 10 years. It is also just a polite way of saying eugenics
Again, emissions are only a small part of the pressure we put on the environment. Deforestation, loss of natural habitat, dwindling fish stocks, pollution at large, and indeed emissions: These are all caused by ever more people needing ever more resources.
This has nothing to do with eugenics, which has a completely different meaning.
Renewable energy will have a hard time winning globally unless cheap dirty stuff like coal and oil is made much more expensive through taxes or other means. There is also active resistance from the fossil fuel industry too.
> This image should terrify you. It should be on billboards.
> As you can see, in either scenario, global emissions must peak and begin declining immediately. For a medium chance to avoid 1.5 degrees, the world has to zero out net carbon emissions by 2050 or so — for a good chance of avoiding 2 degrees, by around 2065.
Interestingly some studies indicate that 1200ppm and higher might confer some mild cognitive impairment, even if it's a long way away from fatal. This has been used glibly to explain the poor decisions made in office rooms, but one does wonder what happens to humanity if global emissions make us slightly dumber.
Overall it's good for plants though this is more than offset by the downsides.
At 400 ppm CO2 is only 0.04% of the total atmosphere. Increasing from 0.028% to 0.04% is a 42% increase, but 0.04% is too low to directly poison plants.
The climate change effects will be a problem long before plants and animals start getting poisoned by it.