Comment by campfireveteran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by campfireveteran | Hacker News Reader

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campfireveteran

Just like recycling bins, that's only the virtue-signaling parts of the story. It is vital to discontinue nearly all petrochem uses of fossil fuels and leave much of the rest of it in the ground. This implies:

- massive expansions of renewables (doable since costs have dropped precipitously)

- possibly temporary use of fission (replaced hopefully by fusion)

- elimination of diesel-powered ships, replaced by electrical (battery) and/or nuclear fission (again hopefully replaced by fusion)

- elimination of FF-powered air transport with electric-powered

- derivation of reasonable amounts of polymers from recycled materials and plant sources

- improved, efficient post-consumer recycling diverting a considerable fraction of the waste stream back into raw materials

Furthermore, it is necessary and possible to spend on the order of what was spent on the wars in Afganistan and Iraq on CCS to return GHGs to pre-industrial levels... if we don't do this, nothing else matters because we (and our progeny) will all be dead. We ought to examine:

- ferrous ocean seeding of phytoplankton blooms

- blooming the kelp over-proliferation between Mexico and Africa for harvest and subterranean/hadopelagic CCS

And to be consistent, the top two other major sources of GHGs should be minimized:

- meat agriculture

- clinker production (Portland cement / concrete)

The math to replace fossil fuels is staggering. Look at this analysis of what it would take to replace existing fossil fuel with net zero carbon alternatives by 2050 (11000 days from now). Here's the conclusions:

So the math here is simple: to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, the world would need to deploy 3 [brand new] nuclear plants worth of carbon-free energy every two days, starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050. At the same time, a nuclear plant’s worth of fossil fuels would need to be decommissioned every day, starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050.

I’ve found that some people don’t like the use of a nuclear power plant as a measuring stick. So we can substitute wind energy as a measuring stick. Net-zero carbon dioxide by 2050 would require the deployment of ~1500 wind turbines (2.5 MW) over ~300 square miles, every day starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050.

Just consider the steel (coking coal) and cement needed to accomplish this.

source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/09/30/net-zero...

Its a simple method and easy to validate on your own.

This analysis assumes that we can continue on the current consumption spree and growth in energy usage as before.

It has to be a combination and there will have to be painful adjustments to the current western lifestyle.

We need to find better ways of moving around, buy less stuff and produce food in better ways.

> It has to be a combination and there will have to be painful adjustments to the current western lifestyle.

I feel quite confident in saying “that will never happen.”

If you want to avoid a mass revolution from the people, you can’t take away quality of life.

The taking of quality of life is a given anyway, there simply is not enough stuff to satisfy everyone. There are already large parts of the population in the US living in poverty and the middle class is being decimated.

And that's basically why any plan that doesn't start with better (drastically less GHG) cement and steel manufacturing is not very insightful.

Furthermore the fact that we aren't building 10 test fusion reactors all around the planet shows how less people are aware of the problem, and how little effort and resources are we willing to allocate toward really averting it.

Skewed analysis. It assumes:

1. No energy savings.

2. No carbon sequestration.

Now, I'm no expert on either of these, but both are of extreme importance to achieving emission reduction goals, and there is huge potential for such reductions.

Sue but even if those two factors cut the problem in half (they won't) we still can't build at this lower rate. Oil consumption and electrical needs are projected to rise during the next thirty years.

At least for energy use it turns out that the problem is cut in half!

https://medium.com/otherlab-news/decarbonization-and-gnd-b8d...

“The mere act of electrification has a powerful effect on efficiency: electrifying the US economy from carbon free sources will reduce the amount of energy needed by more than half.”

They will cut the problem by much more than a half.

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