> A lot more needs to happen to end oil's stranglehold.
So what's your plan? Honest question. No sarcasm. How do we get from words to action?
So what's your plan? Honest question. No sarcasm. How do we get from words to action?
Maybe I did give a partial answer? And I'll paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson on this one, "You can't save the world with an app." Get INTO the industry you want to fix and fucking fix it. Enough people do it, someone is bound to figure it out.
(The others are "pray that a geoengineering plan works without disaster" and "try to mitigate a whole bunch of warming while emissions gradually stabilize". Not exactly inspiring.)
Visions of fixing global warming with high gasoline prices and renewable electricity subsidies are ludicrous. Focus on reducing personal emissions is almost always a distraction (perhaps excluding air travel and diet). As soon as you dive into numbers, it becomes obvious that even the most optimistic gains from those things can't come close to solving the problem. There's just too much CO2 output from production (concrete, plastics, farming, etc.), non-car engines (cargo ships, planes, heavy machinery, etc.), and hard-to-replace, high-emissions power (e.g. coal in outlying China). And power improvements are often less good than they appear; it's common to report fossil fuel reductions without accounting for any offsetting harms like sulfur hexafluoride leaks from wind turbines, or CO2 emissions from solar panel manufacture and disposal.
That doesn't mean things are hopeless, or oil is blameless, or America should ignore the problem because China, or any of the other cop-outs. But I think you're exactly right: existing producers aren't going to roll over and quit, and meaningful state action will require promoting deep, pervasive changes, not just subsidizing rooftop solar.
We need lobbying and outreach and communication and legislation; we also need a million practical things to be made better, or used better, or supplanted. All I can see to do is pick a problem that suits me and dive in.
Might as well walk the walk, I thought myself.
Corodra above says: "Don't think for a second I'm "for oil". But I'm a realist. A lot more needs to happen to end oil's stranglehold. Not drum circles, UN circle jerks climate summits with teenagers crying nor bullshit "plant trees" PR stunts(past tree planting stunts have real piss poor success rates of the trees surviving after a year."
I think there's a lot of truth in this. The current propaganda/meme-based approach (repetitive half true newspaper articles, Greta Thunberg, etc) to the issue is not only not moving the ball forward, it's actually causing unrest and resentment in our populations. It is causing people who likely don't really differ all that much in underlying beliefs to split into opposing psychological/ideological camps, and as the conversation continues in this same form, become further entrenched in their opposing stances. If you pay close attention when reading forum discussions, this seems quite apparent to me, even here among relatively more intelligent HN folks.
I believe people need to start realizing this, and then we have to study the nature of the problem, and then we have to find a new approach to the global public discussion on this topic, and others like it.
Once you have mass production of nuclear power plants, you can start using nuclear power to create liquid alcohol fuels. Start a process of changing cars to electric or alcohol based fuels, the same goes for ships and eventually planes.
The process of switching to alcohol based fuels can be started in parallel, with early on using fossil fuels.
Start taxing fossil fuel usage to make people move over to liquid fuels.
This vision was created out by one of the nuclear innovates. He invented the PWR (currently used nuclear) but rejected it as a terrible design for human energy production. His insistence that PWR were not 'perfectly save' got him essentially fired. He had come up with Molten Salt reactors to fix all the issues of PWRs.
His vision was more to use nuclear heat to turn salt water into water you can use for irrigation. Not really produce Liquid fuels in a carbon neutral way but the vision makes sense.
Now, unfortunately this should really have started in the 70s, but it would have been the most systematic approach to actually solving the problem. But of course that requires the population not to freak out about nuclear and to accept potentially higher oil prices.
Today's solar and wind boom was started in the 70s. It's kind of amazing how many people prefer the "bird in the bush" over the "bird in the hand".
Even today no industrial country is even close to having even all its energy from solar and wind. And were not even talking about transportation.
For an alternative level you can look at France. France basically removed fossil fuels from its electricity production in less then 20 years of producing nuclear. And we know that CO2 saved earlier is more valuable.
Now they never went to the step of trying to introduce alcohol fuels, as of course their goal was to limit import of oil to make the French economy resilient and not to save CO2.
I didn't say anything like that! What I meant is that the sustained technology development effort you called for actually happened for other energy-generating technologies, starting on the date you suggested. The result is that costs fell by several orders of magnitude, and also that it makes sense to widely deploy them now.
There are reports that Scotland has been generating 200% of household energy needs from wind alone in 2019. That sounds close to me. Here is a news report, and wiki: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/scotland-has-produced-enough...
But of course during the transition you would not really save on CO2. As methanol would still be produced by natural gas. But once you have it carbon neutral you can at least still use liquid fuel, and that's something the world will continue to use.
But alcohol fuels also burn much cleaner and release less actual harmful stuff and would make cities much healthier. So there are other things to consider outside of CO2.
But in general, for personal cars and stuff like that batteries are a better solution. The thing is, we could have done more alcohol fuels much earlier.
You're missing every other machine using non-ethanol fuel to operate which is required for harvesting/producing ethanol biofuel.
Ethanol's net CO2 output is positive, not negative. That is not good.
While you might argue that some cases of bioethanol in the first world are essentially just farm subsidies, producing sugarcane ethanol in favorable conditions (e.g. Brazil) definitely is profitable in the financial sense and also in the CO2 sense because it saves most of CO2 emissions compared to the fossil fuels they replace.
Of course, even in ideal conditions any fuel has zero net emissions and can't possibly have a net negative CO2 contribution by itself (that would require carbon sequestration) but every liter of gasoline/diesel that gets replaced by a low-CO2 fuel means a reduction of CO2 emissions.
You shouldn't compare something against a fictional zero, you compare it against realistic alternatives, so CO2 emissions are not only acceptable but actually desirable if they replace much larger CO2 emissions.
You can't set that aside. Consider the whole chain of production and usage or be consigned to a disingenuous selective argument upon the level of quack doctors. Plain and simple.
Usually this wouldn't happen because of climate change. France pushed nuclear because they wanted to be independent of Saudi princes.
But the French example clearly shows that a industrial country can go away from fossil fuel electricity in 15 years if its actually determined to do so and using nuclear energy. And they did it with 1960s technology, the same kind of effort with modern types of nuclear plants, could potentially be even faster.
There is no question in my mind if there was political consensuses on a plan, any industrial nation could move away from 90% of fossil fuels usage within 20 years and it wouldn't actually cost as much as people tend to think.
For the oil and gas industry this would translate into a tax at the pump.