Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist
thetyee.ca
thetyee.ca
I don't see any possibility of the required power generation capability being built. Even if the economic resources were made available, which is at least plausible in the abstract, the irrational politics around nuclear power in the developed world would guarantee that there would be little actual progress.
Constructively addressing climate change means massively increasing power generation capacity as a primary input. Given the ample evidence that this is not politically achievable, I think it is fair to call pessimism "realism".
... solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now, yet somehow that's not good enough for the people who claim to be realists. Odd.
New demand every year is at parity or maybe outpacing the new production of wind & solar.
Not to mention the huge amounts of glass, plastic, concrete (which by the way, we are apporoaching a shortage of suitable sand for making it), and rare earth metals required to build wind & solar infrastructure.
Dont get me wrong, I'm with you. I want to beat climate change as much as the next guy, but this article is saying what we need to hear. The situation is dire & it might be too late to avoid the worst.
Man, I hope not. I'm very hopeful. But I often get worried, & pessimistic like the author. If you really look at it objectively, everything is still trending in the wrong direction. Even at the rate renewable energy is coming online.
Electricity is only part of the problem. Only 20% according to this guys numbers. And it's still predominantly created by coal. What about all the gasoline/ diesel for cars? Oil heating homes & buildings?
There's too many people. Crap it's hard to not be pessimistic :(
But social change for energy efficiency is slow. Especially if you cannot convince the majority that it matters. Not easy to fix air travel either.
Metals, glass and concrete are easy enough to make (the shortages of sand are mostly driven by economics of mining and not availability), the rare earths and batteries are the hard part.
Hydropower is a nice solution, but highly geography-dependent. China is attacking this problem by investing heavily in ultra-long-range HVDC power transmission from dams in the west to cities on the east.
Removing CO2 is important, and urgent in the medium term, but it isn't urgent in the "must happen this second" sense. Intermitten removal would be fine if the removal tech could be power intermittently.
It may be possible to do atmospheric CO2 removal with intermittent power, I haven't attempted any kind of chemical engineering deep dive into what that process entails, but that is likely to incur a significant loss of productivity. Given that it is already an extremely expensive proposition, we will probably need to maximize process efficiency, which means reliable continuous power.
That changes economics a lot.
The issue is that scaling is about relative growth, and to solve climate change we need absolute growth. Despite all the optimistic growth, the truth is that our world runs on fossil fuels and is likely to do so in the future as more and more parts become developed and use more energy.
On the other hand, nuclear fission and fusion plants are spatially compact and can be located in secured areas near the industrial and residential users connected by short transmission lines. Nuclear plant heat and power can also be harnessed to generate synthetic fuels for transportation and chemical feedstocks as required for military and civilian purposes.
All indications are that renewable power is more practical at this time than nuclear.
Pennsylvania is a fossil fuel economy now, through fracking, and we are idiosyncratically beholden to it in our federal election. Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Ukraine, Venezuela, Mexico, Norway, Denmark, Sudan, the Middle East and Iran... these are all volatile fossil fuel and mineral extraction economies, they do not export much else to us besides a declining pool of cheap labor or in Denmark’s case, cheese.
Many countries aspire to be mineral economies, not the other way around, life is much simpler that way. That some places extract minerals from the earth, and others “extract minerals” by converting their control of the worldwide supply of attention into ads, and that the Earth extractors are in Pennsylvania and other parts of the world while the Attention extractors are in San Francisco and Los Angeles, is also a big part of the issue.
It is indeed more complicated than “who’s to blame, consumers or producers?” This forum is constantly full of people whose opinions boil down to, “I should get paid for my thing, and everyone’s else’s thing can go suck it.” It isn’t workable. This guy isn’t advancing a workable politic for global action against global warming.
And yet neither is solar power, despite obviously fixing the carbon problem. They do not make solar panels in Indonesia or Iran or Saudi Arabia or Mexico or Brazil or Sudan, that’s a billion people right there who depend on fossil fuel economics. What do you think their opinion is about solar panels? Making solar panels is hard, squeezing oil out of the ground is easy.
And if there’s anything history has taught us, people will fight violently to protect not their profitable means of making money, but their easy means of making money. That’s the problem dude.
Natural gas. The year-over-year growth in natural gas deployment is greater than the entire historic deployment of solar power. Let that sink in.
I'll be optimistic when the total fossil fuel footprint stops growing. Hell, I'll be optimistic when it stops growing exponentially. We aren't there. We aren't anywhere near there. We don't have the foggiest plan of how we will get there. Germany killed its coal power industry, and transitioned right into burning Russian natural gas.
And this is just in electrical generation. Electrical generation is only 20% of our overall energy usage. In order to transition the rest of our society to green energy, we'd have to triple our overall electricity production.
Solar and wind deployments aren't even able to keep up with increased demand in electricity growth. How you expect them to triple our overall electricity generation capacity anytime soon is beyond me.
Resources are ultimately more limited than oil, and have grown only through extremely expensive, and environmentally damaging (groundwater contamination, earthquakes) hydrofracking. Simply on a financial basis that appears unsustainable.
Natgas has and will help smooth the transition. It's not a stable goal, however. Lifeboat, not safe land.
EDIT: I'd appreciate knowing where I'm wrong.
+ A smart grid allows demand and load to be managed, home and industrial storage and devices to be controlled to vary the load. This is a direction Europe is moving in. Your industrial heavy user might willingly sign up to a service that can be cut to stop grid crash in exchange for discount on the vast amount of electric used - this has quietly existed for decades. Getting smarter, homes and other premises can have charging and in building devices controlled to move demand, and in home spare solar battery added to grid storage for the overnight. Again for discounts. There are examples of this working already.
+ Pumped hydro can add TWh of storage if built at scale. It needs suitable geography, but we don't lack potential sites. Sites that would attract a NIMBY reaction can take the "hollowed out mountain" approach, invisible when finished. Again, plenty of examples exist. Unlike battery will last hundreds of years needing only turbine replacement periodically. The higher build cost can amortise beyond a lifetime.
+ It is very unlikely the whole of the US will completely lack wind at the same time, especially offshore. It's just about unheard of for tiny UK to be becalmed, though admittedly we're more "blessed" with wind than many regions. Over specify to allow the regions with wind to assist any region currently becalmed.
+ Last, use neighbours as storage - sell and buy electric from surrounding countries to smooth each other's demand. Once again this is already coming into being across Europe with the super-grid.
In short, we have ample ways to store and move electricity, along with managing demand today. It's already being done in many places. We just need the political will do more of it to support a fully renewable grid.
FWIW, I also tend to agree 10 of his 11 closing points. I'm not at all convinced by his argument renewables can't scale up to cover all global electric generation.
> A smart grid allows demand and load to be managed
Which we don't have on a national (let alone international) scale, and won't have in any reasonable period of time.
> Pumped hydro can add TWh of storage if built at scale.
It's not, and it's not being built or even planned.
> sell and buy electric from surrounding countries
We can't. There's not enough transmission capacity, and there's no sign that capacity between countries is being built. We can't even ship power from the east coast to the mid-west interior.
> It is very unlikely the whole of the US will completely lack wind at the same time, especially offshore.
Which doesn't help the interior of the US - see comment about a complete lack of transmission capacity. We also have effectively-zero offshore wind capacity, and none in the works to be built.
It's a dirty secret but the US simply doesn't have the capacity to ship power any major distance. The country is broken into individual sub-groups that are maybe a thousand miles on a side that are physically incapable of linking up due to a lack of infrastructure for lots of power.
Theoretical technology won't solve our problems; Pumped Hydro is a great example. It effectively doesn't exist outside of a few demos; per Wikipedia the total installed pumped hydro storage in under 200 GWh. That wouldn't even cover the electricity imported into CA.
The sticking point is political, not technical or logistical. If there are ever politicians convinced climate heating, and sustainability is important, it's fixable with no more difficulty than building a highway network. Undoubtedly you'll say citizens won't tolerate the taxes that would be needed -- still a political issue. Those can change.
As the International Energy Agency noted today whilst criticising the completely inadequate efforts the globe is making: “We will need to see great political will around the world. This is why I believe that the world needs to build a grand coalition encompassing governments, investors, companies and everyone else who is genuinely committed to tackling climate change.”
> That wouldn't even cover the electricity imported into CA
In a year. CA doesn't need a year's storage backup capacity, just enough to cover cyclic shortfalls. A few hours to cover winter nights, that's under a day's worth at most.
Why is every nation not committing an investment on the scale of the Apollo/Manhattan Projects? Politically it should be sell-able as a near-term investment (jobs) and future prosperity (cheaper renewable energy).
Governments should be putting billions into fusion, wave/tidal generation (nothing should be too expensive), upgrading all hydro to pumped hydro as well as developing more.
Ideas like this: https://www.arup.com/projects/bendigo-underground-pumped-hyd...
should be fully supported and funded. As each of the dozens of 400m+ deep underground coal mines around the world are wound down and replaced with wind or solar generation, convert them to pumped hydro, providing jobs for displaced coal miners and saving their communities in the process.
The US currently subsidies renewables at about $7 billion annually.
Though the renewables subsidy doesn't look as generous if you compare things in % of GDP terms.
The current US Government investment seems pretty small.
There is promising work coming out of Lockheed's Skunk Works, using a completely different design and MIT has SPARC. Given ITER is pretty well locked in on the Tokamak design they've chosen and it a matter of building it, why not fund as many ideas as possible as while most may not work, you just don't know whether one results in a discovery and pivot that changes everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Compact_Fusion...
Manhattan needed to build a vialbe, air-transportable, nuclear bomb. It arrived at two independent designs, both effective to task, and succeeded in assimilating materials for at least several more weapons (on the order of 6 IIRC), over the course of WWII. The rationalisation was both defeating, and not losing military supremacy over, an enemy. (Germany was also working on a nuclear weapon.)
Apollo needed to land a man on the Moon and return him, alive, to Earth. Rationales varied, but one compelling argument was as a proof-of-capability of US technological capacity as regards missile design, reliability, control, targeting, with the additional constraints of solving life-support systems challenges capable of keeping meat-puppets alive for a week in space. Drag-racing and Lunar golf were bonus stretch targets.
Each project was relatively independent of other complex technological systems, and wasn't concerned with a tightly-coupled, long-term, widespread integration. Manhattan's gadgets needed to fit in Bock's Car's bomb bay. Apollo's designs, once the fundamental mission was completed, were largely abandoned. Several technologies survived, but the project as a whole did not.
Both projects saw numerous exceedingly close approaches with disaster. Manhattan's tail-tickling proved unwise, the US are still cleaning up Hanford (and as yet have no final management plan), and there were several near-catastrophic handling mishaps at Oak Ridge. (Though in total the project was remarkably smooth.)
Apollo's record was, to my knowledge, far worse. An entire crew were lost in ground testing, one very nearly in space (13), and missions 8, 11, 12, and probably others, saw one or more potentially fatal / mission-loss incidents and events. Margins for safety were extraordinarily slim.
(Subsequent history with the Space Shuttle and two total vehicle losses shows that risks persisted decades later.)
The Global Energy Sustainability Project is far more complex.
It is building not a simple tool or one-shot mission, but a total system. That system needs to be tighly integrated, as an integral component, of the worldwide technical economic system. It needs to function from now until doomsday, or at least until some replacement regime is established. It challenges what's arguably been the most lucrative and critical as well as geopolitically salient sector of the global economy, which is to say it upsets a vast set of economic, financial, political, military, and national interests. Pains are localised, benefits are diffuse.
Success depends on global coordination and cooperation, or barring that, sacrifice and effectiveness on local scales which counters the actions of any defectors.
This is almost certainly the Biggest of the Big Problems.
As in India, which is nearly finished building from ~ 40GW to 170GW of renewable energy. And you skip past the powers of conservation. We don't need more power, we need less CO2.
> capable of scaling ... nuclear fission
The CO2 problem needs to be addressed promptly, and efficiently. Renewables build -much- more quickly, and the immediate cost of hundreds of nukes would finance thousands of green installs. (Waste aside.) Sunlight and wind are the result of the Sun's NF ... it eats the waste problem.
> I don't see any possibility.
Oh it's possible. What you 'see' as irrational politics I see as just as rational as the CO2 evidence. And the rational response is to vote out all of those who stand in the way of prompt and efficient.
Consider if we had acted and done in the same short period what India has done, we'd now have the equivalent of 130 nuclear plants online ... ready for a mandate to move to electric transportation.
The future cost of continued reliance on fossils completes the calculation.
In that time, other forms of energy generation (with no major lasting effects following catastrophic failure) and storage are getting cheaper, and if that happens at a sufficiently fast (e.g. half-life (heh) of price of a few years) than fission reactors will be priced out before they even start running.
Fusion is safe! D: Fusion when?
Nuclear is safe compared to the alternatives.
Hydro power, for much the same organisational, political, and disaster response reasons as nuclear, which is to say, non-technical reasons, can be exceedingly risky.
But once the immediate hazard is resolved, over the course of months to years, the region returns to normal.
The immediate innundation from Banqiao was responsible for ~25k deaths. The additional 100k or so came from starvation and disease due to widespread disruption of the region, and a grossly inadequate disaster response plan and capability.
Organisational / institutional failures at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and for that matter, Hanford and Sellafield, were and are massive contributing factors. You cannot engineer around those.
Something I say as no particular fan (though also not a doctrinaire opponent) of nuclear power.
The fact that scaling nuclear beyond its present contribution would require vast numbers of plants, many in politically (and otherwise) unstable regions, is a much larger concern in my book. We're committing to decades to millennia of addressing consequences in regions where stability is often measured in years, sometimes months.
This sounds like a tautology, but we solved hard problems by solving them, not by believing we'd solve them.
You sounds like the typical advocator of oil pipelines over protected land and I'm sure you know how that ended up. Can we build safe pipelines? Yes. Do we? No. Why? Because of the human factor, which comes down to greed, stupidity, and laxation of regulation.
This is the same exact case for nuclear. Already we see that a majority of nuclear power plants in the US are operating at almost 2x the design life and will likely get additional extensions. This is done by continued laxation of regulation.
And this is in the US where I would expect the strictest of regulation. When the rest of the world sees the US doing this, it sets a precedence for them to follow and I'm sure other countries will have even less strict regulations and inspections. It's really only a matter of time until we have another disaster.
Next is the assumption that renewables have to be deployed at grid scale, with the materials and transmission costs associated with that. This is also not true - solar + battery is a perfect use case for distributed deployment by homeowners, businesses, parking lots, etc. in any sunny location, and trends in non-grid installed solar reflect this where non-utility accounts for over a third of new installs per year.
Next is the questionable bundling of global statistics rather than breaking out by country. If you break it out by country, the trends are a lot different. For example, most of the west already reached effective peak energy demand (or close to it), and renewables deployments are offsetting dirtier production methods at a decent pace, mostly due to economics. The "bad" trends the author points are are specific to developing locations.
There's more, but this is already a long comment.
Edit: Another one... solar panels don't last "a few years more" [than turbines], they last a decade or more longer. Current estimate is 25-30 years with proper maintenance before performance is significantly degraded, and even at that point they still work just fine. It's not like you don't have to replace or overhaul major power plant components every few decades for other energy sources...
This is simply not feasible. Do the math. To store 3 days worth of current US energy use, you need to build $50 trillion worth of batteries. If you assume that the battery installation lifetime is 20 years, and amortize it over that period, you’re looking at over 10% of US GDP spent just on building and installing the batteries. Seriously, do the math.
There is absolutely no need, of any kind, to store 3 days of US energy use. It's a complete strawman.
If you absolutely must have 100% uptime then $1000 will get you a diesel generator which would keep the batteries topped off if you ever need it.
And if your argument is that someone living inside the arctic circle could find themselves becalmed for too long during the long night... then maybe back it up a notch and realise that 99% of humans don't live in those conditions and maybe the ones that do can still use some fuel oil.
Ah, great, so every house that has food in a freezer or likes to stay warm in winter now has to buy and maintain a diesel generator. Welcome to the great new renewable world.
We've developed a food distribution network dependent on a cold chain -- not only the ability to refrigerate or freeze product, but to maintain constant refrigeration from the process point to retail to the home until final consumption. This is not an inevitability, and it need not remain standard practice into the future.
There are other methods of preserving food. They sacrifice convenience, freshness, and nutritional quality, but are tractable.
Canning, fermentation, drying, and other preservation methods can make many foods long-term stable.
Certain foods, especially fruit and vegetables, may need to be sourced fresh. This is where local production can be appropriate, including home or neighbourhood gardens.
If meat is still to be consumed, the traditional method of keeping it fresh was to ship it live. Canned or salt beef and port were common prior to widespread refrigeration.
How widely or enthusiastically such changes might be adopted becomes an interesting question. But as a long-term adaptation, this could well be a potential path.
One key mindset to looking at radical changes to environment and resource regimes is to recognise that changes in underlying costs, abundance, and/or suitability may be radical changes in products, practices, and behaviours.
you're floating a strawman which has never been floated as a serious risk analysis: there isn't a single US distribution network, it is not a single integral thing, parts fail all the time, and more to the point, you haven't even demonstrated one weather system can produce no wind and no solar output for a week.
Winter does not == the entire united states is black for 24h/day. The Rockies exist, and weather on the west coast is not like weather in the mid-west, or the east coast, all the time, for sustained week-long periods.
I don't know how to predict the future reliably either. I just think the argument here is ridiculously reductive.
We aren't on mars. The current systems exist, and won't be turned off overnight, and we don't have a single global network in the economy under discussion. Pricing and distribution and storage have to be approached, not arrived at suddenly, And have upside consequences like increased employment, which means the spend is not 'hole in the ground' but actually has net beneficial effects on the economy.
To repeat what I said elsewhere you have mis-represented the 2/3 losses figure.
https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/electr...
(same source as you) is clear transmission losses are significantly different. You rolled up energy conversion and production losses from all sources which includes Coal and Gas and Oil and Nuclear.
No, you don't seem to understand pumped-hydro. The largest pumped-hydro plant in the US, the Bath County Pumped Storage Station, can store enough energy to satisfy US energy use for 250 milliseconds. Yes, milliseconds. Suppose you want to have enough pumped-hydro to store US energy use for, say, 1 hour. There are 3600 seconds in an hour. You need ~15 000 pumped hydro plants. Where are you going to build them? Where are you going to get enough water from?
> or economics. Using hyperbolic language like "through the roof" when we cannot magically wave a wand to make a 100% renewables world in one go, but are approaching it asymptotically means that the pricing function, the costs, and the outcomes are not 'through the roof' but a function of where we are in a migration.
Of course it will be "a function" of something. The above sentence is devoid of content. The real question is, what will be the shape of the function? I argue that if we depend on renewables on majority of our energy, the cost per kWh produced will go through the roof. I argue why it is so. Do you have any argument? Show me your math, like I do in my every comment.
> And have upside consequences like increased employment, which means the spend is not 'hole in the ground' but actually has net beneficial effects on the economy.
This is just a broken window fallacy. Having lots of people spend lots of effort on something that before didn't require so many people will be greatly detrimental, not beneficial to economy.
> To repeat what I said elsewhere you have mis-represented the 2/3 losses figure.
Ah, thanks. I misinterpreted the figure.
You insist I "do the math" but your premises has twice to your own admission had fundamental flaws in the source data and in the maths.
You really want me to "put up my numbers" ? I think you're trolling.
There is no compelling "all US from storage" problem. There is no "week long no-wind no-solar" problem. There is no immediate current TWh supply from renewables.
There are undoubtedly problems: They're just not the phantoms you are floating.
Go away please.
These actually are insurmountable problems. Even just taking the time to deploy the required capacity wiggle allowing a generous 5% compound speed scaling gets us to required capacity in 50 years of constantly building renewables. For just the USA. And this ignores the expansion of the grid, attempts to actually secure best land for the deployments and so on.
A great solar system has peak 300 W/m^2 efficiency or thereabouts. You need 1400 W per capita on average, which means with generous 140 W/m^2 about 10m^2 of solar power per person plus support wiring and storage. Wind requires 20+m height and big rotors to match this average, making it require some 100 m^2 per. Neither completely infeasible, but the millions of square km to cover should show the magnitude of the task.
Hardcore California plans envision 60% renewable at 2030. This means at increased growth rate of still 2 billion tons. Essentially at the high endgrowth of renewables the 20 years would match last 10.
Conservative climate predictions at this level of CO2 equivalent give over 5 C increase!
It is too slow. Way too slow.
Wikipedia claims US yearly electricity consumption is 4,090 TWh, and Bath County stores 24 TWh, with a generation capacity of 3,003 MW. That comes out as enough storage for a couple of days worth of US electricity use. Obviously you'd need 3 more to cover generation capacity.
My calculation was done under assumption of 101 quads of annual US energy use, but I'll redo this calculation with assumption more charitable to your argument.
US uses only 4090 TWh worth of electricity, which is about 13 quads, but it also uses about 70 quads of energy in other forms than electricity. See the breakdown at [1]. Let's assume that moving to all-electric world reduces the transportation energy use by half. In all electric world, the 25 quads we waste to generate electricity also vanish. Thus, the annual US energy needs is 101 - 25 - 14 = 62 quads, assuming we can increase efficiency by replacing majority of heat engines with electric engines. Putting this in Wolfram Alpha[2] gives you about 40 seconds.
So, now we need about 100 pumped hydro plants of the same size as largest one energy storage facility in existence, to cover 1 hour of US energy use (I'm ignoring of course the problem of not enough generating capacity to convert that storage to electricity fast enough as needed). Where are you going to build them? Where are you going to take water from?
[1] - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained//us-energy-facts/ [2] - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2824GWh%2F62+quads%2F...
Anyway. 100 of that scale might be better or easier as 1,000 smaller capacity, but even then we can reduce further. Some percentage of the grid is nuclear (roughly 20% of US electric) which would not need underwriting nor would 100% of continental wind power ever be becalmed. I would further assume that any concerted national effort to electrify carbon neutrally would come with a matching efficiency drive - insulation, tax inefficient users, take first steps toward a national grid (that TIL the US apparently does not have), etc to allow you to use the power you have rather better.
Yet ignoring all that, the US must have thousands or tens of thousands of disused mines and quarries, probably many open ones with an accidental lake in their place that could be repurposed. If there's adequate volume, you don't need much head of water. There's no shortage of hills and mountains with rainfall or snow melt that should give plenty of potential spots, population and environment permitting. The one thing America does not lack is space - of all terrain types.
There are about 70 > 1MW pumped storage stations around the world already, with 40 more planned (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...), mostly in China. These are just glorified dams and as far as dams go they're tiny, so scaling up (and maybe down too) isn't an issue, there are an estimated 84,000 dams already in the United States. At ~$4 bilion dollars to build 100 of them would come in at the cost of about 1/3 the F-35 program and deliver much more national security.
So it's entirely feasible to have enough pumped hydro storage to cover this mythical scenario of a continent having no wind for an hour.
The problem with massive projects like that is that you simply cannot build them just about anywhere.
It isn't actually unreasonable to just say fossil fuels here. If we had to burn natural gas for a week every two years it would still represent a 99% reduction in carbon emissions.
And on top of that, suppose we keep a week's supply of biofuels. They're not cost-competitive on a normal day, but you're not using them on a normal day.
Of course, in practice, if you overbuild renewable energy generation to a large enough multiple that will greatly increase the average cost of produced kWh, and if you keep most of the fossil fuel infrastructure on standby, then at the immense expense, and greatly increased energy prices, you could reduce CO2 emissions by switching to renewables. The real question is, why would you do so, if it would be much, much cheaper to just build enough nuclear plants to cover your needs. France managed to do it in the 70s., why can't we do it 50 years later?
We produce around ten times as many gallons of ethanol as biodiesel. It has about half as many BTUs, which implies we would need around two years of production. Not really a problem if we only need that much once every two years.
It's also assuming we couldn't produce more than we do now, or do something more efficient like convert existing coal fired plants to burn biomass from algae.
> The real question is, why would you do so, if it would be much, much cheaper to just build enough nuclear plants to cover your needs. France managed to do it in the 70s., why can't we do it 50 years later?
Because we do whatever costs less. Nuclear plants are expensive. On the other hand, so is storage. It's not actually clear which one is going to cost less in the long term, so what we should probably be doing is building both at the same time.
Which has the additional advantage of replacing fossil fuels even faster, because the two technologies have very little overlap in terms of either labor expertise or materials use, and complement one another in that there is more electricity demand during the day when solar is generating but there is still non-trivial demand at night which can be handled by nuclear. They're not coming at the expense of one another, they're both coming at the expense of fossil fuels, so the more the merrier.
Right. It's really worth asking why exactly nuclear plants are so expensive to build, and why they were so much cheaper in the past. The plants that French built in the 70s and 80s were produce much cheaper electricity than fossils and renewables, in terms of LCOE. Why is US so terrible at building things today? Would it even be possible to build, say, Hoover dam today? How many more times it would cost now than it did in the 1930s, in inflation adjusted dollars, despite great advancements in the available technology?
> so what we should probably be doing is building both at the same time.
If you build nuclear, there's no need to build storage, really. Energy storage is very expensive to build, per stored MWh, much more expensive than nuclear is today, even at today's greatly inflated prices.
I tend to think it's a combination of factors that mostly boil down to bureaucratic inefficiency and various forms of political corruption.
The problem is there are multiple groups who profit from it being expensive.
First you have the people actually receiving the money. Contractors and unions. If it costs ten times as much they get a ten times bigger contract with ten times more hours.
Then you have the competitors. The fossil fuel industry is committed to ensuring that nuclear reactors are "sufficiently" regulated.
And the problem is there's nobody on the other side. The people paying the money are the utility ratepayers. They're not organized.
Maybe the key to fixing it is recognizing that the two groups in favor of higher costs aren't actually aligned. The contractors and unions want lucrative construction work, the competitors don't want construction at all. But if nobody's building then you don't get a big fat contract, you get a big fat nothing.
But at the root it's a political problem. Existing laws make construction expensive. Either fix them or expect it to continue to be expensive.
> If you build nuclear, there's no need to build storage, really.
Solar is cheaper than anything when the sun is shining, and there are a lot of things -- charging electric vehicles is a big one -- that can be demand-shifted into that time period with price incentives. But as soon as you're using it you've got an issue. Sunlight doesn't perfectly align with demand. You need something to get you over the demand peak in the evening. But storage enough to cover the base to peak load differential for two or three hours a day is a whole lot cheaper than needing to cover the full load for the full night.
Interestingly, some of the newer nuclear reactor designs have built-in storage. A molten salt reactor can use hot salt as thermal storage. Let solar handle more of the load during daylight while you put heat from the reactor into a vat of molten salt, then have the extra heat to spin more turbines during the load peak in the evening.
EDIT: this is actually wrong, I misinterpreted the diagram, see the comment below.
I believe you mis-quoted the figures. You rolled up total conversion costs and bloated them into transmission losses.
Humans have run civilisations with 80% of the effort dedicated to gathering agricultural produce. 10% devoted to energy storage is workable. I don't like the idea but it is clearly doable.
This is not a point against solar, but the "lifetime" of wind turbine installations is misrepresented in the article. It states "the life expectancy of a wind turbine may be less than 15 years." and it links one 7 year old article to support that idea, which is known to be false except in the sly sense that for sure a windturbine may need repairs at any time.
Modern windfarms are commonly financed to be built and make a profit from investment by selling electricity for 15 years. After that contract is up, however much they require new blades and/or refurbished or modernized generators - extending their life is due to be much cheaper than putting entirely new ones in their foundations. The relatively short supply contracts are very desirable to investors, not a sign of unreliability.[1]
[1] https://www.intechopen.com/books/stability-control-and-relia...
If you run short of energy in january in many boreal areas (like Moscow or Bismark), and suddenly can't heat your home, you could face a serious danger of death. Gaz and electricity are a must. Same for Mojave or Death Valley if you can't use electricity to keep the temperature in acceptable limits.
There is a limit on how much the developped countries could lower their "lifestyle" (needs of energy) to get closer to the energy requirements of developping countries, just because winter here can be really harsh.
Hot areas (in developping and developped countries) will face the same problem but many developping countries in tropical areas would not have this problem (even if they could have other serious problems to solve, like the monsoon period)
The energy requirements can be very different in the different periods of the year also. If we talk about average requirements of energy that would be wrong.
https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/testing-a-thirt...
https://global.kyocera.com/news-archive/2009/0805_jeao.html
My feeling is that most significant degradation comes from problems with assembly weather sealing, connectors, and/or electronic components. The cells themselves should last for a long time with modest degradation.
Inverters on the other hand seem to be closer to consumables in PV installs, but even those should last 10-20 years depending on the model, and refurbishment is possible.
Does renewable deployment cover new energy demand as well as the fossil fuels we are supposed not to use anymore?
> renewables deployments are offsetting dirtier production methods
Renewables take their toll on the environment too. Batteries and solar panels need fossil fuels for their production, and the mining of rare metals is an extremely polluting industry (and often delocalized in countries with little regulations).
> If you look at the charts
The charts I looked at suggested that there will be both an energy and an environmental crisis.
It's very hard to argue over this topic as all we can do is cite experts. Maybe I'm attracted to the most pessimistic authors? where to look to have the scientific consensus on this matter?
The increase in fossil fuel demand, however “lumpy”, is more than current total renewable output.
(Who is downvoting? this is a statement of fact, from the article.)
Do you mean it can’t be maintained forever? I can think of lots of physical processes that have exponential behavior for some amount of time.
People want to have their lifestyle and telling people in developing countries that they can never have the Western lifestyle and telling people in developed countries that they have to reduce their lifestyle are simply untenable politically.
We should be focusing on climate change mitigation.
The challenge is to keep the extracted carbon from returning to the atmosphere. Those underground reservoirs of coal and hydrocarbons we have been digging up all the time are hard to beat.
Regardless, mitigating a disaster while still causing that disaster doesn't result in the disaster ending. If we allocate all our efforts into mitigation we won't be in a position to actually restructure our society to be sustainable when the problem of climate change remains.
Wouldn't you need even more energy to pull it in that it took to release it? So to undo 10 years worth of global emissions, you'd need more energy than was generated worldwide over those 10 years? Sounds impossible.
The 250kWh number likely only accounts for the operational energy requirements, not the fully burdened energy requirements of creating the consumable inputs.
I've never heard a convincing case for this that accepted that warming will keep going and going unless we stop emitting.
Mitigation in that event will be something like "abandon all historical coastal cities and keep building new port infrastructure every couple decades".
I share the authors concern here that doing the exact same thing we're doing now but handwave electric is not going to get us to where we're going to need to be. We need to be smarter about how we use energy and our resources and use less.
For example shifting our entire automobile based transportation infrastructure to the exact same thing but electric is not nearly as impactful on lowering CO2 emissions taking those cars off the road via better public transit and land use that enables active transportation (ie. walking/cycling).
Modern coal-fired powerplants are substantially more efficient then car internal combustion engines.
And who knows. If we actually had an effective carbon tax that internalizes the externalities of carbon pollution, nuclear fission might suddenly look very cheap.
Carbon-emitting generation:
35% Natural Gas
3% Coal
11% "Unspecified" (lets be pessimistic and assume all of that is fossil fuel)
Non-carbon emitting (or carbon neutral):
11% Large Hydro
9% Nuclear
31% "Renewables" (solar, wind, small hydro, etc)
Yes, transportation is still almost entirely fossil fuel based. Many homes and businesses use natural gas for heat. Industry uses fossil fuels as well in significant amounts. None of these can be ignored.
But de-carbonizing electricity is a crucial first step.
[0] https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_sys...
Part 2: https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/12/Climate-Crisis-Realis...
This is highly disturbing. With the 11,000 scientist warning the other day they proposed something similar. I find it very worrying. Who will decide who lives? Or who has kids and a family? This will not end well...
I don't have very high hopes for us getting out of this demographic crunch without a world war, but so far Millenials are not letting us down, though they aren't exactly happy about it. Let's hope that we can remain on the "mildly disgruntled" side rather than the "shooting war".
We’re so far away from having to debate this as realistic thing politically right now, the discourse is an exercise in fear mongering.
Plenty to be freaked out about before next month is passed.
I'm someone who subsidizes families having children, my taxes are paying for their healthcare, their schools, their childcare, etc. And while I'm happy to do that because maintaining society is important I'm not happy to do it for someone pumping out 15 kids.
> I bet you this will be a political discussion in some years.
I bet you it won't, reproduction rates have plummeted in developed nations.
Is it ok to let people crank out as many babies as they want, destabilizing things further for the species?
Can you more concretely define “in some years”? Before or after I am dead?
This is the ultimate point I am trying to make: how much plastic and how many phones we make today impact the necessity of that future dialog.
Do something about the activity today to avoid the conversation from having value rather than emotionally spinning in circles over a hypothetical.
Who is this blogger to think we owe their position much thought?
Cleanup the planet to keep it from being a problem then.
If it ever gets to a point where perhaps more coercive measures are needed, it’s probably too late. But it will be interesting to see how the Overton window moves when there’s suddenly no food left...
A starting point would be to just stop treating big-family parents like heros. "You're not exactly doing me a favor by spreading your genes like that"
If you want to solve tradgedy of the commons type problems, the two known solutions are privatization and regulation. Nobody has yet thought of a way to privatize the earths climate, so we are pretty much stuck with regulation.
That sucks.
But the alternative sucks worse.
Without a steady flow of migration from the undeveloped world to the developed world, the population of the native developed world would greatly decline in the coming decades.
There are none amongst the countries breeding at the rate of replacement [0].
We've seen that when a populace has better access to medicine, improving life expectancy and especially reducing child mortality rates, gains access to contraception & abortion, becomes better educated and less religious leading to becoming more well off and having their basic needs met as defined by Maslow, that they trend towards having less and less children.
Even migrants from the undeveloped world to the developed world have shown to have gradually less children as generations go by.
So the theory would be that we could bring down the world's population over time by simply making the above abundantly more accessible to those who are currently fueling the population explosion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
"Family planning", as it's commonly understood, is an umbrella term for how normal, everyday people avoid having children when they don't want to have them.
When toxik responded to your question "Who will decide who lives? Or who has kids and a family?" with "Probably just family planning. Nobody needs to die to save the earth", they are suggesting that humans will continue to practice (as we have for millennia) techniques that reduce the number of unplanned children we have.
FYI before we were born we didn’t have much say in the shape of the world and then were shaped to agree with it.
That’s how it works.
If such a social policy does come into effect we’ll be long dead and have no say. Not so much a thing to worry about.
Our concern on Earth is our own behavior, and I don’t mean to come off as pious, but we have no control over 50 years from except by changing our behavior now.
Write ups like this, proposing entirely untenable political positions are worth as much East German currency, and unlike East German currency, broadly distributed making any individual one repetitive.
Life is the leading cause of death. It ends badly for all us :shrug:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Compact_Fusion...
The smaller scale might simplify things.
Borrowing from the analogy in the article, fusion is a magnetic field management problem.
Fortunately in the case of solar, we're already in the active commercial use phase, and there is a long-term declining cost trend. Whether that's sufficient remains to be seen, but it's promising.
Nuclear has tended to become more expensive over time, as consequences of utilisation become more apparent.
I'm not sure we should care about costs now. It sounds really lame on the long run to say to past generations that "we could have changed things, but it wasn't cost effective, anyways good luck rebooting the Golf stream and stuff"
We need to do. Or plan / prepare for the alternatives.
Sustaining a modest research program on potential long bets is probably defensible. But don't hinge all hopes on this.
I do appreciate the science and am glad for progress in our efforts. It seems to me we are not competent enough to solve such things when we have largely rejected the instructions given by the earth's creator (like, honesty, the Golden Rule, etc, etc): we have a hard time trusting each other even when we say we agree. I'm glad we can share our own thoughts. We need His help both to address important issues globally, and in our personal lives.
(More details on these thoughts at http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html , a simple site w/o javascript).
They point out the plan assumes you can launch planes from a few different points around the globe. You don’t need global agreement, but at least access to some foreign airports.
An utterly meaningless comparison. None of those countries are going to simply stop spending all of their money on their military overnight.
This will not end humanity. The apocalypse is not coming. Humans will adapt because we have no choice. Engineering a solution to a global climate problem is borderline impossible. Engineering a solution to imminent local direct impacts of climate change is a more coherent, approachable problem.
I agree with the author's assessment - humans require fossil fuels for society's function. Thus, instead of moping around about how we are all fucked, it seems a more productive exercise to sort out how to cohabitate a world where we are going to continue consuming, for the medium term, our near infinite supply of natural gas for energy.
And then there's higher wet bulb temperatures in heat waves. With enough warming, that should render a large chunk of the planet effectively uninhabitable without AC.
Do you accept these consequences when you make such claims?
Over hundreds of years, yes. Some of the biggest cities in the world didn't exist 200 years ago or were small villages.
I lived on land that was under Lake Michigan 100 years ago.
It'll change the world for sure, but that won't kill us off. The change is too slow.
We'd probably lose Boston, New York, San Francisco and Miami this century, or at least chunks of them.
It's not just where the waterline is either: what matters is where the water goes in storm surges. Most current coastal cities would be unliveable within a 100 years I think, if we keep on burning carbon and do "mitigation" only, as OP suggested.
No one has yet retrofitted a local climate. Air conditioning works on the level of buildings.
Argumentum ad consequentiam.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
I throw you into a fire. Will you adapt, because you have no choice?
Maybe not, but what would you suggest we do otherwise?
“A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature.“
Same ‘ole Club of Rome, population control policies.
For the sort of order of magnitude of decarbonisation that is required to meet the climate change requirement, not only to provide the current energy but future growth too, there isn't really any realistic solution other than nuclear energy.
Government needs to put its fingers on the scale until men and organizations with billions to invest can run the numbers on nuclear and have it be more profitable than slapping up windmills. We're not gonna entice the money guys we need to entice with opportunities that are less profitable, involve more tech risk, and have a longer time period to first revenue.
You might want to think through the implications of that stopping.
So basically we're putting money over the survival of the species and generally life on earth. Our priorities are back to front, and discussing how cheap or expensive it is to switch to renewables is pointless. We're just headed for extinction. And good riddance to us, because we're bloody stupid monkeys who can't control the processes we set in motion. Becaues we are reckless and destructive and we do not trust each other enough to work together to avert our shared catastrophe.
Over how long a time-frame does Dr.Rees expect this to happen? Thanos only killed half the population. Mao only starved ~40M/50M.
He has no imagination for what could be with all the will and imagination of a generation faced with dire results and instead draws bleak resolutions that sound like the aftermath of a WW3.
Depending on the timeline for achieving a 2-3B population, any period of less than ~100 years is not attainable without a huge increase in mortality. That's shown in numerous models suggested by the 1970 Limits to Growth project.
In pre-industrial times, and as recently as 1850s Ireland, massive population declines in regional areas were fairly commonplace. The Irish Potato Famine, through direct mortality and emigration, reduced the population of Ireland from 8 million to 4, over a period of 60 years:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/medi...
Ireland has still not regained its 1850 population peak.
Note too that Ireland's population had increased tremendously from the 3 millions of 1740. The potato primed the trap the blight triggered.
There were numerous other notable famines in the 19th century, several in China, then as Ireland under strong British influence. These continued through the 20th century, including in both Nationalist and Communist regimes. The Ukranian Holdomor struck at the same time as famines elsewhere in the world, and was somewhat contemporaneous with the Dust Bowl in the US, a localised famine, in which there was some starvation, though largely manifested as a massive internal migration (see especially Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath).
The people who realise this is a potential path are largely wholly aware of just how horrific the prospect is, both in direct misery and the all-but-certain breakdown of all social, governmental, commercial, and technical institutions. While there are some who embrace this, they tend to be extreme outliers.
Most see this as the scenario to avoid at all costs.
The broadside attack on capitalism is going to be the undoing of the climate advocacy movement. Neoliberalism has become the global consensus, and it’s not going anywhere. Neoliberals and outright conservatives have been in charge of the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Australia, the United States, etc., for decades. Even “socialist” Macron has reinvented himself as a neo-liberal. People remember the depredations of socialism and the stagnation of “democratic socialism” and don’t seem eager to repeat them. (Greta Thunberg’s home country of Sweden cut spending as a percentage of GDP by almost 20 points since 1990, slashed corporate taxes, deregulated and privatized, etc.).
Telling people we need a command economy to effectively combat climate change is a non-starter. “Major lifestyle changes” or ghastly thoughts like “reducing human population” will result in climate advocates being pilloried.
There are basically three possible outcomes:
1) We don’t change, technology doesn’t save us, and climate change turns out to be not as bad as some people feared. (A recent UNDP report estimated that a “high warming” scenario would case Bangladesh’s GDP growth rate to decrease from 6% to 4% by 2100. Bangladesh would be vastly better off taking that hit than departing from neoliberal economic policies.)
2) We don’t change, but technology reverses climate change.
3) We don’t change, technology doesn’t save us, and contrary to consensus science, runaway greenhouse effects kill us all.
Some "realist" this guy is.
"Jancovici : Can we save energy, jobs and growth at the same time?"
08/01/2018
Jean-Marc Jancovici
Jancovici's conference in ENS School of Paris - 08/01/2018
> The depletion of natural resources, with oil to start with, and the need for a stable climate, will make it harder and harder to pursue economic growth as we know it. It has now become urgent to develop a new branch of economics which does not rely on the unrealistic assumption of a perpetual GDP increase. In this Colloquium, I will discuss a "physical" approach to economics which aims at understanding and managing the scaling back of our world economy. Biography : Jean-Marc Jancovici, is a French engineer who graduated from École Polytechnique and Télécom, and who specializes in energy-climate subjects. He is a consultant, teacher, lecturer, author of books and columnist. He is known for his outreach work on climate change and the energy crisis. He is co-founder of the organization "Carbone 4" and president of the think tank "The Shift Project".
Adding a title and description would have helped tremendously though.
Paraphrasing lightly from the intro:
"I decided to talk on something which is not generally studied, the link between economics and physics. The conclusion I will lead you to is that when you put physics in economics, you end up with results which are not easy to sell in an election.... The UN tells us that we can have everything at once in their development goals.... The short answer is no, we can't, so we can all go out and have a beer."
1h28m runtime. Hold that beer.
I'm part of the choir to whom the author is preaching but I find this weak tea. (Although he's not preaching, he's RFC'ing his assumptions.)
If we grant that fusion isn't around the corner (and I don't, see "Fusion in a magnetically-shielded-grid inertial electrostatic confinement device" https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01788 abstract: "Theory for a gridded inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion system is presented that shows a net energy gain is possible if the grid is magnetically shielded from ion impact. A simplified grid geometry is studied, consisting of two negatively-biased coaxial current-carrying rings, oriented such that their opposing magnetic fields produce a spindle cusp. Our analysis indicates that better than break-even performance is possible even in a deuterium-deuterium system at bench-top scales. The proposed device has the unusual property that it can avoid both the cusp losses of traditional magnetic fusion systems and the grid losses of traditional IEC configurations." So that's neat.)
If we grant that we must massively reduce our energy consumption that is not necessarily mean lower Q-of-L. Our systems are hugely wasteful (count the number of LEDs in your house tonight. A first-world household burns so much energy so pointlessly. The not-really-off nature of modern electronics is a small part of it. Bad insulation. Pilot lights. Refrigerators that open like cabinets rather than drawers. Incandescent "light" bulbs that put out more heat than light: they're literally heaters that also give off light. I could go on and on and on...)
Bottom line: if we took physics seriously and gave a shit about efficiency we could cut our emissions in half overnight without any major technology change in production. (Although we should still do that too.)
Also, ever since the 70's people have studied e.g. passive solar design for buildings. We can easily make our cities more efficient and more ecological with just a little cleverness. (Remember that time when we accidentally built a solar furnace in London: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/london-skyscrap... ) The power is there we just have to use it wisely. "It's raining soup, grab a bucket!"
And with applied ecology (e.g. "Permaculture", regenerative agriculture, urban "food forests", etc.) we should be able to recycle wastes and produce food in situ in urban and suburban areas in densities great enough to sustain Arcologies ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology ) integrated ecological city-buildings that provide high quality-of-life in an ecologically harmonious and sustainable way. (The beginnings of this are already happening in parts of asia. ( E.g. https://www.quora.com/How-is-China-able-to-provide-enough-fo... ))
11. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature.
Another anti-humanist Malthusian loony. It’s probably the effect of Vancouver’s dump weather. Ignore.
Which of these do you prefer:
- >10 billion people living on this planet, depleting resources so that inequality levels will rise while total (real) wealth will decline.
- A lot less people than now living on this planet in a way that we can actually permanently get close to the current western standard of living for ~all of them.
Neither. You, like the author of these articles, left out the third choice:
- Continue to improve technology so it can continue to supply increasing real wealth with a smaller ecological footprint.
This has already been happening for pretty much the entire history of technology. The computers we are using to have this conversation consume orders of magnitude less power for orders of magnitude more computing operations than the ones people used to have similar conversations a couple of decades ago. The cars we drive are much more efficient and emit much less. The widespread availability of telecommunications and the Internet reduces the need for people to physically go somewhere in order to get something done.
People can adapt to change if they are given the tools.
What are the net gains provided by millionsfold increases in compute capacity and performance? How much such gains remain?
(And as a side note: peak humans has arrived and the consequences may not be as rosy as the UBC professor who spent his entire life and career in an immigration infused growth zone, thinks they will)
BUT ALSO we need to end factory farming and transition the vast majority of cars to electric. The main reason they are still locked exclusively into hydrocarbons is the massive subsidies the US government has given to fossil fuels. Otherwise we could have had great battery tech 30 years ago after Suez Crisis and OPEC would jolt markets awake and people would clamor for alternatives.
https://www.eenews.net/assets/2017/10/02/document_gw_01.pdf
But these days other countries are far worse in fuel subsidies
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/united...
The world oscillates. It has so for a long, long time. We should stop polluting not with some agenda to think we'll have an effect on global temperature, but to stop poisoning ourselves.
[1] https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=448
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...
The second post was better, but it's from 2011...and the PDO did not stay negative for very long, by 2015 it was positive again, so that was not a longer term negative flip in PDO [1].
So we saw warmer temps in 2016, which briefly skirted highs set in 1998...but since then global temps have cooled. The AMO will go negative sometime in the 2020s and it will coincide with a negative PDO and a grand solar minimum and that is well correlated with global temps dropping based on thousands of years of ice cores and tree rings. See below.
That's not the issue. You attacked my sources but yours don't present significantly different facts. I'll grant that we might get a relatively chill decade. And then those pendula will swing back. And when we're looking at a 3-5C increase by 2100, a decade-long 1C dip won't make that big of a difference for my kid's lifetime.
UAH satellite temperature data: https://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
2004 article showing the prior 70 years featured unusually high sunspots: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15510145/
Changes in Asian monsoons linked to solar output: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15879216/
Impact of AMO and PDO on temperature: https://judithcurry.com/2015/06/30/impact-of-amopdo-on-u-s-r...
[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/decadaltem...
[2] https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/the-10-hotte...