U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=~CHN
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...
If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy. As always, I think we should have been building more nuclear plants back in the 90s. And again in the 2000s. And the 2010s. Maybe now we can go wind and solar. But we need lots of something.
Making people's standards of living go backwards make them shoot you.
Holding down people's standards of living makes their kids or grand-kids shoot you.
Policy sticks are a time bomb. Social solutions (convincing people to behave in a way that reduces their environmental footprint) only get you so far. We need technical solutions (more efficiency in the entire economy) such that people can eat fish or beef and drive in cars (or have access to functionally equivalent or superior analogues) at lesser environmental cost. The "western lifestyle" (moving target, I know) needs to scale because even if the west manages to reduce consumption enough to have a good impact the masses in developing nations are certainly not going to settle for the status quo let alone a reduction in consumption.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#country-by-country...
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-a...
It's much easier for the planet to support a high standard of living for four or six billion people than eight or ten billion.
The developing world population growth is peaking soon or looks to be. But standards of living growth there is exploding so their impact will peak at some unknown point in the future. The already developed world is staying roughly static in terms of population and environmental impact per person is declining slowly there. To use a metaphor, it's like we've got a half full bucket, are very slowly siphoning out water and are also half way through rapidly pouring in an unknown amount of water. Will it overflow? Nobody knows. It would be prudent to try to remove more water and pour in less though.
Edit: Anyone care to tell me why I'm so wrong? Is genocide back on the table or are people just annoyed that this is a hard problem with no shovel ready silver bullet?
It's high time we give up on the fantasy of an ever growing population as a ponzi scheme to boost the economy and finance public spending. We need to face the reality that we ought to have at the very least a stable population and reorganise society accordingly.
In relation to developing countries, any healthcare-related aid should be conditional to implementation of birth control policies.
Globally we really should have a target to reduce population by a few billions if we want to all enjoy life in comfort (~Western country level) on a thriving planet.
Edit: Judging by the reactions, the penny has not dropped yet for some... Hopefully it will before it's too late.
Of course, Americans are very wasteful, and we can’t scale that amount of wastefulness to the entire planet.
More depth can explored using keywords like “global footprint” and “ecological footprint”. What’s your source (“last time I checked”)?
But nature also has little regard for per country statistics. Splitting China into two countries, isn't going to lower their polution.
Using per capita statistics at least allows us to focus on those that are emitting excessively more than others.
"We want" is language that hides reality. Who wants this? How many people?
As the Trump election (and many other elections around the world) show there is no "we want". Different people want different things. Sweeping that fact under the carpet again and again leads to Paris type meaninglessness. Paris fails because there was never any "we".
All the narratives of fear and blame, guilt and shame that have been tried did not make a dent.
Those who want to do something will do it and those that don't want to wont.
Reconcile to that reality and things will actually move forward.
This is not true. It is possible for 8 Billion people to live in comfort (of course, for a reasonable definition of comfort, which isn't typical US lifestyle at the moment), with the amount of Energy produced right now. _If_ production and distribution, political and economic structures, transportation and habitation systems etc. were to change significantly.
(This is regardless of the Nuclear yes/no discussion.)
It acts as both an efficiency measure as well as an indication of whether those most able to solve the issue are doing so.
If one is to ask "whom's individual citizen way of living is contributing most" we would look at per capita C02. If the question is "Who is at risk of increasing their pollution" you would look at living standards and growth rates. If you ask "Who has the beast means to invest into climate change preventing technology" you would look at GDP. If you ask "where in the production chain pollution is created" then looking at trade gives that. If the question is whom is to be blamed historically for getting us into this situation then the historical global cumulative CO2 graph shows that, through I am a bit skeptical that it actually gives a correct picture since ww1 and ww2 were very central in ushering us into the age of fossil fuels.
So if China were to spin off each province as a separate country and the US were to spin of each state as a separate country with each of the new countries emitting exactly as much CO2 as it had before it was a separate country, this would be an improvement?
If we go by per capita, the country that contribute the most to the world pollution is a island country with 300 islands and 1700 people. At the same time there are a bunch of oil countries which list as the most green countries in the world because per capita they got close to nothing in pollution per person. If we go outside of countries, the international space station and antarctic would have insane amount of CO2 per capita since only a very small number of highly specialized people living there.
If we want to stop climate change, going to Palau and Luxembourg with remedies will have zero impact. Their numbers at top of the table is only relevant in terms of statistics.
At least some of them have woken up to the realisation that exporting your pollution/nasty stuff to other parts of the world doesn't really solve all that much, but even so, they're still a minority, the great majority still believes in silver bullets like recycling, "clean tech" etc.
This so called natural self-regulation will be ugly and painful. I don't envy the generation that will have to go through it.
Natural self-regulation means hitting resource limits, followed by sudden and drastic mass dying off, through wars and starvation.
(It's just a shame that renewables and other tech (plus the required behaviour changes) are coming in to maturity a couple of decades too late. Surely we just need to bridge the gap between demographic changes and adoption of cleaner tech. I might be overly optimistic on this front)
We'll see drastic climate change happening everywhere. It'll probably have little effect on "us" in the west; probably limited to local tragedies because of extreme weather and a price increase in food. But elsewhere it'll cause famine, mass death, and mass migration.
Sure if you zoom out enough, humanity will manage and survive just fine. But at what cost? You can try to be utilitarian about it, but you shouldn't shrug at the prospect of millions dying and getting displaced.
I believe this is a very dangerous misconception. In our globalized interconnected world nobody will be spared. "We" might suffer a little less then other parts of the world, but effect on "us" will still be huge.
My country’s ambitious plans are shot down by members of parliament going for the kneejern ”but India and China...” response, and the net result would be no action if they were in power. Luckily we at least have people some people in the government who are willing to make sacrifices. It’s about time the US as a developed country caught up (not just on the state level).
In other words there are externalities (polluting the global environment) that aren't priced into the cost of labor when you're comparing the two countries. Tariffs and similar things can help price in that externality.
The only way we will substantially reduce CO2 emissions is to develop a source of energy that is carbon-free (or incredibly low carbon) and cheaper and easier to deploy than coal and gas. Reductions without that are politically impossible. There is no other way. If we don't succeed in doing so, we should plan for significant climate change as a certainty and begin planning our adaptive response.
That's like saying that cleaning my house means moving the dirt to somebody else's house.
> There is no other way.
That is not true. The other ways are:
1. Reduction of energy use per person.
2. Control of population growth - at the very least, stabilizing the Earth's population and theoretically a reduction.
3. Using Energy sources which are low-carbon, but expensive and/or difficult to deploy.
of course your way makes it a lot _easier_, but since reduction of greenhouse gasses is necessary regardless of the availability of a convenient energy solution, these are also relevant, and gradually are becoming necessary.
By the way - (1.) is already progressing relatively well in lots and lots of countries.
No, it's more like moving your cooking and garage wood shop work to someone else's house, taking the results home, and leaving the mess.
The dirtiest parts of the production chain required to sustain our lifestyle have largely been offshored, not only because of cheaper labor but because less developed or more totalitarian countries will tolerate the pollution.
Yes these things can be done cleaner, but that adds cost that people don't seem to be willing to pay.
Americans want all of: (1) high paying good jobs, (2) clean air and water, and (3) cheap manufactured shit. Sorry, but it's worse than a trichotomy. If you pick 3 you have to pass on 1 and 2.
So we are doing nothing. And eventually it's going to catch up with us all.
I can't believe that a country wanting to have a "comfortable standard of living" is seen as a "risk". Almost suggesting as if those countries don't deserve them and a comfortable standard of living should be reserved only for a select few countries.
I just can't fucking believe what I just read.
Risk doesn’t mean emotional judgment or anything about who deserves what.
Long term it isn't. Reducing emissions is going to cost a lot of money. There is less money available for that after economies shrink and governments print money to support their people. Covid helps emissions temporarily but harms the overall path.
It is unlikely there is political capital to make significant changes to reverse the damage.
Calling some countries a "risk" isn't a value judgement. It's pointing out that focusing on US, EU and China is looking at less than half of the picture.
Do you not think it is a responsibility of the already developed nations to solve this crisis first?
COVID-19 gives solid evidence that there is no playbook involved: in terms of political and business processes, the pandemic happened in a flash. And yet every country mismanaged the reaction in roughly the same way, for roughly the same reason. This wasn't coordinated, it's the default way we fail to solve global problems.
What is true that none of the presidential candidates is taking the crisis seriously: Trump denies it, Biden pays a bit of lip service to it but has done very little about it with Obama, and will probably not do much about it if elected.
Unstoppable severe climate change is coming, if not already here. Emissions continue to go up and up and up every year, the best you get is a slight pause in a year, while we need emissions to go to zero, fast. At this point the only slight hope is geoengineering, and even then I wouldn't bet on it.
Science, Capitalism and entrepreneurship will be the unstoppable force that will solve our energy crisis, if western governments let them.
Africa, India and China will be the biggest factors going forward.
UPDATE: To be clear, I'm not arguing for laissez-faire capitalism. Government incentives are required to develop markets, as Germany did with PV, and US does with EV. My point is that the US being part of the Climate Accord or not won't matter much, the move away from coal and ICE cars is inevitable due to already existing market forces. A bigger lever would be to de-regulate nuclear where it makes sense, as that is where the biggest cost lie.
Take those away and the "green" companies would have NO incentive to push their work. They'd be working with people wanting to do better first and foremost, and then they would - ironically - be competing with petrol and energy companies, who also have "green" all over their marketing.
Renewables and EVs could not compete without government incentives.
Of course, that is the ideal success scenario, in the failure scenario, you subsidize the thing until it fails, or until you can no longer afford to subsidize it.
EDIT: grammar
1. Tesla's impact on global emissions is minimal.
2. Government intervention in EVs has been there from the start.
The charitable conclusion is that governments and markets can work together. The pessimistic conclusion is that markets are only capable of putting lipstick on pigs.
Yes, everybody knows that EVs received precisely zero government subsidy in terms of R&D, business loans, and consumer rebates. That free market did it all by itself. And we've got what... 1% of the cars on the road running on electric?
Frankly, I think the Paris Accords does more harm than good by giving anyone the notion that we were solving the problem.
The optimal strategy to combat Global Warming is to bring manufacturing back to the EU and US and regulate emissions strongly.
In the current system, however, a country who keeps their population low will have small allowances; It clearly incentives overpopulating its land. This inverse-incentive effect may provoke countries into doing nothing against evergrowing population, keeping cost of life too affordable, and thus, ensuring that the next generation will be overpopulated, and thus, extenuating the land.
But now that the US basically proven to be untrustworthy, even towards allies, these kind of deals are just undoable anymore.
This will end in tears
It’s a deal that’s been hijacked by business interests; just like the Cali proposition written by Uber that’s “for drivers”.
You will never get a hundred countries to voluntarily agree to prioritising climate change over prioritising business interests.
China has shown time and time again that China will do what China feels like doing.
Meaning them committing to doing something 10 years doesn't mean they will do it at all.
We clearly don't really care about climate change or stuff like this would be about taxing pollution through tariffs and other means. Rules like this just move the manufacturing and thus pollution to different countries. Which is pointless when the goal is to reduce climate change.
They actually know, understand, and to some degree care, that they're basically 1/5th of the world's population and if they don't get pollution under control the entire world will burn.
That is a reality under pretty much any regime in the truest sense of the words meaning, which contrary to popular use is not negative but rather descriptive.
They care in the sense that: the whole world burns - China is part of the world - China will burn - their citizens will riot making 1989 look like child's play - the CCP will go up in flames, too. Cynical logic, but logic nonetheless.
They don't care in the "care bear" sense.
Developing nations have a claim. It's deeply unfair that wealthy nations who have emitted a lot of carbon get permission to keep emitting more as a result. But also.. if developing nations fully stake this claim by increasing their emissions or even flatlining then the game is lost.
This is the problem with thinking in absolutes. The alternative is making some concessions and moving forward regardless because of belief in the mission. Europe is already in the same per capita ballpark as china. If the US/Australia/etc had gotten themselves near this per capita level, the politics of developed/developing economies would have softened somewhat. The fairness issues aren't as sharp once emissions are similar.
Realistically, we are not politically structured (as a world) to deal with carbon reduction well. Nationalism is the dominant paradigm both structurally/politically and ideologically. It's a weak paradigm for global action.
I emphasize the politics over the economics, though obviously both intertwine. Long term, there are economic upsides as well as downsides to carbon reduction. As a blind (long) bet, I'd always bet on new energy paradigms being a good thing. The long tail upside is especially interesting. Within a functioning polity, that's something you can work. The world isn't.
Was the US ever trustworthy?
Yes you can. The world's problems are not really personified entities, where hypocrisy is a valid concern. China is a problem.
Wouldn't it be better to instead let the developing world leapfrog fossil fuel energy generation, and go straight to renewables (and possibly nuclear)? By e.g. donating technology, IP and expertise, and otherwise incentivize them to skip the dirty tech, at no loss in QoL improvements of their citizens?
Think about it, they have more people than the US, Canada, the EU, UK, Russia and Australia combined. That's some major need for energy, which everyone else just blames on "China".
I think they're doing pretty well in comparison.
While I'm at it, I need to mention their one child policy basically stopped hundreds of millions people from ever existing. A whole lot of pollution that never happened. Something no other country has done, and I think China should have some recognition for that.
But how? The manufacturing that went overseas did so for cost reasons. If you make it even more expensive then there is even less incentive to have it here. Dismantling the economies of the east from afar is not an option for a ton of reasons.
This is not true. From 2001 to 2011 China almost tripled their emissions, but after 2011 they haven't grown almost at all. It's stable. Maybe you haven't looked at the data in the past 10 years?
There is a question of follow through as they are still building new coal power plants, but China is making noises that its going commit to changing. The US is not a leader on this issue any more.
Agreed. It is possible to simultaneously believe "we need to cut emissions" and "the Paris accord is a bad way to do it". But it seems many people think Paris is the only way to do it.
The issue is rather that nobody really brings up any valid alternatives when they disagree with Paris.
Saying "bring manufacturing back" is not an valid alternative, it's wishful thinking that ignores how this current situation came about, while offering zero actual actionable advise how to reverse that development and fix the problem itself.
Manufacturing went to China because of laxer regulations there making it more cost-effective, how are you gonna convince it to come back to the US and EU with even harsher regulations?
Easy. Tariffs on Chinese imports so its cheaper to manufacture cleanly back home.
If that works at all, it only works in disincentivizing manufacturing in China.
That doesn't bring manufacturing "back home", it only brings it to other countries similar or even lower in standards as China, are you gonna tariff those too?
Err, yes, obviously. There aren't an infinite number of countries in the world. You could quite comfortably track all the countries that do and do not comply with Western environmental laws in Excel. Or declare a free trade area the conditions of entry to which are compliance. This is a very very easy problem to solve... once we wean ourselves off the cheap tat China produces.
It's not really that obvious because an escalating global trade-war is rarely good for anybody, and tariffs only end up costing the consumers.
That's also why even after years of Trump tariffs on China, and all kinds of other countries, there was still no major shift of manufacturing back to the US.
> This is a very very easy problem to solve... once we wean ourselves off the cheap tat China produces
That "cheap tat" is by now a globally unique industry [0] that took decades to be built, by a government that can centrally plan in the decades. You can't just replace something like that from one day to another, and it most certainly wouldn't be easy.
Is this factual? They committed to peaking in 2030. Stopping at the stop sign is a radically different concept from starting to brake at the stop sign.
Apply linear extrapolation, and USA would go below Germany in 20 years. Extrapolating with exponential decay, in 40 years.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country...
Germany is significantly lower in per capita emissions so their reduction is (I'm assuming) a lot harder to achieve. It's like comparing fat loss between someone who starts overweight vs someone who is starting neutral bmi.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country... and add Germany.
Happy to hear why I'm wrong, I'm certainly not an expert in stats or emissions.
Which is primarily due to Obama era regulations that Trump has done everything he can to roll back. Had the price of gas not skyrocketed and the mortgage crisis not hit, we would've had almost no improvements from 2000-2008.
If you look at the data available from 2016-2018 we went BACKWARDS. You can't extrapolate the data from Obama's regulations that have rolled back and say: look it'll take care of itself.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-....
That didn't reduce emissions and may have actually increased them.
The NOAA tracking global methane has literally nothing to do with tracking methane output from individual wells - which again, we don't do. Moving the goal posts doesn't make you right. We DO actively track emissions from coal fired plants. We DO know that fracking has absolutely increased methane emissions:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/frack...
But where do they come from? From the optimisation of our energy consumption? Or from the relocation of some of our companies abroad?
France has the benefit of large-scale nuclear power. Any given day, my home province of Ontario, is at around 85%-95% fossil-fuel-free emissions because of nuclear and hydro [1]. If instead we decided to go with solar and wind, then we'd be waiting until 2060 to cut CO2 emissions and burning much more natural gas until then ... just like Germany.
[0] If you are from elsewhere in the world, it might be hard to imagine how few threats of natural disasters we have in central Europe: there are basically no earthquakes, no tsunamis, no bush fires, no (real) hurricans (we call them 'storms'), no real tornadoes (it is such a rare thing that it usually makes it to national news if there is one), no (terrible) floods (well, every few decades there is a large flood somewhere here but that's it).
Germany has a much larger per-capita manufacturing and export sectors of their economy, I would expect their emissions to slow more slowly.
Using the same data source you can truly see how much of an outlier the US carbon footprint is:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country...
Basically the large majority of countries sit below the 10 tonne per capita cut-off, with the outliers of US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Luxembourg above the 15 tonne cut-off (with Qatar being basically off the charts). I am not sure if it is just consumer behaviour differences or energy source differences and I am sure there will be multiple factors depending on the country and regions but these outlier countries are effectively emitting anywhere between 50% to 300% more emissions than any other population on Earth.
The main issue here is population size:
Luxembourg : 600k
Qatar: 2.897M
Saudi Arabia: 34.997M
Canada: 37.885M
US: 331.669M
If you stop thinking per capita and actually take into account total population, you quickly realize that all other nations on Earth are dependent on US market carbon correction in order to avoid environmental collapse. Far more than any other foreign policy ineptitude from the current adminsistration it's the environmental inaction and downright resistance of US lobby driven policy that scares everyone else around the world.
We are still on track for an inevitable major environmental collapse but it could still be vastly mitigated, if US politicians and citizens would get with the program.
But that's not the case. America is reducing its emissions greatly by shifting from coal to natural gas (which mirrors what Germany is doing, for example). Coal is ostensibly dead in US. If you look at the charts from Wikipedia [1][2], you'll see the US has cut emissions at about the same rate (or faster) than Europe. That trend will continue. So what will Paris actually do in practical terms?
The problem is that after transitioning away from coal, there isn't a clear answer about the next step. Renewables are not a panacea and may never be able to power a modern economy as they will probably always require fossil fuel baseload ... not to mention that because renewables are a diffuse energy source, they require HUGE land areas which makes no different for CO2 emissions, but makes a huge difference for environmental collapse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...
Fossil fuel to .. fossil fuel. Sigh.
https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/CO2-spez_e...
Unfortunately there are methane leaks in the systems, and it is quite possible that when accounting for the methane releases, natural gas has equally bad climate effect (emissions of CO2 and CH4 combined) as coal.
I think fixing leaks is an easier task than reducing the coal CO2 footprint. We'll have to figure this out somehow anyways, because a lot of methane will be going into the atmosphere from thawing permafrost, both on land and in the seas.
In practice, doing either of those will spike the price of the energy, and the only reason to use them over renewables is their being cheap, so it won't happen.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#cite_ref-C...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Atmospheri...
Sure ... and how do we do that? Nuclear is dead in the developed world (very few new nuclear projects and lots of existing plants being decomissioned)... so what's left? What do we replace natural gas with?
Look at the numbers: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Yeah, there is a slight increase in natural gas over the years (with large fluctuations), while coal is in slight decline. By far the largest share of the nuclear phaseout has been replacing it with renewables.
One can discuss the pros and cons of german energy politics (of which there are both plenty), but that should start by knowing the facts.
But the gas infrastructure synergizes extremely well with a shift to a hydrogen based energy economy, as is not just the goal in Germany, but pretty much an EU wide ambition [0].
It has nothing to do with the German nuclear phase-out that started in the early 2000s, just like European reliance on Russian resources it not anything new, nor is it bound to change, it's the consequence of geographical proximity and thus realpolitik.
Particularly considering the alternatives: LNG shipped from the US to Europe in tankers is an net-energy negative. It would be a pointless and expensive exercise of creating even more pollution all for the sake of satisfying US foreign policy ambitions to antagonize Russia and keep it as separated from the EU as possible.
[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/dutch-pin-hopes...
[1] https://i.imgur.com/KgcCyWu.png
[2] https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
But is it obvious? Let's say that fusion becomes commercially viable and vast amounts of emission-free energy become available cheaply. Would reducing the usage of it still matter? I would say the driving factor is the side-effects of energy production by current methods, not the energy itself.
And that's ignoring the reality that if you make something 10x efficient, it tends to become used more - sometimes much more, cancelling the gains. Our economy is self-regulating; altering one factor only makes all others readjust to compensate. Permanent change will require more complex approach.
Energy efficiency is definitely a very important part of dealing with climate change, but it isn't a silver bullet.
We need to get off this exponential! Any modification of Capitalism is painted as an attack on basic human freedoms so that the rich can go down with the ship, rather than pass it on for the rest of humanity and the world.
How do we change what we optimize for? Because it currently isn't working.
> 10x efficient, it tends to become used more
Cars are more fuel efficient than ever. I own an SUV and average 30.1 MPG. Imagine that in 2000. Light bulbs are overwhelmingly LED these days. New homes are much more insulating than ever. Smart homes are less wasteful.
Smarthome might theoretically work, but as of right now most people are just throwing even more IT and IoT devices, constantly drawing power, into their homes. As these come from a myriad of different vendors, there is no unified platform to utilize and manage all that for electricity efficiency, it's just going on, drawing additional power.
I think this is because energy consumption is directly related to our ability to manufacture things, and the ability to manufacture things is directly connected to both wealth and military power.
(I’m half-remembering someone else’s explanation, so I assume this is an oversimplification).
Because reducing energy use reduces quality of life at constant dollar income (at least medium term), and reduces economic growth (energy's an input in all economic activities), with all the social negative consequences that produces. It's a third rail, politically. No one's going to get elected by saying "your children have to live worse than you".
The Western world is already (slowly, over decades) reducing this (look at per capita energy use dropping nicely since the 90s), and there's significant pushback even at this rate (gillets jaunes, cost of living protests). All future energy use growth is elsewhere (Africa, China, India) with no plans to stop and if the Western world tries to impose their views on them, it'll look a lot like neocolonialism for environmental reasons.
If we are serious about tackling climate change then we need to decarbonize these other sectors by moving them off of fossil fuels and onto clean electricity. We are going to need to generate a lot more energy, not less.
It doesn't require coordinated action to move away from coal and gas at that point.
Solar is great for marginal additional output, but to make it useful as a primary energy source it requires massive investments in storage technology. Solar doesn’t work at night or on cloudy days, so you still need other power sources. At least as long as storage solutions are rare.
The problem is, that change didn't effect anyone negatively, and thanks to cheaper gas imports it was essentially free.
Now that we are off coal, future cuts are going to be a lot harder.
In fact, practically the only facilities being built for the last decade have been wind and solar and in massive quantities. If you look in the generation queues of the various RTO/ISOs (organizations that manage which units run and at what level for large parts of the grid) the only thing expected to be built is even more wind and solar along with storage. Multiple GW of wind capacity is being added each year, so it isn't slowing.
Why is this happening? It's complicated, but it's basically economics at this point.
What problems do we face? Well, sometimes wind and solar aren't available. You can solve this in three ways. The first is to have thermal generation respond when the wind/solar dips. This can be tricky as thermal generators (outside of natural gas) weren't designed to move that fast. They were designed to run near max for most of their life. Natural gas peakers are more effective here. Another option is storage, which can hold you over until you get more wind/solar again. However, we would need a massive amount of storage built for this to be effective. A third option would be to increase demand response at the industrial and customer level. Meaning, power isn't generally expected to be 100% available in that scenario. If there isn't enough generation capacity, those that aren't willing to pay the high prices are shut off (or something along those lines). That is generally how supply/demand is supposed to work anyway, but practically speaking, the demand doesn't participate today. In actuality, I expect a combination of all of that to become common place and it is what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been pushing for.
I don’t think any of these solutions are viable to prove we can be reliant on renewables, and this one especially would not resonate with a populace.
Just at a consumer level, think of everything you use power for on a daily basis. It’s a cornerstone of modern life, and you can’t expect society to backtrack.
The result for individuals: many people just subscribe to a flat rate from the electricity companies to avoid the uncertainty and pay the same predictable price each month (but of course, this predictable price comes at a significant markup with respect to the "free market" price). The rest of us go with the fluctuating price but just don't bother, because we are not going to spend substantial amount of time every day looking at how the prices evolve to decide when we turn stuff on or off. So we just read the bill every two months, not even making an effort to understand it, grumble a bit and go on with our lives. I suppose there may be some people who actually try to optimize, but I don't know any - from what I know, people short on income tend to go with the flat rate because they can't afford the uncertainty.
I don't know how it works in industrial applications. I do know that some industries (e.g. steel) complain about the fluctuating prices because they operate 24/7, and basically they reaction is that if the government doesn't subsidize their electricity bill, they'll just close and go to some other country. So my guess is it's not really working either.
Before I left the UK, the flat I lived in had two electricity rates, with the night rate being significantly cheaper then the day rate [0]. This meant the water heater and the (electric) storage heaters [1] were powered at night, when schools and offices used no power.
[0] I’m not certain, but I think it was: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
Also, storage heaters are a real pain to deal with. They're inefficient and not very controllable in terms of the amount of heat they produce.
Not so; when the problem is bad weather rather than the diurnal cycle, even weather forecasting gives more forewarning than emergency stop buttons in power stations, and (given the geographical distribution) the change itself is smoother. On the scale of a continental grid, do you even need to care about anything besides diurnal storage/demand-shifting (as preferred) and seasonal issues?
You can model this as (cost per kWh of cheapest alternative) / (cost of rentable per kWh) = marginal oversupply you want. So, if hypothetically Solar was 2c/kWh and peaking natural gas was 6c/kWh then you would want to add more solar until 3kWh of new Solar only offset 1kWh of natural gas with the other 2kWh being wasted.
Which does not mean 2/3 of total solar energy would be wasted. Further, storage and energy markets also complicate things. However, it does illustrate why you want an over supply of the cheapest option even if not all of it gets used.
Though when selecting individual locations for wind, different locations favor different time of the day. And of course solar output varies significantly east/west and based on local weather conditions. That all gets modeled ahead of time and in practice get reflected in market rates.
Even then, I do really expect a category of "peak demanders" to appear soon (storage is one kind, but there are other things one can do with intermittent almost free electricity). That will help increasing the spare capacity.
I suspect an outgrowth of oversupply is storage will ramp up based on consistent access to very cheap rates. It makes a huge difference if you’re paying 0.4c/kWh or 4c/kWh to charge, especially when storage is significantly less than 100% efficient.
That said, consistent very low prices will likely result in someone using most of that power for something even if the power plant operators aren’t making money during that period.
You say that like it's true, and it's not. Anyway, the climate doesn't care. Human emissions will reach equilibrium with what's compatible with life on Earth, one way or the other. Figuring this out is preferable to massive loss of life and degraded standards of living for the survivors.
I find it particularly telling you exclude nuclear as a baseload and specify it has to be fossil fuel baseload.
I'm not.
>which have already demonstrated their viability in southern Australia.
They didn't. They replaced natural gas in one specific use-case, namely to provide grid stability. Those batteries (no batteries) are capable of bridging renewable variability.
When the wind is blowing. If the wind isn't blowing, you're not getting any power and you're going to have to fire up those coal/natural gas plants.
>when their new synchronous capacitor projects are completed they won't need stand by gas power plants.
How much power can these 'synchronous capacitors' store, and for how long? Can they even store enough to power a small city (~250k) for more than few mins? Let me spoil something for you, there is no battery technology that can scale to run a modern economy and hard industry. Not now, and not upcoming. If you have favorable geography, you may be able to do pumped storage, but that's about the best you can do.
Keep in mind that EVEN if you miraculously had something to store grid-scale power over a long-term, you need to greatly overprovision renewables because those 'batteries' need to be charged (with lots of energy loss) during peaks enough to bridge daily, seasonal and inter-year variability. And of course, land-use requirements for renewables is MASSIVE (from mining to deployment to decommissioning) - so renewables are very heavy on the environment. They aren't going to work.
There's a reason why no developed region relies on renewables without either fossil fuel backup (or if geography allows, geothermal or hydro). There's a reason why Germany is spending billions to build pipelines to ship natural gas from Russia for decades to come. What do they know about renewables, that you don't?
How about, at the very least it is symbolic of the fact that the US will fully take part in one of the most important global programmes there is. That it will set targets and be transparent, reporting on its efforts to reach those targets. It will share know-how and expertise with countries that are trying to solve a problem that is an existential threat to civilisation.
And if, as you suggest, the US is actually beating the progress it needs to make to keep global temperature rise to within 1.5C, then that's great - it can get the global plaudits it deserves, with no further action needed.
This is completely fallacious. There will always be outliers but the overwhelming majority of power needs, both residential and commercial, can be addressed with renewable energy and battery solutions.
> not to mention that because renewables are a diffuse energy source, they require HUGE land areas which makes no different for CO2 emissions, but makes a huge difference for environmental collapse.
Can you cite anything backing that up? Hydro electric does dramatically impact the environment but other renewable sources have no such impact. Wind is negligible despite the fanatic ravings of one fat orange lunatic who doesn't like it's aesthetics. Solar is easily deployed on rooftops and along transit corridors which has zero impact. You don't have to consolidate all the renewable energy sources in one location.
I have a solar array that covers less than half my roof, produces 1.5x my energy needs annually, it stores reserves in a battery, and back-feeds excess into the grid. The cost to operate the array is less than the cost of grid power, and my excess production results in a payout from the power company.
The excess production from residential and commercial arrays can be captured and distributed to outliers who are unable to directly leverage renewable energy and completely offset the need for polluting energy sources.
The graph in [2] is subtitled:
Since 2000, rising CO 2 emissions in China and the rest of world have eclipsed the output of the United States and Europe
The graph in [1] is subtitled:
Per person, the United States generates carbon dioxide at a far faster rate than other primary regions.
Of course a country of 1 billion people, like India or China, is going to produce more emissiosn than a country of 330 million, in total, even if each of the smaller country's citizens produces about twice as many as the citizens of every other country in the world.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/clim...
Were you referring to China? They are still building coal plants at a record pace.
If the US evaporated from the planet, nothing would change. In fact, atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise.
Humanity cannot solve this problem by subtraction.
If ALL of humanity left the planet, it would take 100,000 years for a 100 ppm drop in CO2.
That means we can’t solve it by eliminating fossil fuels, cars, trucks, planes, etc. We can’t solve it with solar panels. And we sure as heck know the Paris accord can’t solve it either.
It is astounding to me to see see how we continue to talk about this problem from the perspective of a premise that is completely false.
Source: 800,000 years of ice core atmospheric data.
Stop worrying about the US and stand on your own feet!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Seriously, it’s time counties who want to improve the situation need move on from worrying about what the United sates is doing because it doesn’t look like much will be happening for a long time.
>My new hobby is taking graphs of economic data over time and indicating the year that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, in case people find that helpful or informative.
Actual taxes on the 1% in the 50s weren't really that much higher, despite the marginal rates-- https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/
Even if you use a more realistic number and want to focus on the top 0.0000003%, that's very different than taxing people who earn income as a linear function of their hours worked.
1. Drop the US dollar as a reserve currency.
2. Free the SWIFT system from subservience to US decrees.
Because that would address the argument about cost and staying competitive.
Buying less, but more expensive because of less polluting manufacturing methods is the answer. Economy will still keep going.
How so? If you are adding crushing taxes, then you're likely to see a downturn in production and consumption, which generally results in a weak or shrinking economy.
Let's take a hipothetical sweater as an example.
Now I buy a €20 sweater every 2 years. Let's say pollution tax would be €10. Suddenly it becomes €30 sweater and my €10/year sweater budget becomes €15/year. Instead, I could buy a nice sweater for €40 (+€10 tax) and wear it for 5 years. Now I'm back at original €10/year budget.
Economy wise, most of the chain is now just making nicer stuff that takes more resources. Aside from truck driver. Who is now moving twice as much sweaters. But €10 tax ideally would go to environment-improving projects and some drivers will make a living in those new sectors.
However, industry is without a doubt a massive resource user. Modern methods in manufacturing can save significant amounts of energy, water, and more. As China is the main producer in many instances, a change also needs to happen there to go from heavy polluting to less polluting methods.
That being said, tariffs and other mechanisms meant to force the pollution cost back onto producers really end up being paid largely by consumers anyway. You can't tax citizens of another country. So the tariff taxes citizens of your own country. The cost gets back to the producer country indirectly in that they sell less stuff, but every time the tax is paid it is paid inside the country imposing the tariff by citizens of that country. So it works more or less according to your suggested mechanism.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...
This brings up something that I don't understand. How can there be candidates that say they support the environment, support worker rights, and support free trade with places such as China? Laborers are treated like crap and pollution is rampant in China. Promoting free trade seems to oppose the other two positions since there's more pollution in the developing nations that we outsource out manufacturing to and that labor in our country can't compete with the lower wages of those developing countries, partly due to lower living standard but also due to fewer worker protections and even safety equipment.
Of course the downside free trade allows production to move to places where there are no controls because non-local pollution both less affects any individual, and because international politics come into play trying to solve it, and those who have a bad standard of living see this as the rich trying to keep them down by not letting them compete.
The last might sound negative about free trade ever solving pollution, but it actually isn't. China and India are both reaching the tipping point where enough people are rich enough to care about pollution that they are doing something about it. Half the world population is already rich enough to care, and that half also wants more stuff so there isn't enough poor places left for this cycle of moving production to repeat for many more cycles. Also, every time production moves they bring the latest technology - China never had the cities full of coal smoke stacks spewing black smoke into the air like the US and Europe had 120 years ago. (they are big into coal, but their coal has always been cleaner just because some cleaner coal technology is also cheaper in the long run)
You are incorrect about your coal comment. You can see China spewing yellow smoke (it's an even dirtier type of coal than the two we have here). The cleaner tech only gets adopted if it's financially cheaper or has some other incentive like the government enforcing standard (which relies on the education/opinion of the people).
"China never had the cities full of coal smoke stacks spewing black smoke into the air like the US and Europe had 120 years ago."
Please do a search for air quality alerts and deaths in china as well as for pictures of the smog. It is every bit as bad or even worse. The tech may ne more efficient but the scale and overall output has similar effects. Yes the smoke is a yellow color and not black, that is mostly due to the soft brown coal they use in some parts of the country rather than the anthracite or even bituminous coal we used.
This works if the problem is local and bothersome to the locals -- rusting drums leaking poison or heaps of trash. Carbon dioxide and methane are invisible and odorless and instantly become everyone's problem, so we can't expect this mechanism to induce people to solve the problem locally.
I guess I'm basically saying there tends to exist a lot of scope creep in each individual's definition of when local and basic concern have been met.
Originally the thought was to do this on a product by product basis, but unwinding supply chains is effectively impossible.
Actually, it's still pretty tough because some countries buy and rebrand products to slip around tariffs even now.
https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/news/commission-launch...
Which is unfortunate for me, because I wasn't aware that there are such consultations until your comment :(.
The Paris accord is not worth the paper it’s written on.
It’s non-biding, it has no enforcement, and the goals where self imposed and for some countries ridiculous.
Even if it’s not for the right reasons, the US leaving might force world leaders to actually do something.
Seems like very obscure logic.
What kind of message is that sending?
If the US creates an alternative to the Paris Agreement that has more teeth, there might be an opportunity cost. Until then, this is the best thing we have.
The message being sent here is, "in the global coordination problem of climate change, I'm the defector and the freeloader, and I need to be coerced to take part".
Hah! No, the Paris accord, the "no enforcement, and the goals where self imposed and for some countries ridiculous" Paris accord is the world "doing something".
Even that will not be reached.
That is not how steps in the right direction work.
If you want to fight climate change, pressure China.
Also, China emitted about half as much CO2 per capita as the US in 2018, still ofc more in total, with about 4 times as large a population than the US.[1]
Edit 2: If you calculate in the trade, the US ends up with almost 3 times the emissions per capita of China.
[0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
- 26% of companies in EU
- 9% of companies in APAC
- 7% of companies in US
Still a long way to go obviously, but these numbers have doubled compared to fiscal 2017.
Our whole culture is culprit. Like, When people preach not to use plastic straws, while they define themselves by the shiny crap they excessively shop online.
US EUR APAC
financls 12% 37% 16%
energy 8% 20% 12%
materials 8% 24% 7%
utilities 3% 22% 7%
industrls 3% 12% 3%
consumer 5% 14% 4%
telco 3% 12% -
tech 3% 8% -
healthcr 3% 11% -Democrats need both the presidency and majority senate to be able to get shit done.
Not saying Biden will definitely win, just we can't tell yet.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/04/whats-behind-trumps-leads-in...
Is there a good explanation for that assertion? I've seen it being said in many places but never any reason for it. Why would mail in votes skew in a particular direction?
>Starting early this year, the coronavirus pandemic prompted millions of voters across the country to request mail-in ballots in order to avoid exposure to the virus at the polls. And while the party breakdown for mail-in ballots started off fairly even, it split off after Trump launched a monthslong crusade to discredit mail-in voting.
>As Election Day neared, some states, like Florida and North Carolina, tallied up the mail-in ballots they received ahead of time, and then released that total soon after the polls closed on Election Day, and before they finished counting up the in-person votes... they tended to show early leads for Biden which disappeared once all the in-person votes (which tended to favor Trump) were counted. This was dubbed the blue mirage.
Also
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/10/09/voter-engage...
>Trump supporters are more than twice as likely as Biden supporters to say they plan to vote in person on Election Day (50% vs. 20%). By contrast, 51% of Biden supporters say they plan to vote by mail or absentee (or have already voted this way). A quarter of Trump supporters (25%) say they plan to vote by mail or absentee.
Like, how difficult would it be for everyone to vote in a secure, cryptographically hidden and verified manner, using some sort booth/app/device/website with proper identity verification linked to your government identification databases? It's beyond scary and infuriating that with all this technology and really smart people around that we still have to have papers, mails and random fallible/corruptible volunteers doing the counting.
In an ideal world, we’d have a hybrid system. Everyone gets a paper with an ID cryptographically hashed with their voter id. They vote electronically and mail/in person hand their paper with a cast ID that’s also cryptographically signed with their voter id and vote cast. Like how two factor TOTP works, the verification of cast ID can be done totally offline.
That way you have a two factor audit system. A fast digital tally backed with a verifiable paper trail for every vote.
If paper tally is not within 1% of digital tally, then you have a discrepancy and people ought to vote again.
Sure it would take a while to verify paper trail but a couple of days of two factor counting is totally worth it for an important thing as election that decides the fate of a country.
I think part of the explanation is that Republicans tend to feel less threatened by covid-19 and thus more willing to vote in person.
Sea level rise is projected to be around 2.4 meters by 2100 in the worst scenarios. Maybe it'll be a bit higher than that but not by much. And by the time the oceans do rise by that level, maybe we'll have reclaimed most of the continental shelves anyways by building dams, so we'll have a firm grip on the technology needed to build dams at scale.
There are far graver consequences of climate change that affect humans immediately, this decade, this year, this century.
I feel that this is the key sentence. Solar panels are getting better every year, batteries are getting better, and in the meantime we have natural gas replacing coal plants which helps to bring down carbon dioxide emissions. I'm personally OK with this.
And fortunately for the environment, Trump's efforts at the DoE to help coal have been staggeringly incompetent and ineffective. But I fear that in the past four years, the administration might have found some lawyers that understand the basics of how executive branches can legally execute given the laws that gave them executive powers.
Because of natural gas, not renewables. Renewables still need base load due to variable generation because storage technology isn’t economical.
If the price of natural gas didn’t collapse due to fracking the fuck out of the whole country for the last 15 years, we would still be building coal plants hand over fist.
That’s base load. If you didn’t have the gas plants you would have had rolling outages, which means it’s providing base load.
Perhaps you are confusing them with peaker plants, which are to help during high demand.
However, we will need to provide some subsidies to keep these gas plants around, because within a decade it will not be economical to operate them unless markets are redesigned to properly compensate combined cycle gas turbines that operate at <25% capacity factor.
And for the future, renewables + storage is cheaper than natural gas. We can get to 80% renewables cheaply. And as the modelers update their cost curves to adapt to the pace of storage's learning curve, we will be able to get to 90% renewables cheaply, then 95%, then 100% as we start to decarbonize the non-electrical parts of our economy.
And though there were tax incentives that helped build the industry, and help from countries like Germany that decided to start buying the expensive first generation products in order to drive down prices, the end result is that we are now living in a world where tech has changed the economic landscape.
The cheapest grids to be build will not be based on fossil fuels. Developing countries will be able to build renewables+storage based micro grids far more cheaply than they will build traditional wires + thermal heat engines. And places with the wealth to do long term investing will be able to build long distance transmission to distribute cheap renewables with less storage.
Sigh, there is no evidence of this or projects yet planned based on full renewable that uses storage to account for generation troughs. The storage gap is significant right now and making solar panels so cheap that labor and transmission are 99% of the cost won’t help that.
In the ERCOT market in Texas, where rules have recently changed to allow storage into the grid as both supply and load, there are absolutely massive amounts of projects in the pipeline. Since it's one of the most open markets, anybody can go and download all the projects that are at any point of the connection process. Last month, there were 18GW of storage planned for Texas alone. Interconnection only cares about power, not energy, so we only no GW and not GWh for these projects at the moment. The energy capacity in MWh only comes into play as they bid on the market to sell or buy energy.
ERCOT is only the most transparent energy market, which is why I mention it first, but other markets are also seeing massive amounts of storage planned in the coming years.
The other most open electricity market, PJM, shows a similar surge of renewables and storage:
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/10/03/rocky-mountain-institut...
On the rest of the US grids, which are more centrally planned by monopoly utilities, we need to be sure that regulations actually reward the cheapest energy if we want renewables and storage to win. Typically (but not always) regulators allow the monopoly utility to take a fixed percentage of costs as profit, so monopoly utilities are incentivized to choose higher cost options for supplying electricity.
Storage alone doesn't care about where the electricity is coming from, so these storage projects from the grid are planned based on any sort of time arbitrage, grid congestion relief, or frequency regulation reimbursement people think they can get. This is based purely on people's bets with their own capital and what they think the market will look like. Academic estimates and monopoly central planning is far far more conservative in storage than people spending their own money.
Non-sequitur. I never said about things US internally makes. Also Tesla makes like 1% of all US cars?
But a lot of US imports are from China. And if a large part of those imports became "green", I doubt Chinese authorities would build non-green infra just to spite Americans and/or the World.
What examples do you have of green tech exported from China that has found widespread adoption in China?
I said "So if US goes all electric car, China would follow suit, etc."
I didn't say if a single company in US goes electric car, China would follow suit.
I quantified it as "all/most" not "exists".
> What examples do you have of green tech exported from China that has found widespread adoption in China?
Not green tech specifically, but most tech exported from China is also present locally in China.
You are implying that China would be producing the cars, or at least the primary components. But you have provided no support for this. Current production and sourcing partnerships show no evidence to support your implication. Even ICE vehicles in the US overwhelmingly have the engine and transmission built in countries other than China, with a large number being built in the US, Canada, and Mexico.
They already are.
Just because US doesn't buy all components from China doesn't mean that China won't develop those components for other markets or its internal use.
But electric cars are at the moment a minority in China, if US went all-in on electric cars (an assuming no tariff war with China), that would kickstart mass conversion of car manufacturing process to electric.
>Even ICE vehicles in the US overwhelmingly have the engine and transmission built in countries other than China,
ICE != EV
Yeah, because perfecting ICE takes decades of investment. Compared to them EV are easy and China already knows how to make them. Hell, they have entire logistic lines worked out for electrical motors.
https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2020/01/02/ch...
The above is speculation of course. It seems reasonable, but only time will tell.
https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insan...
Maybe they actually do want to reduce pollution ?
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I don’t know if “Wired” would know the full story either. China a pretty difficult place to get information in and out of ?
Then go for carbon neutral in 2060.
Src: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-carbon-idUSKCN1VQ1K...
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...