Climate change: Curbing methane emissions will 'buy us time'

I read the other day that in recent wildfire in Siberia, burned as much trees as it was planted in the entire world. And planted trees are young saplings they do not have ability to sequester same amount of CO2 like full grown trees.

I think it is this one: 'Russian fires burned 4.7 billion trees, seven times more than were planted' https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/11/siberia-fire...

Just for the comparison 1 trillion trees project as of 30 May 2021, 164 restoration projects participate in the campaign and 13.96 billion trees have been planted worldwide.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_Tree_Campaign

And if we take that idea was founded in 1977 that means 44 years ~320 million trees planted per year...

And that damage is only Siberia, what with Australia, Canada, California, Alaska, Amazon ...

The electrical grid also cannot handle all-electric heating for all households, at least in Germany. France is different because of their big nuclear fleet.

Very often, green energy discussions forget that doing everything (heating, traffic, industrial processes) electrically needs an increase in electric capacity by a factor of 2 or 3 at least.

Quite expensive? That's understated. My understanding now is that it comes at the cost a modest new house.

Our family bought a house in the immediate periphery of a smaller city. Since most city housing here is old, the consequence of that decision is that our modest city home has abysmal energy efficiency.

I have wanted to renovate ever since we bought it, in order to cut down on our carbon footprint before 2030, but I have given up on the idea that we'll be able to afford a heat pump before then.

After having spoken with several architects, the building cost alone will eat up €200K without any frills. This will make our house smaller, by replacing poorly built annexes with a more compact and thus thermally efficient cube shaped annex. This comes on top of the mortgage that we took out.

So ironically, in making our home more energy efficient, we would also be making it smaller and less desirable in this regard, at a great expense. Tacking on a heat pump and PV panels would inflate the cost by another 10%.

That is the very real cost of making a home suitable for low energy heating systems.

Don't get me wrong, I'm counting my lucky stars that I'm able to consider such an undertaking, but going through this exercise myself is just a reality check of how dire the situation really is.

If we want to achieve net zero in housing, can we really do so at the cost of conventional building practices?

Talking about the local situation, less than a third of homes are from after 1981 [1]. That's millions of homes slated for a similarly-priced revamp. Who is going to foot the bill? Even with government incentives, some owners don't want to spend all that money on something as intangible as low energy housing, and others simply can't afford to.

[1] https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/housing/building-stock

Yes, flaring gas is a slightly lesser evil. But I think it's the gas that misses being captured (even when they're trying) from the gas wells, the big pipelines and industrial facilities that are the real big problem sites for fugitive emissions.

I read a report that claimed that properly accounting for fugitive methane emissions (which have tended to be massively underestimated) actually brings gas back to being just as bad as coal in terms of global warming cost. But coal plants do emit huge quantities of other nasty pollutants apart from CO2, so gas is still slightly better in that way.

Also, the running costs of a heat pump are reasonably comparable to gas heating, so you don't even really save money by doing this. (Plus they're more complex and expensive to replace when they break, the installation process is really disruptive and not practical for everyone, etc.) On top of that, a lot of the electricity to run them is going to come from burning gas anyway in most countries. They mostly seem to have caught on in places where gas wasn't plumbed out to so many homes, there are good reserves of dispatchable renewable sources like hydropower, or both.

Even I have trouble motivating the investment in a ground source pump in a really cold climate in Sweden. My regular air-water pump is around £4-7k and has a thermal efficiency (COP) of over 4 (so 1kw electricity is more than 4kw heat) and that’s with no digging or expensive installation.

I get that there is no way Central Europe will switch to ground source, but regular heat pumps should be cheap enough to subsidize.

Heat pump water heating system with simple air outside unit (similar to mini-split A/C), tank, and remote control is about 300k-500k JPY in Japan including construction cost.

How can it be so expansive?

Norging stands out in the stats.

Is this because people who use electric heating have old direct electric radiators? Don’t most homes in Spain or Italy these days have AC? Those are heat pumps so should be able to provide (some) heat in winter with reasonable efficiency.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...

Belgium chiming in. For the longest time, the electricity bill was this kind of back door for politicians to sneak in stuff they wanted to keep out of the General Budget.

It started harmless enough, but it has spiraled out of control. Of course distribution and transmission need to factor into the energy price somehow, but unfortunately for our friend, the electricity bill, stuff got out of hand.

Government after government tasked transmission and distribution network companies with ever more duties.

In addition to the core business of running their networks, their obligations include, but aren't limited to: acting as the social energy provider of last resort, running the street lights, building and maintaining EV charging infrastructure, buying green energy certificates at predetermined prices, financing offshore wind interconnection, etc.

In light of these extended duties, the DSOs and TSOs then went to the energy market regulators and asked if they could raise prices. Of course, the regulators decided in their favor, or they'd be guilty of systematically underfunding the companies they're supposed to regulate.

The situation now is that 35-44% of the electricity bill is directly earmarked for these so called Public Service Obligations. Add some excise taxes, miscellaneous fees, sum them all up, add VAT to the subtotal, and you end up with a grand total of ⅔ of your electricity bill being spent... not on electricity.

Don't get me wrong: We should be subsidizing most of these things, but in light of the energy transition, the electricity bill is just about the worst place to hide the cost.

Meanwhile, the gas bill has only a fraction of these Public Service Obligations factored into them. How on earth is that right?

No wonder people are reluctant to install heat pumps. It makes no financial sense!

Except we use that efficiency to consume more, hence increasing GDP. We have also been picking the low hanging fruit. It is going to get progressively more difficult.

no, and that is the point, until we put pressure there, all effort done here is worthless.

Sure thing, and whose carbon numbers should I tell them to use when they calculate the tariff? The figures reported by the PRC’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment?

ahahahahahahahahah, you're a riot

Less humans, not so much.

Less rich humans, maybe? At this point, just getting rid of people probably still leaves the earth in a tailspin of overheating

OTOH one American's share of US CO2 emissions is 7 times that of one Indian's share of India's CO2 emissions.

Even before you take into account billing emissions to the consumer, where they rightfully belong!