* You need to conserve the water, California peasant! Ignore the fact that 80% of water in California is consumed by agriculture and we are not going to do anything about it.
* You need to stop using your gas stove, peasant! Ignore the fact that we are going to switch off Diablo Nuclear Power plant and replace it with gas plants.
That's a bit disingenuous. Those units were brought online in 1985 and 1986 and are licensed to operate through 2025. That's forty years - which is the life span of a power plant, especially a nuclear power plant. So, they're not being "switched off", they've hit end-of-life. Building a new nuclear power station is logistically impossible. Without getting into it, in essence the U.S. has lost the ability to construct nuclear power stations. People cite the regulatory nightmare, but that's not the real issue - that's an excuse. The real issue is much more complicated.
Note: I work for a U.S. utility that tried to build a nuclear power station due to go online in 2009. We had to abandon the effort and turned the plant into a Integrated Coal Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) power plant. It was brought online shortly after President Obama made the statement there will be no more coal plants opened in this country. I still get a chuckle out of that (we've since shuttered several of our coal units and have reduced our CO2 output by 50%). I know of at least two other U.S. utilities that ended up building IGCC plants for the same reasons. All of us already had nuclear generators in our fleet, so we all know how to work with the NRC. Given all the problems we've experienced trying to build new nuclear generation stations I seriously doubt we'll see any new nuclear generation stations built for some time. The last nuclear generation station brought online was in 2016 and took 43 years to build! It also cost billions of dollars. Nobody has the appetite for that kind of endeavor.
I doubt that is true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#2021... talks about a report that states "that keeping Diablo operating until 2045 would save the state a cumulative $21 billion," and I doubt they'd make a projection like that if the plant would be worn out in 2025.
It's probably not end of life, it probably just needs maintenance and recertification. This nuclear plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_Point_Nuclear_Generatin...) has some reactors that were built earlier, and are apparently now licensed to operate for a total of 80 years.
> Building a new nuclear power station is logistically impossible. Without getting into it, in essence the U.S. has lost the ability to construct nuclear power stations. People cite the regulatory nightmare, but that's not the real issue - that's an excuse. The real issue is much more complicated.
You make this claim, but you don't really support it. Why is this a "lack of ability" rather than a lack of political will?
Even in countries that are massively pushing for nuclear energy and where the utilities are sometimes outright government-owned, like in France, Finland or the UK, nuclear reactor projects have continuously hit massive cost and deadline overruns: Finland's Olkiluoto 3 had 12 years delay and ended up costing over three times as expected, French Flamanville will end up at over six times the estimated budget and at least eight years delay, and UK's Hinkley Point can't even be reliably estimated.
The only ones being able to build out plants is China, and for what it's worth I think they will manage to blow up at least one of them due to shoddy construction.
>China’s Climate Goals Hinge on a $440 Billion Nuclear Buildout
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
Accounting for all these risks takes up serious amounts of money, enough to make the construction of a new plant so expensive it literally cannot ever turn a profit against incredibly cheap solar energy and ever-cheaper battery or molten-salt storage.
One might even say that nuclear energy was never profitable because the only way it appeared to be cheap was that the general public took up an extremely risky bet that the reactors would not go boom and because the costs for teardown and storage were never really accounted for.
Coal plants cause orders of magnitude more premature deaths, but since they happen in hospitals and cancer treatment centers rather than homes, nobody cares. You can't make a 'Chernobyl' miniseries about cancer and emphysema patients scattered over an entire country (or planet.)
We haven't, really. We were quite lucky.
What if the Chernobyl disaster had reached the Pripyat river, and in turn contaminated the Dnieper? We are all familiar with them geography of Ukraine now.
What if a radioactive cloud from Fukushima had reached Tokyo?
What would have been the cost of a temporary evacuation of Tokyo?
Nuclear radiation isn’t a boogeyman, and isn’t the most dangerous type of contamination by a long shot. I would be way more worried about a chemical spill or a industrial accident that released toxic gas.
* VC Summer in South Carolina: failed due to corruption and construction/design incompetence
* Vogtle in Georgia: might finish, but every few months gets delayed more for a grab bag list of reasons. See, for example:
https://thecurrentga.org/2021/12/03/construction-quality-iss...
* Flamanville in France: who knows what went wrong here
* Hinkley Point C in the UK: not looking great
* Olkiluoto in Finland: it finally finished and works! Yay!
https://thecurrentga.org/2021/12/03/construction-quality-iss...
Even in France's first generation of building, of the same design, costs rose as they built more. Nuclear just can not seem to find its groove of being reliably constructed or planned.
But that's not necessarily accurate, either. My dad worked in the nuclear industry all his career and specifically within the licensing group for maybe five or ten years. His job was, for a time, to relicense the plant that he worked at so they could continue after their 40 year initial licensure period.
Maybe Diablo happens to be end of life due to other issues, but saying that the license is up is not the same as it being end of life.
If nuclear can't guarantee baseload, then how is it a better investment than much cheaper renewables?
> at least a factor in that decision anyway.
What were the other factors? Were the plummeting LCOE of renewables and storage part of it? Also what about the (previously low) price of natural gas?
Now that natural gas is expensive, it seems like keeping Diablo Canyon operational for another 20 years is back in the table if federal funds can be used to subsidize it:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/analysts-differ-on-feasibil...
* Cost to extend the operating license of the plant. The NRC will likely mandate modifications be made in order to keep the plant running safely for another 20-40 yers.
* Public Relations. There's strong public opposition to nuclear power. PG&E already has a poor image in California. Closing the plant would be expected to generate some goodwill toward PG&E.
* Soaring insurance costs/increased liabilities. California has made it abundantly clear to PG&E that if Diablo were to have any problems affecting the public in any manner whatsoever then they are totally on the hook for the financial impacts. Look at what happened with the wildfires caused by arcing transmission equipment. Now imagine the costs associated with a nuclear "incident." That's simply too much risk.
Between the high financial risk and decreased dispatch that's a one-two punch that makes continued operations untenable.
Come on now, don't leave us hanging like that!
Gas being burned to heat something is way more efficient than gas being burned to turn turbines to make electricity to be transported hundreds of miles to a restaurant only to be used to heat coils at 1500 watts to boil water. I am guessing at least 15 times more gas would be used.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Anybody who says it does should not be allowed near anything in even the lowest levels of government/bureaucracy
Here in Europe eyes seem to have been wrenched open and the resistance against nuclear power is being seen for what it is by many, a form of Luddism which is partly pushed by fossil fuel industries. Several countries - the Netherlands and the UK among them - are now planning to build new nuclear power stations. France seems to have been saved from the brink of switching their mostly nuclear power fleet to non-nuclear and is now planning to continue its reliance on nuclear power. Then there is Germany, the black sheep (probably due to it grazing next to a coal-fired power station) of Europe where 'die Grüne' (the Green party) and their ideological allies have managed to increase Germany's emissions substantially by forcing the closure of all nuclear power stations. Germany is one of the better examples on how not to manage power production and distribution.
Consulting the current list of nuclear power plants under construction around the world by a pro-nuclear power agency here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
I see the following as the only ones still under construction in all of Europe (not counting Belarus and Russia): 1) Mochovce 3 in Slovakia. Construction started November 2008, originally scheduled to complete in 2012, now hopefully complete later this year, so 15 years total, 10 years late. 2) Flamenville 3 in France. Construction started in 2007, originally scheduled to complete in 2012. Hopefully complete in 2023, so 16 years later, 11 years late. 3) Mochovce 4 in Slovakia. Construction started November 2008, original scheduled to complete in 2013, now hopefully complete in 2023, so 16 years total, 10 years late. 4,5) Hinkley Point C1 and C2 in the UK. Construction started in roughly 2008[1], originally expected to be online 2022 or so ("early 2020s" is the best I can find with Google now, and that's for both C1 and C2 to be online). Now C1 is expected to be complete in 2027, and C2 in 2028. So 19-20 years total, 6 years late.
(The US has two reactors on the list, Vogtle 3 and 4, started in 2009, originally expected to finish in 2016 and 2017, now expected to finish in 2023.)
South Korea has 4 reactors under construction right now (plus two they are building in the UAE). India has 8, China has 19, and Russia has 3 (plus 4 they are building in Turkey, 1 in Belarus, 2 in Bangladesh). Argentina has their first indigenous design under construction- and that appears to be it, as far as nuclear power plant construction goes around the world.
One or more of those countries might have things figured out, but whatever problems the US has seem to be happening across the developed world (minus potentially South Korea), which suggests that it really is not a case where firing a few rogue regulators will fix things.
[1]: The Hinkley Point story is a complete flustercluck of nonsense.
The whole carbon footprint thing was created to shift blame from the dirty industry to inviduals - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...
you think that "the dirty industry" are just emitting carbon for the fun of it?
On top of that, our governments are full of cowards who won't create policies that make it more expensive to destroy the planet than to save it.
Yes, for fun and profit.
This idea that Exxon Mobile is solely to blame for gasoline emissions or that a factory owner is the only one responsible for the emissions from their factory, rather than the person who purchases and uses those products is quite frankly absurd.
No it's not. The cost of pumping CO2 into the air should be factored into the cost of running a polluting factory. If it's not factored in, there's basically zero chance that a "clean" alternative factory will be economically competitive today. Asking everyone in the world to voluntarily spend more on goods that they're not even sure are manufactured in a cleaner way (see "greenwashing") seems like a dead end to me.
I also agree with you we should factor in CO2 production as a cost, to take advantage of the economic system (which actually works pretty well within it's domain after all, eh?)
For some reason lots of people have this idea that the path to solving climate change is for consumers to make no changes to their wasteful consumption, but somehow fix it on the backend so everything is net-zero. In reality, the only workable path must include systematic changes that result in people consuming less (along with lowering industrial emissions for the consumption that remains)
combine this ^ with:
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/12/05/tale-fish-two-cou...
> An example of this would be when a wild cod is caught off the coast of Alaska and, due to economic factors, is shipped to another country to be fabricated into fillets and packaged. If this process of turning a whole fish into packaged fillets occurs in China, the cod fillets are declared “Wild Caught Product of China” upon import into the United States.
Yes, the fishing industry is to blame for shipping caught fish from USA to china and back, and the whole thing is very absurd.
When it comes to CO2, personal vehicles emit several times more carbon than the entire global shipping fleet.
I don't see how it's any more absurd than manufacturing iPhones in China only to have it shipped half way across the world to the American consumer.
Emitting carbon has negative externalities (climate change) that are not priced into the emissions, rather they are passed onto the future you and future generations. We can change this by putting a price on carbon. This will incentivize the growth of cleaner alternatives, give Joe an opportunity to not contribute to emissions, and this will affect the profits of the “dirty industry”.
The “dirty industry” wants to keep profits as high as possible for as long as possible, it’s just business. Blaming average Joe on the problem is a distraction. Blaming individuals for systemic issues is fruitless. Industry knows this. The longer policy can be delayed, the longer profits can be made.
The systematic issues that folk talk about abstractly are things like “too many people pick SUVs rather than commuting by subway” or “society needs to switch away from eating so much beef”. It isn’t just a matter of waltzing into a factory and turning some dials that the greedy factory owner doesn’t want to change
When I talk about systemic issues, I talk specifically about the distribution of personal choices people can make that lead to outcomes. Taken into context, this means that if I only have one choice for electricity provider, and my investor owned utility makes a decision to burn coal to generate electricity, there’s very little I can do to change that. If the area I live in has only single family zoning, things are so spread out that it means that most people need a car for basic human needs like going to work and getting groceries. In my city electricity and transportation represents 80% of emissions. These systems have big impacts. You can throw all the personal responsibility that you want at that and not make any meaningful changes.
We don’t have to have these systems, you could empower the community to make power purchasing agreements to buy electricity on the wholesale market that would be cleaner than what the utility provides. You could pass mixed use zoning to allow developers the autonomy to build commercial/residential mid rise buildings. People could walk to a lot more stuff. We just choose not to do that.
This is a matter of waltzing into your town hall, state legislature, and congress and demanding that we allow people the ability to make better choices. If people had real choices, we’d have better outcomes.
Many jurisdictions in the US allow people to sign up for alternative energy providers. Electricity is fungible, so technically you might be using electrons from a coal power plant, but on a kWh basis you are supposed to be getting all your electricity from renewable sources. That's basically how so many companies can say they're running on "100% renewable power", without having to build wind turbines/solar panels around their facilities.
>If the area I live in has only single family zoning, things are so spread out that it means that most people need a car for basic human needs like going to work and getting groceries.
1. You can vote with your feet.
2. of all the issues to bring up, this seems like the weakest one. NIMBY zoning laws are probably the most grass-roots type of lobbying there is. It's hard to blame corporations for that.
>You can throw all the personal responsibility that you want at that and not make any meaningful changes.
The comment you replied to doesn't mention "personal responsibility" at all. It only mentions "people" and "customers", ie. groups of people. If 80% of consumers don't want their electricity bills to rise and like white picket suburban houses, that's ultimately a problem with "people" and "customers", even if the remaining 20% are trying to be green but can't be.
They do it because it's what consumers want. It's not industries job to kneecap themselves so that less scrupulous companies can gain market share.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/8bceef94-86cd-11e9-a028-86cea8523...
1. I get the joke you're trying to make, but realistically speaking the fact that the company is in the "fun" industry, doesn't mean the company itself is being run "for fun".
2. that's at least somewhat misleading because the pollutants mentioned are pollutants that tend to be aggressively curtailed for land vehicles (because of their negative effects on local air quality), but are far less of an issue on the open sea
3. I get excusing the consumer if the good/service in question is essential and there's no pollution free alternative, but it seems weird to pin the blame on Carnival when consumers are making entirely discretionary purchases that are known to have negative environmental impacts.
Look at the classic beer industry... you have/had a crate full of standardized glass bottles, with metal caps and paper labels, you pay some deposit to take the crate and the bottles, you drink the beer, return the crate and the empty bottles to be washed and refilled, get back your deposit (or take a new full crate), and that's it. Yes, some energy goes for transport and washing of those bottles.
Now look at soda industry.... you have 6 plastic bottles full of soda, capped with plastic, with plastic labels, wrapped in plastic (a "six pack"), set on a pallet, wrapped in more plastic, that you throw away after you drink them (or return them for recycling, and then china burns them).
And in the meantime, we're discussing and banning plastic straws.
And this is just a tiny thing, compared to all the poisons that are emited by large industries, especially in 3rd world countries using unregulated, dangerous chemicals (pesticides, herbicides,...) that are killing the local ecosystems, so nestle can earn 2cents extra on a box of cocoa powder.
I'm not sure what time period "classic" implies, but what you described hasn't been the case for years.
About 12 percent of all U.S. beer was sold in returnable bottles in 1981. Since 2007, the percentage has been negligible, according to statistics kept by the Washington, D.C.-based Beer Institute.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reusable-beer-bottles-facing-ex...
>Yes, some energy goes for transport and washing of those bottles.
I find it strange that you admit this is a thing, but ultimately gloss over it. What really is the TCO of plastic bottles vs glass bottles? It's tempting to conclude that reusing must be better than throwing stuff out, but given the costs associated with transporting heavy glass bottles and/or sanitizing them, it's not exactly obvious which one has overall higher costs.
>(or return them for recycling, and then china burns them).
There's a lot wrong with recycling today (eg. ending up in landfills because recycling is too expensive), but what you described isn't one of them. Landfill space in the US is cheap as it is. Nobody is shipping plastic half-way across the world only to incinerate them.
It's still the case in many countries for "normal" (non craft, etc.) beers.
> I find it strange that you admit this is a thing, but ultimately gloss over it. What really is the TCO of plastic bottles vs glass bottles? It's tempting to conclude that reusing must be better than throwing stuff out, but given the costs associated with transporting heavy glass bottles and/or sanitizing them, it's not exactly obvious which one has overall higher costs.
Considering that CO2 is not the only thing, and we have problems with microplastics, we should consider that impact too.
> There's a lot wrong with recycling today (eg. ending up in landfills because recycling is too expensive), but what you described isn't one of them. Landfill space in the US is cheap as it is. Nobody is shipping plastic half-way across the world only to incinerate them.
But we did just that, before china banned import. We ship that stuff over to china "for recycling" and they burn it. Same with e-waste in africa ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-... )
Realistically speaking the amount of microplastics being generated from drink bottles is negligible in first world countries. Over there, the overwhelming amount of plastic waste is properly managed (recycled or landfilled), which means they're not sitting in rivers degrading and generating microplastic.
> But we did just that, before china banned import. We ship that stuff over to china "for recycling" and they burn it. Same with e-waste in africa ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-... )
Again, it's more complicated than that. The importers are actually trying to recycle the plastic/e-waste. It's just that through a combination of incompetence/malice, that some of the unrecycleable waste gets improperly disposed.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/7025017...
>China had plenty of capacity to handle plastics and lots of cheap laborers to sort the recyclable materials from the nonrecyclable. By 2016, the U.S. was exporting almost 700,000 tons a year to China alone. Overall, China imported 7 million tons from around the world.
>About five years ago, the Chinese government started to worry about all this trash coming in. A lot of the plastic was contaminated with stuff that made it difficult and expensive to recycle – paper, food waste, plastic wrap (which is not recyclable). And some of the plastic was hard to recycle and thus not profitable to import.
I suppose your statement is technically true in the sense that yes, we do ship plastic to china, and yes, they burn some of it, but that statement is still misleading. With the same logic you could also say that we send people to hospitals to die.
Also this criticism fails to take into account how people actually live. When I was in Menlo Park, California it was discovered that pool filter pumps draw lots of energy over time because they get left on and old designs are extremely inefficient. This news spread and all over town older boomers who of course lived a lifestyle with pools in their backyard had their pool filter pumps upgraded to modern designs and often changed to have them powered by solar and allowed to stop overnight. The savings from a neighborhood of rich folks converting pool filter pumps all in a short period of time was significant and now a huge constant draw from the local grid has been eliminated. There is no way that is a plot by dirty industry, just a big victory that gets overlooked because of carelessness and political projection.
Consumer do emit significant amounts of carbon, and whatever someone else does, we need to reduce it. Pointing the finger at someone else and saying, 'well they do it', doesn't help climate change; it just throws around blame - generally a useless distraction in life - and adjusts our standards to the lowest denominator.
Is that true? Or is it true that no factor is more than 10%, so everyone can use this rhetoric and say '90% isn't me!'
Also, if you think about it, though it's a very trendy take (which you can see repeated many times on this page) - think past the trend: it's a transparent, embarrassing abdication of responsibility. As just one person, only a tiny amount of the world is impacted by me, but I still have full responsibility for it. I don't sh-t in the street and say, '99.99% isn't me'. A soldier doesn't go AWOL and say, 'only 0.0001% of the battle is me'.
> 99% of the media coverage and legislation on me
Is that true? And if so, is it only the things you read about, the media coverage covering things that interest their readers and not generally addressing technical regulations of power plants?
There's such an attempt at a victim position - a common rhetorical tactic to disrupt progress and serious consideration of issues. Instead of pointing the finger and using rhetoric, which accomplishes nothing, what are you doing about climate change?
> Transportation (27% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation primarily come from burning fossil fuel for our cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes. Over 90% of the fuel used for transportation is petroleum based, which includes primarily gasoline and diesel.2
> Electricity production (25% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – Electricity production generates the second largest share of greenhouse gas emissions. Approximately 60% of our electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gas.3
> Industry (24% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – Greenhouse gas emissions from industry primarily come from burning fossil fuels for energy, as well as greenhouse gas emissions from certain chemical reactions necessary to produce goods from raw materials.
> Commercial and Residential (13% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – Greenhouse gas emissions from businesses and homes arise primarily from fossil fuels burned for heat, the use of certain products that contain greenhouse gases, and the handling of waste.
> Agriculture (11% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture come from livestock such as cows, agricultural soils, and rice production.
> Land Use and Forestry (13% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – Land areas can act as a sink (absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere) or a source of greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, since 1990, managed forests and other lands are a net sink, i.e., they have absorbed more CO2 from the atmosphere than they emit.
> the media coverage covering things that interest their readers and not generally addressing technical regulations of power plants?
This is insanely naive. The media is propaganda which benefits their owners, the same ones that own the polluting corporations.
3/4 of Transportation comes from road travel, only 45% of which is consumers, so... 9% of emissions due to road travel by consumers. The EPA doesn't distinguish between "Commercial and Residential" but we can be extremely generous and say 50% of that residential (we're ignoring that commercial is actually using the vast majority due to refrigeration, lighting and air conditioning)... then around 15% is due to things consumers have direct power over. Obviously I mixed numbers (greenhouse gasses vs. just CO2) but as you can see by rough estimate, the rhetorical exaggeration is not far off at all. Newspapers just blame individuals so that those who actually have control of these things and profit from it can keep profiting.
> Instead of pointing the finger and using rhetoric, which accomplishes nothing, what are you doing about climate change?
Nice ad hominem but it would fail even if it weren't a logical fallacy, because the answer is far more than almost everyone, which is pretty easy in Sweden using public transportation, buying only green electricity, living next door to two second hand stores and buying virtually nothing ever anyway (being a minimalist) and running everything into the ground before I replace it.
> Instead of pointing the finger and using rhetoric
Correctly identifying the source of the problem is exactly what everyone should do in every situation, otherwise you end up with the wrong solutions.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
The consumer is obviously accountable too.
You can't sit and eat a mail order stake from japan and say you have no carbon footprint, but the airline and ag industries do.
The obvious answer has always been cap and trade, but it is dead on arrival because consumers don't want to pay more for their CO2 intensive goods.
They have no power over how such things are produced. Markets are not democracies. Everything those corporations are doing can be done in a sustainable way, but they choose not to for the sake of growth.
You're also forgetting all the manipulative advertising and propaganda driving people to consume more for the sake of growth.
Anyway, even if every single consumer made the absolute best choice (which is impossible given information asymmetry and finite wealth), then corporations would still be responsible for 90% and the news would still be talking about individuals 99% of the time.
I would argue that corporations have zero carbon footprint and consumers have 100% of the carbon footprint.
>[consumers] have no power over how such things are produced.
Consumers have 100% of the power. If they dont purchase a good, it wont be produced. The whole reason Industries dont move away from carbon is because consumers refuse to pay more for it.
For example, carbon free airlines are technically feasible today but Dead on Arrival because no one will pay for the ticket.
Regulations can have an impact, but the only reason they work is because they take the option to buy cheap and dirty products away from Consumers.
Like I said above, cap-and-trade is a simple solution but consumers don't want it because they know prices will get past along. 1 million little Industrial regulations will also pass the costs along, but consumers are more okay with them because they erroneously think the cost won't be passed to them. They have a downside that bad are rarely logical and have unintended and sometimes counterproductive consequences.
Nope, because they have no control over the products that are available, how they are produced and most likely cannot afford to pay more.
> Consumers have 100% of the power.
No, 0%. They have _NO_ vote on how industry does what it does. Industry is not a democracy. They cannot just not buy food and electricity. That's stupid. They have to buy the things they can afford. The working class doesn't just have extra cash laying around, they buy what they can afford, unlike infinite growth corporations who are trying to avoid profit loss.
Alas, I can see you've already made up your mind about this.
There are options to buy low carbon, and nobody does. People can vote with their wallets or they can vote at the ballot box. They will pay the increased cost either way.
I think you are in error if you think that somehow making the change with regulations means the cost wont be passed to consumers.
I already addressed this twice, but let's do it a third time. People don't "vote" with their wallets. That's nonsense and not democracy because the "votes" aren't distributed remotely equally. Most people don't have margins to make these choices easily, as I already said... and are also being fed manipulative advertisements and propaganda, as I already said.
> I think you are in error if you think that somehow making the change with regulations means the cost wont be passed to consumers.
Nope.
That's a misconception spread by the anti-tax crowd. The seller can take the increased cost out of their own profits or they can try to pass it along as an increased the price, but they can't just demand that people buy their product at the higher price.
First, in this respect, there is no difference between regulatory costs and other costs (e.g., raw materials); it's just costs. Second, goods are generally already priced to maximize profit (profit each x items sold), and not based on cost (e.g., not 'cost + 50%'); increasing prices (the first factor) causes the quantity of sales (the second factor) to drop. The ability to increase prices without sacrificing profits depends on the price elasticity of the item: if you have the only well in a desert, you can charge what you want for water; if it is 100 yards from a clear, running river, your ability to increase prices is limited.
For example, it might cost Coca-Cola to 2 cents to make a liter of Coke and they might charge $2. If regulations increase the cost to 10 cents, will they now charge $2.10? No, they chose $2 as the price that generates maximum revenue; that doesn't change with the increased cost. They likely eat the cost themselves.
Blaming average joe is turning large part of population into fed-up-by-all-this-shit group, I can see it around me quite a bit.
Me personally I am still all in, but at this point I am completely fed up with radical and utterly naive folks who blame all general population and push for more restrictions, celebrating straws and ignoring lobbying elephants. Thats not where real solution is.
Going your way is a very ineffective solution that will take too long to get into effect (convince population that will make politicians realize this is what gets them elected, and over time regulations come), and the damage needs to be addressed now
It's the same old tactic used by reactionaries to polarize and disrupt every other discussion - somehow twist the reactionaries into victims, demonize whoever by just lobbing tons of BS at the wall, and turn it into an impossible emotional discussion. End of discussion!
I don't care what you think about activists; I think that's an intentional distraction - just like the others that have been used for decades to prevent action on climate change. You are doing a great job of it.
You are missing the point, purposely, because now we are talking about your BS (and there is more BS in the comment, but I have better things to do).
https://old.reddit.com/r/environment/comments/dbabxu/til_tha...
combine this ^ with:
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/12/05/tale-fish-two-cou...
> An example of this would be when a wild cod is caught off the coast of Alaska and, due to economic factors, is shipped to another country to be fabricated into fillets and packaged. If this process of turning a whole fish into packaged fillets occurs in China, the cod fillets are declared “Wild Caught Product of China” upon import into the United States.
So, I cannot buy straws because of pollution, but large industry, can catch fish in alaska, transport it to china, process it there, transport it back to US and sell it?
Would keeping Diablo nuclear plant and focusing on replacing other plants with clean energy help global warning? Yes! But that is hard.
Anyway, this stove one is sad, it really removes one of those tiny luxuries. Like no more quick roasting of some greasy naan bread on the stove. That's a real loss.
Carbon study from 2017: https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.123...
Any time this comes up I love to singe the praises of induction!
They are slower to heat.
They are more expensive to operate.
They are more fragile.
They rely on complex electronics vs. simple mechanics.
They require specific cookware made out of only certain materials.
They require direct contact with the "burner" to work.
In what possible way are they superior?
Pot handles don't get hot from the hot air going up the side.
They are much easier to clean. Spills don't get burnt onto the cooktop.
There's no risk of fire or burning oneself.
No risk of a gas leak from bumping a knob.
No harmful pollutants emitted by combusting fossil fuels in an interior space.
Power failure is very rare where I live so it didn't occur to me. I have never experienced a power outage for more than a few hours in my entire life.
I would think a lot of the advantages of induction are really obvious, so I don't think your statement that they are "inferior to gas in every way" is particularly in good faith. No gas in a building should be obviously advantageous. Reduced ability to cause burns or fires too. Reduction of use of a potent greenhouse gas.
It's a bit like saying, "if you care about the neighborhood being quieter, then you're free to turn off your own radio at night, but don't yell at me for blasting a boombox at 4AM, that's my choice". The greenhouse gases you let out don't stay on your property, they "trespass" onto everybody else's -- so it's more difficult for me to view pollution as a purely individual choice because air pollution is effectively dumping waste onto other people's land.
Of course, sometimes there are ways we can influence outcomes without outright banning things. Maybe you're allowed to play your boombox at full volume at 4AM but have to pay an noise tax? Maybe we subsidize replacing your boombox with an iPod and some decent headphones? Policy is complicated.
But even if you approach this from a pure Libertarian perspective, Libertarianism has a concept of conflicting rights and acknowledges that a recursive "right to infringe other people's rights" doesn't actually work and is reasonable in many situations to ban. I suspect that the pure Libertarian perspective would be that you can burn as much carbon as you like as long as those emissions stay entirely on your property and aren't being dumped into the collective atmosphere for everyone else to deal with.
the one way in which they surpass induction stoves is the only thing that counts, instant control of the heat applied to the pan.
No gas stove I’ve used has had this functionality. They let you set the exact output you want, which is not the same (and induction cooktops can do that too).
Yes, if you want to set a specific temperature induction cooktops will cycle, but you can also use them the same way you’d use a gas stove and then they don’t.
Gas stoves would likely cycle as well if they had a temperature set feature. It's what gas ovens do.
> cycling is just usually a good way to maintain a temperature when you've got a pan and some food sitting on top of it since there's quite a bit of inertia in actually changing the temperature of whatever is on the stove.
Why precisely is cycling more effective than attenuating down (better word please?) the output? I don’t see what the thermal inertia of what’s on the cooktop has to do with making the optimal (for cooking) choice between cycling and modulating the power.
Without detailed knowledge of the precise energy and time costs, I think it’s a fair default assumption that continuous power modulation should be more efficient, because it’s in a sense a superset of cycling, with much more fine grained control, but you can always set the continuous power output to 0 or 1 to accomplish cycling if in a specific scenario it is helpful.
Maybe when you say “a good way” you mean “a good enough way”? That makes sense, but doesn’t really sell induction stoves relative to gas (if you want to sell induction stoves relative to gas, I suggest to downplay any cycling and promote the continuous output modulation)..
My experience with induction cooktops is admittedly mostly with portable ones, because I’m renting for now and can’t install my own stove. I suspect mine’s just not sophisticated enough. :)
Increasing temperature is a function of the range, and in my experience induction is significantly faster.
To the extent that "it must vary on and off to maintain temperature" is true, that's not really relevant. As a sibling poster states, you're not setting a temperatures. You're setting a level of output on both induction and gas. Your food is separated from the output by a heat reservoir and cannot possibly respond quickly enough to induction's on/off switching for this to matter. This does however, seem to be an area where induction can vary greatly in quality, and I suspect most of the complaints people have about induction have more to do with dodgier induction units than they do with the technology versus gas.
Funny story and rather infamously, the researchers who studied the fumes from gas stoves almost immediately ripped out their gas stoves after the results came back from the studies. Several states are passing or have passed copy-paste laws, written by gas companies, making ripping out gas stoves cost a fee even if the gas company isn't ripping out the gas stoves themselves.
Ah, that's lovely. :)
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Also pilot lights: older gas ranges have tiny flames burning 24/7 just in case you want to cook something in the middle of the night. (Most newer models use electric sparks "on demand" to light.)
https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
80% of human consumption is by agriculture and most of that agriculture is not satiating the needs of Californians. It's also important to note that farms are doing significant work on this:
> Higher-revenue perennial crops—nuts, grapes, and other fruit—have increased as a share of irrigated acreage (from 16% in 1980 to 33% in 2015 statewide, and from 21% to 45% in the southern Central Valley). This shift, plus rising crop yields, has increased the economic return on water used for agriculture. Farm production generated 38% more gross state product in 2015 than in 1980, even though farm water use was about 14% lower.
The rest of the economy is outpacing these efficiencies though, so it pales agricultures value to the GDP year over year.
Urban water usage is also falling:
> The San Francisco Bay and South Coast regions account for most urban water use in California. Both rely heavily on water imported from other parts of the state. Total urban water use has been falling even as the population grows. Even before the latest drought, per capita water use had declined significantly—from 231 gallons per day in 1990 to 180 gallons per day in 2010—reflecting substantial efforts to reduce water use through pricing incentives and mandatory installation of water-saving technologies like low-flow toilets and shower heads. In 2015, per capita use fell to 146 gallons per day in response to drought-related conservation requirements. Much of the recent savings came from reducing landscape watering, which makes up roughly half of all urban water use. Per capita use has since rebounded slightly, but a new state law will require further long-term reductions.
Big takeaway here, large urban centers are not in our best interest.
Environment use is split into four categories:
- Water in rivers protected as “wild and scenic” under federal and state laws
- Water required for maintaining habitat within streams
- Water that supports wetlands within wildlife preserves
- Water needed to maintain water quality for agricultural and urban use
> Half of California’s environmental water use occurs in rivers along the state’s north coast. These waters are largely isolated from major agricultural and urban areas, and their wild and scenic status protects them from significant future development. In dry years, the share of water that goes to the environment decreases dramatically as flows diminish in rivers and streams. At the height of the 2012‒16 drought, the state also reduced water allocations for the environment to reserve some supplies for farms and cities.
I think environment needs to be split out into its own categories, one is very farm adjacent, two have to do with maintaining habitats that (our own) interactions have devastated or made dependent on artificial means, and the last is basically "untapped" water.
Fixing water in California isn't going to be as simple as sweeping changes in agriculture, though that is needed as well. It also means dismantling dense urban centers and making them more sustainable and establishing criteria for when we support a habitat artificially and for how long.
This is not true, it will be replaced with zero carbon generation, including geothermal. For intermittent zero carbon generation, there needs to be matched storage, which will consist both of "regular" lithium storage, and some newer less tested tech for longer duration storage.
This is mandated specifically by law, so if it doesn't happen then somebody is violating the law. It was senate bill 1090, passed in 2018:
https://www.powermag.com/press-releases/california-gov-brown...
And two years before the law mandating it, the zero carbon replacement was part of the original closure announcement:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/pge-to-replace-...
However, I see this false claim repeated again and again, and some weird nuclear lobbying group has performed SEO to have their misinformation be high up on the search results:
https://www.ans.org/news/article-3835/four-clues-that-diablo...
I spend most of my hobby time researching energy, and find that nuclear proponents are often the lowest information contributors on forums, repeating dates talking points, and in the rare cases that they have data, it's far out of date. I really wonder where these whisper campaigns come from, because its really clear when a new bit of talking points has been released through the propaganda networks.
The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant does not meet old laws on the use of once-through-cooling, laws that grandfathered in existing licenses, but required new operating licenses to meet the environmental rules. 15 years ago, the utility started evaluating the cost of fixing the cooling situation, and found that it was not economical. Which led to the 2015 decision to not extend the license, and replace DC with renewables, geothermal, storage, and hydro.
Even if it were cheaper to retrofit the cooling, there's a strong technological argument to instead invest in new technologies. Every bill on dollars invested in these new technologies makes them cheaper and drives down prices for future installs. However spending billions on cooling does nothing to improve future construction efficiency. Nuclear power is less a technology than it is a construction project. We do not gain efficiency in construction when we build more nuclear infrastructure.
No. It will be replaced by gas, because we've pretty much tapped out on sources of geothermal and hydroelectric power, and wind/solar are intermittent. So the only thing that's left is gas or coal.
>which will consist both of "regular" lithium storage, and some newer less tested tech for longer duration storage.
No. Lithium for long-term grid scale storage (let's say, on the order of even a day, though in reality we need a few weeks of storage) is never going to work. Outside of pumped storage (for which you need the right geography), there are no other options.
You're going to be burning gas or coal if you shut down Nuclear. Germany is finding that out the hard way.
>so if it doesn't happen then somebody is violating the law. It was senate bill 1090, passed in 2018:
Congress can pass any bill they want, but physics wins every time.
>I spend most of my hobby time researching energy, and find that nuclear proponents are often the lowest information contributors on forums, repeating dates talking points, and in the rare cases that they have data, it's far out of date.
In all your research around energy, did it ever strike you as odd that no region in the world is powered by renewables (outside of hydro and geothermal)? How about the fact that Germany, at the same time they are touting wind energy, is building multi-billion dollar pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades? Should raise some questions on the viability of solar and wind - no?
Here is a year old article on the DC replacement package, and there are lots of CPUC PDFs that are more recent and go into more detail:
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/california-approv...
> we've pretty much tapped out on sources of geothermal
No, the technology is changing and there are far far more sites due to enhanced geothermal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_geothermal_system
> Lithium for long-term grid scale storage (let's say, on the order of even a day, though in reality we need a few weeks of storage) is never going to work.
The GW and GWh of deployed lithium ion batteries seems to disagree with your unsourced version of reality...
> Congress can pass any bill they want, but physics wins every time.
I've found that people that say that "physics" is why we can't deploy renewables never, not even once, can back up their assertion with any physics. It's a dead give away that you haven't even evaluated the problem.
> In all your research around energy, did it ever strike you as odd that no region in the world is powered by renewables
Before there was a telephone network, did it ever strike anyone that because it didn't exist, it would never be possible?
Energy technology is changing at an immense pace, and anybody who says "we can't do it because we haven't done it before" is not really thinking about reality.
Germany is always brought up as if it is some sort of energy disaster, and even if it were, it would not disprove the ability of renewables to power a grid. There's all this vague rumors and unsourced assertion about Germany really screening things up, but no technical details, quantitative assertions, or benchmarks that back that up.
Uh huh ... you say that, but then there is a Stanford/MIT study from 2021 that called the closing of the plant a terrible idea. This utopian replacement of DC with no-gas sources is just that .. utopian.
>No, the technology is changing and there are far far more sites due to enhanced geothermal
... EGS is a science project with no clear path to commercial viability.
>The GW and GWh of deployed lithium ion batteries seems to disagree with your unsourced version of reality...
No! Who is actually using Lithium ion for grid storage? WHO? Lithium Ion is finding a nice little niche in providing very short term storage to even out spikes in electrical transmission. That's great, but not good enough to make wind/solar viable.
>Before there was a telephone network, did it ever strike anyone that because it didn't exist, it would never be possible?
Uh huh.
>Germany is always brought up as if it is some sort of energy disaster, and even if it were, it would not disprove the ability of renewables to power a grid.
Germany isn't an energy disaster, but it goes to show you that actions speak louder than words. If Germany was confident that they could replace fossil fuels with Wind/Solar/Battery they wouldn't spend billions to build gas pipelines from an authoritarian nation ... for decades to come.
So the question for you is: What do you they know that you don't.
Unfortunately the politics are completely attached to dirty energy transmitted from other states, due to jobs and weird Union personalities.