Switzerland Is Paying Poorer Nations to Cut Emissions on Its Behalf
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
They've kind of lost the battle on "are renewables a scam", "are EVs a scam", "is climate change a scam" etc. but still with pockets of resistance. Unfortunately they were fighting it on multiple fronts and are still winning on some.
One where they're still winning is "are carbon credits a scam".
(For completeness, in the US they're still doing okay on "is recycling a scam" and "are carbon fees a scam")
So it's basically a succesful artificial conspiracy theory that we're dealing with.
Rich countries paying poorer countries to escape fossil fuel dependency is an obviously good idea, but like anything it's not perfect, so if you get people angry enough then you can slow it down and sell more fossil fuels.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/waste-recycling-in-europe
And in the US per-state:
https://www.eunomia.co.uk/reports-tools/the-50-states-of-rec...
> The study ranked each state according to its recycling rate for CCPMs in 2018, with the 10 states with the best recycling rates comprising: Maine (72%); Vermont (62%); Massachusetts (55%); Oregon (55%); Connecticut (52%); New York (51%); Minnesota (49%); Michigan (48%); New Jersey (46%); and Iowa (44%).
Note for comparison purposes, that US report is on CCPM (plastic bottles and trays, glass bottles and jars, aluminium cans, steel cans and cardboard and boxboard), which the EU calls out seperately as "packaging waste" with an average of 66%.
And it's 'material reprocessed rather than material collected for recycling' they count.
That recent Greenpeace USA study suggests that only type 1 and 2 plastics are close to meeting their 'actually being recycled into more of the same stuff' targets across the USA.
The most outrageous part of this is that this campaign is dominated and spearheaded by environmental groups and green parties. By successfully stopping the expansion of nuclear power, these groups have done more than any other faction or movement to increase CO2 emissions.
I don't know if the people still banging that drum are being disengenious, or they've just been taken in by the misinformation campaign I mentioned, but generally the more of the items I listed you hate or are suspicious of, then the more suspicious of you I am, as it lends evidence of you being someone who has been duped, so for example:
If someone likes (or at least doesn't hate in a weirdly political way) carbon fees, carbon credit, heat pumps, EVs, renewables, induction stoves, green parties and environmentalists, recycling, efficiency then yeah sure I believe you like nuclear power because it's a low carbon power source, see James Hansen for example.
On the other hand, if you hate carbon fees, and carbon credits, and EV subsidies, and green parties and environmentalists but love nuclear power because it's such a great low carbon source. That doesn't add up to me. You might be sincere but confused, but either way you're not really helping so motivations don't really matter. See Michael Shellenberger for example of someone who is obviously lying, or Bill Gates for someone who's just partially confused.
If you study the history of nuclear power, you will see that environmental groups and green parties have been the singular force stopping its expansion. This criticism is not an exaggeration and justifies my harsh judgment of them.
>>See Michael Shellenberger for example of someone who is obviously lying
What makes it obvious that he's lying?
https://www.desmog.com/michael-shellenberger/
Like you he claims to be pro-nuclear but is also scathing about government subsidies and expensive power. Which doesn't add up, not for two decades if you're paying attention, and certainly not for the last five years even if you haven't. Renewables are cheap power.
It's like his audience is a couple of decades behind the facts if they can accept this as a logical argument.
His very pro natural gas stance is also a weird anomaly.
Renewables are not cheap power.
"True cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh"
https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...
>>His very pro natural gas stance is also a weird anomaly
Natural gas is cheap and cleaner than coal.
It does make for a pretty good demonstration of the type of shilling Shellenberger does though, so props on that part.
The study projects out the costs of going 100% renewable in Minnesota as the current plan calls for, so the assumption of 3x penetration is appropriate. I also don't see the basis for your claim that it triples/quadruples costs.
>>by fossil fuel interest
Which fossil fuel interests?
The study says that Minnesota could achieve the 100% zero carbon goal without unduly burdering the state's residents if it depends on hydroelectric and nuclear, neither of which is fossil fuel.
"We don't need Californian solutions in Minnesota" is not the kind of argument you want to be making if you want to be taken seriously as an objective source.
Why isn't renewables a Texas solution? They got help from someone in Texas to write this and Texas has lots of renewables.
Secondly, it can't expand. There's not enough Uranium. Add 100GW a year of PWRs for ten years and you can't fuel them for more than a couple of decades (MOX is an expensive scam that saves 20% at best and releases more radiation than fukushima and tmi combined as a matter of course). Breeders might be viable, but they don't centralise power to Urenco and Rosatom so they were abandoned.
You're spreading a lie designed by the fossil fuel industry to delay renewables.
The largest environmental group, Greenpeace, has literally invaded a number of nuclear plants to protest government plans to permit new plants.
>>Secondly, it can't expand. There's not enough Uranium.
There's enough uranium and thorium for 2.3 million years of humanity's total global energy consumption x 1000.
Breeder reactors extract something on the order of 100X more energy from uranium than 2nd generation nuclear power plants, and that's the standard by which you have to judge the sustainability of fission feedstock resources.
You can disagree with them if you want, people are free to have their own priorities, but they correctly think that nuclear power is a hidden subsidy for nuclear weapons.
Have similar protests in coal mines or fracking or oil wells or on fuel tankers ever done anything to slow down the fossil fuel industry? Did they send state sponsored terrorists to bomb an EDF ship and get away with it completely other than throwing a couple of patsies under the bus?
Greenpeace's objections have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the permits go through and the very idea that they have more power than the French, Chinese, Russian, and US military and nuclear industries combined is utterly laughable. You cannot possibly think anyone would believe such a ludicrous lie.
It's actually kind of heart warming that you think environmentalists have so much power. Why do you think they chose not to use it to stop coal, plastic or beef?
> Breeder reactors extract something on the order of 100X more energy from uranium than 2nd generation nuclear power plants, and that's the standard by which you have to judge the sustainability of fission feedstock resources.
Not until one exists that actually runs in breeding mode on a commercial scale and that's what you're proposing building. Until then there's about 40 years with the current fleet and the suggestion of building enough PWRs to make a similar contribution to renewables means there would be 20 even after doubling the fuel economy.
Suggesting that you could scale uranium mining 5x to provide the first load for a couple of thousdand PWRs, complete them all by 2030, and then design and build five times as many breeders to keep them fueled in the 20 years you had left so as not to decomission all your freshly built reactors is a ridiculous farce. And that wouldn't even cover all electricity, let alone primary energy.
Your narrative doesn't line up with reality. In Germany, the primary political force behind the decision to shut down the country's nuclear plants was the national Green Party. A similar dynamic is seen across numerous countries in the EU.
Greenpeace and other environmental groups have significant influence on the leading left-leaning parties, and are the most responsible for so many governments stopping nuclear power expansion.
>>Not until one exists that actually runs in breeding mode on a commercial scale and that's what you're proposing building.
We'll have such reactors long before we run out of uranium. And once operational, they will be able to use the stored waste from the non breeder reactors as fuel.
The shunning of nuclear power at the behest of so-called green parties and environmental groups like Greenpeace is why it has not grown massively as an energy source. If permits for new plants were actually issued at the pace that the economy needs, and especially if that were combined with next gen nuclear tech got anywhere close to as much funding as solar/wind for deploying generation potential, the technology would have rapidly progressed, and today would dominate energy sources.
The reality is the PWR industry is just a bunch of liars, grifters and scammers that came into a cash cow as part of a program to force tax payers to fund weapons programs, and now they're crying because they didn't get to have a turn raping and destroying the planet and forcing every government on the planet to be subservient to Framatome, Urenco and Rosatom. Fossil fuel interests are amplifying their voice because they know every dollar spent on PWRs is a watt of fossil fuels that won't be replaced.
> We'll have such reactors long before we run out of uranium. And once operational, they will be able to use the stored waste from the non breeder reactors as fuel.
The most optimistic programs have breeders just barely producing a surplus in an experimental reactor in the late 2030s. You can't produce 100t of fuel for a PWR in a reactor that produces 30t and needs 28t for itself. PWRs are completely irrelevant for power generation and if your goal is to promote nuclear power rather than grift more money you'd be pushing for completely defunding all of the reactors in construction and planning and putting the money into breeder development.
> and especially if that were combined with next gen nuclear tech got anywhere close to as much funding as solar/wind for deploying generation potential, the technology would have rapidly progressed, and today would dominate energy sources.
It did. It's had trillions of dollars poured into it. Nothing happened. Noone in the nuclear industry wants it to happen because it would end the grift, and no-one in the military or government wants it to happen because any country with one can build bombs. China's probably the only exception because they mostly use their small minority of nuclear reactors for power (with a little bit of geopolitical domination on the side). The similar trillions poured into renewables created working power infrastructure the whole time, and now the cost is approaching the cost of just the steam generator portion.
Because greens don't have the political capital to institute a zero tolerance policy toward fossil fuels, and probably don't want to implement such a policy as it would mean their standard of living would regress 80 years.
Freezing nuclear power expansion and phasing out existing plants on the other can be done without an immediate economic cataclysmic that would make it both politically infeasible, and perhaps for the greens themselves, undesirable.
If the greens weren't powerful, how do you explain Germany's Green Party successfully pushing to get the country's nuclear power plants decommissioned?
>>The most optimistic programs have breeders just barely producing a surplus in an experimental reactor in the late 2030s.
My understanding was that breeder reactors are already producing surpluses and the only issue being that they're not economical because they have higher capital costs and it's cheaper to just enrich or use more uranium.
What's your source suggesting otherwise?
>>It did. It's had trillions of dollars poured into it. Nothing happened.
I know this is not true but I'm open to seeing any credible source that proves me otherwise.
So you agree that the power to stop it didn't come from the greens but from general political will and the complete lack of any economic or practical viability? Good.
> My understanding was that breeder reactors are already producing surpluses and the only issue being that they're not economical because they have higher capital costs and it's cheaper to just enrich or use more uranium.
Give me a single example of a breeder reactor running a full load of fuel without prolonged shutdowns for repairs or to deal with it catching fire in breeding mode and coming out with more. It hasn't happened. A reactor that could, in principle, breed if it was operated completely differently like BN-800 whicb has the primary function of destroying plutonium doesn't count.
> I know this is not true but I'm open to seeing any credible source that proves me otherwise.
Phenix, Superphenix, the french MOX program (which existed only to serve Phenix and cost even more), IFR, the BN series.. the list is very long. They cost tens of billions each.
Consider countries like Mongolia, where the dirtiest coal is used to heat homes. This is both an environmental and health crisis.
That's an interesting summary.
Or as someone in an east european country said: we are selling carbon (CO2 emissions) certificates because we don't polute enough.
The problem here is not Switzerland. The ptoblem are the carbon (CO2 emissions) certificates.