Shell admits 1.5C climate goal means immediate end to fossil fuel growth

"The annual number of permanent nuclear reactor shutdowns fluctuated between 2005 and 2022. In the latter year, there were 4 shutdowns worldwide, of which three were in the United Kingdom (UK) and one in the United States (U.S.) "[0x40000000]

[0x3F800000] https://spectrum.ieee.org/slow-steady-progress-for-two-us-nu...

[0x40000000] https://www.statista.com/statistics/238656/number-of-nuclear...

Nuclear takes so long to build it doesn't help at all.

MIT has a really neat policy simulator called En-ROADS [1] where you can tinker with applying various policies at various levels, and estimate their impacts. Check it out, and see just how minimal nuclear energy's effects are on their own. Compare that to, for example, just "highly reducing" methane emissions.

[1] https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=23.2...

How is this related? What change was expected from the pandemic?

No reason to celebrate because there's much to do, but it's not all doom and gloom.

As it stands, global PV installed capacity has been growing by a pretty constant 20% per annum for the last five years, about half of which is in China and Europe but with similar exponential rates in other countries (Brazil in particular has doubled its installed capacity in less than three years). At that rate, depending on the capacity factor, it would produce the majority of the world's electricity in 15-20 years. Storage is behind, but faces a chicken-and-egg problem: if you don't have installed PV capacity, there's no demand to build storage.

My point is: 20% YoY growth is fast by the standards of almost anything, let alone durable infrastructure. Rome wasn't built in a day. Part of the challenge is to make sure we keep it up.

"Peak oil" and CO2 are just the tip of the iceberg.

Some future generation is going to dig up the garbage we buried and harvest it for resources. To a degree we're already doing this ourselves looking for stuff like palladium and rhodium.

I think we are talking about people who are yet to be born (in the future), not younger humans already born.

If you think things will be okay because historically has been so, let me remind you that a permanent change of this scale is a catastrophe that is unmatched and unprecedented in human history. Maybe nuclear conflict was as scary, but its solution was comparatively much simpler, and it never passed the point of no return.

More than that, things usually do not turn out okay except for the class of people who initially benefited from bringing about the problem. Many peoples have faced horrors that were not and could not be undone, though it's easy to forget that while living in the society built on their ashes. Things always turn out to be okay... for the colonizer, the wealthy, the powerful

Statistically speaking, commenting on this platform firmly places you in a category that will likely survive climate change (at least in the medium term...) and probably profit from it, so excuse me for calling out your reasons for believing that technology will save us.

By the way, it is my understanding that the scientific consensus is that technological solutions are not going to be able to save us (as they are impractical, too far off, and harder to implement than just stopping the use of fossil fuels).

Also if you think that "spouting predictions of the apocalypse" is comforting, you severely misunderstand the psychological issues that (especially the younger generations) are facing in light of terrifying powerlessness against climate change

Ultimately, this is a political problem, and assuring everyone that "things will be okay" only makes it less likely that any action will be taken in time.

Now is the time to panic, and do something about it. If we are able to turn the tide and somehow make things okay... great! The panic was well placed.

Serious question. Planting trees and re-growing ecosystems seems like a simple, straightforward solution, but I feel like it's a red herring.

One year of carbon sequestration from a mature tree == 1 or 2 days of commuting to the city 20 miles away that many people who are priced out of this town drive back and forth from.

Trees are great, and most places should plant more street trees. But if you preserve trees at the cost of building dense cities that are more environmentally friendly, you're doing it wrong. Dense cities also allow for more trees in actual wild lands outside of them, rather than sprawl.

In the US, transportation and heating are our biggest individual contributions to climate change.

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/ecosystems/coastal-blue-carbon...

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/figures/summary...

Reforesting, afforesting and ecosystem restoration are nearly as impactful, but listed seperately.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth

I’ll update the comment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

As far as I understand, the habitable zone in our system is not stable. It’s shifting. Between 500m and 800m years from now it’ll have moved sufficiently where our carbon cycles start grinding to a halt.

If we had to go to the stars in the next 50 years, sure, current industry would be our best bet.

If we (or whatever is evolved) have 500 million years, why would not environmentalists be RIGHT that we need to focus on sustainability first, and improve the odds of society not getting a huge setback?

I think we’ve gotten incredibly lucky in the last 600 years or so and have stumbled our way into a viable exit strategy for life on our planet.

We don’t necessarily deserve this role.

I think I’m well aligned that keeping life alive for the next few thousand years is absolutely necessary. We can’t do anything on a 500m year timeline if our species is wiped out in 1000 years.

But, I’d disagree with many of the seemingly “at all costs” approaches I’ve seen advocated for in my social circles (outside of the media). I’ve seen my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade.

If we save all life on earth in the next 1000 years by ridding the planet of human civilization, we doom it to death in 500m years. Unless another species stumbles into another approach for leaving this planet, everything dies. If we are going to step down, we absolutely need to acknowledge that.

If you want to save life on earth, your plan needs to save life on earth. If you aren’t solving for these expected extinction events on these timelines, what are you solving for?

To put that another way: if you save life on earth over the next 1000 years by collapsing human civilization, you haven’t saved life on earth. You’ve doomed it to a slow death unless lightning strikes twice and cephalopods figure out how to build rockets.

I don’t think we deserve this role, we’ve lucked into it. But now that we wield the capacity to get life off of this rock, stepping down from that role on moral grounds seems… immoral. We do this because it’s what our ecosystem demands of us, not because of anything special about us but because there is no other species that can do it. The ball is in our court regardless of whether we like it or deserve it.

Too many people are just "hoping for a miracle" as if that's doing something. Or they think "technology will fix this before it gets too bad". It might, but it will be in spite of those people, not because of. If we want technology to save us we have to make investments today, not "when it gets bad".

It would require sacrifices and global cooperation, but any real solution to climate change will require that

"If we do <x> we'll be able to stay under 1.5C" <- lie

"If we don't do <y> we won't be able to stay under 1.5C" <- possibly true, but deceptive

"Our goal is to keep global warming under 1.5C" <- lie, a goal is by definition achievable and anyone who's giving statements on climate change knows that 1.5C is not achievable

0.1 on average can mean huge spikes on some parts of the globe.

People are being told technology will solve the problem, you can do x only if the alternative has at least the same advantages and no more disadvantages and you can't do y, because 'freedom'. (oh and did I forget 'communism'?)

1,5 degrees aren't an arbitrary goal either, at least to climate scientists: four tipping points are triggered at about that temperature. https://twitter.com/globalcommonshq/status/16164772483740467...

There's some really bad redline some place past 1.5C.

Putting the goal possibly to the right of that redline (and possibly blowing past it anyways) is not good.

1.5C is a decent benchmark because it lets us measure various scales of intervention against it.

I find this a sad dilemma. We want to save humanity from the climate catastrophe, but we are more worried about crashing the economy.

So if you want to not reach much more than 1.5°C, let's say 2°C or 2.5°C, you need to be realistic and set a lower goal. We will always be above any goal.

China has one thing right, the idea of actions for a greater good. I forget the actual wording/idiom but we severely lack that in the west. It's all "what about me" and it drags any kind of progress to a halt unless it can be put in someone elses back yard or they can make a profit off of it.

I am fully in favor of the kind of "fair trade" that would force countries to eat their environmental externalities. In the case of China, it's a double-win since it would put huge pressure on them to change and also more than fund all of our environmental initiatives. But without a global carbon tax/credit system, this just ain't gonna happen.

It's unfair when the western countries demand lowering emissions from the third world. West was able to enjoy unlimited carbon emissions for years, while the third world was mostly agricultural and had poorly developed economies. Now, when other countries undergo the same economic transformations US had long time ago, Americans demand them to ditch progress for the sake of preventing climate change. And that's while outsourcing "dirty" manufacturing and waste management to the same third world countries.

Whatever particular incident you're referring to, the evidence was not released in a straightforward fashion, but tricked out through document drops and the partisan media, so that the pols could avoid a clear public announcement that so-and-so was a pedophile. That's exactly consistent with "avoiding embarrassment"; it just happens that a small fraction — usually, people who were already opposed to that official — believe they should be embarrassed.

When there are clear allegations of CSA, as with Mark Foley, the individual is quickly cast out. When a politician embarrasses their own party, as with Madison Cawthorn, the same thing happens. When the message can be sufficiently contained and redirected, the embarrassment has been avoided.

The question is when and where it will occur. On one side more difficult extractions become viable, on the other side green energy makes the oil economy less viable (though notably most plastics are still fossil based)

You can read it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20080527233843/http://www.hubber...

Here's the central thesis: "When we consider that it has taken 500 million years of geological history to accumulate the present supplies of fossil fuels, it should be clear that, although the same geological processes are still operative, the amount of new fossil fuels that is likely to be produced during the next few thousands of years will be inconsequential. Therefore, as an essential part of our analysis, we can assume with complete assurance that the industrial exploitation of the fossil fuels will consist in the progressive exhaustion of an initially fixed supply to which there will be no significant additions during the period of our interest."

The paper outlines the historical growth of fossil fuel exploitation and posits how it will reach a peak and then decline. The last third of it notes that nuclear fuels, having an energy content several orders of magnitude greater than that of fossil fuels, can supply abundant energy for at least 5000 years into the future. The age of fossil fuels is a short lived transitional phase in the development of industrial civilization.

"Peak oil" later accumulated a vast penumbra of connotations beyond Hubbert's rather technical and dry outlook. The peak oil movement, if it can be called such, has in recent decades predicted the imminent collapse of industrial civilization due to oil shortages. Neither Hubbert's original prediction nor the more recent peak oil collapse predictions have been driven by climate change denial. At best (worst?) I remember peak oilers who believed that we needed to increase coal exploitation because otherwise we'd be facing gigadeaths from energy shortages in a decade or two.

#3 highest spender is insurance, at $158m, #2 electronics at $221m, pharma at #1 $373m.

I too think we have to try to be reasonable, & there's a lot of factors, and it's hard. They are a gigantic lobbying force, quite close to top 3 though.

I don't think this is new. O&G was pushing just as hard for pipelines in the last government too.

Not just Alberta but of course the Feds themselves bought a pipeline in order to get it built and push back against accusations from the opposition that they were against the O&G industry.

Rich countries are scarcely getting back around to upscaling nuclear themselves, much less subsidizing it in others. One advantage the developing countries have is they don't have the baggage of existing extensive infrastructure for electricity, and some renewables can be deployed in a more decentralized fashion (i.e. solar). I believe this is currently happening in India in limited fashion.

Add to the fact, renewable tech, and mitigating tech like carbon capture, is very much subsidized in the West. The necessary shift from the private sector is going to cost trillions; it's happening already, but not overnight, and the angsty projection against barons and the wealthy class won't make it go any faster. I mean, they needed to hear the message, but there's no reason to believe it isn't loud and clear at this point.

Well, if they say they have the right then they have the right. They are, after all, as free to govern themselves as we are. If you mean ethics doesn't allow them, sure, but the same ethics doesn't allow us to let them pay for the damage we did and especially since much of their pollution is actually them producing stuff for us. Chinese made pollution creating stuff for Americans should clearly be in the US pollution account, not the Chinese one.

It is going in circles, wasting time on talk. The only solution is that those that polluted in the past pay for those that are on the rise now. Either directly or by not pollution in the future. Anything else (unless you invent a Pollution Eater 9000) is the typical talk and zero real action.

Step one: Let companies like Apple pay for 100% of their pollution all the way from mineral mining to garbage disposable.

Of course any investment is new infrastructure. I think the analysis you want to do is a long term trend line of fossil fuel investment and a projection into the future.

What we, hopefully, want to see is that the overall % energy production projected into the future is decreasing.

Long story short stop making this about 'burbs vs cities vs rural. It's not going to work, you aren't going to guilt enough people into doing the right thing. We need to make living sustainable for a variety of different type of living arrangements because nothing in America is ever this clear cut and dry or uniform. You can exercise positive patterns of behavior and living/lifestyle choices where ever you are. Besides, 99.9% of human existence was the village model: clusters of independent and self-sufficient communities. There's nothing wrong with this, and it's what we've evolved with.

I think you are right in that many Americans won't "vote" for a lot of these benefits. Again the "300 new manufacturing jobs" headline sounds better than "16 small businesses and a 2% drop in obesity-related premature deaths over a 5 year period" [1] and that's what we optimize for.

To your point though, as many Americans won't "vote to get rid of the suburbs" they'll eventually just go bankrupt trying to maintain all of the highways and cars [2], or we'll have to go to war to secure oil flows. There's certainly a social choice to be made and I think we'll choose suburbs, cars, war, heat, and all of those things.

[1] There's nothing wrong with 300 new (or any amount) manufacturing jobs, and the numbers I'm using are made up, though my point is largely that better urban planning and design, zoning, etc. will produce greater economic benefits it's just that they aren't concentrated into a single headline that some dumb idiot can point to and say "Mission Accomplished".

[2] Please note that there's nothing wrong with cars existing, the main problem is cars being a hard requirement (government mandate really) for every single thing you do in your life.

I don't think it really matters to be honest, Americans are not moving into even something like my ~1500sqft terraced house en masse. You may as well ask half the country to learn Russian.

A bit like how London couldn't turn into LA now without demolishing half of it. We tried to build a couple of freeways in the 60's and failed.

We go extinct or evolve. But that's always been true about every existential problem that humanity has faced before, including how to get food, clothe ourselves, not die in childbirth, on and on goes the list of things we've solved in the past.

I'm not saying we should recklessly exacerbate every scenario but we know that distributed problems are very difficult for humanity to solve without a present crisis (as ww2 was, and unfortunately 2050 is not present enough for typical human psychology) .

> life as we know it is fundamentally altered.

Yes. This has happened dozens of times, at an increasing pace across human history. Agriculture, Printing press, Germ Theory/Antibiotics, birth control + feminine hygiene products, Nuclear theory, Extra terrestrial travel, the internet, "AI" ... Each of them has unlocked an order of magnitude difference in human existence

I fully expect us to invent something in this case, and do not fear if we do not. Given enough dice rolls something is going to end humanity eventually.

The "Bronze Age Collapse"[0] wasn't global, but it certainly wasn't "localized" in the sense that (I think) you're using it.

Yes, I'm picking a nit there. That said, you're otherwise spot on.

And that's not breaking news either, and it's been discussed ad infinitum, Fall of Civilizations[1] brings your point into a pretty clear focus. I highly recommend it!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B965f8AcNbw

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations/videos

While I agree there will be some delta nearly every where, I disagree there will be a life ending delta every where. It's worth noting I'm talking about this very stoically. It will be horrific either way.

Even for those that do live in rural communities, this isn't an intractable situation with no possibility of improving. First of all, many rural communities existed before the invention of the automobile. They began as compact towns centered around the train station. Nearly all of them have lost passenger rail access, but places like Germany, Austria, and Switzerland show that this need not be the case. Traditional community planning would allow many people to accomplish daily tasks within town without a car, even if one was used to travel outside of town.

Second, fewer people should be living an hour away from their job in an urban center, and nobody should be forced to. It must be affordable and convenient for everyone to live close enough to their job so as to enable them to easily get there without a car, but this is not a problem that can be solved overnight.

Third, we must invest in an effort to install fiber optic internet access in these communities, in a 21st century repeat of the Rural Electrification program of the 20th century. Remote work is a vital lifeline to stave off the steady decline of population in rural areas.

Rural communities face several existential threats, climate change is just one of them. Hopefully there can be some synergy among solutions that will make these communities more resilient in every dimension, not just climate.