Not sure the project moving forward with coal power is an environmental win.
Undoing a landscape change on the scale of the Grand Canyon is a very different proposition.
And the CO2 dispersed in the atmosphere can be caught with butterfly nets. Easy breasy.
"Oh, let's nkt replace NG or coal or oil with a dam, because cement!"
Note that the same is true of wind farms, tital farms, because these things use massive amounts of cement vs lifetime + power output. EG, cement footings, etc.
Probably more cement is used, per kw produced, with wind farms in ocean.
I wonder, has there been extensive work done, examining life of project, comparing all types of projects, and power output, as well as "how consistent" energy output is? Adding things in like "wind power only vs a dam, means massive amounts of pollution due to battery creation and disposal, and lifetime costs".
Probably not.
And so politicians have reasons to opt out of everything. "Oh, but that's not really green" "Oh but that isn't"
All based upon some dude, smoking a fatty, saying "woha! concrete uses co2 in creation" without any numbers, impact studies, and comparatives.
Are you serious? There are multiple university departments that study this sort of thing. The amount of CO2 released by all these various things has been very well calculated. We can definitely go into projects with good numbers to help us compare what the consequences will be.
So you see, I'm quite serious, because you've not showed me what I asked for. A study comparison, including all factors such as lifetime of project, battery costs(or not), and so on.
Most importantly, that study should compare co2 released by burning coal, compared to dam, wind, solar, etc lifetime.
Imagine if it is 100000 for coal vs 1.1 for dam and 1.06 for windfarm?
If so, no one has any business complaining about a dam's cement! If so, complaining only helps hurt the environment. It helps the deniers, it helps the coal industry, all for naught!
So let's see the numbers, before people go on about dam bad.
Foundations of offshore wind turbines: A review
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.rser.2019.01.012
You can combine that (and others) with your global GIS map of offshore turbines, cross product against makes, models, developers, other papers on various foundations types and then add in on shore windfarms.
You then end up with a wind farm version of something like, say:
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
which took some years to put together and is pay to access.
Have large scale resource companies commissioned such integrated overviews with hot link to all the relevant technical reports that have been written on renewable energy?
Yes.
Is it in the public domain?
No.
Infomation want to be free, sure, but there's still a lot of high grade dark data out there.
But with a bit of perseverance you can get a pretty good ballpark on the data you're asking for with some sweat equity.
My point is, I see endless people saying "dams are horrible because of cement carbon!", yet no one has the raw numbers, compared to other green projects, to validate that statement.
People are just twitter spreading, an unjustified, unconfirmed hypothesis!
And it serves no one except bad actors.
> your link goes to some generic mining sector page.
To an up to date database of every significant mineral resource deposit across the globe backed by Tech Reports (geochem, geophysics, drilling, resource and reserve estimations), company ownership structure, land ownership structures, stock exchange filings, etc. Also includes prospects and ownership and development pipeline.
The equivilants exist for energy (trad fossil fuel exploration) and the renewable sectors (capital investments in tech (wind turbines) and resource pipelines (copper, lithium, etc..))
It's an an example of what you can do if you put your mind to it.
That one was developed here where I live (Western Australia) and onsold to Standard & Poor (the S&P people) when the private backers who wanted it had what they needed and passed it on.
Cement is an interesting one as we can make cement from fly ash left over from coal fired plants; that has a much lower carbon footprint than other cement.
You're not paying attention.
I'm saying, without validation, and proof, no one should be saying dams aren't as green as, for example, wind.
You've basically made my point for me, in that, no one has a clue, and everyone is just repeating a random thought someone had, without any comparative study done.
Destroying the habitat of thousands of species is not fungible. It can never be restored.
Coal for example has to come from somewhere. Take the Garzweiler, Inden or Hambach regions in Germany (FYI, these are coal mining areas). Through coincidence while doing some work for RWE I had the pleasure to get the long run-down on the project basics regarding the renaturalisation of these regions and the projects are on a massive scale, even if they are only a fraction of the size of the Grand Canyon. When they started exploiting the coal in the 1970s they planned very far ahead, including the renaturalisation starting in the 2030s (meaning it is all already approved). Garzweiler and Hambach are situated in one of the most densely populated areas in all of Europe. Since the 1970s whole cities and villages had to be resettled, infrastructure dismantled and rebuild, and over 100 square km of area have basically been turned into a desert. Currently Germany is preparing the first stage [1] of the renaturalisation and it is expected that it will be done around the turn of the next century.
So, yes, dams are a massive intrusion in the ecosphere but let's not kid ourselves into thinking the resources we need to run coal, gas, nuclear or oil power plants just fall from the sky. I wonder why it's OK to wreak such massive havoc on our environment for coal, but not for hydropower.
[1] The project page for Hambach https://www.rwe.com/forschung-und-entwicklung/projektvorhabe...
EDIT: I would oppose flooding the Grand Canyon either way ;)
This is one of those issues where being visible distorts the perceived damage. Tourism would probably also have adapted to seeing the large lake.
Seems a little silly to focus on preserving the appearance of a hole in the ground over, idk, most life on earth.
Even just the single plant alone is incredibly harmful: Coal power plants are estimated to cause an average of 25 (direct and indirect) deaths per PWh, 33 for brown coal. A 2GW power plant makes 17PWh per yeah, which extrapolates to 432 deaths per year.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
It’s the same basic math as figuring out how many cancers were caused by Hiroshima. Individually some people would have gotten cancer either way so you can’t guarantee some specific person died from that exposure, but you can compare populations and find statistically significant differences.
No, you can't. There are far too many variables involved, people confuse correlation with causation, ignore the null hypothesis, and most of all: the people doing these calculations in the first place (on either side) have an axe to grind.
The bulk of those involved want to know the true risks and aren't motivated to under or over report.
Discrepencies in results stand out.
Here's one study (third in a series, IIRC) on the two bombs in Japan.
https://bioone.org/journals/radiation-research/volume-187/is...
You can be specific in your objections, quote the parts you take issue with, etc.
Do you also disagree with excess death calculations from the pandemic?
The formula for expected deaths I saw used in the media was “the average of the last 5 years of deaths”.
That seems like an incredible oversimplification. Population growth and age demographic trends alone would cause the actual expected deaths to trend upwards over time, and not capturing that would make this formula underestimate expected deaths (and therefore overestimate excess deaths).
I did not see this problem addressed anywhere, did anyone else?
Sure, there might be a sudden and expected increase in population growth (and especially in the 70+ people), but one would have to have to explain how that happened…
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#what-is-ex...
Google has a tool for doing this called CausalImpact (available as an R & Python library if you want to play with a tool that can do this analysis).
Of all the axes needing grinding, this one should get serviced first.
> ... blah blah imperfect data
Sure, the data is imprecise but we are all very sure that "air pollution == very bad". What's your suggestion, doing nothing and letting the problem grow just because there might be an percentage error margin in the numbers for how badly we are screwed?
Doesn't matter if the real numbers are a quarter or 10 times higher, it's horrible compared to the alternatives regardless - unless you are somehow arguing that solar and wind are unknowingly extremely deadly.
(Nuclear is a trickier discussion - the reason it is seen as safer per Wh than even wind despite the horrible incidents is due to the massive power generated by the few hundred reactors in the world, where installing hundreds of thousands of huge windmills make construction and workplace disasters more common and an insignificant cause of death.)
I am starting to understand why rural America hates the cities.
A rich person might have a second/third house in the most beautiful of areas. Typically the coastal towns are depressed economically, and have a lot of confederate flag flying trucks.
If that's correct, I wonder how that trade off would then look?
And people would be arguing that we need to keep the levels of lake Gread high or something.