The World Solved Acid Rain. We Can Also Solve Climate Change
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/10/24/scientific-america...
What we need more of in academic analysis of data is someone to ask the tough questions like “if archeologists see evidence of women hunting, isn’t that just buttressing feminism?”, “does feminism need buttressing?”, and “does this buttress Left ideology?”. There is not enough talk about what bones that are dug up buttress, and if they are sufficiently or excessively leftist.
It’s undeniable that the mass adoption of nuclear power would be a huge step forward in terms of emissions. It’s statistically safer than fossile fuels, it’s not cyclical, thus more feasible without storage and infrastructure extravaganza. It’s also not perpetually 10 years away like fusion power. But, it’s political, a threat to powerful and profitable industries, and it threatens neocons on their unipolar powertrip. I could go on to list a whole bunch of other promising ideas, but their reasons for not existing are similar to the point of boring me before even writing them down.
It's like a kid that lies all the time and everyone sees it, they aren't going to be trusted as adults.
Why are there mediterranean archeological sites about 2000 years old in 30 feet of water a kilometer or so off the current coastlines?
I think in the Mediterranean coastal subsidence is mostly due to plate tectonics. I remember reading something about how myth of Atlantis might be due to a real life city that sunk as a result of an earthquake.
Is always fun to talk about when looking at the geology of the Mediterranean.
"Climate change" has become a cottage industry religion, people will see profits in it for a while yet.
This makes both sides happy: reduces taxes, reduces pollution, reduces federal government waste.
This sort of win-win thinking is covered in the 7 Habits. Unfortunately, environmental issues are hijacked into voting issues and these things _have to be_ us vs them, when in reality both sides are probably reasonable. The two party system is the downfall of the planet.
We could solve climate change within 3 years. We could make a concerted effort by humanity to universally move the world to clean energy. But it's not going to happen, or at least happen way slower than it should, because of capitalism. You can't do what we did with acid rain and transpose it to climate change because it threatens some of the very largest owners of capital and they're not giving up their wealth extraction machine without a very dangerous fight.
Decarbonizing our world's economies otoh is a much much bigger project. Running across many sectors & involving big upfront investments. And even if GHG emissions were cut to 0 today, effect of higher CO2 will last for centuries. If no irreversible tipping points are hit.
Note that in any case NO effort was made to remove substances from the environment. Only cut emissions.
So yeah, one can be hopeful. But we'll be in for a rough ride anyway.
Can we really, without either a massive reduction in population, a massive reduction in standard of living, or a massive centralization of capital and authority to force a switch to alternative energy sources?
And if it requires any of those three, is it really a lack of willingness that prevents us?
Let me start with this part of the framing.
Fossil fuels have historically and still benefit from incredible amounts of explicit subsidies (e.g. government money) and implicit policies (e.g. unpriced externalities like pollution and CO2).
If governments stop providing these subsidies and stop people from treating the atmosphere as a free sewer then nobody has to be forced to use renewables, people will gladly choose them because they're simply cheaper AND better for their personal health and the environment.
Fossil fuels receive an estimated ~$7T ($1.3T of which are direct "government money" subsidies) subsidies globally[0]. That's about 7.3% of global GDP subsidizing an energy source that comprises over 80% of the world consumption[1]. Honestly, it sounds like a pretty good deal.
Are you claiming that without any subsidies, that >80% of all energy consumed (or some substantial fraction thereof) would naturally come from renewable sources? That sounds unrealistic with present-day technology, and optimistic even for the foreseeable future. Besides, renewables aren't free of negative externalities, either.
In the end, existence itself is an imposition on the surroundings. Would you tell the caveman not to burn sticks for warmth, out of respect to CO2 emissions? Would you tell the people of the developing world that increased energy expenditure per capita, no matter the source, necessarily results in a greater impact to the environment?
No policy is going to "solve" the fact that we live in a world of limited resources that we must economize to bring about maximal human flourishing. Fossil fuels have done a pretty good job at that. I welcome developments in nuclear and renewable technology, but I question your assertion that some kind of panacea can be achieved with renewables where we can maintain our present population and standards of living and have a radically smaller footprint on the environment.
[0]: https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...
[1]: https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021...
Firstly, that's 7% of global GDP per year, not some one-time fee. But more important that sounds like a horrible deal since 100% of that is leading to climate change. And as a bonus it's also going to the companies fighting most strongly to prevent any change on the matter.
> Besides, renewables aren't free of negative externalities, either.
Neither is breathing. The comparison between renewables and fossil fuels is not even close, not by a few orders of magnitude. Take the figure halfway through the article as comparison [0].
> Would you tell the caveman not to burn sticks for warmth, out of respect to CO2 emissions?
This is a blatant strawman, I won't even comment.
> Would you tell the people of the developing world that increased energy expenditure per capita, no matter the source, necessarily results in a greater impact to the environment?
I did not say this, I don't know why you think I did.
I will simply repeat my previous comment: the levelized cost of solar in north America is already below that for gas and coal. In Africa, where the sun shines a heck a lot more, that number will be even better. They can either build fossil fuel energy, which will be costlier, worse for their people, and make them dependent on outside oil and coal imports. Or the can build cheap and cleaner renewables, which will also give them better energy independence from the rest of the world.
See China. Do you think they're building wind, hydro, and solar like crazy out of the goodness of their heart? Or perhaps their doing it to not be dependent on oil and gas imports and to get cheaper electricity to boot?
> but I question your assertion that some kind of panacea can be achieved with renewables where we can maintain our present population and standards of living and have a radically smaller footprint on the environment.
I made no such statement. Renewable are not a panacea. Everyone in the world cannot have a McMansion, if only because there isn't the surface area for it.
But by stopping the burning of fossil fuels and switching to renewables we will have a substantial decrease in our footprint on the environment. (oil and gas still have important uses as chemical feedstocks, and as long as we don't pollute with them they're no different from other things we extract from the ground)
[0]: https://ieefa.org/resources/how-big-indias-solar-waste-chall...
2. Solar is not a solutio for baseload without grid level storage.
3. China continues to build loads of coal power plants too.
3. Yes, but if you look at their production mix, coal has come down from 75% to 60% over the past 10 years, the large majority of that has been taken up by renewables [0].
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
This is brought up often. But you know what?
If China replaces its car park with EVs, heats its buildings with heat pumps etc, then even coal powered that's a massive win.
But in the meantime, renewables (and to a lesser degree, nuclear) continue to chip away at the fossil part of their energy mix. Or at the very least, replace what would have been more fossil use otherwise.
The levelized cost of solar in the US is comparable to combined-cycle gas plants (at around ~$37/MWh) without taking into account the cost of storage[0]. Add battery storage to the mix and the cost more than quadruples. The grid as it exists currently does not handle intermittency very well at all. Wind and solar cannot provide base load and need to be paired with some other source, which at the moment is most often gas combustion.
You can very well argue that we need to modernize the grid so that it can handle intermittent sources better, and I agree, but that ends up being a lot more expensive than your simple LCOE comparison would suggest.
> In Africa, where the sun shines a heck a lot more, that number will be even better. They can either build fossil fuel energy, which will be costlier, worse for their people, and make them dependent on outside oil and coal imports.
I mean, that's great. By all means, they should build whatever makes sense. If fossil fuels are in fact worse by every metric as you imply, it would be ridiculous to invest more in that direction. But the fact remains that over the past decade, they've added more generation capacity from natural gas in one year (on average) than all renewables combined over the ten years[2].
So either renewables don't make as much sense as you claim, or there's something else going on. How do you explain the discrepancy?
> See China. Do you think they're building wind, hydro, and solar like crazy out of the goodness of their heart?
Of course they have a strategic interest in reducing dependency on foreign oil imports. But 60% of their electric grid is still from coal, and they've added almost as much coal generation capacity as they did all forms of renewables over the past 10 years[1]. And if you look at their total energy consumption (including thermal needs, not just electricity generation), 85% of all energy consumed in China comes from coal, oil, and natural gas[3].
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
Comparable yes. But this comes back to the framing of the discussion. The US price does not include a price on the carbon (and CO2e) polution from those sources. And given that the majority of gas/coal's LCOE is made up of variable costs (i.e. fuel) it will be sensitive to such pricing.
> Add battery storage to the mix and the cost more than quadruples. The grid as it exists currently does not handle intermittency very well at all. Wind and solar cannot provide base load and need to be paired with some other source, which at the moment is most often gas combustion.
That is also changing. Batteries are not the only option. Other vaiable options are wider more interconnected grids, as you mention below, as well as pairing with options such as hydro power. Another consideration, many places currently have time of use pricing, with the evening/night being cheaper. With the intermittency of solar, for example, time of use pricing during the day may decrease, incentivizing a shifting of loads to during the day rather than at night.
> You can very well argue that we need to modernize the grid so that it can handle intermittent sources better, and I agree, but that ends up being a lot more expensive than your simple LCOE comparison would suggest.
The US grid in particular needs modernization before even considering the intermittency of renewables, so a some portion of that modernization cost is going to be paid anyway.
> So either renewables don't make as much sense as you claim, or there's something else going on. How do you explain the discrepancy?
Part of the explanation for that discrepancy is that while the levelized cost is currently on par or lower than fossil fuels, this was absolutely not true ten years ago [0]. The price for solar dropped ~6x over the last 14 years, and there is reason to believe that it will drop further still.
> Of course they have a strategic interest in reducing dependency on foreign oil imports. But 60% of their electric grid is still from coal, and they've added almost as much coal generation capacity as they did all forms of renewables over the past 10 years[1]. And if you look at their total energy consumption (including thermal needs, not just electricity generation), 85% of all energy consumed in China comes from coal, oil, and natural gas.
And given their large coal supply it will, unfortunately, be the last to be dropped. My argument for this is the same thing I mentioned for Africa; until recently they were simply not cost competitive, but that has been changing very drastically. You are correct that their mix is 60% coal, but compare it to 10 years ago and you'll see that it fell 15 percentage points (from 75% to 60%) [1]. So while they're building coal, they're building everything else faster (and that everything else is majority renewables).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...