40% of US electricity is now emissions-free
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
1. We reached peak coal in 2007. Coal generation has declined since.
2. We reached a consumption plateau also in 2007. Electricity use has been more or less level since.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
The neighboring chart that tracks renewables since 1950 is also interesting. Growth in renewables really started around 2007 with growth in wind being the primary contributor. Growth in solar has made a smaller but significant contribution in the past decade or so.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
I wonder how those charts compare with the rest of the world?
For example without crypto you might have seen a decline due to more efficient products such as LED's.
I think the idea that this is "impossible" and the only way to get there is to go back to the stone ages is actually the reason why we're not there yet.
Rather than spend time just improving things, we like to have a bitch about it.
Unfortunately there is. See [1] and [2] for an introduction to the topic and [3] for the concept of ecological overshoot. It’s simply not possible to have infinite growth in a finite world.
Humanity have first exceeded the annual carrying capacity of Earth in 1971, first year when Earth Overshoot Day happened.
1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4
2: https://www.collapsemusings.com/overshoot-why-its-already-to...
3: https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/newsroom/media-backgr...
Infinite growth is a sily idea and I doubt the majority of people really think this is a worthwhile / desirable thing to shoot for anyway goal anyway.
I don't see why we can't have tech, sustainable travel (more rail, even intercontinental high speed trains), renewable energy industries and innovation, and more driving a sustainable economy?
> I don't see why we can't have tech ...
The article I linked ("Overshoot: Why It's Already Too Late To Save Civilization") explains why we can't, there simply isn't enough resources on planet Earth now. If the humanity were to follow the platonic utopian ideal of strictly sustainable development of technology over past centuries, sure, why not? We could mine the asteroids and whatnot. There was enough resources and a sufficiently intact biosphere, atmosphere etc. to allow it. But the Earth-system at this point is simply fucked up beyond repair. Reread this last sentence. For a person who sees his purpose in this world and has hopes to achieve something in this world (read: most people in the West), this is the most depressing and hopeless thing he can ever think of, even more depressing than "I am mentally/physically fucked up beyond repair."
I am a Muslim, so everything I do is ultimately oriented for my afterlife, and all deeds (and sins) of mine are recorded and will be carried with me to the day of Judgement, where I will face God's absolute justice and hopefully mercy for all what I did. This world is no longer than a blink of an eye relative to my eternal life. Thus I am not depressed by the situation the world is in. What matters is what I do here in my time. YMMV based on your faith/beliefs/lack of them.
The article is a long but enlightening read, I even translated it to my native lang and published it even though I am no writer or translator.
Tomorrow won't be the same as today, look at the advances in AI, which will likely benefit many aspects of science. More will be done with less.
so everything I do is ultimately oriented for my afterlife, and all deeds (and sins) of mine are recorded and will be carried with me to the day of Judgement
In my opinion this is why you hold such a bleak outlook on everything. Try changing that and it might feel a bit better.
Thus I am not depressed by the situation the world is in
I'm sorry, but I'm not sure you're being honest with yourself.
I don’t doubt this. But the technological advancements required to sustain the current population are either not even in the horizon, or are outright physically impossible. AGI leading hopefully rapidly to ASI can probably solve a lot of things with advanced materials science, but aside from that possibility the future does look pretty bleak. Please read the article yourself and you’ll understand, there’s just too many crises cornering humanity, each of them currently with seemingly no way to solve.
> I'm not sure you're being honest with yourself.
I’m sorry, no. The only reason I mentioned the relation with depression is because I know from experience (friends, sample size < 10) an awful lot ratio of Western people tend to get serious depression at least temporarily after seeing the current true situation of the world.
Maybe you should calm down.
Now, with EVs on the other hand, consumption will probably pick up a lot.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/09/08/fact....
It is also cleaner. Emissions are pretty much pure CO2 whereas coal also emits other compounds, e.g. sulfur, and particulates. This even includes a level of radioactive elements. So it is very polluting.
Apparently no one cares about the little leaks everywhere (or they cannot be fixed cheaply). Later on I noticed that other gas pipeline junctions -- the type that are scattered around subdivisions -- often smelled faintly of gas. I wonder if these small leaks can be avoided with better engineering or if perfectly sealed pipe fittings in the outdoors are impractical.
What’s even wilder about this is the population of earth just hit an estimated 8 billion total. The US population isn’t 100% indicative of the whole planet, but one of the largest superpowers balancing out despite further planetary growth is a great sign.
It keeps our eyes on the target - not emitting CO2 and other gasses to the atmosphere.
Other qualities like “renewablility” or “greenness” are cherries in the top. Nice to haves!
One affects the entire environment with air pollution, and the other affects a localized area by modifying terrain.
I say might, because there is no way of knowing how many deaths will occur (or even statistically should be expected to occur) simply because we don't know what will happen to the nuclear waste.
I favor nuclear, but I'd love to see hard numbers on the 'headroom' nuclear has on deaths/GWH compared to dams, with some argument about whether long-term nuclear waste storage is likely to be less deadly than that headroom.
Alright, so it goes by several names but it's sold to consumers as "Natural Gas". I'm not sure if it was green washing, but obviously the marketers were going for the most palatable name for consumers.
Predicated upon what?
Natural gas was merely a name to differentiate between 'gasoline', short form 'gas' for many english speaking countries. And the name is valid, it's mostly in its natural form, compared to 'gasoline aka gas', which required loads of processing to create it from oil.
And the name comes from a time before most of the population had even heard of global warming, at a time before people cared about using fossil fuels. There was in no way any attempt to greenwash, because absolutely no one cared one iota back then!
And the same is true for being palatable. It was just fuel. There was no reason to make it sound better. This was the age when most homes were heated by heating oil, or wood, or coal even!
People didn't get "triggered" back then, not in the 1950s or whatever. No one really cared except in the most extreme of cases. The earliest marketing concern over a name I know of, is "canola" oil, created by Canadian research programs, first on market I believe in the 70s, which is rapeseed oil.
(Rapeseed oil was added to cattle feed before this, but was considered too bitter for people until processing improvements were developed.)
It was thought that women would associate rapeseed with rape, and not buy it. This was in North America, the rest of the world generally, at the time, just called it rapeseed oil.
also toxic
No, it has absolutely nothing to do with gasoline. Other languages, e.g. Russian, which don’t use the word gasoline also call it natural gas (coming from nature). This extra confusion is a late American thing.
I tend to agree with this - there is a dichotomy here, but it is "natural" vs. "supernatural" - not "natural" vs "synthetic". I think it would be fine if for most cases we simply said "man-made" vs "not man-made" as it succinctly describes the dichotomy we're aiming for.
The "greenwashing" here is that you _could_ call anything that's not a ghost or a god "natural" by a certain definition...
Sure, if you completely disregard the context. “Natural” when talking in the context of humans is “nature vs man”.
A beaver dam is nature. The Hoover dam is man-made. If you want to red herring you could say “but man is part of nature” - there’s no point to doing so other than to argue semantics, but you could.
"Naturally occurring gas" does not magically transform itself into energy. The process along the way from being a resource to being usable as energy is usually anything other than "natural" and "green."
Greenwashing is an intentional effort to portray greenhouse gas emissions as safe by relativizing their contribution to the climate change. Calling natural gas natural according to an old tradition is not the same.
Anyway, if you would do it today, it is really hard to justify, not least because there exist new meanings of the words now and there exist already sufficiently good classifications. Context does matter.
Education does not change how these sorts of tricks affect our brains. Research has shown that using the term "Natural Gas" creates false impressions of the its environmental impact.
Assumption about my personality doesn’t make your statement right or make sense. Of course it was intentional, just not the way you suggest here. The name “natural gas” exists in many languages, literally means “coming from nature” and is being used for centuries. Major suppliers outside USA use this name in contracts etc. Nobody is going to rename it just because American education system is so bad that people are getting confused.
>Education does not change how these sorts of tricks affect our brains. Research has shown that using the term "Natural Gas" creates false impressions of the its environmental impact.
Proof link? What factors were controlled in that research?
Not exactly hard to find, but here you go. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/should-it...
Do you have proof that this association or this type of association is correlated with education?
It is not a label, it is scientifically established and accurate name that nobody except some woke and poorly educated Americans wants to change.
The associations of the name with other terms are not correlated with education, they are caused by it, ergo the only proof needed is logical. If you know what it is, you describe it exactly as it really is — clean when burning if compared to coal, producing even stronger greenhouse effect when directly released to atmosphere.
Not all all. To someone who only understands the meanings of the individual words, the term is extremely ambigous. "Natural gas" could simply mean "air" or could refer to any gas that is naturally occuring in our atmosphere.
The reason why "natural gas" has the meaning that it does is purely convention and has no scientific basis or justification.
> The associations of the name with other terms are not correlated with education, they are caused by it
Education is not how we learn language. We learn language primarily contextually based on experience. While learning additional languages can be assisted by education, contextual experiencea are required for mastery.
> ergo the only proof needed is logical.
That's not how logic works...at all
> nobody except some woke and poorly educated Americans wants to change.
Scientists at Yale are "poorly educated"...? Throwing that accusation out pair with the word 'woke' exposes you as a partisan who has no intrest in learning or constructive discussion
That's not how logic works. Go learn about how logic and science are used together.
This person probably has a communication disability if they are not able to use language properly. We are not speaking in individual words, we use sentences and grammar, metaphors and homonyms, we have a lot of context even in low-context cultures. All of this can be learned and this is what education is for.
> Scientists at Yale are "poorly educated"...?
Maybe. Ivy League university or scientific degree is not a seal of quality. When you design such research only to control for political affiliation, that’s a bad science.
Gas can be created by many other means (combustion, chemistry, etc). Natural gas means it's gas that is found "as is" without any kind of synthesis.
Having a few terms like “natural gas” as a way to counteract people’s perceptions of the niceness of “natural” isn’t so bad.
It would be far better if we called it methane, but that's not really accurate either. It might contain ethane, propane, butane pentane and hexane. A lot of that stuff is condensed out before use, but not all.
The only path forward is a drastic reduction in overall consumption. Even if we reach 100% emissions-free electricity, we'll end up with an unlivable planet anyway if we don't focus on the other issues too. If we limit warming to 1,5°C — which isn't even realistic anymore — what good will it do to us if our water and arable land are contaminated beyond repair?
Seems physically possible to me.
Maybe you mean "we need to consume to live," which I agree with a whole lot more. Even then, there's no reason we need to maximize consumption. Food is definitely critical to our existence, but pre-peeled oranges in individual plastic packaging are not.
There is no way 80% of the planet is willing to give up any comfort to stave off future ecological problems they cannot feel yet. We saw how much effort it took with global warming, and I doubt that will have made subsequent changes for the better easier. In fact, I suspect a lot of 'what, there is another thing wrong according to the scientific bozo's even though I can't see it' that will make people more resistant.
Actually reducing consumption globally won't happen. Not until it is too late. The best we can do is slow down consumption, and make consumption better. We have seen decent improvements in plastic free packaging. And power draw of devices is also getting much more attention. One big point here is pricing in externalities. That will push people into the less damaging choices.
Not to say that we should give up, nor to say that we should be quiet about other issues, nor even to say that people shouldn't reduce their consumption. My point is that a global reduction of consumption isn't going to happen voluntarily, and therefore shouldn't be the solution we pursue.
I do feel there needs to be space to discuss what kinds of reductions of consumption make sense, esp for rich countries.
Now, your turn: what are you doing to help avoid global ecological catastrophe, even a little bit?
If we refuse to choose the lesser of two evils, we will be fucked.
Because it's false? Nothing is emissions-free: making solar panels and wind turbines create emissions, and since they are all made in China, just transporting them around the world where they are used cause emissions as well. And when they become garbage they are shipped once more around the world to be disposed (and not recycled). So it's only "emissions-free" if you ignore the whole supply chain.
High grade bullshit stated with confidence.
Based on cursory checks of https://ourworldindata.org/energy, https://www.statista.com/statistics/668749/regional-distribu..., whatever sources they use.
Actually, burning natural gas does result in emissions of nearly all types of air pollutants and carbon dioxide (CO2).
About 117 pounds of CO2 are produced per million British thermal units (MMBtu) equivalent of natural gas compared with more than 200 pounds of CO2 per MMBtu of coal and more than 160 pounds per MMBtu of distillate fuel oil.
Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-...
The article also specifically says that natural gas is not emissions-free: "The explosive growth of natural gas in the US has been a big environmental win, since it creates the least particulate pollution of all the fossil fuels, as well as the lowest carbon emissions per unit of electricity. But its use is going to need to start dropping soon if the US is to meet its climate goals, so it will be critical to see whether its growth flat lines over the next few years."
Everybody (one would hope) understands that about coal, oil, and natural gas.
Many people (it seems) overlook that for wind, solar, and battery technology.
It's akin to ignoring | being wilfully ignorant of what happens to material in the recycle bin.
Think of it more as a plea to remember that all this clean energy comes with a boatload of waste that needs addressing, that is often in other people's backyards, and the you don't get $64 billion US worth of copper without the digging up of what some consider to be sacred ground.
What is the action this realization is supposed to help us come to though? Should we stop the transition to cleaner energy until we find a 100% clean energy source throughout its life cycle before we begin the transition? It is simple really. Wind, solar, and so on are cleaner than fossil fuel sources of energy, so we should gradually transition to them. Cleaner mining and responsible recycling and reuse of the infra we build can be worked on over time.
In another 50 years we will have a pile of toxic waste as a direct result of scaling solar and wind up from the sliver it is now to enough to replace fossil fuels in world electricty production and replace fossil fuels in transport and build out enough batteries to ride out at least 10 hours of global demand.
> Cleaner mining and responsible recycling and reuse of the infra we build can be worked on over time.
How's that going so far - I can point to a few examples of mine reclaimation .. these are dwarfed by the majority that are left as problems for later on.
It's simple really, high consumers should consume less and as resources are used there should be focus on remediation and harm reduction from the outset.
Typically the worst offenders greenwash the nasty away and tut-tut about waste piling up in third world | southernn economies.
More meetings and deliberations
Which places in particular? Here in the middle east temperatures regularly get up to 45-50 degrees celsius in the summer and people get by okay. Most places have average temperatures much lower than that, so how would a rise of just 3-4 degress make then uninhabitable?
Bangladesh alone is +170M people. Dispacing these people will be a refugee crisis on an unseen scale.
The issue isn't all thermometers going up by 3.5 degC. The issue is that it also brings a host of other changes, and it's those things that kill you. They include:
- higher variability of temperatures. So your +3.5 degC actually makes heatwaves of +10/+15 more likely
- changing rainfall patterns, taking rain away from some places that rely on it.
- rising sea level, where the small average temperature changes are sufficient for a significant increase.
I actually think the focus on global average temperature increase is a major failure of public science communication, precisely because everyone mentally adds the increase to their local climate and thinks "meh".
Largely because the 45-50 degree temperature do not last very long. And partly because AC loss due to prolonged blackouts has not happened during such heat - yet.
A 3-4 degree increase in average temperature means that 45-50 degree temperature periods may go from lasting 1-3 days to 2-3 weeks. And that's a whole new ball game.
Another thing noted is that urban features such as green spaces, water features, and increased shade may work where exceedance is typically nonhumid (i.e., North America, Middle East, Australia), these factors may not be as effective or even actively detrimental in more humid environments due to the added humidity.
23 years ago, climate scientists were predicting that, "snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event" and that "Children just aren't going to know what snow is" [1], in Britain.
In 2008, James Hansen, an influential climate scientist at Columbia predicted the Arctic would be ice free in the summer by 2018 [3]. Instead, the sea ice trend reversed in 2012 and since rebounded to higher levels than when Hansen made the prediction [4].
Furthermore, the predictions of dire consequences as a result of CO2 increase or mild warming have not materialized. Instead global biomass has dramatically increased and crop yields continue to achieve record highs, which is what you would predict as a result of increased plant growth from CO2 fertilization [2].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150912124604/http:/www.indepen...
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...
[3] https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1988&dat=20080624&id=...
[4] https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-...
[5] https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/climate-model-projecti...
Everything can be seen from space...
1. Flaring isn't efficient. You only burn about 90% of the gas, the rest leaks into the atmosphere.
2. Gas includes Methane. Methane is a 10x more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, though it lasts considerably less long (about 10y i believe).
This means that a single well flaring methane is emitting just as much as 10 wells just releasing co2 into the air. To combat this, we need to install an internal combustion engine attached to something to bleed the energy generated by the engine into something else.
Traditionally, this is not something affordable. There is a significant upfront cost, and very few solutions to use the energy, as most of these installations are far removed from the grid.
Luckily, there is a new solution that can make this a profitable situation for everyone. It is rapidly seeing more interest, and it is even powering a system that can benefit everyone in the world: Bitcoin mining.
Bitcoin mining requires cheap, dependable energy. It doesn't require a grid connection, and adding a satellite connection is enough to start mining. You can drive a single container full of mining ASICs onsite, and maintenance is mostly possible off-site.
You could do the same analysis for wind turbines that don't turn, solar panels that don't sol. What we do know is that natural gas beats the shit out of coal on every measure climate bros claim to care about and it doesn't require digging up half the world's minerals to waste on early-stage renewable technology that is almost certain to require far less cobalt and God-knows-what else when the technology matures.
The US has the biggest responsability on this planet, being the largest rich country, having emitted more than twice the CO2 per capita of Europe in the recent decades.
Can't expect pour countries to go quicker than the US.
Besides that you could run smelting ovens, internal combustion engines, and other furnaces of hydrogen. Though that hydrogen will probably come from electricity if it isn't polluting.
You can replace say, gas powered heating with heat pumps and transfer the gas to storage for use in electric generators for when demand and supply diverge.
These transitions can be done in parallel but once you hit a certain degree of carbon free electricity it makes sense to redirect focus to shift towards electrification as things that may have been borderline become viable.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
And massively invest in research to find realistic ways to improve the situation (aka not the current concept of carbon capture)
Does it really? Or are your claims just baseless fearmongering? What are your sources that back up those claims?
Compared to the staggering amounts of emissions, pollution, and environmental destruction; and indeed countless of people whose health is destroyed by that caused by the fossil fuel industry, mining related to batteries is nothing. It doesn't register as anywhere near similar in scope or impact. Most mining and mineral extraction is coal. Then you get a bit of iron ore and other metals. And then some long way into the long tail of mining you'll find lithium extraction. The amount of lithium mined per year is measured in the hundreds of thousands of tonnes. The amount of coal mined per year is billions of tonnes. All of that is burned. The lithium on the other hand is nearly 100% recyclable. Once extracted, it stays useful.
How harmful are they exactly? Like how many deaths/how much damage in $ per ton mined - and how does it compare to other metals or coal?