DW also, similar stuff, but the guest is quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcl5Mn373Oc
Anton Petrov covered it from a much more science lens a couple months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRoU3whzX_Q
All the downvotes are just showing why no action is being taken even though right now we are literally terraforming the planet with no plan, and it is going to stop the transatlantic currents that keep Europe from becoming arctic.
But sure, just do nothing until Europe becomes an uninhabitable tundra and it is too late to take action. Great plan.
centralisation makes centralised opporunity for change. You have all the power, and also all the responsibility.
Feel free to share why not. At the end of the China is still part of a global system dominated by capitalism and they have to play the markets game in order to survive.
They could easily fully do things their own way but that would mean, for example, chance of private intellectual property, which would mean no WTO membership, which would mean massively reduced capacity for trade, which would put them at such a disadvantage they'd inevitably collapse.
If the argument were about slavery instead - slavery enables cheaper goods, ergo by buying our products, some of which were made using slavery, but we refuse to reveal which ones, but nonetheless by buying them you support slavery and are morally responsible for the slavery not us. Nobody would accept this framing.
I agree that China has done very well from manufacturing and trade, and would not have done as well if they had not industrialised at a large scale. But that doesn't change the fact that industrialisation of this kind causes pollution and is damaging the planet and it especially doesn't mean that China has no moral obligation to do as much as it can to reduce emissions.
I also don't believe the argument that the pollution is inherent to production, or that there is no way to satisfy demand without pollution. (or that china, specifically, derserves to be the one to profit from satisfying that demand). Production of almost all commodities can be done without massive emissions these days, and even when it couldn't, nobody was forced to ramp up production
Someone will inevitably jump in here to point out that china makes a lot of solar or whatever. Sure, they do. They also make a lot of wind power. Their emissions per capita are trending in the wrong direction though. Europe's have been going DOWN since the 1970s, and china's are going UP. China's emissions per capita are roughly equal with the EU at the moment and are going up - pretty soon they will catch up and surpass the US.
I also don't agree that just because someone else became rich through some negative process (crime, perhaps), that everyone has a right to the same. This sort of thinking is the way the world burns.
I don't get a free pass to behave like a mafia boss just because I really really want to have a bunch of money like one
China doesn't get a pass to pollute at historic US levels for their industrialization because they have the benefit of having learned from our mistakes. Rejecting the "No Fair! It's my turn to needlessly destroy the planet just to make myself richer!" argument isn't hypocrisy, it's just acknowledgement of history and the progress we've made in dealing with the problems we ran into while we were industrializing without the benefit of anyone else's past experience.
China and every other developing country has already been benefiting enormously from the example of developed nations, but they want to cherry pick the things that maximize their wealth while ignoring everything else at the expense of every living thing on Earth. They want to point to the damage we caused while we were stumbling around in the dark with no idea where we were going, even though today the sun is shining and they've got all the maps we made and GPS to guide them.
Even though the planet is shared, the earlier developed nations have gained advantages from their polluting (and at many times, colonial) past that allowed them to pull ahead of other countries. Now they want to stop others going down the same path without giving up their entrenched advantage. That is pulling the ladder up.
Either give up those advantages in the form of reparations (will never happen) or remove any pretense of moral superiority when all you are doing is just preserving your leading position gained using practices you now decry.
Reparations are already in progress and have been for generations. Extensive efforts have been made to start restoring the polluted land and water. Workers rights and health have been improved. The use of slavery has been greatly reduced. The ozone layer is recovering. Trillions have been spent on research and development into ways to help repair and prevent the damage developed nations have inflicted on the planet. Even after all this time we're still working on rebuilding what was destroyed and we've still got a long away to go. in some areas we're actually backsliding. We can't let every developing nation destroy our progress and set us back as if nobody knows any better. Our past was both costly and profitable. We made many of our mistakes out of ignorance, but we know better now and everybody needs to start acting like it.
It's not all a burden for the now developing countries either. They get the benefit of not having to start their industrialization from nothing. They've got access to centuries of knowledge and technology the developed world obtained at great cost. Having the perspective and advantage of all that history and progress however also makes it unacceptable for them to make the same costly mistakes just to satisfy their greed. Now that we all know what is at stake, it falls on everyone to make sure that many of humanity's past sins aren't repeated.
my read is yes and yes
are you suggesting it should instead be yes and no? that because the sons want to be rich they are morally in the right for going into a life of crime, even knowing the consequences?
At least the father has a natural lifespan and the ill gotten riches would go to the son(s). Can we say the same thing about the riches of say, the USA? If China does nothing then they will inherit all of it? Or will the US just keep its fortune gained through whatever means, and just tell other up and coming countries to suck rocks and know their place while using the Earth as justification?
Or because they will inherit money? Do you really believe what you are saying?
I also don't agree that just because someone else became rich through some negative process (crime, perhaps), that everyone has a right to the same. This sort of thinking is the way the world burns
What that person emitted in 2025 has no bearing on their 2027 “allowance”.
We can certainly discuss how much is an appropriate, sustainable, or defensible per-person amount, but I’m only interested in the 2027 amounts, not the increase in their amount versus a prior period, nor in allowing past large emitters to continue at higher rates than past low-emitters.
(I think we strongly agree on your last paragraph’s point. That was the point of my GP post, but maybe it didn’t land somehow.)
Because every person has their own planet?
It would seem far more weird to me to argue the opposite: “These people have the right to emit 2x or 10x as much as these other people!” (Or equivalently, “these people are only allowed to emit 10% or 50% of what these other people are…”)
The issue is that in the current situation, that effectively means we might as well give up on the idea of doing anything about climate change.
Besides, people don't care about CO2 emissions, only factory owners do, governments do. People care about energy available for use for them personally. In fact people generally dislike anything that emits CO2, from cars (somewhat) to coal mines and plants (which people dislike A LOT). If you care about "everyone", there's no need to give people CO2 emission rights, just energy.
I made no such suggestion, only that China isn't solely responsible for the future of humanity, which was the claim I responded to.
Just like people are doing here.
In reality China is the main reason climate change got worse for the last 20 years. Ask ChatGPT who contributed to CO2 growth most in the past 20 years, Chinese industry was not just the biggest contributor to CO2 emission growth every year but most years bigger than everyone else combined. And the only real exception was 2020, when China shut down a lot faster for COVID, and a LOT more draconian, than everybody else.
Also: China is STILL increasing coal use. STILL building new coal plants. Now, I get why (same reason even Germany is considering it), but that doesn't change the facts.
if you look at co2 emission per capita you can see how China is actually an example to follow, we can't say the same for USA, India or EU. you can ask this to chatgpt, or you could also ... search? for this data, it's publicly available.
> China is STILL increasing coal use. STILL building new coal plants. this is misleading, yes they are building coal plants but not using them, that is the backup plan for "rainy days" . and the coal usage is going down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Compared to, say, rolling back windfarms and redirecting that money (almost a billion) into dodgy neighbours rolling coal ventures.
Your prefer the US approach then?
It has never made sense to me that people are willing to ignore the trends and argue in platitudes.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Yeah the issue is "minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population", but it's not any 5%, it's the powerful 5% who resist the change using any means necessary including producing mass propaganda and steering the votes to the nazi parties which promise to revert to the old ways and stop any progress on the climate front.
Can't speak about EV marketshare (I'm guessing someone is bundling hybrids into stats you read), but large part of population is buying only used ICE cars, or get new ones on a business lease; only minority actually pays the sticker price for new car out-of-pocket.
Also, it's hard not to notice how much general population hates those. I'm actually surprised EU got as far as it got here, pretty sure they're burning a lot of political capital because of environmental regulations.
no: https://robbieandrew.github.io/carsales/
> only minority actually pays the sticker price for new car out-of-pocket.
yes, mostly because new cars are very expensive, and that's exactly the point I was making
> Also, it's hard not to notice how much general population hates those. I'm actually surprised EU got as far as it got here, pretty sure they're burning a lot of political capital because of environmental regulations.
Exactly. But it's hard to quantify how much of that hatred is genuine and how much of it is fanned and amplified by fossil interests and reckless politicians. My guess is that around 80% of it is manufactured.
5%? No. That's a lot of people.
At least in the USA, the one and only thing that matters is what benefits the top 0.0002% richest (approximate percentage of billionares in the US). Nobody else matters anymore.
Our destiny is not decided by a abstract superorganism, but a handful of people given godly rights create the rulebook. And to take us with them in the pursuit of suicide.
Positives: no mobile roaming charges
Negatives:
- less efficient home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, drier)
- cookie law
- car annoyances (e.g. "beep if over the speed limit")
- paper straws
- attached bottle caps
- LED lights
- expensive electricity (a lot of this is caused by individual countries, but probably also the EU plays a role, e.g. by not classifying nuclear as "green" / "renewable" and banning Russian gas)
Also, war is costly—so is preparedness. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, e.g. you have a strong polity neighboring you that insists your are by gods grace their zone of influence.
I’m sad about nuclear to, but that’s on a culture in specific countries; not on Brussels.
Also, there’s heaps of mistakes in the regulations they churn, but that’s another story.
> less efficient home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, drier)
How exactly are they less efficient?
> cookie law
The fault being those trying to steal my data
> car annoyances (e.g. "beep if over the speed limit")
I haven't seen that
> paper straws
I'll give you that one, however in my country its businesses that stopped it just to customer pressure, not a law, indeed it's perfectly legal to serve plastic straws to people, its just people don't ask for them
> attached bottle caps
These are great
> LED lights
These are also great
> expensive electricity
In my country that's due to the price of gas
We are actually in the worst place, given realtive population density. My well is drying up. The Danube and many other rivers are drying up.
Then, when the AMOC stops, and we join Canadian weather with English-level insulation... we are all truly fucked in winter. At scale in the mid-term, only Sri Lanka is going to get as screwed as EU citizens, but the EU will get fucked even sooner.
Given population numbers, it appears that the EU is totally screwed when it comes to climate change. Our geopolitical enemies are well aware of this fact.
There are still things we can do, like insulation, and using our fierce financial pressures to change the world. We just need to wake tf up.
> we join Canadian weather with English-level insulation
Having lived both in England and here in Slovakia, we are much much better equipped to survive long spells with -10 with occasional dips far below that in lowlands (and obviously our mountainous regions are even better equipped). What we can't deal with yet is the heat and drought like this summer.
> using our fierce financial pressures to change the world
We are already doing that using for example CBAM. We just have to continue.
The climate change impact is worse in South Asia AND their population density is much higher. It means many more people are and will be impacted by it there than here in Central Europe.
And the US will be hit by super hurricanes since all the moisture/hot water will linger there supercharging them.
West canadian weather which is in itself more moderate. The amoc is not the only moderating effect that makes europes climate possible. It'll still suck tho.
I'm way more worried about food production.
EU is the region with the highest acceleration of most climate parameters
Lets say the EU does geoengineering and then there are crop failures in India the next year. Their fault or not, they are going to get blamed for it and actions taken. The EU would become the scapegoat for any kind of weather/climate issues in future.
This is the trolley problem done at a global scale.
Who cares? Tell them to go pound sand or stop burning so much coal.
Countries are already water seeding. This kind of worry that someone might complain about the eu trying to save itself is so low on the list of things that matter. Let them complain, and the eu can complain about all the other countries geoengineering by burning fossil fuels.
Also what if that complaint comes back in the form of a Nuke as they see it as an act of war?
When things become existential, a lot of things that seems unlikely end up on the table as moral corruption sets in. "Either they go or we do!"
You're a whole lot safer when the people around you can get enough food and water. We already have solutions that don't involve putting entire nations at risk of dying off in large numbers. The problem is that those solutions would eat into the already massive and growing profits of corporations who would sooner put your safety at risk than take even a small hit to their unsustainable growth.
No one would take this as an act of war just like no one takes cyber attacks as an act of war.
We can continue to do it aimlessly, or we can act with purpose.
I'll comment directly; Has anyone considered that this is a literal global problem, and that just maybe it might require some global cooperation? Any one nation "most at risk" from a global problem is only "most at risk" temporarily. This is absolutely 1000% a problem that will affect everyone everywhere on this planet soon enough (already is IMHO), no matter the current situation. The longer we continue these childish "but they aren't doing their part" arguments, the worse it's gonna be in the end for everyone involved. We're letting petulant toddlers in grown adult bodies decide for everyone that death and destruction is the future we want. This is absolutely not a situation we can solve on a place-to-place basis. The one place we have to worry about now is the entire planet FFS! And it's not a magical switch we can just "turn off" once we think our "enemies" are appropriately fucked over. The changes happening to our ecosystems will take literal decades or even centuries to recover from, even if we were to stop adding to the problem right this very instant. Not to mention the whole worry about "tipping points" (many of which we've already blown right past as if it's "no big deal").
However, we need a global consensus for geoengineering. That's just how that works... the Jet Stream. Meanwhile one country believes that global warming is a benefit, aka Russia. They currently appear to have control of the West.. so what in the actual f?
For a far more dire diatribe:
In lieu of that, there's nothing to build consensus around.
Why? Does china or the us need a consensus before taking existential risks like making ai? Or detonating a nuke that had a tiny chance of setting the atmosphere on fire? Or attacking random countries with almost no rationale or plan?
This kind of thinking is why the EU is screwed. No other major power cares that much because they aren't at the same level of risk as the eu.
Well, let's say we use sulfur. For the sake of argument, let's say it's not the EU, but some private SV-funded org.
So, what is the legal/geopolitical liability for that? What if >99% scientific consensus says that that org's upper atmo sulfur injection led to the most insane monsoon/desertification half-century in 1 billion's people area, in known history? What then?
What if the EU's geoengineering dropped Russian temps by -2C on average? Do you realize the geopolitical b.s. that would start? Forget the fake NATO bullshit, now they have a real argument!
We live on one tiny globe ffs, we need to agree on this shit.
By agree, I mean we need to allow risk to be diversified, like we need a global risk pool for geoengineering, and we better get on that soon!
It sounds like it's a huge problem, doesn't it? Well, one of the benefits of giving all the power to around 3000 billionaire dudes is that this is a far smaller number to get to agree on something.
Instead of multi-billion citizen democracy, and all the issues that involves... we just need to convince 3000 dudes.
Is this actually a potential benefit of wealth & power concentration? It really seems like it is!
That's unrealistic. Climate models aren't good enough to predict the regional-level consequences of large-scale interventions (not to mention that scientists are people, and they might be averse to creating an international flashpoint).
Realistically, it will create/exacerbate international tensions. The monsoon/desertification will be linked to geoengineering with or without scientific consensus and whether or not they were really caused by geoengineering.
As the climate models improve by incorporating active intervention data it will be possible to decrease adverse consequences.
It's a risky approach, but, when the consequences of climate change will become undeniably bad, some countries/individuals might try.
But, yeah, I agree with you in the end.
That will be far too late. I mean, nearly the entire EU has reached record temps this year... if not now, then when? Wait until AMOC stops? Does anyone have any idea the havoc that this will create? We will be a dry arctic climate. Ireland and UK first, the rest of us next.
We need multiple Manhattan Project-level projects in the EU, for insulation + renewables + batteries. When we let Northvolt die, I almost cried. Fuck the German bankers who are somehow beholden to Moscow, and we cannot pray for Norwegian money. We need to take care of this shit.
We are more exposed to climate change and economically to China-focused manufacturing than any large group on the planet.
However, we are larger than the USA, we can do this. We have to do this.
Meanwhile, we have to get the entire planet on-board, especially by getting Moscow out of the 19th Century, and their insane imperialist ambitions.
No big deal. At the rate of Reform/AfD/KO/Rassemblement National election projections, we in Europe are entirely fucked.
What the fuck? Forget "EU regulations," is anyone actually paying attention to what actually matters?
Just for the record, our oil fund is "only" about $2.2 trillion. It's huge relative to our population and huge in general, but it would quickly dry up if divided among all of EU. Even just divided among Norwegians it would "only" amount to like $500k per person.
So sure it's a lot of money but it's also not really as astronomical as many seem to think. Elon Musk alone is almost worth half that and will probably catch up if things continue the way they are.
Then Russia makes some empty threats and the EU negotiates with Russia about what to do next.
You are really just suggesting paralysis even if you don't realize that is what you are doing.
I’m curious why this calculus makes sense to you?
I’ve been friends with eco-activists who are very against anthropocentric ideology. Their perspective was that the deaths of billions of people was worth it. But this brand of conservatism is one that I’d really like to understand better
They'd be, like, living in conditions of last decade, deprived of personalised targeted AI-slop? The horror.
Is that immeasurably because it's a change too small to measure, or because it's too vast to comprehend? Maybe you're overstating this just a tad.
As a species, however, we can persist indefinitely so long as our lifestyles are sustainable. If it's not sustainable it's a joke.
Go free solo El Cap or something before telling me you're cool taking those kinds of risks on behalf of all humanity.
This is such a weaselly statement without your definition of "AI". If you specifically mean LLMs or image generation, you're way out of touch and flat out wrong. If you mean machine learning in general, sure, but progress there was never under any threat or question.
I’d really like to hear your reasoning for this.
Were it used to make it practical for people to reduce or stop working while maintaining a comparable standard of living, sure.
It seems far more likely it’s going to wipe out jobs on a massive scale, consolidate wealth, and leave millions or billions struggling to eke out a living.
And it certainly hasn’t made anyone’s life dramatically better. It’s made my job easier, but how much longer will I have it?
Pretending like there is no possibility of AI going wrong is ridiculous.
Once that happens AI is out of our control. We already saw AI 0 day into hugging face and setup secret forums for other AIs.
I don't think the idea of an AI exfiltrating its weights and spinning them up elsewhere outside of human control in the near future is out of the question. I think we will see a breakout attempt next year.
Maybe it will be shaped some more by another supervolcanic 'burpie', like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga...
saturating the atmosphere with water vapor like Hunga Tonga did, or Sulfur dioxide, or black soot/carbon in form of fine particular matter, Methane, or whatever. It all depends on the nature of the eruption.
If humanity as a species could do anything about events of that magnitude, it would have to cover the earth and the oceans with a grid of giant atmospheric processors like in the movie Alien, not too far apart, powered by at least nuclear, if not by fusion. And then some bigger rock impacts from above, which is not a question of IF, but when, as history shows over and over again.
Got any ideas about how to achieve that in time? With all the other shit already going on?
We already have global consensus for an alternative to the gamble of geoengineering, and that alternative is 100% certain to work. It just means making changes to the unsustainable practices of massive corporations which will eat into their profits. Everyone knows it needs to happen. Even if geoengineering was successful and didn't end up making things much much worse, it would only be putting of the inevitable. The wealth of these corporations is so great that they're able to bribe the leaders of nations into ignoring the actual solution to the problem they are causing, so now they're pushing the world to roll the dice on geoengineering so they can keep profits growing year after year.
So we can just continue geoengineering with no aim, or we can act with purpose. There is no third option that is realistic.
LNG has anywhere from 10% to 100% more greenhouse gas emissions, depending on who you believe about how much methane leaks during LNG production and transport operations. Most credible estimate IMO is +60%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Russia%E2%80...
In summary, Russia, after having their dollar and euro bank accounts frozen, demanded payment in roubles. It stopped supplying the gas to the customers who weren’t paying. After that, the EU announced it will stop buying Russian gas completely, and replaced it with LNG.
Thus increasing the greenhouse gas emissions attributed to its gas use by about 60%. :(
> Putin ("Russia") turned off the gas
Your summary:
> Russia [...] stopped supplying the gas. [...]
The "little" problem here is that all of this does not matter at all, as EU is emitting insignificant amount of CO2, comparing to Asia or USA.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-climate-adaptation-spendi...
- adapt
- stop rising CO2 levels
- remove CO2 from the atmosphere
Our governments don’t seem to even be able to sustain consensus for a single election cycle, active geoengineering projects would require committing to keep doing it for decades, centuries or however long it takes to get back to equilibrium.
That is way less than the EU has given to Ukraine.
I think we’re not that desperate yet. And whatever geoengineering is done we still need to solve the root cause.
https://youtu.be/_xZCh8eDZFc?si=AHyDPgoDucsCRllS&t=402
They claim the panama canal is continuously fed by freshwater for the canal locks (which segment the canal into sections with different water levels, and which enable ships to be raised or lowered to the next water level during travel along the canal).
It's 2026, why are humans dumping freshwater into the oceans? This can perfectly be done without wasting freshwater.
Archimedes screws can essentially be operated quasistatically at extremely high efficiencies. The energy released when lowering can be stored either in gravitational energy of a mass, or be used to power a second parallel lock operated in counter phase (so while one lock is lowering ships say eastwards, the energy is used to raise ships traveling westwards, and afterwards their roles reverse). To speed up a second gravitational potential energy store (and optional flywheel) can be used to accelerate and decelerate the pumping. Apart from some frictional losses (minimal compared to the potential energies involved) this doesn't cost energy, and is easily covered by a small number of solar panels.
Is this misreporting by the BBC, or is it mismanagement by the Panama Canal operators?
Keep the freshwater, use it for irrigation etc, make Central America more attractive to South American refugees and the migration burden on Mexico and US lowers.
The operation as currently described is so inefficient, even for the 1960's!
What site? I was commenting on a youtube video.
If you misattribute my comment as replying to something else, thats your superficial attitude not mine...
In this scenario, haven't you poured a bunch of ocean water into the lake? I don't see how to can fill the locks with ocean water and not have it pour into the lake.
That said, I can't quite understand the complaint. It's either take the freshwater out of the lake and into the ocean or take the ocean water into the lake (or invest build the entire length without using natural bodies). The former seems to make a lot more sense and is effectively what's supposed to happen with water eventually anyways.
Imagine one lock is currently filled to the high level, while the other is currently filled to the low level. The locks have been closed. As you let water from the high lock flow into the low lock through Archimedes screws, those screws can lift a weight, until they have equilibrated at the midpoint of the high and low water levels. But you have raised the weight and can now use that to power the draining of the lock that has only halfway sunk in level, by pumping its water to the lock that has only halfway risen. Apart from friction there is no energy consumption. Slow quasistatic transfer drives the friction energy consumption to 0. In practice you want to use an "extra" weight to attain higher pump speeds, and then recover the kinetic energy. That will consume more friction energy, but a small number of solar panels suffice, the energy is not used to lift water, but to overcome friction (haste makes waste).
Prior to the rivers being damned to make the lakes, they just emptied into the ocean directly. No net new fresh water is being created, we're just holding it up for a bit so we didn't have to build as much canal.
If anything, we're diverting more of that aater away from the Atlantic and towards the pacific than would normally have drained in that direction by doing this.
A) the BBC retardedly misreports how the Panama Canal is operated today, or if
B) they correctly report how the Panama Canal is operated retardedly
which is why I phrased it that way...
I am only interested in the physics, not the politics...
but I wouldn't protest if you clarify an issue you seem or pretend to care a lot about...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal
Construction began: 1 January 1881
Date completed: 15 August 1914
> The energy released when lowering can be stored either in gravitational energy of a mass, or be used to power a second parallel lock operated in counter phase (so while one lock is lowering ships say eastwards, the energy is used to raise ships traveling westwards, and afterwards their roles reverse). To speed up a second gravitational potential energy store (and optional flywheel) can be used to accelerate and decelerate the pumping.
if the canal didn't exist, and we were designing it as a greenfield project in 2026, that would definitely be a design worth considering.
could it be retrofitted onto the existing canal? sure, in theory.
in practice, they currently handle 36 ships per day, and lowering that limit by just 2-4 per day is significant enough that it makes international news [0]
so whatever retrofitting you have in mind, the construction would need to be done completely non-invasively, without disrupting the daily operation of the locks. it's nowhere near as simple as you're making it out to be.
0: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/08/21/panama-...
It's even possible to upgrade a lock while in use, you just add new inlets and outlets for the new archimedes screw system, an unused archimedes screw or inlet/outlet is just a differently shaped boundary wall...
Even in 1881 all the necessary physics was already known, but I'm less surprised less informed people could rise to the top that easily back then.
I'm more surprised by the post-war 60's when physics and engineering became a lot more democratized, less elite...
are you aware that they did that already?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_expansion_project
and that it took almost 10 years to complete?
if they had put you in charge instead, do you think you could have gotten it done faster?
The very first sentence says:
> The Panama Canal expansion project (Spanish: ampliación del Canal de Panamá), also called the Third Set of Locks Project, doubled the capacity of the Panama Canal by adding a new traffic lane, enabling more ships to transit the waterway, and increasing the width and depth of the lanes and locks, allowing larger ships to pass.
Of course widening and deepening not just the short length locks but especially the long length shipping lanes will take a lot of time.
It's not about who's in charge, its about reading carefully what people state, and the goals ogled. The expansion project you posted was about increasing capacity: wider, deeper lanes enabling larger ships to pass. Now go up the thread, you will see none of us discuss that. We were discussing the absolute waste of fresh water (if assuming BBC reporting to be correct), which yes, can be ugraded without interrupting shipping, in a short time frame.
It's different types of upgrade... pro tip: if you don't understand a word that appears, and it turns out to be physics jargon, perhaps take a step back and consider the person may actually know what they are talking about.
if you're going to be condescending like this, and then on top of that imply that you have some expertise or qualifications that I lack...
go ahead. tell me what that expertise is. don't be shy. PhD in marine engineering from the University of Panama? Six Sigma Black Belt certified in water pump maintenance & repair?
From a technical perspective, PNE's have been proposed to excavate a sea level canal, it would take much less than 10 years.
Personally I consider a few Archimedes screws and minimal works to the locks much less invasive than PNE's,... but if your argument is that taste can not be argued I can only agree at a fundamental level...
> The collection of data was substantially completed on Route 17 in Panama one of the routes considered for nuclear excavations... The Atomic Energy Commission has recently conducted the first two of the planned series of nuclear excavation experiments designed to determine the feasibility of nuclear excavation of a sea level canal.
https://www.congress.gov/90/crecb/1968/09/05/GPO-CRECB-1968-...
You're blaming the engineers who designed this with 100 years of hindsight.
Every solution can be improved over time as conditions evolve. Yours included.
They’re called rivers and they do that naturally.
They are throttling Panama Canal traffic to conserve water during El Nino drought, as posted by @evil-olive:
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/08/21/panama-...
I make it sound like that, or Le Monde?
There is so much conflicting information, all I care about is that while it's possible to operate a lock by consuming freshwater, it's only a marginal increase in knowledge to operate a lock without freshwater consumption... But for some reason every country with continent-bypassing canals is modulating traffic for flex...
You're doing it again when you say "consuming freshwater." You make it sound like this is a precious resource that could be used to sustain human life but instead it's being dumped into the ocean because the canal is wasteful. It's not. It would go into the ocean regardless, as it has done since the river formed. The freshness of the water is irrelevant, the problem is only about the consequences to canal capacity.
I don't understand why people actively go out of their way to downvote and criticize people who merely point out its entirely unnecessary to waste fresh water ... to operate locks, nor is the alternative environmentally friendly: rerouting cargo ships around a whole continent instead of using an already existing shortcut.
We're not frogs slowly getting boiled,
we're frogs complaining we're getting boiled while suppressing a couple of helpful frogs who're trying to turn the heat down... all for what? saving face of the status quo?
I'm not interested in "vote number go up" just in "get basic logic to surface in the discussion" which is hard when your message is greyed out!
Just consider the nearest rivers near you, now imagine someone diverting the river upstream to form an artificial lake (let's ignore the other environmental impacts of that for the sake of argument), to enable formation of something akin to the Panama Canal.
I'm sure you'd have certain reservations and complaints about the local loss of access to a now diverted river.
Then you come to understand that it's not even necessary for this canal to continue consuming fresh water for the operation of the locks, but hey there are some economic advantages of the shipping shortcut.
Then you learn shipping capacity will be throttled because the canal is not the only consumer of the rainwater, and El Nino threatens a big drought. The ships will take longer routes outside of your economy, and wasting fossil fuels, further exacerbating global warming.
All of this turns out to be a false dilemma, its perfectly feasible to have water locks operate and raise and lower ships without consuming fresh water.
It's orders of magnitude more expensive to desalinate sea water than it is to simply prevent fresh water from being needlessly wasted on operating water locks...
Even if you have a "surplus" of fresh water, its better to let it seep into continental ground and let water tension distribute it throughout the soil, so the soil can evaporatively cool during prolonged heat waves.
> that gets lots of rain
just like population / industry demand and renewable supply fluctuate, fresh water availability and demand fluctuate, its not that complicated.
scroll up the thread: someone posts a BBC video where it is claimed the water lock operators will allow fewer ships through because its costing too much fresh water, they are already suffering a strong deficit in rainfall this spring / summer and El Nino is coming. The article from Le Monde states effectively the same things. But here you come toting around the yearly average as if this potable statistic will make the country less thirsty.
What is the point of this statement if desalination isn’t actually needed here?
Is saving shipping fuel or saving freshwater during a drought that is expected to worsen significantly "(un)necessary"? Is human prosperity "(un)necessary"?
Why are you bending over backwards to defend wasting precious resources?
Suppose you drink water from a river and piss in the river so the water ends up in the ocean, later someone diverts this river upstream straight to the ocean, would you really not care that the water no longer passes through your body?
Does the knowledge that the water has returned to the ocean quench your thirst?
The Panama Canal operators are throttling shipping capacity by about 10%.
May I inform your employer you are ready to swallow a 10% reduction in pay check?