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The world is losing the war against climate change

economist.com

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Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#191

Post by candiodari »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #99
candiodari wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the problem is simply with intent. Shutting down coal power would achieve all climate goals for several decades and we can in fact just kind of do that in most places. Government subsidies are what's keeping coal power plants online in many locations. The problem is that this would impose costs on business owners, or force banks and/or governments to pay out large sums to those business owners (not that large…

It is more telling that nuclear is on the decline. The right doesn’t take the problem seriously, and the left doesn’t take the solution seriously. So of course there is no progress.

That's one of the engineering solutions that people seem to be terminally opposed to. We have global warming ... and we have engineering solutions, indeed nuclear could do a lot as well, especially in countries like China.

Let's NOT USE THOSE ! They're scary ! Science is wrong and evil ! Green glowy children !

And of course, somehow you can criticize science like nuclear and it's safety record, but shout "science denial" at people opposing climate science. That's an entirely reasonable attitude of course.

But it's very clear: getting and grabbing power, that's what it's about. Not fixing a problem.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#192

Post by Brakenshire »

randomThoughts9 wrote: post #123

Not even the people that pretend to care are putting in the minimum necessary effort to fight this. So where does the war in the title come from? "War on/against x" is becoming a meaningless expression. As far as I can see, our only real plan is: we'll invent something. The rest is just rhetoric.

We will invent things, the question is the market conditions which will allow inventions to arise and then quickly gain market share. Even with the amazing progress in solar, wind and electric batteries, it’s still not enough. We need some meaningful pricing of carbon to allow the market to solve the problem.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#193

Post by swebs »

benchaney wrote: post #161
swebs wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country. Then what happens when the trees are fully grown? Processing them for industry would just reintroduce the carbon back into the environment. Letting them stay in the forest is nice, but you would qu…

>Letting them stay in the forest is nice, but you would quickly run out of room. No you wouldn't. There is massive deforestation all over the world. If we planted so many trees to offset carbon emissions that we accidentally solved that problem, that would be a huge environmental benefit on its own, and it would hold an enormous amount of carbon.

>There is massive deforestation all over the world.

And that deforestation is to make room for other things, mostly farms. As the world population continues to explode, the amount of land that can be allocated to forests quickly decreases.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#194

Post by craftyguy »

sjwright wrote: post #154
radicalbyte wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking into carbon capture recently because it's going to be vital to slowing down the warming (and buying us another 50 years for the transition). What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country. We need a global carbon tax and we need…

But it's not just planting the tree, right? It's taking land that currently has no tree, reserving it for the tree, and guaranteeing that the land & tree will remain intact for a nominal period of time, possibly indefinitely? Trees are cheap. Fertile tree-growing land not currently used for trees: not so much.

Here in the (western) US, millions (billions?) of trees are burning up every year due to forest fires.

So to add to your list, we also need a way to facilitate healthy forests without completely destroying them and re-releasing nearly all of their stored carbon back into the atmosphere within a couple of weeks. Controlled burns is one way, but that requires an investment in firefighters and other specialists.. who are currently all preoccupied fighting uncontrolled fires.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#195

Post by vowelless »

Brakenshire wrote: post #179
rb808 wrote: post #151

The war is unwinnable. Global warming can only be reversed if we stop all Co2 and methane emissions, and then start net carbon capture to reduce current co2 levels. Its just not going to happen. No one ever says that out loud. There is noise about reducing carbon emissions - in reality this is a lot of argument about reducing carbon emissions in wealthy countries. We can't even do that. Meanwhile even my greeny-lefty…

> Global warming can only be reversed if we stop all Co2 and methane emissions, and then start net carbon capture to reduce current co2 levels. We do not want to reverse climate change, we want to slow it as much as possible. And there is never a point at which you can meaningfully give up, 5C is better than 6C, 3C is better than 4C. What you’ve posted is just another rationalization for inaction.

> What you’ve posted is just another rationalization for inaction.

How so? Seems like they are advocating for even more action than usually discussed because the problem is even more severe than we think.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#196

Post by teachrdan »

tmaly wrote: post #132
WhompingWindows wrote: post #12

If you look at global power sector emissions from 1998 to 2018, you'll see that while we have dramatically improved upon the energy intensity (energy/capita) and even are making improvements on carbon intensity (carbon/capita), but the sad reality is this: we are still using around 35% coal power in 2018, the same as we did in 1998. And the power sector is the easiest sector to decarbonize, by the way. If you look at…

Education is what needs to be innovated. We need more kids becoming scientists. Battery and storage technology need to be improved. We should be taking a multi-prong approach to coming up with working nuclear fusion.

What if better educated kids grow up to be lobbyists for Exxon? Or work at the Heritage Foundation? Or finance new coal infrastructure at Goldman Sachs?

The problem has nothing to do with an insufficient number of smart people being involved. The problem is that coal and oil companies are paying a lot of those smart people a lot of money to make things worse.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#197

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F »

alkonaut wrote: post #155
rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We haven't done $%# to try and execute Plan A i.e. reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It's the cheapest and easiest plan by far , so why do you think we can afford to switch to some fanciful plan B? Most alternative are either distractions by/for those who can't accept the harsh reality, Get-rich-quick schemes by some industrialists or science-fiction by/for those who prefer to dream of a nice future rather than doin…

> It's the cheapest and easiest plan by far, It’s the simplest plan, but I’ll argue we are seeing it’s pretty difficult as it requires changing the behavior of a lot of people, if even just a little abd/or changing policies of a lot of countries. I’m not saying plan A should be somehow abandoned or slowed (so perhaps B is a bad name because it’s typically used when A is abandoned) But it should be complemented. We sh…

>a simple and cheap plan that is politically impossible.

If it's impossible to execute the cheap and simple plan because of political obstacles, we just have to change politics. It's also simple and cheap once you know that money has nothing to do in politics.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#198

Post by WorldMaker »

vowelless wrote: post #91

I am a little out of the loop and so I have a few questions: 1. At what point in time can we arrest ocean temperature rise purely by reducing emissions? 2. Even if we stopped further rise in temperature, is the current temperature (land and ocean) sustainable, or is a chain reaction already underway that will increasingly lead to more and more turbulent weather? 3. Are there viable ways to extract greenhouses gasses…

A good book on the subject is Hot Earth Dreams: https://smile.amazon.com/Hot-Earth-Dreams-climate-happens/dp...

Frank Landis did a ton of research to try to find the best comparable models of what's happening, what's about to happen, and the book is still extremely easy to read (well analogized) despite trying to get to hard science answers for most of it.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#199

Post by xyzzyz »

ithkuil wrote: post #190
rb808 wrote: post #151

The war is unwinnable. Global warming can only be reversed if we stop all Co2 and methane emissions, and then start net carbon capture to reduce current co2 levels. Its just not going to happen. No one ever says that out loud. There is noise about reducing carbon emissions - in reality this is a lot of argument about reducing carbon emissions in wealthy countries. We can't even do that. Meanwhile even my greeny-lefty…

honest but silly question: since the only way to deal with the problem is to also implement carbon capture to deal with the existing excess, would the same carbon capture mechanism be also able to cope with the rest of the world continuing to emit carbon at present rates?

Possibly, but more likely it would be more cost effective to actually subsidize the energy of the rest of the world so that they don’t emit carbon in the first place.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#200

Post by sp332 »

vowelless wrote: post #146
radicalbyte wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking into carbon capture recently because it's going to be vital to slowing down the warming (and buying us another 50 years for the transition). What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country. We need a global carbon tax and we need…

It's disappointing to me that planting trees is the best we can come up with. One would hope that we could work on a 10x, technological solution.

"If you write out the basic facts of trees, but framed as technology, it sounds like impossible sci-fi nonsense. Self-replicating, solar-powered machines that synthesize carbon dioxide and rainwater into oxygen and sturdy building materials on a planetary scale." - @CryptoNature
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