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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

#291

Post by JamesBarney »

teachrdan wrote: post #254
JamesBarney wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a lot of oil is in favor of a carbon tax because it shifts more electricity away from coal to oil than from oil to wind/solar.

Perhaps. But oil companies give millions to climate change-denying politicians, and to think tanks that falsely claim that there is no human-driven climate change. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/15/exxon-mo... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jul/01/exxon-mo...

This is just saying oil and ags gives lots of money to Republicans which I don't think is a surprise to anyone especially because Republicans tend to not only bw climate change deniers but are also anti-environmentalism, which oil and gas still very much funds.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#292

Post by Scarblac »

BurningFrog wrote: post #82
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…

I don't think any amount of innovation can have close to the impact of de-tabooing nuclear energy for the next few decades.

This entire thread is talking about different ways of producing energy. I think using less energy could have an even higher impact. We'd be poorer as a result, but it's technically easiest to implement.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#293

Post by Someone »

gandreani wrote: post #166
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…

I was curious about this and wanted to share some quick calculations on how viable this is: A tree can absorb as much as 48 lbs of CO2 per year [1]. This is pretty vague cause this can vary by tree age and size, but let's use this arbitrary number In 2014 the United States generated 6,870 million metric tonnes of CO2 [2]. 48 lbs is about 0.021 metric tonnes [3]. So... 6,870,000,000 / .021 = 327,142,857,142.85 327 tri…

(Even in the short scale, 327,142,857,142 is ‘only’ 327 billion, not 327 trillion)

More importantly, those trees will capture that amount every year. So, once you have them, you only have to replace trees that get lost. Assuming a 10 year lifespan (many will die young), it’s only 100 a year to plant. That’s doable (trees you plant will be tiny)

However, 1,000 trees at, say, 10 meters average distance cover about 0.1 square kilometers/25 acres. That way, the USA would support about 100 million people (I think 10 meters distance is a bit conservative, but there also will be areas where trees won’t easily grow)

⇒ Americans will have to (at least) halve their energy use. I think that is doable.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#294

Post by safgasCVS »

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…

I think you need to be clearer what you mean by innovation.

If by innovation you mean new technology coming to save the day then I'm very skeptical it will work out. Teslas are nice but not a match for 1 billion Chinese entering the middle class.

If by innovation you mean a drastic change in how carbon is taxed leading to a sensible focus on how energy is consumed then we may have a chance however it means paying $50 for a bigmac and no more flights to Ibiza for 20 Euros.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#295

Post by marcosdumay »

Scarblac wrote: post #289
marcosdumay wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if you plant 3 times your current forest sizes into wood harvesting forests, you would capture all of your CO2 emissions into a solid. That's probably not reasonable (but I'm not sure). Even then, if you double your forest area, and cut the wood from there you'll offset some 20% of your emission already. It's not a silver bullet, but it is something.

Then add that many trees again each following year.

I assumed the forests were harvested every 4 years. That's average for low quality wood, like what goes into MDF.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#296

Post by steego »

nonbel wrote: post #129
steego wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but think that picking apart a magazine's headline is a huge distraction from an important issue, but I also can't help myself in pointing out how off the mark you with such a superficial observation. As far as global poverty is concerned, between 1990-2013 more than a billion people were lifted out of poverty according to the World Bank. I'm sure you can point to local and anecdotal evidence that does n…

>"As far as global poverty is concerned, between 1990-2013 more than a billion people were lifted out of poverty according to the World Bank. I'm sure you can point to local and anecdotal evidence that does not correlate, but to say efforts to reduce poverty have failed are just flat wrong." Those "war on" phrases refer to specific projects in the US. For that one I wasn't too familiar but quickly looked it up and di…

> For that one I wasn't too familiar but quickly looked it up and didn't see anyone claiming success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty

Think about it. The "War on Poverty" was Lyndon Johnson's campaign to expand Roosevelt's New Deal. Does that sound like something that would prosper under the Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton (consider the congress), and Bush Jr administrations? Unlike the "War on Drugs", which was actually a never-ending boondoggle that received ample bi-partisan and financial support, Johnson's programs were in the political cross-hairs since day one.

In other words, these two programs were failures for very different reasons. The comparison of the "War on Drugs" to the "War on Poverty" is incredibly superficial insofar as the only real thing they have in common are their names.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#297

Post by leereeves »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #265
atlantic wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The war is perfectly winnable, but not within the context of a democracy. Here you would need the equivalent of a state of emergency, lasting for perhaps a century, to force the necessary changes upon an unwilling public, who are quite happy to sort trash into three piles, stop using straws, or engage in other such cargo-cult behaviours, but not to give up their iPhones, 2nd cars or annual vacations. Ironically, a co…

A large majority of Americans support adding a revenue-neutral carbon tax, which demonstrates a willingness to reduce consumption as long as it is part of a concerted action and not just an insignificant choice by a single person that will make no noticeable difference to climate change. We need "leaders" to catch up with the general public's views on this matter, not the other way around.

Or a large number of Americans think they personally could afford to pay a carbon tax and are happy to place the burden on poor people who cannot.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#298

Post by TheCoelacanth »

leereeves wrote: post #297
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large majority of Americans support adding a revenue-neutral carbon tax, which demonstrates a willingness to reduce consumption as long as it is part of a concerted action and not just an insignificant choice by a single person that will make no noticeable difference to climate change. We need "leaders" to catch up with the general public's views on this matter, not the other way around.

Or a large number of Americans think they personally could afford to pay a carbon tax and are happy to place the burden on poor people who cannot.

The money has to come from somewhere. If I have to pay a tax on carbon, I have to spend less money on something else. Regardless of whether or not I can afford a carbon tax, it still has to result in lower consumption.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#299

Post by nonbel »

jmcgough wrote: post #236
nonbel wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its just an excuse, you are talking about a field with 10% replication rate, and when they tried to start doing more replications it was too expensive to even figure out what generated the data so they had to drop 25% of the studies before even beginning. One guy even calling the literature "augean stables": https://www.nature.com/news/cancer-reproducibility-project-s... Every disease can be arbitrarily split or comb…

I know a lot of smart people who've devoted their lives to solving this problem. It's very easy for you to dismiss it as easy or say that researchers are incompetent when you haven't spent years working on cancer research in a wet lab.

I see now that they had to scale down again to only 36% of the original results:

>"A large effort to reproduce high-impact cancer research has scaled down the number of studies it plans to replicate from 50 to 18, Science reported yesterday (July 31).

[...]

Hurdles to replicating experiments included a lack of detailed protocols and easily obtainable reagents. “Communication and sharing are low-hanging fruit that we can work on to improve,” Elizabeth Iorns, the president of Science Exchange, tells Science." https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/effort-to-reprodu...

Yup, the entire system is set up for an environment of no replication. How do you expect to cure cancer without making reproducibility a priority? I'd expect people who don't do that will end up thinking everything is "so complicated" due to all the conflicting results they generate, eg "one disease" becomes "many diseases".

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#300

Post by nonbel »

steego wrote: post #296
nonbel wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"As far as global poverty is concerned, between 1990-2013 more than a billion people were lifted out of poverty according to the World Bank. I'm sure you can point to local and anecdotal evidence that does not correlate, but to say efforts to reduce poverty have failed are just flat wrong." Those "war on" phrases refer to specific projects in the US. For that one I wasn't too familiar but quickly looked it up and di…

> For that one I wasn't too familiar but quickly looked it up and didn't see anyone claiming success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty Think about it. The "War on Poverty" was Lyndon Johnson's campaign to expand Roosevelt's New Deal. Does that sound like something that would prosper under the Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton (consider the congress), and Bush Jr administrations? Unlike the "War on Drugs", whic…

>"the only real thing they have in common are their names."

They are names for efforts by the US government to achieve some goal that it never achieves. I don't see what difference the detailed reasons for failure are, I am sure there are many.

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