Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist
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Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist
#2Lots of assumptions baked in here. Chief among them is that renewables deployment will continue to be slower than new energy demand. If you look at the charts, this is pretty unlikely since the renewables trend is a consistent exponential increase year over year while the demand curve is very lumpy and mostly linear when averaged.
Next is the assumption that renewables have to be deployed at grid scale, with the materials and transmission costs associated with that. This is also not true - solar + battery is a perfect use case for distributed deployment by homeowners, businesses, parking lots, etc. in any sunny location, and trends in non-grid installed solar reflect this where non-utility accounts for over a third of new installs per year.
Next is the questionable bundling of global statistics rather than breaking out by country. If you break it out by country, the trends are a lot different. For example, most of the west already reached effective peak energy demand (or close to it), and renewables deployments are offsetting dirtier production methods at a decent pace, mostly due to economics. The "bad" trends the author points are are specific to developing locations.
There's more, but this is already a long comment.
Edit: Another one... solar panels don't last "a few years more" [than turbines], they last a decade or more longer. Current estimate is 25-30 years with proper maintenance before performance is significantly degraded, and even at that point they still work just fine. It's not like you don't have to replace or overhaul major power plant components every few decades for other energy sources...
Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist
#3> The modern world is deeply addicted to fossil fuels and green energy is no substitute. Am I wrong?
Maybe not, but what would you suggest we do otherwise?
Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist
#4Lots of assumptions baked in here. Chief among them is that renewables deployment will continue to be slower than new energy demand. If you look at the charts, this is pretty unlikely since the renewables trend is a consistent exponential increase year over year while the demand curve is very lumpy and mostly linear when averaged. Next is the assumption that renewables have to be deployed at grid scale, with the mate…
However, the developing locations have the much larger populations.
Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist
#5It's the hard truth. As it is, there's just no way to solve the problem without some sort of global cataclysm. I think people in power have the logistics to know this, which is why I'm so skeptical about the political movement today in western nations that largely revolves around consolidating power over world energy even further into the hands of a small group of elites that more or less exist beyond the reach of any one nations political process.
Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist
#6Lots of assumptions baked in here. Chief among them is that renewables deployment will continue to be slower than new energy demand. If you look at the charts, this is pretty unlikely since the renewables trend is a consistent exponential increase year over year while the demand curve is very lumpy and mostly linear when averaged. Next is the assumption that renewables have to be deployed at grid scale, with the mate…
That’s not the demand curve. That’s the increase in demand curve.
The increase in fossil fuel demand, however “lumpy”, is more than current total renewable output.
(Who is downvoting? this is a statement of fact, from the article.)
Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist
#7There's an interesting point here on the resource intensiveness of creating 'renewable' energy itself (ie. windmill costs).
I share the authors concern here that doing the exact same thing we're doing now but handwave electric is not going to get us to where we're going to need to be. We need to be smarter about how we use energy and our resources and use less.
For example shifting our entire automobile based transportation infrastructure to the exact same thing but electric is not nearly as impactful on lowering CO2 emissions taking those cars off the road via better public transit and land use that enables active transportation (ie. walking/cycling).
Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist
#8> The modern world is deeply addicted to fossil fuels and green energy is no substitute. Am I wrong? Maybe not, but what would you suggest we do otherwise?
Click to the next article:
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/12/Climate-Crisis-Realis...
Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist
#9It makes me wonder if the slaughter of so many people by different horrible governments in history actually helped prevent climate change from happening sooner.
Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist
#10Lots of assumptions baked in here. Chief among them is that renewables deployment will continue to be slower than new energy demand. If you look at the charts, this is pretty unlikely since the renewables trend is a consistent exponential increase year over year while the demand curve is very lumpy and mostly linear when averaged. Next is the assumption that renewables have to be deployed at grid scale, with the mate…
That’s not the demand curve. That’s the increase in demand curve. The increase in fossil fuel demand, however “lumpy”, is more than current total renewable output. (Who is downvoting? this is a statement of fact, from the article.)
Good point, but I don't see why that matters. Exponential output increase will overcome linear demand increase in pretty short order.