261–270 of 368 posts
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China and the EU can, and should. "Polluter pays" should become the standard policy in international trade in numerous other ways, too.
China is the biggest polluter and they plan to increase their co2 emissions to at least 2030 so I don't think you'll find an ally there.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...
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Here are some interesting graphs from arguably the most transformative economic miracle in human history [0]. The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=~CHN
> The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living. I can't believe that a country wanting to have a "comfortable standard of living" is seen as a "risk". Almost suggesting as if those countries don't deserve them and a comfortable standard of living should be reserved only for a select few countries. I just can't fucking believe wha…
Calling some countries a "risk" isn't a value judgement. It's pointing out that focusing on US, EU and China is looking at less than half of the picture.
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>coal to natural gas Fossil fuel to .. fossil fuel. Sigh.
What do you think Germany is doing? They are going from fossil-fuel-free (nuclear) -> fossil-fuel (Russian natural gas).
But the gas infrastructure synergizes extremely well with a shift to a hydrogen based energy economy, as is not just the goal in Germany, but pretty much an EU wide ambition [0].
It has nothing to do with the German nuclear phase-out that started in the early 2000s, just like European reliance on Russian resources it not anything new, nor is it bound to change, it's the consequence of geographical proximity and thus realpolitik.
Particularly considering the alternatives: LNG shipped from the US to Europe in tankers is an net-energy negative. It would be a pointless and expensive exercise of creating even more pollution all for the sake of satisfying US foreign policy ambitions to antagonize Russia and keep it as separated from the EU as possible.
[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/dutch-pin-hopes...
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This is quite a good tool to explore what would happen at different sea level rises - http://flood.firetree.net/ - it maxes out at 60m, but even there it's a very different world.
Don't show that to climate action skeptic. They will think, the world looks almost the same even for 60m. Each country is affected differently, most by a small percentage of land, some not at all. People will adapt.
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> CO2 per KWh is lower for natural gas than it is for coal. Unfortunately there are methane leaks in the systems, and it is quite possible that when accounting for the methane releases, natural gas has equally bad climate effect (emissions of CO2 and CH4 combined) as coal.
It's a step, though. Methane is inherently unstable and won't stick around in the atmosphere forever once we stop emitting it. CO2 gets absorbed into the ocean very slowly and with acidification as a consequence.
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>4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. But that's not the case. America is reducing its emissions greatly by shifting from coal to natural gas (which mirrors what Germany is doing, for example). Coal is ostensibly dead in US. If you look at the charts from Wikipedia [1][2], you'll see the US has cut emissions at about the same rate (o…
Next step is to reduce energy consumption. It's so obvious I wonder why it isn't talked about more. I'm not saying it's easy. We either choose to reduce energy consumption, or the consequences of climate change will force us to do it. The difference is in the first case, we have more control over it, and it might cause less human suffering.
If we are serious about tackling climate change then we need to decarbonize these other sectors by moving them off of fossil fuels and onto clean electricity. We are going to need to generate a lot more energy, not less.
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Next step is to reduce energy consumption. It's so obvious I wonder why it isn't talked about more. I'm not saying it's easy. We either choose to reduce energy consumption, or the consequences of climate change will force us to do it. The difference is in the first case, we have more control over it, and it might cause less human suffering.
Um, this is already happening, in a big way. Cars are more fuel efficient than ever. I own an SUV and average 30.1 MPG. Imagine that in 2000. Light bulbs are overwhelmingly LED these days. New homes are much more insulating than ever. Smart homes are less wasteful.
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Only if Biden wins. We won't know for sure yet, for a while.
And it still doesn't mean squat if the US Senate does not approve.
Democrats need both the presidency and majority senate to be able to get shit done.
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The frustrating thing about the handling of COVID is watching the climate change story play out at lightning speed. Deny the problem exists, politicize the science, eventually admit the problem but say there's nothing we can do about it, etc.
It's almost like there is a playbook for this that just gets applied to things like asbestos, cigarettes, lead gasoline, DDT, sugar, climate change, COVID ...
COVID-19 gives solid evidence that there is no playbook involved: in terms of political and business processes, the pandemic happened in a flash. And yet every country mismanaged the reaction in roughly the same way, for roughly the same reason. This wasn't coordinated, it's the default way we fail to solve global problems.
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This already occurred back when renewables were nothing more than the fantasies of tree-hugging hippies like my mum. Before I left the UK, the flat I lived in had two electricity rates, with the night rate being significantly cheaper then the day rate [0]. This meant the water heater and the (electric) storage heaters [1] were powered at night, when schools and offices used no power. [0] I’m not certain, but I think…
That has the advantage that the drop in power demand during the night is extremely predictable, so everyone knew that they could reliably get cheap power for heating just by shifting their demand by half a day. (Also, the UK had and still has a fairly large nuclear power fleet which generally runs full-out 24/7, and this kind of demand shifting is a good match for that.) The trouble with renewables is that a lot of t…
Not so; when the problem is bad weather rather than the diurnal cycle, even weather forecasting gives more forewarning than emergency stop buttons in power stations, and (given the geographical distribution) the change itself is smoother. On the scale of a continental grid, do you even need to care about anything besides diurnal storage/demand-shifting (as preferred) and seasonal issues?