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U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

scientificamerican.com

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Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#271

Post by Gwypaas »

dragonelite wrote: post #80
m0zg wrote: post #33

Without China (which is a part of the accord, but doesn't have to cut its emissions until 2030, a loophole they're actively using to build insane numbers of coal power plants - whatever their CO2 emissions are in 2030 becomes their "baseline" from which to reduce) this was pretty pointless anyway. Whoever negotiated PCA should not be allowed to negotiate whatever comes after it, because they suck at negotiations. htt…

Didn't China also said they expect their CO2 emmision to peak in 2022, 8 years before their goal of 2030 from the Paris accord. Then go for carbon neutral in 2060. Src: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-carbon-idUSKCN1VQ1K...

Wouldn't be surprising considering the per capita has mostly leveled off since 2011

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#272

Post by minikites »

bart_spoon wrote: post #248
bamboozled wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He he he, it’s the 1950s without the good bits then.

Its the 80s/90s that the US is stuck in. The Reagan/Thatcher deregulation revolution was the inflection point.

https://twitter.com/wardqnormal/status/1206280031552454656

>My new hobby is taking graphs of economic data over time and indicating the year that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, in case people find that helpful or informative.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#273

Post by epistasis »

kortilla wrote: post #15
epistasis wrote: post #7

The market is doing its best to counter Trump's efforts here, as renewables and storage are dropping faster in price than anybody expected, even the biggest boosters of the tech. We will never build another coal plant in the US. And our energy is getting cheaper, and the grid will get more reliable as we distribute more storage through it. And fortunately for the environment, Trump's efforts at the DoE to help coal h…

> We will never build another coal plant in the US. Because of natural gas, not renewables. Renewables still need base load due to variable generation because storage technology isn’t economical. If the price of natural gas didn’t collapse due to fracking the fuck out of the whole country for the last 15 years, we would still be building coal plants hand over fist.

With the Paris Accord, we are talking about the future, not the last 15 years.

And for the future, renewables + storage is cheaper than natural gas. We can get to 80% renewables cheaply. And as the modelers update their cost curves to adapt to the pace of storage's learning curve, we will be able to get to 90% renewables cheaply, then 95%, then 100% as we start to decarbonize the non-electrical parts of our economy.

And though there were tax incentives that helped build the industry, and help from countries like Germany that decided to start buying the expensive first generation products in order to drive down prices, the end result is that we are now living in a world where tech has changed the economic landscape.

The cheapest grids to be build will not be based on fossil fuels. Developing countries will be able to build renewables+storage based micro grids far more cheaply than they will build traditional wires + thermal heat engines. And places with the wealth to do long term investing will be able to build long distance transmission to distribute cheap renewables with less storage.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#274

Post by nojvek »

zo1 wrote: post #210
perryizgr8 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mail in votes will almost certainly heavily skew blue. Is there a good explanation for that assertion? I've seen it being said in many places but never any reason for it. Why would mail in votes skew in a particular direction?

The going conspiracy reason is that it's because the "Left" is using mail-in ballots to commit election fraud. To be fair, I still don't understand how we can have such manual, potentially-manipulated and mistrusted voting systems in 2020. Like, how difficult would it be for everyone to vote in a secure, cryptographically hidden and verified manner, using some sort booth/app/device/website with proper identity verifi…

Anything that’s only electronic is ripe for fraud. Securing digital things is really hard. For something as important as elections we absolutely need a paper trail. Physical things that both parties can verify exist and are simple to understand.

In an ideal world, we’d have a hybrid system. Everyone gets a paper with an ID cryptographically hashed with their voter id. They vote electronically and mail/in person hand their paper with a cast ID that’s also cryptographically signed with their voter id and vote cast. Like how two factor TOTP works, the verification of cast ID can be done totally offline.

That way you have a two factor audit system. A fast digital tally backed with a verifiable paper trail for every vote.

If paper tally is not within 1% of digital tally, then you have a discrepancy and people ought to vote again.

Sure it would take a while to verify paper trail but a couple of days of two factor counting is totally worth it for an important thing as election that decides the fate of a country.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#275

Post by laichzeit0 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #191
tootie wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was barely debated. We can't even get half the country to care about a disaster that's unfolding in their faces.

If anything, I think the US election has emphasized how the idea that humans can come together, globally, to solve a problem that will require worldwide shared sacrifice for benefits that are largely at least one lifetime in the future is a pipe dream. Humans (and in fairness, most creatures) are fundamentally too selfish as a species to implement this kind of collective action. Unstoppable severe climate change is c…

How has the US election emphasized that?

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#276

Post by freeflight »

thehappypm wrote: post #230
abyssin wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tho it seems like a lot of these increases in efficiency we traded-off by being more liberal in using the tech; Light bulbs are overwhelmingly LED these days, but we now also stick LEDs in all kinds of places where a light bulb would never have fit/made sense before.

Smarthome might theoretically work, but as of right now most people are just throwing even more IT and IoT devices, constantly drawing power, into their homes. As these come from a myriad of different vendors, there is no unified platform to utilize and manage all that for electricity efficiency, it's just going on, drawing additional power.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#277

Post by pg_bot »

tw04 wrote: post #207
pg_bot wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emissions have gone down because of the fracking boom. Coal power plants are being replaced with natural gas which releases half as much carbon dioxide. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-... .

The fracking boom has released massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere so we basically went from something we actively track (coal emissions) to something we don't track and thus aren't regulating or controlling (methane leaking from fracking wells). This is a net negative for planet earth... That didn't reduce emissions and may have actually increased them.

We do track methane in the atmosphere, that is NOAA's job. Methane in the atmosphere tripled from preindustrial times to 1995 and has started to level off since then. It doesn't look like fracking has lead to a dramatic increase in the release of methane in the atmosphere.

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/carbontracker-ch4/

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#278

Post by RankingMember »

mola wrote: post #83
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US entrepreneurism kickstarted the electric vehicle transition (thx Elon1). Batteries prices are falling. PV is already incredibly cheap and getting cheaper. Coal is becoming increasingly uncompetitive. Nuclear is making a comeback, also thanks to US entrepreneurs. Science, Capitalism and entrepreneurship will be the unstoppable force that will solve our energy crisis, if western governments let them. Africa, India a…

You under appreciate Obama's administration push towards renewables.

Yep. I think it's reasonable to think that Tesla wouldn't be where it is today without the nearly half a billion dollars it was loaned by the federal government in 2010.

https://www.energy.gov/lpo/tesla

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#279

Post by freeflight »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #231
oblio wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this would have sounded absurd a few years ago, but the authoritarian Chinese regime is currently more rational than the democratic US regime. They actually know, understand, and to some degree care, that they're basically 1/5th of the world's population and if they don't get pollution under control the entire world will burn.

The CCP has absolutely zero problem suppressing its own citizens if they threaten the government’s power, I seriously doubt they care any more about the rest of the world.

> The CCP has absolutely zero problem suppressing its own citizens if they threaten the government’s power

That is a reality under pretty much any regime in the truest sense of the words meaning, which contrary to popular use is not negative but rather descriptive.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#280

Post by Angostura »

macspoofing wrote: post #145
originalvichy wrote: post #3

As a European this is the main fear I have during this election. 4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. Not that I’m super proud of how we are doing in my country, but it can’t get worse.

>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…

"So what will Paris actually do in practical terms?"

How about, at the very least it is symbolic of the fact that the US will fully take part in one of the most important global programmes there is. That it will set targets and be transparent, reporting on its efforts to reach those targets. It will share know-how and expertise with countries that are trying to solve a problem that is an existential threat to civilisation.

And if, as you suggest, the US is actually beating the progress it needs to make to keep global temperature rise to within 1.5C, then that's great - it can get the global plaudits it deserves, with no further action needed.

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