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U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

scientificamerican.com

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Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#351

Post by api »

einpoklum wrote: post #119
api wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cleaning up the US would probably mean outsourcing more carbon emissions to the rest of the world. Outsourcing is the primary way the developed world has "cleaned up" so far. The only way we will substantially reduce CO2 emissions is to develop a source of energy that is carbon-free (or incredibly low carbon) and cheaper and easier to deploy than coal and gas . Reductions without that are politically impossible. Ther…

> Cleaning up the US would probably mean outsourcing more carbon emissions to the rest of the world. That's like saying that cleaning my house means moving the dirt to somebody else's house. > There is no other way. That is not true. The other ways are: 1. Reduction of energy use per person. 2. Control of population growth - at the very least, stabilizing the Earth's population and theoretically a reduction. 3. Using…

> That's like saying that cleaning my house means moving the dirt to somebody else's house.

No, it's more like moving your cooking and garage wood shop work to someone else's house, taking the results home, and leaving the mess.

The dirtiest parts of the production chain required to sustain our lifestyle have largely been offshored, not only because of cheaper labor but because less developed or more totalitarian countries will tolerate the pollution.

Yes these things can be done cleaner, but that adds cost that people don't seem to be willing to pay.

Americans want all of: (1) high paying good jobs, (2) clean air and water, and (3) cheap manufactured shit. Sorry, but it's worse than a trichotomy. If you pick 3 you have to pass on 1 and 2.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#352

Post by mantas »

giantg2 wrote: post #318
mantas wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make taxes big enough to make pollution too expensive even in cheap countries? Buying less, but more expensive because of less polluting manufacturing methods is the answer. Economy will still keep going.

"Economy will still keep going." How so? If you are adding crushing taxes, then you're likely to see a downturn in production and consumption, which generally results in a weak or shrinking economy.

Polluting taxes will promote spending on less polluting ways to manufacture. Or better quality goods that put out same amount of pollution, but you end up buying them not as frequently.

Let's take a hipothetical sweater as an example.

Now I buy a €20 sweater every 2 years. Let's say pollution tax would be €10. Suddenly it becomes €30 sweater and my €10/year sweater budget becomes €15/year. Instead, I could buy a nice sweater for €40 (+€10 tax) and wear it for 5 years. Now I'm back at original €10/year budget.

Economy wise, most of the chain is now just making nicer stuff that takes more resources. Aside from truck driver. Who is now moving twice as much sweaters. But €10 tax ideally would go to environment-improving projects and some drivers will make a living in those new sectors.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#353

Post by macspoofing »

cptskippy wrote: post #344
macspoofing wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're completely ignoring batteries I'm not. >which have already demonstrated their viability in southern Australia. They didn't. They replaced natural gas in one specific use-case, namely to provide grid stability. Those batteries (no batteries) are capable of bridging renewable variability.

Southern Australia's wind farms alone are enough to meet demand and when their new synchronous capacitor projects are completed they won't need stand by gas power plants.

>Southern Australia's wind farms alone are enough to meet demand

When the wind is blowing. If the wind isn't blowing, you're not getting any power and you're going to have to fire up those coal/natural gas plants.

>when their new synchronous capacitor projects are completed they won't need stand by gas power plants.

How much power can these 'synchronous capacitors' store, and for how long? Can they even store enough to power a small city (~250k) for more than few mins? Let me spoil something for you, there is no battery technology that can scale to run a modern economy and hard industry. Not now, and not upcoming. If you have favorable geography, you may be able to do pumped storage, but that's about the best you can do.

Keep in mind that EVEN if you miraculously had something to store grid-scale power over a long-term, you need to greatly overprovision renewables because those 'batteries' need to be charged (with lots of energy loss) during peaks enough to bridge daily, seasonal and inter-year variability. And of course, land-use requirements for renewables is MASSIVE (from mining to deployment to decommissioning) - so renewables are very heavy on the environment. They aren't going to work.

There's a reason why no developed region relies on renewables without either fossil fuel backup (or if geography allows, geothermal or hydro). There's a reason why Germany is spending billions to build pipelines to ship natural gas from Russia for decades to come. What do they know about renewables, that you don't?

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#354

Post by macspoofing »

FrojoS wrote: post #223
est31 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CO2 per KWh is lower for natural gas than it is for coal. https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/CO2-spez_e...

We need to get to zero (or negative) net carbon emissions. Building brand new infracstructure for gas is counterpruductive to say the least.

>when their new synchronous capacitor projects are completed they won't need stand by gas power plants.

Sure ... and how do we do that? Nuclear is dead in the developed world (very few new nuclear projects and lots of existing plants being decomissioned)... so what's left? What do we replace natural gas with?

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#355

Post by epistasis »

kortilla wrote: post #349
epistasis wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 for the future, renewables + storage is cheaper than natural gas. Sigh , there is no evidence of this or projects yet planned based on full renewable that uses storage to account for generation troughs. The storage gap is significant right now and making solar panels so cheap that labor and transmission are 99% of the cost won’t help that.

Don't sigh yet, there is ample evidence in the markets that storage is making serious inroads.

In the ERCOT market in Texas, where rules have recently changed to allow storage into the grid as both supply and load, there are absolutely massive amounts of projects in the pipeline. Since it's one of the most open markets, anybody can go and download all the projects that are at any point of the connection process. Last month, there were 18GW of storage planned for Texas alone. Interconnection only cares about power, not energy, so we only no GW and not GWh for these projects at the moment. The energy capacity in MWh only comes into play as they bid on the market to sell or buy energy.

ERCOT is only the most transparent energy market, which is why I mention it first, but other markets are also seeing massive amounts of storage planned in the coming years.

The other most open electricity market, PJM, shows a similar surge of renewables and storage:

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/10/03/rocky-mountain-institut...

On the rest of the US grids, which are more centrally planned by monopoly utilities, we need to be sure that regulations actually reward the cheapest energy if we want renewables and storage to win. Typically (but not always) regulators allow the monopoly utility to take a fixed percentage of costs as profit, so monopoly utilities are incentivized to choose higher cost options for supplying electricity.

Storage alone doesn't care about where the electricity is coming from, so these storage projects from the grid are planned based on any sort of time arbitrage, grid congestion relief, or frequency regulation reimbursement people think they can get. This is based purely on people's bets with their own capital and what they think the market will look like. Academic estimates and monopoly central planning is far far more conservative in storage than people spending their own money.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#356

Post by epistasis »

kortilla wrote: post #348
bluGill wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but misleading. Last year Iowa got more than 60% of their electric from renewable sources (almost entirely wind). The natural gas plants are not for base load, but for backup when the wind isn't blowing.

> gas plants are not for base load, but for backup when the wind isn't blowing. That’s base load. If you didn’t have the gas plants you would have had rolling outages, which means it’s providing base load. Perhaps you are confusing them with peaker plants, which are to help during high demand.

In the future, which again, is what we are talking about when we are talking about the Paris Accords, gas will serve as a backup source for extended wind droughts.

However, we will need to provide some subsidies to keep these gas plants around, because within a decade it will not be economical to operate them unless markets are redesigned to properly compensate combined cycle gas turbines that operate at <25% capacity factor.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#357

Post by Zanneth »

bamboozled wrote: post #64

I hope I’m wrong but it seems the world may have to leave the United States in the 1950s where it currently plans to reside. Seriously, it’s time counties who want to improve the situation need move on from worrying about what the United sates is doing because it doesn’t look like much will be happening for a long time.

The Paris Climate Accord is not going to have any major impact on the drive and desire to develop renewable energy sources in the US. Politics don't decide technological outcomes like this, despite what politicians would like to tell us.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#358

Post by freeflight »

goatinaboat wrote: post #333
freeflight wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it seems many people think Paris is the only way to do it. The issue is rather that nobody really brings up any valid alternatives when they disagree with Paris. Saying "bring manufacturing back" is not an valid alternative, it's wishful thinking that ignores how this current situation came about, while offering zero actual actionable advise how to reverse that development and fix the problem itself. Manufactur…

Manufacturing went to China because of laxer regulations there making it more cost-effective, how are you gonna convince it to come back to the US and EU with even harsher regulations? Easy. Tariffs on Chinese imports so its cheaper to manufacture cleanly back home.

> Tariffs on Chinese imports

If that works at all, it only works in disincentivizing manufacturing in China.

That doesn't bring manufacturing "back home", it only brings it to other countries similar or even lower in standards as China, are you gonna tariff those too?

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#359

Post by lenkite »

Angostura wrote: post #280
macspoofing wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 civilis…

One of the prime objections by Trump was the need to sponsor the GCF (green climate fund). The US was already the top-most contributor with 3.5 billion+ taxpayer money signed away and even more was expected from the US. AFAIK China - a major polluter - contributed next to nil since it came into the gambit of a developing nation.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#360

Post by poutrathor »

macspoofing wrote: post #312
throwaway5752 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables are not a panacea and may never be able to power a modern economy as they will probably always require fossil fuel baseload You say that like it's true, and it's not. Anyway, the climate doesn't care. Human emissions will reach equilibrium with what's compatible with life on Earth, one way or the other. Figuring this out is preferable to massive loss of life and degraded standards of living for the survivo…

Nuclear is great but it is a terrible baseload for renewables because nuclear cannot just spin up and spin down like hydro or natural gas can.

That's actually a classic misconception : see here https://mobile.twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1102620969808... this detailed example from France nuclear power centrals
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