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Primary energy vs final energy: why replacing fossil fuels may not be so hard

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Re: Primary energy vs final energy: why replacing fossil fuels may not be so hard

#21

Post by xenocyon »

lettergram wrote: post #19
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #14

It's too bad that reality doesn't really care if you have clever accounting tricks to show that "things aren't really as bad as they look!" The only number that matters at all is global green house gas emissions. We need to get that to zero, and it has continued to go up. Imagine you have a drinking problem and your doctor tells you you need to stop drinking alcohol or you will suffer liver failure. You can argue all…

It’s funny, I’m not a claimant change denier, but I don’t view emissions as a problem. An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing. There’s also volcanos, etc. I’m a lot more worried about chemicals outside of CO2. Such as lead or pesticides. CO2 fluctuates massively throughout the year. Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other…

> An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing.

That is a remarkable claim - do you have a citation?

Regarding heavy metal pollutants etc - I agree that those are a concern, but that is more or less orthogonal to the climate crisis.

Re: Primary energy vs final energy: why replacing fossil fuels may not be so hard

#22

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

lettergram wrote: post #19
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #14

It's too bad that reality doesn't really care if you have clever accounting tricks to show that "things aren't really as bad as they look!" The only number that matters at all is global green house gas emissions. We need to get that to zero, and it has continued to go up. Imagine you have a drinking problem and your doctor tells you you need to stop drinking alcohol or you will suffer liver failure. You can argue all…

It’s funny, I’m not a claimant change denier, but I don’t view emissions as a problem. An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing. There’s also volcanos, etc. I’m a lot more worried about chemicals outside of CO2. Such as lead or pesticides. CO2 fluctuates massively throughout the year. Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other…

> An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing

Then explain why China, despite having more than four times as many people as the US, only has twice the CO2 emissions?

Can you even link a single study that puts anything but fossil fuel use as the primary contributor (by a wide margin) to atmospheric CO2? Because I couldn't in several minutes of googling.

> Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other chemicals

If that were true, climatologists wouldn't be so concerned about the problem, they'd just be telling us to plant some more trees.

Re: Primary energy vs final energy: why replacing fossil fuels may not be so hard

#23

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

dudus wrote: post #10
jcampbell1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with the concept of a heat pump? A resistor converts electricity into heat 100% efficiently, and a heat pump is often 3x as efficient at heating a house vs electric baseboards.

Ok then the electric baseboard is 30% efficient vs the heatpump which is 100% efficient.

No; you're missing the point - 100% of the energy in an electric baseboard system is converted into heat. It's 100% efficient. There is no more effective way to turn electricity into heat than resistively.

A heat pump doesn't turn electricity into heat. It moves heat from one place (outside) to another place (inside); and can seem more efficient because the system isn't closed.

Re: Primary energy vs final energy: why replacing fossil fuels may not be so hard

#24

Post by thinkharderdev »

wnevets wrote: post #18
akshatrathi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally right that what matters is greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Tackling them, however, is going to take all our muscles. Many climate deniers have used the 80% of primary energy from fossil fuel figure as a way to claim it's too hard to do anything about the problem or to say there's been little progress. That's misleading and I wrote the article to explain to correct that narrative.

>That's misleading and I wrote the article to explain to correct that narrative. There is your first mistake, you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves in to. There are literally people denying covid is real/serious while they or their love ones drown in their fluids.

I don't think this is a useful way to think about it:

1. You don't need to convince literally everyone. There are still some people who believe the Earth is flat and probably always will be, but it is not super-relevant to collective actions because they are a tiny minority

2. People do in fact change their minds on things. It usually just happens on larger time scales so while one article isn't moving the needle, the accretion of many articles and arguments can change population-wide beliefs.

3. The population of people with an opinion on any given topic is not static. Even if any individual never changes their mind, the composition of the population can change if new people are forming opinions in one way more often. Science progresses one funeral at a time and all that....

Re: Primary energy vs final energy: why replacing fossil fuels may not be so hard

#26

Post by briantakita »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #22
lettergram wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny, I’m not a claimant change denier, but I don’t view emissions as a problem. An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing. There’s also volcanos, etc. I’m a lot more worried about chemicals outside of CO2. Such as lead or pesticides. CO2 fluctuates massively throughout the year. Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other…

> An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing Then explain why China, despite having more than four times as many people as the US, only has twice the CO2 emissions? Can you even link a single study that puts anything but fossil fuel use as the primary contributor (by a wide margin) to atmospheric CO2? Because I couldn't in several minutes of googling. > Presumably the world can much…

How do you know China's or the USA's CO2 emissions? Do you have both countries placed into a container with tools to measure the aggregate CO2 output?

Science is based on empirical observation. The map is not the territory & models are often wrong. We don't even know how often the models are wrong.

Re: Primary energy vs final energy: why replacing fossil fuels may not be so hard

#27

Post by robertlagrant »

The article seems incomplete. Sure we may be burning three times more coal than we'd have to if we could perfectly convert it to energy. That has literally never factored into an argument I've seen about renewables - it's always "we currently produce X GigaWatts 24x7, and renewables don't let us do that".

Saying we burn coal at 30% efficiency isn't addressing anything useful. And it's one of those articles where many won't completely follow it, but they'll come out with an impression that the premise is true because of some "sciency bits", when with some more content they could've actually been educated in something useful.

Or you could say, "nuclear power would solve this quicker than anything" and you'd be right :-)

Re: Primary energy vs final energy: why replacing fossil fuels may not be so hard

#29

Post by layla5alive »

lettergram wrote: post #19
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #14

It's too bad that reality doesn't really care if you have clever accounting tricks to show that "things aren't really as bad as they look!" The only number that matters at all is global green house gas emissions. We need to get that to zero, and it has continued to go up. Imagine you have a drinking problem and your doctor tells you you need to stop drinking alcohol or you will suffer liver failure. You can argue all…

It’s funny, I’m not a claimant change denier, but I don’t view emissions as a problem. An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing. There’s also volcanos, etc. I’m a lot more worried about chemicals outside of CO2. Such as lead or pesticides. CO2 fluctuates massively throughout the year. Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other…

"I'm not a climate change denier but let me just deny all the science that CO2 is meaningfully contributing to climate change"

What exactly do you think the definition of a "climate change denier" is?

The important part isn't recognizing that climate change exists. The important part is recognizing why and what needs to be done about it.

You're misinformed about the science on this one...

Re: Primary energy vs final energy: why replacing fossil fuels may not be so hard

#30

Post by zzzeek »

xenocyon wrote: post #21
lettergram wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny, I’m not a claimant change denier, but I don’t view emissions as a problem. An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing. There’s also volcanos, etc. I’m a lot more worried about chemicals outside of CO2. Such as lead or pesticides. CO2 fluctuates massively throughout the year. Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other…

> An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing. That is a remarkable claim - do you have a citation? Regarding heavy metal pollutants etc - I agree that those are a concern, but that is more or less orthogonal to the climate crisis.

perhaps they are confusing CO2 for methane emitted by large fields of livestock (at the cost of their consumption of vegetation no longer available to help capture CO2) which is a non-trivial portion of greenhouse gas emission.
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