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A 3°C world has no safe place

economist.com

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Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#251

Post by amanaplanacanal »

908B64B197 wrote: post #161
bko wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know who you're referring to as 'we' but in the US, carbon emissions have actually peaked in the early 2000s and decreased in an absolute sense since then, despite growing population and industrialization. We're currently at 1986 emission levels. US has 15% of global emissions, while China has 28% and is growing in both per person and absolute. I don't think you're wrong to be cynical about tackling this prob…

> while China has 28% and is growing in both per person and absolute. I'm personally completely in favor of import tariffs on goods manufactured abroad with dirty energy and immigration quotas on nationals from countries that have decided not to control their emissions.

What does immigration have to do with CO2?

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#252

Post by bookofsand »

e12e wrote: post #250
bookofsand wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers don't work out. Let's say in USA we cut meat consumption, car usage and air travel in half. That is quite a lot, congratulations to our eco-conscious citizens! Alas, let's not pat ourselves on the back just yet. USA accounts for 15% of global emissions. Agriculture and transportation make 14% and 24%, together 48%. Half of that is 24%. 24% of 15% is 3.6% of global emissions. On the flip side: * 96.4 of th…

Seems to be missing that the US can cut US emissions, but cannot cut other countries' emissions. So if you can drop (say) 5% global emissions and choose not to - that's just willful ignorance?

A. "serious bicycle or transit prioritization in our major (US) urban areas" will not make a dent in the world global emissions.

B. The level of cuts required to bring the world to sustainable emissions level, combined with global population growth and global equity, would require that everybody to live with under 1.7t/year CO2 emissions by 2050. This is the level of Albania, Colombia or Morocco, complete political dead end on both left and right.

The crux of the problem is that there are no solutions. Even the 'we should do something about it' crowd is utterly incapable in articulating the depth of the cuts needed avert disaster, or articulate the life of the average American after such cuts. Hint: the Great Depression would be 'the good times' in comparison.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#253

Post by pyuser583 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #236
pyuser583 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear waste is very easy to deal with. It’s physically small, and easy to transport. It has a long half life, but a deep shaft filled with cement in a remote area does the trick. There’s no kicking the can down the road.

Oddly, it seems that finding that deep shaft that is known to be geologically stable for at least a couple of half lives is fairly difficult, to say nothing of the issue of transporting the material from the reactor to said shaft.

The obstacles aren’t scientific or engineering. Plenty of safe places to put it. The problem is NIMBYism.

https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-radioactive-problem-...

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#254

Post by john579 »

Higher amounts of carbon dioxide and warmer temperatures are excellent for plant growth. A greener earth and more wildlife is paradise on earth. I wish it was true, but unfortunately people easily fall for propaganda. They will end up climate engineering us into an ice age and destroying civilization in the process. Take a deep breath, relax, and look forward to the warmer climate forecast for your future: an eternity in hell.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#255

Post by bookofsand »

NumberWangMan wrote: post #230
bko wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get what you're asking. US emissions per capita have been going down considerably since ~2000 without too much prodding or political will. As have Europes. If you look at the chart, there are only three countries with growing per capita emissions and that's China Russia and India, but most dramatically China. I don't see your point refereeing the past emissions of the US as some kind of moral victory against…

This is where border adjustments come into play. We can, for example, implement a carbon tax in the US and impose a tariff on goods from other countries depending on their own environmental policies. This serves as a way to put pressure on all countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions together. In fact, the EU is in the process of doing this right now, and China is definitely reacting to it (not happy, but it seem…

How does the life of the average human looks like in a world with net zero emissions? How is that life different than subsistence farming?

We need to articulate the future, not wax poetically toward some vague economic abstractions. Unless we can articulate some hopeful answer to this question, nothing consequential will change. People really do not want to live as subsistence farmers.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#256

Post by scoofy »

bookofsand wrote: post #252
e12e wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be missing that the US can cut US emissions, but cannot cut other countries' emissions. So if you can drop (say) 5% global emissions and choose not to - that's just willful ignorance?

A. "serious bicycle or transit prioritization in our major (US) urban areas" will not make a dent in the world global emissions. B. The level of cuts required to bring the world to sustainable emissions level, combined with global population growth and global equity, would require that everybody to live with under 1.7t/year CO2 emissions by 2050. This is the level of Albania, Colombia or Morocco, complete political d…

Cool, low-hanging fruit is just, woe is me, too much trouble! No problem, let's do nothing then. Should be a fun ride. Going to be Great Depression either way!

I'm not saying we can fix it, I'm a nihilist at this point, I'm saying we could have fixed it 15 years ago.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#257

Post by elihu »

cloverich wrote: post #223
visiblink wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is such a horrible replacement. Let's let future generations deal with the waste from the power that sustained our lifestyle. I hate it. I'd rather live with less.

nucelear is the only realistic option to even get to the future.

Nah, we can do pretty well with just wind and solar.

The practical difficulty with using renewables effectively is that you need to be able to either store large amounts of energy for later use, or trade power across long distances. We (by which I mean "in the U.S." but for other developed countries it's pretty much the same) could buy solar power from Kenya, Australia, Algeria, or similar places to get us through the night if we had high-capacity transcontinental HVDC lines running to those places. That's a major infrastructure project that would cost a lot of money, but I expect it's probably worth it.

(We can even mitigate the risk of the power lines being temporarily disabled by keeping the fossil fuel plants on standby and just not using them except as an emergency backup.)

Another option is to just build batteries on an unheard-of scale. Lithium iron phosphate cells might do the job -- being free of cobalt an nickel, the only other major bottleneck resource would be lithium. I'm not sure how practical it is to build the kinds of gigantic battery packs that would be needed to provide, say, an 18-hour backup power supply for the entire U.S., but it's probably less cells in total than we'd need to electrify our current fleet of gas-powered cars.

edit: to clarify, I'm not particularly opposed to nuclear. I just don't think it's the only option at this point.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#258

Post by noasaservice »

megablast wrote: post #45
noasaservice wrote: post #27

I'm sitting in my air conditioned room, in the USA. Doing computer stuff, naturally. I look at what I can do about this. I can turn up the temp in my room, and the house. Meager difference. I can use less water - I already am, with getting showers every other day on average. I can eat less meat - which I do with purchase of the beef CSA. I'm big into the repair movement, and repair household equipment and electronics…

> These global climate change issues are the sum of all the work in this world, but the bulk of it is emitted by companies who do the cheapest thing. Who you are giving money to. Do you own a car?? Then you are destroying the planet.

Your comment reminds me of this comic: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#259

Post by nabergh »

willis936 wrote: post #237

The symptom of global warming is not the sole long term concern of climate change. We already have the tools to reverse global warming. I wager that a poor country with most of its GDP within 5 feet of 2021 sea level will unilaterally decide to stop global warming in the next 50 years. Maybe it's not a logical move, maybe it's already too late to save their cities, maybe it won't stop millions from dying of heat or f…

I'm curious which method you're referring to when you talk about one country unilaterally stopping global warming.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#260

Post by taktoa »

nabergh wrote: post #259
willis936 wrote: post #237

The symptom of global warming is not the sole long term concern of climate change. We already have the tools to reverse global warming. I wager that a poor country with most of its GDP within 5 feet of 2021 sea level will unilaterally decide to stop global warming in the next 50 years. Maybe it's not a logical move, maybe it's already too late to save their cities, maybe it won't stop millions from dying of heat or f…

I'm curious which method you're referring to when you talk about one country unilaterally stopping global warming.

Stratospheric sulfur dioxide injection is one option
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