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UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

bbc.co.uk

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Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#121

Post by gitfan86 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #113
gitfan86 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufacturing, refining, and AI improvements are going to reduce the price of batteries by another 90%

> Manufacturing, refining, and AI improvements are going to reduce the price of batteries by another 90% This is a pipe dream. Battery demand will be astronomical for decades to come. That means ramping up supply and prioritising deployment via price signals.

Your logic is backwards, it is the demand for batteries that will make them cheap. Just look at the actual data

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#122

Post by fulafel »

Ninjak8051 wrote: post #20

Such pathways require global cooperation and will fail unless all major nations are on board. In particular, Russia is making no effort, and has no incentive or motivation to make any effort due to their vast tundra landscape. Step 1 is to get Russia on board by some means, without Russia any of these goals are senseless.

We have a lot of experience in the global system of cajoling outlier countries into a common agreement, it's just stick and carrot. Diplomacy, negotiations over interests, trade deals, etc.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#123

Post by greenhearth »

ericmay wrote: post #22
zb1plus wrote: post #8

I wish humanity could discard narrow-minded nationalist/short-sighted capitalist tendencies and unite against this threat. Imagine a climate pact between the US, EU, China and India where each society placed a similar focus on pivoting to renewables and developing reliable fusion energy as the Allies devoted to winning ww2 and developing atomic weaponry. Amusingly, the end of our dependency would also resolve many ge…

> focus on pivoting to renewables and developing reliable fusion energy... You know that this would be accomplished through capitalism right? The more we rail against capitalism and free markets (which every successful country from Denmark to Australia uses) the less likely we'll ever be to solve any problems. The market is an unwieldy force that can be generally shaped in a direction by the people (purchasing decisi…

Baudrillard wrote a while ago that "capital has never been linked by a contract to the society it dominates." It follows no social contract and is not at any moral obligation. He goes on to explain that asking it to follow some rules is laughable and absurd.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#124

Post by happytoexplain »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #95
newswasboring wrote: post #26

> "Into the classrooms, into the boardrooms, into the voting booth, over the dinner table. We cannot let go of climate change." I wonder if this is the right approach. It certainly is the approach we have been following for years. But I think that has just lead to empathy fatigue. Edit: added empathy

That quote sounds like a religion to me.

That's pretty uncharitable, and really only makes sense as a criticism if you think the proponents don't really believe this is a critical, concrete issue for society (i.e. if you think they are just being political, or ignorant).

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#125

Post by el_nahual »

Yizahi wrote: post #51
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #9

Not a surprise, since co2 is an oxide, and therefore very stable in the athmosphere. It would take a huge amount of energy to remove it, and we don't even stop putting it in there. Janvici had a nice way to put it: the 1.5C are already signed for, which means we won't ever see the climate of today again in the next 5000 years.

Yeah, that the key problem - all current "green" or "zero" tech is simply a trick, with shuffling emissions to other countries, selling-buying quotas, maybe reducing emissions a little in the best case. Until we have a working industrial scale CO2 sequestration factories we are essentially doing nothing, or close to nothing.

A lot of replies to this comment are saying a version of "how is solar/wind/etc a trick?"

And the answer is that no, they are not a trick...they legitimately produce energy.

But the goal isn't "make more clean energy", the goal is "keep coal and oil and gas underground"!

And yet coal(!!) production is at basically all time highs, with oil not far behind.

Unless we start making oil, coal and gas artificially expensive to produce, "clean" sources just add to global energy usage, instead of displacing it.

https://yearbook.enerdata.net/coal-lignite/coal-production-d...

https://yearbook.enerdata.net/crude-oil/world-production-sta...

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#126

Post by _jal »

el_nahual wrote: post #105
macspoofing wrote: post #70

There is no chance of removing existing CO2 from Air to make any sort of difference. There is no chance of meaningfully reducing CO2 emissions, because outside of Nuclear (and hydro/geothermal but only if you have the geography for it) there is no alternative to replacing fossil fuels. At some point the public will realize the lie of solar/wind as a replacement. We lost 50 years of greatly reduced emissions had nucle…

Geoengineering is starting to seem like less of a "possibility" and more of a necessity, because self-sustaining methane emission loops seem to have been unlocked in the artic and tropics. So even if we were to magically stop the emission of new carbon, Earth will likely just keep heating up. And yes, it's hard to prove that runaway warming is happening (data is noisy, and the time is short), but the burden of proof…

> Geoengineering is starting to seem like less of a "possibility" and more of a necessity

It always was going to end up here. Humans suck at collective action, and especially so on long timescales.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#127

Post by dsfyu404ed »

pjc50 wrote: post #10
canadiantim wrote: post #6

Maybe then we should consider not kneecapping our economy and driving people into poverty? The worst thing for the environment is poverty. I'm convinced most of the measures put in place to fight climate change have been a net negative to the environment, when you consider how much they are impoverishing people and thus driving more people to disregard environmental concerns for survival.

This argument might be valid in Brazil but definitely isn't in Canada.

>This argument might be valid in Brazil but definitely isn't in Canada.

I assure you many Canadians are getting ready to fire up ye olde wood stove this winter who wouldn't otherwise but are doing so thanks to motivation from energy prices.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#128

Post by pclmulqdq »

dontreact wrote: post #110
macspoofing wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By the time nuclear projects started now complete, solar and wind will be mopping the floor with them ROI wise. Yes, it will take decades to restart large scale nuclear projects. So we lost more than 50 years. With Solar/Wind it's not a question of cost or ROI. Solar/wind, as an intermittent and diffuse energy source, CANNOT power a modern economy. It needs base-load.

What about if storage improves? Can't that smooth out the intermittent nature and provide for the base load?

Storage needs to improve by a few orders of magnitude to make that possible, and it's not clear that we even know what storage technology to use.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#129

Post by govg »

dontreact wrote: post #110
macspoofing wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By the time nuclear projects started now complete, solar and wind will be mopping the floor with them ROI wise. Yes, it will take decades to restart large scale nuclear projects. So we lost more than 50 years. With Solar/Wind it's not a question of cost or ROI. Solar/wind, as an intermittent and diffuse energy source, CANNOT power a modern economy. It needs base-load.

What about if storage improves? Can't that smooth out the intermittent nature and provide for the base load?

To be very honest, I feel like the car culture in the US gives every household a potential large battery to sustain their house with. In a future where every car is an EV, every American house has two giant batteries, if not more, hooked up to it all night.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#130

Post by bayesianbot »

pier25 wrote: post #5

No surprises here. We've known for years we're going to shoot beyond 2C with very high certainty. Even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today, the climate will keep warming at least for some more decades due to climate lag and feedbacks.

If we reached actual zero emissions for humans, the ocean absorbing CO2 from air would almost exactly balance the warming climate lag, IIRC. But you're right in a sense that in reality most likely we'd still be emitting CO2, balance it with the natural CO2 sinks and call that net-zero.
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