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

bbc.co.uk

181–190 of 349 posts

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

#181
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you use your car as battery during the night it won't have energy in the morning when you need it. It defeats the purpose of having a car.

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

#182
post #68
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…

The problem is not capitalists or communists or whateverists. The problem is sociopaths in power. Until we, collectively as a humanity, won't start regularly vetting people in power for the mental disorders, of all types - genetic, old age, chemically induced, regular mental illnesses etc. we will continue to suffer. And political compass of they day won't matter at all.

> Until we, collectively as a humanity, won't start regularly vetting people in power for the mental disorders, of all types - genetic, old age, chemically induced, regular mental illnesses etc.

Who decides what a mental illness is? .... and back to Square One.

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

#183
> "We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over," said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP, who produced the study.

> "Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster," she said.

I don't see that happening, and my guess is neither do they. Plan C needs to be a massive geoengineering project that would have seemed crazy even ten years ago, may worry some people as irresponsible even now. The nightmare scenario is that we can't even do that in time, because we're too busy arguing about it.

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you build 5-10x redundancy for solar/wind I don't see it, solar and wind are all over the place between the peak and valley outputs. Unless we find a "battery" storage technology that can smooth it out over say a couple of weeks, I don't think countries are going to go for it as the only grid power source. We have nuclear now, and climate change is a huge deal to solve, possibly end of human civilization h…

Where does your 5x-10x number come from? I sense that it's a guess, but the cool thing about stats is that we can actually find a redundancy ratio for a given probability of shortage.

Because at best, Renewables run at 20% percent of their installed capacity comparing to more 80% for nuclear.

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

#185
Climate change seems to me to be the "gotcha" of liberal democracy. The timescales involved in democracy are so short that there's little incentive to do the things that would improve the situation, since the pain is felt now vs the (greater) pain in the future of climate change.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> it is the demand for batteries that will make them cheap This isn’t how supply and demand work. Demand can induce scale efficiencies in production, which lowers costs. That’s what’s happening in your link, which tracks through 2018. In 2019, electric car sales shares rose globally and non-linearly [1]. We persist on that path. As a result, battery costs are spiking [2][3]. [1] https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/asse…

It is exactly how supply and demand works, lithium refiners are making huge profits, which causes more investment in refining capabilities which unlocks larger economies of scale.

If you don't understand this please just circle back to this thread in 5 years, and I can show you what actually happened.

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

#187

I used to be really depressed about this sort of thing. It caused me to severely limit my lifestyle out of a desire to "do the right thing". I didn't own a car. Very low consumption and minimal waste (no takeaway food, coffee etc., very frugal, didn't use things like paper towels and napkins). I cycled and walked everywhere. Didn't go on holidays abroad or even very far away. Then I looked around and noticed that eve…

Not having children makes your carbon footprint miniscule compared to everyone who does, so you're still doing the right thing.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada is tripling its carbon tax meanwhile residents e.g. in Newfoundland are suffering extremely under the cost of fuel prices for heating their home, so much so that even liberal mps are voting to exempt home heating from the tripling of the carbon tax. So this argument definitely still valid in Canada, though I do agree that it is more valid is more developing countries.

It's such a convoluted situation in Canada. The same politicians forcing insane "carbon taxes" are also putting in place immigration policies that bring in an absolutely massive number of people each year. This, of course, drives up the demand for electricity, housing (including heating, as you mention), infrastructure, transportation (of goods and people), food, and so forth, all of which contribute to "carbon emiss…

The societal 'culture' has changed so rapidly that you'd hear cries of racism, bigotry, ignorance, etc. if you even suggested slowing/stopping immigration to the current party in power.

I get we've got low birth rates. Maybe encourage the people that are here _now_ to procreate instead of forcing both care-givers to slave away all their hours to their employer instead of using the time for child-rearing?

I get that people don't want to work for low wages - maybe we can stop bringing or severely limit the amount of immigrants for a bit (all avenues of immigration, education - and it's associated literal immigration mills and foreign housing investment schemes; refugees - that somehow are still refugees when crossing by land from USA into Canada, that are happier than ever to come to the country and make minimum wage because it's MUCH more than they made overseas - which they're now finding out is completely untenable in today's Canada, and some are even choosing to leave the country they immigrated to!)

I'm definitely _NOT_ claiming immigration as the sole cause of all our problems, but when Statistics Canada says a quarter of all people in Canada are immigrants or permanent residents, maybe we need to slow things down a bit for a little while to let things settle.

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

#189

We are too politically polarized to solve problems in this class, which requires political unity because of the scale, cost, and speed requirements. All of our major political forces play games, constantly make moves in bad faith, talk out of both sides of their mouths publicly vs privately, so we are screwed. The reality is that IF climate change science were a big hoax (sadly, it's not) there WOULD be a team using…

I think you're editorializing it in a way that is making it far more politically neutral or "pox on both your houses" than it actually is. It's not about warring world views. It's just about money. The simple reality is: almost all wealth on the planet is tied up with fossil fuels. This being the case, the more wealthy you are, the more "polarized" in a certain direction you will be. Might makes right. Or at least at…

There's a lot of not wealthy people who are polarized in that direction as well though. It's not simply a matter of sending a few oligarchs to the gillotine. In the short run, basically everyone in North America and Europe benefit from out destruction of the climate, and most people in other countries too.

To put it another way, the people who control the oil supply aren't simply wealthy because they pillaged and stole a bunch of people's stuff. The product they supply is extremely convenient and popular. You'd probably have an easier time fixing a world where everyone's a methhead than fixing the current problem.

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

#190
post #45

1.5*C ? What kind of fictional reality are living in? We are way past 2.4*C projection and are actually on track for 2.9*C or so. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/09/cop26-se...

1.5° C Was the goal of the Paris Agreement and is important because it's (somewhat arbitrarily somewhat backed by models) the point where we go from bad but not disastrous to we're going to have serious climate impacts.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/08/1052198840/1-5-degrees-warmin...

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