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Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

economist.com

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Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#211

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #138
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the Linux we use today isn't 20 year old software. Sure, the foundation is over 30 year old, but most of the Linux code we use today is relatively fresh and is constantly being improved and updated. Again, I bring the ship of Theseus argument. I doubt my Android phone has too many lines of code written by Linus on it. Not many places are running software that saw no more active development for over 20 years. Even…

bitrot is real. Is it comparable to actual food rot or the one way transformation of fossil fuels into energy? No.

You completely misunderstood my point. Yes bit-rot exists, but that's not what I was talking about. Software doesn't rot like food, it just stops being useful for its intended purpose if left un-updated for too long.

Just look at my 10 year old Android phone. It still boots and works just fine, but having not received anymore SW updates for 8 years, it's completely unusable for its intended purpose today despite it still running. There's nothing wrong with the hardware, OLED screen is still very bright and sharp and I changed the battery and everything, but with such old unmaintained software it's basically an e-waste paperweight now.

Most software doesn't stay useful forever, and without updates it has a shelf-life, as most software becomes useless after a while if left un-updated. So yes, my point stands, old un-updated software provides no value in most cases.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#212

Post by marcosdumay »

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #175
marcosdumay wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sodium-sulfur batteries are made of two very abundant elements, where the other active elements are mostly aluminum oxides and the structural elements are iron and carbon. Hydrogen is hard to store, but there is sufficient space for satisfying most of our needs by itself. Hydrogen generators are also mostly made of iron, carbon, and aluminum, or alternatively a lot of organic chemicals and aluminum. Pumped hydro has…

Hydrogen is extremely easy to store underground. It is expensive to make (i.e. inefficient and capital intensive) and to move around with compressors but actually storing it if you have access to salt domes and depleted gas fields is not hard at all. If the thesis is that electrical energy will be hyper abundant 80% of the time and deeply scarce the remaining 20% (which is the case if you use only solar and wind) and…

"Extremely" is really not a good way to describe it.

Yes, salt domes are quite viable. They are more the "expensive" kind of storage, and require a lot of scale. They are probably not economically viable for electricity storage as it's usually understood, but they are cheap enough that it's perfectly viable to dig them at a loss for societal assurance. They are certainly a lesser drag on the economy than nuclear power.

AFAIK the vast majority of depleted gas fields can't be used for hydrogen storage. The ones that can are obviously a major gain, but those aren't enough to sustain a society.

Storing hydrogen is perfectly viable, and won't have any catastrophic impact on electricity prices. But the "extremely easy" is a bit too optimistic.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#213

Post by harimau777 »

mlindner wrote: post #177
myrmidon wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely disagree. And I used to be strong nuclear proponent until 2015 or so. Nuclear power is no longer a viable pathway for a government to throw tax dollars at, and there are multiple reasons: 1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind. 2) Nuclear power costs explode if the capacity factor of your plants decreases: Meaning that they are basi…

> 1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind. This argument is an important one, but most of the reasons that this is the case is a related problem to the ever lasting light bulb problem, they last too long. Because we're not building them they're expensive to build. Once we start building them the costs go down. > 3) Nuclear power failed to deliv…

Is the fact that Fukushima was built in a poor location with poorly designed generators part of nuclear's failure to deliver on safety promises? That is to say, if nuclear power cannot reliably avoid design failures then that sounds to me like it is failing to deliver on safety promises.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#214

Post by magicalhippo »

stephen_g wrote: post #149
pstrateman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be generating 120% but what happens if everybody installs? Do you have storage installed to smooth out the dead hours? Unfortunately the answer is that you need days of storage for solar and wind to be anywhere near 100% of the energy mix. The cost of that is astronomical.

The answer actually isn’t that you need days of storage. A researcher I follow on Twitter here in Australia called David Osmond has been running a simulation for over a year that scales up the wind and solar we have to the levels we would need to achieve around 100% renewable energy, and using real time data simulates storage requirements. He’s found that for the NEM grid in Australia at least, just six hours of stor…

You need those interconnects though.

Here in Norway the electricity prices this summer and fall were up to 100x higher in the south compared to the north, due to lack of interconnect capacity between the north and south.

Building hundreds of miles of high-capacity interconnects ain't done in a weekend either.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#215

Post by sveme »

bheadmaster wrote: post #123
sveme wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's dropping since the 1950s, so not a fluke. Major reasons are probably improvements in living conditions (yes, in comparison to the 50s), the invention and widespread use of contraception and social security (which removes the need for kids to support you in old age).

> It's dropping since the 1950s So has quality of life, so it might have something to do with it.

The quality of life has dropped since the 50s? Definitely not im Germany or Europe in general. On what metrics has it dropped?

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#216

Post by Comevius »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #136
Comevius wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, consumption and energy use went up, not to mention waste. That video game needs 600-700 watts per client and most of it is created very inefficiently, using fossil fuels. People still drive up and down too, and there are more people. > the economy of 2200 The planet will be barely habitable, if at all.

Sorry I exaggerated. Video games are only 1000x better than driving an 80s car, not a millions.

I don't even know what are you talking about, most teenagers didn't own a car in the 80's. In fact there are more cars now than there were back then, more people too. I don't see how the video game industry helped the environment, on the contrary it had a measurable negative impact on it thanks to the energy consumption and the waste.

The only thing video games have going for them is that they don't get you laid.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#217

Post by ZeroGravitas »

eloff wrote: post #196
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most economies are aiming for net zero by 2050. A goal, which it is now clear, that would have been absolutely trivial to meet while making a solid profit on the deal, if we'd just started earlier, like when the problem became widely known four decades ago. But we didn't. So we can probably still do it, and we can probably still come out richer, but some people are still trying to slow it down so they can profit from…

The only possible solution four decades ago was nuclear, and even then it was only a partial solution, and which people oppose for illogical reasons. The story now is much more hopeful. I also hope nuclear can be a part of it, but I think battery advances are more likely to beat it to the starting line.

Climate change is not just about electricity production.

There was a wide array of solutions available 40 years ago, including, but not limited to nuclear.

Notable mentions: carbon fees, preventing deforestation, not subsidizing fossil fuels, not actively encouraging methane release from oilfields, more efficient cars, trains, insulation, heat pumps and solar water heaters but really the list is very, very long.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#218

Post by perrygeo »

Seriously? Analyzing data at the country level and claiming to have achieved decoupling is an egregious logical error that ignores our global trade network. Yes the US economy can grow without burning fossil fuels because someone else burns it for us. Decoupling can only be analyzed at a global scale and anyone who claims otherwise is trying to fool you.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#219

Post by diordiderot »

treis wrote: post #198
diordiderot wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just false. Annual nuclear wast in the US in volume is "roughly equivalent to less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool." With more modern plants you could recycle that material and cut it down to a fifth the size. Its a political problem, forced by dishonest actors

>still an unresolved issue >This is just false >Its a political problem

Touche

But I would still argue it's an opaque argument at best, more likely intentionally deceptive.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#220

Post by matthewdgreen »

lettergram wrote: post #166
matthewdgreen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now wind and solar have dropped so much in price that they represent a serious threat to fossil fuels on a short time frame. Have all storage problems been worked out? No. But even moving 50% of our current fossil sources to renewables would have a huge impact on the profits of those industries and it’s now completely feasible in the short term and very cheap. If I was in the fossil fuel extraction industry I’d…

> Right now wind and solar have dropped so much in price that they represent a serious threat to fossil fuels on a short time frame. I recommend sitting down and calculating the input cost for solar / wind. It's being subsidized substantially. There aren't even enough materials currently mined to support the US switching to mostly (>50%) solar / wind. Silver/gold/copper/nickle prices would go up an order of magnitude…

Have you calculated the costs of nuclear without government subsidies? As best I understand, it’s completely unsupportable.
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