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We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

aljazeera.com

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Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#71

Post by slothtrop »

adrianN wrote: post #37
korroziya wrote: post #21

From the article: "The supposed energy transition that has been undertaken has seen renewable energy production expanded, but there has been no indication that oil and gas are being substituted and ultimately phased out." That's not going to happen for another 27 years at least. I've said it before: Most people (including those who post here) are staggeringly illiterate when it comes to energy. Hydrocarbons store an…

"You can't replace it in XX years" is particularly true if you don't even try. Everything we use oil and gas for that is not fuel is a tiny fraction of our consumption and can be replaced with synthesis pipelines that use carbon dioxide, water and electricity.

Besides fuel for transportation, the following make up a large use-case: blast furnaces for smelting steel and making coke, cement-making, ammonia synthesis, creating plastics. Electricity by itself accounts for near 25% of fossil fuel use.

None of those can be viably replaced right now. With very large transpo, there seems to be a lot of investment in hydrogen but skepticism surrounding it too, including for the environment.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#72

Post by AshamedCaptain »

bambax wrote: post #40
rootusrootus wrote: post #31

> the push to replace fuel-engine vehicles with electric ones As opposed to what, replacing cars with public transit? It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and think that we can just wave a magic wand and make public transit work in places that largely rely on cars (even in Europe, which is much denser and more friendly to public transit, there are a lot of personal cars). We will run out of oil wa…

We could make it harder and harder to use/own a car: more expensive, difficult to park, slower to use, etc. Then people would seek out other solutions by themselves, be it using a bike, public transport, or moving less (asking for more remote work options, for instance). We don't seem to even be trying to do this and it's depressing.

> We could make it harder and harder to use/own a car: more expensive, difficult to park, slower to use, etc. [...] We don't seem to even be trying to do this and it's depressing.

Well, because the parties who try to do that (e.g. Greens in europe) immediately get out-voted out of office once the population starts to notice the permanent traffic jams.

But it's not for a lack of trying -- they put measures like reducing speed limits in cities, reducing car lanes, etc.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#73

Post by ArnoVW »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #45
InitialLastName wrote: post #18

It's worth keeping in mind that Al Jazeera (as the state-funded news outlet of an extremely wealthy state that is built entirely and existentially on the sales of oil) may not be unbiased on this particular analysis.

If I was an oil company executive, I would want carbon offsets to actually work, because they could enable my business to function for longer. Am I getting this wrong?

They don't have to actually work. Just seem for long enough to work, until I have made enough money.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#74

Post by slothtrop »

rootusrootus wrote: post #32
korroziya wrote: post #21

From the article: "The supposed energy transition that has been undertaken has seen renewable energy production expanded, but there has been no indication that oil and gas are being substituted and ultimately phased out." That's not going to happen for another 27 years at least. I've said it before: Most people (including those who post here) are staggeringly illiterate when it comes to energy. Hydrocarbons store an…

I haven't met that many people who think we can do it in a year. But it won't happen in 27 years if we don't make a consistent effort every year between now and then.

I'm not sure it will even happen in 27 years, with effort.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#75

Post by rootusrootus »

ravenstine wrote: post #48
rootusrootus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> solar and wind only makes sense to use where it can offset the carbon footprint that it created when it was manufactured IIRC, PV panels become (on average) carbon neutral after three years of operation. Given the lifespan, this suggests that there are very few locations you can put them where they won't more than pay back the carbon emitted in their production. I'm a former nuclear fan. In anything like its curren…

> I'm a former nuclear fan. In anything like its current form it is a dead end, and it is past time we move on. Could you further elaborate on this take? I'm not interested in challenging you or anything, but the anti-nuclear position is often out of fear of catastophe, so it's refreshing to hear an opinion that it's a dead end.

I don't know that any of my opinions are particularly refreshing, but I'm happy to share them anyway. It's certainly never stopped me in the past ;-).

All current reactor designs, even the most recently approved ones, are bespoke. Incredibly expensive, slow to build, relying on a lot of one-off manufacturing and a dwindling number of experts in the technology. We could overbuild wind & solar on breathtaking scales and still spend a good bit less. I suspect we will find an energy storage solution for solar (EVs is a reasonably good bet IMO) before we'll figure out how to make economical nuclear a reality.

I don't worry much about catastrophe. The worst ones we have seen so far were practically non-events compared to the ongoing damage we do just with coal alone. Both of the big disastrous nuclear events have straightforward engineering solutions (and in the case of the first, we already have done that engineering). Aside from it being a bit of an eyesore, I'd happily live in close proximity to a current generation nuclear plant.

I think we'd need to see a fundamental shift in our approach to nuclear before we could make it viable. Maybe something like shifting to smaller floating reactors that we could churn out in quantity. I doubt we could make it directly cost competitive with wind & solar, but maybe we could find a way to make it valuable enough to keep as an alternative.

We'd also need a cultural shift, of course -- people already fear nuclear power plants and have forced them to close prematurely as a result. That's a non-trivial problem, and I don't have a solution for that. Humans aren't rational, even if we like to pretend otherwise.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#76

Post by RetpolineDrama »

ravenstine wrote: post #46

The very premise of modern environmentalism necessitates human extinction by logical extension. You can't act or believe as if humans can or should have no impact on the environment without entertaining humanity's gradual demise as part of the process of "saving the earth" when all other known options are exhausted.

>You can't act or believe as if humans can or should have no impact on the environment without entertaining humanity's gradual demise as part of the process of "saving the earth" when all other known options are exhausted.

IMO this particular aspect of modern environmentalism is a religious root on a secular tree.

Many religions imply that man isn't natural, that there's the nature world and that we are above it/not part of it. That core belief carries over into secular society/people even though they no longer believe the system of thought that lead to that conclusion.

I assert that man is in fact natural not supernatural, and that the changes man makes to the world as as natural of a process a trees overgrowing a grassland to make a forest or an ocean eroding away an island.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#77

Post by sacrosancty »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #43
spchampion2 wrote: post #7

> But this fallacy has been repeatedly exposed. For one, the organisations that are supposed to certify that indeed enough tree-planting has taken place do not have the tools to verify that the declared emissions will definitely be absorbed. Another problem is that many offsetting activities do not actually offset anything. > A recent investigation into the world’s largest carbon standard found that 94 percent of its…

> When I looked at the offset market in the past, I realized that it was one of the few markets where both the buyer and seller are perfectly happy with fraud. > I can't think of many other markets where this dynamic exists. Recycling market is the same - UK government pays you to recycle plastic, £60 per tonne. You find someone in a 3rd world country that will take it off your hands for £30 per tonne, and pocket the…

They must be recycling enough of it to recover their £30. They may dump the unrecyclable parts into the ocean, but nobody doubts there are unrecyclable things mixed in with it. It can't be 100% recycled.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#78

Post by chimprich »

slothtrop wrote: post #63
Gasp0de wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it will kill your children?

Why entertain a hypothetical that isn't anywhere near reflective of what is projected?

It's a bit of an unnecessarily emotional way to frame the debate, but climate change under current projections will kill a lot of people, including children. Realistic forecasts suggest many deaths from increased natural disasters, air pollution, famine, drought, heat stress, poverty and war.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#79

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Xymist wrote: post #58
bambax wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could make it harder and harder to use/own a car: more expensive, difficult to park, slower to use, etc. Then people would seek out other solutions by themselves, be it using a bike, public transport, or moving less (asking for more remote work options, for instance). We don't seem to even be trying to do this and it's depressing.

Perhaps don't advocate making good things in life shittier in order to make comparatively shit options you happen to approve of look good by comparison? If you want public transport to be an even barely acceptable alternative to cars: - Make it door to door, no connections, no hiking to or from a station/stop/port at either end - Make it on demand, no timetables or shortages - Make it actually show up, and not be sus…

If you want cars to be an even barely acceptable alternative to public transport:

- They should not be stuck in traffic jams

- They should not kill children, pedestrians and cyclists

- They should be electric without heavy and polluting batteries

These aren't unreasonable requirements, or some utopia situation. They're all things that trains and subways provide that cars do not.

> - Make a ticket cost the same as or less than the cost in petrol (or electricity) for the same journey

In your utopia, do I get a free car and only spend money on petrol for travel? It it a country that provides free car repairs and service, need no insurance, MOT checks, and has no road tax?

In Britain the fixed costs of owning a car exceed £2000 a year before you've driven a single mile.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#80

Post by yabones »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #55

The article accuses greentech and carbon-credits of genocide: "While guaranteeing high returns, this deception is tantamount to the genocide of the hundreds of millions of people who will perish from the effects of climate change within the next century because things are that bad." That's pretty harsh. But, if you think "things are that bad," let's also consider the moral culpability of people trying to stop the sci…

From my understanding, there's two major issues with geoengineering.

1. You have to keep doing it forever, and likely accelerate the rate at which you do. If rapid decarbonization doesn't happen in tandem, you'll need to be adding more and more aerosols over time. And the second you stop, you get a sudden whiplash climate change event that has a hundred years of warming in one. The risk of that catastrophe isn't worthwhile to many.

2. Most of the compounds that are cheap and effective are both ozone depleters and cause acid rain. The one studied most is Sulfur Dioxide, which would cause ocean acidification after many years of sustained use.

IMO, it's a fundamentally bad idea because it's using one form of pollution to fix the problem created by another. The second and third order effects could be unforeseen and catastrophic.

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