91–100 of 244 posts
Better satellites and other aerial survey data has determined that oil and gas related methane emissions are far, far higher than industry reports. Everywhere independent researchers look along the production, transmission, distribution and end use pipeline they find more leakage than has been assumed because industry has provided the numbers the assumptions are based on for years. Along some particularly leaky produ…
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In Massachusetts, Lost and Unaccounted for Gas (LAUG) is estimated per mile of pipe, rather than evaluated by regulators or even industry. It is a simple multiplication problem with little bearing on reality. Consumers bear the cost of LAUG while the utilities are guaranteed a 10% profit on their infrastructure expenses. This, along with subsidies for leak prone pipe replacement, leads to needless investment in outmo…
Meanwhile in California, PG&E underfunded maintenance, perhaps because regulators squeezed too hard? Eventually we had things like the San Bruno gas explosion and wildfires so bad that PG&E went bankrupt. Finding the optimal amount of regulation seems difficult. It seems like too blunt an instrument. Incentives are no substitute for technical people who want to do what's right.
Better satellites and other aerial survey data has determined that oil and gas related methane emissions are far, far higher than industry reports. Everywhere independent researchers look along the production, transmission, distribution and end use pipeline they find more leakage than has been assumed because industry has provided the numbers the assumptions are based on for years. Along some particularly leaky produ…
In Massachusetts, Lost and Unaccounted for Gas (LAUG) is estimated per mile of pipe, rather than evaluated by regulators or even industry. It is a simple multiplication problem with little bearing on reality. Consumers bear the cost of LAUG while the utilities are guaranteed a 10% profit on their infrastructure expenses. This, along with subsidies for leak prone pipe replacement, leads to needless investment in outmo…
Isn't both ends of a pipe metered? Even if not every pope is metered, at the very least there should be metering at the point of bulk purchase (eg. from a LNG ship) to the end user (gas meter at a home). How hard is it to compare how much is put into the pipe vs how much comes out?
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How does that solve the problem of fossil fuel emissions?
It can decrease the solar exposure of the earth and potentially decrease temperature, doesn’t address fossil fuel pollution but it does mitigate the impacts of fossil fuel CO2.
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Short of China and India voluntarily holding themselves to the same standards as Western Europe and the US for free, we are not going to avoid catastrophic global warming. The good news is, while we may not be able to prevent climate change, we are not powerless against it. The Dutch know how to win the fight against sea level rise. Middle Eastern architecture knows how to keep people cool even with >50°C air tempera…
> Short of China and India voluntarily holding themselves to the same standards as Western Europe and the US China and India emit significantly less CO2 per capita than Western Europe and the US [0] - and that's ignoring the fact they do all of our manufacturing. [0] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
Which would be great if CO2's heat trapping properties depended on the per capita emissions of their nation of origin. Unfortunately CO2 molecules don't know where they came from and can't adjust their heat trapping properties accordingly, and instead it's about absolute amounts as ppm of the atmosphere.
But there's a silver lining for China and India - which is that even small reductions in their per capita emissions cash out as massive reductions in absolute terms.
So in terms of bang for the buck per-capita wise, they are the top candidates for emissions savings.
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Not sure if your answer is intended to be serious or sarcastic. But there is a justifiable argument for it -- you have new humans to take care of, who have needs, and the same moral claim as anyone else in the world nto address those needs using fossil fuels. On the other hand, there's no reason to think that an increase in the number of countries is a valid excuse to increase emissions.
Leading to the conclusion: those few people (government) who have the greatest influence over the problem (over the countries with the largest emissions in real terms, not per person) somehow don't have the responsibility. It's true that if a country splits into two countries, that doesn't give them a right to emit more collectively. However, it does mean that each country now has little control over what the other o…
I'd say that per capita emissions is a reasonable measure of scoring how much a country and its people are doing to make climate change worse (or better). And, while not perfectly so, it does a reasonable job as being an actionable metric for how sustainable a country's standard of living is. "America (14.4 t/cap/yr) should try to be more like Japan (8.6 t/cap/yr)" is a reasonable take on how the US can reduce its per-capita emissions, and what changes might take it there. "America (4.8 Gt/yr) should try to be more like the United Arab Emirates (220 Mt/yr)" ends up being rather bad advice.
And while the standard of living in Iceland is quite nice, I doubt that there's any practical way that either China or the United States could reduce their emissions to that level (3.5 Mt/yr) in the short term without millions of people starving to death in the process. It wouldn't be realistic or fair for Iceland to demand that the US cut its emissions to Icelandic levels on an absolute basis (but very fair and reasonable to demand that the US cut to Icelandic levels on a per-capita basis).
In terms of how much responsibility a government has, well... certainly governments that govern more people do have more leverage, and with larger total emissions, there are more opportunities to cut. But if there is any non-zero level that we may consider an acceptable emissions target, surely this level should be proportional to a country's population. And when it comes to international agreements, it's reasonable to ask China and India to make cuts, and it's very reasonable for China and India to say "OK we'll make cuts, but we expect small rich countries like Canada to pull their weight, and if they don't, we won't either".
And when that happens, per-capita emissions is the only sensible way to gauge if those countries are pulling their weight.
There are, after all, a lot of countries, and while the top four (China, US, India, Russia) emit 57% of the total, the rest emit the other 43% of that total, with no single country among them emitting over 2.9%. Even cutting China, the US, India, and Russia's emissions to zero would only cut global emissions in about half, and that's really still not enough to solve the problem, so the little countries will have to pitch in.
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It can decrease the solar exposure of the earth and potentially decrease temperature, doesn’t address fossil fuel pollution but it does mitigate the impacts of fossil fuel CO2.
What are the material requirements for this proposal?
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The article was written in 2019 before a number of extraordinarily significant events with major climate policy impacts: - a noticeable and rapid dip in emissions has proven to be viable due to COVID lockdowns - Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Europe and the US to accelerate plans to diversify energy generation away from natural gas - China’s insanely rapid growth in green energy production domestically It seems…
This data is good for cognitive behavioral therapy and not much else. In that, the world is certainly not going to end, and maybe it's helpful to look at some data that trends positive in order to inspire hope. But we are committed now to living in a world that will be radically different and less pleasant for a lot of people. How fast these trends improve will determine the scope and magnitude of degraded pleasentne…
Committed?
We will have extra energy for carbon capture on the next decade. This is a problem we can solve. Not before it gets worse, but we can stop it from being permanent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article was written in 2019 before a number of extraordinarily significant events with major climate policy impacts: - a noticeable and rapid dip in emissions has proven to be viable due to COVID lockdowns - Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Europe and the US to accelerate plans to diversify energy generation away from natural gas - China’s insanely rapid growth in green energy production domestically It seems…
This data is good for cognitive behavioral therapy and not much else. In that, the world is certainly not going to end, and maybe it's helpful to look at some data that trends positive in order to inspire hope. But we are committed now to living in a world that will be radically different and less pleasant for a lot of people. How fast these trends improve will determine the scope and magnitude of degraded pleasentne…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Say Brazil floods this year, and next year, and the year after that. What do you think will happen next? What will happen is Brazil will start planning for it, and then they'll be fine. There will be an adjustment period, and then, life goes on.
This is what people don’t get about places like Florida. The people in Florida are in fact aware that it storms and floods, thats why the house is built on stilts with metal storm shutters.
Like literally it’s already too expensive to keep doing it without a massive funnel of taxpayer money into peoples beach houses. It’s literally only viable to keep doing that by leeching off the largesse of the taxpayer and other homeowners in less dangerous locales.
Florida also has the additional problem that it’s literally built on karst topology, it’s limestone riddled with tunnels and sinkholes so water comes right up under it, you can’t even pump the cities dry like the Netherlands.