121–130 of 178 posts
What are you gonna do about all the nitrogen etc which the plants need? Are there good ways to reextract these nutrients from dead plant material without releasing loads of carbon at the same time?
Oil formed over millions of years at a rate of about 80,000 barrels / year. We consume 36.4 billion barrels of oil per year. That means we consume oil about 455,000 times faster than it was originally produced. And this is just oil; I'm not counting coal and natural gas. Trying to reverse that process by taking a fraction of one year's plant growth and sequestering it is probably 5-6 orders of magnitude too little to…
I want to counter the implication by saying that the problem of solving climate change is easy in concept but complex in implementation.
The concept is that we must reduce GHG in the atmosphere and oceans, and reduce the amount of new GHG added there.
The solution can contain hundreds of minor actions working on concert, some certainly have more impact than others, but they all contribute, such as for example:
- Taxes on emissions.
- Incentives on sustainable actions.
- Local changes such as improved public transportation and cycling.
- Electric transportation.
- Large scale battery storage.
- Renewable energy sources.
- Better insulated houses can avoid peaker plants needed in winter cold snaps for heating, and summer heat wave air conditioning.
- large scale (industrial) carbon capture.
- Re-forestation (where the tree is not immediately burned but instead used long-term in e.g. housing and furniture).
- High speed rail to offset flights.
- Incentivise local tourism rather than long-haul flights for vacations.
- Social changes such as adjusted diet to be better (e.g. less beef, more lamb, poultry, and especially vegetables).
- Right-to-repair and related social changes that lead to a thriving second-hand-market.
For example, the EU Common Charger Directive (aka the USB-C Law) is expected to reduce e-waste by 12 000 tonnes yearly in the medium-long term and reduce GHG emissions ~to~ by 900k tonnes yearly. That may not look like nearly enough in the grand scheme of things, but once you do a handful of those it starts moving the needle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far we are still increasing the rate at which we extract fossil fuels, even with all the investment in renewables and alternate power sources in the last decades ( https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels ). The Jevon paradox seem to still be valid in this, even with a few countries that managed to have most of their energy matrix on clean sources. And with all the time that CO2 remains in the atmosphere it is not…
And that’s why carbon taxes are so beneficial. It’s a shame they’ve been villainized and are unpopular.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that’s why carbon taxes are so beneficial. It’s a shame they’ve been villainized and are unpopular.
The issue is that they do not work. If your constituents made bad investments and are stuck with oil heating because they heard that solar is woke on Fox, you cannot actually have them face the consequences of their actions. You will either not be elected or the media response will be so bad that you won't be able to govern. You will have to bail them out or add exemptions
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far we are still increasing the rate at which we extract fossil fuels, even with all the investment in renewables and alternate power sources in the last decades ( https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels ). The Jevon paradox seem to still be valid in this, even with a few countries that managed to have most of their energy matrix on clean sources. And with all the time that CO2 remains in the atmosphere it is not…
And that’s why carbon taxes are so beneficial. It’s a shame they’ve been villainized and are unpopular.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that’s why carbon taxes are so beneficial. It’s a shame they’ve been villainized and are unpopular.
I am a fan of a carbon tax, but one issue I’ve never seen addressed by proponents is the regressive structure of the tax. Oftentimes the poorest areas are using the most carbon-intensive energy sources and thus stand to be hurt the most by a carbon tax. There is little the average poor person can do to avoid this Similar logic applies for, e.g. EV subsidies - the people most capable of dishing out the cash to secure…
Annoyingly, one big problem is that we've allowed NIMBY's to make it illegal to build homes near jobs, so people who can't afford homes near work are often stuck driving long distances to work through no fault of their own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Coal is finite, a resources stored away over a tremendous period of time, much of it burned in about a century Sure, it's finite, but we will run out of oil and natural gas much faster than of coal. There are centuries worth of known economically viable coal reserves. Even more, if we count low-quality lignite and peat reserves.
Do those 'centuries' include the large increases in power demands across the world, ( as the wider world develops ) and the requirement to replace the missing oil and gas when they run out?
What are you gonna do about all the nitrogen etc which the plants need? Are there good ways to reextract these nutrients from dead plant material without releasing loads of carbon at the same time?
I had a very short back and forth with someone here. One thing makes you wonder about another. You calculate the cost of manufacturing hydrogen from water to feed into a the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia. All you are doing is replacing the existing steam reformer with an electrolysis plant. But the what if is what if you can take a further step and directly create amino acids instead of ammonia. You go why d…
This. It's widely underappreciated how much more efficient solar panels are than plants at harvesting sunlight.
Forget amino acids, those are hard; if we could even just create sugar directly from electrical energy we could save a shit ton of corn being grown and turned into HFCS.
What are you gonna do about all the nitrogen etc which the plants need? Are there good ways to reextract these nutrients from dead plant material without releasing loads of carbon at the same time?
Serious question (I'm not a biologist): How did the nitrogen, etc. get released when the plant material (that became oil) first died and got buried? Is this fundamentally different?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is that they do not work. If your constituents made bad investments and are stuck with oil heating because they heard that solar is woke on Fox, you cannot actually have them face the consequences of their actions. You will either not be elected or the media response will be so bad that you won't be able to govern. You will have to bail them out or add exemptions
This is easily solved. Particularly as industry is such a large contributor to GHG emissions, imposing a carbon tax on industry and possibly even allowing grandfathering allows the costs to be baked in to (only) future considerations, and makes cleaner companies more competitive compared to dirtier ones.