131–140 of 365 posts
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There will always be a need for on-demand power. Renewables are great, but cannot deal with peaks as easily and capacity is dependent on weather.
Hydro is renewable, can deal with peaks and not directly dependent on weather. Use its power down when in need of electricity. Bring water up hill when too much electricity is available.
Two weeks ago here in Umbria, Italy the heat was extreme. It was 40°C without a breeze of air, it literally felt like braathing hot air. One morning while I was walking I couldn't believe the amount of dry leaves on the street, by pictures people would have guessed that it was autumn.
I have a really good tolerance to high temperatures but this time I got home very dizzy.
Hope is not too late to revert the current situation, but realistically year after year temperatures have been raising steadly.
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Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. We have solved fusion at a distance with solar and batteries. We're arguing speed and cost of deployment for the collection and storage system. The technology drops in cost rapidly, it lasts for decades with no moving parts and minimal maintenance. It can be trivially recycled today with no further technology advancements needed. It fails…
> Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year Sure, the sun is incredible, but our capacity of actually using that power is the bottleneck. We still have to have energy to dig up the materials and manufacture the panels and batteries and deploy them and such.
Ember Energy: From scale to system: navigating the next phase of China’s battery storage - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/from-scale-to-syste... - July 16th, 2026
China Battery Storage Use Surges After Policy Shift, Ember Energy Says - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-15/china-bat... | https://archive.today/QBXxV - July 15th, 2026
China Crosses Energy Milestone as Coal Falls Below 50% of Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110187 - July 2026
Nearly a third of new heavy truck sales in China Electric in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676673 - June 2026 ("China targeting EVs to make up 40% of heavy truck sales by 2030 - EVs to make up 20% of heavy truck fleet by 2030 - Trade-in schemes will prioritise EV trucks to boost adoption")
China Is The World’s First Electrostate - https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/26/china-is-the-worlds-fir... - May 26th, 2025
China’s Oil & Gas Giant Sinopec Says Peak Oil Demand Already Happened In China - https://cleantechnica.com/2023/10/11/chinas-oil-gas-giant-si... - October 11th, 2023
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As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power, climate change cannot be that urgent.
Nuclear Power is useless in a climate change scenario. France and Spain are having to shut down their nuclear plants because they can't cool them during heatwaves: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/weather/extreme-weather-events/fra...
"The crisis in France has claimed dozens of lives, with 40 people drowning while attempting to call off from the heat since June 18"
Call off should be "cool off".
And forgive me if this is a stupid question, but don't nuclear power plants produce enough energy that they could power their own cooling? Why do they have to rely on the free cooling provided by a river?
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As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power, climate change cannot be that urgent.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "like Germany", but singling out Germany seems a strange choice given that the main global offenders are orders of magnitude worse in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions. Germany is currently producing more than half of its electricity from renewables. Check out this year's edition of Ember's Global Electricity Review [0]. The table on p. 78 lists the following five countries…
Yeah, other emit more, but the rank stupidity of this environmental vandalism deserves the scorn it gets!
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As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power, climate change cannot be that urgent.
This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Meanwhile power from nuclear plants are very expensive, comparatively. So why should we invest in nuclear energy? I have the impression a lot of the debate about nuclea…
They had this as an explicit choice, and they demanded other parties went along with closing the nuclear power plants. They knew, it was discussed, that keeping them open would help with global warming, and they explicitly chose against that. Then they stood by that choice, and kept standing by it even up to 2023.
Now you obviously can't fault them for the fact that the Ukraine war would make things 10x worse (by forcing Germany back onto coal and LNG), but you CAN fault them for making that choice, and standing by it. This makes them the main responsible party for the current electricity prices problem in Germany.
European green parties have explicitly chosen that their other goals mattered more than global warming. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are absolutely 100% unwilling to make compromises elsewhere to help fix global warming, when they are the ones making a compromise.
And, frankly, if we can't compromise as a country in parliament we may as well stop attempting to do anything about global warming. Green parties are demanding big compromises from everybody else, but cannot give a millimeter themselves? Obviously everybody else is just going to fight them tooth and nail, forever, and we'll get nowhere.
I think that is what is meant by that question.
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Even if we stopped emissions today, Earth will keep warming up for a couple of decades. We’re not at equilibrium temperature for the current CO2 levels.
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You don't seem to be denying human caused, or maybe you'd say accelerated, climate change. If we could flip a switch and spread the future warming over a millennium instead of half a century I think everyone would take that deal.
bah, all is not lost. Climate change will create winners and losers. Losers -- anyone on the equator or within the the tropic of cancer/capricorn. Winners -- those outside those regions or with enough $ to adapt. Give me solar geoengineering, 2x increase in R&D spending on reducing fossil fuel usage, and funding for direct carbon capture (and a financial incentive to do it). It's going to get worse before it gets bet…
Russia and Canada might end up winning from this, but for everyone else it seems like a big negative, with some silver linings
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As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power, climate change cannot be that urgent.
This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Meanwhile power from nuclear plants are very expensive, comparatively. So why should we invest in nuclear energy? I have the impression a lot of the debate about nuclea…
A sensible global policy could be:
- Tax carbon positive energy consumption to death. I.e. coal, oil or natural gas.
- Tax (close to) carbon neutral energy consumption at a fixed high rate, e.g. solar, hydro, nuclear or wind. Tax nuclear separately because of its other side effects if you want.
- Use the proceeds to negatively tax carbon negative energy consumption only.
Not that I have any illusions of any policy even remotely like this ever getting enacted. Zero consensus on earth and too many dangerous and selfish idiots.
Our children will be boiling frogs and angry.
People are truly having a climate change discussion fatigue. They hear all the time from politicians, celebrities, influencers, etc. that they should stop eating meat, should not drive non-electric vehicles, should not use AC, reduce consumption, and all other bullshit while the people preaching those have started wars that emit billions of tons of carbon, travel on their private planes to climate change summits, tak…
well I have good news! normal people don't have to sacrifice, fossil fuel companies do. if the govt mandates something (like with the ozone layer, or with lead acid battery recycling), something that was once impossible becomes possible.