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Europe's fires are just the start

economist.com

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Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#281

Post by JumpCrisscross »

adrianN wrote: post #269
palata wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn’t do well economically Well, economy is fossil fuels. In the world after fossil fuels, we may have to redefine what "economy" means.

That seems to have very low chances of success.

If it were true there is no point trying to avert climate change. It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset.

Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense, so it actually makes sense to try and address this problem.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#282

Post by markvdb »

looperhacks wrote: post #160
markvdb wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just replacing expensive fossil energy with cheap renewables and storage doesn't help. The problem is Jevons paradox. Cheaper energy means more consumption. 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…

Jevons paradox is often claimed, but largely irrelevant in this case, imo. If the demand rises, the price rises again, as well. It doesn't force anybody to keep using fossil energy

Price elasticity definitely is a thing, but I'd argue not in the way you see it.

Have a somewhat competitive energy market and falling production prices like we have for carbon neutral energy. What do you think will happen? The market will gobble up any and all production.

Look at what we currently have even with largely fossil energy. The substantial US/EU delta in energy price and energy consumption. Notice how similar the deltas are?

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#283

Post by abandonliberty »

margalabargala wrote: post #248
palata wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned. We're talking about using more energy than the one we got from the fossil fuels we burned, right? So that means that on top of replacing fossil fuels with renewables, we would need to more than double it in order to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. This, in itself, is impossible. Already we won't be able to replace fossil fuels e…

So the neat thing is that this isn't at all true. The total annual CO2 budget of the earth is tremendous; less than 5% of CO2 emissions each year into the atmosphere are from humans. Volcanism, photosynthesis, and other natural sources outweigh humans by far. In numbers, ballpark 730gigatons from natural sources and about 30gt from humans. If you look at the amount the CO2 levels increase each year in the atmosphere,…

It's unclear which message you're trying to convey, but your math checks out.

The net CO2 impact of natural processes is -19Gt/yr. Humans add +37G/yr for a net +18Gt. If we stopped everything, you'd expect -19Gt/yr; however, natural sinks like the ocean will start off-gassing, cutting the improvement to about half.

Because of how long this switch will take, most IPCC options need 100 to 1000 Gt of net CO2 removal by the end of the century to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#284

Post by Paradigma11 »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #36
cbmuser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power, climate change cannot be that urgent.

While I agree that the ban is stupid, Hungarys nuclear power plant closed today due to lack of water: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea...

Thats not a property of nuclear power plants but of having been built some 60 years ago when nobody took that into account.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#285

Post by spwa4 »

OKRainbowKid wrote: post #186
spwa4 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point of this question is that the Green party of Germany chose in 2003 that closure of nuclear power plants was more important than global warming. 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…

I'm sorry, but your comment to me just reads like a long rant about the Green party.

Sorry, let me put a short rant then. The Green party of Germany forced through the shutdown of nuclear power in Germany and stood by that decision, even when it became clear the already bad impact on climate change it had was made 10x worse by the war in Ukraine (forcing Germany to switch to Coal and LNG). Meanwhile this "Green" party, unwilling to make compromises themselves, is using climate change to demand enormous compromises from everyone else, guaranteeing yet another fight to stop climate change legislation.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#287

Post by spwa4 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #204
modo_mario wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is proportionally expensive for one because we build a lot less and lose insititional knowledge and manufacturing capacity. Secondly because of ridiculous legislation and europes extreme ability to fuck with it politically. Thirdly because we don't count the gas plant to cover the intermitency of the renewables as part of the cost and if they'd take those out they'd find they run out of options for the cheap…

- nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them. China is not currently experiencing cost price reduction in nuclear. Maybe we'd experience scale reductions in cost if we were to build at a much larger scale than that, but given that the world is already spending hundreds of billions just to build a handful of plants.... - nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands > I still remem…

> nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them

Let's not pretend price is any concern of the people shutting down nuclear power. That's just not what it's about. Here is their page on the subject, and as you can clearly read: nuclear power "has no future".

https://www.gruene-bundestag.de/unsere-politik/was-unsere-po...

Second, Germany would not have to rebuild nuclear power, as the green party clearly shows. They only need to reopen existing plants.

It is STILL the case that reopening the existing plants would lower prices - a bit. But it would make a very large difference for German CO2 production because coal powerplants are doing baseload now and would be displaced by the nuclear plants. And if the Ukraine and Iran wars keep going it will lower prices a lot (or rather it would prevent another large price spike)

https://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/de/aktuelles/gasverstromung-und...

> nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands

This is not a good argument given that the alternative was to switch to gas for most of the baseload, then lose the gas due to the war in Ukraine, to then switch to coal and LNG (LNG might technically be gas, but due to additional inefficiency it's worse than coal), and now losing all gas supplies (ie. from Qatar) and being forced to use even worse LNG supplies from the US.

Hell you'd think the greens would massively sponsor chemical research into LNG, since LNG efficiency is actually worse than what our bodies do to make fat. In other words: turning gas into liquid fuel (not LNG, actual liquid fuel) is possible to do with a catalyst at much higher efficiency than turning it into LNG. We don't know how, despite the fact that your body is probably doing it (to produce fatty acids) right now as you read this. You want to help climate change? Let's figure that one out, that would actually help CO2 output AND lower prices.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#288

Post by AlecSchueler »

Hasz wrote: post #101

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…

Where "winning" means surviving in relative comfort until global society disintegrates into a constant state of famine and war and you run out of local resources.

> Give me...

Who's going to give you any of this in time?

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#290

Post by mikhailfranco »

jmclnx wrote: post #77

So Economist is now stating Climate Change is an issue. Where was that magazine in the 80s and 90s. Oh, the were writing how fossil fuels are still a good investment and are still the future. And I expect they stated Trump was the better choice in 2020 and 2024. So in 2026, this magazine (and others) are reporting how +2C will be far worse than +1.5C. How about reporting stopping at +2C is a pipe dream. We are headin…

Their infamous editorial Drowning in oil (4 March 1999) bottom-ticked the oil price.
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