191–200 of 221 posts
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Nice! Add your company to AirMiners, the largest index of companies mining carbon fro the air: http://airminers.org We'll feature it on the top of the list.
Wow nice index, will add ASAP, your site need the lock (https) by the way. Thanks.
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Oh, I'm sure liberals will gloat and be happy the grumpy conservatives are at the table, and everyone will agree on the importance of the problem. Then both sides will fight over who funds the solution. Liberals say big oil creates the problem and must fund the solution, conservatives will say the public demands the oil and is affected by the problem and must fund the solution. Nobody will agree to anything and the w…
Most of the CO2 is produced in China and India so I doubt the conversation in the USA will be even relevant.
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The nuclear fleets peak was decades ago when environmental and safety regulation was more permissive than it was today, and the long term problems and threats were not as well known. Even a handful of articles about planning applications being declined is not evidence of your prophecy of significant price increases for solar and wind bound to show up, or just "big challenges" as you put it as indistinctly as it is un…
> The nuclear fleets peak was decades ago when environmental and safety regulation was more permissive than it was today, and the long term problems and threats were not as well known. That doesn't stand to evidence. The Browns Ferry fire in 1975 was the real tipping point for regulations. After 1979, the regulations and QA requirements were very serious. The improved quality cost the plants more up front but they be…
Its not some people not liking nuclear that is its problem, its few people are willing to pay for nuclear. Nuclears land, water, staffing and security costs are not low impact and not cheap which is why its not winning investments now, despite the powerful politics which likes to spend big money on near permanent assignments, and plenty of PR, nobody can justify it.
EROI of renewables is fine and continuing to improve. Nuclear's calculations always assume the plants will stay competitive and be run for 40+ years at full capacity (hello renewable competition again). Renewables assume the equipment will not be extended after 20 or cheaply upgraded, but they don't need to fiddle benchmarks they are already far quicker and cheaper to build and run. Fwiw good luck with something showing up.
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> That's a big "if" though. No, that's pretty much how the CCS debate has been going. Norway announced a big project to cleanup a gas plant with CCS used for an oil refinery. The plant was built, but without CCS. When Germany built its last wave of new coal power plants a common argument was that "the CO2 emissions are no big problem, we'll add CCS later". Which never happened. The promise of CCS as an excuse for con…
I always wonder how one could enforce CCS via forestation. How can you be sure that the forest won't be cut down and never replanted? After all the idea behind capture certificates is to buy and forget.
You can see a lot of examples where the planting is managed forestry that will be re-harvested. As long as it wasn’t recently a forested area, then it’s still a valid long-term carbon store for as long as the re-planting never stops or the final harvest is not taken. That’s a pretty big ‘if’ though, and the commercial interest that sits atop the arrangement is not aligned with a positive outcome. You’d also have to account for the output production of the felled wood to be sure of the benefit/cost to carbon capture. If a significant portion of the logged timber survives in some manufactured form for a long time that nudges the dial in a positive direction.
Also monoculture forests, characteristic of commercial interest, are a problem in terms of the multi-faceted nature of the climate change we’re attempting to halt/reverse. One of the big impacts of climate change is loss of biodiversity, but monoculture forestry does little to support nature and in many ways is akin to concreting over the area. Diverse native plantings that support wildlife and promote humus buildup is far more desirable to reclaim carbon AND provide much-needed refuge to threatened species.
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So what? I thought the goal was to solve climate change, not to spite the oil companies.
You've struck on something, here. For a lot of people, those two are tied up together, to the point that there are people more concerned with punishing oil companies than solving climate change.
Nah. We consider companies to be people in a legal sense and they should face justice in that same sense. Asset seizure, restorative justice, and incarceration all have suitable analogues that can be applied to these companies.
But back to the main point, that the two issues are often conflated by people? Also a reasonable position. Where has the profit been sought in extraction of non-renewables and release of CO2? Where should the capital for carbon re-capture and environmental restoration be drawn? The argument is that these two places are one and the same, and this idea has merit.
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Oh, I'm sure liberals will gloat and be happy the grumpy conservatives are at the table, and everyone will agree on the importance of the problem. Then both sides will fight over who funds the solution. Liberals say big oil creates the problem and must fund the solution, conservatives will say the public demands the oil and is affected by the problem and must fund the solution. Nobody will agree to anything and the w…
Most of the CO2 is produced in China and India so I doubt the conversation in the USA will be even relevant.
China and India have enormous populations. Their per-capita emissions are low.
Unless you’re arguing a position that some folks in the world are inherently more deserving of a better quality of their life beyond mere circumstance, it doesn’t make sense to raise the ‘per-nation’ measure of emissions over the per-person measure.
There is greatest scope for emissions reduction in nations where per-capita emissions are highest. American citizens need to be converned primarily about how to reduce America’s emissions. Chinese citizens need to be concerned primarily about how to reduce China’s emissions. Everyone is already best placed to exert political pressure and carry out grassroots change on their respective home turf.
Targets for nations have already been established in inter-governmental negotiations and re-litigating the basic figures in individual citizen discussion is pointless at best, actively distracting at worst.
“First, pluck the beam from your own eye”
CCS is absolutely going to be necessary. So is nuclear. What is the renewable alternative for the cement, steel, shipping, and aviation industries? Environmentalists need to get out of their own way and stop treating good as the enemy of perfect. Some progress is better than no progress. All technologies and approaches will be required. https://mobile.twitter.com/Peters_Glen/status/11948866002552...
This is true. We should be able to reach net-zero emissions in the energy industry by around 2040 (optimistic, but realistic target), and even produce enough clean electricity to power clean electric solutions in transport/agriculture/industrial/appliance sectors (which are the other main contributors to net GHG emissions). The only problem is that a lot of this technology is still missing / not adopting fast enough.…
We’re currently at ~415ppm and that this is the highest the atmospheric level has been in the entire history of humankind. Not human civilisation; humankind.
There’s no future scenario where we achieve neutrality and decide the atmospheric co2 concentration is ‘ideal’.
Apologies for sniping a single snippet of your post, but this bit stuck out to me.
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This is true. We should be able to reach net-zero emissions in the energy industry by around 2040 (optimistic, but realistic target), and even produce enough clean electricity to power clean electric solutions in transport/agriculture/industrial/appliance sectors (which are the other main contributors to net GHG emissions). The only problem is that a lot of this technology is still missing / not adopting fast enough.…
>even induce net cooling if we feel we have overshot the ideal atmospheric carbon level. We’re currently at ~415ppm and that this is the highest the atmospheric level has been in the entire history of humankind. Not human civilisation; humankind. There’s no future scenario where we achieve neutrality and decide the atmospheric co2 concentration is ‘ideal’. Apologies for sniping a single snippet of your post, but this…
Currently, the science is not settled on whether warming has so far been net-good or net-bad.
Everything in life is a trade-off: when the temperature rises, there are more deaths due to extremely high temperatures, but less deaths due to extremely low temperatures. (This is just an analogy, there are countless actual examples of trade-offs in this case)
It may very well be that warming has up until this point, and perhaps even for a little longer, has been and will be a good thing overall. The world has been a lot warmer and a lot colder in relatively recent times.
I'm far more concerned about the effects of air pollution, acidification etc than a slight increase in temperatures (do not misinterpret: I say more concerned, both are concerning)
> You understand that we’re currently at ~415ppm and that this is the highest the atmospheric level has been in the entire history of humankind?
This is also highly misleading. We were well above 500ppm for the entirety of 50mya - 250mya.
Homo sapiens is extremely young, we are born of an ice age. 415ppm is among the lowest CO2 concentrations of all time, ever.
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Most of the CO2 is produced in China and India so I doubt the conversation in the USA will be even relevant.
Whenever this point is brought up it’s suspiciously blind to the concept of per-capita emissions. China and India have enormous populations. Their per-capita emissions are low. Unless you’re arguing a position that some folks in the world are inherently more deserving of a better quality of their life beyond mere circumstance, it doesn’t make sense to raise the ‘per-nation’ measure of emissions over the per-person me…
Suppose a Chinese factory uses electricity supplied by coal to manufacture a product. The product is shipped to the United States aboard a Korean container ship before being shipped by diesel train to Seattle, where it is delivered to a retailer by truck, purchased, plugged into the wall and powered by a combination of hydroelectric and natural gas energy. In this scenario, many of the carbon emissions can be counted as Korean or Chinese even though the end consumer is American.
The flip side of this is that the United States can also directly affect Chinese carbon emissions by simply buying fewer Chinese products.
Edit: Also, since China is a totalitarian dictatorship, it’s not like Chinese people can pressure their government very much.
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You've struck on something, here. For a lot of people, those two are tied up together, to the point that there are people more concerned with punishing oil companies than solving climate change.
Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable position to take. If someone murders a bunch of people, then trains as a trauma surgeon likely capable of saving a bunch of lives, the expectation is that we collectively shrug our shoulders and everything’s fine because it’s likely the final count will come out neutral? Nah. We consider companies to be people in a legal sense and they should face justice in that same sense. Asset se…