241–250 of 366 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I said "people who care about the climate emergency", where did you see "royalists & co"?
Who are they? They all are for growth, increased productivity, increase standard of living, global commerce races to the bottom They want to keep everything exactly the same but somehow stamp it "green"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ok... but now we're damaging ecosystems by installing hydroelectric power stations and dams and such in these areas. Besides, not every country can effectively utilize hydroelectric power. Germany, like other countries, should be investing in a mix of power sources. You probably want your backbone to be nuclear and then renewables where it makes sense with a goal (at least in western countries) of also eliminating re…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale [...] The unsolved problem is extracting You answered it yourself: it's not possible to get rid of the excess CO2. Think about conservation of energy: we extracted energy by burning stuff and producing CO2. We cannot revert that with less energy than we extracted from doing it in the first place. > It sounds scary, but is actually safe Famous last word…
I agree that it's not easy, but we could in theory use solar energy, which is abundant and cheap. 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 entirely, we will just end up with less energy in total. We most certainly won't end up with twice as much.
And that's assuming that we could extract the CO2 from the atmosphere with close to the amount of energy we got by burning it in the first place. Which is wrong. CO2 in the atmosphere is actually very costly to extract in terms of energy.
It's not that it's not easy. It's practically impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One not very well known fact is that even if we stop emissions today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for many centuries. They way I think/hope we can fix this is two parts: 1. The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphe…
Best would be to capture CO2, and then solidify the carbon to a compact stable stable state by taking away the oxygen. Then we have a highly concentrated pure carbon form that we can just bury underground. Or add some hydrogen and get this liquid state that we can pump back into those empty underground reservoirs. But maybe we should stop taking it out in the first place...
We already cannot stop burning oil today because the economy would implode. I don't think that it is reasonable to think that not only we could stop burning oil entirely, AND at the same time produce more energy than we got from oil just for extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere... And the reality is even worse than that, because on top of all that* we would need more energy to... live.
It's important people understand that we cannot extract the CO2 once it's out there. It's practically impossible, period.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One problem with renewables is that they rely a lot on electronics, which relies a lot on petrochemicals (just to build them) and on globalisation. In a world without abundant oil, can we keep producing and maintaining as many solar panels as we need? Nuclear is different in that regard.
"renewables increase oil dependency" now that is an argument I haven't seen before.
So the question is: what can we preserve once we don't have oil anymore? And my point was that renewables are piloted with electronics, and we haven't tried building and maintaining that system in a world without oil.
People like to extrapolate the growth of renewables, but they tend to forget that the current growth is totally subsidised by oil: your solar panel was built and transported with oil, period.
If you are serious about the "after the end of oil", you have to wonder if that system works, at scale, without oil. Don't you?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we assume that the forests will regrow to their former strength then the fires are indeed not all the consequential. The trees release the stored CO2 when they burn, and new plants will take up an equivalent amount of CO2 again when they grow. The CO2 sequestered in a forest is more or less just the biomass in it (some is in the soil, but not that much) But if climate change leads to permanently losing those fores…
If we figured out how to store chopped down trees somewhere where the wood doesn't break down, that would be a really effective way to get CO2 out of the air! Easier said than done, of course. Sinking millions of trees to the bottom of the ocean might be the most practical way.
There is no "new normal", we are in a slope. As long as we emit CO2, the climate will get worse. Year after year. With effects like fires accelerating it, or the loss of the Amazon (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?) that will just result in more CO2 being released. We don't have to adapt to the situation as it is now , because it is pretty much the best scenario. We have to adapt to the fact that it will get…
Worth comparing Lula versus other Brazilian leader’s records on this. It looks like left-wing leaders are more likely to prioritise climate action because it’s a collective problem/resource
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it's not easy, but we could in theory use solar energy, which is abundant and cheap. I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned.
> 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…
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, you'll find that they net increase by 16gt per year or so.
Implying that if we ceased all human CO2 emissions, the atmospheric levels would start recovering at around half the rate they're currently increasing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One not very well known fact is that even if we stop emissions today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for many centuries. They way I think/hope we can fix this is two parts: 1. The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphe…
> The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale [...] The unsolved problem is extracting You answered it yourself: it's not possible to get rid of the excess CO2. Think about conservation of energy: we extracted energy by burning stuff and producing CO2. We cannot revert that with less energy than we extracted from doing it in the first place. > It sounds scary, but is actually safe Famous last word…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?) Not even close. Look at satellite imaging. Not only is the Amazon far from lost, the jungles in Africa/Borneo/PNG all look to be doing surprisingly okay.
The theory is that it can reach a point where it won't be able to survive, and therefore it will die. We are around that limit. It may well be that it has already passed it and therefore it will die. I didn't mean "it is not there anymore", I meant "we won't be able to preserve it, it may already be too late for that".