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The world is losing the war against climate change

economist.com

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Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#281

Post by mrob »

Jill_the_Pill wrote: post #274
mrob wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They very likely can, but it would require a massive program of nuclear power plant building. This is unacceptable to environmentalists, who prefer to pretend that people will voluntarily reduce their quality of life.

I just read that the warmer oceans are making it hard to cool nuclear plants.

The classic hyperboloid cooling tower works by evaporation, and the latent heat of vaporization of water is high, so a few degrees difference in the temperature of the make-up water isn't going to matter. It only matters with the more environmentally harmful once-through cooling, where the waste heat is dumped directly into the sea.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#282

Post by DoctorOetker »

kang wrote: post #21
acd wrote: post #16

We should switch to a carbon/anti pollution based crypto currency that is mined in a earth friendly way. All goods and transports and all other pollution is such a system should be accounted for. As it now with the current economic system it is too easy to offset the cost on somebody else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

solar mining in space and beaming the results to earth https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/897631806899597312

there is no fundamental reason cryptocurrency "mining" should be energy-intensive, it was & is merely an unnecessary side-effect of the first cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) and its spin-off's / copycats. Sadly a large fraction of the crypto proponent "community" misinterprets the unnecessary energy expenditure as the source of "value", while the majority of the crypto opponents similarily consider it an unavoidable side-effect of cryptocurrencies and hence an argument against cryptocurrencies in general...

check out the Algorand papers to learn more

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#283

Post by Symmetry »

btrettel wrote: post #280
Symmetry wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are bad but they're a pretty small problem compared to airplanes. A single trip across the Atlantic and back is about equivalent to commuting in a SUV for a year. Per passenger-mile cars and planes use about the same amount of carbon but people tend to take far longer plane trips.

I agree in principle. But it seems to me that the marginal cost in terms of CO2 emissions is not exactly clear for flying. Whether I fly or not, the planes will fly. My addition to a single plane in terms of the weight is not that significant. It becomes a more murky economic argument. I agree people should not fly, but this is more of a collective action type approach in my view. It takes roughly a plane load of peo…

If people stop or reduce flying one by one there's clearly some point at which a stepwise reduction in service occurs. Your are unlikely to be the person who triggers this but the reduction will also be proportionately larger than your contribution too. So you should think of yourself as reducing carbon emissions by the person-mile amount in expectation even if it will never actually be that amount.

Or to frame it another way, when you fly you're playing Russian roulette with adding an amount of CO2 to the atmosphere dwarfing anything else you might be causing.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#284

Post by ZeroGravitas »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #12

If you look at global power sector emissions from 1998 to 2018, you'll see that while we have dramatically improved upon the energy intensity (energy/capita) and even are making improvements on carbon intensity (carbon/capita), but the sad reality is this: we are still using around 35% coal power in 2018, the same as we did in 1998. And the power sector is the easiest sector to decarbonize, by the way. If you look at…

Why does the use of fossil fuels in chemical or plastic production factor into climate change?

I've seen this mentioned before and didn't really understand it, and interestingly that person also mentioned Vaclav Smil (in fact, it may have been an article written by him).

Is there something I'm missing or is that conflating two realted but different things for no obvious reason? Or does carbon end up in the air due to plastic production and chemical feedstock usage?

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#285

Post by DoctorOetker »

batteryhorse wrote: post #157
ryanx435 wrote: post #65

"Climate change" is the athiests' version of Armageddon.

It's true. Climate change really is modern day religion. A volcanic eruption is more likely to cause the climate to change. The war on climate change suggests that humans are capable of preventing a volcano from erupting. The poles are shifting as well. Pollution is a separate issue, of course we should keep everything clean, but when the climate stops changing, that probably means the planet is dead, like Mars (sett…

the number of volcanos erupting in some interval (say 10 years) is large enough that you can roughly treat it as a constant source of CO2, but at the same time the volcano is emitting igneous rock (i.e. the magma with CO2 removed), which will reabsorb the CO2 over a very long timespan... so yes volcanos emit large amounts of CO2, and commensurate amounts of CO2 absorbing igneous rock, in geological timescales they cancel

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#286

Post by Reason077 »

swebs wrote: post #145
radicalbyte wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking into carbon capture recently because it's going to be vital to slowing down the warming (and buying us another 50 years for the transition). What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country. We need a global carbon tax and we need…

>What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country. Then what happens when the trees are fully grown? Processing them for industry would just reintroduce the carbon back into the environment. Letting them stay in the forest is nice, but you would qu…

> "Then what happens when the trees are fully grown? Processing them for industry would just reintroduce the carbon back into the environment."

A forest is only a significant carbon sink while it is growing. Harvesting and replanting a mature forest is the best thing to do with it.

Obviously you want to use the wood for construction, or other long-term applications. Well-constructed buildings can last for hundreds of years (and after that, the timber can be recycled). Long term carbon storage.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#287

Post by gizmo686 »

coryrc wrote: post #168
vowelless wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's disappointing to me that planting trees is the best we can come up with. One would hope that we could work on a 10x, technological solution.

It's generating useful material for us and fully biodegradable at the end of its lifecycle, and even self-replicates. What's not to love?

> What's, not to love?

Biodegradable. That means that at the end of its life it decomposes and returns its recourses to the environment. Normally this is good, but not when the goal is to remove a resource from the environment.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#288

Post by serpix »

coryrc wrote: post #173
swebs wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country. Then what happens when the trees are fully grown? Processing them for industry would just reintroduce the carbon back into the environment. Letting them stay in the forest is nice, but you would qu…

Build housing out of them. There's a 14-story skyscraper going up in Portland, OR made of cross-laminated timber; basically no concrete.

those type of houses are mostly made of glue and plastic. There is a ridiculous amount of toxic glue in modern wood buildings.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#289

Post by Scarblac »

marcosdumay wrote: post #228
ashelmire wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was pretty interesting. So I looked up how many trees there are per person: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20... The US has 716 per person. Sadly, it looks like China and India are the worst culprits: "Brazil had 301 billion trees (1,494 per person), Canada 318 billion (8,953 per person), and China 139 billion (102 trees per person). Among highly populous countries, India (po…

So, if you plant 3 times your current forest sizes into wood harvesting forests, you would capture all of your CO2 emissions into a solid. That's probably not reasonable (but I'm not sure). Even then, if you double your forest area, and cut the wood from there you'll offset some 20% of your emission already. It's not a silver bullet, but it is something.

Then add that many trees again each following year.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#290

Post by Scarblac »

coryrc wrote: post #173
swebs wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country. Then what happens when the trees are fully grown? Processing them for industry would just reintroduce the carbon back into the environment. Letting them stay in the forest is nice, but you would qu…

Build housing out of them. There's a 14-story skyscraper going up in Portland, OR made of cross-laminated timber; basically no concrete.

At 1000 trees per year per person, that's a lot of building per person.
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