31–40 of 72 posts
How many thousands get to not die because of use of fossil fuels? Just for perspective...
Look to the Haber-Bosch process for just one example of this sustainability.
There’s no free lunch. It came with side effects.
Are the vast majority of these deaths specifically from coal? I didn’t see numbers split out by fossil fuel and thought that’d be interesting.
How about calculating the lives lost by manufacturing solar panels, batteries and wind turbines?
We really need to ramp up on nuclear. Either by building more traditional fission power plants, figuring out fusion, or capturing more of the energy from the giant, infinite nuclear reactor in the sky.
It's too late for nuclear. If the last 30 years had seen R&D anything like wind and solar we'd be in a much better place. And the battle for public opinion is lost. Unfortunately, there's no time left for nuclear (fission), so the best we can do is jump on the renewables bandwagon.
How will renewables keep people warm all winter? Perhaps we could hope for a planet-scale superconducting grid, or a cheap way to make methane from sunlight, but those seem less practical than nuclear, which already works. Though it'd be nice if we poured more investment into "walk away safe" reactor designs.
We really need to ramp up on nuclear. Either by building more traditional fission power plants, figuring out fusion, or capturing more of the energy from the giant, infinite nuclear reactor in the sky.
It's too late for nuclear. If the last 30 years had seen R&D anything like wind and solar we'd be in a much better place. And the battle for public opinion is lost. Unfortunately, there's no time left for nuclear (fission), so the best we can do is jump on the renewables bandwagon.
France was able to go from nothing to getting almost all of their electricity through nuclear in a couple of decades.
It is possible that we will be able to ramp up grid storage enough that we don't have to rely on natural gas to make up for the intermittent nature of renewables, but there is no guarantee that will happen.
Saying "it is too late" or "there is no time" for other options ignores the fact that we only have a fraction fo the grid storage we would need if we want to eliminate burning natural gas.
>...And the battle for public opinion is lost.
Even with a growing anti-science movement in the US, people are about evenly divided on nuclear power which is about a 5% improvement since 2016.
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-public-opinion-ev...
I think talking about deaths is too binary when we are looking at air pollution, since I would imagine most of the deaths are from peope who have other conditions that air pollution is making worse, as opposed to things like car crashes where even very healthy people are killed. Looking at how much air pollution reduces life expectancy is a better measure, and is what they talk about in the study linked to by this ar…
Surely it doesn't need to be said that all of the industry facilitated by the fossil fuel use, raises average life expectancy by a lot more. I mean, we will do well to move beyond it, but this article saying it's "staggering" etc. is akin to saying that human activity vs. no activity causes staggering impacts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just for perspective... How does that give you any perspective? A huge percentage of the air pollution in NYC is from the same couple dozen buildings that were grandfathered into not needing to meet air pollution laws, as well as things like construction vehicles and cruise ships, which are completely unregulated. There is almost zero relationship between the benefits from fossil fuel use and the deaths from air po…
Fossil fuels are responsible for a majority of our current heat and electricity generation as well as logistics for medications and emergency transportation. We technically could transition, but doing so would be massively expensive (whether we went with nuclear or renewables), and some industries would simply not be cost effective or would be eliminated entirely. The consequence of that cost is the stress of financi…
How many thousands get to not die because of use of fossil fuels? Just for perspective...
If only we had a huge fusion reactor floating in the sky that gave us energy for free.
The costs are substantial (though coming down quite a bit), the logistical problems plentiful and the grid that we have today is not well suited to decentralized generation, though that too is work in progress and improving.
I'm a pretty big fan of renewables, at the same time it is always good to be aware of the practical limitations of a technology.
Also, note that heating your house with renewables is a lot harder than say powering the lights or our low power tech demands. By the time you want to replace that oil/gas furnace or you want to power your baseboard heating system (quite common in the US) strictly with renewables it is suddenly not all that simple unless you are willing to pay a very substantial premium.