Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 349 posts

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#301

Post by macspoofing »

goodpoint wrote: post #294
macspoofing wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By the time nuclear projects started now complete, solar and wind will be mopping the floor with them ROI wise. Yes, it will take decades to restart large scale nuclear projects. So we lost more than 50 years. With Solar/Wind it's not a question of cost or ROI. Solar/wind, as an intermittent and diffuse energy source, CANNOT power a modern economy. It needs base-load.

"base load" is a myth.

OK. Don't focus on the semantics. There are times when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow - what do you do then?

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#302

Post by greenhearth »

ericmay wrote: post #287
benj111 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I wouldn't say that capitalism, at its core is a government construct. 2.capitalism is about valuing things to allow / encourage efficient allocation. There is a cost to pumping co2 into the atmosphere. Capitalism doesn't take that into account. And as that is what it should be doing, failing to do so is a failure of capitalism. Now the government could (and should) step in to fix that failure. Their failure to st…

I don't know what you mean by construct, but capitalism is an economic system that is regulated and enabled by the government because in order to own private property either you have to defend it yourself or you have the government set rules and act as the enforcement mechanism. Capitalism is one type of economic system that operates with the blessing of the government but there are others. Soviet Russia is an exampl…

Capitalism is not a clear cut binary of "public/private." This is not an essential element of this system, as you have capitalist apparatuses acting in totalitarian/communist states, such as state owned beer companies in China that still act as capitalist entities, i.e. they are invested in in expectations to grow the profits from this company. It is actually speculated by theorists like Althusser that the private/public dynamic doesn't even exist. Maybe you are talking about the definition accepted by market exchange semantics, where anyone can gamble on a company vs. only a specific number of people/one person gambles on it.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#303

Post by pclmulqdq »

gitfan86 wrote: post #265
pclmulqdq wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing the most expensive form of power plant (and mind you, only the most expensive ones out of that class) at a quantity much lower than is needed to actually replace them, with serious supply constraints. Batteries today are replacing peaker plants that run on things like refined gasoline, which are extremely expensive to run. Battery + renewable is still not anywhere near cost competitive with base load plants…

That is incorrect, "The International Energy Agency recently predicted that solar power would become “the cheapest source of electricity in history,” and a report by Carbon Tracker found that 90 percent of the global population lives in places where new renewable power would be cheaper than new dirty power. " https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/26/magazine/clim...

Power demand is inelastic. What these agencies say about power prices is true if you don't factor in the fact that wind isn't always blowing and the sun isn't always shining. When wind and solar can produce power, they can produce it very cheaply. 1 watt of solar power is very expensive to produce from starlight, and so is 1 watt of wind power on a calm day.

The price of the batteries and/or overbuilt capacity has to be factored in to the price of renewable energy if you want to run the grid 100% on renewables. If you don't want batteries, and instead want a global grid, the cost of transport has to be factored in. Either proposition makes renewable energy extremely expensive for providing base load power, not to mention currently impossible.

Currently, we need something like 10-100 TWh of batteries for grid stabilization in just the US. Taking a high estimate of 1 TWh this year, that would be 10-100 years of the entire current global lithium ion battery production (not including the fact that those batteries are going to depreciate over 5-10 years). Pumped storage and other (weirder) energy storage methods also can't scale up enough to get anywhere near this demand.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#305

Post by macspoofing »

raphaelj wrote: post #211
macspoofing wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By the time nuclear projects started now complete, solar and wind will be mopping the floor with them ROI wise. Yes, it will take decades to restart large scale nuclear projects. So we lost more than 50 years. With Solar/Wind it's not a question of cost or ROI. Solar/wind, as an intermittent and diffuse energy source, CANNOT power a modern economy. It needs base-load.

Building a modern zero carbon economy based on renewable energies is not only possible but also close to cost competitive to the nuclear-intensive alternative [1]: >>> Regarding the evolution of technology costs, under the baseline scenario, the cost difference between the M23 (renewable only) and N2 (old and new nuclear + renewable) scenarios is close to 10 billion euros a year (0.3% of France's GDP) . This is a quo…

>Building a modern zero carbon economy based on renewable energies is not only possible but also close to cost competitive to the nuclear-intensive alternative [1]:

Oh yeah? Point me at an example.

This is not a question of ROI. Wind/Solar could be free and still could not power a modern economy. There are no economies of any significant size (say, larger than a mid-size city) that are powered by wind/solar. There are no economies that have plans in the near-to-mid term to be powered by wind/solar. Why was Germany, up until recently, investing billions to ship Russian gas for decades if wind/solar is just around the corner?

So what are we talking about here?

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#306

Post by macspoofing »

dontreact wrote: post #110
macspoofing wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By the time nuclear projects started now complete, solar and wind will be mopping the floor with them ROI wise. Yes, it will take decades to restart large scale nuclear projects. So we lost more than 50 years. With Solar/Wind it's not a question of cost or ROI. Solar/wind, as an intermittent and diffuse energy source, CANNOT power a modern economy. It needs base-load.

What about if storage improves? Can't that smooth out the intermittent nature and provide for the base load?

>What about if storage improves?

But it isn't. There is no storage solution that is able to bridge the intermittency gap to make wind/solar workable for a modern economy.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#307

Post by egberts1 »

Please, continue to add past the 14,200 new temperature reading stations in mostly the exclusively US urban/metro areas since 1973.

It is important to stack the average by the virtue of its urban heat (over the cooler but carbon-tax-infused countrysides) and be able to note its mostly upward climate-change trend.

And we won't bother with illusive matrix math in smoothing out the newer stations because we got the eLusive hockey stick trend going now (which started in 1973).

Let's not ignore these 14,200+ new temp. stations because all data are valid.

/sarcasm

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#308

Post by egberts1 »

benj111 wrote: post #65
Yizahi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that the key problem - all current "green" or "zero" tech is simply a trick, with shuffling emissions to other countries, selling-buying quotas, maybe reducing emissions a little in the best case. Until we have a working industrial scale CO2 sequestration factories we are essentially doing nothing, or close to nothing.

How is it a 'trick'? Building a wind turbine isn't shuffling emissions anywhere. Neither is solar. Or a more efficient boiler, or....

Neither is hydroelectric dam.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#309

Post by fzeroracer »

canadiantim wrote: post #41
ntp85 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it common sense that the wealthy are the ones who produce / emit the most CO2? Maybe I'm missing the point here, but I can't understand how poverty is the worst thing for the environment seeing that it restricts consumption.

Poor people care less for the environment than wealthier people, as a general rule. So if you push more people into poverty you get a population that will care about environmental concerns less. E.g. they will overharvest fish populations, or care less about other environmental pollution because their primary concern is getting food on their table and surviving. It's like maslow's heirarchy of needs. People generally…

> Poor people care less for the environment than wealthier people, as a general rule.

If you're going to make up a rule then you need to actually substantiate your rule. Because considering I came from a family of fishermen (per your fish population quote) that was also in deep poverty I can tell you we specifically cared quite a bit about the environment; because ensuring that fish stocks didn't deplete is kind of a big deal for business.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#310

Post by ericmay »

greenhearth wrote: post #302
ericmay wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you mean by construct, but capitalism is an economic system that is regulated and enabled by the government because in order to own private property either you have to defend it yourself or you have the government set rules and act as the enforcement mechanism. Capitalism is one type of economic system that operates with the blessing of the government but there are others. Soviet Russia is an exampl…

Capitalism is not a clear cut binary of "public/private." This is not an essential element of this system, as you have capitalist apparatuses acting in totalitarian/communist states, such as state owned beer companies in China that still act as capitalist entities, i.e. they are invested in in expectations to grow the profits from this company. It is actually speculated by theorists like Althusser that the private/pu…

I agree that it is not necessarily clear cut, and your example is a good one but we have to start somewhere and I'm not sure that this is material to the conversation at hand anyway except that if the corporations are state-owned then it's just even more the government's fault that they're polluting.

Of course new configurations of so-called private and public entities can and will occur and it's more of a shades of gray kind of thing. But to the extent that they become closer to the government (like US defense contractors for example which are publicly traded entities which are privately owned) it just, as in the case with China, becomes more of the government's fault that they're allowed to pollute.

In my mind there's no way to escape that the fault of climate change rests squarely on the shoulders of the government and the people. People just don't want to look in the mirror or accept responsibility so it's easy to blame everything on ephemeral billionaires and corporations and then nothing gets done because we can just complain instead of no longer flying, or having to use paper straws or whatever pisses people off these days.

Post reply on HN