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U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

scientificamerican.com

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Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#311

Post by macspoofing »

Retric wrote: post #200
7thaccount wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has majorly been transitioning to both natural gas AND renewables. In fact, practically the only facilities being built for the last decade have been wind and solar and in massive quantities. If you look in the generation queues of the various RTO/ISOs (organizations that manage which units run and at what level for large parts of the grid) the only thing expected to be built is even more wind and solar along…

The most economical option is it have a massive oversupply of wind and solar as their significantly less expensive than any alternative. You can model this as (cost per kWh of cheapest alternative) / (cost of rentable per kWh) = marginal oversupply you want. So, if hypothetically Solar was 2c/kWh and peaking natural gas was 6c/kWh then you would want to add more solar until 3kWh of new Solar only offset 1kWh of natur…

And where are you going to store this oversupply?

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#312

Post by macspoofing »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #219
macspoofing wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. But that's not the case. America is reducing its emissions greatly by shifting from coal to natural gas (which mirrors what Germany is doing, for example). Coal is ostensibly dead in US. If you look at the charts from Wikipedia [1][2], you'll see the US has cut emissions at about the same rate (o…

Renewables are not a panacea and may never be able to power a modern economy as they will probably always require fossil fuel baseload You say that like it's true, and it's not. Anyway, the climate doesn't care. Human emissions will reach equilibrium with what's compatible with life on Earth, one way or the other. Figuring this out is preferable to massive loss of life and degraded standards of living for the survivo…

Nuclear is great but it is a terrible baseload for renewables because nuclear cannot just spin up and spin down like hydro or natural gas can.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#313

Post by noworriesnate »

nojvek wrote: post #274
zo1 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The going conspiracy reason is that it's because the "Left" is using mail-in ballots to commit election fraud. To be fair, I still don't understand how we can have such manual, potentially-manipulated and mistrusted voting systems in 2020. Like, how difficult would it be for everyone to vote in a secure, cryptographically hidden and verified manner, using some sort booth/app/device/website with proper identity verifi…

Anything that’s only electronic is ripe for fraud. Securing digital things is really hard. For something as important as elections we absolutely need a paper trail. Physical things that both parties can verify exist and are simple to understand. In an ideal world, we’d have a hybrid system. Everyone gets a paper with an ID cryptographically hashed with their voter id. They vote electronically and mail/in person hand…

Exactly. And even cryptography can't keep files from being deleted. When someone deletes files, it's not immediately obvious what they're doing, even to software developers. When someone throws a bunch of ballots in a trash can, it's immediately obvious what they're doing to anyone.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#314

Post by nodpekar »

To be fair, the US is just doing overtly what every other signatory to the agreement has been doing covertly. Not a single goal of the Paris agreement has been met, it's like being bound to an agreement in which the terms are TBD.The heads of state at the table of the agreement made sure that they legally had no liability. Stringent treaties are big no for a lot of countries. Leaders need to be held accountable for the upcoming climate disaster.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#315

Post by throwaway5752 »

macspoofing wrote: post #312
throwaway5752 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables are not a panacea and may never be able to power a modern economy as they will probably always require fossil fuel baseload You say that like it's true, and it's not. Anyway, the climate doesn't care. Human emissions will reach equilibrium with what's compatible with life on Earth, one way or the other. Figuring this out is preferable to massive loss of life and degraded standards of living for the survivo…

Nuclear is great but it is a terrible baseload for renewables because nuclear cannot just spin up and spin down like hydro or natural gas can.

That is not what baseload power is. You are talking about peak load generation. And pumped hydro is a classic smoothing solution to energy storage from uneven renewable base load generation.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#316

Post by tootie »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #269
Ensorceled wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like there is a playbook for this that just gets applied to things like asbestos, cigarettes, lead gasoline, DDT, sugar, climate change, COVID ...

There's no playbook here. It may look like there is, because we keep seeing the same thing happening, but it's not coordination - it's the outcome of everyone caring primarily about their own personal interests over those of everyone else. We've built an economy and a culture that demands this kind of selfishness. COVID-19 gives solid evidence that there is no playbook involved: in terms of political and business pro…

I think COVID is different. There have been coordinate disinformation campaigns emanating from vested parties in the past. Tobacco and fossil fuel companies actively invest in tamping down regulation and sponsoring fake science to support their goals. There is no pro-COVID lobby in any corner of the world who wants people to die to protect their profits. Trump has made some ham-fisted attempts to pretend one exists, but in general companies big and small are treating it as very real and very dangerous to their bottom lines. Small businesses and brick and mortars are pushing to relax restrictions with the express intent of trading health for wealth. I see a really disturbing trend among American Conservatives to just decide there's nothing to be done about the pandemic and whoever dies, dies.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#317

Post by mantas »

giantg2 wrote: post #89
Ekaros wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have the option to pick up option that has less attached taxes. Or not to buy something.

Who imposes the taxes then? The exporting country (China) is unlikely to do it. The importing county is only likely to do it if the government and people support it. The problem is that even with a tax on the import, polluting in a developing nation would likely be cheaper than not polluting anywhere else. Many items do not have options to buy from various countries (economies of scale usually consolidate factories a…

Make taxes big enough to make pollution too expensive even in cheap countries?

Buying less, but more expensive because of less polluting manufacturing methods is the answer. Economy will still keep going.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#318

Post by giantg2 »

mantas wrote: post #317
giantg2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who imposes the taxes then? The exporting country (China) is unlikely to do it. The importing county is only likely to do it if the government and people support it. The problem is that even with a tax on the import, polluting in a developing nation would likely be cheaper than not polluting anywhere else. Many items do not have options to buy from various countries (economies of scale usually consolidate factories a…

Make taxes big enough to make pollution too expensive even in cheap countries? Buying less, but more expensive because of less polluting manufacturing methods is the answer. Economy will still keep going.

"Economy will still keep going."

How so? If you are adding crushing taxes, then you're likely to see a downturn in production and consumption, which generally results in a weak or shrinking economy.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#319

Post by Retric »

marcosdumay wrote: post #256
Retric wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most economical option is it have a massive oversupply of wind and solar as their significantly less expensive than any alternative. You can model this as (cost per kWh of cheapest alternative) / (cost of rentable per kWh) = marginal oversupply you want. So, if hypothetically Solar was 2c/kWh and peaking natural gas was 6c/kWh then you would want to add more solar until 3kWh of new Solar only offset 1kWh of natur…

The oversupply is coming, it seems almost inevitable by now. But a massive oversupply requires a large fall on the prices of electricity conversion and generators maintenance. Even then, I do really expect a category of "peak demanders" to appear soon (storage is one kind, but there are other things one can do with intermittent almost free electricity). That will help increasing the spare capacity.

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens if daytime rates start to consistently dip below current night time rates.

I suspect an outgrowth of oversupply is storage will ramp up based on consistent access to very cheap rates. It makes a huge difference if you’re paying 0.4c/kWh or 4c/kWh to charge, especially when storage is significantly less than 100% efficient.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#320

Post by tzs »

belorn wrote: post #107
cher88 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the more pertinent graph? https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...

Which graph to look at depend on what question one has. If the question is "Who is polluting the world and need to stop" then country’s annual CO2 emissions is the single most relevant graph since that is where the pollution is right now coming from. If one is to ask "whom's individual citizen way of living is contributing most" we would look at per capita C02. If the question is "Who is at risk of increasing their p…

> Which graph to look at depend on what question one has. If the question is "Who is polluting the world and need to stop" then country’s annual CO2 emissions is the single most relevant graph since that is where the pollution is right now coming from.

So if China were to spin off each province as a separate country and the US were to spin of each state as a separate country with each of the new countries emitting exactly as much CO2 as it had before it was a separate country, this would be an improvement?

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