Without energy storage you sure aren't. Hydrocarbons are just store of energy. So ya. Find a better one. Sounds like you think this is easy.
lol no, what I literally said is that if we got a lot more serious about solving this problem a lot sooner, we would be further ahead than we are now. "Energy storage" and "lithium-ion battery" are not necessarily one in the same; the most commonly used batteries today are not the only form of energy storage we could have come up with. For instance, here are some technologies that are being worked on:
tldw: gravity storage, compressed air storage, cryogenic air separation, hydrogen generation, thermal battery, flow battery
If we got on to this problem a lot sooner, we'd likely have these technologies much futher along, and also come up with more and better solutions, plus having them developed on a large scale. Instead, we lost tons of time and opportunity spending decades debating bad-faith paid shills.
Yes. The technology has improved over time due to investment, as has every advancement in oil and gas extraction technology. It costs money for research and development.
You’re going to have to specify how you define the word endless in this context.
We can probably agree that fossil fuels provide a lot of energy relatively inexpensively compared to a number of alternatives, and that if you didn’t know there was a long term downside to its use there’d be no reason to invest in a cleaner form of energy.
Research and development requires investment capital. Had the truth been known earlier it’s almost a certainty that you would have seen an earlier uptick in the investment of green technology, much like we’ve been seeing recently. Think of how much even internal combustion engines have evolved in the last 100 years, 50 years, 25 years or even the last 10 years and ask yourself do you seriously think even as little as an extra 5 years of earlier research in a green tech wouldn’t have had an impact? Because if that’s the case it sounds like you’re essentially arguing that green energy technology hasn’t advanced at all in the past 5 years. Which is certainly not the case.
The truth has been known for a long time. People preferred to believe in the narrative that allowed them to consume. In the absence of the oil companies governments would have just ignored the problem because election cycles are 4 years not 40 years.
It is only when people can see real affects (and these are really just increased probabilities and magnitudes) of climate change that peoples attitude change. The current unlucky sequence of more probable and more extreme events is what is driving climate change.
"Endless" as in no amount of "we need this" would have changed progress. The demand for a better battery has always been around, and the reward would be massive for whoever did it.
When the greater reward is to continue to invest in the status quo because by the time the other technology has a high enough demand you’ll have missed out on millions or billions it’s pretty easy to understand why investors would go with the status quo.
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I just disagree that we would be further along. The battery and generation advancements have all required cutting edge microprocessors(no getting around that limit quicker), material sciences(also would not have accelerated with market pressures) and critically, the extraction of material and the manufacturing advances. I just don't see the argument that throwing more demand at those sectors would have significantly affected their ability to develop any quicker.
You’re not wrong that there are some things that wouldn’t have been possible without other technological advancements but I think you’re discounting the fact that at least some of those advancements could have likely been sped up with an increase in capital resulting from higher demand.
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From the people here who clearly disagree with my assessment, I'd be interested to see your alternate timeline had we started shifting in the early 80's. Let's say we are at the phase of transition we are now, back in 2000. What technologies would be where we are now, back then? What advancements would allow them to circumvent the shortcomings of the fields I mentioned earlier? I'm curious what that world looks like. And don't just say "like now, but 20 years earlier" because that would be impossible.
I would say that regardless of any shortcomings in the fields you’ve listed we would have been further ahead, not 20 years ahead but definitely ahead. Some if not most that technology would likely now be obsolete or inefficient by todays current standards but that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t have been other ideas that would have worked for the time. If solar panels for example had never been invented do you really think that if someone thought up the idea today the technology would be where it’s at currently by tomorrow without the decades worth of research and development just because the parts exist?
I mean 1873 and 1954 as the beginnings of solar cells kind of suggests we had manufacturing challenges to over come to make them viable. These manufacturing techniques were driven by the semi-conductor industry. So isn’t like we were sitting doing nothing in adjacent technologies.
So yes if solar panels did not exist today we could quickly accelerate to where we are today by utilizing the tech created in adjacent fields.
I think at most you would be talking 5 years.
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I mean 1873 and 1954 as the beginnings of solar cells kind of suggests we had manufacturing challenges to over come to make them viable. These manufacturing techniques were driven by the semi-conductor industry. So isn’t like we were sitting doing nothing in adjacent technologies.
So yes if solar panels did not exist today we could quickly accelerate to where we are today by utilizing the tech created in adjacent fields.
No. You should feel bad about it. That's how bad the analogy was. You should feel shame. Look at the ground and wear a hoodie, up with the drawstring tightened.
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2. Given what we know about emissions and how they need to be curbed to have a meaningful difference, it’s actually kind of idiotic to think that the small sub-section of people A) able to simply drive less and/or B) able to make a near-term switch to a more efficient (electric/hybrid) vehicle, while the largest emitters remain the same or ramp up production, will make any meaningful difference. You’re railing against self-delusions while, you guessed it, deluding yourself into believing this is some worthy sacrifice.
Incorrect - rising gas prices don't just affect people who will drive less or switch to a more efficient vehicle. It affects transportation of goods, making it more cost-effective to produce locally in the long run rather than trucking things in from far away. It affects airline prices, it affects shipping costs. Making those things more expensive does make a small dent - whether or not it's "meaningful", in your view.
And even all of that aside, you've somehow missed my main point: I didn't say this would make a meaningful difference. I said that if this small inconvenience is enough to have people up in arms, they're absolutely not prepared to make the sacrifices that WOULD make a meaningful difference. Yet they demand that meaningful differences be made. Those people are dumb. You're defending dumb people for being dumb. Refer to my earlier comment about shame and hoodies.
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3. You should be dismissed. Not just for not living paycheque to paycheque and owning multiple cars you can just choose to drive less, but mostly (and this is important) for saying “whingeing” instead of “whining.”
... Uh... autocorrect. Yeah. Probably. That's probably what it was.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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I didn't say this would make a meaningful difference. I said that if this small inconvenience is enough to have people up in arms, they're absolutely not prepared to make the sacrifices that WOULD make a meaningful difference.
So you feel this “small inconvenience” (its not) is a great test to see how we’ll react when it’s Canada’s time to step up and really impact world climate change? That’s really stupid. Pull up your hoodie and draw the string. Everyone in Canada could switch to hybrids or stop driving all together and it would do absolutely nothing. The ship is still sinking until the big players make a change, so your social experiment is just kicking a test group in the junk to see how they react.
You meant that literally and not the literally that refers to the written word or the literally that means figuratively. You meant literally tomorrow?
If so that’s a stupid question.
I think the better question is would be meaningfully further behind or meaningfully ahead and my answer to that is no, +/- 5 years wasn’t going to stop us from being ####ed.
You meant that literally and not the literally that refers to the written word or the literally that means figuratively. You meant literally tomorrow?
If so that’s a stupid question.
I don’t disagree. Can you tell that to the poster who’s trying to argue that no amount of extra research would change where we’re at today?
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I think the better question is would be meaningfully further behind or meaningfully ahead and my answer to that is no, +/- 5 years wasn’t going to stop us from being ####ed.
… Prices jumped at an annual rate of 4.7% last year - faster than any other country in the Group of Seven (G7) advanced economies, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In the UK, for example, inflation was just 2.5%.
And as of May, when inflation in the US hit 8.6%, the country remained ahead of the pack - though UK data for the month is still pending.
Many of the forces driving inflation last year - like supply disruptions from Covid and higher food prices after severe storms and drought hurt harvests - were not unique to the US.
The reason the US fared worse? In two words - high demand.
That was driven by the massive $5tn (£4.1tn) in spending the US government approved to shield households and businesses from the economic shock of the pandemic...
A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco concluded that pandemic relief packages probably contributed to 3 percentage points of the rise in inflation until the end of 2021 - a factor that goes a long way to explaining why US inflation outpaced the rest of the world.
Oscar Jorda, senior policy adviser at the bank and one of the people who worked on the study, cautioned against reading too much into the exact percentages, but said the overall picture is clear.
"These programmes... were a considerable infusion of liquidity into consumers' pockets at a time when perhaps industry wasn't quite ready to respond to an increase in demand," he said in an interview in May. They "signified a big push of what I would call demand push inflation"…
Continental Europe, so far at least, seems to have escaped the worst of the scourge. Inflation is leaving barely a trace on Japan. But it is entwining itself around Anglophone economies. Canada is faring slightly worse even than America. Britain has a big problem on its hands (see chart).
A few factors explain the differences. Total fiscal stimulus across Anglophone countries in 2020-21 was about 40% more generous than in other rich places, according to our estimates. It was also more focused on handouts to households (such as stimulus cheques).
That may have further stoked demand. Monetary policy in the euro area and Japan was already ultra-loose before the pandemic, limiting the amount of extra stimulus central banks could provide. Britain’s inflation may also reflect an idiosyncratic factor: Brexit. It turns out that breaking with your largest trading partner causes costs to rise.
Which of those things actually increase inflation? They seem like mostly zero sum type things.
The huge gains in the stock and real estate markets are symptoms of the inflation, not the cause. Central banks created trillions of new dollars (mostly injected into bond markets, some given to people as stimulus)
The huge amount of new money needed to go somewhere. Since it was literally impossible for most people to spend it on services and many goods, most of it went into investments. That drove up the price of those investments, which further fuels inflation as people who feel richer spend more.
I should've bought a hybrid last year. These prices are getting ridiculous.
Blackmail OPEC! Hang the execs!
Buying a hybrid or electric vehicle is great for people with the money to do it and for people who are not renters. Basically, people who are already in the better financial position are in a position to save money. People are literally spending 5-10% of their yearly income to commute to work, and the number is just going up.
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Buying a hybrid or electric vehicle is great for people with the money to do it and for people who are not renters. Basically, people who are already in the better financial position are in a position to save money. People are literally spending 5-10% of their yearly income to commute to work, and the number is just going up.
I know people at work that have been looking into EV's and it's a great idea until they start putting together the costs of running 240V into their garage with energy management systems where you are looking at +$4k off the bat before you even purchased the vehicle. It's simply something that the average family likely can't afford. I think in the beginning of this whole climate change panic people were of the mindset that it was the oil companies that were going to take the hit for combating climate change and we would just move on to EV's but it's not nearly that simple as it's going to cost everyone a lot of money and sacrifices.
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That’s where the discussion started. I also assumed the poster stating it would make literally no difference was speaking figuratively.
Well they seemed pretty adamant. They even insinuated that an additional 20 years of research wouldn’t have changed much. But maybe you’re both right and the poster who pointed out that if it were the case the oil companies wouldn’t have invested in misinformation campaigns when there was no benefit is the one who is out to lunch.
No. You should feel bad about it. That's how bad the analogy was. You should feel shame. Look at the ground and wear a hoodie, up with the drawstring tightened.
Careful, this is getting dangerously close to kink. Anything else you want me to do, sir? I feel soooo bad.
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Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
Incorrect - rising gas prices don't just affect people who will drive less or switch to a more efficient vehicle. It affects transportation of goods, making it more cost-effective to produce locally in the long run rather than trucking things in from far away. It affects airline prices, it affects shipping costs. Making those things more expensive does make a small dent - whether or not it's "meaningful", in your view.
Right, but now we’re getting slightly away from the subject of people reacting to pump prices. An airplane isn’t taxing up to Petro Can and filling up on 87 and hey, yeah sure, give me the car wash with the Turtle Wax, thanks for offering! Sure, flying will get more expensive, but this does… what exactly? Encourages people to take a vacation they drive to? Most people drive to their vacations. Ah, but now they can’t afford that so… they’ll walk to the park or something?
It might make a small difference to a small portion of the population, but it makes a big, unavoidable negative difference to a larger part of the population and a completely avoidable difference to the biggest offenders. You can say it’s dumb to think everyone else should be affected “but not me!” but for the average person, that’s actually a line of thinking that is probably closer to correct than “I will pay an extra $20 at the pump, for the future of our society!”
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Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
And even all of that aside, you've somehow missed my main point: I didn't say this would make a meaningful difference. I said that if this small inconvenience is enough to have people up in arms, they're absolutely not prepared to make the sacrifices that WOULD make a meaningful difference. Yet they demand that meaningful differences be made. Those people are dumb. You're defending dumb people for being dumb. Refer to my earlier comment about shame and hoodies.
People are funny that way. How they feel about something is very much tied to the context surrounding that thing, or the purpose behind it and how valid they think that purpose is. So, you can say “hey, we need to stay home, wear masks everywhere, and make all these other changes” and most people, seeing the valid reasons behind it, do it without much fuss. Some people don’t see the reasoning as valid, so they protest or whatever, great, but you can see how context and determining the validity of the reason impacts how people react.
People are prepared to make a meaningful difference, but the problem is that this isn’t one and being sold as one hasn’t even been attempted because nobody, not even the government, is under the illusion it is meaningful. People will forgo plastic forks and straws and pay for grocery bags and whatever. They’ll do the small stuff that isn’t meaningful. Those who can afford it will start buying EVs or driving less and whatever, they’ll do the small stuff that is still less than meaningful on their own accord because they believe in the reasons for doing it. But to expect people just to be stoked to pay more for gas when nothing meaningful is ACTUALLY done and all it does is affect people with the least amount of money, mobility, and ability to change the most?
Eh, sorry big guy. That’s just dumb.
And who is this mysterious Corolla guy anyway? Honest question: how many actual full-on climate warrior types who are purposely putting around in fuel efficient cars and voting and advocating for all these climate change initiatives do YOU know that are actively complaining about $20? Did you just make a guy up to be mad at?
