Nuclear, Bill Gates on his new Netflix series about him, one of the episodes covers how his startup has a ready to go new gen safe Nuclear reactor ready to go, made a deal with China to build a whole bunch and Trump's government nixed it because of his China trade war...
When we look back at administrations who failed to act, I doubt anyone could have done more harm to the world in just a few short years.
Why would you doubt that? Have you read this thread from the beginning? I'd love to see a coherent plan to replace fossil fuel energy, and replace crude oil used in producing millions of products. Show me the math.
There is no math. There is nothing. There are dreams and plans being thrown around by politicians and wackos who don't make any attempt at accepting reality.
I dare ANY person in this thread to present a solution that would make a comparable difference to what I have said. And not just I, but many smart people throughout both industries.
I also forgot to mention that it is entirely possible to build natural gas power plants that emit next to no carbon. Imagine that.
That's the thing though, no one is being honest about "a lot". They just pretend we can go on living the way we are, but do it cleaner. News flash, if that was possible, we'd be doing it. If it was easy, we would have done it. If it was economically viable, corporations would be all over it.
The frank, honest conversation of what we can accept for changing temperatures vs what we are prepared to do has never happened. No one has said "you can only fly once a decade, drive your car 5000km/year, keep your heat below 18 and only eat food that comes from the ground within 100km of you. Or, we can live with 3-5 degrees warming, and keep all doing what we are doing, and spend our way out of it." You think Brexit was a divisive referendum? Try putting that one to the people.
Even if people in North America did all those things it wouldn't change what is happening.
It needs to be a worldwide movement, which means you need to get countries who are still burning dirty coal (not even clean coal) over to natural gas, and then work in improving their infrastructure to the point where they can implement more renewables.
We have our head massively stuck in the sand if we think any chance we will make in North America without EXPORTING that change to the world will make a difference. It is completely pointless.
Even if people in North America did all those things it wouldn't change what is happening.
It needs to be a worldwide movement, which means you need to get countries who are still burning dirty coal (not even clean coal) over to natural gas, and then work in improving their infrastructure to the point where they can implement more renewables.
We have our head massively stuck in the sand if we think any chance we will make in North America without EXPORTING that change to the world will make a difference. It is completely pointless.
Edit: never mind, I misread it.
Edit edit: I guess I didn’t. So your point is we might as well do nothing because everyone else is doing nothing. Okay.
Last edited by Scroopy Noopers; 09-23-2019 at 09:08 PM.
I am not against these sorts of ideas, but those are the types of solutions being offered up now, and that is the problem: targeting individual examples, and thus missing others. It makes for an unlevel playing field, and that is the challenge.
Excessive packaging is as annoying as anything. But where do you start? And who decides what is excessive? And unless all countries are involved equally, it just creates unfair advantages to those not restricted.
Let's go back to the SUV example above: do we try and make people drive smaller vehicles? (who decides who qualifies for an SUV and who doesn't?) Or do we try to reduce the number of oil tankers carrying oil half way around the world?
Again, who decides? Because unless everyone is playing by the same rules, you aren't accomplishing anything, you are just giving economic advantages to those that won't follow the rules.
Totally agree which is why I say we need a societal shift. But that's not to say regulations can't nudge things alone, for example suppose packaging has a couple logos on it, a "bad" logo if the packaging is not bio degradable. People start to look down on companies that package stuff with the bad logo on it.
But you are absolutely right if we don't have a buy in everywhere things fall apart, and that's our current reality in China they don't care about carbon or pollution China openly admits their plan is use dirty energy to long term achieve their goals which does include clean energy. But certainly not now or in 12 years, maybe 30 or more.
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Originally Posted by Azure
There is no math. There is nothing. There are dreams and plans being thrown around by politicians and wackos who don't make any attempt at accepting reality.
There are millions, probably billions with the same wackaloon views. It's getting to the point of hysteria, which is exactly what a politician wants easy to introduce a pointless tax. Pay up or the planet is doomed.
On doing the math we have to do the math, otherwise may as well be pissing in the wind.
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I dare ANY person in this thread to present a solution that would make a comparable difference to what I have said. And not just I, but many smart people throughout both industries.
I've said this before there may be no solution. Physics doesn't care about environmental dreams.
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I also forgot to mention that it is entirely possible to build natural gas power plants that emit next to no carbon. Imagine that.
Battery electric cars powered by natural gas generators is a good stop gap, the efficiency of this system is quite high and the carbon footprint per vehicle is a fair bit better than gasoline. Not as good as a BEV powered by hydro, although hydro has significant environmental downsides we don't hear about much.
Consumers will not accept CNG cars, they stink, don't have as much power, and are dangerous in enclosed spaces. Not as stupid as hydrogen cars though.
Hey I'm a big proponent of researching and spending money on figuring out alternative methods. Everything should be looked at.
But until then? Coal should be made illegal. Allowing plants to phase out till 2040? Screw that. They have 5 years to shut down or convert to natural gas. Time to get serious about this.
And I only say that because I know it is quite possible to convert the plants in a short time frame. It is also quite easy to build new natural gas plants. And from what I'm reading, it is also becoming cheaper to build solar & wind farms. I'm all for that as well, but it'll take years till get to the point where either of those can do what natural gas does.
The sooner that people accept that, the easier this will get.
Also, the sad part is, if every single coal plant in North America was shut down by natural gas, or better yet, wind/solar, it would still NOT make a difference in global CO2 emissions. It would barely make a dent.
Or tree size. And we’d be talking about 10,000 of these machines which shouldn’t be running on fossil fuels. Okay so it seems this idea is not feasible.
More feasible then building solar or wind or even nuclear at the scale necessary or ramping up lithium extraction to the point where you can replace all cars. The scale of this problem is mind boggling.
The cost of such a program seems relatively low. Tree planing programs run as low as 30 cents per tree but even if it was $1 per tree that’s only 1.5 trillion dollars. If you planted this over 10 years that is 150 billion per year. The GDP of the G7 nations is 33 Trillion so for .5% of GDP you could undertake this effort.
The one issue is that it does take 100 years to get to a steady state point but a lot of trees carbon sequestration occurs in its early years of growing. So maybe this only solves 1/4 of the problem.
The top 20 richest people in the world could essentially pay for this program if they wanted to.
But until then? Coal should be made illegal. Allowing plants to phase out till 2040? Screw that. They have 5 years to shut down or convert to natural gas. Time to get serious about this.
I have no problems with this, unless there is a scenario where a country or region can't use natural gas which I suspect would be not very often.
There was just recently an article that suggested that planting the 1.5 trillion trees required was possible as in there was enough room to plant the trees.
No farmlands or urban areas are touched although some tree cover is added to grazing lands.
Whoa, that article says there are only three trillion trees on the planet. That means planting 50% of the trees that already exist on the planet. Yeah, not even remotely possible. Even if you could come up with the money to buy the saplings, where does the labor come from? Do you know how long it would take to plant 1.5 trillion trees? Big question is, where do you come up with 1.5 trillion saplings? Here's a few others that also question the pragmatism behind the study.
The common thread in these is the original article is a mathematical model to determine the possibility of the concept, but did not take into consideration the actual feasibility of the idea. The potential to plant and then sustain the trees was not considered.
"Converting large areas of natural landscape to biomass plantations threatens these already stressed ecosystems. Converting agricultural land makes it harder to feed the world’s population. Fertilizing tree plantations requires huge inputs of nitrogen fertilizer—which also results in the release of greenhouse gases—and watering them taxes an already water-scarce world."
I have no problems with this, unless there is a scenario where a country or region can't use natural gas which I suspect would be not very often.
So what happens to all those people who lose their jobs overnight? I agree with it as well, but this is where I start accepting the argument of taxes supporting those who work in industries who need massive cutbacks in production. (Not saying the carbon tax in its state was the way to do this. But something similar is important in my opinion).
There may be an answer to this already, but I'm gonna ask it anyways. Why don't we just plant a ####load of trees everywhere? Obviously that's not a permanent solution, but it's better than the whole lot of nothing that we're doing right now. And it might slow things down long enough for us to come up with a permanent solution.
Actually, that would be a great idea, and would make a significant difference.
But there is little point in planting a ton of trees if we don't manage them.
I'm all for it, but there needs to be a proper plan in place, and WORLDWIDE support. Again, little point in doing something in North America (which already has more trees than it ever had in the history of ever) if the rest of the world doesn't give a damn.
Also, trees? How can you increase taxation by planting more trees?
It actually drives me insane how easily people accept the stupid carbon tax. The equivalent of people buying carbon credits. What does it accomplish? Nothing. Companies have been finding ways around tax laws for years, and they almost certainly will with the carbon tax.
There are millions, probably billions with the same wackaloon views. It's getting to the point of hysteria, which is exactly what a politician wants easy to introduce a pointless tax. Pay up or the planet is doomed.
Yup, and many make no attempt at actually educating themselves beyond their assumptions on the subject. Like I said, crazy.
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I've said this before there may be no solution. Physics doesn't care about environmental dreams.
There may be no solution to climate change, or we may be too late. But, there are more benefits to consider than reversing climate change. Such as health and mortality rates.
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???? Explain.
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In the Texas city of La Porte, about 30 miles outside of Houston, the power plant of the future generates enough electricity to power 5,000 homes simultaneously. It burns old-fashioned fossil fuels. And yet it produces no carbon emissions.
I have no problems with this, unless there is a scenario where a country or region can't use natural gas which I suspect would be not very often.
China:
That amount of coal represents nearly 4 billion tons of coal, or half of the world's production. It's also bigger (in TWh) than the entire US electricity system.
So what happens to all those people who lose their jobs overnight? I agree with it as well, but this is where I start accepting the argument of taxes supporting those who work in industries who need massive cutbacks in production. (Not saying the carbon tax in its state was the way to do this. But something similar is important in my opinion).
Why can't those jobs be replaced by work that involves other forms of energy management. I am out of my element here I don't know how the numbers crunch.
Critics claim that there simply isn’t enough land in the U.S. for solar to power the country. While it’s not an immediately practical question, it’s still fun to ponder. So, ignoring practical constraints like storage and grid technology, let’s explore whether we can fit enough solar to electrify the U.S.
One approach would be to start with data points like the size of solar panels, the wattage they produce, and the number of sunny hours per year. Unfortunately, this approach produces wildly different answers depending on assumptions. A better approach is to look at real-world data captured from real-world solar arrays and just extrapolate from there.
Starting with some conservative assumptions from a 2013 National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) report, we know that it takes, on average, 3.4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hour of electricity over a year. Given the U.S. consumes about 4 petawatts of electricity per year, we’d need about 13,600,000 acres or 21,250 square miles of solar panels to meet the total electricity requirements of the United States for a year.
This may seem like an impractically large amount of land but not when you put it in perspective. 21,250 square miles is a square about 145 miles on each side . The U.S. has 3,797,000 square miles of land. Only about half a percent of that would be needed to provide enough solar energy to power the country.
Actually, we probably only need about 10,000 square miles
Fortunately, we wouldn’t need to use all 21,250 square miles. NREL has another report conservatively estimating that rooftop solar alone could generate 34% of all U.S. electricity requirements.
Additionally, the solar arrays in NREL’s 2013 survey had efficiency levels of 13-14%. Modern solar panels average 16-17% efficient with widely available models easily exceeding 20%. Revising the estimates using higher efficiency and including rooftop coverage, only 10,000 square miles is required.
Interestingly, Elon Musk shared a nearly identical metric during a speech to the National Governors Association.
“If you wanted to power the entire U.S. with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States. The batteries you need to store the energy, to make sure you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile. That’s it.” — Elon Musk
The above does not take into account the carbon based energy required to produce the infrastructure, and the upkeep. But it at least it's a starting point.
Why can't those jobs be replaced by work that involves other forms of energy management. I am out of my element here I don't know how the numbers crunch.
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On paper they could. But the real people who lose their income aren’t protected by the invention of a new job, for someone else, somewhere else.
More feasible then building solar or wind or even nuclear at the scale necessary or ramping up lithium extraction to the point where you can replace all cars. The scale of this problem is mind boggling.
The cost of such a program seems relatively low. Tree planing programs run as low as 30 cents per tree but even if it was $1 per tree that’s only 1.5 trillion dollars. If you planted this over 10 years that is 150 billion per year. The GDP of the G7 nations is 33 Trillion so for .5% of GDP you could undertake this effort.
The one issue is that it does take 100 years to get to a steady state point but a lot of trees carbon sequestration occurs in its early years of growing. So maybe this only solves 1/4 of the problem.
The top 20 richest people in the world could essentially pay for this program if they wanted to.
The US federal government owns around 650 million acres of land. All it would have to do is rent out as much of that land for $1 dollar per year to private corporations on the basis that they plant trees and manage the forests in a specific way.
Boom, overnight success.
Tree harvesting is a massively lucrative business if done right. And has the ability to sequester a TON of C02 in a very short time frame.
But how are we going to hate on natural gas that way?
