And while I was looking for that, I came across this, which is pertinent to the xkcd comic above:
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Yup. Rapid decarbonisation would be economically catastrophic, with attendant human consequences.
Which is why we should have done it thirty years ago when the climate research community told us to. Back then, we had time to do things gracefully. With sufficient time and planning, it is possible to create a sustainable industrialised economy, with all that nice electricity and stuff.
But we decided to piss away that time instead, all so that a handful of coal and oil barons could buy slightly newer Porsches. Now it’s too late for a gradual shift. Decarbonise or die.
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The point my father always makes when discussing this issue (and it is true as far as I can tell) is that Democrats/liberals/whoever haven’t actually demonstrated their own willingness or intention for sacrifice.
In most cases, I think Democrats/liberals/whoever haven’t really confronted the reality of what would be required to do anything meaningful about climate change. It’s not changing a few lightbulbs out or driving a Prius. It’s a massive overhaul of our society, including giving up many of the innovations and comforts that people have come to take for granted. It’s hundreds of millions of urbanized or suburbanized humans learning to farm (in a new climactic regime) instead of shuffling paper and bits around. It’s never seeing family who live more than 30 miles away, and barely ever seeing those more than 5 miles away. It’s slaughtering your own livestock and happily eating the sweetmeats because those are precious calories and there’s no one like Armour or Oscar Myer to make them look not like internal organs before you eat them any more.
As a result of this failure to grasp reality on both sides of the issue, the issue has become a totem of political identification rather than a collective problem to be solved together. And I know all you liberals want to push the blame for this failure onto deniers, but…sorry, liberals do share a lot of the blame here. All the moralizing and finger pointing while failing to demonstrate any actual sacrifices to the cause come across as hypocrisy and have caused a lot of the retrenchment of deniers. And the failure to acknowledge the reality of what is required to combat climate change makes liberals look ridiculous. For example, the thing about SUVs. If you think individuals switching to driving Priuses instead of SUVs is going to make a difference then you are simply ignorant about the sources of carbon dioxide emissions and you should educate yourself before getting smug and talking down to any deniers.
I’m fond of the perspective that methods of social organization are forms of technology, and so the failure of human societies to coordinate a response to climate change is a technological failure not a moral failure. Seriously, guys, moralizing about this is what turned so many red meat eaters off the message. It may be good for motivating people who already agree with you, but nothing is more likely to alienate anyone who doesn’t.
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That’s my guess. Each carbon-based ecosystem gets one glut of concentrated sunlight as soon as they figure out how to drill it up and burn it for fuel, and if they don’t become space-faring by the time they run out, they will never become space-faring at all.
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RIGHT NOW makes no sense with new nuclear power plants. I cannot name one current example with a construction time* within the project plan.
* and don’t even talk about actual and projected costs…
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By Right Now, I mean we have the technology and ability to start building now. Yes, such things cost time and money.
It’s funny that you propose socialized power generation - no for-profit energy company is willing to build modern nuclear plants without rather massive public grants. The planned Hinkley Point plant will create power at about the double price of the current wholesale price - naturally guaranteed by the state and with inflationary adjustment.
Wind and solar are ready for prime time (for some reasons the German grid is more stable since the Renewable Energy Sources Act is in force) and the government currently tries to hinder the extension with all might - mostly because the huge suppliers slept through the turnover and are panicking.
For load balancing the grid needs fast-acting plants, so natural gas turbines and not lame coal or nuclear plants. All arguments about the oh-so-needed tansitional technology are bullshit and based in politics and corporate thinking.
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it would be cheaper and more conservative of individual economic freedoms (not to mention militarily a far better idea) to build an agriculturally based carbon-neutral energy infrastructure than to invest in terrestrial fission plants.
The Big Lie, though, is that climate change itself is our problem. Climate change is a symptom, one of many. Pollution is the problem. Carbon is part of that larger picture. Sure, climate change is probably enough to kill us all by itself, in time, but there’s other symptoms too, that are also evil and need attention at the same time.
Nothing I say about pollution and climate change was controversial before Reagan and the big retreat from rationality. Tesla saw it even in the very early 1900s, and condemned the burning of coal and oil. Here’s Don Marquis from 1935:
america was once a paradise
of timberland and stream
but it is dying because of the greed
and money lust of a thousand little kings
who slashed the timber all to hell
and would not be controlled
and changed the climate
Regular people used to understand that pollution was bad… now so-called liberals actively attempt to sabotage anyone identified as “Green”, in the interests of retaining control over a corrupt and self-defeating pollution machine.
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The provisioning and maintenance of nuclear power relies on an industrial system and supply chain largely powered by fossil fuels. That is, creating new nuclear generation capacity will necessarily require an increase in carbon dioxide emissions to make the concrete and steel, to mine and to refine the Uranium etc. It would take decades that we probably don’t have to be able to match our current output using nuclear power.
But that won’t be enough. By that time, our energy needs will have increased. There might be a political solution to that issue, but there isn’t a political solution to the more serious problem: our transportation and heavy industry systems are predicated on the use of liquid fuel in ICEs, and there’s no straight-forward way to switch this stuff over to pure electric. A transition from fossil fuels to nuclear is vaguely within the realm of possibilities, but it would be very difficult, expensive, and – again – would take decades we don’t have.
Another really important point, the storage problem for nuclear waste still hasn’t been solved. Much of the nuclear industry’s waste is left in storage ponds which have to be cooled by physically pumping water into them, otherwise they heat up and radioactive isotopes are emitted into the local atmosphere in large quantities. This means that if the transition from fossil fuels to nuclear doesn’t work out, we end up with incredible amounts of radiation was we lose the infrastructure required to manage the vastly increased volumes of nuclear waste we will have generated.
Finally, nuclear power is non-renewable, and so even if we were able to pull off the incredibly difficult and improbable transition I gestured at above, we get only a few hundred years of industrial civilization out of it. If we haven’t figured out fusion by then, then I hope we’ll at least have solved the waste problem – otherwise, it’s probably extinction for us and most other terrestrial mammals.
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I don’t know what that looks like. Can you explain?
Are they? I thought both industries also required huge subsidies as well. I thought energy storage was still a huge issue. I am not a huge fan of wind, but solar, like I said, I think will be ultimately what we come to rely on, with both home based panels and solar farms.
Feel free to link me to progress made in those two areas.
Anything you burn, you offset by growing plants that use the same amount of carbon to make plant cells. (That’s oversimplified, but gives the general flavor I think. Medievalist will correct me if I have him wrong I’m sure.)
This is exactly correct, and there are many other problems as well. The system-wide costs are incredible and have actually may have caused a net increase in carbon emissions because dirty coal-burning plants are often used to balance the intermittency of energy production. Because installation is expensive but energy production is marginal cost zero, they play hell with the existing energy market. And an underrated problem – taxes on fossil fuel extraction is a huge source of revenue for governments. You can’t switch from government-taxed energy to government-subsidized energy without a huge impact on government revenue.
Some of the comments in the post link to papers by Jacobson (a guy who tries to sketch out plans for all-renewable systems that provide as much energy as we currently used) and critiques of him. It doesn’t look good for wind/water/solar powering our current level of industry.
Edit: There’s also the transition problems I mentioned in connection with nuclear. You can’t power a complicated supply chain by putting windmills and solar panels on top of big rigs. Also, try looking at the infrastructure involved with mining the aluminum, steel, and rare elements used to produce solar panels, windmills, and modern batteries. Producing carbon-free energy requires a lot of carbon, as it turns out.
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For the one-percenters of that day, it sure was.
For the subsistence farmers, sharecroppers, and (going back a little further) slaves, not so much.
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You forgot the biggie:
This is reversible via technological means. Relax.
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the most nuclear friendly feed-in tariff comparison are small (< 10kWp) solar PV (highest compensation): Hinkley Point C will get €108/MWh, the PV €131/MWh. The oh-so-needed nuclear power plant feed-in price will rise (inflationary adjustment), the PV has a built-in degression every quarter.
power-to-gas. the pipeline network in Germany can store about 30 TWh, the first plants on industrial level (> 1MW) are up and running.
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I was confused by the fact that he made Asterix older than Caesar. That yellow mustache really keeps him looking young…
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Sure!
The problem with burning fossil fuels, as understood since at least 1905 and probably earlier, is that it liberates sequestered carbon. In an earlier age of our planet, trillions of tons of carbon were taken out of the atmosphere, creating a climate where human life could flourish. Burning fossil fuels puts that carbon back into the atmosphere, and eventually restores the pre-human climate or something like it.
Van Helmont demonstrated (and the experiment is easily reproduced, I recommend people do it) that plants do not gain the carbon in their physical structures from the soil. They crack it out of the air - their hydrocarbons are made from water and carbon dioxide. So, unlike burning coal and oil, burning plants is carbon neutral - in a minimally clean burning apparatus using uncontaminated plant matter, the smoke doesn’t add anything to the air that wasn’t already present in the air while the plant was growing. The materials taken from the soil are mainly left in the ash, which can be used to re-enrich the soil and grow more plants.
A sustainable agriculture based energy policy would depend on highly distributed production of plants requiring low inputs of work and resources. These would then be (again, in a highly distributed fashion) converted in to burnable liquids and gases, which can be directly consumed by existing infrastructure, such as oil furnaces, diesel and gasoline engines, or used in existing gas furnaces, stoves, refrigerators and power plants.
Such a strategy is highly dependent on pipelines, which makes it desirable to have a society where people don’t feel marginalized and prone to acts of terrorism and vandalism. That being said, a truly highly distributed system would be resilient in the face of pipeline sabotage or acts of war - it’s never as inherently militarily weak as highly centralized energy production methods like deep-sea oil drilling or nuclear fission.
The cost would be equivalent to building the national highway system and a couple of nuke plants. So, a tiny fraction of what we spend slaughtering people in the Endless War on Terror To Keep Texas Oil Prices High. We would be done already if we’d started at the beginning of Bill Clinton’s second term.
So what does it look like? It looks like more pipelines (we already have the big ones, but we need a million miles of smaller feeders) less cancer, less uncontrolled climate change, more employment in healthy trades, more jobs overall, less military vulnerability, more community resilience, less fracking, less coal mining, no deep-sea drilling, more citizen support for energy policy, more green technology investment - and more farms growing less resource-intensive crops.
It also looks like existing powers - who retain their ability to live above the law through control of energy - have to become working people instead of retaining their status as petty, sadistic godlings… and that’s why it’s not already happened.
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That’s the main reason why, though I give widely to climate change and environmental groups, the Sierra Club has always been very low on my list for me.
(Currently my top contributions are to the Environmental Defense Fund, but I’d be happy to hear other great options.)
I didn’t reject it quickly. I used to be gung-ho nuclear, and it took decades of study before I reluctantly came to understand that terrestrial fission plants are not a solution, they are an additional problem. In fact long ago, shortly after I left the aerospace industry, I worked on software* used to control nuclear power plants and weapons reactors**.
But putting aside the empirically demonstrated truth that nuke plants are incompatible with the American economic system, and cannot be operated safely and profitably without forcing people (who do not want nukes!) to subsidize them, they are a ridiculously vulnerable target to build in a nation that goes around invading other sovereign nations. It’s like carrying a briefcase full of TNT around - sure, that might work out OK for Father Niceypants, but it’s not something Officer McJustice should be doing. Given the number of people we’ve got for enemies, it’s best not to carry that briefcase.
* INFOTROL devs, represent!
** That plutonium is not my fault.
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The question of whether we can rapidly change to a low-carbon world can be rephrased as another question: is it possible to convince nations and oil companies to leave carbon in the ground?
This is the key question. There is money (and national progress) — in the form of oil, coal and natural gas — buried in the ground, accessible to anyone with the capital to drill it. How can they be convinced to leave it there? And not just leave some of it there, but to leave 80% of the remaining carbon in the ground.
This is surprisingly difficult, especially because oil companies and their share holders already have trillions of dollars invested in capital costs, well claims, and stocks, and they are depending on pulling that wealth from the ground.
This is the premise of the terrifying and excellent article The New Abolitionism.
It argues that the last time we tried to remove a huge proportion of a ruling class’s wealth was when we tried to abolish slavery, and that took a bloody civil war to resolve. Specifically, we were demanding that the South to give up roughly the same equivalent wealth, several trillion dollars’ worth.
The only way it will be possible to keep 80% of the remaining carbon in the ground will be to make it unprofitable to drill – by reducing the price of energy down so that the capital costs aren’t worth the reward. But we have to remember the value of what we are expecting companies and nations to give up to realize how bitterly they will cling to it.
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As a few others have mentioned, this could really do with being on the front page/own article, rather than hidden away.
Are there ways of reducing the CO2 ppm? I get that once the feedback/chain reaction starts then it is game over, but up to that point?
I’m interested in what would happen after as well. There would be less food and water to go around, but presumably a lot less people to feed and water. I’m not sure how helpful moving to higher ground would be either. Might be okay for a while, until everyone else wants to join.
