Cipheron on 18/7/2023 at 16:16
IDK, if Florida is beset with 6 Cat-5 hurricanes per season and all the resources are spent toughening things up for the short-term storm issues, then that is clearly going to be a much more expensive proposition than getting at the root reason so many mega-storms are hitting you.
I think a good analogy would be people who are behind on their pay, so they keep getting payday loans, overdrafts and maxing out credit cards, and most of their problem ends up being all the repayments and overdraft fees. That's similar short-term thinking, even though the payday loans solve the immediate problems.
Things like insurance agencies bailing on people's high-risk properties is causing some people to move away and could cause property prices to fall. That in itself is a corrective for the "too big storms" problem, but instead we'll probably waste a lot of money propping those unsustainable developments up, rather than invest in long term climate solutions.
There's also the problem of local vs global thinking. Basically, if there's a burglar problem then the "local" solution is to toughen up your house, put bars on all the windows, get a big dog, and pay for private security systems, but the "global" solution is better policing and city infrastructure. That's kind of the same difference between "preparing for the storm" vs "climate change mitigation".
Nicker on 18/7/2023 at 22:00
Governments love fixing visible problems because the public sees both the cause and the result. There's a fire and someone putting it out. Money well spent!
Prevention looks like money spent on a problem that's not there.
For example, in BC, when a homeless person has a medical emergency, like an overdose, and there will be three to five emergency vehicles responding. The whole intervention costs several thousand dollars. But try suggesting we house and feed that person, giving them safe drugs or addiction treatment; that would be an assault on the public purse, even if it is vastly more economical.
heywood on 20/7/2023 at 16:31
Quote Posted by bjack
I'm asking what you meant by your last sentence. Long term climate policies that also have improvements in the short term? Examples of these policies that have, or will have, positive impact short term, as well as the long?
OK, here's 5 examples with some quick notes.
1. Waste reduction and increased recycling
- Extends life of landfills and avoids costs of making new ones
- Reduces the cost and pollution of shipping waste
- Reduces the pollution from incineration
- Reducing food waste will reduce food costs
- Also need to stop subsidizing agriculture production we don't need
2. Change buying habits
- Limit impulse buying
- Choose items for the long term
- Avoid disposable items, items with excessive packaging, etc.
- Avoid buying trivial, valueless gifts that serve a token purpose
- This all saves you money, the hassle of disposal, and reduces waste
The token gifts tradition really gets to me as a parent of school-age kids. Every little plastic toy was responsible for burning some coal in the factory in China, fuel oil in the container ship that brought it here, diesel on the trains and trucks that got it to a warehouse, gasoline getting it to someone's house and to the recipient, and electricity at every stop along the way. Only to be looked at and (maybe) played with for a few minutes. Once it gathers dust it gets thrown into the waste stream and creates more emissions. All for no real joy.
2. Energy efficiency improvements
- Any investments we make that reduce our energy consumption immediately reduce our energy bills
- We all need to start being watt watchers, and we'll need incentives to make that happen
- Efficiency can be incentivized through the tax code, or if necessary, mandated through product regulation
3. Energy grid/infrastructure upgrades & expansion
- Improves resilience to disasters and extreme weather
- Paves the way for expanding electricity generation and storage at end points
- Creates jobs and business activity
- Supports solar deployment industry
4. Development of renewable electricity generation
- Reduces the amount of carcinogens raining down on us
- Helps keep rates down because it increases competition among wholesale suppliers
- Increasing the diversity of energy sources increases resilience and reduces price shocks
- Generates jobs, R&D investments, innovation, and a whole lot of spin-off
- Green energy industries already employ a lot of people and generate a huge amount of economic activity, and what's a bigger growth sector?
5. Electrification of transportation
- Reduces exposure to oil price shocks
- Makes us more energy independent
- Reduces smog, surface ozone, particulate emissions
- Improves health
- Reduces noise pollution
The other big benefit from reducing GHG emissions right now is that it buys us time to plan, prepare, and invest. It doesn't undo past emissions, but it has an immediate effect on the rate of climate change. Every ton we don't put in today gives us more time.
Your turn. What are the coming storm and 150 year storm you're referring to? You're implying some sort of tradeoff there, but between what?
bjack on 21/7/2023 at 06:31
Nice list. I agree mostly to it, but these actions will not have much of an impact on CO2 (especially in the short term - i.e. 10 years) if North America and Europe are the only players.
As for doing the old "electrify everything" angle. OK. Where does the power come from, if not from coal/oil/gas? Wind? Solar? What about during night time or if the wind is still for even a day? Batteries will take up the slack? Current battery infrastructure cannot even come close to what is needed. I've heard we might be able to power things for about 15 minutes by the end of the decade. Lithium mining is also pretty nasty, as are the processes to get all those precious rare earth metals used in the motors. Where is all the steel for the new power lines coming from? How will it be smelted?
People in California with Teslas and the like learned the hard way that charging during brown outs is not fun. Neither is A/C going out in heat waves. And speaking of A/C, what are we going to use? Freon is banned. I saw a new fridge today that uses cyclo-pentane instead of a HFC. We now get to have possibly exploding ice boxes. Maybe we'll use ammonia instead, like they did over 100 years ago. Still flammable though.
Maybe go nuclear? Well that would negate the "less toxic" argument. Nothing like a meltdown that screws up the environment for the next 10K+ years. We could build some pretty safe ones, but I fear the US government would mess it up. And the disposal of waste is a big negative.
Hydro? Think of the poor salmon! Washington state gets most of their power from dams and some people want to tear them down. To replace them with what? Nothing. We must revert to Amish style living.
Giant green goo algae pools that can be harvested for oil? They suck up the same CO2 that is emitted when burnt. Carbon neutral. However, we need to reduce overall carbon, not maintain the status quo. A good stop gap measure if it can be done in a large enough scale.
Still I think we should address "the coming storm" (i.e. issues such as rising sea levels, effects of heat and cold on humans, and changing crop land locations, etc.) by preparing for their coming. We (the USA, Canada, Europe) are not going to stop it. We can reduce green house gas outputs, sure, but the effects will not be huge. Before telling everyone they need to give up their gas powered cars, boats, planes, ovens, stoves, HVAC units, etc. People should move further inland. However, I do find it funny Obama has a place on the water in Fl. I guess he thinks it's going to be around for a while.
From what I have heard, the effects of our CO2 and other gas emissions will not be really felt for at least 100 years and maybe more. I've heard the temp rise is expected to be about 1 C. Cutting some emissions at the expense of a whole way of life is not going to change current weather patterns and storms. Shutting down the economy by shutting off the oil, gas, coal, wood, etc. will not stop hurricanes from hitting the gulf and eastern seaboard in the next 100 years.
The USA cut CO2 drastically by switching to natural gas, but that was more than offset by China and India (plus other countries) burning coal. The USA should not castrate itself just so China can have an economic field day.
Off topic, but actually our 2 biggest problems in the USA at this moment are:
1. Almost certain war with China in the coming year over Taiwan
2. The possible loss of the US Dollar as the world currency.
Either of those things happen and this whole thread is moot. Oh well. Fun to talk about it though.
Nicker on 21/7/2023 at 07:26
Quote:
We must revert to Amish style living.
The best suggestion you made in that entire, logical fallacy filled post.
Quote:
Shutting down the economy by shutting off the oil, gas, coal, wood, etc. will not stop hurricanes from hitting the gulf and eastern seaboard in the next 100 years.
Where to fucking start? Replacing hydrocarbon as our primary energy source, is not synonymous with shutting down the economy unless you believe in bogey men or demand that others do. Scare tactics much?
And who the fuck said CO2 mitigation would ELIMINATE hurricanes? Citations please. Make some up if you have to.
I don't suppose reducing the increase (doubling) of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes would be worth our while, would it. Why bother? Right? I mean if you can't eliminate them altogether, why even try?
Quote:
From what I have heard, the effects of our CO2 and other gas emissions will not be really felt for at least 100 years and maybe more.
Step outside at mid day and say that.
Cipheron on 21/7/2023 at 11:57
Quote Posted by bjack
Nice list. I agree mostly to it, but these actions will not have much of an impact on CO2 (especially in the short term - i.e. 10 years) if North America and Europe are the only players.
Good point, except China is already producing a majority of their energy from renewables. Keep in mind a big driver of fossil fuels is corporations that are profiting from that. China is big enough to tell them to get lost.
(
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-installed-non-fossil-fuel-electricity-capacity-exceeds-50-total-2023-06-12/)
Quote:
China's installed non-fossil fuel electricity capacity exceeds 50% of total
...
Quote Posted by bjack
As for doing the old "electrify everything" angle. OK. Where does the power come from, if not from coal/oil/gas? Wind? Solar? What about during night time or if the wind is still for even a day? Batteries will take up the slack? Current battery infrastructure cannot even come close to what is needed. I've heard we might be able to power things for about 15 minutes by the end of the decade. Lithium mining is also pretty nasty, as are the processes to get all those precious rare earth metals used in the motors. Where is all the steel for the new power lines coming from? How will it be smelted?
Lithium batteries are a terrible choice for stationary storage. Lithium is popular because it has a high energy density by mass. But for stationary storage, energy per mass doesn't matter. The main use is mobile devices and vehicles, but grid storage doesn't have the same constraints. There are plenty of technologies such as pumped hydro storage, and battery tech that doesn't use rare metals. Some of these are a lot cheaper than lithium. The reason they're not the hot item is that they are more bulky. But for grid-scale storage, that's not important. The only reason Tesla "Power Wall" uses lithium batteries is because Elon Musk is a narcissist with a god complex. It's the wrong choice for the job, but they used it because it's the battery tech their company knows.
Quote:
People in California with Teslas and the like learned the hard way that charging during brown outs is not fun. Neither is A/C going out in heat waves. And speaking of A/C, what are we going to use? Freon is banned. I saw a new fridge today that uses cyclo-pentane instead of a HFC. We now get to have possibly exploding ice boxes. Maybe we'll use ammonia instead, like they did over 100 years ago. Still flammable though.
You can link people's car batteries back into the grid to feed some power out during peak times, and store it when it's plentiful. So the rollout of electric cars has the potential to add a lot of distributed batteries around the state, too. Some cars will be at 100%, so those are just sitting there, but could feed 10% back into the grid. This uses the same existing tech that home solar uses, so many properties already have the right infrastructure for this. So, why wouldn't we utilize millions of extra batteries we know about to work as decentralized load storage?
Quote:
We now get to have possibly exploding ice boxes. Maybe we'll use ammonia instead, like they did over 100 years ago. Still flammable though.
And somehow this is a good point when people are having gas pumped into their houses already and driving around in and on vehicles that work by exploding flammable gasses. "we can't drop gas and oil because then we might have to rely on something that could explode!" /s
Quote:
Maybe go nuclear? Well that would negate the "less toxic" argument. Nothing like a meltdown that screws up the environment for the next 10K+ years. We could build some pretty safe ones, but I fear the US government would mess it up. And the disposal of waste is a big negative.
One main problem with the "nuclear would have solved it", is that we only know about ~90 years world of uranium at current consumption rates. But those only account for 10% of global electricity needs. If we had already replaced coal with nuclear and got to 50% nuclear, the world's known supplies would run out in 18 years. But that's 18 years from when the plants were built, not now. So if we already did that we'd probably already be in a uranium supply crisis, and the cost of uranium would be much higher than it is now. Solar and wind would be relatively more cost-effective anyway.
(
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx)
So nuclear is ok, but uranium fission couldn't have practically supplied over about 20% of the world's electricity needs, i.e. double what it's giving us. Then the known economically-viable supplies would last 40 years, which is at least the lifetime of the plants. You still need renewables for the other 80%.
Most of the ideas that make nuclear viable rely on rolling the dice that technologies that don't exist yet or that were abandoned are gonna pay off and that the existing designs of uranium plants will last us until them.
Quote:
Hydro? Think of the poor salmon! Washington state gets most of their power from dams and some people want to tear them down. To replace them with what? Nothing. We must revert to Amish style living.
Quote:
Giant green goo algae pools that can be harvested for oil? They suck up the same CO2 that is emitted when burnt. Carbon neutral. However, we need to reduce overall carbon, not maintain the status quo. A good stop gap measure if it can be done in a large enough scale.
A lot of carbon will be sequestered in the production pipeline however. And the same technology that harvests the goo into oil could also be used to sequester the carbon. Just make more than you need and pump the excess down the same holes we got oil out of in the first place. But that technology needs to be economically viable to start with, so harvesting it for energy would be a start.
Quote:
2. The possible loss of the US Dollar as the world currency.
Either of those things happen and this whole thread is moot. Oh well. Fun to talk about it though.
That's insane. You think the US dollar not being the world currency means we might as well let the whole world burn to death?
Even a war with China is basically fuck all next to the issue of destroying the ecosystem we rely on. I mean, we're basically having that proxy war with Russia over Ukraine right now, and it's not exactly destroying the whole world or anything. China and the USA are not gonna nuke each other. The losses to China from a nuclear war exceed the value of them getting Taiwan 1000 times over.
With China, the centralization of power that's going on is just as likely to signal they're about to fracture as it is to signal they're getting stronger. China's military has a lot of "stuff" but there are signs they have some of the same organizational weaknesses of the Russian military.
heywood on 22/7/2023 at 16:03
Quote Posted by bjack
From what I have heard, the effects of our CO2 and other gas emissions will not be really felt for at least 100 years and maybe more.
Don't you live in the southwest? That really cracked me up. And for some reason made me think about this classic.
[video=youtube_share;r95a3p8Os-w?t=60]https://youtu.be/r95a3p8Os-w?t=60[/video]
The idea that green energy is going to make you give up your lifestyle and modern standard of living is pure oil industry FUD. Oil money has been driving Republican messaging on this since the 90s. Energy is the new economic revolution, particularly but not exclusively green energy. A lot of the wealth in this country came from the computing & information technology revolution, and from the biotech and genetics revolution, which we heavily invested in and produced many market leading companies and individuals. We're in danger of missing the boat this time on energy because of old oil money boot dragging. We let China take over the solar market by dumping, we're well behind Europe on wind, and nuclear is going nowhere.
heywood on 22/7/2023 at 17:49
Quote Posted by Cipheron
One main problem with the "nuclear would have solved it", is that we only know about ~90 years world of uranium at current consumption rates. But those only account for 10% of global electricity needs. If we had already replaced coal with nuclear and got to 50% nuclear, the world's known supplies would run out in 18 years. But that's 18 years from when the plants were built, not now. So if we already did that we'd probably already be in a uranium supply crisis, and the cost of uranium would be much higher than it is now. Solar and wind would be relatively more cost-effective anyway.
(
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx)
So nuclear is ok, but uranium fission couldn't have practically supplied over about 20% of the world's electricity needs, i.e. double what it's giving us. Then the known economically-viable supplies would last 40 years, which is at least the lifetime of the plants. You still need renewables for the other 80%.
You're incorrect in assuming that the known uranium is the sum total of the available uranium. The known reserves keep going up over time. For example, a quote from your article says "
The world's known uranium resources increased by at least one-quarter in the last decade due to increased mineral exploration." Uranium is a common element easily found in crust rock, so there is no reason to worry about scarcity as long as we can efficiently process low grade ore.
Cipheron on 23/7/2023 at 12:34
Quote Posted by heywood
You're incorrect in assuming that the known uranium is the sum total of the available uranium. The known reserves keep going up over time. For example, a quote from your article says "
The world's known uranium resources increased by at least one-quarter in the last decade due to increased mineral exploration." Uranium is a common element easily found in crust rock, so there is no reason to worry about scarcity as long as we can efficiently process low grade ore.
The new discoveries just about keep pace with current consumption.
For example, the future reserves went up from about 80 years to 90 years across 15 years. But that's only at current rates of consumption.
Nuclear is around 10% of world electricity. But ... that's not total energy, because it excludes oil and gas used for fuel and heating. Nuclear only makes up about 5% of world energy needs.
So uranium deposit discoveries are basically keeping up with a level to supply just over 5% of world energy needs.
If it's the primary solution that some people think it should be, then what percentage of world energy should it be replacing? 50%? That would be 10 times the amount we're using now.
If those plants had come online in 2010, then those "80 years worth" of fuel from 2009 would have run out in 2018. Then the new amount we discovered in the meantime would only last another 2 years.
So a world where we replace oil with cars running off electricity from nuclear plants instead of oil is clearly not a sustainable model.
So let's say a more reasonable model is that we expanded nuclear by a factor of 5, not 10. Then, the 80s years worth of fuel from 2009 would be running out in 2024. The new amount we discovered in the mean time was 25 years worth (covers 15 years plus another 10 years buffer), but since we expanded consumption x5, that's only another 5 years, so we'd hit a wall around 2029-2030.
So, "5x" nuclear looks like it wouldn't be sustainable or practical. That's 25% of world energy needs. We'd still need to figure out where we are getting 75% of our electricity from.
The practical limit is probably more like 2x nuclear. In that scenario it would be more practical to explore for more uranium. That would mean nuclear isn't the solution for 90% of our energy needs.
heywood on 23/7/2023 at 18:07
We didn't hit peak oil around Y2K like the predictions of the 70s and 80s said, and we're not going to run out of Uranium either.
Half of the world's known Uranium resources were discovered just in the last 20 years. There was a lot of exploration in the 1950s, but by the 1970s the demand for it was far less than expected, the price crashed, and exploration stopped. Then about 15 years ago, exploration started back up again. Uranium isn't that scarce. It's about 1/3 more abundant than Tin in the Earth's crust, but Tin production is 4x Uranium production because the demand for it is that much greater. If the demand for Uranium goes up, and the price with it, there will be more exploration, and the supply will go up to meet demand. That's kind of the way mining goes.
Fuel cost has never been the driving factor in nuclear operating costs. Plus we're sitting on a mountain of spent fuel that we can get another cycle out of. Nuclear isn't a solution by itself, but nothing else is either, and it's proven. We have to bring all sources to the table.
