I don't get this kind way of thinking. We have a proven and tested way of producing electricity without any emission - nuclear power plants.
This article even mention it, obviously on the last place in a strange way "and to advanced nuclear plants with zero emissions". As if there were some non-advanced nuclear plants that have non-zero emission.
Solar and wind require energy storage that we don't have now and it does not seem we will without major technological leap. In addition, in large parts of the World they just does not make sense as there is not enough sunny/windy days.
For nuclear energy we have everything - knowledge, infrastructure, experience.
What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now? Eco people fought vigorously nuclear energy for years and now we are where we are. Time to say that they've made a costly mistake and move on.
Like solar & wind, nuclear also needs supplementing with peaker plants. Nuclear can be used for peaking, but current designs cannot, and nobody is going to pay the crazy costs of nuclear just to have it idle 23 hours a day as a peaker.
And storage for renewables is a last resort. Instead of storage:
1. build in areas with reliable winds (offshore trade winds)
2. better interconnection ("the wind is always blowing somehwere")
3. over-provisioning. If you build 3 times as much wind power as you need, it's still a lot cheaper than nuclear and you need a lot less storage.
4. storage. It's expensive, but if you did 1-3 correctly, you don't need much of it.
Nuclear is safe, but it's also crazy expensive and takes decades to build.
Scale is missing in your analytsis. For instance in New England, the peak demand goes from 15GWh (average) to 16.5GWh down to 10GWh.
Solar and wind on the other hand, need supplemental for 100% of its installed capacity the day there is no wind...
In France, 70% of the electricity is nuclear, 15% is hydro, pumped by the excess nuclear power generated at during the night.
Now for your arguments:
1. Wind goes from 0 to 50mph at sea. No reliable wind corridor exists. Even if Market Street in San Francisco makes me think otherwise frequently :)
2. The concept of wind proliferation has been debunked, at least on the European level. We built a network between Denmark, Germany, Portugal and Italy. It doesn't work.
3. If you don't have wind, putting 3 wind turbines won't help you more. Germany learned it the hard way where their CO2 emission flat lined since 2009 instead of going down despite their all in on the wind and solar energy. If you install 3 times more than what you need, you also have the side effect of making your renewable energy 3 times more carbone intensive. It kills solar as a viable, scalable option for instance.
4. Yes that would be the required breakthough to change the game. Right now batteries production pollute way too much and cost too much to be climate efficient.
Do you have either a non-paywall version of that article or an alternative article with a similar view? I'm curious what it says, but I can't read it with the paywall in place.
You would need utility scale storage to flatten the load curve. The peaks and super peaks are not going away until there is a viable storage mechanism with enough capacity. We are talking significant changes in demand between even the early afternoon and the super peak in almost all load areas (pjm California ercot). The other alternative is a massive buildout or behind the meter solar which theoretically could solve this issue.
What the above poster is suggesting is adjusting demand dynamically based on price. That requires consumers to throttle their own usage (probably using automated systems that know the real-time price of electricity). You can run the dishwasher or charge your car or cool your home when electricity is cheap.
I’m not sure there is enough play in demand elasticity to affect significant change relative to the amount of load difference you see. Furthermore the peaks are highly weather sensitive. Would love to be proven wrong though.
There's not much play in demand at the moment, but there could be if more systems were aware of the price of electricity. A/C can be turned off, cars can stop charging, dishes can wait, etc.
Variation in renewable energy generation can be reduced by averaging over larger geographic areas. Wind speeds and cloud cover vary much more on local scales than on continent-wide scales.
A combination of demand adjustment and linking of power generation over large geographic areas can reduce the need for energy storage.
The daily fluctuations in demand aren't as large as this comment makes it seem. Usually, demand changes by ~25% between peak demand and minimum demand [1]. Excess energy produced during non-peak demand can be used for carbon sequestration, desalination, hydrogen production, or any other intensive industry.
Nuclear is safe until it isn't, then you lose a large area of the country around the power plant (Chernobyl, Fukushima.) Personally I don't think it's worth the risk, plus the building times you write about and the costs of decommissioning.
I'm starting to think the permanent evacuation zones are based more on arbitrary scare tactics than actual danger, at least after the acute event is under control. Maybe you don't want to live there. But entering doesn't seem to be the death sentence it's made out to be, based on the people that never left Chernobyl and returning population in Japan.
If global warming is as certain and as dangerous as what's being claimed, the risk of contaminating a few thousand acres (or even miles) with radioactivity is certainly worth it to save the world.
Plus Fukushima basically disproved the China syndrome scare we've been fed for 40+ years.
Michael Shellenberger is one of my favorite writers on this topic. The radiation around Fukushima is less than the naturally occurring radiation in Colorado.
3. no ROI and no clean energy without billions of up-front investment and 20 years
I think we should have started spending hundreds of billions on nuclear power plants yesterday, but now we have to walk and chew gum at the same time. If it really does take 20 years to build enough nuclear power plants (construction that will be fueled by carbon) we have to make some other clean energy investments RIGHT NOW that will soften the blow until we finish building those reactors.
1 & 2 are political decisions, fueled by "nucleophobia".
If it can solve global warming in 20 years, that's an easy win to take. There is no emergency forcing anything faster, and I doubt that it's even possible to find a cure (that isn't worse than the disease) that works faster anyway.
I thought it’s more just that nuclear power plants aren’t economically or politically viable any more, since wealthy governments are no longer subsidizing them with their massive and growing nuclear weapons programs.
Nuclear has huge hurdles and long implementation times because of hysterical anti-nuclear activists. It's not inherent in the engineering. If we care about climate change, it needs to be acknowledged that the activists created artificial delays and those should be removed forthwith.
Even China takes >5 years to build a nuclear plant. China normally builds non-controversial infrastructure 3X as fast as the US, so by that rule of thumb a nuclear plant would take 15 years in the US, and longer if you don't get rid of the anti-nuclear activists.
The obvious answer is public distrust of nuclear. There have been several high profile nuclear disasters, not to mention the universal distaste for living anywhere near a nuclear waste dump. Plus reactors are very expensive to build, and they have to compete with cheap fossil fuels for energy cost. In 30 years we haven't been able to tie fossil fuel companies to the carbon cost of their product.
There are so many people who in one breath will say climate change is the biggest existential threat that will kill us all soon and when asked about nuclear will suddenly start hand wringing about politics and ROI.
When people start to truly panic and fear death you can be sure the nukes will start getting built quickly. It’s just too bad people on all sides can’t get there before reality sets in further, including those who claim to be legitimately fearful (if they aren’t pushing for nuclear now, and fast, they’re not truly fearful.)
That’s the thing about this issue: humans aren’t built to deal with it.
> When people start to truly panic and fear death you can be sure the nukes will start getting built quickly.
By this point it is far too late for any action to have meaningful consequence. People are raising hands now, when the effects are practically nonexistent on a human timescale, because if we wait until the effects affect us, then we are well and truly fucked. Society won’t collapse this century, but it might in a few hundred years.
Well, my own prediction is a) that we will mitigate climate change and b) it will not be through any of the activism methods being pursued today. The reason we will succeed is because we are, luckily, converging on market incentives which will (as a side effect) fix climate change. Specifically, it seems likely that the next iteration of technology startups focused on energy should be able to create products that are both clean and radically reduce energy costs, and hence will be in-demand by the global markets. For example, small nuclear reactors, or solar products. These will be easily exportable, and as such will cause a virtuous cycle of iteration and innovation.
In retrospect, the advocacy of regressive policies like "everyone should fly less" will be just another chapter of the long serious of luddites thinking the only solution to problems is to reverse technological progress in the face of new, unexpected problems raised through the continual growth of the global economy.
I agree for the most part. We will either fix it technologically (my guess through a combination of nuclear, renewables, and carbon capture) or we won’t fix it. In the latter case we either won’t fix it and everything will still be fine, because the IPCC and others estimate the cost of a do nothing scenario at like 10% of world GDP by 2100,[1] or we won’t fix it and we’ll all die.
What will never happen is addressing climate change through social engineering.
I think you would probably agree that those technological shifts require significant policy shifts, like a carbon tax, right? Does your pessimism about social engineering extend to getting public support for those kinds of policy shifts? (I agree that individual choices to eg fly less will not be a major component of any solution we reach.)
How is that not still social engineering? It's just collective and punitive instead of individual and guilt driven.
A carbon tax (at least without going 100% to sequestration) is only an behavior penalty. It's not even a net gain, it's just slowing a net loss. There's nothing innovative about that.
The sequestration part of the equation is where there's potential for technological breakthroughs. If we go carbon negative, it won't be because it requires a change in lifestyle, but because we find a cheap way to offset our carbon generation. And I mean literally pulling carbon from thin air (or water). Not using accounting trickery to buy some emission "offset" that a developing population surely would have hypothetically used, had you not paid them cash money (along with a sizable percentage to some broker who has friends in DC).
I think you would find much less opposition, no matter the government's cost, once 1) a plan is laid out that doesn't require a regression in anyone's lifestyle, and 2) doesn't involve a punitive cost to sustain that lifestyle, and 3) doesn't involve any component resembling wealth re-distribution, or buying credit that amounts to paying someone else to not do something.
I said carbon credits (in it's current enron-accounting form) is paying someone to do nothing, and that carbon credits and a carbon tax are both types of negative action social engineering, likely to fail.
If you're going for utilitarianism, pick a more politically agreeable utility, like actual sequestration, if you want to be successful.
I'm speaking as a matter of strategy. A carbon tax might work, and be seen as a victory, tactically, but will be the wrong move, strategically.
It prevents addition of co2, but does not subtract. Focus on encouraging and incentives for subtraction, not preventing addition. If you want people to get on board. (I get that reducing emissions means less to sequester. That's thinking short term, and beyond minor cutbacks, a political loser. A successful solution won't require that to be effective.)
I'm saying anything punitive and negatively coercive is the wrong approach. It might technically work, but won't ever be successful politically. Unless we go full authoritarian regime. As soon as a large enough portion of the population is hit with having to change lifestyle, it's done for. Focus on solutions that don't require that.
Clean energy solutions are only desired by the market because activism impelled governments to try to price in the externality costs of dirty energy.
How do you foresee the other environmental pressures (water, soil etc) being resolved? Are we merely maturing through a series of dirty technologies and are on the cusp of a clean tech revolution that will allow us to arbitrarily increase the Earth's carrying capacity? At what point does absolute decoupling of growth and resource consumption occur?
I do hope you're right, as it seems like the only viable path, but I am still doubtful.
>What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now?
Chernobyl and more recently Fukushima.
You might say those were caused by outdated tech or bad management. I'm someone who doesn't think my local or national government would be immune to those failings.
One thing those disasters have shown about nuclear is that a single accident -- even if there is little loss of life -- absolutely ruins the economics of nuclear power. Even an accident with no loss of life will cost an absolute fortune to clean up and decommission due to how hard it is just to handle and transport the material.
Prior to Fukushima nuclear power was fairly economical in Japan. Post-Fukushima and in retrospect it would have been cheaper to cover every roof in Japan with solar panels, build loads of offshore wind, and build massive energy storage facilities and pumped storage reservoirs.
I'm not doubting you but, do you have some stats to back this up? I'm curious.
I would imagine the expense is difficult to determine and quite controversial. Especially when you consider the costs of the effects to the ocean/environment and whatnot that aren't being borne by the japanese people.
Another issue I am surprised doesn't get brought up is that there are only 450 Nuclear Reactors in the world.
Any nuclear accident is unacceptable, but what do you think the rate of crashes were in the first 1000 Airplanes?
When we don't build nuclear, we don't really get better at nuclear. If the U.S. decided to build 50 Nuclear reactors in relatively remote parts of Nevada to power California. Even if we had another accident, by the time we had finished that project our safety standards would be in a very different place.
America has a huge problem with corporations bribing politicians to loosen "costly" regulations at the expense of our health and environment.
The country is already destroying itself with fracking and coal mining. Nuclear power is orders of magnitude more devastating. So while nuclear is plenty safe when handled correctly, it's completely understandable to feel like America is not a country which can be trusted to handle things correctly.
> The country is already destroying itself with fracking and coal mining. Nuclear power is orders of magnitude more devastating.
All of this is completely wrong. Fracking has enabled us to simultaneously reduce CO2 emissions (by reducing coal mining) while reducing our reliance on foreign oil. Nuclear would be a huge leap forward, again maintaining energy independence (no reliance on Chinese solar panels) while cutting CO2 output.
You’ve got it backwards. America, and the rest of the world, has a problem with environmentalists who can’t do cost-benefit analysis. Thanks to nuclear, France hit CO2 emissions per capita of 6.5 tons back in 1990. Now it’s at 4.6. Germany is still around 9. By the time Germany gets to similar levels using wind and solar, France will have been sitting at those lower levels for 50 years. Everyone in Germany becoming vegans tomorrow won’t make up for half a century of unnecessary CO2 emissions because environmentalists were afraid of nuclear.
I'm not talking about CO2, I'm talking about the localized effects of fracking, which is leaking into the water supply and probably renders the area around fracking sites uninhabitable.
I too am pro-nuclear, but isn't it too late for traditional nuclear to save us? We need solutions very quickly and the typical nuclear power plant takes 10 years to build.
In my uneducated opinion, the only way I see nuclear working is if there are small modular reactors that are produced quickly in a factory assembly line.
Nuclear, slow as it may be to build, is still the fastest option to actually eliminate fossil fuel usage. The other plans involving intermittent sources require immense amounts of energy storage. To put this in perspective, the US consumes ~5TWh of electricity during nighttime. The entire world only produces 300GWh of lithium ion batteries annually [1]. This is expected to increase to 1TWh by 2023 and probably 2TWh by 2030. But still, if we're talking about eliminating fossil fuel usage globally it'd take the better party of a century to build the energy storage required. Other plants for energy storage are either geographically limited (hydroelectric), or have yet to be built at any meaningful scale and have questionable efficiencies (Sabatier process, hydrogen).
France's nuclearization program took 20 years [2], but that's a hare's pace compared to building the energy storage required for intermittent sources.
Technology hasn't regressed. Nuclear plants get built cheaper and faster on a per unit basis when they're built as part of a series of production. France built dozens of copies of the same four reactor designs. By comparison, many new projects are one off or part of only a single digit number of copies.
I don't think she says anything I much disagree with. I think this even restates my point, in less inflammatory language:
> and here, my friends, is where the mythical "we have 12 years to fix this or the world ends" narrative comes from. (I'm not pointing my finger at anyone in particular here; I'm just saying I've heard this. A lot.)
> Concl'n: Science does not identify a specific goal, target, or timeline. What it says is simply this: the more carbon we produce, the worse the impacts. The best thing to do is wean ourselves off it, as soon as is humanly possible. As a human I'd add: while minimizing suffering.
I would say misunderstanding rather than rumour — the original statement was closer to “Given how long it takes politicians to do things, we have until 2030 to get started on really fixing everything and not just painting things green and mistaking that for action”.
> What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now?
People aren't always rational, people will strongly resist changing their current viewpoints and people will very strongly resist making lifestyle changes. Politicians know this also when looking to get elected.
Reducing meat consumption and reducing the number of flights we take are other areas people need to look at but you'll be met with the same problems at a personal and political level.
The article is advocating for increased nuclear. But energy is just one piece of the puzzle, and it's the piece that's the furthest along the deployment curve from emergence to diffusion to reconfiguration. According to the article the other pieces are cars, buildings, trucks, agriculture, aviation, shipping, steel, cement and plastics. Nuclear won't replace any of them.
Bury it underground. The amount of waste generated by nuclear power is a fraction of 1% of all the toxic waste generated by heavy industry. The entirety of the United States' nuclear waste from electricity generation occupies a volume the size of a football field in footprint and 10 yards high [1]. A coal plants generates this much waste every hour.
You reprocess it to remove all the stuff that isn't actually "waste" because it's usable as fuel. What remains presents a much smaller storage problem which has known working solutions.
> We have a proven and tested way of producing electricity without any emission - nuclear power plants.
We don't know that since to this day we do not know what cost a nuclear power plant actually imposes on society. The geological issue of ultimate storage for example is absurdly complex and remains unresolved. Here in Germany there's only very few potential locations[1]. None of them without potentially hazardous downsides.
In terms of agriculture, we could use basic research into perennial staple crops. [1] It’s a promising area, but still a ways off. The result, as mentioned in the article, is less soil disturbance and more long-term carbon sequestration.
From a policy perspective, Victory Gardens [2] were a successful strategy during WWII. It would be great to mobilize a similar effort to get people growing food in their own backyards again, and reduce the amount of monocrop farming and all the global transportation and chemical fertilizer production that goes along with it.
I don't know if you've ever tried growing food in your back yard to eat?
It's a fine hobby if you enjoy gardening and find satisfaction in the honest simplicity and hard work of digging over soil, weeding, and spreading manure.
But the truth is: supermarket food is incredibly cheap, and you'll be putting in 50 hours of labour to grow $20 worth of vegetables.
If you enjoy the process and don't mind not getting much output, by all means enjoy it as a hobby. But as a way to feed the nation? I'm skeptical.
Absolutely, but in the context of this conversation we’re talking about moving away from annuals and all of the labor and inputs associated — towards perennials.
Therefore, I’m not saying we should copy the Victory Garden from WWII verbatim, but use it as a model for how every person can use their backyard to combat climate change.
The point is not to replace all of agriculture, but find ways that, collectively, individuals can make a dent in the problem. Even if it’s as simple as planting more oak trees and fruit trees.
But, some of the comments here lack imagination (to speak kindly of the some of the negativity and snark in some of the other replies) in how we could take a 20th century idea and update it for today. We have more technology available, and more knowledge.
Considering how much arable land is used to produce animal feed (about 50%) there is quite a lot of room for improvement, especially considering how inefficient meat production is.
The first and easiest thing we can each do, individually, is eat less meat (or better - no meat).
My wife and I have been mostly vegan for a year for health reasons and it’s surprisingly easy. Throw on the eco benefit and it’s a very good feeling. Very worth it.
My wife and I made the switch to vegetarian about 3 months ago, and it's been much easier then I expected. I love meat, but knowing both the health and ecological impacts I just couldn't justify my consumption anymore.
My daughter is vegan and sometimes I worry about her diet. A diet is what you do eat, how much, when, etc.; but being vegan only tells you what you don't eat.
Surprisingly little about vegan promotional stuff gives practical advice. It's mostly talking about how wasteful meat is and how foolish meat-eaters are.
Where is practical material about daily eating habits? Like, what should an athletic teenager eat, how much, and how often? Preferably with pictures of actual normal daily food, not "here's an arcane recipe requiring twelve ingredients and ten steps that you will eat once and forget about". And preferably with approximate nutritional value.
For adults it's probably pretty easy simply because adults don't need a lot of food to be healthy, and can skip meals without much downside. Adults are also in many ways less busy. A teenager needs food in the morning rushing to school, and probably needs to pack lunch also because there probably isn't a real vegan meal available at school to buy.
I'm a young, vegetarian person who is working on going vegan - and making good progress.
If you do a cursory search of vegan material, or only pay attention to stuff that pops up on your Facebook/Reddit/HackerNews/Twitter feed, you'll definitely get a lot of "meat = bad"-type material. However, if you put in a little more effort there's a lot of good material available - from recipes, to nutrition advice, to guides on what products are vegan/are not.
Hint: I've found appending the term "vegan" to my Google searches for recipes tends to work quite well and yield healthy, reasonable, scalable meals. By putting in the work, I've gotten a bunch of YouTube channels, saved recipes I like, and nutrition advice.
> The present paper argues that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics ignores or gives short shrift to direct and indirect evidence that vegetarianism may be associated with serious risks for brain and body development in fetuses and children. Regular supplementation with iron, zinc, and B12 will not mitigate all of these risks. Consequently, we cannot say decisively that vegetarianism or veganism is safe for children.
I seriously recommend you read the entire review. I do not think it's something that can be trivially solved with supplementation. Eg:
> The AND says that “[v]egans must regularly consume…B-12-fortified foods or B-12-containing supplements,” and “[m]ost vegetarians should” do the same (Melina, Craig, and Levin 2016). The results of Herrmann et al. (2003) suggest that even with supplementation vegans may still tend to cluster in the deficient-to-borderline-deficient range. Vegetarians can achieve adequate B12 levels with supplementation, but some are still in the deficient and borderline-deficient range. Whether it is realistic for vegetarians/vegans to maintain adequate B12 levels throughout their entire childhood via supplementation is an open question.
> The consequences of B12 deficiency in childhood for brain and body development are extensive, severe, and can be irreversible. Potential consequences include (among many others) impaired cognitive development/school performance, depression, weakness, fatigue, nerve damage, and failure to thrive (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Rasmussen, Fernhoff, and Scanlon 2001). Breastfeeding infants whose mothers are vegetarian/vegan are also known to be at risk for B12 deficiency (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Kühne, Bubl, and Baumgartner 1991; Roschitz et al. 2005; von Schenck, Bender-Götze, and Koletzko 1997).
B12 deficiency happens even when you eat meat. Humans used to get B12 from bacteria in the dirt that accompanied much of the food we ate. Eating meat these days doesn’t give you enough B12 and has to be supplemented.
Thank you for your concern and helpful research. I am concerned as well. As a teen, she has her own mind and determination so my opinion only goes so far. But the links might be helpful.
Read a bit about the Cofnas guy WHO wrote that and judge for yourself if he seems like a guy you want summing the scientific literature regarding veganism.
There’s the big China study you can use as a starting point. If you want a catchy movie check out game changers, it’s flashy but deals specifically with athletes.
Cofnas' is not someone who has any claim of being someone you should listen to when critiquing the AND. He is well known for peddling pseudo-science and twisting results of studies to make points the studies do not support.
Not only that, he is against vegetarianism on the base of it being a thing liberals do.
That's not true in the US. Less than 15% of the feed used for animals would be edible for humans, and much of the land in the US is not suitabe for growing crops other than grass. Most of the food given to animals are farm waste products and leaves etc.
Using regenerative farming, cows can even be net carbon negative, meanwhile a lot of human feed uses artificial fertilizer which is a big contributor to carbon emissions.
Oak Savanna and regenerative farming, in general, are great things. If we committed to only farming animals in these types of regenerative systems, it would _greatly_ reduce the supply. As a vegetarian, I’m all for that. As someone who really wants us to address climate change, I’m all for that.
The fact is, our current system not only ignores the negative externalities of (animal intensive) agriculture — we subsidize it. That’s why I think a carbon tax is a good idea. It would mean meat would become more expensive. This angers a lot of people. But if we get serious about measuring the actual environmental effects of agriculture, it needs to be reflected in the cost. To me, if we solve this problem the world would eat a lot more plants, and the meat that is consumed would be produced by carbon negative, regenerative practices.
That is not what I said. I said that fodder production takes up a very large part of arable land. In my home country, animal feed and human food take up the same amount of area. That land is suitable for growing human food as well. I suspect that arable land use is about the same in the US.
Land that is capable of storing carbon is generally great farmland since the process in carbon sinks is what leads to humus.
I'm aware you said its still a ways off but "green bridges"[1] as well as other persistent pests could become a big issue especially in a broadacre monoculture operation (which is what agriculture generally is if we're talking staple crops). Also from experience with dealing with perennial pastures removing them should the disease get out of control would be a nightmare when the root systems are established. Victory Gardens definitley sound like a good idea though. Just my 2c
Victory Gardens worked because they had a patriotic, pro-war, pro-America appeal. Sort of a "Keep America Great" thing.
I suspect there's zero chance that this type of sentiment could be harnessed for "Hey, let's offset carbon emissions [of whom the #1 emitter is our chief political rival, China]"
In fact that's the biggest problem with broadening support for decarbonization in general. The largest share of global carbon is emitted by countries like India and China, which billionaires exported thousands of American jobs to, profiting from looser environmental regulations in the process. Of course the average American outside of the SF ivory tower is skeptical about changing his or her own habits to clean up that mess!
Thanks for the catch, off the top of my head I remembered that India was #3 but didn't realize how far below the US they were.
I still think the basic thesis I am driving at holds, instead of cleaning up their act 20 years ago, multinational corporations shipped all of these polluting jobs to nations where it was OK to pollute, acting as a sort of escape valve which allowed them to continue belching carbon into the air and keep their profits high.
US and EU industry are among the cleanest in the world and asking the working class in these places to make more sacrifices is a slap in the face which has been going on for years. The Kyoto Protocol established no carbon targets for developing countries. The Paris Agreement established targets but they were laxer than the targets for developed countries.
This is a decarbonization strategy designed to optimize the profits of multinational corporations. If the working and middle classes don't push back it will continue, but corporate-owned media is ready to put Greta Thunberg on stage at every opportunity and shame you for questioning any part of the party line on climate change.
The question of apportioning responsibility (or "blame", if you prefer) is very tricky. Many Americans (and Europeans etc) have for decades had the relatively luxury of living comparatively emissions-intensive lives without having to worry about the environmental impact of their lives. The differentiated responsibility in the treaties is partly to account for historical emissions.
Whether or not that felt like a luxury at the time is kind of irrelevant from an accounting perspective but important from a political perspective.
That said, for someone in the U.S. to try and pass off responsibility to a country emitting three times less per capita [1] seems borderline absurd to me. And that's not even accounting for the fact that -- as you point out -- much of China's emissions are exported from the U.S and EU. If the U.S. had the cleanest industry and its people had already made significant sacrifices in the name of climate protection we should see that the U.S. has comparatively low per-capita emissions. It clearly doesn't.
> US and EU industry are among the cleanest in the world and asking the working class in these places to make more sacrifices is a slap in the face which has been going on for years
US is 16.1 metric tons per capita in 2018. The only countries or territories higher than the US are Kazakhstan (16.8), Australia (16.8), Luxembourg (16.9), Oman (17.6), Saudi Arabia (18.6), Estonia (18.6), Gibraltar (21.8), Bahrain (21.8), United Arab Emirates (22.4), Kuwait (23.9), Trinidad and Tobago (26.2), New Caledonia (26.2), Qatar (38.2), Curaçao (52.1), and Palau (58.0).
The EU average is 8.6. China is 8.0. India is 1.9.
I don't see how the US qualifies as among the cleanest.
Emissions per capita is not a good metric. It favors states which have millions of people who are living in poverty and who thus by definition have low consumption, which translates to low emissions. The downside of course is that these people are starving.
If you imported 200 million people into the US in poverty conditions and did nothing to improve their situation, then all of a sudden US per capita emissions would look great too.
In the worst case scenario if you attach policy to this metric you might see states gaming it by deciding to make sure their poor people stay that way (probably already on the minds of policy makers in some authoritarian states).
Admittedly I don't have numbers handy, but I think it would be better to look at emissions generated per dollar of economic output, particularly in industries that generate the most emissions. Then you can start inferring judgements about whether it's better for humanity to open a new factory in China or in the USA, and those two states have to compete on cleanliness if they want to grow their economic output. I bet this sort of measurement would paint the US in a much more favorable light than per capita (and the EU even better). If adding the next $100B to the world economy in the US or EU is cleaner than adding it in China, why shouldn't we push for that?
>While Victory Gardens were portrayed as a patriotic duty, 54% of Americans polled said they grew gardens for economic reasons while only 20% mentioned patriotism. (which cites the book Eating for victory : food rationing and the politics of domesticity)
Combined with the produce shows and competitions mentioned, I'd put indirect social pressure and saturation advertisement above the patriotism angle with this in mind. I'd wager that if there was a push to have people grow their own veg again, citing economic reasons, and calling them "freedom gardens" or some such, we could see a similar level of success.
I think for agriculture the way to go is syntropic agriculture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE I've seen people implementing this very successfully, I've been doing it myself for around 4 years now, and its very impressive how much carbon the soil stores after a few years on this practice.
A principle pillar of our modern civilization is, we went from 50% farmers to <2% farmers. Freeing all those people to, well, invent our modern civilization.
Everybody going back to farming is a way to use the unemployed I guess. Maybe it'll have a comeback once we've automated everything (we're well down that path now).
Growing food in one's yard is a good use, better than the USA's biggest crop: grass. In the log term, we ought to also build housing that has smaller lawns. Those who do have large lawns could help by growing their own food, trees or having a more low-maintenance plan for it
I always find it odd that atmospheric carbon capture isn't a greater part of the conversation on climate change. It's basically assumed that we'll need to be able to take carbon out of the system to meet our goals, but so few people are willing to mention it as part of the overall solution to transitioning to a net negative economy. It seems like a technology that still has a lot of runway left before we start hitting any sort of fundamental limits on efficiency.
I think air capture is an important part of the discussion when we talk about trying to get temps back down later this century, but I have serious doubts about it playing a large role in determining what the peak CO2 concentration will be around the middle of the century. Capture is orders of magnitude more expensive than emissions reductions, and will be for a long time. When you invest in capture, you get lower net emissions and that's it. When you invest in emissions cuts, at least while there's still a lot of low-hanging-fruit, you get the same net effect while also getting a productive asset like a power plant. Totally onboard with research budgets going way up for capture tech, we're 100% going to need it, but later rather than sooner I think.
Like so many other articles on this subject, the authors first identify the problem (a global scale prisoners' dilemma) and then pretend it can be solved at a local level by individual actors.
I actually find it terrifying that people think this way. It's the same intentional blindness that climate change deniers show, only with more steps and information.
The author even goes as far as parroting George W Bush's (now decade old and stupid even when it was fresh) vague hope that technology will just magically fix the problem. Of course, he is allowed to be bat shit insane because he is on "our side".
This problem is (geo-)political. It's not about technology or ideas or campaigning. It cannot be fixed by any local action (except maybe building flood defenses and watching everyone else drown?). Until people accept that they won't be able to fix this by composting more and hoping others take the bus, we will be doomed. Given that, a great article about how much Madrid could cut it's emissions is pointless and distracting.
You write to your representatives. You vote for greener parties. You donate to green peace etc.
None of those things are actually likely to work. But they're infinitely more likely to work that talking about local action and cutting back your meat intake.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, this problem is really hard. Likely unsolvably hard. But that doesn't make an impractical solution practical.
There are effective things you can do but they require coordination with your community. Mass protests and worker strikes can force the hands of governments and big business. There are many historical examples that this works and just look at how much success the French are having right now. But they need to happen at scale and very frequently. Voting only happens once every few years for a reason.
I have to really blunt, I'm sure you're a nice guy/girl/person, and we both would love to see this problem solved but...
No, there are no effective things my community can take. None.
Even my whole nation has zero actual power. That's the whole point here. I don't know why people keep saying that.
Im a limey brit. We have a huge economy, lots of cars and houses, all pouring out co2. But we only produce 1% of world emissions. So even if we cut our emissions to zero today, that would be only 1/8th of the global cut needed just for 2020. Given world co2 emissions are growing at 2.7%, the problem would still be getting worse.
Nothing the UK does matters in the face of this issue. And we're one of the bigger, more powerful, more polluting nations.
Before we can find an actual solution, we need to stop wasting time and effort pretending this can be solved by communities. It really really can't.
I always wonder if we could heat large blocks of salt in the desert with mirrors and then make power at night extremely expensive. Cable it all up with huge direct power cables... once the infrastructure is built sure this becomes nearly free energy?
Hi Jeff, Project Vesta is making great progress building out our scientific team and deployment plan! We have an update coming out very soon, our last poster in December was featured in the SF Chronicle under the titled "Could putting pebbles on beaches help solve climate change?" ->
https://www.sfchronicle.com/environment/article/Could-puttin...
Hm. This article seems to wield several non-descriptive terms such as "deep decarbonization" or "green steel" while skipping discussing fossil fuels themselves.
One of the main reasons why we can't replace fossil fuels is because they are arguably the most efficient way of storing and transporting a huge potential of energy.
Think about it like this. It's easier to store a ton of coal for 50 years then it is to store the same amount of potential energy as electricity in a battery. It's more efficient to transport a ship filled with coal then it is to transport the same amount of energy as electricity through power lines.
Fossil fuels have a high energy yield per unit and they are abundant.
So, fossil fuels are far easier to scale towards diverse and large energy needs compared to clean energy sources.
The author hears the bells chime, but can't find them: he alludes to the higher price of "green steel" and how subsidies are a necessary to support these innovations. But he ultimately draws the wrong conclusion.
For one, he compares Denmark to China. Which represents 18% of the World's population. Sure, if China would switch to wind energy, the effects would be massive. But that's discounting vast economic differences between those countries.
This article even mention it, obviously on the last place in a strange way "and to advanced nuclear plants with zero emissions". As if there were some non-advanced nuclear plants that have non-zero emission.
Solar and wind require energy storage that we don't have now and it does not seem we will without major technological leap. In addition, in large parts of the World they just does not make sense as there is not enough sunny/windy days.
For nuclear energy we have everything - knowledge, infrastructure, experience.
What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now? Eco people fought vigorously nuclear energy for years and now we are where we are. Time to say that they've made a costly mistake and move on.