Yet almost 100 years later, here we are - Oil and gas dependent, boasting an energy and climate crisis, all the while fooling regulators with worthless climate certificates, unaccountable off-shore factories and just plain rampant fraud when it comes to CO2 emissions.
1. The rare instances of it going wrong look catastrophic, while the many times it does better than coal/oil/gas go ignored. Kinda like how people fear plane travel more than driving, despite the former being far safer than the latter.
2. It's more expensive to setup, so there's an economic incentive to either stick with what's there already (fossil fuels) or try and go with renewable solutions.
3. A certain percentage of the left/environmental movement seem to hate the concept, either because of subtle influencing from the fossil fuels lobby or because the idea of compromising and going with a system that isn't 'perfect' doesn't appeal to them.
Coal in particular results in incredible toxic waste. Even if it was inert (which it very much is not) you get enormous heaps of rock you dug the coal out of and those have to be stored forever. Typically people just leave it in a big pile as somebody else's problem until one day the wind blows and it collapses and kills a bunch of people. Oops.
But even for natural gas in the best case your waste is excess carbon dioxide, which renders your planet inhospitable so that's not great either.
Here’s a guy kissing nuclear waste. It’s a bit tongue in cheek on the surface, but he’s PhD and there is quality information in the video.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
(Tough you could argue that it's your item 3, since nuclear weapons and their open-air testing would be the reason the left/environmental/peace movement started to hate the concept.)
Well, there was Chernobyl.
Then Fukushima.
I'm all for Nuclear. But I think humans have shown repeatedly they can't really handle it.
So think the trepidation is justified.
But, I am hoping with all the technology advances in last 50 years, maybe Nuclear can be made safe. If we do learn from past.
Chernobyl was entirely a product of design compromises due to cost savings, combined by a totalitarian system suppressing the known impact of those design decisions. It was also a much older design.
Fukushima also seemed like a design mistake (I remember reading it that the generators or something like that were flooded with water) , but then caused by a natural disaster and flooding.
The nuclear plans (in on paper at least) we have now as a result of decades of additional knowledge, and are way more safe. Combined with the fact that we have incredible computing firepower to better simulate scenarios, all this has convinced me to feel much better about the prospect of nuclear power plants and their safety.
The worst designed reactor that led to 60 deaths ?
> Fukushima
As in, the reactor that was struck with a generational earthquauke and where no one died?
________
Compare this to other energy sources
Coal - 1500 [1]
Coal waste -12000[2]
You can keep going down this[3] list. Nuclear disasters are a mere blip. Only solar is any safer.
[1]April 26, 1942: Benxihu Colliery disaster in Benxi, Liaoning, China. 1,549 workers died, in the worst coal mine accident ever in the world
[2] December 1952: The Great Smog of London caused by the burning of coal, and to a lesser extent wood, killed 12,000 people within days to months due to inhalation of the smog.
At planet scale nothing will ever get better than: dig hole, pump oil, burn oil
Until the alternatives are cheaper. I would recommend you to read: Not the End of the World, Hannah Ritchie
To get cheaper they'd have to exist in the first place
Cost to lives is free here, same as cost for the future or cost to the environment. If we had to pay for these we'd be in deficit. The simple issue of old oil fields leaking methane would already render most of their operators bankrupt if they had to fix the problem
They're struggling to kill off the fossil fuel industry because the alternative to cheap, reliable coal/natural gas is expensive (when accounting for energy storage + backup energy production capacity), less reliable renewables.
Ironically, they'd have a much easier if the alternative to cheap, reliable coal/natural gas was cheap, reliable nuclear energy!
It's a lot harder to affect something that's so firmly embedded in how we do things as a society. Blocking new nuclear developments was a lot easier than undoing generations worth of infrastructure around fossil power.
A comparison can be drawn to the USA's short-lived attempt at prohibition of alcohol versus the long-lasting prohibition of marijuana which is only now finally calling apart.
The one our society has been at least partially built around for generations has its problems normalized and mostly disregarded until something unignorable happens, which still often gets swept under the rug, where the alternative gets constant scrutiny and has to meet standards the established norm has never been held to.
That was never an option. It still isn’t.
Even though the Nuclear Industry was super powerful. Those little environmentalist toook it doowwwwn.
Chernobyl and Fukushima and failings of the industry were completely un-related.
Wonder why if environmentalist are so strong, they can't take on fossil fuel?
That's a bit of a stretch given how much money the fossil fuel industry has spent on misinformation and greenwashing.
We can all be happy clappy about doing something, but it will always fail if we don't have anything to combat corruption and manage greed.
I think that carbon offsetting is a good idea in the spirit of a glass half-full. It's unrealistic to expect the world economy to quit fossil fuels cold turkey, and a system that allows those who cannot transition to externalize their ability to reduce or eliminate emissions is a way to get close to the desired result with the constraints we have right now.
[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/carbon-loophole-why-is-wood-b...
Remember Acid Rain, it was real, it was solved.
Industry was able to work with a cap/trade system.
In 500 years the idea that we ever burned our most valuable manufacturing chemical to keep warm is going to seem crazy. Petrochemicals are incredibly useful for making things.
...It all seemed so obvious - we partied when we blew up the Bikini islands. Alas
That's not correct, unless you mean to say we discovered nuclear energy in the 1880s: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2382758-eunice-newton-f...
* 1824 - effect proposed (Joseph Fourier)
* 1827/1838 - further evidence (Claude Pouillet)
* 1856 - Speculation that a high vapor atmosphere would give a warm planet (Eunice Newton Foote)
* 1859 - Demonstration that hydrocarbons had a significant effect (John Tyndall)
* 1896 - Quantification of the effect and prediction of global warming (Svante Arrhenius)
* 1901 - Greenhouse name used (Nils Gustaf Ekholm)
The greenhouse effect in itself is critically important in maintaining a liveable temperature on Earth. It's a runaway greenhouse effect causing global warming that is the problem. Anything before 1896 was about understand the basic effect, while after we began understanding that we were affecting the system by emitting gases.
We will just have to deal with the consequences while we try to innovative our way out of this mess. It’s made me a AI accelerationist. Of the two civilizational dooms, I’ll take my chances with the computers.
Take your China example. The issue wasn't just that the government wanted to control Covid and the people pushed back. The issue was that their zero-Covid policy was extremely stupid. I kept thinking "Umm, what do they think is going to happen when they eventually open back up - of course Covid is going to ravage through the populace." And that's exactly what happened. The policy did extremely little to actually save lives in the end compared to much less restrictive policies elsewhere.
So I'm actually less pessimistic about the case for the energy transition. I do think it's particularly unfortunate that our tribal politics has led to people lining up behind "drill baby drill" even if there is no economic basis to do so. But I do think since we know the transition is possible without draconian cutbacks in standard of living that governments can help craft effective incentives to make the change more quickly.
According to data published by John’s Hopkins, China’s overall number of Covid deaths per 100,000 population was 7.6, compared to 341 in the United States.
Additionally, it is not effective unless you want to return to pre-industrial society.
What works is: Changing the source of the energy we consume. Solar is the cheapest source of energy now. Wind is good in some areas. Nuclear can be useful too.
The amazing thing is that solar is so cheap now, there is basically no way stopping it. We may still want to burn gas and oil in the off-hours, but it will be expensive and consumption will be much lower than today.
I wouldn’t call it just useful. As far as I understand it’s the best realistic shot we’ve got.
To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much.
It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports can't cover the use, better to simply increase storage and production a bit more.
Seems like a win win, people get cheaper energy all without force. Generally the market chooses the best product, which is why we replaced horses crapping all over our cities with cars. It wasn't legislation or some global consortium of governments that phased out the horse, it was a better product. What am I missing here?
Foolishly reductionistic model: at the instant that solar becomes defacto cheaper, if everyone immediately changed, you'd need at least [total world power consumption / solar panel production rate] years to change over.
2022 world electricity consumption was about 25000 TWH. That envelope-backs to about 2800 GW if the sun is always directly overhead everywhere and there are no transmission losses.
In 2022, we installed about 228GW of solar panels. Assuming constant production (HAH!) that says it should take more than a decade to replace the existing demand. Which will of course stand still for us.
Apply whatever multiplication factors you like about what percentage of the year a given real solar cell will generate power; about how quickly folks are convinced to change; about the construction of projects which were planned before this price threshold was passed; about the impact of using grid power to do transportation work which was previously done by pumping dead dinosaurs...
The confounding factors abound. But that's an ignorant sideline answer to why. :)
It’s dominant already in newly added capacity. It just takes a while, mostly due to permission processes taking long.
And limited grid capacity, which is also held back by environmental review and nimbys - at least in the western world.
Still needed to some extent even in your optimistic scenario. Because growth is increasing so is demand. New sources of energy are not displacing old ones. Just covering new demand.
Now we can see that vast quantities of people in the first world think not being able to go to Arbys is a human rights violation, and worse still the friendless losers who were pining to back into the office.
If sitting indoors is too much of a sacrifice for people, what happens when they need to make real changes to their lifestyles?
I'm not sure what this refers to but it's not COVID response. At least where I live (the USA), outside of the major metro areas, nothing was enforced except school closures. The Stay At Home "mandates" (more like suggestions) and business "closures" were all pretty much unenforced and widely ignored. Even if our government, by some miracle, manages to enact effective climate rules and legislation, it will be ignored if not enforced. You can't just write a law or set a mandate and then say "Well, our job is done!"
We've already innovated our way out of this mess. We have all the technology available now to decarbonise the economy (well, mostly; we're still a bit limited in a few areas; but we can get a lot of the way there).
Covid is a good example. In most of the liberal democracies people accepted the restrictions their governments argued were necessary to combat Covid. I think these restrictions were significantly greater than what is needed from individuals to combat climate change.
Then why can't we?
The answer is that it would take some Government mandates, and we are back to the original post, that if the Government mandates anything, it will hurt some sector, and then there is popular uprising. At least in US, 50% of country is ready to go to war anytime someone sneezes and merely forgets to say 'bless you'.
How do you fight climate change, even if technology is available, if 50% of the country literally believes in a real physical hell (not just a concept), and that the other side are demons here to steal the blood of their children. How does the committee organize rolling out a technology when half is praying and citing versus and that is the starting point for any technology roll out plan.
If the costs of current living standard wasn't externalized to future generations (to the detriment of the environment), they couldn't afford those bills to begin with.
Unfortunately, it's very hard to reduce people's living standards once they got used to it. So yes, the end result is what you're saying - however, I think it's a very important nuance. It was always a card house; we just chose to ignore the issue and continued to build on top of it.
Exactly. Too few people understand economics, that current costs are being brought down by offsetting future costs.
The same with any pollution in any industry. If the industry is allowed to follow bad practices, and cause pollution but not deal with it, then they are not bearing the brunt of the full costs of generating that pollution. Someone has to clean it all up eventually, typically the government, then people complain about taxes.
You can complain about taxes, but you just voted for someone to cut regulations on industry which then causes the pollution which needs tax dollars to clean it up.
(I know CO2 is not a 'pollutant' technically, it is just another example of the 'cost' to the environment is not being allocated correctly to the producer. I feel need to be correct since even using the word 'pollutant' is a right wing argument point on why climate change advocates don't know what they are talking about.).
Yes as Exxon report suggested:
"Thus, even if solar or nuclear technologies were to be considered viable alternatives, they would not really displace fossil fuel energy for next 40 to 50 years, and CO2 growth would have to be estimated based on realistic market displacement of the fossil fuel technologies."
This was 42 years ago. Maybe it is time for “Non-Populist anger” now.
I do agree that finding alternatives quickly is crucial. However, when all is said and done, our financial concerns and even our personal well-being don't matter as much in the grand scheme of things.
That might be true, but most people care very much about their own "financial concerns" and "well-being".
Reasoning: Intelligent robots and AI will be able to build all sort of stuff and even without that solar + wind nuclear will probably overtake fossil fuel shortly. We can have the bots cover the Sahara with solar and run carbon capture. Also fusion may work although I'm not so sure about that one.
I think that a lack of biochemistry will probably quickly lead to the conclusion that it’s not worth it.
* We are closer in time to the T rex than the T rex was to the Stegosaurus
* We are closer to the time of Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza
It should be the least useful mononym possible, but its totally not. Its perfectly understood.
Also fun fact -- if you're a history nerd -- "Julius Caesar" is almost equally nonsensical to just "Caesar" since "Julius" is not his name, but refers to his family ("gens"). The first Caesar from that family, that we know of at least, was Sextus Julius Caesar in around 200 BC, 300 years before Gaius Julius Caesar was born.
The gory history of Europe’s mummy-eating fad https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eat...
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-...
but people generally don't like to be reminded.
18 years before XKCD, a 386-based PC capable of running Doom would have set you back $6,000–$10,000.
Imagine a game released today that has a 64-core CPU and a 4090 as minimum requirements, and that's roughly what Doom's system requirements would have looked like in 1987.
Let's see... the release of the film The Day After Tomorrow is closer to 'We begin bombing in five minutes' than it is to today.
Back then:
- They didn't have electronics, radio was barely being discovered
- They didn't have airplanes, they just discovered the upper atmosphere, with the very first weather balloons
- They knew about atoms, the periodic table was 30 years old, but nucleus wasn't discovered yet
Climate science is a notoriously difficult topic, with countless feedbacks, positive and negative. Nowadays, we run simulations on supercomputers based on satellite data, decades of precise historical data, geological data, etc... They didn't have that at the time.
Maybe he got the precise value by chance. Sometimes it happens. For example it is said that Eratosthenes (240 BC) calculated the Earth circumference with great accuracy (<1%) and no one managed to get a better estimate until modern times. In fact, many later estimates were off by more than 10%. The technology available at the time wasn't capable of such accuracy, but by chance, it turned out to be spot on (but they didn't know it was).
And there are other effects, like how CO2 get absorbed in the oceans, clouds, water vapor, etc... That CO2 has an effect on temperature is "easy" to realize, quantifying it is much, much harder. And I am just talking about short term effects, long term effects (including a potential tipping point) is yet another layer of complexity.
That's because warnings and exhortations rarely accomplish anything.
Things tend to change only after there's no other choice, i.e., when there's a crisis.
There's an insightful quote from Milton Friedman on this:
"Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."[a]
I disagree with Friedman on many things, but on this, I think he was right.
It is only now, when we find outselves in the early stages of crisis (unprecedented heat waves, perpetual giant fires, etc.), that the work of all those scientists and engineers who have been documenting, predicting, and warning about climate change for the past 128 years is finally being put to good practical use.
Hopefully it's not too late.
---
[a] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/110844-only-a-crisis---actu...
Except that warnings and exhortations did accomplish the result of causing nations to begin banning CFCs back in 1987, well before the hole in the ozone layer became a global crisis.
The increase in the then-current living conditions increased so much that not doing it wouldn't make sense to them.
Same as if our future selves came from 128 years from the future and told us to all stop doing something, it would be near impossible.
It must be emphasized that solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are products of carbon-burning industry. They have their place but we don't have the metals to repair and replace them in the long term, and we don't yet know if a fully electric industrial society is even possible. E.g. how do you reach the necessary temps in a blast furnace without melting your heating element?
Electrifying civilization as we know it is politically palatable, but the feasibility studies are few, and those that have been done are sobering. Any analysis which ends without a serious look in the mirror is likely serving some special interest. To expect that modernity can continue in the same mold, with hydrocarbons swapped out for something else, smacks of nostalgia or naivete. Alternative energy sources are needed, absolutely; but even more important is to transform the way we relate to each other, to other life forms, to natural resources, and to this generation ship we call a planet.
Induction heating? As long as some ferromagnetic material has a higher melting temperature than what you want to melt, this seems solvable.
By the way, I like your writing on your site.
Oh, thank you!
"Yeah, but that can't be us. I need a scientist to prove it's not because of us!"
turning to workforce
"It's not us, keep going!"
[1] https://forceofnature.com/blogs/regenerate/carbon-sequestrat....
Oil is a hell of a drug for civilization, and I'm not sure how we will willingly tune off of it, unless we chose a radically different economical organization.
But as many I am kind of hopeless as it seems competition, which fuel this need, is at the core of mankind (or at least the leading West)'s mentality.
Similarly, the trending on peak heats means that there are places where many people live which are becoming less survivable. Theoretically India could migrate people to Siberia but the political implications of something like that are orders of magnitude worse than reducing emissions.
I've also heard that the total mass of the carbon we've injected into the atmosphere exceeds all the mass of our built world on the surface, which is sort of awesome to think about, but not in the good sense of the word.
Since this is thread under XKCD post: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Isn't it bit naive to exclude rate of change in this argument?
This is a disgusting attitude. I'm sure you'll be safe in Alberta while Bangladesh drowns. Your ancestors benefitted from the industrial revolution, and now you want to reap all the benefits of climate change?
They should be spending their time getting PHDs in Engineering or Physics to try and help solve these issues.
Europeeans tend to have less disposable income and be less consumerist, smaller and better heated/insulated houses, less cars per household, &c.
A quick Google search suggests ~350g CO2 per KWh in Germany vs. ~400g in the US. Looks plausible to me. Germany uses coal but also has a very substantial share of renewables. Another quick search also shows that 60% of electricity in the US is from fossil fuels. The rest is nuclear and renewables in about equal amounts.
[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/air-pollution/news/german-c...
As a result we're now relying on more coal and gas than the much cleaner nuclear energy. What lovely progress!
The propaganda of capitalism has also been widly successful. Many people believe in the myth of meritocracy or that somehow markets will solve all problems or that Jeff Bezos having $200 billion instead of $100 billion while Amazon warehouse employees work in dire conditions are all good things. At the same time, very few of those people can define capitalism but will defend it anyway.
There is no fixing the climate crisis without fixing wealth inequality and giving people dignity and hope for the future. And no, I don't mean some communist utopia where everyone has the same (b3cause that's the usual straw man argument people jump to). I simply mean it has to be way less extreme than it is today.
Capitalism created this problem. Capitalism perpetuates this problem. And it won't be solved until you deal with capitalism.
For me the bigger issue is not that the elite have so much money, its that they have egregious carbon footprints, while telling the little people they need to sacrifice their standard of living to save the planet.
Read the other day, Jeff Bezos yacht, even if it is sitting idle for the entire year, has a bigger carbon footprint than 80,000 people using a gas mower to mow their lawn for a season. And of course, it doesn't sit idle all year, so the carbon generated could be multiple times more than that.
Until the elites and politicians actually start sacrificing, they have no right to lecture me on what I need to give up. I already have a carbon footprint 100's of times smaller than Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Bill Gates Jeff Bezos - they can all go pound sand if they want to tell me I need to dump my propane stove or gas lawnmower to save the planet.
However if a Billionaire did have the largest carbon footprint, would you still criticize if they bought credits to offset to be net 0? Or some other real practice to become net 0?
No matter how many credits they buy, they are still disproportionately polluting the environment - donating money so that 'maybe' somebody else doesn't pollute as much, hardly undos the damage.
But I don't see the advantages over the desktop version, as the images are not made to fit the width, so I need to zoom out of this mobile page to see the image.
And actually, it's better on regular computer for this very reason IMHO. A link or button element could be used though for this button.
Fitting to screen width would not be great on many devices, the image could be too small.
On the other hand, we've been "staving off the next ice age" too zealously: https://xkcd.com/1732/
