754
77% of Top Climate Scientists Think 2.5°C of Warming Is Coming—And They're Horrified
(www.commondreams.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
754 points (100.0% liked)
World News
38977 readers
1899 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Yes and no. Renewables are now cheaper than other forms of energy but cost isn’t the only issue.
There are practical limits on how many renewables projects we can build and integrate at a time. We’re not even remotely close to building them fast enough to save anything. We can’t even build them fast enough to keep up with the ever increasing demand energy.
Nuclear is expensive as fuck but we need to be building more of it as well as renewables because we can’t build enough renewables fast enough to avert the catastrophe, and that’s about the only other tech we have that can generate energy in the massive quantities needed without significant greenhouse gas emissions.
I don't think that's quite true. Where I live it has expanded from nothing to a major power source in just a few years. We'll need grid storage of some kind to kick fossil fuels completely, but that seems surmountable. Worst case scenario we build pumped air and just eat some round trip losses.
Nuclear plants take many years to get off the ground, so I'm not sure that's actually an easier solution. Once they're up and running at scale they're actually really cheap per unit production, so I would have agreed with you a decade ago, but as it is solar and wind have just pulled ahead.
Don’t take my word for it. Look up the numbers for yourself and do the math.
Search for “National GHG inventory {your country}”.
You find a report listing (among a bunch of other things) the amount of electricity generated each year by each method, and the emissions from each. Look up the total TWh of electricity produced by fossil fuels.
Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.
You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.
And that’s before you realize that only about 25% of fossil fuel combustion goes to electricity generation. As we start switching cars, homes, industries to electric we’re going to need 2x-3x more electricity generation.
Yes it takes a long time to bring on a new nuclear plant, roughly 7-9 years. If it was remotely realistic that we could build enough renewable power generation in that time to replace all fossil fuel generation then I’d agree we don’t need nuclear. But we’re not anywhere close to that.
It’s also helpful to note too just how much power a nuclear reactor generates. I live in Canada, our second smallest nuclear power plant in Pickering, generates almost 5 times more electricity annually than all of Canada’s solar farms combined. It will take 1000s or solar and wind farms covering and area larger than all of our major cities combined to replace fossil fuels…
…or about 7 nuclear power stations the same size as Pickering.
Sorry for the delay. I'm trying to get this the response it deserves, including gathering figures for Alberta, and some basic mathematical modeling.
I get ~2 decades when I extrapolate these numbers (from 2010-2023) to get to 2022 total primary energy usage for solar alone.
Energy usage will grow as well, and keeping that growth is ambitious, but it the future doesn't look that bleak too me if you look at it that way.
Did you use linear extrapolation, or something else? Because it's an actual paradigm shift happening now, I'd guess some kind of exponential or subexponential curve would be best. That would bring it even faster.
Extrapolation is tricky, and actually kind of weak, although I think it's appropriate here. This XKCD explains it really well, and I end up linking it all the damn time.
Exponential, it fits the curve very nicely. I can give you the python code if you want to. I got 2 decades for all energy usage, not only electricity, which is only one sixth of that.
I just took the numbers for the whole world, that's easier to find and in the end the only thing that matters.
The next few years are going to be interesting in my opinion. If we can make efuels cheaper than fossil fuels (look up Prometheus Fuels and Terraform Industries), we're going to jump even harder on solar and if production can keep up it will even grow faster.
Yes, code please! This sounds amazing.
E-fuels are a big deal, particularly for aviation. Non-electricity emissions are also something to watch. Hydrogen as a reducing agent seems like it can work very well as long as we do phase out fossil fuels like promised, so that solves steel production and similar. Calcination CO2 from concrete kilns is a very sticky wicket apparently, since they're extremely hot, heavy, and also need to rotate, which is challenging to combine with a good seal.
Cheap grid storage is a trillion-dollar question, but I suspect even if new technology doesn't materialise, pumped air with some losses can do the trick, again subject to proper phase-out of dirty power sources.
Here you go, you'll need numpy, scipy and matplotlib:
Here's what I get, global solar energy generated doubles every ~3.5 (1/0.284) years.
Thank you! That does look like a great fit.
So that's just solar, then? Long term, it does seem like the one that's the biggest deal, but right now there's also a lot of wind and hydro in the mix, so that's another point in favour of the assumptions here being conservative.
Yes, just solar. Hydro is bigger now, but it doesn't have the growing potential. Wind is currently also growing exponential, but I don't see it doing that for 20 more years. And even if it does, it doesn't really make a big difference since exponential + exponential is still exponential. If it grows as fast as solar that would mean we're just a few years ahead of the curve.
Alright, I can't seem to find useful numbers anywhere. We went from 50% coal to nil in just a few years, though, so big changes fast are possible. If you're in Ontario, you also have to consider your local renewables penetration was really high to start with, because of those waterfalls.
And yeah, like I said to the other person, exact growth pattern matters. It's probably exponential-ish right now, not linear, because it's just unambiguously cheaper to move to renewables, and so just getting ducks in order to do it is the bottleneck.
I respect you for doing your own research. People need to understand the scope of the problem if there’s going to be meaningful action.
The reason I’m passionate about nuclear in particular is that only about a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption is from electricity generation.
Most of the rest is burned in transportation, buildings, commercial and residential applications. We have the tech already to switch most of these things to electricity, and eliminate their direct emissions, but that’s not much of a win if we’re burning fossil fuels generate that electricity. Which is what happens today when electricity demand is increased, we can’t just turn up the output of a solar/wind farm in periods of high demand, but we can burn more natural gas.
Switching to electric everything (Car, trucks, ships, heat pumps, furnaces, etc) will increase electricity demand by 2-3x.
Even if renewables growth is held to the exponential-ish curve it’s been so far (doubtful) we still need 15+ years just to get to the point of replacing current global fossil fuel electricity production in the most optimistic case, never mind enough to handle 2-3x demand.
Massive quantities of new carbon free electricity generation is needed to “unlock” the electrification technologies we need to deploy if we going to avoid the worst of the disaster. If we wait until renewables alone get us there it’ll be too late.
The more carbon free energy we can build in the next 20-30 years, the more options we have. Even if we can reach a place of excess capacity, there are a lot of things like DAC and CCS, that we could use it for that today result in more emissions from electricity generation than they sequester.
That's fair. Thanks for the intelligent conversation.
I don't mean to diminish your point about the utility of nuclear, but (a) it's subject to the same ramping up/scaling issues as anything else*, and (b) you'd be surprised how quickly we could ramp up manufacturing of renewables if The Powers That Be actually wanted to.
(* Or worse: in particular, the absolute debacle that was Plant Vogtle 3 and 4 -- delivered years late and billions overbudget, while bankrupting Westinghouse in the process -- shows that we definitely did not maintain our nuclear expertise over the past several decades of building exactly fuck-all new plants.)