> human energy consumption, by means of burning fossil fuels, is the reason for green house gases, that in turn trap more heat, then our environment can sustain.
> technology to reduce CO2 emission, assuming the same level of electricity consumption -- is far from being available.
They had talked about Nuclear, sun, geo, nuclear fusion.
>more efficient means to convert to electricity:
>35% of coal energy is transformed to electricity
> incandescent light bulb converts only 5% to light
If larger city (NY, Moscow, Bombay etc) switch to better light bulb, 1 million ton of C02 emissions every year, each.
> simply changing from coal to gas cuts carbon emission by 40%
>half of worlds oil is used by 500mln road vehicles. 400 mln of those are private cars. each producing 4 times its weight in CO2, each year. Internal com engine is only 20% efficient. Cars can improve by 3 times (not clear, if they assumed electric only or not).
> when gas is not available option, coal can be gasified
>
>Taxation can work both ways, already there is a talk of carbon tax. But how to achieve compliance across national borders.
>Global warming calls for global response. but world is not a common market.
Examples they used is Easter Europe, other developing regions.
>How could this countries advance, but leap-frog energy developments?
Future must be different, developing countries cannot take the same path as the developed countries in the past.
Well, they aren't. I mean we all aren't taking the same exact path. For example:
> technology to reduce CO2 emission, assuming the same level of electricity consumption -- is far from being available. They had talked about Nuclear, sun, geo, nuclear fusion.
Solar and wind power are picking up steam (pun intendend :p).
> incandescent light bulb converts only 5% to light If larger city (NY, Moscow, Bombay etc) switch to better light bulb, 1 million ton of C02 emissions every year, each.
Incadescent light bulbs are largely obsolete. I'm sure they haven't been replaced 100% but they definitely are on their way out.
> simply changing from coal to gas cuts carbon emission by 40%
This is also happening cause gas is very cheap right now.
> Solar and wind power are picking up steam (pun intendend :p).
Yes, we produce more solar and wind power, but the level of electricity consumption has also increased. Are we outputting less CO2 for electricity, or does all the solar and wind just come on top of what we already had?
I expect China's emissions to be through the roof compared to 1990, on the other hand they've noticed the problem and unlike Trump's head in the sand approach, the vast majority of their energy investments are in renewables.
Note that this number is for total primary energy consumption, including things such as transportation and heating. For electrical power generation, it's about 70% from coal, gas and oil. That said, it's completely reasonable to look at the total energy consumption.
Grandparent was talking about investments, though, not the status quo. Couldn't readily find figures relating to the distribution of investments, but it's easy to find articles about the large scope of their renewable ambitions, e.g. http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china-leaving-us-behind-clea...
Re incandescent bulbs: increasing the efficiency of consumption of a resource usually increases the total consumption of that resource. Ergo, switching away from incandescent bulbs will actually accelerate global warming.
Ew, ok, but you get a lot more consumer surplus in the meantime and carbon taxes are much more palatable when costs are lower. This isn't a good reason to not invest in efficiency.
Yes that's a nice summary. It's good to see that some of steps have already been taken (led instead of incandescent) and that at that time photovoltaic technologies weren't viable yet thus not mentioned in the video.
Also I like the irony of showing Volkswagen cars when mentioning efforts from the E.U. to reduce car emissions :)
It is my understanding that with internal combustion engines there is a trade-off between NOx and CO2. The hotter you burn, the more efficient the engine, but you also create more NOx. Volkswagen chose to tune their engines for fuel consumption, reducing GHGs, but tried to cheat their way around the illegally increased NOx.
Private car ownership should be banned imho. People will claim that public transport including taxis isnt up to the task of point to point travel but Id wager this void would be quickly filled up by enterprising private companies. Vanity, materialism.. A bloody shame..
Taxing by weight and emissions and cost are a more pragmatic version of this.
Cars, and houses, are to a degree used for status signalling. With products like that, heavy taxes increase total utility since you can still have a nicer car/house than your poorer neighbour, it's just that all cars/houses have been bumped up a rung of show-offiness. Compare Europe to the USA for example. Even the American electric cars are comically large by euro standards.
(Other co-benefits are improved safety, an analysis of CARB regulations suggested that they paid for themselves just by reducing death and injury by encouraging lighter cars, even if you ignore air quality issues)
Taxing by weight and emissions and cost are a more pragmatic version of this.
We do that here in the UK. The difference between a small economical car and a giant SUV is a factor of 5 (£110 for a small car vs £515 for a huge car, plus a couple of lower bands for electric and 'green' cars). It really isn't enough make anyone who wants to drive a big car choose something else. It needs to be more like 50 times more for a big car rather than 5, but politicians are too scared to introduce that.
Of course politicians should be the one who decide the rules. That's how democracy works...
Keep in mind that the jet fuel that's used to transport all the world's hipsters to “experience the world” is not taxed at all – or does that hit too close to home even for a person who doesn't own a car? A life that's aimed at solely minimising emissions is a bleak one, which is why it's not the will of the majority.
"the jet fuel that's used to transport all the world's hipsters to “experience the world”"
What about the jet fuel that's used for the other 98% of people who fly on a regular basis? Is that less polluting, or are you just jealous of the people who travel internationally for leisure? You're not making any sense, unless you're deluded enough to think that those are the only people who fly.
"does that hit too close to home even for a person who doesn't own a car?"
Again, that makes no sense. Why would car ownership affect the impact of jet fuel pollution? If it's the "hipsters" you're concerned about, wouldn't those be the people who are already offsetting the environmental cost of air travel by using public transport and/or unmotorised travel and thus polluting less than car owners?
In other words, you seem to be more interested at attacking a threadbare strawman than evaluate what's actually happening. It's pretty sad, when the actual reason for taxation is pretty clear (to encourage less polluting methods of transport where one reasonably exists, which may not be the case for many air routes).
You're forgetting tax on fuel, which at 57.95 pence/litre for petrol/diesel is almost a tax rate of 100%. Unfortunately most of this money goes into the general budget rather than being used to improve transport infrastructure and/or reduce CO2 or NOX emissions.
I live in Texas. Private car ownership definitely has a materialistic component. However, owning a car is almost a necessity in every city in Texas. You see a lot of big, decked-out pickup trucks here (vanity). I drive a Prius because there aren't good public transit options (necessity) and I like to visit family in Dallas (I'm in Austin). I end up driving _a lot_.
I understand that some governments have penalized car ownership by way of license plate restrictions and other tax situations (I've heard that license plates in China get auctioned for $12k USD because they're so rare). This turns owning a car into a vanity symbol for the wealthy. It may not even be an intentional symbol, but I'm sure that's the way it's perceived by those who don't own a car.
My point being that for some, car ownership isn't so bad. No need to go shaming people.
Restricting license plates is stupid. Instead they should put extra taxes on cars with higher fuel consumption* and probably on bigger cars * * .
* Higher fuel consumption = some categories could be exempt, for example vans used by ONGs, firms and independent contractors.
* * Bigger cars = smaller cars are easier to park, take less space in traffic and make it overall more fluid, etc. I think exemptions could be made here for the categories I mentioned previously and for families with children, for example.
Wouldn't just tax on petrol solve that? In Europe petrol at the pump is twice the price of the refined barrel. If you look carefully, this has a complete impact on the way EU cities are architectured (way above history).
Plus, taxing per gallon is exactly proportional to the burden on society.
I think there should be an upfront tax. Taxes dilluted over time seem to be less visible, we're really bad at estimates, as every developer knows :)
An extra 50 cents per gallon is quite a bit, but it doesn't seem to discourage this behavior. 40% on the price of the car instead... could make a lot more people think twice about the purchase.
Petrol price at the pump does factor into it. For longer distances, I look at public transport and weigh travel time and ticket prices against fuel costs.
For shorter distances, great bicycling infrastructure helps a lot. Buses are nice but cycling is often as fast, with the benefit of being completely door to door and leaving exactly when you want to. But this benefit only works if people feel completely safe on the road, which means mostly seperate cycle paths, and removing cars from the busy city centers. Not having cars there makes shopping more attractive, because it's now easier to walk from store to the store across the road.
That same infrastructure then also helps make trains more attractive, because you can set up cheap bike hire at stations. This then means your journey can be bike-train-bike door to door, rather than walk-bus-train-bus-walk (or worse).
Where I live, people drive gigantic gas hog trucks and SUV's. I like this idea. People with those types of vehicles might start to gravitate towards those who actually require their use, vs just thinking 'bigger and louder and faster is cooler.'
I think the idea is to penalize car ownership in places where you "shouldn't" need one.
If you're courageous, you could live in downtown Dallas without a car (can move around a bit with DART). Making it harder to own a car (combined with more "dense-city" developments) doesn't seem like the worst idea. Mainly because we could recover the huuuge parking lots.
And when you want to go to Austin for the weekend you can rent a car.
In any case, even if the entire state is still very much "car necessary", you can still try to incentivise pockets of the state to be less so.
If your goal is to have an significant impact on climate change, you'd more bang for your buck and just as likely a chance of banning red meat, especially with electric car ownership on the rise.
I've commuted by bike and public transportation for a number of years and I'd never want to ban vehicle ownership. A more workable solution would be to make driving tests less of a joke or to make dense areas of city centers car free zones. American cities are just too large and often times people drive without a destination in mind, like my Sunday drives down the California Public Highway along the beach.
I wonder which has a bigger impact on human consumption levels: a person that decides to save his time by driving a car instead of waiting for a bus, or Africa's population increasing from 250 million in 1960 to about 5 billion by 2100.
Let's focus on the selfish car guy, that's the big picture all right in “saving” the world.
An affordable car with good gas mileage is a status symbol? A Prius was an environmental status symbol 10 years ago, but now it's just a practical choice for people who want a reliable and (relatively) cheap car.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I drive a fairly economical Jetta. Is that also a status symbol or did I just need a cheap, reliable car to get from point A to point B?
If the area is not dense enough, public transport will be difficult to organise. You would need some form of a hybrid between Uber and a bus.
Also, many professions require high levels of mobility.
Finally, unless you introduce some kind of permit system and create serious beaurocracy for enforcing it, people will just pretend to have their own companies and drive "company" cars anyway.
Nature will find a way :)
And I say this while taking 50% of my trips with public transit (the rest with Uber). I seriously hope we get rid of gas cars one way, but banning private ownership would be crazy.
In some cultures, "overuse" of personal transport (if we want to put it this way) is a vicious circle of context and individual; it's not simply a fault of the latter.
Public transport underdeveloped -> more people use personal transport -> public transport develops even less, city develops around personal transport -> vicious circle.
Of course the individual it's a purely not victim, but in certain contexts, using the car is a necessity. In such cases, a strong collective effort should be made to reverse the situation.
Sadly, this is the norm & the way the current system works...if you can profit now & collect a huge bonus now, your incentive is to do that no matter what happens to the future. Cigarette companies knew of the harms of their product for decades. Bankers knew many of their home loans and other products would fail (but it would be after they got paid massive bonuses...insane speculation didn't happen when investment banks were partnerships and bonuses could be clawed back). Dupont knew PFOAs were harmful for more than half a century and a decade into a massive lawsuit before they finally stopped producing them.
So glad you mentioned that story!! I hope you read that NYTimes write-up. It was EYE-OPENING how LITTLE power the EPA actually has!! It's unbelievable.
That said, I felt that some of Trump's efforts to lower EPA approval times from 6 years to 4 years could be good...I'm just not qualified to say.
I agree though that anyone who read the story about the PFOA will agree that the EPA needs DRAMATICALLY more power and probably more funding not less.
The 'greenhouse effect' (which was the umbrella term for what is now called climate change) was widely discussed in the 80s and 90s and taught in schools, at least in Australia.
As a child I learned that many metropolitan cities would be underwater by the year 2000.
The science confirming man made climate change was presented in the 1970's, many have known since then we are the cause of the earths warming. It has been settled science for the better part of 30 years. It has been taught in schools around the world since the mid 1980's as part of Science and Geography Curriculums including some of its known impacts such as the rise of sea levels.
I decided to do a Google newspaper archive survey just to see what people were saying back then. I'll be honest, the articles seem pretty close to the mark from what I see.
For instance, a 1988 article says scientists warn that pollutants already have committed the planet in "30 years to 50 year to its highest temperatures in 10,000 years"; in 2017 I would say that (based on our reconstructed temperature estimates) this prediction is likely (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past...).
I don't doubt that there were some people that projected overly pessimistic doomsday scenarios of flooded cities by the end of 2000 (though to be honest most of the articles I'm encountering more warn of 2100), but for me this is actually is an interesting confirmation; even 30 years ago, the scientists had a model in place that has proven to be way more resilient than some of the deniers would have it.
This is why you should, if possible, refuel at Statoil/Circle K. Statoil is (partly?) owned by the norwegian government and is basically the only oil giant that try to preserve the environment and to reduce it's impact.
I agree it's good Statoil is making an effort, and they are most definitely trying to pivot into renewables (mainly offshore wind). But they also do some stupid shit, like oil sands in Canada.
However I don't know if they're unique in this aspect, e.g. Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Total are all huge oil companies that are pivoting into solar and wind. At this point it just makes pure business sense; renewable energy has (or will soon, depending on which tech) become profitable even without subsidies. These companies have a lot of engineering talent and money they can invest in projects. They see that oil and gas long term future prospects are bad (production costs are going up while demand is going down). Renewables are the opposite, costs going down and demand increasing. They are already energy production companies.
You can also see they're playing on their strengths, like Statoil doing offshore wind because of their experience with offshore structures in adverse weather, while Saudi Aramco know lots about building and operating production equipment scattered around the desert so they focus on solar, etc.
Yeah sure, other companies does that as well. But in the meantime they deny that climate change is even a thing (at least in the US) but Statoil does not do that.
> Statoil is (partly?) owned by the norwegian government
Statoil is 67% owned by the Norwegian government directly, and another 3% is owned by the Government Pension Fund Norway (which is the "small one" of the two Norwegian sovereign wealth funds - the biggest one which usually gets all the attention only invests outside of Norway)
Statoil/Circle K. (the gas stations business) were spun off from Statoil proper years ago and are fully independent company who was just leasing the brand.
Yeah I understand, but I assume they are still purchasing their oil from Statoil. Probably a lot of other companies does that as well but I am not sure of which.
Some other industry players also made a movie about climate change at about the same time, but their conclusion was basically, "Don't worry about it, because plants will just love all the excess CO2." I remember this film because of an otherwise good, but somewhat dogmatic conservative high school physics teacher.
Nothing new, we all knew about it as students back in the early 80's. The denial came much later, climate change is not a new issue, but we have been incredibly slow to react to it.
Isn't it the same motivation as ExxonMobil supporting a carbon tax? I.e., "buy natural gas from us to replace the coal furnaces" I wouldn't be surprised if before putting out this film they the relative difficulty/cost of displacing coal vs gasoline/diesel
They probably just underestimated the gullability of the average American voter.
Imagine if some nerd had spoke up at a Shell meeting and said his analysis of the American voter suggested that they could just claim it was a Chinese hoax and that would be accepted. Most intelligent people would find it hard to take that seriously, so they only found out by continually pushing the boundaries of what they thought the public would accept.
Unfortunately for the world, there was a certain group of Republican voters that were very susceptible to their propaganda and so they could keep pushing into the absurd.
Really? The negative is that they didn't act in the best interests of humanity--the very people that make up their shareholders, employees, customers, etc.
For example, it's well documented that DuPont fought to continue using CFCs until they had secured patents on replacement products and suffered public humiliation by our government.
Companies will not generally act in the best interests of the citizens, which is why we have a government which should be independent of influence by leaders of companies.
Seriously? This is an industry that is actively undermining climate policy. So yes, we are going to use this video against them and other oil companies until an actual (aka substantial) positive change happens.
Lastly, warning labels do not absolve a company of all responsibility.
They tried to act in the best interest of humanity, but humanity didnt care about best interest of humanity. Companies will never act in the best interest of humanity if humanity dont care. Governments also dont care of the best interest if humanity, if their citizens dont care about humanity, they care about the best interest of their citizens.
Also people dont care about the best interest of humanity, if it doesnt line up with their personal interest (ex: car sales, car usage etc)
I dont know why you are down voted for making a valid point. It is not corporations responsibility to think about best interest of humanity, even this cideo referencing UN studies, I think most to blame is governments.
The car you are using if it is running on oil, is not in the best interest of humanity, 'it is killing someone in the future', but if you are chosing it because it is cheaper versus an electric one, should we blame you, if you are warning us about climate change but using a car consuming oil?
here are my cliff notes:
> human energy consumption, by means of burning fossil fuels, is the reason for green house gases, that in turn trap more heat, then our environment can sustain.
> technology to reduce CO2 emission, assuming the same level of electricity consumption -- is far from being available. They had talked about Nuclear, sun, geo, nuclear fusion.
>more efficient means to convert to electricity:
>35% of coal energy is transformed to electricity
> incandescent light bulb converts only 5% to light If larger city (NY, Moscow, Bombay etc) switch to better light bulb, 1 million ton of C02 emissions every year, each.
> simply changing from coal to gas cuts carbon emission by 40%
>half of worlds oil is used by 500mln road vehicles. 400 mln of those are private cars. each producing 4 times its weight in CO2, each year. Internal com engine is only 20% efficient. Cars can improve by 3 times (not clear, if they assumed electric only or not).
> when gas is not available option, coal can be gasified
> >Taxation can work both ways, already there is a talk of carbon tax. But how to achieve compliance across national borders.
>Global warming calls for global response. but world is not a common market. Examples they used is Easter Europe, other developing regions.
>How could this countries advance, but leap-frog energy developments?
Future must be different, developing countries cannot take the same path as the developed countries in the past.