According to that chart, it’s too late to do anything now. (Arguably, it’s always been too late. There is nothing we could’ve done even starting in 1990 that would avert climate change while accommodating the industrialization or China, India, and Africa.)
If you turn off the natural gas plants now, the economy shuts down whenever the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. The alternative energy storage you need to back up renewables simply doesn’t exist yet.
Yes, we needed to use nuclear back in the 1970s. We would be much better positioned today if we had done it. But the same type of environmentalists that want to ban fracking today are the folks who stymied nuclear uptake. We shouldn’t listen to them this time.
> The remaining available carbon budget does not afford for a two-step transition. All investment in carbon emission producing generation needs to be replaced with investment in non-carbon-emitting generation, starting "in 2020" but honestly that's just politician talk. The real deadline is "fucking yesterday".
First, this is a response to someone who suggested we ban fracking. We will need fracking for the foreseeable future to power natural gas peaker plants. So your response to me doesn’t really make sense in context if you’re not actually supporting a fracking ban.
Second, until we have replacement technology, we need to replace retiring coal plants with natural gas even as we invest in renewables. Renewables are, at this stage, not stand alone power. More renewables means we need more peaker plants capacity to balance it out. That means fracking will have to continue and even increase over the next 20-30 years as we shift to more renewables.
The very part you quoted has the word "investment" in it twice, and the post you're replying to had the word new in all-caps to highlight it, and yet somehow your brain twisted that into turning off existing capacity.
You either cannot read, or are not discussing in good faith. I honestly can't do more than be triple-redundant in my explicit phrasing.
The problem isn't really that hard, we need to have vast far reaching austerity measures be put into place immediately or the human race AND human civilization will cease to exist.
People that make arguments like yours beg the question as to economic progress and standards of living. Standards of living should drop overall, but should normalize across the population. A smooth transition is not possible.
AFAIK the extreme, apocalyptic statements you are making are not supported by the science such as the IPCC. 3-4 degrees C of warming by 2100 will not make the human race or civilization cease to exist. There are also technological options available to us to cool the planet such as seeding the upper atmosphere with dust, which we have not yet used and could provide some additional time to switch to sustainable energy production means.
In any case, a non-smooth transition is not possible right now. Look at France which was paralyzed by “yellow vest” protests for a fuel tax increase until it was rolled back - the needed carbon taxes are far higher than that small tax increase. Right now the best scenario is to continue R&D and target promotion of sustainable energy, not attempt to reduce people’s standard of living which a democratic society will refuse to accept.
AFAIK the extreme, apocalyptic statements you are making are not supported by the science such as the IPCC.
Other people here are asserting that an abrupt and urgent transition away from fossil fuels 'will crash the economy and kill off most of the population' (which I take to mean >50%) without offering any citations for that claim whatsoever.
considering modern society relies on Diesel trucks and fuel oil-burning ships to feed itself, those numbers don’t seem too crazy. If we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow we’d have mass starvation everywhere within weeks.
So I guess it depends on what you mean by abrupt. I think we could certainly do something like add a $2/gallon tax on gas and diesel fuel without that happening, and it would reduce driving and emissions, but I would see the politicians who passed that law getting voted out at the next election as the people refuse to have their current standard of living lowered.
The year 2500? Who knows what technologies we might have available by then (e.g. fusion power enabling cheap energy to the point where we can do carbon capture and reverse warming).
What we are already seeing is that we are trending away from a baseline scenario by electrifying transport, energy generation and energy storage. And it’s probably harder to predict politics than the climate but right now I only see that trend continuing. There are some unfortunate anti-nuclear steps being taken but eventually enough solar and wind will get online to replace them. Emissions in the USA have trended down thanks to fracking and coal being wiped out.
Sea levels will rise but new land in the arctic will open up for human habitation and agriculture. Wars and migration may certainly happen but we’ve had plenty of that in the last 200 years without the end of civilization.
Obviously most people and governments aren't going to agree to voluntarily lower living standards, regardless of the consequences. So we need to focus on what's actually achievable.
Fracking in the US is very low-infrastructure. It's not like the 10-30 years it takes to spin up a deep-sea drill rig. It's literally a month or two and a couple million dollars. Here are some actual numbers: https://www.roseassoc.com/the-current-costs-for-drilling-a-s...
That's the whole reason it has taken off -- you turn it on when prices are high, you turn it off when prices are low.
We aren't committing to 30 years of energy policy by fracking in the US. You're committing a to maybe a couple years to pay off the investment.
It's not too late to bootstrap more nuclear, but big nuclear plants don't make less sense economically nowadays. SMRs on the other hand do. NuScale's design is very interesting.
It is specifically, exactly, too late to wait for that. Did you not look at the graph?
I'm all for continued and increased R&D funding, but the best case scenario for SMRs is they help us with the back half of the transition (2035 - 2050) not the front half (2020 - 2035).
Anything more optimist than that is simply denying the science (see ipcc report again).
If you turn off the natural gas plants now, the economy shuts down whenever the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. The alternative energy storage you need to back up renewables simply doesn’t exist yet.
Yes, we needed to use nuclear back in the 1970s. We would be much better positioned today if we had done it. But the same type of environmentalists that want to ban fracking today are the folks who stymied nuclear uptake. We shouldn’t listen to them this time.