To stay under +2°C in 2100 we need to reduce our CO² emission to ~2T/year of CO² per human. We are at 15T/year in the US and ~10T/year at the OECD. We are currently aiming at +4°C or more.
Doind a Paris-NewYork (one way) is 1.3T of CO² emitted.
The effort that we all have to do is huge. And we need to to it NOW (CO² stay ~2 century in the atmosphere, everything emitted only add-up).
The alternative is what? Contract GDP in every nation until carbon emissions are below target? You think people will allow you to go through something larger a great depression in order to meet climate targets? Did you not see the shitshow that happened in Chile and France when those governments tried to hike gasoline taxes by a small amount?
There is very little we can do over the next few decades to curb emissions. Solar and wind are not viable replacements for coal and natural gas (and are disastrous for the environment due to the requirement for exotic minerals and land-use requirements). Nuclear power is, but the environmental movement is actively blocking re-investment, and we're so far behind that it would take decades to jump-start the industry. Outside of energy generation, freight (sea and air), as well as air travel have no obvious non-fossil fuel alternatives. There are also thousands of petroleum products that don't have obvious alternatives either.
> Nuclear power is, but the environmental movement is actively blocking re-investment, and we're so far behind that it would take decades to jump-start the industry.
That isn't true. With desire and enough money, we could be churning out small modular reactors (SMRs) by the thousands. ThorCon, Nuscale, Terrapower and many others have designs.
In fact, that's my recommendation for the conservatives/populists. Take climate change away as an issue by promoting the only workable plan - a massive shift to nuclear power generation along with "renewables".
Even if global warming isn't an emergency, clean air is a good thing, and so is cheap, plentiful power.
>Contract GDP in every nation until carbon emissions are below target?
well in rich nations yes but of course it'll absolutely never ever ever happen. people holding out hope for renewables are deluding themselves. i's just not happening. i don't know what the value of "remaining hopeful" is.
>To stay under +2°C in 2100 we need to reduce our CO² emission to ~2T/year of CO² per human. We are at 15T/year in the US and ~10T/year at the OECD. We are currently aiming at +4°C or more.
Start an integrated organic fuel farm, a CSA for gas. It's carbon-neutral, potentially profitable, and you can start today.
Here's the manual: http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/node/277 (Disclosure: I took a Permaculture course from Farmer Dave Blume years ago, and IMO he knows what he's talking about; but I'm not affiliated with him or his site or book. I just think it's a really good way to take constructive direct action to counter CO2 and climate change w/o giving up quality of life.)
> Alcohol Can Be a Gas! (subtitled Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century) is an information-dense, highly readable, profusely illustrated manual, covering every aspect of alcohol fuel from history through crops, hands-on fuel production, and vehicle conversion. It's the first comprehensive book on small- to farm-scale alcohol production and use written in over 90 years.
> Internally divided into six books, the single volume contains 640 8.5" x 11” pages, with more than 500 illustrations, charts, and photos. It sports a 700-word glossary and a full index. It retains the original 1983 foreword by R. Buckminster Fuller. Alcohol Can Be A Gas! is a complete toolbox for farmers, green entrepreneurs, and activists to wrest control of our energy system from the Oilygarchy and put it back in the hands of the public.
Bio-fuels are a disaster for the environment due to land-use requirements because this isn't a very efficient method of getting and storing energy. With biofuels, not only do we need to grow corn to feed the population and livestock but now we need to grow corn so we can burn it in ICEs. We marginally reduce carbon emissions but kill the environment.
That's a good point that Farmer Dave addresses in the book: this ACBAG model is totally different than large-scale biofuel production. The integrated farm permits high-efficiency closed loops. For example the leftovers (DDGs or whatever they're called) from fermentation can be fed to livestock. Or used to culture mushrooms and then fed to livestock (after the mushroom crop is harvested.)
All the nutrients and trace minerals stay on the farm: the molecules of alcohol are made from atoms that come from the air and water. In effect the farm is exporting sunshine in the form of reconfigured air and water.
Well, yeah, if you can afford it buy solar panels and wind turbines and
batteries. That's terrific! (No sarcasm, I'm sincere.) In the medium- and long-term we should transition to all-electric
vehicles with renewable and atomic power.
But there's a huge existing fleet of internal-combustion engines
in vehicles, generators, and tools like chainsaws and leaf blowers, etc.
A locally-produced ecologically benign carbon-neutral fuel source is an important part of the solution, eh?
As for efficiency, consider: Scenario A: grow a crop of corn and feed it
to pigs. Scenario B: grow a crop of corn ferment it and extract the
alcohol and feed the leftovers to pigs.
In B you get two crops for the price of one. (Alcohol is produced by
yeast from sugar. The leftovers are protein, the bodies of the yeast.
The corn is a better feed after fermentation and alcohol extraction.)
As for land use in a permaculture farm you would be growing more than one crop
on the same land at the same time. You might have two or three crops
that produce food and some yams or sugar beets for fermentation.
Also, a lot of things you might not realize can be feedstocks. Pretty
much anything with sugar or starch. Farmer Dave had a deal with a donut
bakery to get their scrap dough for fermentation and fuel production.
I suggest you try to put the plan down on paper to realize it’s feasibility.
Farm equipment is far more expensive than solar panels and batteries, not to mention the amount of man power to deal with the scale needed for fuel production. Plus the extraction equipment.
In option B you end up with a shit ton of fermented waste. The amount you’ll have to grow for fuel will feed 20x more animals than you’d have in a local/small farm.
You’ll need a lot more land than usual to try this. The soil will be depleted in a few years even if you try crop rotation as your options are limited for fuel production.
Unless you show me an example of this system working I’m very skeptic, a lot of wishful thinking.
Indicates that baseline is 2T/year/human (in Spain).
840lbs to 6710lbs (resting to active) exhalation. Which means, not below 0.5T/year/human. We are at 20T/year/human here in Canada -- but, of course, at 8953 trees/human, with each tree absorbing 48lbs of CO2/year, Canada absorbs 215T/year/human (carbon negative in Canada by 195T/year/human).
What action would you like? Carbon tax? We have that. Eliminate oil production? Working on that (no pipelines being built, tar-sands bitumen not being sold to anyone but the US).
Personally, I prefer not to freeze, so burn natural gas to heat my house. Really big country, need transport.
I imagine that I could use wood heating could be used - 2 cords per season should be sufficient (6 to 20 trees, depending on diameter - 8 to 14 inches). I previously (20 years ago) converted all wood burning to natural gas, but could convert back. I no longer own enough land for my tree needs but (afair) 2 acres for food, 4 acres for fuel, so 6 acres of land of be sufficient for my needs.
This would reduce my carbon footprint, but would be more polluting -- which would you prefer?
Trouble is that carbon-neutral flights are possible, but they're decades away. There is not way in which we meaningfully limit climate change that doesn't come with a radical change (reduction by most measures) in the quality of life of your average 1st world resident.
How do we change decades to months? Pretty sure it’s possible if we invest in it. Look at rocketry or nukes in the WW2. We need that kind of focus and investment.
What we need to do is figure out how civilization can survive in a 6 degree warmer world. I'd take it if I could get it, but I've given up hope of achieving anything lower.
FYI to anyone else reading, this is the other side of science-denial coin, the doomer side. The most authoritative reports (ipcc ar6 and sr15) show us probably landing in the low 4's in a "BAU" scenario. However those scenarios are widely acknowledged as no longer plausible, as the cost curves of three things: wind, solar, and batteries have invalidated several of the assumptions about future growth in coal and oil demand.
Scientifically speaking we are on target for something over 2C but below 4C. Keep in mind that what we're seing today (puerto rico, california, australia) is 1C. 2C will be terrifying, so the news that we will likely not break 4C is very very mild comfort. Its just that anyone talking about 5, 6, etc is negative-spiraling in a way unsupported by the research and current economics.
>FYI to anyone else reading, this is the other side of science-denial coin, the doomer side
Why not the 'realist' side?
>wind, solar, and batteries have invalidated several of the assumptions about future growth in coal and oil demand.
Did they now? Coal and natural gas growth have outpaced solar and wind deployments. There is still no grid-level storage solution to actually make solar and wind viable replacements, and there isn't one forthcoming anytime soon (right now, places like California, and Germany simply use natural gas backup).
> All of these numbers are fairly fuzzy, but what happens around 2 degrees is that the natural–the consequences of the warming trigger natural processes that contribute further to the warming (positive feedbacks as they are called) in which the permafrost melts and releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere; in which the surface waters of the oceans become so warm they can no longer contain all of the carbon dioxide they absorbed earlier–high school physics, right? Warmer water can contain less dissolved gas. Buy yourself a beer and you’ll see what I mean: if you don’t drink it, it goes flat as it warms up.
> So, all of those feedbacks kick in around 2 degrees and then you’ve lost control, to the point where you may not be able to stop the warming process, even if you stop all of your own emissions.
I'm a fan of Gwynne Dyer youtubes, I think he does an excellent job of articulating the most plausible doomer case, particularly w/r/t to india.
However that's not scientific research published in peer reviewed journals and then aggregated into UN reports. That's just some professor telling plausible stories in a confident tone of voice.
Specifically the big distinction you will notice between the former and the latter is the latter always depends on "feedback loops" which are un-researched speculation that things will get exponentially worse faster than expected in some way. Now, I don't deny the basic premise of what feedback loops are and how they can work, but if you don't have any research or science to back it then talking about "feedback loops" is functionally just a fancier phrase for "depressive negative spiraling".
Its not that its not plausible, its that its a story, not science.
Okay, I mostly agree with you, but saying we should plan for something plausible but not (yet) scientifically established is different than "science-denial", eh?
the problem is IPCC does not includes these 'feedback loops' into their reports. which by themselves are based on atleast a half a decade old 'safe' science due to publication pipeline. This is the reason why most of the climate reporting these days has some sort of 'faster than expected' adjectives. do you honestly believe that there is going to be no impact of permafrost melting or ocean ICE loss resulting in increased albedo? the question is why is IPCC knowingly ignoring these important feedback loops in their reports?
another point to consider, IPCC reporting is typically condensed into 3 scenarios 33%/66%/99% probabilities of staying below 2C. the most quoted carbon budget numbers come from the 66% scenario. is that wise? if we are talking planet-wide death & destruction then shouldn't we be aiming for 99%. if you consider that IMO IPCC is too timid on this issue and is essentially making a case of massive geoengineering when the 'faster than expected' becomes really bad.
>2C will be terrifying, so the news that we will likely not break 4C is very very mild comfort.
how is terrifying any less provocative than "doom"? i'm just as concerned about terrifying circumstances as i am about being doomed? more likely person you responded to is just as terrified as you are and simply remembered the wrong figure (6 instead of 4).
To me the distinction between terrifying and doomed is that the former is something you can/should react to and the later is something you've defined as too-late or given up on.
there's literally nothing that suggests otherwise, other than that it's physically possible to reduce consumption (i.e. it's not counter to the laws of physics). there is zero political or practical plausibility for reducing consumption to the extent that is necessary to avoid 4 degrees. you're holding out hope for something as unlikely as a miracle.
edit: there was a talk given years ago (i forget where/which channel) where the speaker said that to avoid warming we'd need to mobilize on the scale that we did for ww2 i.e. factories would need to be repurposed and laborers re-skilled. in that scenario it would be plausible. ww2[1] mobilized roughly 7 million people. if today we applied that kind of effort to the problem then maybe we'd have a chance. i don't know i'm not an economist but it's a unilateral effort on that scale that's necessary. and if you look around you can see it's not happening.
France manages a reasonable standard of living at 4.5T/capita/year (albeit with a LOT of nuclear, which may be politically and economically difficult to reproduce elsewhere). EU as a whole is 6.3T. So not really an order of magnitude, necessarily. The US is an outlier, granted, but mostly for fixable reasons (in particular, over dependence on cars due to poor public transport).
2T/capita is extremely ambitious, but not inconceivable.
EDIT: By the way, it is notable that even before climate was a concern, CO2 emissions in developed countries were largely falling, since the 70s. This was a result of the oil crisis and other energy security issues pushing greater efficiency, plus the replacement of coal with gas for air quality and economic reasons.
>The US is an outlier, granted, but mostly for fixable reasons (in particular, over dependence on cars due to poor public transport).
This isn't an obstacle, given electric cars and clean electricity generation. As I said elsewhere, nuclear is the only viable answer. Sadly, it has been demonized, and that needs to be reversed.
ThorCon's efforts in Indonesia will be interesting to watch. I'm not sure I like its current plan of siting the reactors like oil platforms in coastal waters though...
The best approach is underground siting, with no or very little water cooling requirement.
No, but my impression is that even in cities in the US which have the density to support good systems, the systems tend to be... not great. I go to SF from time to time, and it's the only place I regularly have to resort to lyft/uber/etc, because the public transport system just doesn't seem... very useful. And I'm coming from Dublin, a city with a pretty bad system by European standards.
And it's _possible_ for public transport to work for fairly low density suburbs; I think some places have had success with small feeder buses feeding larger buses or trams.
Also, of course, urban planning can be improved. And tastes can change too; my impression is that the very large McMansion type houses are getting somewhat less popular in the US now, and they're a big contributor on two grounds (they exacerbate the low density problem, and they're expensive to heat and cool both due to sheer size and to generally relatively cheap construction prompted by the sheer size).
> And it's _possible_ for public transport to work for fairly low density suburbs; I think some places have had success with small feeder buses feeding larger buses or trams.
This is what I was sceptical about, but I haven't looked at these kinds of projects yet. I will 'research' more in to it. Thank you for these directions.
Doind a Paris-NewYork (one way) is 1.3T of CO² emitted.
The effort that we all have to do is huge. And we need to to it NOW (CO² stay ~2 century in the atmosphere, everything emitted only add-up).
We can't do business as usual, that's over.
Let's talk, let's act.