There's some interesting data in there. If you look at the supplemental info, note that this year is well on track to be bracketed within the top ten hottest years on record:
> "This graphic compares the year-to-date temperature anomalies for 2021 (black line) to what were ultimately the ten warmest years on record: 2016 (1st), 2020 (2nd), 2019 (3rd), 2015 (4th), 2017 (5th), 2018 (6th), 2014 (7th), 2010 (8th), 2013 (9th), and 2005 (10th)."
Now, consider the lag effect on climate response and atmospheric forcing (i.e. the ocean absorbs a fair amount of the extra heat, but as the ocean warms, that heat gets injected back into the atmosphere, especially polewards, so there's a lag time before current atmospheric forcings are full realized, and that's a multidecade effect, so we won't feel today's forcing completely for decades, even a century).
Conclusion as I see it: every year for the next 50 years is going to be bracketed in the top ten hottest years, meaning the years 2030-2040 will all be hotter than 2010-2020 and so on. Decade by decade for the rest of the lives of people alive today, this will continue - and while getting off fossil fuels is needed, is indeed the only way to slow this trend, it's only going to slow down the year-to-year increase.
Additionally, as polar melt proceeds, permafrost melt and outgassing becomes self-sustaining even if humans completely stop fossil fuel use and deforestation.
Practically, this means adaptation is simply a must. People have to move out of flood plains, waste treatment plants in low-lying coastal zones needed to be moved uphill, people need to realize the global refugee crisis is going to be 10X as bad as anything seen yet at least, perhaps a steady rate of 1,000,000 per year fleeing climate disaster zones.
In reality we are heading back to climate conditions last seen ~3-5 million years ago, before the ice ages set in, with sea levels dozens of meters higher than they are now. Nobody likes to hear this it seems, but the science does seem to be saying that this has already happened, sort of.
We are not going to a new normal, because even if we stop everything feedback loops will keep worsening things till we can't adapt anymore, will be no mark in the sand saying that we will stay there.
It is not just about temperature, or sea level, is a system where we thrived while it was stable enough, going to a long period of chaos. Agriculture and food production in general, infrastructure, travel and more will be increasingly disrupted.
Passive adaptation may not be the way out, just letting the water to boil up till the frog is cooked, or risk ending things faster with the some of the surprises that climatologist are getting year to year. Stopping or compensating emissions, and aggressive/extensive carbon capture may be a way out. Going into silos much like what happened in Wool may be another (where a lot of things can go wrong, anyway).
Among other things he talks about is the possibility of unilateral geoengineering by some of the nations that will be feeling the effects sooner and more, uh, compellingly than others:
> I talked–actually, the head of the Bangladesh Institute of Strategic
Studies about this (you didn’t even know that existed, did you?). Well,
there is one, it’s quite serious–run by a General, bright guy. I said,
“have you heard about geoengineering?” and he smiled–seraphically–and he
said, “Mmm. Yes. Your question?”
> And I asked the question, “Do you think that this is something the
Bangladesh government might want to do a little bit, before, let’s say,
the US government or the Chinese government?”
> He said, “yes it has crossed our minds.”–and then he stopped talking.
I’d say that unilateral geo-engineering by private entities becomes an option. Far easier for a private billionaire to fund this than for any government considering the geo-political implications . Who’s up for playing billionaire punk?
All of that is assuming we don't make major advances in carbon/methane capture and maybe some sort of "ice capture" plan, of course.
I don't know how much hope we have to actually see major advances in these areas, but given what we all expect of how much pressure we will be in collectively I can imagine a lot more money being thrown at is as people get desperate.
Carbon capture and sequestration, as it's called, suffers from a major co-ordination problem, the free-rider effect. Why pay yourself if others are paying? You get the same benefit. Every country can see that, so no-one pays.
Look how well the world did with covid-19. Low income countries are still desperately short of vaccines, which means that covid is going to be endemic from now on.
Or look how well the world coped when there were commodity food price spikes in 2005-2008, and 2010-2011. Countries banned exports, rather than co-operating.
We're going to have more of those (food price spikes), btw.
Something that has been vanishingly low probability (once per 5_000 years, say), until now, is simultaneous harvest failure by say 10% or more in two or more of the four "bread-basket" (grain) regions of the world.
Simulations suggest that probability will rise over the course of the century to about 50% per decade starting in the '40s.[1] I hope we're planning for it.
1. Daniel Quiggin, Kris De Meyer, Lucy Hubble-Rose and Anthony Froggatt, Climate change risk assessment 2021, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House Environment and Society Programme Research Paper 2021. ISBN 978-1-78413-491-4.
The Musk solution is limited to transport, where emissions can be reduced economically. Other emissions sources, such as steel production, will not be solved with the same mechanism, because no single company is going to suffer the competitive disadvantage of using clean tech.
Sucking carbon out of the atmosphere yourself will never be cheaper than letting other people do it, no matter what Elon's R&D departments do. We can't reach our climate coals without it.
If people are already buying something, like electricity or cars, then buying clean substitutes that are cheaper and better than older dirty products doesn't suffer from free rider effect.
Each person makes their own decision and gets more value with the clean option if it is better than the old product at what it does. The clean option takes over automatically thanks to individuals each looking out for themselves.
I used Musk's name as a short-hand for this approach targeting individual self interest because he has a very high profile in cleaner transport in the US. I did not mean to imply that Musk will somehow make CCS a desirable thing for individuals to buy. That's not possible.
Sucking carbon out of the atmosphere is not something that people get individual value from, or have been willing to pay for to date. So left to themselves, no-one would pay for it. That's why it needs co-ordinated action. Which we're not good at.
Yes, we can't reach climate goals without CCS. But it's going to be hard to scale up to approximately the same size as the global oil and gas industry.
Direct Air Capture (DAC) will never be impactful for the simple reason that you need to process way too much air to remove an appreciable amount of Carbon. Capture at the source of plants producing CO2 will be helpful, but DAC is a pipe dream.
I’m just hoping there’s enough momentum and support for addressing climate change that NOAA can keep getting things done. Regardless of who might be in office in the future.
Last thing we need is a new administration in 2024 completely undoing all the progress we’re making again.
What is your hope based on? Genuinely curious. All evidence shows that there is neither momentum nor support, next to nothing is being done and global emissions just keep rising.
My hope comes from personal experience. Not exactly empirical. I’ve been involved in the climate movement for a long time now (since before I was even a teenager) and things have improved vastly during my life alone. If you asked me this question a few years ago I would be down in the dumps, but what I see around me these days has me much more positive of how humanity makes it through this. (I’m sorry I don’t really have one specific link or citation. Yale Climate Communication is a good place to start though)
There is still a lot of losses and a lot of inaction. I don’t know if humanity will have a peaceful time mid or late century, but I don’t think the situation is as dire as it used to be.
Right before he died, David MacKay did a study indicating we needed to rely on an insane amount of nuclear to survive (but we live in a world insanely against nuclear power). Since then the price of solar energy has plummeted. Has anyone done the study to update these numbers?
Only if we have the tenth of competence in SSA and DMVs (state run) around the US. I want some strong leader to abolish them and start again. Fire all the useless employees that corrupt these places if they don’t improve.
I’m paying for this. And so are you. And we should expect nothing but excellence. It’s harsh but this is what I feel.
Make work, bullshit jobs is basically a crude mechanism for a kind of UBI for many people.
Our governments are deeply disincentivized to cleanup these inefficiencies because it means higher unemployment.
This is one of the reasons I'm a strong supporting of an actual UBI + universal healthcare. If people's lives aren't destroyed and driven to death by poverty if they don't have a job, then there won't be as much moral and political hazard to eliminating bullshit jobs in favor a system that works better for all of us.
Replacing bullshit jobs with UBI takes away many ways that important emotional needs are met. Feeling useful, important, part of something bigger, respected, etc. These are very important for quality of life.
I would argue that it's worse to slowly come to the sickening realization that you're not actually useful. That the people around you just put up with you and give you something to occupy your time with out of pity.
If we make sure everyone's basic economic needs are met, then maybe they'll surprise you and find a job or social niche where they legitimately are useful and valued. But if you're economically imprisoned to your current job, then you won't have the time or freedom to explore.
Also, unemployment insurance and welfare as they are now are fundamentally different from UBI. The nature of these programs is "stay unemployed or economically useless, or else you lose the benefit" and it actively disincentivizes people from trying to contribute to society.
I take it you've not spent much time talking with people in bullshit jobs? Most would be thrilled to be paid to watch/teach their kids, or work on an artistic side-hustle or hobby. Work is just the stupid, pointless bullshit someone makes them do to have money, while taking time from them they could be using for things that are actually valuable. It's not meeting an emotional need or making them feel important. God, certainly not respected.
>Feeling useful, important, part of something bigger, respected, etc. These are very important for quality of life.
And it's pathologically toxic that we as a society believe the only valid way to meet those emotional needs is by providing value to a company in exchange for the means to survive.
I would side with the opposite: To make it easy to fire government employees (mostly leaders and managers) like we do in private industry. Deeply unpopular but I believe it’s the correct strategy. UBI is not fixing the underlying problem. Strong top down direction like Apple or Space X.
I disagree entirely. The practical and moral reason why it's difficult to fire workers is because it generally results in the worker losing his income and healthcare, leading to personal and familial hardship. If healthcare were de-coupled from employment, then the hardship experienced by a fired worker is reduced. If some amount of income is de-coupled from employment, then the hardship experienced by a fired worker is further reduced (unemployment insurance works fine enough as a temporary band-aid, but it's not the real deal).
If we can get enough social infrastructure in place so that fired workers experience minimal hardship, then it becomes morally acceptable to make our government and companies more efficient, by laying off inefficient or unnecessary workers. Society then gets to equitably reap the rewards of this increased efficiency.
Relatedly, in theory it also makes it much easier for a worker in a "local maxima" of doing a job they dislike inefficiently so long as checks get cleared more of an incentive to quit on their own decision and find a better personal "efficiency" for their labor if they feel much more comfortable that they have a safety net if they decide to seek new options.
Along similar lines, it also reduces the risk of quitting to follow some entrepreneurial venture, potentially boosting innovation in addition to adding a force pushing the market towards decentralization, which is probably a good thing.
Along the same lines, it also (in theory) helps non bread winners in abusive domestic relationships leave the relationship, since they have a static income stream tied to themselves rather than being 100% dependent on their partner.
Of course, give them a chance to improve. Shift them to another position if they show curiosity or initiative. Obviously, if you think all people in the workforce are benevolent actors who deserve nothing but praise - you're deluded. There are people that weigh in on the rest of the team, ruin the culture and talk behind others' back. They're the troublemakers and should be fired.
The gov optimization function is to maximize production not employment. This is an ongoing fallacy in the political narrative but the unseen consequences of making up jobs is overall lower purchasing power.
But how would you force people to vaccinate if they are on UBI and dont have to jump when their employer says so? Or do you crack the U of UBI then, attaching strings to the basic income to make people comply to what you want them to comply with?
I've lived in and gotten drivers licenses in several states and in none of them were there any problems with the DMVs that couldn't have been improved by hiring more people.
It seems like a pretty thankless job, and I would by no means want to do it.
At this point, your anecdote doesn't help - heck, DMV's inefficiencies are so widely known and even featured in some movies: https://www.google.com/search?q=dmv+sloth
> The National Smart Water Grid{trademark} will pay for itself in a single major flood event.
Weather patterns will likely change dramatically and violently. We cannot relocate our farmland fast enough. We need a system capable of absorbing extreme precipitation and reclaiming it for food.
This isn't about stealing water from the Great Lakes(that's a common worry). Yes, pumping water takes energy, but it also provides an infrastructure for gravitational storage of solar energy for night time use.
I like and support all of these ideas -- trying to go off grid, becoming more self-sufficient, reducing consumption -- but I will just add that few people/families historically have been entirely self-sufficient. It turns out that such a thing is a lot of work and really hard or impossible to maintain, depending on what your goals are. Even the Europeans that were settling in America in the 1700s were likely not self-sufficient -- there was plenty of gifting and trade throughout.
The key is your community. If shit really does hit the fan, I'd imagine that your chance of survival is much higher if you have a community around you where there is mutual support, rather than being entirely alone in a 200 acre woodlot.
(Not saying that your goal is to be 100% self-sufficient -- just pointing this out because I've idealized this before. It's an understandable reaction to the craziness of the modern world.)
There are a lot of people in various "prepper-adjacent" communities that romanticize and idealize being fully self-sufficient. There's often a hyper-individualistic mentality that comes with that too. My comment is just to add context that going fully self-sufficient is extremely challenging and community is important, especially in an end-of-world scenario.
To be clear, I think becoming more self-sufficient is definitely a good thing, and I strive toward that myself.
>I think becoming more self-sufficient is definitely a good thing
Why? I live in Paris, and get my food (vegetable, fruits, bread, eggs, peas...) from an AMAP. It's like a coop for about 100 families where we pay the farmer one year in advamce for their whole annual production. It's cheaper than most supermarkets, it's local and organic, it's self sufficient (no competition, we pay the farmer well, according to their actual costs). We only have to organize the distribution weekly (take a few hours per year for every member). I bet the farmer will do better for our organization than any "self sufficient" family.
That's beautiful, and something we need more of, but the idea behind self sufficiency is to not starve after the farmers in your coop decide to stop selling their food because historic flooding and heatwaves mean they can barely feed their own families.
"What will you do when public servants leave their posts and infrastructure fails" is a fair question considering our ecological predicament.
>the idea behind self sufficiency is to not starve after the farmers in your coop decide to stop selling their food because historic flooding and heatwaves mean they can barely feed their own families.
If a professional farmer (with the best knowledge and equipment but also the full support of the coop members) can't feed us, how do you expect to better resist to floods and heatwaves on your own? As far as I know, small groups with good ties have always better fared than single families.
We agree re: small groups with good ties. And I kinda think if we go down we're going down together. But not relying on others as much as practical could still be useful, even if it's as simple as "my farmer got covid" or "floods washed out the bridge".
What's the goal of this? eating healthier products or does it minimize environmental impact? In particular, would that model scale to the whole city of Paris?
French farmers are notorious for getting shafted if they're selling to supermarket chains etc, so it would actually be a significant benefit to both parties.
I’m not aiming for anything as radical as a lot of the replies seem to think. I just want bit of space to breathe cleaner air, grow food and install some renewables.
I don't think you are. Maybe I should have added that at the beginning instead of the end of my comment. I think your goals -- especially the ones you outline in this comment -- are great and I have similar ones.
Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but 8 billion people going back to a primitive way of life doesn't seem like a sustainable option either. Nice that you have the privilege to do it, though. Ironically, we are in need affordable housing where the city jobs are. That way we aren't forcing low paid workers to commute 1+ hours each way each day to put food on their families table. Here's the ironic part: depending on where you live, selling your city house in the current market only makes that problem worse!
Cities are wonderful places except that hell is other people. There's actually no need to go back to a primitive way of life but there absolutely is a need to learn more basic survival skills with respect to self-sufficiency. Or if you can't even change a tire on a car you should be afraid, very afraid.
This is such a common attitude in the US, but it's also a very US attitude. I mean, when I lived in Italy, there were just always other people around. High mountains, small towns, walk in the countryside... you're quite likely to see someone anywhere you go. So you just deal with it.
These things are personal preferences, so difficult to reason about, but I feel that a lot of people in the US would be happier if they didn't have this hangup about "other people", while participating in a society that is entirely and completely dependent on other people.
I'm happier walking around in downtown Hong Kong, a place with much greater density of humanity than anywhere in the United States, than I am here in the US. I think you are denying the existence of fundamentally irrational US citizens who make things suck for everything else in a way citizens of some other countries simply don't.
Well, if there aren't real concrete consequences for doing demonstrably obviously illegal things, then it seems to me it will only get worse here going forward. So I honestly do not blame anyone whatsoever for wanting to run away to either the middle of nowhere or to live among likeminded sorts. I did so myself after getting physically attacked by pandemic deniers who lived down the street from me.
But this was a pre-existing condition - the last half decade really unleashed and enabled the full scope of our national insanity with the pandemic and 2020 election the coup de grace IMO.
Nope. I've got those skills. Primitive life is grossly inefficient. Are you gonna burn wood to heat your dwelling and cook? Is everybody? Have you thought through the environmental consequences of this? Hunting and gathering is a similarly ridiculous proposition. Unless you're a supervillain bent on killing billions of people, that is -- hell is other people, indeed.
Did I say anything about primitive life? Where do you guys think this stuff up? I've got a modest place with a nice bit of land on which I'm raising produce and buying everything else from local merchants. But I installed full solar with beefy battery backup and it paired nicely with the Starlink Internet. But by all means assume I'm living a life straight out of Deliverance.
Many of these areas have discovered a remarkable technology, long lost in cities, called "building new houses" - sometimes with their own hands! This does wonders for allowing new people in to a place without displacing existing residents.
In my town most of the upper income people live outside the city in houses with rainwater collection, septic tanks and increasingly no electric grid connection either (thanks to solar panels and battery). There is nothing self sufficient about this. Every one of these households still has 2 cars, fridge, tv, internet, computers, supermarket food, medicine, clothes and furniture from China etc. Most people who go off grid in developed countries probably consume more resources than the average city dweller living in a small apartment.
Are you certain you'll have a smaller footprint? By all my calculation, I can't have less an impact on climate/biodiversity than by living in a flat in a city. No remote, least heating, public park (instead of a private garden, which is comparatively not good at all for biodiversity), still buying food from local farm, etc. Frugal urban lifestyle always beats the rural unless you're a farmer for the many.
Living in a remote area can be as low-impact as you want it to be. The grandparent post said he was going off-grid so he should be energy self-sufficient. assume he'll grow some crops, hunt, fish and/or get locally produced/hunted/fished goods and you're left with whatever "luxury" he'll want to have which he can not take with him while moving out to the countryside. If you want to live the life of a city-dweller, getting commercial goods delivered at your doorstep at a moments' notice, yes, in that case you'll be doing everyone a favour by staying put in the city. Most people who plan on living off-grid in the boonies do not crave for that lifestyle, they tend to aim for self- or local-sufficiency as much as possible.
>he should be energy self-sufficient. assume he'll grow some crops, hunt, fish and/or get locally produced/hunted/fished goods
If you shared the farm and solar panels with a few friends you trust, is this close enough? Because you can have that in a city (search for Enercoop in France for the energy, and AMAP for _Association Pour une Agriculture Paysanne_).
Local, clean, self sufficient, etc. but with a minimum of solidarity. Also, you have a much smaller footprint by living in a city so it's a scalable model (i.e not one man for himself and après moi le déluge).
On a small scale this might work in a city but it is not feasible to build a city (as in a densely populated area, traditionally enclosed by walls but this is not a necessity, multi-story multi-tenant housing with the ground floor often used for business-related activities) where everyone lives like that. Agriculture takes space, this can be reduced by moving to vertical horticulture but that either requires artificial light sources or free exposure to sunlight - which is hard when those vertical growth beds have to compete for space with PV panels, wind generators, housing, business and infrastructure.
It might be possible to create a less densely populated city-like structure which works like this, the question is whether it is worth the effort. For those who see this as a fulfilment of some ideological drive it might, just like living off-grid in the middle of nowhere does for others. For the general population this is unlikely to be true though.
We won't be lacking space if we eat less meat (like our ancestor). We've only started eating so (too!) much meat quite recently and that's what taking all the space. Switching to mostly plant-based diet would resolve most issues.
>It might be possible to create a less densely populated city-like structure which works like this, the question is whether it is worth the effort.
No need to reduce density. Even big cities (like Paris) can procure most of its food from local farms. We just need to focus on local types of food (less exotic but not necessarily less diverse: for instance I get far more diverse vegetable from my farm than most Parisians).
Going vertical is unneeded and would require far more efforts than making farming more reasonable.
A high consumption, high travel lifestyle is bad for the environment wherever you are.
Living in a remote environment limits your income. (Or used to, anyway. I guess we'll see in five or ten years.) Nearly everyone's spending closely follows their income.
Living remote and working in tech definitely does _not_ limit your income these days. You can live like a king outside of major cities on a engineer or higher-up tech salary these days.
Living remote does not limit your income. And in fact, from reduced spending (due to lower CoL), you get way more bang for your buck.
Living rural can work if you reduce your consumption and travel. If you're getting your water from a well in your land with electricity from natural renewables, and you also grow your own vegetables and raise your own chicken, you're self-sufficient.
The problem is, when shit hits the fan, tons of marauders will become a problem. Unless such communities heavily arm themselves, with a bunch of community militia or security forces, they will become a perfect target for such marauders.
What "we in the first world" mostly need to concentrate on is mitigation of the effects of whatever the climate bestows upon us, there is no sense in trying to change the course of the climate. Mitigation means developing crops which will grow and prosper in areas where the conditions become more amenable to agriculture, e.g. large parts of the northern hemisphere which are now tundra might become more bountiful if the temperature goes where it was during the last interglacial and during the Holocene climatic optimum. If there is a marked rise of sea level - which is not a given, it wholly depends on where on the planet you happen to take measurements since several areas are still rising due to post-glacial rebound [1] - this can be mitigated in several ways as has been shown in the Netherlands for centuries.
It does not make sense to waste time doing penance by "reassessing out relationship with this planet" - the planet couldn't care less whether we live or die - when the capabilities of "the first world" are much better suited for developing and implementing technologies to improve the quality of life for anyone who cares to implement them. This does not mean churn out more useless commercial crap to be produced by the lowest bidder. What it means is developing and producing effective desalination systems to ensure the availability of fresh water, effective energy storage systems which actually work, can be affordably produced now in enough quantity, design and series-build nuclear (fission) power generation systems which can be delivered and installed on locations without needing to type-approve each and every installation as if it is a from-the-ground-up design, etc. Whatever impact a changing climate - whether that change means a warmer or cooler climate - has it will be worldwide but the mitigations will need to be implemented on a local/regional/national level.
So, no penance is wanted nor needed nor would that be of any help. It is good old human ingenuity which we should turn to. A species which looks towards colonising other planets should be - and is - capable of facing this much smaller challenge and emerge victoriously.
Nothing is simple. Surviving during the last glaciation wasn't simple yet people still lived. Crossing the ocean without accurate maps wasn't simple yet the oceans were crossed. Developing and growing enough crops to feed 7.5 billion people when Malthus said the planet could not sustain 1 billion people wasn't simple but they were developed and the population is still growing. Landing on the moon, diving to the Marianas trench, reclaiming the 'polders' in the Netherlands, developing nuclear power, writing Beethoven's 5th symphony, writing and memorising "The Gulag Archipelago" to later commit it to paper were not simple but all those things were done.
What do you mean by saying "it's not that simple"?
Please explain in what sense my explanation simplifies the problem and what would need to be changed to what I propose to make it better. Just saying that "it is not that simple" without saying where I'm wrong doesn't help me better my ways. In short I propose to solve problems instead of meditating on them while retreating from the world stage. What is missing?
I think the big risk is wars caused by climate change and millions (billions?) of refugees migrating from where you once could do agriculture to where you might be able to do agriculture in the future. It's really hard to mitigate those effects.
in the other end of the world... in somewhat dense place where there's no hundreds of human-free kilometers, i know some family that not only are living off-grid, off-water say 3-4kms away from some village, but also off-phone, off- whatever infrastructure, .. and they also managing to live off-banks, off-bills, and all that. Producing and trading naturaly grown stuff.. Now that seems like impossible to me.. or impossibly persistent..
I remember a few years back the phrase "global weirding" was circulating to indicate that weather around the world is expected to get more volatile (rather than just warmer across the board). With "global weirding" in mind are there any areas that are experiencing cooler climate than historical average?
One perspective to look at "global weirding" is that global climate change right now is seeing a massive influx of new energy, and not all energy becomes heat. So the volatility implied in "global weirding" doesn't necessarily mean we'll see much in the way of record lows/record cold places (though we'll still see some), but we'll see more energy in the climate in general: stronger winds, stronger storms, more storms, storms in different places "than usual".
We're seeing a lot of that indeed: this is the second tropical storm season in a row we've exhausted the prepared number of about 22 alphabetical "English first names" and have moved on to Greek letters and other stopgaps.
We've seen tropical storms hit more places, including some big activity in what used to be "far north" for tropical storm season such as New York state.
We've seen an expansion/shifting of "Tornado Alley" in the United States. States that never previously had tornado drills have had to add them and start trying to educate their residents.
We have seen some record snow storms and some record single day lows in many cities, especially in "wind chill" lows that factors in increased cold wind velocity, even if no one city can claim to be that much cooler than it was before.
> I remember a few years back the phrase "global weirding" was circulating to indicate that weather around the world is expected to get more volatile (rather than just warmer across the board).
Isn't this a predicted observation in the case of increased media reporting?
rain replaces snow in some places, which changes a lot of things; plants and water that change local weather, change; overall trend of desertification ("becoming a desert") is big
I wanna use cloud tech to help companies that are trying to do something about this. I'm all-in to help. Tell me how, bring me something you need help with.
Previous generations though it was nuclear war. I wonder what our grandkids will decide it's going to be. Probably something we couldn't even imagine being a disaster today.
I still think it'll be nuclear war as the proximate cause.
The US military used to call climate change a "force multiplier". It turns all the existing stresses up to 11. (Water shortage, ideological and ethnic conflict, great power dick-measuring, etc. etc.)
[Sorry, I can't lay hands on the PDF right now, and I think the research unit was disbanded about 10 years ago, so the report will be difficult to find on the internet. But it was in about 2005 or 2006.]
Nuclear is (more or less) clean, and would have been great to focus more on 20 years ago (instead of slowing it down, that was a mistake), and can still be part of the solution, but it's no longer the best or only solution.
“Stabilising the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow. It meets no technical or operational need that these low-carbon competitors cannot meet better, cheaper, and faster."
"The report estimates that the average construction time for reactors worldwide was ten years, significantly longer than the World Nuclear Association’s estimated construction time of between five and eight years. Nuclear reactors are also slow to start and a number have closed, with nine units closing over 2018 and a further five units expected to close over 2019."
"The report also states that nuclear power is more expensive than renewables. Nuclear energy costs around $112-189 per megawatt hour (MWh) compared to $26-56MWh for onshore wind and $36-44MWh for solar power. Levelised cost estimates for solar and wind also dropped by 88% and 69% respectively, while they increased by 23% for nuclear power."
I don't agree with existing ones being shut down, no, unless they're at the end of their natural life (or there's a real and imminent health threat, which might be why some are being shut down).
"All power plants, coal, gas and nuclear, have a finite life beyond which it is not economically feasible to operate them. Generally speaking, early nuclear plants were designed for a life of about 30 years, though with refurbishment, some have proved capable of continuing well beyond this. Newer plants are designed for a 40 to 60 year operating life. At the end of the life of any power plant, it needs to be decommissioned, cleaned up and demolished so that the site is made available for other uses."[1]
I was actually really pro nuclear power until I started reading about how they're starting to be outclassed by wind and solar and are just too slow to build to meet fossil fuel reduction targets in time, especially those set for 2030 considering their ~10 year build times. I still think it's fine if anyone wants to pursue building new plants, it just seems like less people are willing to fund new ones because of these issues.
But I agree there have been some that have been shut down purely for political reasons or due to pressure from certain green activists (I don't think there's a green hivemind and I've seen many people concerned about climate change support nuclear power and think it's quite safe, especially considering the alternative of climate disaster), and those should not have been shut down.
I am not opposed to nuclear on principle, but I am pragmatically opposed to building new nuclear for three reasons: 1) the amount of nuclear that we get per dollar 2) the long delay between funding/approval/design and the first power delivers to the grid, and 3) the chance that when we do spend money, that we will actually get something out at the end.
Throughout the US and Europe, all recent attempts at building new nuclear have suffered from massive construction failure. Not from regulatory burdens, but from just building what was designed by engineers. Vogtle, Summer, Flamanville, Hinkley, and Olkiluoto have been huge disappointments.
France's only hope for new nuclear to replace their aging fleet is now small modular reactors, a technology that in the past has been rejected foe being too costly since the costs are supposed to go down with larger reactors, not smaller.
If we get new nuclear, it will either be because Russia builds it (and there's no evidence that Russia could take a US construction crew and get a completed project), or because we try a new form of nuclear.
I think it's time to realize that nuclear technology does not fit our current skill set. And that wind, solar, and storage have leapfrogged nuclear in terms of advanced technology.
> 2) the long delay between funding/approval/design and the first power delivers to the grid, and 3) the chance that when we do spend money, that we will actually get something out at the end.
So lobby your senator and congressperson to create and pass legislation enabling nuclear (changing radiation limits to be scientifically based, and banning NIMBY lawsuits, for example), and to fast-track the whole approvals process. (Type-approval of factory-made designs, for example. And automatic approval of coal furnace replacement with type-approved reactors.)
We probably should have built more nuclear plants, but it's too late now. Any plants we started planning today would not come on line for 10-20 years. In the meantime, renewable energy is cheaper, simpler, and quicker; any money we might be able to spend developing additional nuclear plants would be put to better use developing more wind, solar, and long-distance transmission infrastructure.
For all practical purposes, we need to pretend like fusion doesn't exist. Sure, we should still invest in it and do research, but we're setting ourselves up for disaster if we peg our hopes on viable fusion.
Plus, fusion likely has the same kind of practical, economic limitations (huge upfront capital cost and long build time) that make fission hard to justify in an environment of small, cheap fossil fuel burners and wind/solar units.
It does feel exciting that fusion has apparently moved from being "just 5 years away" for something like three decades to this past decade they've revised down to now perpetually "just 2 years away", at that burndown rate we can expect it in maybe three decades.
That said the cheapest fusion power we'll ever have access to will always be solar power because the capital costs of building our solar system's sun are already well and easily sunk/amortized.
I'll add that as well as reaching Qtotal > 500, we need continuous operating life to be of the order of 10 million seconds, "only" 13 orders of magnitude away. Not going to happen in 2 years, or 5 years, or 40 years.
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The mininum viable Qplasma would be in the neighborhood of 100.[1] Fusion may get competitive for electricity generation with a Qtotal > 500.[2]
It's clean in the sense that it isn't generating CO2. But it is a finite resource. Also, the environmental impact of a nuclear power plant is non-negligible.
Everything is finite. Solar and other "renewables" aren't clean or renewable because the components don't live forever and their manufacturing requires rare earths which are a finite and very unclean to mine. AFAIK rare earths are not being recycled so we are just sweeping the dirty under the carpet and not really greenifying the energy. But for countries that currently burn coal anything would be an improvement.
Nuclear is finite but so is coal and oil and we are nowhere close of running out of it. New reserves will be discovered once there's demand. And used fuel can be recycled in breeder reactors.
I'll take your word for it as there's dozens of ways to build a panel and some do contain rare earth elements but I don't know how widespread they are because they are probably expensive. But the point still apply because even if they don't contain REE they contain other elements that are also finite. Also consider batteries which will be required for load balancing, lithium is very far from abundant and it's extraction is very far from green.
Whenever I have regrets, I remind myself that I can't know what would have happened if I had went down that other road, maybe a poor decision saved me from a worse fate.
If we had scaled up on nuclear, there's no way every reactor would have had the best engineers, best contractors, best governance -- there would certainly be some that cut corners or got built on a fault line or vulnerable to some other unpredictable disaster or terrorist attack.
that would still be better than what we ended up with. i'll take a dozen fukushima type events over the span of 20-30yrs over slowly but steadily ruining the planet every day.
I'll take a dozen Fukushimas every year (deaths from radiation: 1; deaths from evacuation stress: 273) over the hundreds of thousands killed every year by air pollution from coal burning.
It's wild how a couple of nuclear incidents so horrified the public imagination, when in reality the death toll and pollution from more conventional energy sources is magnitudes worse than nuclear.
Looks to be about 1,000 new coal plants being built or at least planned. Most of which are in China. Which will no doubt operate for decades.
Obviously North America is more interested in Solar, Wind, and Natural Gas. Eventually we will get to gridscale power storage. Suddenly it'll be problem solved.
Nuclear isn't difficult to build because of environmentalists, it's difficult to build because we don't know how to build big things anymore.
Check out the autopsy of VC Summer's failure, or the delays at Vogtle, and you won't find any environmentalists to blame. At least I haven't been able to find any hint of that, and if it were possible to blame environmentalists, I would think that the contractor and utility would be screaming it.
We have already kickstarted positive feedback loops like thawing of the tundra, reduced albedo due to smaller ice sheets, ... . We actually need to go carbon negative for a while to offset those. The technology you mention surely will help greatly in avoiding speeding things up, but they won't take us back to preindustrial levels alone.
> "This graphic compares the year-to-date temperature anomalies for 2021 (black line) to what were ultimately the ten warmest years on record: 2016 (1st), 2020 (2nd), 2019 (3rd), 2015 (4th), 2017 (5th), 2018 (6th), 2014 (7th), 2010 (8th), 2013 (9th), and 2005 (10th)."
Now, consider the lag effect on climate response and atmospheric forcing (i.e. the ocean absorbs a fair amount of the extra heat, but as the ocean warms, that heat gets injected back into the atmosphere, especially polewards, so there's a lag time before current atmospheric forcings are full realized, and that's a multidecade effect, so we won't feel today's forcing completely for decades, even a century).
Conclusion as I see it: every year for the next 50 years is going to be bracketed in the top ten hottest years, meaning the years 2030-2040 will all be hotter than 2010-2020 and so on. Decade by decade for the rest of the lives of people alive today, this will continue - and while getting off fossil fuels is needed, is indeed the only way to slow this trend, it's only going to slow down the year-to-year increase.
Additionally, as polar melt proceeds, permafrost melt and outgassing becomes self-sustaining even if humans completely stop fossil fuel use and deforestation.
Practically, this means adaptation is simply a must. People have to move out of flood plains, waste treatment plants in low-lying coastal zones needed to be moved uphill, people need to realize the global refugee crisis is going to be 10X as bad as anything seen yet at least, perhaps a steady rate of 1,000,000 per year fleeing climate disaster zones.
In reality we are heading back to climate conditions last seen ~3-5 million years ago, before the ice ages set in, with sea levels dozens of meters higher than they are now. Nobody likes to hear this it seems, but the science does seem to be saying that this has already happened, sort of.