I was—and am—unimpressed with the results of the COP26 climate change meeting, but Bill Gates says there was some genuinely good news to come out of it:
At an event like this, one way I measure progress is by the way people are thinking about what it’ll take to reach zero emissions. Do they think we already have all the tools we need to get there? Or is there a nuanced view of the complexity of this problem, and the need for new, affordable clean technology that helps people in low- and middle-income countries raise their standard of living without making climate change worse?
Six years ago, there were more people on the we-have-what-we-need side than on the innovation side. This year, though, innovation was literally on center stage. One session of the World Leaders Summit, where I got to speak, was exclusively about developing and deploying clean technologies faster.
It took me many years to get fully on the innovation side, but eventually the evidence simply piled up too high for me to ignore it any longer. This is still a matter of massive funding, not just speeches at international talkathons, but if Gates is right it means that at least more people are starting to get the message.
0 emissions is a scam. There is no "where" to go with that.
It’s called “net-zero” , it’s always scheduled for a couple of decades in the future by our elected representatives meaning someone else will handle it and we can continue with “business as usual” whiteout remorse because the politicians are on top of this
… yeah, net-zero is a scam!
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CWJIXVclzC4/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Yes and net zero is a scam and irrelevant.
Net zero is just an interim goal. At that point we aren't doing any further harm. We need to get to net negative as soon as possible, to start repairing the harm already done..
That needs some investments … and no one seems to be that eager to cash up
I am deeply pessimistic. I see zero evidence of the sort of collective will it would take to bring about sufficient resources to avoid a mounting catastrophe.
I agree very much with this assessment. We already have all of the technology necessary (and deficiencies are known and solvable far more easily than inventing entirely new technologies). The thing that’s stopping us from doing what’s necessary is the refusal of incumbent fossil fuel companies to allow themselves to be dislodged.
If the fossil fuel companies are blocking existing, well developed technologies such as solar power from being promoted and subsidized why does anyone think that if some magical technology that springs forth from Zeus’s forehead will be fine with big oil or with the asshole from West Virginia?
Complete bollocks.
There is not the commercial technology necessary in heavy transport - electric trucks are a bad fiction, there is no non-carbon route in real economic reach for air travel - and there is enormous amounts of investment needed for non-transport including significant - huge in fact - grid upgrading.
It is Lefty self-deception to put this on big Oil. The transition costs are real and as the French Yellow Vests backlash showed, not mere right wing figments.
Costs are real and need to be brought down and despite greeny hand waiving, the full kit of technology at economically feasible costing is not yet here.
It can be, and American right wing obstructionism and climate denialism is completely wrong-headed and usually factually wrong.
But that does not mean that all that is necessary is ready, nor is it 'Big Oil aka fossil fuel companies fault.
What have lower prices to do with innovation? They come almost entirely from mass production and to a lesser extent from learning by doing The key policy tool is nor research funding but subsdies for early deployment,.
"Elecrteic trucks are bad fiction". Daimler (Mercedes, Freightliner), Volvos (Mack), VW (Scania) and BYD beg to differ. Seceral of them have Class 8 electric heavy trucks on trial in the USA with fleet customrs. Scania argue , surly correctly, that the range reuirement for heavy trucks n Europe is set by well-enforced EU regulations on speed and driver rest. 300 miles is all you need.
Electric trucks are still in their infancy, and may in fact work in an environment where goods do not need to be moved very far (western Europe). However, they will not work in a country as large as the United States. You can take all of Western Europe and pack it just into Texas.
The trucks that are currently still science fiction are hydrogen powered trucks. The Nikola fraud reinforced that.
Heavy trucks generally operate on established routes. As long as that is true, the answer for the limited range of battery powered trucks is quite simple; exchangeable battery packs. There are a number of possible different business models, depending on who owns the batteries. Bigger trucking companies can have their own batteries and depots every two or three hundred miles along their routes where a truck can pull in, swap battery packs, and get back on the road, leaving the depleted battery pack behind for recharging for the next truck. Bigger truck makers can set up depots where all trucks of their make can swap batteries for a moderate fee (this model is already being used by a Chinese electric car company; they refer to it as "battery as a service").
Finally, if battery packs can be standardized across makes, there could be independent companies that own only battery packs and depots and provide battery as a service.
Hydrogen powered trucks are only fiction in the sense that nobody has built one yet. The fuel cells and hydrogen tanks are off-the-shelf items and the power trains already exist in battery powered trucks. It's quite clear that there are no show stoppers in the way of fuel cell powered trucks; it's just a matter of getting the costs down, which requires mass production of both fuel cells and hydrogen.
What counts has 'innovation'? Improvements in production vs improvments in the base product has been a long-running dispute going back at the very least to advent of steam power and mass production. Is it an innovation if you reconfigure your production line of human workers to be more efficient? Is it innovation if you replace human workers by automation?
I think these are the sorts of discussions that have to occure on a case by case basis.
I don’t think this is correct. It’s not necessary to instantly replace fossil fuels but rather to vigorously maximize alternatives and particularly to create disincentives for burning oil and coal. Distributed solar is probably the number one tool that’s available and it could cut a huge amount of the damage.
The other thing to consider is that the flaws or deficiencies of most alternatives are well known and should be easily resolved if there were resources and if the obstacles imposed by fossil fuel companies were removed. And progress is being made in areas once thought impossible such as low carbon, low pollution alternatives to airliner fuels. Similarly the use of electronic motors in trucks is well established and the necessary improvements to the battery and charging technology are well within reach.
And surely these incremental improvements are far more realistic than the development of a magic machine which will cleanse the environment of carbon emissions even as it allows the fossil fuel companies to continue their depredations unimpeded.
We already have all of the technology necessary (and deficiencies are known and solvable far more easily than inventing entirely new technologies).
You know that you just contradicted yourself in the same sentence, right? I know this isn't the best patform for editing, but could you please think about what you want to say before you start writing. Pretty please?
I don’t see a contradiction. To take electric vehicles as an example, the technology works and works well. But any electric car owner will tell you that there are improvements in battery and charging technology which would make electric cars a more seamless transition from gasoline powered vehicles. Even so, the technology is proven in very wide use, improvements and innovations are coming but the speed in which the electric cars are able to replace gasoline cars would be increased if more effort and resources were committed to speeding up the improvements which are easily conceptualized.
So IOW -- the words you are trying to redefine -- there is no substantial difference between the lead-acid and lithium-ion battery. The latter doesn't count as 'new technology' since it's merely a 'solution'. Uh-huh. You don't say. How about that? You need to _show_ me that's the case, not _tell_ me
Oh, and one more thing: You don't get to force the rest of us to use your personal (re)defintions of quite common words, bub. That you would stoop to such tactics is highly offensive. And insulting.
Now show your homework. You haven't done so yet and as a former teacher I'd say you're lit up with telltales that you haven't actually done any.
Given my family's emphasis on striving to be positive, hate to think that you are right, but since so many around the world can't even be persuaded to protect their own lives from COVID-19, it's difficult to foresee anything other than more kicking the can down the road.
The last few years, particularly since the pandemic, have shown that many supposedly educated populations of homo sapiens sapiens are anything but logical - even when it comes to self-preservation.
Protecting against a disease with 2% full recovery rate in total??? You are the problem.
2 percent full recovery rate? so 98 percent of covid patients either die or are permanently disabled? that's what you're saying? and you have the audacity to sneer at other people?
This is why we need the ultra rich in on this, because no one else can unite enough will with enough resources
It’s weird!
Have anyone listened to what world leaders actually have been saying in Glasgow?
Many (most?) of them has started to use Ms Greta Thunberg’s vocabulary.
Does this mean that they also are going to handle climate destruction decisively?
Hardly!
They just want to appear as climate heroes in the eyes of concerned citizens.
Glasgow was so close to end without even having a document claiming anything he’d been agreed on to show afterwards . That document was presented as a great achievement but it made the British chair of the meeting to shed tears of disappointment.
“Economic interests” was the winner of this farce, The first scientific report on climate change is dating from 1896 . This was the first time “fossil fuel “ was mentioned in an international document on how to handle the worst crisis in the history of mankind and it’s called progress!
… but nothing is said about immediately phasing out fossil fuel even if science is very clear.
It’s to expensive!
Is it ?
Fossil fuel companies are subsidized with $11m/minute but nothing much is used for technology to capture carbon dioxide
A report published in Science one year ago indicates that if we only used 10(ten) % of the resources meant to kickstart economy after the pandemic to fight climate breakdown will we have a fair chance to reach the goals we agreed on in Paris. If we don’t act now will we face economic disaster a couple of decades in the future
… but the quarterly economic reports are apparently still of more importance to the businesses world and most elected representatives are still just just planning for one electoral cycle at a time.
A comment from a disillusioned Swede
And if the ceos and politicians don't plan only for the immediate future they get tossed out on their asses for someone who will.
Being the optimist that I am, I would say that getting world leaders to pay even lip service to phasing out coal and reducing petroleum consumption is progress. The trend is toward real action.
You still won’t be able to keep your gas appliances and furnace and your ICE cars. And the trips on a whim will still need to be curtailed.
Do anyone truly expect we , in the global north, will be able to handle climate breakdown without sacrificing some of our privileges?
We who are having it all are the ones who have caused climate breakdown, we who are living as if we are living on a planet with infinite resources and we who are living as if tomorrow doesn’t exist.
Remember, even low income groups in countries like USA is extremely wealthy in a global perspective
We are used to be able to travel hundreds of miles in all directions in just hours at an affordable cost. We are used to be able to fly to romantic remote islands just for fun at any time we choose. We who are able to buy new outfits at any time.
If some politicians or some activists are implying we need to scale down , pay a little more for gas or electricity, in order to save the future for all coming generations are we freaking out and calling them prophets of doom and we are instead turning to politicians who are ensuring us that they are going to handle climate without demanding us to sacrifice anything . They are promising us to reach “net zero”(net zero is a scam) in some distant future and that will be sufficient to save the future of the human race
They are lying!
A comment from a disillusioned Swede
Just to be clear: there’s no need for anyone outside of fossil fuel companies and idiots who are “rolling coal” enthusiasts to make huge sacrifices. There will a significant amount of participation required of most people during a transition to cleaner energy but this would mainly be variations on shopping. If you can vanquish the fossil fuel companies, their lobbyists, and the asshole from West Virginia, the transition will demand vigorous and sustained effort but very little or no sacrifices by the overwhelming majority of people.
You are an optimist, a beautiful way handle life .
I fear we will have to face some changes and some hardships, one reason for this is the fact that we won’t deal with it in time…
As a practical matter, I agree with you. My point is simply that if we oust the fossil fuel companies and crush their stooges, yes, the work will be hard and time will be short but it’s doable and requires very little sacrifice from the rest of us.
It is undeniable that if we fail to do what is necessary, our planet is screwed. Those who are guilty must be made to pay rather than demand sacrifices from the rest of us. That’s the only way forward.
Neoliberalism wrecked our chance to fix the climate crisis .For a brief period in the late 1980s, a consensus developed on the necessity for action. Even persons like Thatcher and Bush sr was promising to handle climate decisively.
Back then, no one considered the science controversial and a surprising number of mainstream politicians both acknowledged the threat facing humanity and pledged themselves to address it.
… and all of a sudden was climate turned into a left-right issue, it was turned into culture war , you “believed” or “didn’t believe” in science
It’s getting late over here, I’m heading for bed…
Aux armes, citoyens ! Aux barricades!
My view is that decarbonization is going to produce an unprecedented economic boom. Major investments in new technology always produce economic booms, and the investments required by decarbonization will be both huge and ongoing, meaning a huge and ongoing economic boom.
Hear, hear.
Thank you, James. Hope all is well with you. Happy Thanksgiving!
A lot of houses in the Northeast will have to switch to heat pumps--but that also means they'll end up with central air. And upgrade electrical boxes. And new kitchens. Maybe heat exchanger hot water. Not sure about storage at home....
But this has to start now.
Uh, huh. And what's the solution for all of us who cannot possibly afford this?
Run it along the lines of winterization programs...grants and low interest loans. It will need to be rolled out in stages so enough supplies are available.
Also, new/updated zoning laws will be needed.
Real interest rates for the federal government are about zero. So borrow and pass the savings on to householders.
There is more talk now of micro grids. But that has been going on for a while. Just has there was talk of avoiding building out fossil fuel networks, and instead, build out solar panels and electrical networks. Twenty years ago, that was an expensive proposition, but doable. Today, it's a lot cheaper, as is storage. These were not due to major breakthroughs, but mainly incremental improvements.
Right now, we just need more incremental improvements. So get started now! There is not going to be any useful technological breakthrough--it's really too late for that. Expand renewables and electrify everything. And most importantly, stop pumping fossil fuel.
That doesn't mean we should stop innovating or even investing in innovation. But it can not be done to the detriment of doing everything we can now. There is not going to be a magic bullet.
Gates is, naturally, speaking of fusion. It's absolutely important to embrace, improve, and expand "current" technologies as necessary and critical solutions, but we all know that fusion is the power of the future that will eclipse and make all other forms of energy obsolete.
Can we all get on board with the notion that the US ought to be spending hundreds of billions (if not trillions) to get in front of this technology? Or nah, let Capitalism control the patents and control the prices?
Fusion has been 20 years away for the past....50 years?
Mini-fission reactors may have a shot....
Fusion continues to advance, does it not?
Let's look at the scale of investment. Over nearly 70 years the federal gov't has committed about $500M a year. That's less than half what Exxon Mobil spent annually on R&D for the last 20 years.
If we spent even just $10B a year in R&D towards fusion, we'd accelerate private investment and public investment abroad into it.
What do you have against speeding up fusion development?
I have nothing against fusion, and I think we should spend more money on it. I just don't see it being viable, at least not for another 50 to 100 years. The latest test reactor, the ITER in France, was started in 2013 (being built) and the goal is to have first plasma by 2025. From Wikipedia, the planning for this specific reactor started in 2006, though the idea was first conceived in 1988.
This reactor is not set up to generate electricity. It's a science experiment to see if we can contain plasma, generate more energy than we put in even if it isn't converted to electricity, and I presume it's meant to test our understanding of how to generate a self-sustaining plasma so we can then build a reactor that generates electricity.
One the latest test be is running, I'm guessing it will take a good 5 to 10 years before we can get to viable plans for actual demo reactors that will produce electricity. After that round, then we may get to a way to produce a large amount of electricity with a fusion reactor. Minimum, another 30 years. And that's if we start now to dig out the tunnels for the next series of reactors now--even though we don't have actual designs in hand. Of course that assumes no problems creep up in ITER.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
yeah, not sure what my fingers end up typing...
last paragraph, first sentence:
"Once the latest test bed is running, ...."
sorry about that...
????
See: https://is.gd/4cCuw8 and https://is.gd/Q9RpqI
ITER isn't the only game, and Bill Gates is specifically chasing funding for fusion.
The US should be dumping hundreds of billions in a very short span of time. It will absolutely speed up innovation and development, including smaller reactors that aren't miles-long.
Also: https://is.gd/K6O6Kw
We're so far beyond being able to keep to IPCC target. I don't doubt that solar will be the short-term solution, but in 15 years, we'll absolutely need fusion, period.
Solar is irrelevant. IPCC targets are irrelevant. First the ICE car, Truck will go. Farm equipment is already being phased. Coal due to its expense even ex-emissions is being replaced by gas/Nuclear.
By 2075 the U.S. will have 85% less emissions than in 2005. Can your colored friends say the same thing???? Will it require milibrary response against these people to save the planet??? The great Napalming?????
Fusion, the power of the future, has been around for some 13 billion years. It's really about harnessing it effectively with photovoltaic cells, wind turbines and other proven and easy to implement technologies.
Bingo!
Yes. 2021-=NG and Nuclear fission. - onward, fusion. Coal and Oil is ending.
Fusion is a total scam. It is an extremely complex technology that, even if it were commercially viable, would generate huge amounts of exactly the wrong type of radioactive waste (I wich people would learn to discriminate between short - medium and long-term radioctivity.) Fission is much simpler, cheaper, and perhaps most importantly, is available right now.
The easiest kind of fusion, deuterium-tritium, produces high energy neutrons. What the result of that in terms of radioactive waste will be depends on what is used to absorb the neutrons.
One of the things that might be done is to follow the example of bomb makers. The typical H-bomb is a fission/fusion/fission bomb. A fission reaction triggers a fusion reaction which produces a blast of neutrons that is absorbed by a blanket of uranium, making it go critical. The same can be done with a reactor but more slowly and carefully. If a fusion reactor is surrounded by a blanket of depleted uranium, that uranium will be transmuted into plutonium, which can then be used to fuel fission reactors.
Uh, you do know that uranium is no substitute for structural steel or copper wiring, right? And that the strength of the magnetic fields used to contain the plasma very somewhere between the third and fourth power of distance?
No, I didn't think you did. In any event, you can look this up, but those mid-range elements like iron and copper become the worst kind of radioactive when subjected to high levels of neutron flux. I've stepped through this one many, many times over the years and I'm tired. I'm not going to try to teach yet another fool who's not going to listen anyway. Suffice it to say that you're wrong. Dead wrong.
You are extremely rude, and I note from your other comments that I am not the only one you display your lack of manners to. this forum would be a more pleasant experience if we would all try to be pleasant.
If I am rude it's because I've had this exact same conversation with the exact same people many, many times over. With you for example. But what happened in your not-at-all-unusual case? You completely ignored everything I said, even when I went into painstaking detail for each and every problem. Worse (I get that admitting you were actually, you know _wrong_ is a fate worse than death, especially when it's on a topic you know little to nothing about), weeks or months later you trot out the exact same talking points that were already addressed and discounted.
And you think _I'm_ the rude one? No, so you bring it up, you're_ the one who transgressed here and I have every right to be digusted with your behaviour. TL;DR: I have good reason to be pissed at you.
You wanna, you know, address what I actually just said? Or are you going to do the same-old same-old, ignore what was just said ... and then say the exact same thing weeks or months later when fusion as as a viable commercial power source comes up again?Which it will, inevitably.
Your move, Tuds.
Geo-engineering, sulfate aerosols. Or ocean-iron seeding, something similar.
They are too cheap (relatively) and the existence of last-minute solutions will preclude other, more costly and coordination-requiring, solutions from being employed.
Except solar, it’s good and cheap and always getting cheaper.
I just feel like no matter what anyone does, the available hydrocarbons will be burned up until they are gone, in 100 or 200 years. We’ll deal with the rise in temperature, and none of it will have been that big a deal.
Maybe I haven’t read the latest estimates, but 2-4 degree rise, 3-5 feet of sea level, slowly over 100 years, had never seemed insurmountable to me. Seems like lots of time to adapt, and MAYBE (I don’t know obviously), but maybe a better use of time/money/effort would be to give resources/build infrastructure to already existing poor people, rather than worry about future harms (unless they are predicted to be catastrophic).
The harm is underway. The migrations from Central America and the violence in Syria are both a consequence of climate change and loss of arable land. By 2050, expect large scale resource wars. Thanks to the internet, starving people looking for food and fresh water know where to find it and will fight to get it. There isn't time to adapt to that reality, it is already upon us.
And that doesn't even factor in the expected increase in epidemic disease.
Going to be a lot of dead corpses soon enough.
As long as we're not getting live corpses.
I’m assuming that you don’t live in Florida, Louisiana, New York, California, Texas, or some such place which will be relocating cities from the coast to more inland locations? Or London, for that matter.
Waves might be the most environmentally prescient movie of the last twenty years.
Mitch-
There is NOTHING to worry about so just move along
108 nuclear reactors across the globe sitting on the oceans edge. I live within 12 miles of one
No one is making a move to shut them down or call attention to the problem. Even Lower Manhattan - home to the NYSE and the Fed Res of New york are not at all nervous and a 5 foot sea level rise coupled with a bad storm would flood the area.
When I see them building a new, NYSE, and planning on moving the Fed REs bank to higher ground then, THEN I would be concerned. They haven't lifted a finger.
What galls me is that not only does sea level rise happen right before our very eyes, it's what happens UNDER ground - under that sea front property that is REAL dangerous and that is coastal water table rise.
Think about what that will do to nuclear waste "pools" that are dug INTO the ground to store waste on site. Think about water bubbling up UNDER those waste pools.
Remember the horrible pics of caskets floating around after an big hurricane or flood? Now picture a nuke waste facility being uprooted like that.
All those coastal refineries.
No one is worried.
It’s fascinating how this is playing out. Without government intervention everyone except tge nuclear operators seems to be willingly sacrificing themselves to allow the fossil fuel companies to continue to make huge profits in the decades to come. Property owners in major costal cities all over the world, big agricultural companies, insurance companies, hotel chains, basically everyone who isn’t a lobbyist or fossil fuels person or the asshole from West Virginia is prepared to self immolâtes instead of banding together to oust big oil and coal from power. Totally nuts!
Truth be told Mitch, I think a lot of people just want to complain - to have their 15 minutes of glory.
The problems with nuclear are the waste, the cooling water needs and the danger. Sure the "risk" is low in actual numbers, it's the result of being in the area if one of those reactors goes south is the problem. Already in our lifetimes we've had Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukishima. The nuke "potential" is great and so is the risk.
Then we have wind power. Little to no risk but people come out of the woodwork saying it will ruin my ocean front property view, they will kill sea gulls, and what have you.
Solar? Only works when the sun shines. OMG - that's an instant dis qualifier. Like wind power, it is inconsistent.
Geothermal is looked at with skeptical eyes as it's not as well publicized as other energy sources are.
But yet, in spite of all this "calamity", all this impending doom - people look at power plants belching smoke and steam, cars smoking it up on the highways, and smelling the exhaust from their lawnmowers and they think POWER! They think it's "manly" - it projects energy, work, and self sufficiency, and wealth. These romantic connotations are deeply embedded in our psyche.
Take Gavin Newsom's recent law signing about gasoline powered engines. What did he exempt, and why? All recreational use of fume and noise emitting gasoline powered engines is allowed. Why? Why exempt those?
Clearly he didn't want to piss off the little guys that want off road vehicles, motorcycles, boats etc?
Whats next? When will we realize that the environmental movement is a movement without teeth, and without the support of MOST of us, because our politicians are doing the same thing. They find exceptions to doing the right thing because they fear us. Let Newsom propose the elimination of gasoline powered drones and see how KD responds.
We will soon hear the following "You will have to pry the keys to my (houseboat, motocross motorcycle, or highly elevated, no-muffler 4x4 with confederate flag) from my cold dead hands."
Don't mess with Americans desire for "fun"
>wind power … will kill sea gulls
Yeah, but what’s the downside?
BTW, in case anyone didn't know from Kevin's previous gig at Mother Jones, he's an anti-nuke nutter with no grasp of figures whatsoever. This has been a public safety message.
KD is not a ‘nutter’, and he has a much-better-than-average grasp of mathematics. However, he, and many others here (and I include myself), recognize that the social and political problems that have blocked any expansion of nuclear power are not less real because they are not technical in nature. No government that is answerable to its citizenry will add nuclear generating capacity at any scale or in any time frame that would mitigate climate change. Authoritarian countries with the technical capabilities (Russia, China) also aren’t moving to nuclear. Non-proliferation concerns exclude many others from adoption. There just isn’t a path for nuclear.
The government of France is answerable to its citizenry.
I'm talking about Mitch Guthman, not Kevin. He's an ignorant anti-nuke fellow who knows what he knows and there's no use telling him otherwise. I had killfiled him over at Mother Jones for his willful ignorance and egregious conduct ('Prove to me I'm wrong', the lawyer says, mistakenly thinking that matter is amenable to courtroom shenanigans) but I can't do that here. All I can do is point the finger and warn people who don't know any better off of him.
I think Kevin is spot on in identifying Fox News as a central problem in the political world but he ignores the obvious culprit when it comes to climate change.
The fossil fuel industry is still controlling the levers , technical and political. , in the energy world. The Techno-fairy-will-save-us notion is actually a way to obscure this fact. Don't get me wrong, I agree that technological innovation can and should be given great weight but it must be in addition to tackling the power of the fossil fuel industry.
As just one example, in this regard it would be nice if our news outlets were to focus on Manchin's regular meetings with fossil fuel lobbyists. Shine a bright light on this aspect of his objections to BBB instead of his incoherent ramblings about deficits and inflation. Just because Manchin wants us to give those credence doesn't mean news organizations can't focus on the money behind Manchin.
Most of bbb climate part, which includes the bipartisan budget infrastructure bill focus on increasing nuclear/gas to power UV. Manchin does not care about that. He just doesn't want WV coal to be nationalized as they export 50% to China for plastics. Ah, WV, a partial home state of mine. Is pretty much the northern part with about 2/3's dead appendages, is a globalist property.
Gangs of thieves ransacking retail in SF and Chicago. Car runs into Christmas parade in Wisconsin. The human race deserves to go extinct. Just let it go.
I'm sorry, Kevin, but you're just plain wrong. I spent 41 years in energy research and there are NO breakthroughs that are going to make non-fossil energy cheap enough unless there is a price on carbon. That's just a fact. Any kind of non-fossil energy comes from either (a) the sun or (b) radionuclides. If it comes from the sun, it's in a dispersed form and must be concentrated before it can be used. The problem is that nature already carried out that step millions of years ago when it converted dead plants into fossil fuels, locking up the chemical energy those plants contained, which initially came from the sun. So there is an entropy cost that has already been paid. You cannot compete, no matter how many Bill Gateses give speeches. He may be a software genius, but when it comes to energy engineering, he doesn't understand. You must, must, MUST put a price on carbon emissions to force the fossil fuel to include the cost of climate damage in its price. Everything else is just hand-waving that will not solve the problem. Forget it.
A problem almost specific to the US is that a large majority of Americans are politically sensitive to vehicle fuel prices. The non-oil producing countries of western Europe and East Asia, and even the countries that have only relatively recently started producing oil, have been heavily taxing oil for generations to protect their balance of payments; thus, they are in a much better position to decarbonize than the US, which continues to demand cheap gasoline.
A carbon tax equal to about three dollars a gallon of gasoline would be an excellent starting point for decarbonizing the US, but it's politically impossible.
We need to address some rather unpleasant things here.
First - we will NEVER eliminate coal mining. It is used NOT just for fuel but for making steel and plastics among other things. Coal is here to stay
Second - we will NEVER eliminate fossil fuels like oil, and NG. Only 41% of the oil we use goes to transportation. Sure cars can (and should) be electrified. I don't have a problem with that. Just make re-charging stations plentiful. But airplanes and ships? No sorry, most will be burning fuel for awhile
Wind and Solar? Support them HEAVILY now. The technology is always changing and improving
Nuclear? I generally favor it but NOT along our seashore. They should be built in tandem with sea water desalinization plants to be used for cooling water supply. Pipe it 25 miles inland longer if necessary. WE pipe gasoline along the 5500 miles of the colonial pipeline.
As for Geothermal, and other source? They sound great and should be explored.
But folks, we need to cut back on the amount of GHG we emit. There is NO 1 single "cure" for this problem. It's gonna take a bunch of everything. Even if we used nuclear as a night time source of electricity, and wind and solar during the day we'd be well on our way.
But the NIMBY attitude will kill off any new nuke plants. As will protests against wind farms off our coast.
Enjoy your GHG emitting drones, motorcycles, boats, and 4x4's California.
What did Calvin say to Hobbes about this? "These dinosaurs are made from real dinosaurs."
For the people who claimed this topic never came up before:
As for the generation of radioactivity by neutron bombardment of structural materials, this may well be a larger issue for a fusion plant than for a fission plant. About five times as many neutrons are created in a deuterium-tritium fusion reactor as in a fission reactor producing the same amount of energy, and the neutrons made in the deuterium-tritium reaction carry about seven times as much energy as the neutrons (on average) created in a fission event. The search for better structural materials for fusion reactors, although principally concerned with finding materials that retain their strength under neutron bombardment, also seeks materials whose demands on waste disposal are reduced [6]. It may be possible, at some additional cost, to lessen waste disposal costs by avoiding steels that contain niobium and molybdenum. Neutron bombardment of niobium will create niobium-94 (94Nb), a radioactive isotope with a half-life of about 20,300 years. This half-life is approximately the same as the half-life of plutonium-239 (24,100 years), which is the isotope whose half-life set the scale for the storage of high-level waste from nuclear fission reactors half a century ago. On the other hand, niobium is one of the elements in superconducting magnets (see Article 3), and this raises the question of the extent to which neutrons can make their way beyond the vacuum vessel to the surrounding magnets to generate 94Nb in significant quantities.
As for molybdenum, neutron bombardment creates radioactive molybdenum-93 (93Mo) from molybdenum-92 (92Mo), a stable isotope of molybdenum constituting 15 percent of the molybdenum in the Earth’s crust. The half-life of 93Mo is 3,500 years, not a desirable half-life from the perspective of waste disposal. Molybdenum provides resistance to wear and extra strength at high temperatures, so metallurgists would rather not remove molybdenum from steel. Under consideration is the use of an isotope-separation process to provide specialty molybdenum for fusion reactors that contains negligible amounts of 92Mo, thereby essentially eliminating 93Mo from the reactor’s structural materials at time of disposal while enjoying the improvements in performance that molybdenum brings to steel [7]. The volume of activated material generated at a fusion power plant would be very large. In the European Union’s Power Plant Conceptual Study, it was estimated that over 70,000 metric tons of waste would be generated during the 25-year lifetime of a 1,500 megawatt plant, with another 50,000 metric tons coming at decommissioning [8]. If all this waste were considered low-level waste, it would need to be stored for about 100 years [8] – a substantial advantage when contrasted with the much longer period required for high-level fission waste. Estimates of the cost for storing low-level waste range from $100 to $10,000 per cubic meter and depend strongly on the radioactivity level. Moreover, the direct payment for storage is estimated to represent only about 15 percent of the total disposal cost; other expenses include evaluation, packaging, and transportation [9].
For those to lazy to do a search on a copy/paste from the above text here is the URL:
https://acee.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ACEE-Fusion-Distillate-Article-5.pdf
Here's an easier read from Bulleton of Atomic Scientists. Let me quote a few of the relevant bits:
and:
Am I disgusted the antics of lawnorder, Mitch Guthman, et. al? why, yes, yes I am. As I have every legitimate reason to be. Watch these clowns ignore everything I just said ... and then spout the exact same talking points when the subject comes up again.