TL;DR: Mitigating climate change is both reasonable and achievable provided we tackle the problem now. Renewable energies are one of several key cornerstones that will help us achieve this. They are safe, they are already commercially available AND more cost-effective than fossil fuels or nuclear energy (which should continue to play a minor role in the energy mix for carrying base loads) are, they are carbon neutral and they do not cause air pollution (particulate matter) thereby improving public health (reduced rates of asthma, lung cancer, ...). There are more than enough resources available on Earth to make the transition to renewable energies.
Main post:
@Alientcp said in #37:
> one thing is to solve a complex physics problem, like building a plane, or a spaceship, other is to switch the entire economy of the world, which is based in energy production.
Those weren't the examples I gave. I compared the monumental global task (I'm not claiming that it's easy!) of transitioning from carbon intensive to carbon neutral energy sources to other monumental tasks like the abolition of slavery in the US (which was also integral to the economy of the Confederacy) or the end of the feudal system in Europe (which had been the predominant economic system for centuries). These certainly don't fully compare in scale to the challenge that the climate crisis poses. The point I was trying to make is that a fatalistic society would not have attempted to challenge these systems in the first place (they seemed too entrenched to be upended). Yet we did challenge them and they ended. This should give us hope that we too can change the system that is currently poisoning the Earth's climate.
> There is an inverse correlation between poverty and energy production. The poorer the country, the less energy consumes. The moment the poverty decreases, the energy consumption grows.
True. But energy cannot only be generated by burning fossil fuels (and thus returning millions of years of carbon uptake by plants to the atmosphere in just 100 years). There are economically viable, carbon neutral alternatives which you are well aware of.
Likewise there are economically viable alternatives to using forced labour (i.e. slavery).
If the system you're using (for organising labour or energy generation or whatever) is harmful (=has a longterm net negative effect) for everyone except a select few that are getting filthy rich in the process, isn't it in the public interest to change that system?
> You assumed that i was not aware of them [renewables] because i skipped them without knowing my take on them.
I apologise for making it seem as if I thought you were not aware of renewable energies. That wasn't my intention. Of course you are aware of them.
I just wanted to remind you that your arguments invoking the stability of the world economy are not watertight (at least not without supplementary justifications) since the energy our economy is predicated upon can also be generated by alternative means.
> My take is that they are expensive, dangerous, toxic, not efficient, not viable and/or not sufficient, depending on the energy you are referring to. Hence, "will do as much harm (if not more) as benefit".
Well, your take on them is not grounded in empirical findings then:
1) You claim they are "expensive". They are not, they are actually already cheaper than conventional energy generation/fossil fuels. Sources:
i)
www.nature.com/articles/s41560-019-0426-y (everything besides the abstract is hidden behind a paywall unfortunately)
ii)
www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2021/levelized-cost-of-electricity-renewables-clearly-superior-to-conventional-power-plants-due-to-rising-co2-prices.htmliii)
www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-electricity-2020Keep in mind that this is the agency that's routinely being criticised for having a bias towards nuclear energy (which I agree should be a small part of our energy generation) and against renewables. Still they say the following:
"The key insight from this 2020 edition is that the levelised costs of electricity generation of low-carbon generation technologies are falling and are increasingly below the costs of conventional fossil fuel generation. Renewable energy costs have continued to decrease in recent years. With the assumed moderate emission costs of USD 30/tCO2 their costs are now competitive, in LCOE terms, with dispatchable fossil fuel-based electricity generation in many countries. In particular, this report shows that onshore wind is expected to have, on average, the lowest levelised costs of electricity generation in 2025."
That's right, onshore wind parks are the number one cheapest way to generate electricity! According to the IEA (which has a history of systematically underestimating renewables).
iv)
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/30/us-coal-more-expensive-than-renewable-energy-study2) You claim they are "dangerous/toxic". Citation needed. What are you referring to specifically? Are you referring to the (very real) problem of disposing of/recycling photovoltaics (which contain some toxic heavy metals like lead)? That's indeed a challenge and we have until about 2050 to figure out a good way to do it. There are no miracle technologies, PV is no exception. The good news is that there are people already working on solutions:
www.circusol.eu/en/overview/about-circusolIt should be noted that conventional energy sources also produce their fair share of waste (nuclear power plants produce radioactive waste, the mining and burning of coal requires enormous amounts of fresh water, ...). Wind turbines on the other hand don't consume any fresh water after production, they are cheap and easier to recycle than photovoltaics. Again, people are working on solutions:
www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/carbon-rivers-makes-wind-turbine-blade-recycling-and-upcycling-reality-support3) You claim alternative (i.e. renewable) energies are "not efficient, not viable and/or not sufficient"
i) You don't refer to anything specific, so let me choose wind turbines as a canonical example again: They have a peak energy conversion efficiency η of about 47-50%. The theoretical maximum is given by Betz's law (
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law) as
η = 16/27 ≈ 0.593 = 59.3%
For comparison: A coal power plant's energy conversion efficiency is about 25-50%
A light-water reactor's energy conversion efficiency is about 33%.
And for the world average fossil fuel electricity generation power plant (as of 2008) the following values were calculated:
Gross output 39%, Net output 33%
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency#Example_of_energy_conversion_efficiencySo no, renewables are not "not efficient". They are comparable (if not superior) in efficiency to conventional power plants.
ii) You further claim alternative energies are "not viable". They are. Certainly there are challenges associated with the widespread adoption, but there are enough resources to (in theory) power the entire Earth with renewables alone (which nobody actually plans to do, you need a healthy mix of renewables, smaller amounts of nuclear energy and backup conventional power plants). Source:
www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/31/1067444/we-have-enough-materials-to-power-world-with-renewables/iii) "[...] not sufficient"
No single source of energy is sufficient to solely power the entire planet. Combined they are sufficient.
> With reasonable i meant to not increase poverty and consequential death because of it.
> And with developing new technologies, I was implying something better that what we currently have. Like the recently discovery in nuclear fusion, which may be viable in the near future.
For the zillionth time, nobody is proposing an abrupt halt of all energy generation via fossil fuels. A smooth transition from fossil fuels to renewables ensures that energy generation isn't halted or significantly reduced and poverty isn't significantly increased. If anything, the transition to renewable sources of energy should create lots of new jobs.
Sure, upfront investments can seem daunting, especially for mid to low income countries. Luckily most of the CO2 emissions come and historically came from high income countries (USA, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, etc.) which can afford these investments. Furthermore international cooperation and solidarity is needed, perhaps even in the form of subsidising renewable energy development in/sharing technological expertise with countries with a lower GDP (but significant CO2).
As much as I want to believe that nuclear fusion energy will become commercially available shortly, it's not going to happen. The recent "discovery" in nuclear fusion is actually only a breakthrough on paper (in a physics experiment in a lab they generated slightly more energy from fusion than they put in, if you do not count the total energy used to power the lasers that were used to compress a deuterium-tritium fuel pellet 2 mm in diameter). This technology isn't ready yet. It will take years, probably decades before the first reactors can be added to the power grid. We simply do not have the time to wait for that to occur. And even if we did, the incalculable challenges and risks of an entirely new technology (we don't even know how expensive fusion energy will be) are not worth taking that sort of risk when commercially available technologies already exist and are cheap and effective enough to do the job.
Fusion will one day (and I hope to live to see it) be a significant part of our energy mix. But probably not in the next 30 years. These next few decades are absolutely crucial for averting the worst effects of climate change (staying below the +1.5 ºC or at least below the 2 ºC mark).
> Wind energy is a death trap for birds, there are cases where complex had to shut down because they were killing birds to the brink of their extinction.
This argument is simply silly.
Wind turbines can and do kill some birds. But so do fossil fuels. In fact, the worst bird killers are neither wind turbines nor oil pits (although oil pits kill more birds than wind turbines do), but another culprit:
factcheck.afp.com/bird-deaths-misleading-numbers-conceal-biggest-culprits> Good luck getting hydro electrical energy on the countries with no access to oceans or big rivers, most do, but who knows if they will be able to produce enough.
Landlocked countries with no major river systems tend not to emit a lot of CO2 for obvious reasons. This is a non-argument.
> But the most important thing of all, fossil fuel energy is cheap, other types of energy are not.
Nonsense, the opposite is true. See the sources I've linked above (by the way, you make countless of unsupported claims without feeling the need to source any of them, this makes debunking the false ones very tiresome, I won't be addressing all of them).
> You cannot reasonably ask a country that is struggling to keep their people fed, (which most likely is also energy dependent from another) to stop their development and instead spend on new energy infrastructure.
1) Those countries do not contribute the lion's share of CO2 emissions.
2) That's where international support (subsidies, direct technical support, developmental aid etc.) should come in. Climate change affects the entire planetary system. All countries will feel its effects.
You are now opening a discussion about the very important and interesting topic of climate justice. The industrialised countries of this world have screwed up the planet's climate by using fossil fuels (the cutting edge technology at the time) in order to fast-track their industrial revolution/development. And now they are expecting developing countries to refuse the lure of fossil fuels to the disadvantage of their respective development?
That's not right. That's why it's so important that cutting edge technologies of our days (renewables, nuclear power, ...) are made cost effective and available to developing countries and that they receive subsidies and aid in order to help them skip fossil fuels for the most part.
While I can empathise with Mexico's situation and while I can understand that it cannot be nice to hear that fossil fuels need to be phased out (in light of the impression that scarce economic success in your country has come from oil refineries), this doesn't change the fact that it needs to be done, most urgently in the countries that emit (and have emitted) the most CO2 (in no particular order: USA, Canada, Australia, European Union, China, Russia, Japan ...).
In addition to keeping the Earth's climate bearable, the transition will benefit public health (as it will significantly decrease particulate matter concentrations and air pollution as a nice side effect) and make energy cheaper for consumers.
> And if everyone jumps to the clean energy wagon, say solar, the costs of acquiring the resources will grow exponentially because it will be material scarcity. That will happen.
No. Not "say solar". These are not mutually exclusive. All renewable energies can be used and the most appropriate ones for your region/country should be used. Regarding material scarcity, again:
www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/31/1067444/we-have-enough-materials-to-power-world-with-renewables/This isn't to say that there won't be temporary supply shortages. There might. But you're basically arguing for doing nothing (or at least nothing more than we are already doing) because there MIGHT be problems that could conceivably arise while we try to solve a difficult problem. With this kind of thinking we would still live in a cave.
> Most other things can be solved because they are not the core economic activity of the entire human race.
One last time: Fossil fuels are not the only option for generating the ENERGY that's needed for core economic activity of the human race. You are pretending that they are. Pretending they are won't make it so. You are conflating the concept of fossil fuels with the concept of energy. They are not the same thing. Therefore your argument doesn't work.
> And im not saying it cant be solved, it can, but as i said, it will cause as much harm, if not more, than the solution.
You have not demonstrated that it will. You have asserted a bunch of stuff (based on half-truths and misinformation such as the false notion that renewables cost more than conventional energies, that wind turbines are vile bird killers, ...) without providing a shred of evidence or even a single source corroborating one of your claims.
You are arguing that transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables will cause as much harm, if not more, than climate change will. That's simply not the case judging from the evidence available (some of which I have provided in this and my last post).
> [...] Its doable, its not reasonable, but its doable.
It's both doable and reasonable.
