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As a European this is the main fear I have during this election. 4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. Not that I’m super proud of how we are doing in my country, but it can’t get worse.
>4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass.
But that's not the case. America is reducing its emissions greatly by shifting from coal to natural gas (which mirrors what Germany is doing, for example). Coal is ostensibly dead in US. If you look at the charts from Wikipedia [1][2], you'll see the US has cut emissions at about the same rate (or faster) than Europe. That trend will continue. So what will Paris actually do in practical terms?
The problem is that after transitioning away from coal, there isn't a clear answer about the next step. Renewables are not a panacea and may never be able to power a modern economy as they will probably always require fossil fuel baseload ... not to mention that because renewables are a diffuse energy source, they require HUGE land areas which makes no different for CO2 emissions, but makes a huge difference for environmental collapse.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...
The US has majorly been transitioning to both natural gas AND renewables.
In fact, practically the only facilities being built for the last decade have been wind and solar and in massive quantities. If you look in the generation queues of the various RTO/ISOs (organizations that manage which units run and at what level for large parts of the grid) the only thing expected to be built is even more wind and solar along with storage. Multiple GW of wind capacity is being added each year, so it isn't slowing.
Why is this happening? It's complicated, but it's basically economics at this point.
What problems do we face? Well, sometimes wind and solar aren't available. You can solve this in three ways. The first is to have thermal generation respond when the wind/solar dips. This can be tricky as thermal generators (outside of natural gas) weren't designed to move that fast. They were designed to run near max for most of their life. Natural gas peakers are more effective here. Another option is storage, which can hold you over until you get more wind/solar again. However, we would need a massive amount of storage built for this to be effective. A third option would be to increase demand response at the industrial and customer level. Meaning, power isn't generally expected to be 100% available in that scenario. If there isn't enough generation capacity, those that aren't willing to pay the high prices are shut off (or something along those lines). That is generally how supply/demand is supposed to work anyway, but practically speaking, the demand doesn't participate today. In actuality, I expect a combination of all of that to become common place and it is what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been pushing for.
The most economical option is it have a massive oversupply of wind and solar as their significantly less expensive than any alternative.
You can model this as (cost per kWh of cheapest alternative) / (cost of rentable per kWh) = marginal oversupply you want. So, if hypothetically Solar was 2c/kWh and peaking natural gas was 6c/kWh then you would want to add more solar until 3kWh of new Solar only offset 1kWh of natural gas with the other 2kWh being wasted.
Which does not mean 2/3 of total solar energy would be wasted. Further, storage and energy markets also complicate things. However, it does illustrate why you want an over supply of the cheapest option even if not all of it gets used.
There is a problem with the massive oversupply idea though. It assumes wind locations are fairly randomized and I don't think that is entirely true. Meaning you can build more in area "x", but if it isn't blowing a quarter mile away, it probably isn't blowing near you either. Think of this more as a conceptual argument. Now oversupply would help if it's just blowing a little bit I suppose.
It doesn’t matter if supply sinks up 1:1 because demand doesn’t. If solar always produced the same energy evenly form exactly 10AM to 6PM EST for some parts of the day you could have an over supply of solar and at other parts of the day you would have an under supply. The same is true on the weekend vs weekday. Even seasonal power demand is less in spring and fall than summer and winter due to heating and cooling.
Though when selecting individual locations for wind, different locations favor different time of the day. And of course solar output varies significantly east/west and based on local weather conditions. That all gets modeled ahead of time and in practice get reflected in market rates.
Exactly. The big blocker to a full-scale rollout of renewables is storage and it has been this way for years. We're still facing the problem of the duck curve, which has been known for years: wind and solar peak at the wrong times because peak load is actually in the evening.
The oversupply is coming, it seems almost inevitable by now. But a _massive_ oversupply requires a large fall on the prices of electricity conversion and generators maintenance.
Even then, I do really expect a category of "peak demanders" to appear soon (storage is one kind, but there are other things one can do with intermittent almost free electricity). That will help increasing the spare capacity.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens if daytime rates start to consistently dip below current night time rates.
I suspect an outgrowth of oversupply is storage will ramp up based on consistent access to very cheap rates. It makes a huge difference if you’re paying 0.4c/kWh or 4c/kWh to charge, especially when storage is significantly less than 100% efficient.
And where are you going to store this oversupply?
My point is you don’t need to store the oversupply. Grid spot prices hitting zero mean you can just dump the power as that excess is in effect worthless.
That said, consistent very low prices will likely result in someone using most of that power for something even if the power plant operators aren’t making money during that period.
> A third option would be to increase demand response at the industrial and customer level. Meaning, power isn't generally expected to be 100% available in that scenario. If there isn't enough generation capacity, those that aren't willing to pay the high prices are shut off (or something along those lines). That is generally how supply/demand is supposed to work anyway
I don’t think any of these solutions are viable to prove we can be reliant on renewables, and this one especially would not resonate with a populace.
Just at a consumer level, think of everything you use power for on a daily basis. It’s a cornerstone of modern life, and you can’t expect society to backtrack.
This already occurred back when renewables were nothing more than the fantasies of tree-hugging hippies like my mum.
Before I left the UK, the flat I lived in had two electricity rates, with the night rate being significantly cheaper then the day rate [0]. This meant the water heater and the (electric) storage heaters [1] were powered at night, when schools and offices used no power.
[0] I’m not certain, but I think it was:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
[1]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater
That has the advantage that the drop in power demand during the night is extremely predictable, so everyone knew that they could reliably get cheap power for heating just by shifting their demand by half a day. (Also, the UK had and still has a fairly large nuclear power fleet which generally runs full-out 24/7, and this kind of demand shifting is a good match for that.) The trouble with renewables is that a lot of the drops in supply are both unpredictable and relatively long, which makes them hardre to deal with.
Also, storage heaters are a real pain to deal with. They're inefficient and not very controllable in terms of the amount of heat they produce.
> The trouble with renewables is that a lot of the drops in supply are both unpredictable and relatively long, which makes them hardre to deal with.
Not so; when the problem is bad weather rather than the diurnal cycle, even weather forecasting gives more forewarning than emergency stop buttons in power stations, and (given the geographical distribution) the change itself is smoother. On the scale of a continental grid, do you even need to care about anything besides diurnal storage/demand-shifting (as preferred) and seasonal issues?
I agree it would be unpopular, but it's what the US has been pushing towards for a long time with deregulation and it's the dream of the economists as the prices should be more transparent and optimal.
In my country we already have a system where the price of electricity fluctuates hourly depending on supply and demand.
The result for individuals: many people just subscribe to a flat rate from the electricity companies to avoid the uncertainty and pay the same predictable price each month (but of course, this predictable price comes at a significant markup with respect to the "free market" price). The rest of us go with the fluctuating price but just don't bother, because we are not going to spend substantial amount of time every day looking at how the prices evolve to decide when we turn stuff on or off. So we just read the bill every two months, not even making an effort to understand it, grumble a bit and go on with our lives. I suppose there may be some people who actually try to optimize, but I don't know any - from what I know, people short on income tend to go with the flat rate because they can't afford the uncertainty.
I don't know how it works in industrial applications. I do know that some industries (e.g. steel) complain about the fluctuating prices because they operate 24/7, and basically they reaction is that if the government doesn't subsidize their electricity bill, they'll just close and go to some other country. So my guess is it's not really working either.
Interesting comment. Thank you! Does anyone have an automated system in place that would automatically curtail yourself when price gets above X at Y time?
The theory was that such systems should exist, but I haven't heard of any at the moment and Google doesn't seem to find any either. And this is several years after the system was implemented.
_Renewables are not a panacea and may never be able to power a modern economy as they will probably always require fossil fuel baseload_
You say that like it's true, and it's not. Anyway, the climate doesn't care. Human emissions will reach equilibrium with what's compatible with life on Earth, one way or the other. Figuring this out is preferable to massive loss of life and degraded standards of living for the survivors.
I find it particularly telling you exclude nuclear as a baseload and specify it has to be fossil fuel baseload.
Nuclear is great but it is a terrible baseload for renewables because nuclear cannot just spin up and spin down like hydro or natural gas can.
That is not what baseload power is. You are talking about peak load generation. And pumped hydro is a classic smoothing solution to energy storage from uneven renewable base load generation.
That's actually a classic misconception : see here
https://mobile.twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1102620969808...
this detailed example from France nuclear power centrals
You're completely ignoring batteries which have already demonstrated their viability in southern Australia.
>You're completely ignoring batteries
I'm not.
>which have already demonstrated their viability in southern Australia.
They didn't. They replaced natural gas in one specific use-case, namely to provide grid stability. Those batteries (no batteries) are capable of bridging renewable variability.
Southern Australia's wind farms alone are enough to meet demand and when their new synchronous capacitor projects are completed they won't need stand by gas power plants.
>Southern Australia's wind farms alone are enough to meet demand
When the wind is blowing. If the wind isn't blowing, you're not getting any power and you're going to have to fire up those coal/natural gas plants.
>when their new synchronous capacitor projects are completed they won't need stand by gas power plants.
How much power can these 'synchronous capacitors' store, and for how long? Can they even store enough to power a small city (~250k) for more than few mins? Let me spoil something for you, there is no battery technology that can scale to run a modern economy and hard industry. Not now, and not upcoming. If you have favorable geography, you may be able to do pumped storage, but that's about the best you can do.
Keep in mind that EVEN if you miraculously had something to store grid-scale power over a long-term, you need to greatly overprovision renewables because those 'batteries' need to be charged (with lots of energy loss) during peaks enough to bridge daily, seasonal and inter-year variability. And of course, land-use requirements for renewables is MASSIVE (from mining to deployment to decommissioning) - so renewables are very heavy on the environment. They aren't going to work.
There's a reason why no developed region relies on renewables without either fossil fuel backup (or if geography allows, geothermal or hydro). There's a reason why Germany is spending billions to build pipelines to ship natural gas from Russia for decades to come. What do they know about renewables, that you don't?
This is what the UK did a number of years ago. At the time we got a lot of praise for dramatically cutting emissions.
The problem is, that change didn't effect anyone negatively, and thanks to cheaper gas imports it was essentially free.
Now that we are off coal, future cuts are going to be a lot harder.
>coal to natural gas
Fossil fuel to .. fossil fuel. Sigh.
CO2 per KWh is lower for natural gas than it is for coal.
https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/CO2-spez_e...
> CO2 per KWh is lower for natural gas than it is for coal.
Unfortunately there are methane leaks in the systems, and it is quite possible that when accounting for the methane releases, natural gas has equally bad climate effect (emissions of CO2 and CH4 combined) as coal.
It's a step, though. Methane is inherently unstable and won't stick around in the atmosphere forever once we stop emitting it. CO2 gets absorbed into the ocean very slowly and with acidification as a consequence.
It's important to say explicitly what "not forever" is here. Half life of methane in the atmosphere is 9 years[0]. Then it decomposes into CO₂ and water; the latter is suspected to be a potent greenhouse gas at that altitude[1].
--
[0] -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#cite_ref-C...
[1] -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Atmospheri...
But in the meantime methane has bigger effect (per kg) than CO2.
Good point. CO2 equivalents are a better measure than CO2.
I think fixing leaks is an easier task than reducing the coal CO2 footprint. We'll have to figure this out somehow anyways, because a lot of methane will be going into the atmosphere from thawing permafrost, both on land and in the seas.
It's not easier - as I understand it, the leaks are tiny amounts along the entire length of the pipelines. Getting an absolutely perfect seal is something that's expensive to do, whereas in theory the CO2 footprint of coal is concentrated and therefore much easier to capture.
In practice, doing either of those will spike the price of the energy, and the only reason to use them over renewables is their being cheap, so it won't happen.
We need to get to zero (or negative) net carbon emissions. Building brand new infracstructure for gas is counterpruductive to say the least.
>when their new synchronous capacitor projects are completed they won't need stand by gas power plants.
Sure ... and how do we do that? Nuclear is dead in the developed world (very few new nuclear projects and lots of existing plants being decomissioned)... so what's left? What do we replace natural gas with?
What do you think Germany is doing? They are going from fossil-fuel-free (nuclear) -> fossil-fuel (Russian natural gas).
The main reason for German gas demand is that a lot of the residential heating still works with gas.
But the gas infrastructure synergizes extremely well with a shift to a hydrogen based energy economy, as is not just the goal in Germany, but pretty much an EU wide ambition [0].
It has nothing to do with the German nuclear phase-out that started in the early 2000s, just like European reliance on Russian resources it not anything new, nor is it bound to change, it's the consequence of geographical proximity and thus realpolitik.
Particularly considering the alternatives: LNG shipped from the US to Europe in tankers _is_ an net-energy negative. It would be a pointless and expensive exercise of creating even more pollution all for the sake of satisfying US foreign policy ambitions to antagonize Russia and keep it as separated from the EU as possible.
[0]
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/dutch-pin-hopes...
This is a gross misrepresentation of the situation.
Look at the numbers:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Yeah, there is a slight increase in natural gas over the years (with large fluctuations), while coal is in slight decline. By far the largest share of the nuclear phaseout has been replacing it with renewables.
One can discuss the pros and cons of german energy politics (of which there are both plenty), but that should start by knowing the facts.
There's no clear trend for German elictricity production from gas, cf [1] via [2].
[1]
https://i.imgur.com/KgcCyWu.png
[2]
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
> Renewables are not a panacea and may never be able to power a modern economy as they will probably always require fossil fuel baseload
This is completely fallacious. There will always be outliers but the overwhelming majority of power needs, both residential and commercial, can be addressed with renewable energy and battery solutions.
> not to mention that because renewables are a diffuse energy source, they require HUGE land areas which makes no different for CO2 emissions, but makes a huge difference for environmental collapse.
Can you cite anything backing that up? Hydro electric does dramatically impact the environment but other renewable sources have no such impact. Wind is negligible despite the fanatic ravings of one fat orange lunatic who doesn't like it's aesthetics. Solar is easily deployed on rooftops and along transit corridors which has zero impact. You don't have to consolidate all the renewable energy sources in one location.
I have a solar array that covers less than half my roof, produces 1.5x my energy needs annually, it stores reserves in a battery, and back-feeds excess into the grid. The cost to operate the array is less than the cost of grid power, and my excess production results in a payout from the power company.
The excess production from residential and commercial arrays can be captured and distributed to outliers who are unable to directly leverage renewable energy and completely offset the need for polluting energy sources.
Your two liknks show per capita and total fossil fuel emissions between 2000 and 2018.
The graph in [2] is subtitled:
_Since 2000, rising CO 2 emissions in China and the rest of world have eclipsed the output of the United States and Europe_
The graph in [1] is subtitled:
_Per person, the United States generates carbon dioxide at a far faster rate than other primary regions._
Of course a country of 1 billion people, like India or China, is going to produce more emissiosn than a country of 330 million, _in total_, even if each of the smaller country's citizens produces about twice as many as the citizens of _every other country in the world_.
"So what will Paris actually do in practical terms?"
How about, at the very least it is symbolic of the fact that the US will fully take part in one of the most important global programmes there is. That it will set targets and be transparent, reporting on its efforts to reach those targets. It will share know-how and expertise with countries that are trying to solve a problem that is an existential threat to civilisation.
And if, as you suggest, the US is actually beating the progress it needs to make to keep global temperature rise to within 1.5C, then that's great - it can get the global plaudits it deserves, with no further action needed.
One of the prime objections by Trump was the need to sponsor the GCF (green climate fund). The US was already the top-most contributor with 3.5 billion+ taxpayer money signed away and even more was expected from the US. AFAIK China - a major polluter - contributed next to nil since it came into the gambit of a developing nation.
Also Paris accords don't do anything to slow down emissions in China and India the next big ones whereas USA is clearly showing some progress. I think with major solar improvements in the next decade and incredible price decreases things are looking a lot better. I hope for nuclear to supplement that but it looks like the world at large just isn't ready to get over their unnecessary, irrational fear of nuclear, except maybe China.
How plausible is the electric truck migration ? I've seen the marketing but I don't know if companies are actually going for it.
Next step is to reduce energy consumption. It's so obvious I wonder why it isn't talked about more. I'm not saying it's easy. We either choose to reduce energy consumption, or the consequences of climate change will force us to do it. The difference is in the first case, we have more control over it, and it might cause less human suffering.
Electricity generation is responsible for only 27% of US greenhouse gas emissions -
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
.
If we are serious about tackling climate change then we need to decarbonize these other sectors by moving them off of fossil fuels and onto clean electricity. We are going to need to generate a lot _more_ energy, not less.
> why it isn't talked about more
Because reducing energy use reduces quality of life at constant dollar income (at least medium term), and reduces economic growth (energy's an input in all economic activities), with all the social negative consequences that produces. It's a third rail, politically. No one's going to get elected by saying "your children have to live worse than you".
The Western world is already (slowly, over decades) reducing this (look at per capita energy use dropping nicely since the 90s), and there's significant pushback even at this rate (gillets jaunes, cost of living protests). All future energy use growth is elsewhere (Africa, China, India) with no plans to stop and if the Western world tries to impose their views on them, it'll look a lot like neocolonialism for environmental reasons.
Um, this is already happening, in a big way.
Cars are more fuel efficient than ever. I own an SUV and average 30.1 MPG. Imagine that in 2000.
Light bulbs are overwhelmingly LED these days.
New homes are much more insulating than ever.
Smart homes are less wasteful.
Tho it seems like a lot of these increases in efficiency we traded-off by being more liberal in using the tech; Light bulbs are overwhelmingly LED these days, but we now also stick LEDs in all kinds of places where a light bulb would never have fit/made sense before.
Smarthome might theoretically work, but as of right now most people are just throwing even more IT and IoT devices, constantly drawing power, into their homes. As these come from a myriad of different vendors, there is no unified platform to utilize and manage all that for electricity efficiency, it's just going on, drawing additional power.
Not quite such a rosy prospect given the short and long terms problems with LED lights. They have a phototoxic effect on the eyes causing macular degeneration after chronic exposure to lower-intensity sources - the blue light relationship. The efficacy of filters (yet more cost) has still to be established.
There is some low hanging fruit in that department. To begin with, properly isolating old buildings would make a huge difference. But I agree it won't be easy.
_It's so obvious I wonder why it isn't talked about more_
But is it obvious? Let's say that fusion becomes commercially viable and vast amounts of emission-free energy become available cheaply. Would reducing the usage of it still matter? I would say the driving factor is the side-effects of energy production by current methods, not the energy itself.
> It's so obvious I wonder why it isn't talked about more
I think this is because energy consumption is directly related to our ability to manufacture things, and the ability to manufacture things is directly connected to both wealth and military power.
(I’m half-remembering someone else’s explanation, so I assume this is an oversimplification).
Because our energy consumption is ultimately tied to the exponential growth of the economy. Even if everything around us would become 10x more efficient - which already would require many scientific breakthroughs - that's just multiplying the exponential growth curve by a constant factor of 0.1. A little bit of relief, but it fundamentally doesn't change anything.
And that's ignoring the reality that if you make something 10x efficient, it tends to become used more - sometimes much more, cancelling the gains. Our economy is self-regulating; altering one factor only makes all others readjust to compensate. Permanent change will require more complex approach.
Energy efficiency is definitely a very important part of dealing with climate change, but it isn't a silver bullet.
> Because our energy consumption is ultimately tied to the exponential growth of the economy.
We need to get off this exponential! Any modification of Capitalism is painted as an attack on basic human freedoms so that the rich can go down with the ship, rather than pass it on for the rest of humanity and the world.
How do we change what we optimize for? Because it currently isn't working.
> 10x efficient, it tends to become used more
https://simplicable.com/new/jevons-paradox
it certainly does bot require a fossil fuel base load, and thank goodness because that won’t be affordable forever
Now if we could get Australian politicians to stop taking that coal money...
It's also almost cheaper to build new solar than to operate natural gas.
It doesn't require coordinated action to move away from coal and gas at that point.
They’re not interchangeable.
Solar is great for marginal additional output, but to make it useful as a primary energy source it requires massive investments in storage technology. Solar doesn’t work at night or on cloudy days, so you still need other power sources. At least as long as storage solutions are rare.
Which is why Tesla is now talking about Terafactories rather than just Gigafactories for battery production.
The biggest issue with the Paris Accords is that China did not commit to begin any restrictions until 2030. ...and since they are both the world's largest CO2 emitter and world's fastest growing CO2 emitter, the Accords became a corporate strategy to just move more manufacturing to China (and other non-limited countries).
Frankly, I think the Paris Accords does more harm than good by giving anyone the notion that we were solving the problem.
The optimal strategy to combat Global Warming is to bring manufacturing back to the EU and US and regulate emissions strongly.
> China [...] world's fastest growing CO2 emitter
This is not true. From 2001 to 2011 China almost tripled their emissions, but after 2011 they haven't grown almost at all. It's stable. Maybe you haven't looked at the data in the past 10 years?
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=~CHN
Plus, to be fair, they make all our stuff. Or at least a lot of it. So a big part of their CO2 is YOUR stuff being made.
I dont know if it is funny or sad to see that whenever the US passes an environmental or labor regulation there is no net reduction in bad behavior, the bad behavior just gets moved to a different country and we burn a little more oil to move it there
Yup
You cannot hinder developing countries from the comfort of living in a develop country. The fact that China agreed to a year is amazing.
If the US would have kept part of that deal then maybe we would've seen improvements.
But now that the US basically proven to be untrustworthy, even towards allies, these kind of deals are just undoable anymore.
This will end in tears
Ultimately, both arguments are true.
Developing nations have a claim. It's deeply unfair that wealthy nations who have emitted a lot of carbon get permission to keep emitting more as a result. But also.. if developing nations fully stake this claim by increasing their emissions or even flatlining then the game is lost.
This is the problem with thinking in absolutes. The alternative is making some concessions and moving forward regardless because of belief in the mission. Europe is already in the same per capita ballpark as china. If the US/Australia/etc had gotten themselves near this per capita level, the politics of developed/developing economies would have softened somewhat. The fairness issues aren't as sharp once emissions are similar.
Realistically, we are not politically structured (as a world) to deal with carbon reduction well. Nationalism is the dominant paradigm both structurally/politically and ideologically. It's a weak paradigm for global action.
I emphasize the politics over the economics, though obviously both intertwine. Long term, there are economic upsides as well as downsides to carbon reduction. As a blind (long) bet, I'd always bet on new energy paradigms being a good thing. The long tail upside is especially interesting. Within a functioning polity, that's something you can work. The world isn't.
The reality is that production just moved to China. It isn’t better for the planet.
It’s a deal that’s been hijacked by business interests; just like the Cali proposition written by Uber that’s “for drivers”.
You will never get a hundred countries to voluntarily agree to prioritising climate change over prioritising business interests.
I'd be much more receptive to these "the Paris Agreement wasn't even that strong to begin with" if an alternative was being proposed. But the alternative that the Trump administration is choosing is to attack scientists and deny the problem in the first place.
> now that the US basically proven to be untrustworthy
Was the US ever trustworthy?
They were better at pretending.
Why exactly?
China has shown time and time again that China will do what China feels like doing.
Meaning them committing to doing something 10 years doesn't mean they will do it at all.
We clearly don't really care about climate change or stuff like this would be about taxing pollution through tariffs and other means. Rules like this just move the manufacturing and thus pollution to different countries. Which is pointless when the goal is to reduce climate change.
I know this would have sounded absurd a few years ago, but the authoritarian Chinese regime is currently more rational than the democratic US regime.
They actually know, understand, and to some degree care, that they're basically 1/5th of the world's population and if they don't get pollution under control the entire world will burn.
The CCP has absolutely zero problem suppressing its own citizens if they threaten the government’s power, I seriously doubt they care any more about the rest of the world.
_> The CCP has absolutely zero problem suppressing its own citizens if they threaten the government’s power_
That is a reality under pretty much any _regime_ in the truest sense of the words meaning, which contrary to popular use is not negative but rather descriptive.
I think you misunderstood my comment.
They care in the sense that: the whole world burns - China is part of the world - China will burn - their citizens will riot making 1989 look like child's play - the CCP will go up in flames, too. Cynical logic, but logic nonetheless.
They don't care in the "care bear" sense.
>You cannot hinder developing countries from the comfort of living in a develop country.
Yes you can. The world's problems are not really personified entities, where hypocrisy is a valid concern. China is a problem.
China has a lower level of pollution per capita than many other countries, including the US.
Think about it, they have more people than the US, Canada, the EU, UK, Russia and Australia _combined_. That's some major need for energy, which everyone else just blames on "China".
I think they're doing pretty well in comparison.
While I'm at it, I need to mention their one child policy basically stopped _hundreds of millions_ people from ever existing. A whole lot of pollution that never happened. Something no other country has done, and I think China should have some recognition for that.
No, you can't. First of all, it's not China that's going to be the problem, but the rest of Asia and Africa. Secondly, if we deny them the comfort, they'll do it anyway, and we'll have to either let them or go to war.
Wouldn't it be better to instead let the developing world leapfrog fossil fuel energy generation, and go straight to renewables (and possibly nuclear)? By e.g. donating technology, IP and expertise, and otherwise incentivize them to skip the dirty tech, at no loss in QoL improvements of their citizens?
However, Xi Jinping very publicly announced that net zero by 2060 is now a national aim, which is basically what is needed from china on this issue:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54256826
There is a question of follow through as they are still building new coal power plants, but China is making noises that its going commit to changing. The US is not a leader on this issue any more.
All the new plants Chinese government approve to build now are super critical coal plants. These are the most efficient ones. The gov also regulated older coal plants to retrofit NOx, SOx, pm2.5 treatment equipments. China doesn't have much oil and natural gas but has a lot of coal. So for energy security at the present moment they kinda have to still use coal. They already import lots of oil for transportation and industrial use. But at least they are doing something to reduce coal impact which I think is better than nothing. The air quality issue is known to every Chinese person now, so the government has a lot pressure to improve it. The gov also have good strategies to drive solar adoption. Like if farmers to build solar panels in their farm fields they get tax breaks and they earn money from selling to the grid. And with the price of solar and electricity rate, it's a profitable business. So far it's being working. Solar installation is growing year by year. The gov also pushed to build a few extreme high voltage DC transmission line from the west to the east to transit the renewables generated in that region to the east where energy is demanded. The China National Nuclear Corporation has a mandate to research and build new nuclear technologies. It's now building a number of gen 3 nuclear reactors and they are researching gen 4. A number of electric car companies are taking off in China. Big Chinese cities are already clogged by ICE cars. To buy a car you need to take a lottery for licence plates. In these cities they have separate lottery group for new energy vehicles, which includes hybrid and pure electric vehicles. The gov is now giving equal quota for both groups or more for NEVs. So a lot of people are buying NEVs just because the lottery line is shorter. These people probably won't consider a NEVs before. But companies like Tesla and nio is making great cars too and that is driving demand as well. Some cities are also transition public utility vehicles like buses to electric. Also the high speed rail system and subway system also has major environmental benefits. HSR moved 2.35 billion people in 2019. I think thats amazing. Thats 2.36 billion trips on electric transportation, and not on cars and airplanes. So without the massive investments and foresight to build the HSR, there will be more cars clogging the environment and oil used.
China is building nuclear power plants like crazy:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/china-build-4...
. So, in a few years things should look much better there.
Maybe that will inspire a similar approach elsewhere. Hopefully they don't have any safety lapses that threaten nuclear elsewhere. Not saying there's any reason to expect meltdowns, just that it wouldn't take much to undermine the public's faith in the technology.
> The optimal strategy to combat Global Warming is to bring manufacturing back to the EU and US and regulate emissions strongly.
But how? The manufacturing that went overseas did so for cost reasons. If you make it _even more expensive_ then there is even less incentive to have it here. Dismantling the economies of the east from afar is not an option for a ton of reasons.
It is also based on the idea that any human deserves the same emissions. Of course, at first level, it is legitimate. However, a country which doesn’t want to pollute should rather choose to keep their population low, through various incentives including cost of life. It would set them back on the economic power, but that may be a choice: Better lifestyle for fewer people.
In the current system, however, a country who keeps their population low will have small allowances; It clearly incentives overpopulating its land. This inverse-incentive effect may provoke countries into doing nothing against evergrowing population, keeping cost of life too affordable, and thus, ensuring that the next generation will be overpopulated, and thus, extenuating the land.
Unfortunately, with open (or even just somehow permeable) borders, any noticeable delta in lifestyle would just be gobbled up by slow population displacement from shamelessly breeding places. There at no panacea solutions. I envy those born a decade earlier and pity those born a decade later.
> China did not commit to begin any restrictions until 2030
Is this factual? They committed to peaking in 2030. Stopping at the stop sign is a radically different concept from starting to brake at the stop sign.
_The optimal strategy to combat Global Warming is to bring manufacturing back to the EU and US and regulate emissions strongly._
Agreed. It is possible to simultaneously believe "we need to cut emissions" and "the Paris accord is a bad way to do it". But it seems many people think Paris is the _only_ way to do it.
_> But it seems many people think Paris is the only way to do it._
The issue is rather that nobody really brings up any valid alternatives when they disagree with Paris.
Saying "bring manufacturing back" is not an valid alternative, it's wishful thinking that ignores how this current situation came about, while offering _zero_ actual actionable advise how to reverse that development and fix the problem itself.
Manufacturing went to China because of laxer regulations there making it more cost-effective, how are you gonna convince it to come back to the US and EU with even harsher regulations?
_Manufacturing went to China because of laxer regulations there making it more cost-effective, how are you gonna convince it to come back to the US and EU with even harsher regulations?_
Easy. Tariffs on Chinese imports so its cheaper to manufacture cleanly back home.
_> Tariffs on Chinese imports_
If that works at all, it only works in disincentivizing manufacturing in China.
That doesn't bring manufacturing "back home", it only brings it to other countries similar or even lower in standards as China, are you gonna tariff those too?
Here are some interesting graphs from arguably the most transformative economic miracle in human history [0]. The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living.
[0]
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=~CHN
I feel like this is a deflection and a critical reason why progress isn’t happening fast enough. Your house is already messy, and the need to clean it up is now. Not when China and a couple billion other people mess their house up.
My country’s ambitious plans are shot down by members of parliament going for the kneejern ”but India and China...” response, and the net result would be no action if they were in power. Luckily we at least have people some people in the government who are willing to make sacrifices. It’s about time the US as a developed country caught up (not just on the state level).
If we bring jobs back to the U.S., we will no longer be outsourcing our pollution production. The same jobs will produce less pollution in the U.S. than in China. Of course prices will go up for the goods being produced. So there is something we can do about China and India being major polluters.
Isn’t this something that’s up to the companies that put their production there to decide?
No, because companies that want to employ Americans can't compete with companies that want to employ Chinese, because it costs less to employ Chinese.
In other words there are externalities (polluting the global environment) that aren't priced into the cost of labor when you're comparing the two countries. Tariffs and similar things can help price in that externality.
Tariffs have been good for China. In fact their economy is booming. Polluting your own soil is never a good thing and spills over on other aspects of society makes it more expensive.
Prices are low because we have lots of machines using cheap fossil energy working for us. If we have less machines working for us, we'll produce less goods, and we'll be less rich.
More importantly, if you want China, India and Africa to pollute less, the only way to do so is leading by example and figuring out a way to achieve cost-effective, environmental-friendly path for economic growth for yourself. If it works, and it's better, they'll copy it.
Cleaning up the US would probably mean outsourcing more carbon emissions to the rest of the world. Outsourcing is the primary way the developed world has "cleaned up" so far.
The only way we will substantially reduce CO2 emissions is to develop a source of energy that is carbon-free (or incredibly low carbon) and _cheaper and easier to deploy than coal and gas_. Reductions without that are politically impossible. There is no other way. If we don't succeed in doing so, we should plan for significant climate change as a certainty and begin planning our adaptive response.
Nuclear, Solar, Wind and Wave energy are all there if we just were willing to do it (too bad about the Green lobby getting stuck up about Nuclear and the Coal/Oil lobby(+nimbyists) sabotaging everything else).
> Cleaning up the US would probably mean outsourcing more carbon emissions to the rest of the world.
That's like saying that cleaning my house means moving the dirt to somebody else's house.
> There is no other way.
That is not true. The other ways are:
1. Reduction of energy use per person.
2. Control of population growth - at the very least, stabilizing the Earth's population and theoretically a reduction.
3. Using Energy sources which are low-carbon, but expensive and/or difficult to deploy.
of course your way makes it a lot _easier_, but since reduction of greenhouse gasses is necessary regardless of the availability of a convenient energy solution, these are also relevant, and gradually are becoming necessary.
By the way - (1.) is already progressing relatively well in lots and lots of countries.
> That's like saying that cleaning my house means moving the dirt to somebody else's house.
No, it's more like moving your cooking and garage wood shop work to someone else's house, taking the results home, and leaving the mess.
The dirtiest parts of the production chain required to sustain our lifestyle have largely been offshored, not only because of cheaper labor but because less developed or more totalitarian countries will tolerate the pollution.
Yes these things can be done cleaner, but that adds cost that people don't seem to be willing to pay.
Americans want all of: (1) high paying good jobs, (2) clean air and water, and (3) cheap manufactured shit. Sorry, but it's worse than a trichotomy. If you pick 3 you have to pass on 1 and 2.
Isn't this the more pertinent graph?
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...
Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics.
If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy. As always, I think we should have been building more nuclear plants back in the 90s. And again in the 2000s. And the 2010s. Maybe now we can go wind and solar. But we need lots of something.
> Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics.
But nature also has little regard for per country statistics. Splitting China into two countries, isn't going to lower their polution.
Using per capita statistics at least allows us to focus on those that are emitting excessively more than others.
Splitting a country is not going to lower the pollution, but equally so does a high populations density not decrease pollution.
Although we probably do need to explain why the U.S. requires significantly _more_ energy per person to let people live in comfort compared to European countries.
Hmmm. Could it be our stick houses instead of brick and designs that rely on AC for summer cooling?
Take a look at Canada, it's even higher. That should provides clues.
The definition of comfort is the issue. There are simply not enough resources for everyone on Earth to live like an American. Maybe Europeans if we stretch with renewables and quickly cut down overfishing and stripmining agricultural practices. My money (unfortunately) is on a whole lot of death and despair from crop failures, drought, and mass migrations due to climate change even if we’re able to rapidly decarbonize energy infrastructure. We waited too long to change direction, and aren’t moving fast enough in the right direction.
I’m really not sure this is the case. For example, we know that we have far more than enough capacity to produce food for the entire world, we just simply don’t do it.
Of course, Americans are very wasteful, and we can’t scale that amount of wastefulness to the entire planet.
We have enough fossil-fuel-dependent capacity to strip-mine soil to feed the entire world. I'm not sure if we have enough capacity for _sustainable_ food production, and even if, the methods, technologies and supply chains aren't there (and won't be, as long as they have to compete against modern agriculture).
Is it so hard on HN to use specific and appropriate verbs other than “to scale” for any idea related to something expanding or getting bigger ?
But why, if there's a perfectly good, appropriate enough, and concise term available? Being verbose does not scale.
I’m not aware of what specific or appropriate verb I should have used. Happy to edit the post if you can educate me :)
The things you'd need to do to get the world to accept a definition of "comfort" that doesn't include eating meat (vegan definition) several times a week, living and working comfortably climate control buildings and access to a wide array of consumer products would not be pretty to put it mildly.
Making people's standards of living go backwards make them shoot you.
Holding down people's standards of living makes their kids or grand-kids shoot you.
Policy sticks are a time bomb. Social solutions (convincing people to behave in a way that reduces their environmental footprint) only get you so far. We need technical solutions (more efficiency in the entire economy) such that people can eat fish or beef and drive in cars (or have access to functionally equivalent or superior analogues) at lesser environmental cost. The "western lifestyle" (moving target, I know) needs to scale because even if the west manages to reduce consumption enough to have a good impact the masses in developing nations are certainly not going to settle for the status quo let alone a reduction in consumption.
You need less people, fundamentally. The total fertility rate is declining across the world luckily (except a handful of countries and Africa) [1], but everyone around now is going to have a rough ride until equilibrium is reached (sometime after 2100). Can’t grow your way out of resource exhaustion (renewables excepted).
[1]
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#country-by-country...
It's declining in Africa also.
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-a...
Thanks for pointing that out. Our World In Data’s data is out of date [1], I keep poking them to update their fertility rate data but get no response (maybe busy with COVID data sets, I have no context into why).
[1]
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
I suspect that Covid is going to run a coach and horses right through that improvement. The best ways of getting population growth down in places like Africa are education and a strong, stable economy - and it's just trashed both.
Actually, the best way is empowering women.
We can also just have fewer people: If you lower infant mortality, educate women and give them access to family planning, all evidence suggests they will choose to have fewer children.
It's much easier for the planet to support a high standard of living for four or six billion people than eight or ten billion.
I agree with the premise but the fundamental question is whether we can get from the current status quo to a hypothetical sustainable equilibrium without the squeeze of climate change causing a ton of pain along the way and in a manner that is at least kinda sorta ethically tolerable (i.e. genocide and/or picking who gets to reproduce are not options on the table).
The developing world population growth is peaking soon or looks to be. But standards of living growth there is exploding so their impact will peak at some unknown point in the future. The already developed world is staying roughly static in terms of population and environmental impact per person is declining slowly there. To use a metaphor, it's like we've got a half full bucket, are very slowly siphoning out water and are also half way through rapidly pouring in an unknown amount of water. Will it overflow? Nobody knows. It would be prudent to try to remove more water and pour in less though.
Edit: Anyone care to tell me why I'm so wrong? Is genocide back on the table or are people just annoyed that this is a hard problem with no shovel ready silver bullet?
Do you have a source for this? Because last time I checked this wasn't the case.
From a quick Google search:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712
More depth can explored using keywords like “global footprint” and “ecological footprint”. What’s your source (“last time I checked”)?
Aggressive population control should be given high priority, yet declining population growth and fertility rates are always depicted as negatives in Western countries. In Europe many countries still have incentives to boost fertility.
It's high time we give up on the fantasy of an ever growing population as a ponzi scheme to boost the economy and finance public spending. We need to face the reality that we ought to have at the very least a stable population and reorganise society accordingly.
In relation to developing countries, any healthcare-related aid should be conditional to implementation of birth control policies.
Globally we really should have a target to reduce population by a few billions if we want to all enjoy life in comfort (~Western country level) on a thriving planet.
Edit: Judging by the reactions, the penny has not dropped yet for some... Hopefully it will before it's too late.
> If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy
This is not true. It is possible for 8 Billion people to live in comfort (of course, for a reasonable definition of comfort, which isn't typical US lifestyle at the moment), with the amount of Energy produced right now. _If_ production and distribution, political and economic structures, transportation and habitation systems etc. were to change significantly.
(This is regardless of the Nuclear yes/no discussion.)
>> If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy
"We want" is language that hides reality. Who wants this? How many people?
As the Trump election (and many other elections around the world) show there is no "we want". Different people want different things. Sweeping that fact under the carpet again and again leads to Paris type meaninglessness. Paris fails because there was never any "we".
All the narratives of fear and blame, guilt and shame that have been tried did not make a dent.
Those who want to do something will do it and those that don't want to wont.
Reconcile to that reality and things will actually move forward.
"We want" here is a figure of speech. The world doesn't actually care if you _don't_ want other people to live as comfortably as you, because it's gonna happen either way, no country in the world is going to stop pursuing a better quality of life. The real question here is "do we want to figure this out, or do we look the other way".
From the perspective of actually fixing the problem (which takes capital investment), the most pertinent graph would be per unit of GDP.
It acts as both an efficiency measure as well as an indication of whether those most able to solve the issue are doing so.
Which graph to look at depend on what question one has. If the question is "Who is polluting the world and need to stop" then country’s annual CO2 emissions is the single most relevant graph since that is where the pollution is right now coming from.
If one is to ask "whom's individual citizen way of living is contributing most" we would look at per capita C02. If the question is "Who is at risk of increasing their pollution" you would look at living standards and growth rates. If you ask "Who has the beast means to invest into climate change preventing technology" you would look at GDP. If you ask "where in the production chain pollution is created" then looking at trade gives that. If the question is whom is to be blamed historically for getting us into this situation then the historical global cumulative CO2 graph shows that, through I am a bit skeptical that it actually gives a correct picture since ww1 and ww2 were very central in ushering us into the age of fossil fuels.
> Which graph to look at depend on what question one has. If the question is "Who is polluting the world and need to stop" then country’s annual CO2 emissions is the single most relevant graph since that is where the pollution is right now coming from.
So if China were to spin off each province as a separate country and the US were to spin of each state as a separate country with each of the new countries emitting exactly as much CO2 as it had before it was a separate country, this would be an improvement?
Splitting of countries has as much improvement as getting higher population density. A 5 person household does not have less pollution than 4 person household just because they got one person more to share the blame. Similar two countries combined do as much pollution as if they were separated, because physics does not care about borders.
If we go by per capita, the country that contribute the most to the world pollution is a island country with 300 islands and 1700 people. At the same time there are a bunch of oil countries which list as the most green countries in the world because per capita they got close to nothing in pollution per person. If we go outside of countries, the international space station and antarctic would have insane amount of CO2 per capita since only a very small number of highly specialized people living there.
If we want to stop climate change, going to Palau and Luxembourg with remedies will have zero impact. Their numbers at top of the table is only relevant in terms of statistics.
As my logical view, the one who is emitting and can afford to reduce, should work on it.
This is a very harmful, and yet depressingly common answer. "But look at [...finger-pointing here...]" — which "justifies" doing nothing.
So we are doing nothing. And eventually it's going to catch up with us all.
> The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living.
I can't believe that a country wanting to have a "comfortable standard of living" is seen as a "risk". Almost suggesting as if those countries don't deserve them and a comfortable standard of living should be reserved only for a select few countries.
I just can't fucking believe what I just read.
Right? Surely it is the responsibility of the already developed nations to solve this crisis. Putting the blame on developing nations for daring to live the same way we do is... pretty ridiculous.
Don’t apply emotions to science. Ending COVID19 is a risk to global emissions, because the pandemic‘s lockdowns has reduced emissions.
Risk doesn’t mean emotional judgment or anything about who deserves what.
> Ending COVID19 is a risk to global emissions, because the pandemic‘s lockdowns has reduced emissions.
Long term it isn't. Reducing emissions is going to cost a lot of money. There is less money available for that after economies shrink and governments print money to support their people. Covid helps emissions temporarily but harms the overall path.
I assume consumption and population growth have declined due to COVID19, which also greatly reduce emissions. Even after it ends, it will take years before we return to pre-pandemic levels.
But slowing growth isn't enough. It needs to drop _dramatically_ and _permanently_.
It's expressed in the wrong way, but the truth is the so-called developed countries should focus on the ways to help the developing countries in transitioning to renewable energy as quickly as possible. This is as important and urgent as finding a cure for COVID-19.
GP is correct, just expressed it in a clinical way. Re-read that commend, but mentally prepend to it "From a perspective of identifying the biggest contributing factors to the climate crisis, ...".
Calling some countries a "risk" isn't a value judgement. It's pointing out that focusing on US, EU and China is looking at less than half of the picture.
Especially while the US sits with our thumb in our ass demanding that we do nothing at all. "Comfort for me, not for thee".
Irrespective of who wins, the close nature of the election has shown that significant part of the U.S. lives in a different reality which thinks exactly like that.
It is unlikely there is political capital to make significant changes to reverse the damage.
>The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living.
Do you not think it is a responsibility of the already developed nations to solve this crisis first?
And people still say Malthus was wrong.
At least some of them have woken up to the realisation that exporting your pollution/nasty stuff to other parts of the world doesn't really solve all that much, but even so, they're still a minority, the great majority still believes in silver bullets like recycling, "clean tech" etc.
The silver bullet is natural self-regulation. Mankind will shrink automatically after hitting a real ceiling.
"natural self-regulation"... of human population, in the best case. But before we will extinguish all the biodiversity left. Future generations will see us as the stupid ones, killing the richness of the planet created after eons of evolution.
You're never going to look smart to the people of the future. Look how people crap all over various historical figures because despite some great achievement they did some other thing or had some other views that were not out of line for their time but are not ok anymore.
I guess people who say this kind of things don't believe they themselves will be part of the cohort undergoing the shrinkage.
This so called natural self-regulation will be ugly and painful. I don't envy the generation that will have to go through it.
Not GP but I do say the same, and yes it will be uglier than the first half of the 20th century. The fight for food will be very real and it takes away confidence from my family planning.
If every woman gives birth to less than ~2.1 children, we're shrinking. Is having <= 2 children painful and ugly?
Humans live for decades. Catastrophic climate change is less than a generation away. It would take hundreds of years for the population to shrink enough to stop it.
That's not how "natural self-regulation" works. People aren't PID regulators and don't suddenly adjust their fertility to not exceed the carrying capacity of the environment.
Natural self-regulation means hitting resource limits, followed by sudden and drastic mass dying off, through wars and starvation.
We've already hit peak child and longer lifespans is the only thing keeping the population growing. Assuming this trend continues then human population will start dropping within a lifetime.
(It's just a shame that renewables and other tech (plus the required behaviour changes) are coming in to maturity a couple of decades too late. Surely we just need to bridge the gap between demographic changes and adoption of cleaner tech. I might be overly optimistic on this front)
This depends if we've already overshot maximum sustainable population. You can run many different machines at over 100% capacity. The issue is they break down much more quickly. Water would be a good example of a resource that has stores we can use at a speed much faster than 100% of replacement rate.
The problem is that when it comes to emissions and the resulting climate change, it won't be a smooth self-correction but rather sharp and catastrophic. I believe we've already reached the point of no return and the greenhouse effect is out of control (north pole ice not recovering, permafrost melting, etc).
We'll see drastic climate change happening everywhere. It'll probably have little effect on "us" in the west; probably limited to local tragedies because of extreme weather and a price increase in food. But elsewhere it'll cause famine, mass death, and mass migration.
Sure if you zoom out enough, humanity will manage and survive just fine. But at what cost? You can try to be utilitarian about it, but you shouldn't shrug at the prospect of millions dying and getting displaced.
> It'll probably have little effect on "us" in the west
I believe this is a very dangerous misconception. In our globalized interconnected world nobody will be spared. "We" might suffer a little less then other parts of the world, but effect on "us" will still be huge.
"Natural self-regulation" - that's a nice euphemism for mass starvation. Pity wars tend to cause a spike in population growth.
If the US, brimming with wealth, technologically advanced and educated can't commit to fighting climate change, what will the poorest developing countries decide? They would need to take the burden themselves and falling behind economically (something China in particular would strongly resist). A few defectors can ruin the entire plan because of economic pressure. I think we should be nearing an accord with greater control anyway -- defectors will need to suffer harsh economic sanctions greater than what they'd spend on the accord anyway. I expect this to happen within a few years.
It was barely debated. We can't even get half the country to care about a disaster that's unfolding in their faces.
The frustrating thing about the handling of COVID is watching the climate change story play out at lightning speed. Deny the problem exists, politicize the science, eventually admit the problem but say there's nothing we can do about it, etc.
It's almost like there is a playbook for this that just gets applied to things like asbestos, cigarettes, lead gasoline, DDT, sugar, climate change, COVID ...
There's no playbook here. It may look like there is, because we keep seeing the same thing happening, but it's not coordination - it's the outcome of everyone caring primarily about their own personal interests over those of everyone else. We've built an economy and a culture that demands this kind of selfishness.
COVID-19 gives solid evidence that there is no playbook involved: in terms of political and business processes, the pandemic happened in a flash. And yet every country mismanaged the reaction in roughly the same way, for roughly the same reason. This wasn't coordinated, it's the default way we fail to solve global problems.
I think COVID is different. There have been coordinate disinformation campaigns emanating from vested parties in the past. Tobacco and fossil fuel companies actively invest in tamping down regulation and sponsoring fake science to support their goals. There is no pro-COVID lobby in any corner of the world who wants people to die to protect their profits. Trump has made some ham-fisted attempts to pretend one exists, but in general companies big and small are treating it as very real and very dangerous to their bottom lines. Small businesses and brick and mortars are pushing to relax restrictions with the express intent of trading health for wealth. I see a really disturbing trend among American Conservatives to just decide there's nothing to be done about the pandemic and whoever dies, dies.
If anything, I think the US election has emphasized how the idea that humans can come together, globally, to solve a problem that will require worldwide shared sacrifice for benefits that are largely at least one lifetime in the future is a pipe dream. Humans (and in fairness, most creatures) are fundamentally too selfish as a species to implement this kind of collective action.
Unstoppable severe climate change is coming, if not already here. Emissions _continue_ to go up and up and up every year, the best you get is a slight pause in a year, while we need emissions to go to zero, fast. At this point the only slight hope is geoengineering, and even then I wouldn't bet on it.
How has the US election emphasized that?
It's not "half the country". In a recent Fox news (yes, those Fox news...) poll, they found that 72% of people were either "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" about climate change.
What is true that none of the presidential candidates is taking the crisis seriously: Trump denies it, Biden pays a bit of lip service to it but has done very little about it with Obama, and will probably not do much about it if elected.
Noting down your concern on a poll isn't the same as taking action - even the least action, voting for someone who is not a climate change denier, was beyond half the country. And if this sort of political action is what 73% produces? Then that figure isn't worth the poll paper it's printed on.
By that argument, both halves should have voted for the Green Party candidate, Hawkins. I guess the half-the-country you like isn't taking climate change that seriously, either, right?
Exactly. The poll does not dictate any action - you might as well ask people if they like puppies. Sure, most people like having an environment, but they also like sitting in an air-conditioned SUV on their trip to Wal-Mart to buy a gallon of milk. Polls like this are how you get people who are absolutely in favor of better public education, but every bond measure for the last 8 years has failed. They're useless as a policy dictating measure.
Saying they take it seriously and then putting parochial concerns ahead of it at the polls every single time. And there's a vast gulf between Obama/Biden not doing enough while Trump and the GOP are running us backwards as fast as they can. Just look at the last two administrations positions on vehicle mileage standards. Obama pushed for a huge increase and got car manufactured onboard pretty enthusiastically. Trump just undid it completely and the auto companies are actually upset. That's just unconscionable.
As a European living in the US I think it’s time for Europe to stop looking at the US and start leading. If you are worried about climate change, there is plenty of stuff that can be done in Europe without the US. Europe could also take a strong lead in developing green technologies.
Stop worrying about the US and stand on your own feet!
Europe already does a lot more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
USA per capita CO2 emissions are large, but at least they have been coming down moderately fast. From 2007 to 2017, USA reduced emissions by 20%, whereas if we take Germany as an example of a country with strong "green" element in politics, Germany reduced by 8%.
Apply linear extrapolation, and USA would go below Germany in 20 years. Extrapolating with exponential decay, in 40 years.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country...
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany?country=~DEU
Isn't it bunk to apply extrapolation to two countries that start from a different per capita base?
Germany is significantly lower in per capita emissions so their reduction is (I'm assuming) a lot harder to achieve. It's like comparing fat loss between someone who starts overweight vs someone who is starting neutral bmi.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country...
and add Germany.
Happy to hear why I'm wrong, I'm certainly not an expert in stats or emissions.
I think arguing percentages is misleading and is missing the point of the total environmental impact.
Using the same data source you can truly see how much of an outlier the US carbon footprint is:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country...
Basically the large majority of countries sit below the 10 tonne per capita cut-off, with the outliers of US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Luxembourg above the 15 tonne cut-off (with Qatar being basically off the charts). I am not sure if it is just consumer behaviour differences or energy source differences and I am sure there will be multiple factors depending on the country and regions but these outlier countries are effectively emitting anywhere between 50% to 300% more emissions than any other population on Earth.
The main issue here is population size:
Luxembourg : 600k
Qatar: 2.897M
Saudi Arabia: 34.997M
Canada: 37.885M
US: 331.669M
If you stop thinking per capita and actually take into account total population, you quickly realize that all other nations on Earth are dependent on US market carbon correction in order to avoid environmental collapse. Far more than any other foreign policy ineptitude from the current adminsistration it's the environmental inaction and downright resistance of US lobby driven policy that scares everyone else around the world.
We are still on track for an inevitable major environmental collapse but it could still be vastly mitigated, _if_ US politicians and citizens would get with the program.
Well, after the disaster at Fukushima, we started phasing out nuclear power. It was replaced by renewables. (This was super-stupid since we have a stable government, no enemies close by and basically no natural disasters [0] that would threaten our power plants.) We should have shut down coal plants instead but dwelling on what we should have done does not help. The bright side of this is that our emissions are decreasing _despite_ still running coal plants. Once we shut these down, they will drop even more and this hopefully as early as possible. I hope it is going happen because of economic reasons, i.e. when coal becomes too expensive compared to other sources of energy because that would mean it would already happen before the scheduled phase-out.
[0] If you are from elsewhere in the world, it might be hard to imagine how few threats of natural disasters we have in central Europe: there are basically no earthquakes, no tsunamis, no bush fires, no (real) hurricans (we call them 'storms'), no real tornadoes (it is such a rare thing that it usually makes it to national news if there is one), no (terrible) floods (well, every few decades there is a large flood somewhere here but that's it).
Right that makes sense, also
In a global economy, per-country per-capita emissions mean little, as my consumption largely "counts" against another country that produces the goods I use.
Germany has a much larger per-capita manufacturing and export sectors of their economy, I would expect their emissions to slow more slowly.
Energy & emissions are complex to account for. I don’t know too much about the US but in France we had quite good results in term of reductions.
But where do they come from? From the optimisation of our energy consumption? Or from the relocation of some of our companies abroad?
>France we had quite good results in term of reductions.
France has the benefit of large-scale nuclear power. Any given day, my home province of Ontario, is at around 85%-95% fossil-fuel-free emissions because of nuclear and hydro [1]. If instead we decided to go with solar and wind, then we'd be waiting until 2060 to cut CO2 emissions and burning much more natural gas until then ... just like Germany.
[1]
https://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html
>USA per capita CO2 emissions are large, but at least they have been coming down moderately fast. From 2007 to 2017, USA reduced emissions by 20%, whereas if we take Germany as an example of a country with strong "green" element in politics, Germany reduced by 8%.
Which is primarily due to Obama era regulations that Trump has done everything he can to roll back. Had the price of gas not skyrocketed and the mortgage crisis not hit, we would've had almost no improvements from 2000-2008.
If you look at the data available from 2016-2018 we went BACKWARDS. You can't extrapolate the data from Obama's regulations that have rolled back and say: look it'll take care of itself.
Emissions have gone down because of the fracking boom. Coal power plants are being replaced with natural gas which releases half as much carbon dioxide.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
.
The fracking boom has released massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere so we basically went from something we actively track (coal emissions) to something we don't track and thus aren't regulating or controlling (methane leaking from fracking wells). This is a net negative for planet earth...
That didn't reduce emissions and may have actually increased them.
We do track methane in the atmosphere, that is NOAA's job. Methane in the atmosphere tripled from preindustrial times to 1995 and has started to level off since then. It doesn't look like fracking has lead to a dramatic increase in the release of methane in the atmosphere.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/carbontracker-ch4/
Leveled off? It's at record highs and has continued to increase every single year, it hasn't leveled off at all:
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/12/1561/2020/
The NOAA tracking global methane has literally nothing to do with tracking methane output from individual wells - which again, we don't do. Moving the goal posts doesn't make you right. We DO actively track emissions from coal fired plants. We DO know that fracking has absolutely increased methane emissions:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/frack...
https://www.pnas.org/content/112/51/15597.abstract
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab9ed2
Oh it certainly can get worse
Japan is racing to build coal plants while US is reducing
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/clim...
This is part of the fallacy in this mess that climate change has become.
If the US evaporated from the planet, nothing would change. In fact, atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise.
Humanity cannot solve this problem by subtraction.
If ALL of humanity left the planet, it would take 100,000 years for a 100 ppm drop in CO2.
That means we can’t solve it by eliminating fossil fuels, cars, trucks, planes, etc. We can’t solve it with solar panels. And we sure as heck know the Paris accord can’t solve it either.
It is astounding to me to see see how we continue to talk about this problem from the perspective of a premise that is completely false.
Source: 800,000 years of ice core atmospheric data.
Which European country are you in?
Has China signed on to this if so, have they shown verifiable reductions?
The main fear I have during this election is that Biden wins, he picks up where Obama left waging wars, and once again they flood Europe with "refugees".
You realize Obama didn’t start any wars and spent 8 years trying to close Pandora’s box?
That's the opposite of what happened, see Libya. We still get boats full of illegals pretty much on a daily basis in EU, partly thanks to President Obama.
In fact, even Obama seems to agree:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36013703
"Clinton on Qaddafi: We came, we saw, he died."
> Obama didn’t start any wars
Obama:
* Started a military campaign in Syria.
* Supported diplomatically and militarily, and armed, Saudi Arabia in its genocidal war on Yemen.
* Supported diplomatically and militarily, and armed, Saudi Arabia in its occupation of Bahrain.
* Supported diplomatically and militarily, and armed, Israel in three military campaigns in Gaza.
* Started military intervention in Somalia.
* Started involvement in hostilities in Uganda.
Now, you could argue that only two or three of these count as "starting a war", but still.
> spent 8 years trying to close Pandora’s box?
More like 8 years keeping them open, or prying them open (e.g. vis-a-vis China).
But there's one notable exception: Iran. Even though he bears responsibility for illegal and unjustified sanctions, the JCPOA agreement was a tolerable compromise all around.
So why does the situation only start to improve after he leaves?
What about Syria?
Obama has been at war longer than any president in the history of the country.
The Syrian civil war (if that's what you're referring to) is a result of the Arab Spring that started in 2010 in reaction to low standards of living in Tunisia, which spread to amongst others Syria.
That's the wiki summary anyway, which doesn't directly implicate the US or any particular president.
That said, general unrest in the middle-east can be attributed to meddling from the US that has been going on for decades, from the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the US funding the Afghans during the Soviet/Afghan war, to the first and second gulf war, the Saudis, etc.
While I don't like Obama's policy when it came to the conflicts down there, he inherited it from decades of policy.
While it's fun to blame the US for all the problems in the world ever, in the middle east lets not forget the heart of the serious issues are largely a result of _European_ colonialism at the turn of the 20th century. And then they made a bunch of "mandates", peaced out, and left everything in shambles..
Replacement migration has been handled about as poorly as possible.
_4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world_
Were you referring to China? They are still building coal plants at a record pace.
What does the election have to do with it? As far as I know, neither major candidate has a realistic plan for climate action.
US entrepreneurism kickstarted the electric vehicle transition (thx Elon1). Batteries prices are falling. PV is already incredibly cheap and getting cheaper. Coal is becoming increasingly uncompetitive. Nuclear is making a comeback, also thanks to US entrepreneurs.
Science, Capitalism and entrepreneurship will be the unstoppable force that will solve our energy crisis, if western governments let them.
Africa, India and China will be the biggest factors going forward.
UPDATE: To be clear, I'm not arguing for laissez-faire capitalism. Government incentives are required to develop markets, as Germany did with PV, and US does with EV. My point is that the US being part of the Climate Accord or not won't matter much, the move away from coal and ICE cars is inevitable due to already existing market forces. A bigger lever would be to de-regulate nuclear where it makes sense, as that is where the biggest cost lie.
> Science, Capitalism and entrepreneurship will be the unstoppable force that will solve our energy crisis, if western governments let them.
Yes, everybody knows that EVs received precisely zero government subsidy in terms of R&D, business loans, and consumer rebates. That free market did it all by itself. And we've got what... 1% of the cars on the road running on electric?
You under appreciate Obama's administration push towards renewables.
Yep. I think it's reasonable to think that Tesla wouldn't be where it is today without the nearly half a billion dollars it was loaned by the federal government in 2010.
https://www.energy.gov/lpo/tesla
Capitalism and enterpreneurship is how we got here in the first place. Elon and renewables are only becoming a thing because of economic incentives from governments - positive incentives in the form of subsidies on e.g. new EVs, solar panels, etc, and negative incentives in the form of carbon taxes.
Take those away and the "green" companies would have NO incentive to push their work. They'd be working with people wanting to do better first and foremost, and then they would - ironically - be competing with petrol and energy companies, who also have "green" all over their marketing.
Renewables and EVs could not compete without government incentives.
I don´t know why people overvalue Musk an Tesla that much for reducing emissions. When I ran the numbers last year, a single city in China(Guangzhou) was enough to reduce emissions more than entire Tesla sales, just by replacing all of their busses with electrical ones.
I'd actually argue that the lack of a carbon tax - not its existence - is an incentive, since you're not charging for the negative externality of trashing the atmosphere.
Isn't that exactly what government incentives are for? Subsidize the thing you want to see succeed, until it no longer needs subsidizing.
Of course, that is the ideal success scenario, in the failure scenario, you subsidize the thing until it fails, or until you can no longer afford to subsidize it.
EDIT: grammar
Of course. The point is that it is ridiculous to use Tesla as evidence that the free market will solve our problems when
1. Tesla's impact on global emissions is minimal.
2. Government intervention in EVs has been there from the start.
The charitable conclusion is that governments and markets can work together. The pessimistic conclusion is that markets are only capable of putting lipstick on pigs.
I hope I’m wrong but it seems the world may have to leave the United States in the 1950s where it currently plans to reside.
Seriously, it’s time counties who want to improve the situation need move on from worrying about what the United sates is doing because it doesn’t look like much will be happening for a long time.
If this were the 50's again we'd have an 84% marginal rate on income over $400,000. Which we would use to fund our infrastructure and energy projects.
He he he, it’s the 1950s without the good bits then.
Its the 80s/90s that the US is stuck in. The Reagan/Thatcher deregulation revolution was the inflection point.
https://twitter.com/wardqnormal/status/1206280031552454656
>My new hobby is taking graphs of economic data over time and indicating the year that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, in case people find that helpful or informative.
Whoever that is, is my hero.
I think you're leaving out a super important point. These tax rates didn't affect people making this amount of money. The _capital gains tax was 25%_ at the time, so business owners and investors were _not_ paying 84% tax. If they had been, the oil tycoons of the 50's (basically the entire fortune list) would never have become so wealthy.
It's hard to imagine anyone would keep working for that $400,001th dollar if they only got to keep 16 cents of it. Surgeons, for instance, can literally stop taking patients and go to Aruba when they get near the bend. High-dual income households is another example-- imagine a double-physician household where one of them is taxed at 84%-- they'd save money by one of them _not working at all_ considering daycare expenses.
Actual taxes on the 1% in the 50s weren't really that much higher, despite the marginal rates--
https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/
I would very happily take 16% of an extra $1B.
Do any US taxpayers earn $1 billion annually?
Even if you use a more realistic number and want to focus on the top 0.0000003%, that's very different than taxing people who earn income as a linear function of their hours worked.
Americans are about to start learning what it's like trying to emigrate to other countries for a better life.
How so? People love cheap shit without paying for the externalities.
The Paris Climate Accord is not going to have any major impact on the drive and desire to develop renewable energy sources in the US. Politics don't decide technological outcomes like this, despite what politicians would like to tell us.
First order of business:
1. Drop the US dollar as a reserve currency.
2. Free the SWIFT system from subservience to US decrees.
Question: should countries be able to tax imports from countries with more lax environmental laws?
Because that would address the argument about cost and staying competitive.
Then you would be entering into a "trade war" with the United States - which most countries aren't going to be able to do.
China and the EU can, and should. "Polluter pays" should become the standard policy in international trade in numerous other ways, too.
China is the biggest polluter and they plan to increase their co2 emissions to at least 2030 so I don't think you'll find an ally there.
Big polluter because it's a giant country. Per capita it's quite low, and there is no reason a big country should be punished why a smaller country that does significantly worse shouldn't. According to that logic if they would split into lots of smaller countries it suddenly isn't an issue anymore.
China already leveled off in 2011.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...
Imposing tariffs based on pollution is already GATT-legal. AFAIK it's something countries avoid for all the other reasons why countries avoid tariffs.
Wouldn't "user pays" be more logical. I think it is quite dishonest to blame China when consumption happens in Europe or USA... All of the pollution should be transported in calculations where consumption happens.
When China bids to manufacture something for the world market, a variety of things go into the price they can bid: labor, shipping, materials, and pollution, chiefly (there is also research, facilities maintenance, etc). The main factors which give them an advantage are labor and pollution. Their labor advantage is internal but their pollution advantage -- the portion dumped into water or air -- they get by extracting value from a shared account. In countries with stricter pollution laws companies can't rob their neighbors to win a bid.
That being said, tariffs and other mechanisms meant to force the pollution cost back onto producers really end up being paid largely by consumers anyway. You can't tax citizens of another country. So the tariff taxes citizens of your own country. The cost gets back to the producer country indirectly in that they sell less stuff, but every time the tax is paid it is paid inside the country imposing the tariff by citizens of that country. So it works more or less according to your suggested mechanism.
The end result should be largely the same regardless of whether the externality compensation takes the form of an import tariff or user-facing retail tax. Either way customer prices rise and manufacturer/importer/seller margins drop. Tariffs are a blunt tool, but so are most consumer-end taxes as well. But coming up with the sort of Pigovian precision instrument, that attempts to fairly reflect the actual lifecycle externalities of a good or a service, is probably going to be almost impossible for several reasons.
Then you would be charging people who have no control over the production. The producer nation sets the laws and standards for their facilities.
They do have the option to pick up option that has less attached taxes. Or not to buy something.
Who imposes the taxes then? The exporting country (China) is unlikely to do it. The importing county is only likely to do it if the government and people support it. The problem is that even with a tax on the import, polluting in a developing nation would likely be cheaper than not polluting anywhere else. Many items do not have options to buy from various countries (economies of scale usually consolidate factories and leave little room for competitors). Not to mention that drastically reducing consumption (your comment about not buying) will cause most economies to fail since we are consumer based.
Make taxes big enough to make pollution too expensive even in cheap countries?
Buying less, but more expensive because of less polluting manufacturing methods is the answer. Economy will still keep going.
"Economy will still keep going."
How so? If you are adding crushing taxes, then you're likely to see a downturn in production and consumption, which generally results in a weak or shrinking economy.
Polluting taxes will promote spending on less polluting ways to manufacture. Or better quality goods that put out same amount of pollution, but you end up buying them not as frequently.
Let's take a hipothetical sweater as an example.
Now I buy a €20 sweater every 2 years. Let's say pollution tax would be €10. Suddenly it becomes €30 sweater and my €10/year sweater budget becomes €15/year. Instead, I could buy a nice sweater for €40 (+€10 tax) and wear it for 5 years. Now I'm back at original €10/year budget.
Economy wise, most of the chain is now just making nicer stuff that takes more resources. Aside from truck driver. Who is now moving twice as much sweaters. But €10 tax ideally would go to environment-improving projects and some drivers will make a living in those new sectors.
To a certain extend, absolutely. Much of the richer EU states cause and have caused quite a bit of pollution and without a serious shift in consumption, I don't believe we can achieve our goals.
However, industry is without a doubt a massive resource user. Modern methods in manufacturing can save significant amounts of energy, water, and more. As China is the main producer in many instances, a change also needs to happen there to go from heavy polluting to less polluting methods.
it's the same thing, the tax increases the price for the buyer.
At the end of the day, it's always "user pays".
Well, as an unhappily former EU citizen I don't think getting into arguments at all is an option for the country I live in. :-(
China may be on the accord, but they still have abysmal pollution right now. So currently, it would be a trade war with China too.
This brings up something that I don't understand. How can there be candidates that say they support the environment, support worker rights, and support free trade with places such as China? Laborers are treated like crap and pollution is rampant in China. Promoting free trade seems to oppose the other two positions since there's more pollution in the developing nations that we outsource out manufacturing to and that labor in our country can't compete with the lower wages of those developing countries, partly due to lower living standard but also due to fewer worker protections and even safety equipment.
Free trade raises the standard for everyone. Today China has those issues, but free trade is raising their living standard. As standards of living raise people find pollution is negatively affecting them and so they solve the problem locally.
Of course the downside free trade allows production to move to places where there are no controls because non-local pollution both less affects any individual, and because international politics come into play trying to solve it, and those who have a bad standard of living see this as the rich trying to keep them down by not letting them compete.
The last might sound negative about free trade ever solving pollution, but it actually isn't. China and India are both reaching the tipping point where enough people are rich enough to care about pollution that they are doing something about it. Half the world population is already rich enough to care, and that half also wants more stuff so there isn't enough poor places left for this cycle of moving production to repeat for many more cycles. Also, every time production moves they bring the latest technology - China never had the cities full of coal smoke stacks spewing black smoke into the air like the US and Europe had 120 years ago. (they are big into coal, but their coal has always been cleaner just because some cleaner coal technology is also cheaper in the long run)
> As standards of living raise people find pollution is negatively affecting them and so they solve the problem locally.
This works if the problem is local and bothersome to the locals -- rusting drums leaking poison or heaps of trash. Carbon dioxide and methane are invisible and odorless and instantly become everyone's problem, so we can't expect this mechanism to induce people to solve the problem locally.
You are yourself the counter example that proves you are wrong. People like you do in fact care about non-local pollution. there are steps: first you need to get far enough out of poverty that you can start thinking you can accept the lower standard of living not having poison around you is acceptable. When you don't have enough to eat or in danger of freezing to death (or other weather/nature related disasters) that poison is something you just stay away from - particularity if your job is with whoever is dumping it since making them clean up might me they don't pay you and then you can't eat. When you don't have those basic worries to you worry about more avoidable ones like local poison/pollution. Only after the above do non-local concerns matter.
It's all about perspective. Even the poor in developed nations have a much higher standard of living than the poor in developing nations. Most people only compare their situation with the situation of others in the same country/culture. So it's tough for most people to objectively say that they are doing well and would rather spend their limited money for a more expensive version of the same item. You also have human nature, where most people live nearly at their means, or even beyond them, rather than within them.
I guess I'm basically saying there tends to exist a lot of scope creep in each individual's definition of when local and basic concern have been met.
You are right that it basically just moves the pollution to the next developing country.
You are incorrect about your coal comment. You can see China spewing yellow smoke (it's an even dirtier type of coal than the two we have here). The cleaner tech only gets adopted if it's financially cheaper or has some other incentive like the government enforcing standard (which relies on the education/opinion of the people).
You didn't understand my coal comment. No surprise, it is hard to explain. Efficiency gains mean you burn less coal. The old boilers in 1900 were very inefficient. It is not very hard to build a modern boiler that is much more efficient, and thus uses less fuel. The coal might worse, but China is using far less to get the same energy out of it which means less pollution.
I can see that on a per Kw basis. You would also have to factor in what the electricity production is today vs in 1900 to make an accurate comparison. Total pollution output today may still be higher. For example, you might have quadrupled the efficiency but the demand may have increased ten times or more. So sure, they adopted a newer technology than 120 years ago and is cleaner, but it's also not the latest technology nor is it even close to the cleanest. Many of their plants are currently very dirty. They do have plans to upgrade in the future. Not to mention, it's not the cleanest option out there, even at the higher efficiency. For example, natural gas is cleaner and that tech has been around for a while. Even a lot of nuclear tech is about 60 years old.
"China never had the cities full of coal smoke stacks spewing black smoke into the air like the US and Europe had 120 years ago."
Please do a search for air quality alerts and deaths in china as well as for pictures of the smog. It is every bit as bad or even worse. The tech may ne more efficient but the scale and overall output has similar effects. Yes the smoke is a yellow color and not black, that is mostly due to the soft brown coal they use in some parts of the country rather than the anthracite or even bituminous coal we used.
The point was, US can do this too.
The EU is stating public consultations on energy taxation and a carbon border adjustment mechanism :
https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/news/commission-launch...
According to the timelines linked there, the public consultations on this _just closed_ few weeks ago.
Which is unfortunate for me, because I wasn't aware that there are such consultations until your comment :(.
You cannot do that on a nation by nation basis as you will just push the pollution to other unregulated nations - although if done globally, this might work.
Originally the thought was to do this on a product by product basis, but unwinding supply chains is effectively impossible.
Actually, it's still pretty tough because some countries buy and rebrand products to slip around tariffs even now.
Doing so would raise the price of consumer products significantly, which will go down terribly in most rich, developed nations.
Since the Paris Agreement was non-binding, it's not really relevant. Anyway, would you accept a country that had states representing over 50% of the population in the Agreement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Climate_Alliance
Does this include the past? Should we "tax" the US and Europe since they've been burning coal and diesel faster than everyone else for more than a century?
Should we also favor countries like Kenya, who have burned zero coal historically and are currently some of the greenest countries in the world?
Yes, addressing one nation and failing to address countries without environmental laws despite being part of the Accord is failure people fear talking about.
Good.
The Paris accord is not worth the paper it’s written on.
It’s non-biding, it has no enforcement, and the goals where self imposed and for some countries ridiculous.
Even if it’s not for the right reasons, the US leaving might force world leaders to actually do something.
And how is it not worth it? You said it yourself. It was non-biding, no enforcement, goals where self imposed and the US government still didn't want to take part.
What kind of message is _that_ sending?
That you don't want to take part in a bullshit agreement that has no effect on anything. Why would it be better to pretend?
The Paris Agreement is useful in creating goals for emission targets so countries can work towards them. Sure, the goal posts can and will change, but they'll always be pointed downfield.
If the US creates an alternative to the Paris Agreement that has more teeth, there might be an opportunity cost. Until then, this is the best thing we have.
How about just take part, and not pretend?
The message being sent here is, "in the global coordination problem of climate change, I'm the defector and the freeloader, and I need to be coerced to take part".
Why would the United States leaving force leaders to do something ?
Seems like very obscure logic.
It was a big virtue signaling show where nobody involved made any changes. Which some will always see as a huge success because it avoids any need to do anything as long as declarations of support are cheered and awareness is raised and verbal support is given.
Politics is always going to have an element of self-interest. As bad as the agreement is, can't we agree that doing _something_ is better than doing nothing? We can change an existing accord to make it better in a few years, but you can't improve something that doesn't exist.
Well, you could take the position that not flying in all those politicians to sign the accord (and all the other resources the accord used) would have effectively done more than the accord itself, given that the resulting policies were self-imposed and could have been enacted without the international accord.
i thought the sentiment was that personal life/work and politics should be kept separate and intermingling them is capital B Bad.
>the US leaving might force world leaders to actually do something
Hah! No, the Paris accord, the "no enforcement, and the goals where self imposed and for some countries ridiculous" Paris accord is the world "doing something".
Even that will not be reached.
We’re a severe embarrassment. Sorry everyone. Hopefully some day America will get our act together, but at this point I doubt it. Stupider by the minute.
It wasn't going to solve the problem, so there was no point doing it.
That is not how steps in the right direction work.
If even this is politically unachievable, how do you imagine we are going to achieve an agreement with greater impact?
The Paris Accord has no teeth and places the West at an economic disadvantage to China, who keeps riding its “developing nation” label to get out of any restrictions. The US is already reducing emissions and has been doing so for years.
If you want to fight climate change, pressure China.
The US is a net importer of CO2 emissions if you account for trade. Goods that cause CO2 emissions in China and Europe are imported, amounting to about 7% of the US domestic total emissions in 2017 (edit: while China is a net exporter, about 14% of its emissions are for goods that leave the country). So reducing emissions only matters if they're not moved to somewhere else. [0]
Also, China emitted about half as much CO2 per capita as the US in 2018, still ofc more in total, with about 4 times as large a population than the US.[1]
Edit 2: If you calculate in the trade, the US ends up with almost 3 times the emissions per capita of China.
[0]
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...
[1]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
Meanwhile, awareness/disclosure of climate risk is rising sharply in large publicly traded companies, measured by counting the percentage of companies reporting "climate risk" in their 2019 annual reports:
- 26% of companies in EU
- 9% of companies in APAC
- 7% of companies in US
Still a long way to go obviously, but these numbers have doubled compared to fiscal 2017.
Wow. Rising sharply, from what, 0%? Assuming the size of the US public markets is the largest in the world, and that we needed to take action decades ago to prevent climate change's worst effects, these statistics place the blame squarely on large corporations
Better late than never, says the optimist. If you break these numbers down by industry it looks like climate risk is primarily identified by (european) financials. Fiscal 2019:
US EUR APAC
financls 12% 37% 16%
energy 8% 20% 12%
materials 8% 24% 7%
utilities 3% 22% 7%
industrls 3% 12% 3%
consumer 5% 14% 4%
telco 3% 12% -
tech 3% 8% -
healthcr 3% 11% -
No, blame is spread also on consumer mentality, consumer love a new and shiny, brainwashing advertising, economic thinkers pushing the idea of continual growth. Etc etc etc.
Our whole culture is culprit. Like, When people preach not to use plastic straws, while they define themselves by the shiny crap they excessively shop online.
can you cite a source for this? I'm interested in learning more in detail
Source: own research after collecting and processing 14000 annual reports the last 2 years. Mostly for infosec purposes but it seems to be useful in other areas as well.
US really trying hard to shake its image as world leader...
To be fair, the US is just doing overtly what every other signatory to the agreement has been doing covertly. Not a single goal of the Paris agreement has been met, it's like being bound to an agreement in which the terms are TBD.The heads of state at the table of the agreement made sure that they legally had no liability. Stringent treaties are big no for a lot of countries. Leaders need to be held accountable for the upcoming climate disaster.
Kinda sorta. The US is likely to officially re-enter the Paris climate accord in 77 days.
Only if Biden wins. We won't know for sure yet, for a while.
And it still doesn't mean squat if the US Senate does not approve.
Senate is irrelevant in this case because the Paris Agreement is not regarded as a treaty. The Senate didn’t ratify anything five years ago either.
Even if Biden wins but Senate is mostly republican (which is very likely), Biden can’t do much. Senate will keep tossing it out as it did with Obama’s 2nd term.
Democrats need both the presidency and majority senate to be able to get shit done.
Not looking good.
Looking better than ever, according to predictit; the senate, however, is a different matter.
It looks like that because unlike most states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania didn't start counting their mail-in votes until after in person votes. Mail in votes will almost certainly heavily skew blue and there's substantial numbers of them this year.
Not saying Biden will definitely win, just we can't tell yet.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/04/whats-behind-trumps-leads-in...
> Mail in votes will almost certainly heavily skew blue.
Is there a good explanation for that assertion? I've seen it being said in many places but never any reason for it. Why would mail in votes skew in a particular direction?
>Is there a good explanation for that assertion?
I think part of the explanation is that Republicans tend to feel less threatened by covid-19 and thus more willing to vote in person.
It's in the article I shared in the GP
>Starting early this year, the coronavirus pandemic prompted millions of voters across the country to request mail-in ballots in order to avoid exposure to the virus at the polls. And while the party breakdown for mail-in ballots started off fairly even, it split off after Trump launched a monthslong crusade to discredit mail-in voting.
>As Election Day neared, some states, like Florida and North Carolina, tallied up the mail-in ballots they received ahead of time, and then released that total soon after the polls closed on Election Day, and before they finished counting up the in-person votes... they tended to show early leads for Biden which disappeared once all the in-person votes (which tended to favor Trump) were counted. This was dubbed the blue mirage.
Also
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/10/09/voter-engage...
>Trump supporters are more than twice as likely as Biden supporters to say they plan to vote in person on Election Day (50% vs. 20%). By contrast, 51% of Biden supporters say they plan to vote by mail or absentee (or have already voted this way). A quarter of Trump supporters (25%) say they plan to vote by mail or absentee.
The going conspiracy reason is that it's because the "Left" is using mail-in ballots to commit election fraud. To be fair, I still don't understand how we can have such manual, potentially-manipulated and mistrusted voting systems in 2020.
Like, how difficult would it be for everyone to vote in a secure, cryptographically hidden and verified manner, using some sort booth/app/device/website with proper identity verification linked to your government identification databases? It's beyond scary and infuriating that with all this technology and really smart people around that we still have to have papers, mails and random fallible/corruptible volunteers doing the counting.
Anything that’s only electronic is ripe for fraud. Securing digital things is really hard. For something as important as elections we absolutely need a paper trail. Physical things that both parties can verify exist and are simple to understand.
In an ideal world, we’d have a hybrid system. Everyone gets a paper with an ID cryptographically hashed with their voter id. They vote electronically and mail/in person hand their paper with a cast ID that’s also cryptographically signed with their voter id and vote cast. Like how two factor TOTP works, the verification of cast ID can be done totally offline.
That way you have a two factor audit system. A fast digital tally backed with a verifiable paper trail for every vote.
If paper tally is not within 1% of digital tally, then you have a discrepancy and people ought to vote again.
Sure it would take a while to verify paper trail but a couple of days of two factor counting is totally worth it for an important thing as election that decides the fate of a country.
Exactly. And even cryptography can't keep files from being deleted. When someone deletes files, it's not immediately obvious what they're doing, even to software developers. When someone throws a bunch of ballots in a trash can, it's immediately obvious what they're doing to anyone.
We absolutely could have trustable, reliable, verifiable voting systems. It is done all around the country. That it is not universal is because - I imagine - the parties _want_ the gamesmanship.
COVID is doing more for climate than Paris would
On a related note, if all of the frozen ice goes melty melty, Paris will be underwater. It’s at 35m, and sea levels could rise by 70m if Earth goes full thaw.
It can absolutely happen, yes, but note that this is nothing that anyone alive today will witness (barring progress in life extension technology).
Sea level rise is projected to be around 2.4 meters by 2100 in the worst scenarios. Maybe it'll be a bit higher than that but not by much. And by the time the oceans do rise by that level, maybe we'll have reclaimed most of the continental shelves anyways by building dams, so we'll have a firm grip on the technology needed to build dams at scale.
There are far graver consequences of climate change that affect humans immediately, this decade, this year, this century.
This is quite a good tool to explore what would happen at different sea level rises -
- it maxes out at 60m, but even there it's a very different world.
Don't show that to climate action skeptic. They will think, the world looks almost the same even for 60m. Each country is affected differently, most by a small percentage of land, some not at all. People will adapt.
Most of the population of Earth lives close to the water though. Be it rivers or coasts.
Where can one find the data for the predictions of Pacific coast sea level rise on various timelines?
along with the growing economic competitiveness of renewable energy sources
I feel that this is the key sentence. Solar panels are getting better every year, batteries are getting better, and in the meantime we have natural gas replacing coal plants which helps to bring down carbon dioxide emissions. I'm personally OK with this.
The market is doing its best to counter Trump's efforts here, as renewables and storage are dropping faster in price than anybody expected, even the biggest boosters of the tech. We will never build another coal plant in the US. And our energy is getting cheaper, and the grid will get more reliable as we distribute more storage through it.
And fortunately for the environment, Trump's efforts at the DoE to help coal have been staggeringly incompetent and ineffective. But I fear that in the past four years, the administration might have found some lawyers that understand the basics of how executive branches can legally execute given the laws that gave them executive powers.
> We will never build another coal plant in the US.
Because of natural gas, not renewables. Renewables still need base load due to variable generation because storage technology isn’t economical.
If the price of natural gas didn’t collapse due to fracking the fuck out of the whole country for the last 15 years, we would still be building coal plants hand over fist.
With the Paris Accord, we are talking about the future, not the last 15 years.
And for the future, renewables + storage is cheaper than natural gas. We can get to 80% renewables cheaply. And as the modelers update their cost curves to adapt to the pace of storage's learning curve, we will be able to get to 90% renewables cheaply, then 95%, then 100% as we start to decarbonize the non-electrical parts of our economy.
And though there were tax incentives that helped build the industry, and help from countries like Germany that decided to start buying the expensive first generation products in order to drive down prices, the end result is that we are now living in a world where tech has changed the economic landscape.
The cheapest grids to be build will not be based on fossil fuels. Developing countries will be able to build renewables+storage based micro grids far more cheaply than they will build traditional wires + thermal heat engines. And places with the wealth to do long term investing will be able to build long distance transmission to distribute cheap renewables with less storage.
> And for the future, renewables + storage is cheaper than natural gas.
_Sigh_, there is no evidence of this or projects yet planned based on full renewable that uses storage to account for generation troughs. The storage gap is significant right now and making solar panels so cheap that labor and transmission are 99% of the cost won’t help that.
Don't sigh yet, there is ample evidence in the markets that storage is making serious inroads.
In the ERCOT market in Texas, where rules have recently changed to allow storage into the grid as both supply and load, there are absolutely massive amounts of projects in the pipeline. Since it's one of the most open markets, anybody can go and download all the projects that are at any point of the connection process. Last month, there were 18GW of storage planned for Texas alone. Interconnection only cares about power, not energy, so we only no GW and not GWh for these projects at the moment. The energy capacity in MWh only comes into play as they bid on the market to sell or buy energy.
ERCOT is only the most transparent energy market, which is why I mention it first, but other markets are also seeing massive amounts of storage planned in the coming years.
The other most open electricity market, PJM, shows a similar surge of renewables and storage:
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/10/03/rocky-mountain-institut...
On the rest of the US grids, which are more centrally planned by monopoly utilities, we need to be sure that regulations actually reward the cheapest energy if we want renewables and storage to win. Typically (but not always) regulators allow the monopoly utility to take a fixed percentage of costs as profit, so monopoly utilities are incentivized to choose higher cost options for supplying electricity.
Storage alone doesn't care about where the electricity is coming from, so these storage projects from the grid are planned based on any sort of time arbitrage, grid congestion relief, or frequency regulation reimbursement people think they can get. This is based purely on people's bets with their own capital and what they think the market will look like. Academic estimates and monopoly central planning is far far more conservative in storage than people spending their own money.
True, but misleading. Last year Iowa got more than 60% of their electric from renewable sources (almost entirely wind). The natural gas plants are not for base load, but for backup when the wind isn't blowing.
> gas plants are not for base load, but for backup when the wind isn't blowing.
That’s base load. If you didn’t have the gas plants you would have had rolling outages, which means it’s providing base load.
Perhaps you are confusing them with peaker plants, which are to help during high demand.
In the future, which again, is what we are talking about when we are talking about the Paris Accords, gas will serve as a backup source for extended wind droughts.
However, we will need to provide some subsidies to keep these gas plants around, because within a decade it will not be economical to operate them unless markets are redesigned to properly compensate combined cycle gas turbines that operate at <25% capacity factor.
So much opportunity wasted considering China would do more if the US also did more.
I highly doubt that. As others have said, China has no plans to reduce pollution until 2030 (negotiated at the accord) and is currently increasing their polluting infrastructure.
Building forty nuclear power plants - which is what China is doing - won’t reduce pollution?
I understand they are still producing coal plants. So the nuclear plants might reduce their trajectory, but overall pollution will still be up if they are producing more coal plants. Hopefully those nuclear plants will be FAST reactors or there could be concerns around the waste management or poor building practices causing pollution too.
Chinese Co2 emission seem to have flattened quite a lot in the last 6 years.
What gives you that belief?
They have linked economies. What China makes for US
they also use a version of that internally. So if US goes all electric car, China would follow suit, etc.
China is able to look at the rest of the world and see trends and where they want to be. Most oil people who really look see that electric cars will have a place in the future world (as oil people they want to minimize it, but they are forced to admit there is a place for it). China doesn't have the built up oil infrastructure that the rest of the world has, and is seeing the affects of pollution in their cities. Thus it makes sense for China to adopt electric cars faster than the rest of the world: if you don't have infrastructure in place it is easier to justify building electric over oil, as opposed to US/Europe which needs to justify replacing otherwise working find oil infrastructure. If you can't be confident that you can fill your gas car on a long trip anyway you are going to prefer a gas car for those rare long trips, and so lack of charging infrastructure doesn't mean as much. This of course means more demand for electric car charging stations over gas stations and the effect can snowball into gas not being viable to use for long trips in China.
The above is speculation of course. It seems reasonable, but only time will tell.
So Tesla is being built in China? That's not what I've heard. In fact Tesla has shipped cars _to_ China. Just look at the recent recall. China has their own versions of electric cars (see NIO as an example).
> So Tesla is being built in China?
Non-sequitur. I never said about things US internally makes. Also Tesla makes like 1% of all US cars?
But a lot of US imports are from China. And if a large part of those imports became "green", I doubt Chinese authorities would build non-green infra just to spite Americans and/or the World.
You specifically mentioned electric cars in the US, of which Tesla is the largest producer. So this is a valid assumption to make. Do you have any information that would suggest a change in this model, such as GM or Ford sourcing their motors or batteries from China?
What examples do you have of green tech exported from China that has found widespread adoption in China?
> You specifically mentioned electric cars in the US, of which Tesla is the largest producer
I said "So if US goes all electric car, China would follow suit, etc."
I didn't say if a single company in US goes electric car, China would follow suit.
I quantified it as "all/most" not "exists".
> What examples do you have of green tech exported from China that has found widespread adoption in China?
Not green tech specifically, but most tech exported from China is also present locally in China.
"What China makes for US they also use a version of that internally."
You are implying that China would be producing the cars, or at least the primary components. But you have provided no support for this. Current production and sourcing partnerships show no evidence to support your implication. Even ICE vehicles in the US overwhelmingly have the engine and transmission built in countries other than China, with a large number being built in the US, Canada, and Mexico.
> You are implying that China would be producing the cars, or at least the primary components.
They already are.
Just because US doesn't buy all components from China doesn't mean that China won't develop those components for other markets or its internal use.
But electric cars are at the moment a minority in China, if US went all-in on electric cars (an assuming no tariff war with China), that would kickstart mass conversion of car manufacturing process to electric.
>Even ICE vehicles in the US overwhelmingly have the engine and transmission built in countries other than China,
ICE != EV
Yeah, because perfecting ICE takes decades of investment. Compared to them EV are easy and China already knows how to make them. Hell, they have entire logistic lines worked out for electrical motors.
https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2020/01/02/ch...
Erm, yes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Shanghai
Thanks, I didn't see that. I had only heard of the cars being shipped over (in the recent recall).
Can it enter back????????
This is a sad day in history.
I'm not a trump supporter or right wing or a climate denier. But the Paris agreement is shit. Its a non binding "accord" to do nothing and hope that the problem goes away. The pretense that it matters or will make a difference (let alone actually solve the issue) activey prevents progress.
While it is important to be good stewards and not pollute etc, I don't think we are competent to solve climate issues as a whole, when we can't trust each other to keep our word, and especially when we have rejected the specific advice of the planet's Creator. I have put reasons I think this, and why I know some of these things, in some depth, at my simple site:
http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html
-- for what it's worth.
(thoughtful comments appreciated with any votes)
Gone through the article. almost all countries are trying to avoid climate indication.
Excellent!
Down with that globalist bullshit.
Good since, the Paris Climate accord is about taking resources from white people and giving it to brown people and not the climate.
Any serious climate plan shall contain 100% push for nuclear power to be credible.
Without China (which is a part of the accord, but doesn't have to cut its emissions until 2030, a loophole they're actively using to build insane numbers of coal power plants - whatever their CO2 emissions are in 2030 becomes their "baseline" from which to reduce) this was pretty pointless anyway. Whoever negotiated PCA should not be allowed to negotiate whatever comes after it, because they suck at negotiations.
https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insan...
Why do people want to believe so strongly that China is working so hard to destroy everything they’ve worked so hard to achieve.
Maybe they actually do want to reduce pollution ?
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I don’t know if “Wired” would know the full story either. China a pretty difficult place to get information in and out of ?
You don't build coal fired power plants if your goal is to reduce pollution.
You don’t build 40 nuclear power plants if your goal isn’t to reduce pollution.
Traditionally you built 40 nuclear power plants if you wanted plutonium for your atomic bombs.
You do. Absent onerous Western regulations nuclear power is economically viable, especially if you don't build a custom design for every plant, and build a lot of them.
Didn't China also said they expect their CO2 emmision to peak in 2022, 8 years before their goal of 2030 from the Paris accord.
Then go for carbon neutral in 2060.
Src:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-carbon-idUSKCN1VQ1K...
Wouldn't be surprising considering the per capita has mostly leveled off since 2011
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...