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Monday, 5 October 2020
quote [ Exxon Mobil Corp. has been planning to increase annual carbon-dioxide emissions by as much as the output of the entire nation of Greece, an analysis of internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg shows, setting one of the largest corporate emitters against international efforts to slow the pace of warming. ]
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donnie said @ 10:17am GMT on 7th October
Nuclear can only displace base load and takes years to commission. Hydro isn't available everywhere. Solar and wind need grid storage technology to improve. Change takes time.
donnie said @ 10:28am GMT on 7th October
Nuclear can only displace base load and takes years to commission. Hydro isn't available everywhere. Solar and wind need grid storage technology to improve. Besides, less than a third of CO2 comes from energy generation - most of it is light and heavy duty transport, air, agriculture, residential heating, etc.
Change takes time. It also takes replacing a huge amount of infrastructure. Throwing out old gas-burning cars, diesel-burning trucks, diesel-burning farm equipment, natural gas furnaces, busses, boilers, smelters, industrial ovens, etc. That's a staggering quantity of capital goods.
Replacing much of it while it still has useful life can actually be carbon negative because you have to manufacture a whole new "green" piece of equipment to replace the non-green one. If the non-green one could have run another eight years making less CO2 than it would take to manufacture a new green one, then it can really make sense to keep using the non-green one and push off manufacturing the green alternative to later - later, when the CO2 footprint of manufacturing the green alternative has become smaller.
The world is a deeply complex place, and most of it is not intuitive. It's easy to sit and point and proclaim that things should be better, or could be better, but I've yet to hear anyone with a real workable plan to make things move any faster than they already are (short of requiring an authoritarian takeover to force the change through faster... that's fine, if that's what you're proposing, but we should at least be aware that that's what we're talking about).
<-- Entry / Current Comment
donnie said @ 10:17am GMT on 7th October [Score:-1 Boring]
Nuclear can only displace base load and takes years to commission. Hydro isn't available everywhere. Solar and wind need grid storage technology to improve. Besides, less than a third of CO2 comes from energy generation - most of it is light and heavy duty transport, air, agriculture, residential heating, etc.
Change takes time. It also takes replacing a huge amount of infrastructure. Throwing out old gas-burning cars, diesel-burning trucks, diesel-burning farm equipment, natural gas furnaces, busses, boilers, smelters, industrial ovens, etc. That's a staggering quantity of capital goods.
Replacing much of it while it still has useful life can actually be carbon negative because you have to manufacture a whole new "green" piece of equipment to replace the non-green one. If the non-green one could have run another eight years making less CO2 than it would take to manufacture a new green one, then it can really make sense to keep using the non-green one and push off manufacturing the green alternative to later - later, when the CO2 footprint of manufacturing the green alternative has become smaller.
The world is a deeply complex place, and most of it is not intuitive. It's easy to sit and point and proclaim that things should be better, or could be better, but I've yet to hear anyone with a real workable plan to make things move any faster than they already are (short of requiring an authoritarian takeover to force the change through faster... that's fine, if that's what you're proposing, but we should at least be aware that that's what we're talking about).
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