Comment Re:who cares? (Score 1) 238
If it had absolute zero leakage, it would be half as bad as coal. Which is still too bad.
If it had absolute zero leakage, it would be half as bad as coal. Which is still too bad.
Well said that "When the speak of 'climate adaptation', they mean for the rich. The poor just 'adapt' by suffering and dying."
Well, of course, the military, to whom all cash flows, will be the richest adapters of all, with gold-plated adaptation.
Absolutely the only government function where they measure the budget by asking how much society can stand, given the size of the economy. Every other one measures the need, and spends only on well-proven needs.
CH4
MIT researchers did a model in 2016 that showed using methane for energy did as much global warming damage as using coal, if the total leakage were 4%:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co...
The industry promptly claimed 0.25%, of course, but studies like this one have come in closer to 2.5%:
https://nymag.com/intelligence...
A more-digestible take on the article came from NY Mag: https://nymag.com/intelligence...
Other studies have indicated the number 2.5% for leakage. 7.5 sounds pretty high! But even at 2.5%, then use of Nat. Gas is 80% as bad as coal.
I scanned the page for the word "dollar" and nobody seems to have gone there, so to point out the obvious:
* Concrete runs over $200/cu.m. so 45 cu.m. is $9000.
* Alas, "concrete" is about 25% "cement" and 75% "rocks", and rocks aren't much of the $200.
* If you were to make cubic metres of pure cement, with no aggregate (nobody in construction does) then the 45cu.m. would probably run you $35,000
* Whatever turns it into a battery would add to that, in manufacture cost if not materials, so it's hard to cost this thing out under $40,000 for 10kWh, or $4000/kWh.
It's about the most-expensive battery proposed, and using pure cement as your basement and walls - if it can dual-task as structure - would only defray 25% of the cost, because you're replacing "concrete" with "cement".
My retirement speech from a career in Waterworks got a huge round of applause. People love being told they save lives every day. And we do.
"The Case for Climate Engineering", by Keith, is a short, digestible read on the ups and downs of spraying sulfur into the stratosphere. Frankly, it's very compelling that we already are experimenting with climate engineering - the ship fuels were an experiment to apply them, another to remove the sulfur.
Pretending that "climate engineering" is not just *another* experiment, like every single tonne of CO2 is already an experiment, is just silly.
Oh, and I got that from a speaker on David Roberts "Volts" podcast, at volts.wtf.
David has been instrumental in improving my mental health about the future prospects; he slums into politics, but the real focus is on the engineers and inventors who are in the thick of the R&D fight.
The binary thinking here ("doomed" or "saved") is the worst. It's a spectrum. We are already very much on-track to prevent 4C, which is, as the man said, "incompatible with organized civilization", so three cheers for that. The IRA and responses to it from Europe and Asia will surely hold it below 3C, which would be really bad. We have a great shot, if we work at it, of staying below 2.5C and many are thinking 2.2C. Those levels are considered compatible with continued economic activity that will make the race richer and more-able to cope further.
The only real "tipping point" is economic: consequences so bad that the race becomes poorer and poorer through crop failure, loss of manufacturing cities, endless disruption of supply chains. We can avoid that tipping point.
It's a spectrum, and like the income spectrum, we should fight for every inch we can rise up in it. Just because "getting really rich" has been ruled out, "getting comfortable" is still within reach.
Another detail remembered: my VIC was $520 (canada) that is, $400 plus $120 for a tape recorder that was like a very slow floppy drive, and not random-access; basically, you stored one program per tape, so that you didn't have to type it in every time. (Think about that, a second).
My brother was doing traffic engineering as a work-from-home job to put himself through law school, and we concluded that a Commodore 64 could handle the job, $400 plus I think $200 for the one floppy - and the 64K memory meant only three swaps to copy! And an old B&W TV.
That was computing in the early 80s - people think that the IBM PC just came in 1980 and took over the office, but that was only in places with big budgets. $3K with a monitor and two floppies, which was then a month's salary for a professional engineer. I saw my first one in 1983, which was when most offices with, say, 1000 desks, got their first two or three IBM PCs for engineers. (Accounting and "office" computing was all on the mainframe until 1990ish)
I never saw an Apple ][ in that era, outside of a store display. Couldn't afford anything as a student, before 1980, didn't know any university students (and I was in engineering) with a computer. Our proud possessions were programmable calculators. I even had a TI-59 that took magnetic cards, and plugged into a printer. These were in the low hundreds, as was the VIC-20 I got after graduation, and ran with an old TV because a monitor was out of the question.
An Apple ][ with two floppies - so that you did not have to exchange master and copy floppies five times to copy one - and the minimal 16K of ram was about $2000. Note that my first car, a 2-year-old Honda Civic, was $4000.
I was the most-computerized-guy in my circle of engineers, with my VIC-20, and some experience on a TRS-80 (more like $800+) bought by a rich guy I knew. A small business paid me to do their client list on their TRS-80, too: a small business wouldn't splurge on the twice-the-price Apple if the list could be printed on an $800 machine with a $400 printer.
Note that your little computer lived in a box, no contact with the Earth, unless you spent another $400 on a printer (Price of a movie: $3.50; record album $6) because computers had zero communications. So businesses looking at Apple just saw higher prices for printers, monitors, a separate cost for the connection to a TV, whereas Commodore automatically output to TV. So we used TV, though that meant only 40 char/line.
Later on, gamer friends splurged on an Atari 400, again half the price of Apple. Never did see an Apple ][ in my circle. Apple has never, ever been price-competitive.
I think the original show had the world ending in 2010? The lack of distributed power is already looking like an alternate timeline.
If you bumped it even to 2025, there would just be a lot of cabins out there with power and water. "Alexandria" would have a power co-op. The show got around the problem of gasoline getting thicker and the engine unreliable after a year or so in a car's tank, by just ignoring it. But in 2025, there will be a lot of cars you can "refuel" at home, if slowly.
If they keep extending out that world with stories shown in the late 2020s, there will be a lot of viewers pitying them for having only the 2010 world to build upon. How do a few amateurs with operator's manuals get a gigawatt gas plant on again? After they get the whole gas-delivery infrastructure running, that is.
Shout on, guys. And on. We can afford to be magnanimous, welcome to the platform.
We aren't just at 60% of the population in America (higher everywhere else) in the "Alarmed"(34%) or "Concerned" (26%) about the issue, but those numbers are shifting at a percent-per-year, each. Every year with "unprecedented" heat waves (like this year) and "unprecedented" forest losses (like this year).
The guys who really run the world are putting tens of billions of *private* money into sun/wind/transmission/battery projects. Maybe they believe themselves, or they may just be serving the market that they are certain will be huge by the time they finish.
You've lost. The money and effort are being redirected. Here's the fun part: It no longer matters whether the climate theories you dispute are true. Produce all the evidence that they are untrue, that you want! It won't matter. This public opinion shift has been a long, long time coming, it has enormous sociological inertia, and it will continue absolutely no matter what proofs you bring forward in media that only 20% of the population pay any attention to.
Unlike so many other issues: "Are Black people just lazy and deservedly poor?" or "Do tax cuts increase revenues?", this one is not confined to people who read complex analyses: it's the weather reports. The one bit of news everybody pays some attention to.
We non-deniers know this painfully, humiliatingly well: WE spent decades screaming at all those forums, in media, town halls, Congressional testimony, sage reports from Universities, and got diddly-squat, because public opinion isn't much shifted by those things - not about bread&butter jobs issues, at least. We know how little good you can do, trying to shift opinions with slashdot posts and letters to editors.
But giant, multi-week "weather" stories every year, about one per continent on average at this point, got attention from people who read no news. Now that this has sunk in, you can't un-sink it with any mere media campaign. Your oil industry PR friends are putting hundreds of millions into their campaign, with no opinion shift.
But, hey: be of good cheer: if you guys really are right, then "natural variation in weather" will include an end to the southern drought, an end to fire seasons when the forest gets hydrated again, an end to all these heat waves, some cool summers to balance out the odds.
IF, by 2033, the "weather" averages have re-established themselves because we finally got years as cool as recent ones have been hot, that will change opinion back. Public opinion will swing back AFTER many cool summers with few fires, few floods; people will forget, and you'll get oil back.
So, IF you are right, your eventual, final victory is inevitable!
IF.
$1.5B is just 40,000 tonnes. The recently found 1.6M tonnes in Alberta, in lithium carbonate brines. Alberta is already messed up by 4.2M oil wells, and just re-elected a Conservative government that was happily bribed to let the oil companies out of well-remediation. Since they're already screwed by oil, the lithium wells won't do much more damage, and Alberta seems to actually like it.
I killed time every morning in the pandemic with a blog (at brander.ca - easily seen on main page) where my theme was the "COVID Cup" to be awarded to the nation with the lowest deaths/million. (After filtering for liars like China and India.)
Vietnam and Cuba being communist, I didn't know whether to trust, though both nations have been very open and cooperative on UN Health measures. But I grew to trust that they'd simply had really good lockdowns, (the one public service that tyranny can provide...Cuban families were, ah, escorted to hotels if one person tested positive, so that they couldn't go see neighbours or family - I think Vietnam was almost as harsh.)
Both nations simply claimed no deaths to mention until Omicron blew through them. Both were vaccinating frantically by that point, and both shut down the Omicron wave in weeks, got off with some of the lowest death-rates of the event, like a third of Canada's, a tenth the USA.
A whole lot of socialists have admitted to its flaws, over the years. It's maybe time for we capitalists to learn from their few(?) virtues.
User hostile.
