It was in my school text book in the 80s. My conclusion, back then: nuclear power was the obvious answer. Of course sensible people were going go to solve this, since the technology was available...
That's how I felt about this as a politically native teenager in 1988, 2 years after Chernobyl, in Sweden which got a pretty large portion of the fallout. We couldn't eat moose meat for a few years, but we survived anyway, somehow.
I had given up on people accepting nuclear power, but now it's finally getting really, really popular.
I can't believe how many people are still out there cheerleading nuclear power after watching what's happening in Ukraine.
Nuclear power is great until you have a large-scale conflict in the vicinity of one of your plants. Then, one stray missile and you've got an enormous nuclear disaster on your hands.
Renewables are much worse. Large scale disasters wikke make Chernobyl look like a joke and the brittleness of a long range transmission dependent solar/wind geoid woud have cast all of Europe into darkness.
Obvious things are often wrong. There is insufficient uranium 235 to run the world and closed fuel cycles are even more expensive than PWRs that don't catch fire or shut down constantly due to corrosion.
Wind was available and proven viable (albeit slightly more expensive in the first prototype than coal with no emissions controls) before the first fission reactor. The first practical (albeit misunderstood) PV array was 1906. A fraction of the investment put renewables further down the learning curve than nuclear.
If these myths about nuclear were true, then china would not be building a single gas or coal plant right now. They have all the ingredients present in the US mythical golden age. Uranium mined by enslaved indigenous people and colonised foreigners with no safety, a government capable of steamrolling any opposition, a massive highly experienced and underpaid construction workforce, many recently built reactors, no environmental regulation, pressure and funding from military interests for plutonium. And yet they are constructing more coal than nuclear and an order of magnitude more renewables than both combined. Why?
> I had given up on people accepting nuclear power, but now it's finally getting really, really popular
You're confusing your own shilling in an echo chamber for popularity. Just because the industry is astroturfing like crazy and now has the backing of the fossil fuel industry's propaganda machine doesn't make it popular.
We wouldn't have acted. Even if we knew. We're doing nothing now. Not really. The average person has greater CO² emission than at any other time in history, and that's with far more efficient products (light bulbs, engines etc).
Yup. Even the folks I know who regularly post about the dangers of climate change still make frequent use of commercial flight to take unnecessary trips, usually vacations. If Exxon had published their findings in the 70's, the only thing it would have gotten us is a few more decades of hand-wringing and empty virtue signaling.
> It’s a distraction to ask people to change when we don’t force industry to change.
It's not. Having folks like Bernie Sanders or AOC telling us that we're all going to die unless we drastically cut our emissions is not very convincing when they themselves are gleefully hoping on a commercial jet 2 or more times a week. It's hard for people to take something seriously when the very people sounding the alarm aren't willing to make even the most basic sacrifices.
So you're correct that we can't meaningfully reduce emissions unless we force industry to change, but we're also not going to have much success advocating for those kinds of laws unless people are the top are willing to show a basic level of moral courage and leadership.
You’re right that for a large swath of private jet owners, their use of the private jet vastly outweighs the benefits of what they do with that jet. (Like an extreme example of an exception being someone like Al Gore)
Global aviation (including domestic and international; passenger and freight) accounts for 2.5% of CO2 emissions and 3.5% of ‘effective radiative forcing’ (a closer measure of its impact on warming) [1].
which is low but NOT not "a rounding error" in the global context.
The main reasons to look at aviation are that much of it slips through the fingers a it is "international" and not specific to single countries AND that the impact of aviation is rapidly increasing (albeit relatively stable against the qually rapid per capia overall emissions growth).
How we consume and how we consume per capita are the big picture questions to be addressed, both population numbers and per capita emissions are growing.
That said I think many agree that the old "why should I do anything when all these people are flying .." is a tedious lazy arguement.
I absolutely 100% agree with you - both coal* AND aviation contribute to the climate problem so let's talk about both.
Check the IPCC reports, the margins of change require we address both, we are serious here after all and not simply hoping to greenwish inadequate changes magically solve everything.
> That said I think many agree that the old "why should I do anything when all these people are flying .." is a tedious lazy arguement.
It's not an argument against doing anything - we should definitely take action, but that's just not going to happen on a meaningful scale until it's too late. And that's because it's next to impossible to persuade people to make sacrifices when the person(s) asking/telling are themselves unwilling to make said sacrifices.
Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park was named after George Bird Grinnell, who wrote in 1926 on his last visit:
>...the glacier is melting very fast and the amount of water coming from it is great. All these glaciers are receding rapidly and after a time will disappear.
The Smith-Putnam turbine was 1941 or if you needed some vocational school students to show you how to bring costs down and set the modern form factor tvindkraft was 1975, and a Shippingport worth of research would have moved solar about three decades down the learning curve, either starting from 1953 or the george cove array from 1906 if enough people had cared to pay attention to the concept in the ensuing 6 decades.
The ideal action at the time would have been a massive investment in public transport and serious adoption of smaller cars rather than starting a trending weight and height arms race in the SUV | truck class.
That, coupled with the USofA leading the world in setting an example of reduced consumption would have had a large impact and given us today more breathing room and time to deploy better solutions.
Instead the action of the time was by the only people to really really take the forecasts seriously - the Koch brothers and other big oil investors.
Their coordinated actions amounted to sinking each and every public transport project no matter how small, to relentlessly promote Car==Freedom ! Individualism ! and every other PR notion of the think tanks to increase oil consumption and profits.
Not to mention funding decades of anti-AGW denial and downplaying.
Which explains a certain cynicism toward free market capitalists.
We really didn't have the technology back then to substitute green energy for fossil fuels. Now we do and prices have come down a lot and will continue to do so. Fifteen years from now climate change will be like the ozone hole today.
Just one example, ten years ago solar panels were only financially viable (and needed subsidies at that) in the hottest places and low latitudes. Now Norway is putting up solar panels north of 60 degrees. The panels are more efficient but the primary factor is that the price has come way down.
We did, however, have the capability to implement walkable cities with decent public transport. Not every city had to have an interstate running down the middle of it.
The smith-putnam turbine was 1941, and at any time since 1953 (or possibly 1906) one shippingport worth of investment into solar would have kick started the pv industry, learning curves are a pretty consistent thing.
Zinc Bromide batteries are still competitive today, nickel iron aren't far off. Pumped hydro is centuries old.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 78.0 ms ] threadThat's how I felt about this as a politically native teenager in 1988, 2 years after Chernobyl, in Sweden which got a pretty large portion of the fallout. We couldn't eat moose meat for a few years, but we survived anyway, somehow.
I had given up on people accepting nuclear power, but now it's finally getting really, really popular.
That'll flatten the curve on climate change, we'll finally be able to build nuclear power, and we'll solve world hunger.
Nuclear power is great until you have a large-scale conflict in the vicinity of one of your plants. Then, one stray missile and you've got an enormous nuclear disaster on your hands.
Wind was available and proven viable (albeit slightly more expensive in the first prototype than coal with no emissions controls) before the first fission reactor. The first practical (albeit misunderstood) PV array was 1906. A fraction of the investment put renewables further down the learning curve than nuclear.
If these myths about nuclear were true, then china would not be building a single gas or coal plant right now. They have all the ingredients present in the US mythical golden age. Uranium mined by enslaved indigenous people and colonised foreigners with no safety, a government capable of steamrolling any opposition, a massive highly experienced and underpaid construction workforce, many recently built reactors, no environmental regulation, pressure and funding from military interests for plutonium. And yet they are constructing more coal than nuclear and an order of magnitude more renewables than both combined. Why?
> I had given up on people accepting nuclear power, but now it's finally getting really, really popular
You're confusing your own shilling in an echo chamber for popularity. Just because the industry is astroturfing like crazy and now has the backing of the fossil fuel industry's propaganda machine doesn't make it popular.
If we acted then we would be talking about getting to net zero by 2125, instead of 2050, in order to prevent major climate change.
Instead, it’s already too late to prevent 1.5C.
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/23/no-chance-of...
Yup. Even the folks I know who regularly post about the dangers of climate change still make frequent use of commercial flight to take unnecessary trips, usually vacations. If Exxon had published their findings in the 70's, the only thing it would have gotten us is a few more decades of hand-wringing and empty virtue signaling.
It's not. Having folks like Bernie Sanders or AOC telling us that we're all going to die unless we drastically cut our emissions is not very convincing when they themselves are gleefully hoping on a commercial jet 2 or more times a week. It's hard for people to take something seriously when the very people sounding the alarm aren't willing to make even the most basic sacrifices.
So you're correct that we can't meaningfully reduce emissions unless we force industry to change, but we're also not going to have much success advocating for those kinds of laws unless people are the top are willing to show a basic level of moral courage and leadership.
one year of coal power plants is about 10 years of all aviation
The main reasons to look at aviation are that much of it slips through the fingers a it is "international" and not specific to single countries AND that the impact of aviation is rapidly increasing (albeit relatively stable against the qually rapid per capia overall emissions growth).
How we consume and how we consume per capita are the big picture questions to be addressed, both population numbers and per capita emissions are growing.
That said I think many agree that the old "why should I do anything when all these people are flying .." is a tedious lazy arguement.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation
If we made it go away 50 years ago, …
But hey, let’s keep talking about aviation
Check the IPCC reports, the margins of change require we address both, we are serious here after all and not simply hoping to greenwish inadequate changes magically solve everything.
It's not an argument against doing anything - we should definitely take action, but that's just not going to happen on a meaningful scale until it's too late. And that's because it's next to impossible to persuade people to make sacrifices when the person(s) asking/telling are themselves unwilling to make said sacrifices.
Low emission home heating= heatpump (air, ground, water)
Low emission ground travel= train, EV
Low emission flight= Zeppelin?
>...the glacier is melting very fast and the amount of water coming from it is great. All these glaciers are receding rapidly and after a time will disappear.
https://www.hikinginglacier.com/grinnell-glacier-overlook.ht...
Would have been amazing for humanity.
That, coupled with the USofA leading the world in setting an example of reduced consumption would have had a large impact and given us today more breathing room and time to deploy better solutions.
Instead the action of the time was by the only people to really really take the forecasts seriously - the Koch brothers and other big oil investors.
Their coordinated actions amounted to sinking each and every public transport project no matter how small, to relentlessly promote Car==Freedom ! Individualism ! and every other PR notion of the think tanks to increase oil consumption and profits.
Not to mention funding decades of anti-AGW denial and downplaying.
Which explains a certain cynicism toward free market capitalists.
Just one example, ten years ago solar panels were only financially viable (and needed subsidies at that) in the hottest places and low latitudes. Now Norway is putting up solar panels north of 60 degrees. The panels are more efficient but the primary factor is that the price has come way down.
Zinc Bromide batteries are still competitive today, nickel iron aren't far off. Pumped hydro is centuries old.