G7 Nations Promise Decarbonization, 870 Million Covid-19 Vaccines (politico.com) 95
Slashdot reader Charlotte Web writes: The "Group of Seven" (or G7) nations are some of the world's largest economies — the U.S. and Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy, and Japan. On Sunday they pledged $2 billion to help developing countries pivot away from fossil fuels and pledged an "overwhelmingly decarbonized" electricity sector by 2030. The New York Times calls these "major steps in what leaders hope will be a global transition to wind, solar and other energy that does not produce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions."
Politico's Ryan Heath argues "The language on a 'green revolution' is quite strong — there's plenty of detail missing, but it gives climate campaigners a lot to hit leaders with if they fail to deliver. And it's a big deal for the G-7 to agree to 'to conserve or protect at least 30 percent of our land and oceans by 2030.'"
Other reports from Politico's writers:
Politico's Ryan Heath argues "The language on a 'green revolution' is quite strong — there's plenty of detail missing, but it gives climate campaigners a lot to hit leaders with if they fail to deliver. And it's a big deal for the G-7 to agree to 'to conserve or protect at least 30 percent of our land and oceans by 2030.'"
Other reports from Politico's writers:
- "Boris Johnson admitted that the world's richest economies had not managed to secure a widely advertised 1 billion vaccine doses to send to developing countries. The final communique says the group will deliver 870 million doses over the next year."
- "The G-7 nations called for a 'timely, transparent, expert-led, and science-based WHO-convened' investigation into the origins of Covid-19, including in China. WHO's first crack at an investigation — released in March — called a lab leak 'extremely unlikely,' but China didn't grant access to key documents and Secretary of State Antony Blinken called that investigation 'highly deficient' this morning. The U.S. government remains split between two origin theories."
Re:Good (Score:4, Funny)
Yes that's right .. too much carbon can make you black. Avoid soy sauce too. Never eat steak well done.
Re: (Score:2)
"We only eat American food here. That's french fries and hamburgers"
(quote from the movie Gutterbee)
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Never eat steak well done.
Too late for someone who eats their steak well done with ketchup [yahoo.com].
Lets Be Real (Score:5, Insightful)
And if the G7 really cared about carbon emissions, they'd call out China and do a global boycott of their manufacturing. Alas, ever single one of those other first-world nations are so dependent on China, they can't risk recognizing Taiwan as independent or else they'll lose trade with China.
This is politicians having an expensive weekend together, which cost carbon for everyone's travel, lodging, and work, including the support staff, security, and the reporters covering it.
What a bunch of hypocrites.
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You must be new to the planet.
Re: Lets Be Real (Score:2)
Re: Lets Be Real (Score:4, Insightful)
Blowing some mod points but...
Every year, we burn literally hundreds of thousands of years of fossil fuel.
That's the problem.
And it's also why growing trees is a drop in the bucket.
After plants randomly mutated to produce lignon, nothing could break it down for 70 million years. That's where most of the coal comes from. 70 million years of non rotting plants that just kept piling up on each other.
Unless we get down to 1 year's worth of coal from from fossil fuels, all the young folks are screwed. It's likely to be really bad sooner than people think. As in 5C, and huge areas become uninhabitable because the wet-bulb temperature is 35c or above because the human body isn't able to cool off and people just die.
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Yes, billions of people are dying in India today where the wet-bulb temperature is consistently greater than 35c. Wait, no they're not.
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per USNW/Sydney https://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/ [unsw.edu.au]
"The highest values in the world are about 30-31C, during the worst heat/humidity events in India, the Amazon, and a few other very humid places."
Looks like you got hold of some bad information.
Folks may find this site helpful:
https://sustainabilitymath.org... [sustainabilitymath.org]
It has a global map of current wet bulb temperatures as well as an explanation of what the wet bulb term means ( but it's basically: the measured temperature with a damp cloth on the thermometer bulb / senso
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Re:Lets Be Real (Score:5, Informative)
Except there are super cheap EVs coming onstream now. Examples: China: Wuling Hong Guang Mini EV https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
India: Mahindra EV: https://www.mahindraelectric.c... [mahindraelectric.com]
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Except for developing countries:
Hope you kind of get the point now...
Re:Lets Be Real (Score:5, Interesting)
You need an EV to build the infrastructure and economy necessary to get clean water and indoor plumbing. If you can't get to a workplace how are you supposed to get clean water or buy plumbing fixtures? I don't see you buying anyone plumbing or helping anyone, they have to do it themselves because of keyboard warrior assholes like you. Transportation is key to addressing poverty.
Re:Lets Be Real (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't mention Tesla, I said that electric cars were getting cheap. In fact, I gave non-Tesla examples. I also pointed out that you can't get someone clean water sustainably without making sure they have a means of transportation. A shared electric car can easily transport villagers to a workplace or allow them to get to places. Transportation is important. What's your plan to get them clean water, other than depriving them of EVs? So with your proposal they will not get sustained clean water, they won't get a job. They won't get anything. Who is going to build them water infrastructure without transportation?
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I didn't mention Tesla, I said that electric cars were getting cheap. In fact, I gave non-Tesla examples. I also pointed out that you can't get someone clean water sustainably without making sure they have a means of transportation.
Since when does clean water, require an EV?
Just because you pointed this out, doesn't make it true. And priorities matter. If clean water is a struggle, I would imagine clean sustainable power, probably is too.
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OK present your plan, comrade.
Re:Lets Be Real (Score:5, Informative)
It's not impossible to do both at the same time. Look at India.
% of population with access to a toilet
2001 - 46.4%
2011 - 68.9%
2018 - 97.2%
Meanwhile India has also developed a profitable space programme and automotive industry. Industry is complementary to the other efforts, it generates tax revenue and provides jobs.
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They had a problem, they decided to fix it. India has a successful space programme, they can engineer toilets and sewage.
Although to be fair I think a lot of it was paid for by aid money and supervised by charities.
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They had a problem, they decided to fix it. India has a successful space programme, they can engineer toilets and sewage.
Although to be fair I think a lot of it was paid for by aid money and supervised by charities.
To be fair, all those charities appear to care FAR more about a space program, than providing funding for toilets and sewage.
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...Transportation is key to addressing poverty.
A car in every pot? How tasty are they?
(Hint: You're a fucking moron. Cars didn't exist for thousands of years since humans have been surviving poverty.)
Re: Lets Be Real (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Mahindra needs to make an electric roxor UTV. They could sell umpty-infinite units. EVs are going to fully dominate rock crawling.
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Re:Lets Be Real (Score:4, Insightful)
"Developing countries" pivoting from oil is absurd when they still have basic things like getting indoor plumbing and clean water into every home.
On the contrary, distributed solar power and EVs work well in developing countries because they can avoid centralized corruption.
Re:Lets Be Real (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, you aren't going to get an African family who have owned a 1940s truck from new, maintain it themselves, and run their family haulage business using it, to give that truck up for anything less than a free replacement thats easily maintainable or has free maintenance included.
The 1940s truck in my example is by now a hybrid thats had its engine replaced two or three times, uses a different companies breaks, probably has gone through several dozen transmissions in its days etc etc etc but, and this is the most important thing, is still running and can 99% of the time be repaired at most large villages and small towns. It might not be a repair out of the manufacturers handbook, but it will get the vehicle running again - the repair shop typically isnt going to be one you would look at with any confidence, but its going to have an inspection pit, electricity, a welder and some other power tools, and a heap of refurbished parts just waiting to be adapted to your vehicle.
And this is the norm. Vehicles which would have been considered end of life decades ago in the US or Europe will be lovingly cared for as the main money maker for a family in most African nations. These people work *hard* for their income, and they do it with things they either repair themselves or otherwise go hungry.
EVs are great for developed nations, but as one of the other posters said, its going to take a loooong time for it to be something Africans in general can think about - ICE, for all its issues, is cheap and easy to repair (so long as you arent using a modern vehicle, which these peeps arent) in the field.
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The problem is, you aren't going to get an African family who have owned a 1940s truck from new, maintain it themselves, and run their family haulage business using it, to give that truck up for anything less than a free replacement thats easily maintainable or has free maintenance included.
That's not really a problem. The emissions from a small number of trucks will be low, it's when every member of that family wants their own SUV, the same as families in certain developed nations, that we have a problem.
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The problem is, you aren't going to get an African family who have owned a 1940s truck from new, maintain it themselves, and run their family haulage business using it, to give that truck up for anything less than a free replacement thats easily maintainable or has free maintenance included.
Actual African hauling company: https://asasgrouptz.com/transp... [asasgrouptz.com]
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Congratulations, you found a successful haulage company on the internet - now go spend a month in Uganda, Rwanda, Congo etc and see what is predominantly on the roads there - your haulage company with shiny modern trucks is not the norm.
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I'm sure they have people who do drugs. They just don't live very long because they don't have a welfare state army devoted to their care.
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Yeah, my friend *literally* went to Afghanistan and is oberving exactly that. People there *sell* drugs. They do not consume them the way we do. They don't grow poppy forany other reason than survival.
But, sure, if Mr. Armchair Expert on Slashdot says it's nonsense, that must be true. --.--
...says the one guy here with a *literally* friend.
Stop trying to ASS-U-ME. Both of you. We know how people survive when it comes to drugs. Everywhere on this planet.
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"Developing countries" pivoting from oil is absurd when they still have basic things like getting indoor plumbing and clean water into every home.
On the contrary, distributed solar power and EVs work well in developing countries because they can avoid centralized corruption.
Ever been to one of those countries where there is apparently no centralized corruption? Ever seen how aide is(n't) distributed?
FFS, it's like you've never heard of the concept of a dictator before.
Re:Lets Be Real (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there something about EVs that developing countries just can't handle? All I've heard is that they require less maintenance. If you're imagining it's an issue of upfront cost, that problem is rapidly disappearing. There are a lot of electrics now that aren't Tesla luxuries. Many are coming from China and India, but you don't see them in the US where people are conditioned to want a truck or a muscle car.
Ways to reduce China's global influence actually are being discussed [youtube.com] at the G7 summit. Infrastructure initiatives to counter China's Belt & Road influence program in poorer countries. They speak of it in terms of a "partnership" (as does China with their initiative). Maybe you'd rather have them go on Twitter and act like buffoons about it? Maybe that's what "calling out" means to you, but that's not what gets results. On the home front, G7 members are working to bring chip manufacturing back from China.
You can certainly make a case that they're not doing enough, or point out that they also use it as a photo op. But it's not like this is a trip to a golf course. Important things actually get discussed here, super boring important things that never reach your ears. (Some of them don't even have anything to do with China!) Skype meetings are great and everything, I'm all for remote working 3 days out of 5, but some things benefit from being discussed in person.
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I'm sure you know that though and are just trolling.
Re:Lets Be Real (Score:5, Informative)
EVs can work pretty well in the developing world. You don't think Tesla Plaid EV, do you? Think electric moped instead of a two stroke belching blue oil smoke.
Even more basic, cooking fires can be a big problem in the least developed nations or parts of nations. Reliable electricity, generated with renewables can solve a lot of problems in the developing world.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Electric mopeds are incredibly popular in China, you see them everywhere. It's a bit scary actually, they are silent and people drive them on the pavement. I saw one guy with a woman on the back of his. I guess his horn must have been broken because he had his phone mounted on the handlebars with a horn app he could tap on.
Re:Lets Be Real (Score:5, Interesting)
"Developing countries" pivoting from oil is absurd when they still have basic things like getting indoor plumbing and clean water into every home. They're decades away from driving EVs. .
I wouldn't bet on that. Take phone systems ... Most of Africa had a crap landline system. Everyone was saying something akin to you -- they are decades from a phone system, they don't even have plumbing, etc. Rather than fix or develop the landlines system, they just skipped it and went straight to cellular. Maybe something similar will happen with vehicles? Who knows?
Re:Lets Be Real (Score:4, Interesting)
They're decades away from driving EVs.
China is full of EVs. They are either 2-wheel, or many-wheeled (trains).
"A double garage on every home" does not work well when the typical home is in high-rise apartment tower.
China already has far more cars than the roads can possibly cope with. Their cities cannot possibly follow the 1950s western pattern of car-based suburbia.
Re:Lets Be Real (Score:4, Insightful)
"Developing countries" pivoting from oil is absurd when they still have basic things like getting indoor plumbing and clean water into every home. They're decades away from driving EVs.
Yeah, cos, like... personal transport is the only thing that needs fixing, right?
You've been listening to too much denialist propaganda.
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Developing countries aren't also starting by building telegraphs and inventing internet themselves. They piggyback of the development and R&D of developed nations. They are in no different positions than we are. There's no reason their future power projects can't be green. Just like India now has a nation wide standard of 10ppm sulfur in diesel.
You don't need to have a functional sewer to solve a problem completely unrelated to the functional sewer.
Re:Lets Be Real (Score:5, Insightful)
There's another school of thought to this - the same as developing countries skipped directly from no telephones to wireless mobile service, maybe they can skip the spewing of coal exhaust and fly ash and go directly to solar / wind / etc.
If there is no incumbent technology, adopting new technology has far less resistance.
Re:Origin Theory (Score:4, Funny)
Mediocre. You left out Bill Gates and 5G.
Re: (Score:2)
Gen III nuclear (Re:Things to invest in right now) (Score:5, Interesting)
The 1980s called, they want their fear mongering back.
The plant at Fukushima was built before Chernobyl. Had Japan kept building new nuclear power plants like they used to then those old dangerous reactors from the 1960s would have been retired. They were running a reactor built to last 30 years 15 years past its expiration date. Three Mile Island was also one of these second generation nuclear power plants from the 1960s to 1980s. Third generation nuclear power plants don't fail like those old reactors, if they fail at all.
Refurbished second generation nuclear power is almost as good as third generation nuclear. They have better containment structures. (Or simply have one at all. I'm looking at you, Chernobyl.) They have better backup power. Fukushima had reactors melt down because the batteries ran dead, the generators were flooded, and the power lines were washed out to sea. If they had a bigger battery pack, like one Tesla can build today, then perhaps we would not even know where Fukushima is today. The Hornsdale Power Reserve held up the grid long enough to start backup generators when a large, gigawatt scale, coal plant went off line suddenly. Put a few of them in Japan and all the old nuclear power plants in the nation just got a whole lot safer.
Nuclear power is the safest energy source in the world. In the USA, UK, France, Germany, and a few more nations it is safer yet. Because the Japanese government can't build proper protections to vital infrastructure from tsunamis and earthquakes we can't build nuclear power plants in Oklahoma or North Dakota? We build nuclear power plants in hot and dry Arizona, cold and wet Washington, and everywhere in between. Claims of water shortages causing nuclear power plants to reduce power is because of an engineering decision, not an inherent problem with nuclear power. Texas saw nuclear power plants shut down in a snow storm because their cooling pools were freezing, but in Washington the nuclear power plants operate in snow storms all the time. In fact their output increases as the temperature drops and demand increases. This is a solved problem, someone just needs to build things instead of complain about how hard things are.
Fourth generation nuclear power offers even more. Fourth generation nuclear power is in the future, third generation nuclear is something we can build today while we work out the engineering with fourth generation nuclear power. Third generation nuclear is something we can invest in right now. It's a technology that's been proven and improved upon for decades. It works, and it will work at least until fourth generation nuclear comes along to replace it.
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Fourth generation nuclear power offers even more.
Yeah, even more bullshit and buzzwords from the nuclear shill army.
Re: (Score:3)
You must own a nuclear plant for how much shilling you seem to do for them. Nuke plants are simply too expensive and end up costing double their proposed budgets. Watts Bar cost $12 billion dollars to complete and a lot of that was tax money.
Re:Things to invest in right now (Score:4, Informative)
Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are not remotely comparable.
Nor is Chernobyl remotely comparable with Fukushima Daiichi.
The RBMK reactor at Chernobyl was a graphite-moderated positive water-cooled positive void coefficient design. That design has an inherent thermal runaway failure mode. If it loses the water, or boils it all, the nuclear reaction continues, the plant goes into runaway, and explodes. That is exactly what happened at Chernobyl. To make matters worse, the Chernobyl plant had NO containment structure whatsoever.
The reactors at Three Mile Island are water-moderated water-cooled negative void coefficient designs. This design has no thermal runaway mode. If it loses the water, or boils too much of it, the nuclear reaction stops. It still has a heat problem, which will (and did) result in a meltdown, but the containment structure was designed to contain the meltdown.
And it did. It was literally YEARS after the failure at Three Mile Island before they actually confirmed that it had in fact melted down: they had to cut the containment structure open to look. Until they actually cut it open, they DID NOT KNOW that it had melted down. They thought it had, but they didn't know.
Positive void coefficient designs have always been illegal in the US, precisely because of the well-known thermal runaway failure mode. This was deliberate on the part of Teller et al, who wrote the original specifications and laws. They were not stupid. Positive void coefficient designs were legal in the USSR when Chernobyl was built. They were later outlawed, for the same reasons as they are outlawed everywhere else, but the Chernobyl plant was grandfathered.
Fukushima Daiichi was hit by the worst earthquake and tsunami seen in those parts in several centuries. There used to be a fair-sized town next to the plant. After the tsunami, there was quite literally NOTHING left standing, except for the nuclear plant structures. After the tsunami, the plant structures were immediately pressed into service as emergency shelters, for the people who managed to survive, by being inside the plant when it happened.
At best, conflating the three is ignorance. At worst, it is fear-mongering and demagoguery.
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Fukushima Daiichi was hit by the worst earthquake and tsunami seen in those parts in several centuries.
But not stronger than the one that led earlier Japanese to place stone markers saying "don't build below this point", below which Fukushima Daiichi was sited. They literally had warnings from the past about not putting things there, but they did it anyway. And this basically sums up the entire nuclear industry.
The old joke... (Score:2)
It won't happen without more nuclear fission power (Score:3, Interesting)
I read what was supposed to be plans on replacing fossil fuels with "zero carbon" energy and plans to address COVID-19 but what I got was a lot of nothing. There were words but they had no mention of solutions. A lot was said about a need to do this and that but I didn't see anyone talking about solutions.
We will need more nuclear power. We should cut China off from international trade until they deal with their human rights violations, pollution, unfair trade policies, and let people look around on what happened with COVID-19. China is dumping cheap solar panels on the world while they burn more coal than ever. These are made with slave labor, in factories powered by coal, and the government subsidizes their exports. If solar power is so great then they would be using them domestically, and not have to sell them at a loss.
Nuclear power is plentiful, safe, domestically sourced, lower in CO2 emissions than solar, and we don't have to listen to China on anything to do this. Oh, right, people will want a source. Here's the US DOE, Lancet, and more all in one: https://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/... [blogspot.com]
Solar and wind power requires inefficient natural gas backup. Or rather it will until we can figure out how to build enough storage that is not tanks of natural gas. Fuel is storage. Uranium is fuel. People say we need storage to make solar and wind viable? I offer uranium fuel as storage. We can heat up molten salt thermal energy storage with a nuclear power plant just as easily with nuclear power as with solar power. The difference is that nuclear power won't require nearly as much land, concrete, silver, copper, steel, or labor.
We've been converting old coal power plants to natural gas. That's been the source of the largest CO2 emissions decrease in much of the world. To lower it more we will have to convert natural gas plants to nuclear fission.
People that take the problem seriously will demand solutions. The best solution is nuclear fission power. If news articles took this seriously then I'd see nuclear fission mentioned in the article.
News outlets can't mention nuclear power. That would mean we solved the problem. Solved problems don't get eyeballs on advertising. Slashdot is either a participant in this or a victim. News for Nerds should include solutions because nerds like to see solutions. Stuff that matters would mean things like highlighting people that are working on solutions. There's news articles on solutions out there, isn't Slashdot interested in them?
Re: (Score:1)
Did your blindseer account get hacked, terminated, or what?
2 billion dollars isn't a lot of money (Score:3)
"Decarbonization" (Score:2, Troll)
Good luck with that. (Score:2)
The key word here (Score:2)
The key word here is "promise".
Politicians Making Promises*. News at 11.
* = We should just acronymize that tot PMP already.
Yeah sure... (Score:1)
The more developed a country is (Score:2)
The more CO2 it produces. The G7s consume more resources than all of the other countries.
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Yeah, and that "one of them", isn't what you think.
It's amazing what happens when you click the checkbox marked "reality":
https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
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You're an ignorant moron. America is the fattest so it gets to stay fattest and just redefine fat as healthy? You're an idiot.
You start with China at 0.14 and America 15.97. And you're somehow surprised China's relative growth is higher? You're far far dumber than even I thought possible.
China holds over 18% of the human population. India holds another 17%.
Numbers matter, idiot. So do trends. America could become THE green paradise, and it won't fucking matter. The Paris Climate accord, even acknowledged this by basically not counting them as developed countries to give that accord even the slightest chance.
Grow up, and wake up, moron.
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The more CO2 it produces. The G7s consume more resources than all of the other countries.
That is correct.
So, along with holding up a mirror, doesn't it make sense to target developing countries since the G7 knows first hand what the future looks like, without intervention?
As much as we may (rightfully) mock the hypocrite, this logic does make sense.
Would You Like To Buy? (Score:2)
Would you lie to buy "Promises, Promises" - Naked Eyes ?