EU Prepares To Push For 'Global Phase-Out' of Fossil Fuels at COP28, Draft Document Shows (euronews.com) 207
A proposal to phase out CO2-emitting fossil fuels at COP27 last won backing from more than 80 countries but oil and gas-rich nations opposed it. European Union countries are preparing to push for a global deal on phasing out fossil fuels at the COP28 climate summit, a draft of the EU's negotiating position has shown. From a report: Diplomats from the bloc's 27 member states are drafting their position for the summit in Dubai in November, where nearly 200 countries will try to strengthen efforts to rein in climate change. "The shift towards a climate neutral economy will require the global phase-out of [unabated] fossil fuels and a peak in their consumption already in the near term," a draft of the EU's negotiating stance, seen by Reuters, says.
Countries have never agreed in UN climate negotiations to gradually stop burning all CO2-emitting fossil fuels, despite this being the main cause of climate change. "Unabated" refers to fossil fuels burned without using technologies to capture the resulting CO2 emissions. The word was in brackets in the draft EU text, indicating that countries have not yet agreed on whether to include it. EU diplomats hope a deal can be made at COP28 - but expect to meet resistance from economies reliant on income from selling oil and gas.
Countries have never agreed in UN climate negotiations to gradually stop burning all CO2-emitting fossil fuels, despite this being the main cause of climate change. "Unabated" refers to fossil fuels burned without using technologies to capture the resulting CO2 emissions. The word was in brackets in the draft EU text, indicating that countries have not yet agreed on whether to include it. EU diplomats hope a deal can be made at COP28 - but expect to meet resistance from economies reliant on income from selling oil and gas.
Oil producers don't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
If countries stop buying oil, the drilling stops.
The problem will be nations that are both producers and consumers of vast volumes of oil, and controlling them will require force - economic or military.
Good luck with that.
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"The problem will be nations that are both producers and consumers of vast volumes of oil, and controlling them will require force - economic or military."
That won't be the only problem.
"If countries stop buying oil, the drilling stops."
If countries stop buying oil, the price of oil drops. Capitalism doesn't solve the problem, it ensures the problem won't be solved.
But sure, let's let free markets and willing cooperation solve it without agreements because those would require physical force.
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"Just stop buying oil"
Not that simple.
Things like petroleum-based fuel are just ONE piece of the puzzle.
Fertilizer, plastics, and all sorts of things that support our civilization are byproducts of petroleum extraction.
Complete cessation would crash the economy and destroy set our civilization back decades if not centuries.
It's still not the plastics [Re:Oil producers...] (Score:3)
"Just stop buying oil"
Not that simple. Things like petroleum-based fuel are just ONE piece of the puzzle. Fertilizer, plastics, and all sorts of things that support our civilization are byproducts of petroleum extraction.
Let me say this louder. Plastics are not the problem.
Burning fossil fuels is the problem, not making plastic.
Got it now?
Complete cessation would crash the economy and destroy set our civilization back decades if not centuries.
Nobody thinks we could do complete cessation of all fossil fuel use instantly. But, you know what would happen if we did? The price of oil would drop and there would be plenty of oil to make plastics with.
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Things like petroleum-based fuel are just ONE piece of the puzzle.
Fertilizer, plastics, and all sorts of things that support our civilization are byproducts of petroleum extraction.
Complete cessation would crash the economy and destroy set our civilization back decades if not centuries.
Good thing that nobody talks about completely banning plastics and fertilizers.
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So... EVs don't exist in your world?
Re: Oil producers don't matter (Score:3)
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Sorry, it's not like most of these trains are pulling power off the grid.
They're essentially big diesel motors hooked to a generator.
And in the end, the power has to be generated someplace.
And, currently renewables can't cover this.
Re: Oil producers don't matter (Score:2, Troll)
Re: Oil producers don't matter (Score:2)
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So... EVs don't exist in your world?
Not at the scale and speed needed for your proposal.
If you think you can just stop oil and magically replace all existing truck fleets instantly, you are in for a rude awakening.
If you think we have time to wait for truck fleets to gradually and very slowly transition to EVs, you are in for a rude awakening (most likely, political instabilities linked to climate changes will kill billions, resulting in a much faster effect in CO2 reduction that the gradual switch to EV).
Basically, saying "countries just nee
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One step at a time, passenger vehicles are going to eat up battery capacity for the next decade. Heavy diesel vehicles will come afterwards. A reduction is still a reduction.
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One step at a time, passenger vehicles are going to eat up battery capacity for the next decade. Heavy diesel vehicles will come afterwards. A reduction is still a reduction.
Ah, I do agree with that.
But then, this is not what the original poster said, which was: stop buying oil, the drilling stops. The incremental steps you are talking about is indeed what will actually happen. And they will be so slow that climate change will get much worse, and that actual consequences will impact us more than people think they will. The good news is that most of those consequences (poverty rising, political instabilities, lots of deaths) will actually help reduce climate change. I mean, that
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Yeah we're realizing now that we are probably past the tipping point, bad things are going to happen and now we have to litigate and adapt.
The two strawman I hate seeing though are these ideas that we have to stop production immediately with no replacement (which isn't happening and isn't going to happen) and that a shift off fossil fuels require degrowth when it's extremely viable for a transition to actually create economic growth and the economy to come out stronger on the other side. The only thing in
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You can call it degrowth, or you can call it "bad things are going to happen and we have to litigate and adapt". I feel like both things are the same.
Or actually, degrowth is one of the bad thing that will happen. And you can either do it voluntarily (e.g.: eat less meat) or involuntarily, in which case you can just call it poverty (e.g.: you can't afford meat twice a day). Honestly, from a strict physical point of view, it does not matter: both ends up reducing physical flows (energy, resources, you call i
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Except it does work, CO2 emissions per capita for the USA are dropping year over year and will continue to drop. We need to get the rest of the world caught up but evidence shows if we make a concerted effort to reduce CO2 we can reduce CO2 all while growing the economy.
Poverty is not defined as "meat twice a day".
Spending a shitload of money and energy to manufacture energy producing systems is in fact good. Their lifetime emissions are better than the old alternatives. EVs are not carbon free but produ
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So... EVs don't exist in your world?
They sure do...and they require lubricants for their many moving parts. Lubricants are but one of many distillate products derived from petroleum.
If you drive on an asphalt road, some of that might be recycled asphalt and some might be fresh asphalt. Asphalt is another petroleum distillate.
Various types of waxes and petroleum jellies are petroleum distillates. I don't need to explain their many uses do I?
In the US, the biggest producer of sulfur (or sulphur) is the de-sulfurization process in petroleum dist
It's not the plastic [Re:Oil producers don't m...] (Score:2)
The first six things you mention use only a tiny fraction of the 94 million barrels of oil the world produces per day. And we're not burning them.
Plastics do have their own problems, but those problems do not include greenhouse gas.
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Sure! Unfortunately their usage case doesn't work in reality.
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No, just like they don't exist in yours. Last mile delivery is all diesel, with some local natgas etc exotic fuel burners for image reasons (and there's even an occasional garage queen EV truck that is present in all the photoshoots and few if any of the actual deliveries).
In world with no fossil fuels, there are no cities, because there's no way to feed them. And that's before the problem of growing food in the first place, which is also all fossil power driven, and uses fertilizers that also require the s
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Not on that scale, no.
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Price is the only bottleneck today though and that is on the precipice. There is gigawatts of battery production being constructed at this very moment. Every major automaker is building new battery and production plants just in the US alone.
Demand for EVs is growing as they are just better vehicles for most people most of the time. Saying EVs are unaffordable today is like saying cars in general aren't affordable in 1907 and then wouldn't you know it a couple years later the Model T drops on the market.
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No. Use case is also a bottleneck.
As is additional wear.
Don't underestimate, price is a HUGE bottleneck.
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But my entire second point, price is a function of production. As production ramps up over the next decade the price will drop. The only part that's expensive is batteries and there are a dozen plants under construction just in the US currently.
Use case is passenger vehicles first other vehicles once that need is filled (which will be another decade)
Outside of tires due to increased weight there is less wear in electric vehicles. Even the brakes last longer.
Re: Oil producers don't matter (Score:3, Informative)
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electrify any kind of major rail line with overhead wires
There are 140,000 miles of track in North America. Good luck with that.
Re: Oil producers don't matter (Score:3)
Re: Oil producers don't matter (Score:2)
Europe has more railroads electrified than US has railroads. Better get started.
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But Europe has about 1/2 of the railroad track miles compared to the USA.
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Re:Oil producers don't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
People's lives will change, either voluntarily now or involuntarily later. That's what people are in denial over. But the rich don't care, their only concern is that it not change for them. They just have to propagandize enough poor, low information voters to support their interests, that or do away with democracy. It's about taking what they want, then Fuck You if there's not enough left.
Plus, Republicans are fine with lives being destroyed, so long as it's Democrat's lives. Their entire zero-sum platform is to make sure someone else suffers the consequences. And that's not a Trump thing, even though it frames perfectly his COVID response, just look at Reagan's attitude toward AIDS.
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Well, to be fair, he was just listening to "the science"...as that Fauci was appointed by Reagan back then I believe and look what he was advising back then.
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If countries stop buying oil, the drilling stops.
You've overlooked some additional ramifications: the cessation of oil consumption could lead to loss of lives.
Nobody's thinking it's possible to cease oil consumption overnight. The proposal is to reduce fossil fuel use, and eventually phase it out for all but the most critical needs.
A typical urban area, or even regions in the United States dependent on regular supermarket visits for their sustenance, would face dire consequences if they lacked the thousands of daily truck deliveries required to transport essential food items for residents.
Which is precisely why so many people are pushing for electric vehicles.
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Which is precisely why so many people are pushing for electric vehicles.
EVs at the needed scale are just a dream. Resources are just not there for that, electricity and grid reliability is not there for that.
People are still looking for a free meal, now that the energy one appears to not be unlimited.
Waiting for EVs to change anything about climate change is a pipe dream.
EVs, over their lifetime, still emit ~40-50% the CO2 of a conventional ICE (electricity, even from renewable, is low-carbon, not carbon-free; EVs manufacturing is more CO2 intensive than ICE due to the batterie
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Which is precisely why so many people are pushing for electric vehicles.
EVs at the needed scale are just a dream.
So far.
Did you miss the part where I said
Nobody's thinking it's possible to cease oil consumption overnight.
?
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Nope, I didn't miss that part, but this was not the original argument of the OP. The original argument was "stop buying oil, the drilling stops". My first point was exactly that: you can't stop buying oil overnight.
My second point is that if you do the maths (available resources, CO2 impact of an all-EV fleet), going all EV is not going to solve the CO2 emissions issue that we have which causes the climate change issue that we have to deal with.
Saying "so far, but it will turn out allright in the future, I
Re:Oil producers don't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
I hear you. But unfortunately, not doing anything because "wealthy people have the money to not care" is not a viable option for anyone with a normal IQ. Money always allowed people to not care. If you don't have that level of money, you will suffer from climate change, even if you have a "normal IQ".
So not doing anything works if you have money (a lot). Doing whatever you can works if you have money or not.
Saying anything different is another excuse to not do anything, because you are too lazy or afraid to change.
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It's not about "rich people don't have to follow the rules," it's about "the exact people telling you how you have to live do not live that way, and, in fact, live the exact opposite of the way they want to force you to live."
That's not leadership, it's raging hypocrisy and abuse.
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That's not leadership, it's raging hypocrisy and abuse.
That's not leadership, but it doesn't mean they aren't right. When I tell a homeless person that his best way of getting out of the street is to get clean and get a job, that's a good advice. The fact that I don't have to work for a living does not change that.
Also, I don't know why you guys are focused on the few like Al Gore (I guess it's a US thing, on my side of the globe, I must admit I almost never heard of him). Scientists, engineers, people who basically don't live the extravagant life that you thin
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Here's a better idea, tax them so they aren't so inclined to take private jets everywhere.
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Pfft they'll just turn around and tax everyone else.
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This is a perfect example of an ad hominem [scribbr.com] argument.
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If Al Gore believed what he shovels, he wouldn't live the way he does. It is irrational to the point of insanity to accept that he believes a word of it.
And if he doesn't believe what he says, why should anyone else?
Sometimes, it's irrational to not consider the character of the messenger before considering the message.
The biggest enemy of the greens isn't greedy Republicans, it's themselves. Their actions are the direct cause of the large number of people who don't believe their claimed science.
And they ca
ad hominem [Re:Oil producers don't matter] (Score:2)
More examples of ad hominem arguments. You seem to be full of them!
If Al Gore believed what he shovels, he wouldn't live the way he does.
I have so little interest in the way Al Gore lives that I'm not even going to bother googling. He was a presidential candidate 23 years ago Why should I care? He's not a climate scientist.
When they say "pay attention to the science" you should also please read an addendum "rather than politicians, celebrities, talk-show pundits, or teenagers from Sweden."
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If you have no interest in the way Al Gore lives, then he oughtn't have any interest how anyone else lives.
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I would agree with that, the framing of the issue as an individual action problem has been a failure and frankly I think something of a coordinated campaign to push the issue off when the real solutions have always been at the industrial and public sector levels.
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Fair enough but I also don't think the arguments made for CO2 reduction are even valid. All the biomass that originated petroleum was once part of the carbon cycle on Earth. It was part of the biosphere. It's not some unnatural source of carbon. Earth was hotter in the past and will be getting hotter. But that's not due to man - that's inevitable.
That's really dumb. Yes it's "natural" but that biomass was sitting quietly underground, we dug it up and burnt it.
Back when dinosaurs were around [Re:Oil produc...] (Score:2)
Fair enough but I also don't think the arguments made for CO2 reduction are even valid. All the biomass that originated petroleum was once part of the carbon cycle on Earth. It was part of the biosphere. It's not some unnatural source of carbon. Earth was hotter in the past and will be getting hotter.
Yes, a few million years ago the Earth was hotter. Quite a bit hotter. The planet had no ice caps. The ecology was completely different.
It would be disruptive to humans if we heat the planet, melt the ice caps, flood all the coastal areas, and turn current farmlands into deserts, but the Earth has been there before, and in a hundred thousand years or so the ecology will adapt.
But that's not due to man
That warming wasn't due to man, but this warming is.
- that's inevitable.
You are mixing up natural climate change occurring over time scales of hundreds
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Sure but if we are just talking about the planet itself that's really sidestepping the entire argument. That biomass was in the planet some odd 100m+ years ago when mammals weren't even the dominant fauna type.
The issue of rising temps related to CO2 is both the fact that the planet was downright hostile to homo sapiens then (mammals became dominant because we were better adapted to the temperate conditions that came after the last major extinction event) and also the fact that we released so much of that
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Not everyone shares your fears.
I want to reassure you: I feel no fear. Mainly because I happen to be in a place were the nuisances from climate change should be quite low (even the ripples from it). The fact that you don't share my conclusions does not matter though: physics is on my side, and believe it or not, but physical laws don't care a penny about what you think or wish to be true.
Sign and Ignore. (Score:2)
Worse case, you are long term in office Merkel , and you will get to about 5 years away from a goal date and sign another commitment 15 years out. Your friends in the media have no long term historical memory so you wil
Unfortunately this will just make oil cheaper (Score:2)
We’ve decided to just follow our biology and consume every resource we can get our opposable thumbs on. We’re gonna burn every liter of oil, cubic meter of gas and kilogram of coal that we can pull out of the ground, in addition to consuming every watt of wind, solar and nuclear we can generate. And
For... what replacement? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a reason we've liked what we use. Heck, ignoring the pulling it from the ground part wouldn't change a thing if we could help it.
Portable (liquid at STP), high energy (carbon hydrogen covalent bonds hold more energy than hydrogen hydrogen covalent bonds do), can burn completely (turns into gases when reacted), etc. I'm sure there are more.
You don't get to exclude a piece just because you don't like 1 aspect of it. Create a replacement first, or you're fighting a stupid battle. You're fighting against something without another solution. When has that worked before? Did it work in the "war on drugs"?
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There is a reason we've liked what we use. Heck, ignoring the pulling it from the ground part wouldn't change a thing if we could help it.
Portable (liquid at STP), high energy (carbon hydrogen covalent bonds hold more energy than hydrogen hydrogen covalent bonds do), can burn completely (turns into gases when reacted), etc. I'm sure there are more.
You don't get to exclude a piece just because you don't like 1 aspect of it. Create a replacement first, or you're fighting a stupid battle. You're fighting against something without another solution.
A replacement for what? Hydrocarbons as vehicle fuel? We have it for cars (EVs). Ships and planes are trickier, but in theory we could use synthetic fuels or simply recapture the amount of carbon they emit.
And for power generation? There's already lots of non-fossil fuel ways of generating power.
What else? Coal for steel making? Again, alternatives are there, they're just more expensive.
When has that worked before? Did it work in the "war on drugs"?
That's a... really bad metaphor.
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your inconvenience has no impact
It does in countries that have free and fair elections.
And nuclear is still bad, right? (Score:2)
Oh, this is going to go over like a lead balloon. Can't wait to say I told you so.
I Wonder (Score:2)
If the EU actually goes forward with this plan ... will they stop buying overseas LPG, and a lot of that comes from Big Bad Polluting America, to heat their Euro homes in the winter?
Piece of advice to the EU: If you want to understand the importance of a stable electric grid just look at The Great Freeze In Texas in 2021. People actually died from that event.
Reminder to EU politicians: When your voters die because of your failed policies ... there is no way that sorrow can be spun into a WIN by any talking
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If the EU actually goes forward with this plan ... will they stop buying overseas LPG, and a lot of that comes from Big Bad Polluting America, to heat their Euro homes in the winter?
Yes they will. It's not a long-term solution.
Texas and its unreliable grid [Re:I Wonder] (Score:2)
Piece of advice to the EU: If you want to understand the importance of a stable electric grid just look at The Great Freeze In Texas in 2021. People actually died from that event.
You do understand that the failure of the electric grid in Texas was because Texas deliberately didn't connect their electric grid to the rest of the US because they didn't want to be regulated, right?
Start checking the boxes (Score:2)
1 - Put the target date far enough in the future that countries can ignore it for a few years before being in danger of not meeting the commitment
2 - Carve out exceptions to entice reluctant partners
3 - Make sure that failure to comply has no meaningful penalties. No teeth please.
It will never work, and we need BETTER than this (Score:2)
Put a slowly increasing tax on consumed goods/services based on where the WORST part/sub-service comes from. This will encourage decisions by governments, utilities and other businesses to take stock of a tax that will increase based on parts/sub-service and do something about it.
This is simple to design and apply:
1) use moving satellites ( not geostationary ) to
Europe is out (Score:2)
This is Europe realizing it has nothing to burn underground anymore. No more monetary incentives to keep digging, so action can happen...
North sea oil is in decline, coal is in decline, gas too. Renewables is what we need to keep going long term. And nukes, but lets not kid ourselves, Germans will put a wrench in that. Latest I hear the anti-nuke German green party had been influenced by the KGB. That would be so funny if proven true. (and would explain a lot)
Just a few days ago: https://news.slashdot.org/s [slashdot.org]
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There's a lot of shale reserves in Europe. It's just that it's a pretty crappy shale (something like 5 layers in most places, compared to 10-13 in most of US if memory serves me right). And it's politically very difficult, which isn't helped by the fact that some of the best places to extract are under large cities. One of the best extraction points is literally under Louvre itself. Good luck getting drilling permits there.
So EU scoured the planet for LNG and oil to replace Russian piped gas and oil. Which
Another good move by the EU (Score:3)
Re: A better idea.. (Score:2)
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Re: A better idea.. (Score:3)
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Hey, dumb fucker: I'm a hippy. And you... do you support a location for permanent disposal of waste within 50 mi of where you live?
If not, you're full of shit.
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It's easier for countries collectively to agree on what all must NOT do than to what all must do. International agreements are not about "phasing in jobs, economy [or] shit like that", that's up to the individual countries.
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The proper way to do this is to rapidly build nuclear power plants and solar. CO2 will phase out on its own then.
There should totally be a build up of the maximum amount of those. Also Wind power which is much more flexible than the other two and reliable as long as it's well spread out, somewhat overbuilt for core demand and grid connected. The overbuild of wind will allow thing which need really really cheap power but can accept throttling.
However, in the end, pre-existing fossil fuel infrastructure is already paid for and depreciated. As renewables replace that, the fuel costs will become lower and lower and so the
Re:A better idea.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear is too expensive and we don’t have any time left anyway.
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"Best time plant a garden is today, the next best time is tomorrow" or something like that.
It's only too expensive in capital costs which markets care about. Just let the public/government build them. The carbon offset and low generation costs will more than be paid back in economic growth and activity as well as the reduction of atmospheric carbon. The government doesn't have to turn a direct profit, it can tax the economic growth.
Shade (Score:2)
"If you want to sit in the shade of an oak tree, the best time to plant the acorn was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now."
Re:A better idea.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Too expensive?
So we burn shitloads of money on greenwashing bullshit like carbon capture instead?
Sure! We spend trillions of dollars on schemes that won't actually do ANYTHING about CO2 levels and will take decades to set up.
But nuclear power takes too long and costs too much?
GTFO.
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Yup, carbon capture is actually very cool but energy intensive so nuclear power and carbon capture fit together perfectly.
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As opposed to installing intermittents, massively building up grid to even pretend that those can somehow work, and then switch wholesale to coal for backup like Germany did?
If environmentalists cared even a little bit as much about global warming as they claim they do, they'd pay every penny and then ask for a possibility for paying more to get nukes up and running faster. But you don't. Instead you complain about "costs" while burning money on wind mills and grid expansions for it, while backing it with c
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We don't have any time left? What do you mean?
A reasonable question. In fact, climate change is indeed a slow catastrophe, not an 'OMG we have to do something immediately or we'll all die!"
It's not like these climate idiots are close to being correct about the situation.
Not sure who you're referring to as "climate idiots", but the climate scientists have so far been accurate.
All the carbon we have put in the biosphere was in the biosphere in the past.
Yes, at a time when the world was much hotter, and the Earth had no polar ice caps.
The planet will survive if we return to Jurassic climate. It will, however, be a significant disruption to humans, and to the currently existing ecosystems. But in ten to a hundr
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The planet will survive if we return to Jurassic climate. It will, however, be a significant disruption to humans, and to the currently existing ecosystems. But in ten to a hundred thousand years, everything will adapt.
Completely possible you are right. However there's no guarantee and no magic system that ensures stability. Previously the world has gone into climate regimes almost incompatible with life - look up "snowball earth". We're in a rate of change that has never happened before and so it's completely possible that positive feedback mechanisms that have never been seen before come in and drive us over the edge. Or maybe not. Do we really want to risk our entire species and the ecosystems that surround us on a hun
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> there is unfortunately quite a bit of stigma publishing something that goes against certain well understood narratives
Well, if you go try publishing that the earth is flat...
But yes, everything evolves one funeral at a time.
> What I disagree on is the impact humans have vs. the natural long-term temperature shifts of the planet.
The stratosphere is cooling. That means energy is getting trapped in the troposphere. The best candidate for a cause are greenhouse gases. Which are emitted by us.
The key wor
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Not particularly.
Yes, particularly. This is well documented.
https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/... [nasa.gov]
https://www.nationalacademies.... [nationalacademies.org]
And in academia, where I have spent some time, even in scientific fields there is unfortunately quite a bit of stigma publishing something that goes against certain well understood narratives, no matter how incorrect those narratives may be.
Maybe in your field. In the field I'm in, I see no hint of a shortage of wackos claiming that physics is all wrong, and they have a much better idea, incoherently explained, that would overturn Einstein and everything else, if only people would listen.
You do realize that any scientist who could convincingly show that the current physics-bas
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I be folks said the following about cars at the turn of the 20th century:
"Whats the point, we already have horses? Plenty of places that will feed and shelter my horse and we have existing services to clean up the horse shit. Plus cars aren't that much faster than horses. Oh, and there arent any places to get gas so you end up stranded on the road which won't happen with horses!"
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Inaccurate stat, the peak efficient of combustion vehicles is 40% so a majority of that extra density is just waste heat.
Nevermind all the factors of multiple fuel sources, charging at home, cheaper transport costs (can't ship gasoline by wire), decreased pollution, simpler mechanical builds, more torque and acceleration, quieter and that's before the greater environmental benefits. EVs as passenger vehicles have every advantage for most people besides cost and that's going to change soon.
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"Green science fiction, divorced from reality, drafted by people who likely don't have to open doors for themselves."
Says a master at being divorced from reality. Your "solution" is to criticize others who look for solutions since you're a member of the crowd who sees suffering as a win, just so long as it's forced disproportionately on others.
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I'd start with "not starving", not "lights". Entire ag sector is fossil fuel driven, from machinery to fertilizers and pesticides.
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Rhetoric is hilarious when compared to reality of last couple of years. When EU bureaucrats combined with representatives of various nations scoured the planet looking for more natgas and oil to replace Russian ones.
Because of it, places like Pakistan are now shutting down natgas plants and switching back to coal wholesale. It's going to be fun to be a fly on the wall when the rich, decadent EU bureaucrats who just grabbed all your natgas contracts forcing you to switch back to coal come to argue that you s
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Who is saying we stop production of those items though? If anything oil is far too useful a product to waste so much of it simply to make things hot.
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Less oil consumption = less drilling = more expensive oil. Are you ready for hyper inflation ?
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All non-fuel uses for crude oil account for at most 10% of every barrel with plastics specifically using somewhere from 4-5%.
I haven't seen anyone here directly arguing for degrowth, I certainly am not. We can shift off fossil fuels and still have economic growth, maybe even more.
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Less oil consumption = less drilling = more expensive oil.
Nope, that's not how supply and demand works.
Less consumption = oversupply of fossil fuels = less expensive oil.
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> Nope, that's not how supply and demand works.
Yes, it is. If there's no demand, supply adjusts. If the only supply is big oil companies, they might simply exit the market leaving only smaller operations that can't afford to sell you oil on the cheap.
Cost per barrel increases at lower extraction scales. Meaning all the derivative products are subsidized currently by oil extraction for fuel.
> Less consumption = oversupply of fossil fuels = less expensive oil.
The problem is if there's less consumpt
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Nope, that's not how supply and demand works.
Less consumption = oversupply of fossil fuels = less expensive oil.
Yes, it is. If there's no demand, supply adjusts.
If demand decreases, there will be a huge oversupply of oil, because the oil industry has paid-for infrastructure that is sized to produce 94 million barrels of oil per day.
If demand drops, oil will be a glut on the market.
Simple economics.
...Cost per barrel increases at lower extraction scales.
Yes but the extraction cost is an only a small trivial of the price of oil. The big cost is all sunk cost, finding and developing the field, drilling and putting in the drilling needed to pump oil. The actual marginal cost of pumping oil out of the ground is small.
And as
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Oil contains certain set portions of each distillate.
This is why we almost universally power lighter vehicles with gasoline rather than much better distillates. Gasoline is a very large percentage of pretty much all crude oil types, and it's utterly horrible at being anything useful, including fuel. This is why we put it into the least demanding thing we know. Powering light vehicles.
Compare it to something like kerosene, of which there's far less in pretty much all crude types, and that we use for actually
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Those things are getting into our food supply so we need to find alternatives.
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It was worth it for the rich.
You have the entire premise wrong. You think it's a loss for everybody, there's an entire political group that sees it as an opportunity to stick the loss to the others while they continue to indulge. In fact, indulging is even sweeter because it makes consequences worse for those they don't like.
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Now everything will be scarce, expensive, only for the rich
It was always like that.
The only difference is that previously, you were on the right side of the barrier and were considered "rich" (hint: food, energy, water, or whatever you consider as "normal" has always been scarce and expensive in some third-world countries).
I guess it sucks to be on the other side, but did you really care when you were not the one having to suffer? Nope.
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Most of us here do live in a culture that prioritizes individual freedoms, that's the basis of western liberal democracy, it was a wild concept at the time which did not exist for the majority of human civilization .
Civilization is built on compromises though, every individual doesn't have absolute freedom to do whatever they want because there is a bedrock of collective cooperation, that's why we came out of tribes and into cities. It's why we evolved our big ol frontal cortexes that allow complex languag
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Most of us here do live in a culture that prioritizes individual freedoms
Where is 'here'?
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EU is made up of 80 third-world countries now?