The Earth is Dying

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

This is your regular reminder that THE EARTH IS DYING.

Only one US political party has denied the reality of climate change.

Clean energy is a perfectly viable alternative and we continue with fossil fuels to line the pockets of a few.

Giving up plastic straws doesn't do shit. The number of CEOs and stockholders responsible for two thirds of global warming and pollution could fit on two greyhound buses.

Storm of the Century storms have become Storm of the Decade, well on their way to becoming Storm of the Year, because of man-made climate change.
Ditto for wildfires.
Ditto for heatwaves that cause street signs and mailboxes in some areas to melt.

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

[LittleRaven]

Oh please.

700 million years ago, the Earth was literally a giant snowball. We might have had some seasonal liquid water on the surface during warm days, but there were standing glaciers throughout the tropics.

100 million years ago, Antarctica was a tropical rain forest. There was over 1000 PPM of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, almost 3 times the 'doomsday' point that we still hope to avoid.

The Earth was just fine. Earth will be just fine. Everything we've done....everything we could possibly do before we die as a species is but a passing inconvenience to the Earth. She has been fire and flood, ice and gale, and will be all these long after we're gone.

It's not the Earth we're killing. It's ourselves.

Now I get that the climate changes are scary, and unsustainable. We're going to have to do something about that. But Fuzzy, you have to realize that keeping 7 BILLION people alive on Earth requires a LOT of energy and nitrates. If you REALLY want to cut back energy usage fast....well, a lot people are going to die. I mean, a LOT.

[Antiboyscout]

When environmentalists quit it with the anti-nuclear BS ill start listening.

[LittleRaven]

Nuclear power is just too expensive.

It's expensive to build. It's expensive to fuel and maintain. And it's SUPER expensive to clean up after when something goes wrong.

Technology may eventually fix these problems. There's reason to be hopeful. But there's very good reasons to not be investing lots of money in nuclear plants right now.

Renewable energy is definitely the new hotness. If we can ever get better energy storage technology, then it's REALLY going to thrive.

[Admiral X]

[Antiboyscout]

Nuclear power is just too expensive.

It's expensive to build. It's expensive to fuel and maintain. And it's SUPER expensive to clean up after when something goes wrong.

Technology may eventually fix these problems. There's reason to be hopeful. But there's very good reasons to not be investing lots of money in nuclear plants right now.

Renewable energy is definitely the new hotness. If we can ever get better energy storage technology, then it's REALLY going to thrive.

We already have better safer reactor designs. The problem is, anti-nuclear environmentalists threw a fit in the 70's and have prevented any new reactors from being built. That includes replacing old reactors with new ones. Every reactor running today was built in the 70's at least if not the 60's

Battery tech was not similarly hamstrung, yet it looks like even the next generation of Solid State batteries will not be enough to make solar or wind viable.

[Darth Wedgius]

Just throwing this in there for the curious: a research reactor is being built an accelerator-driven subcritical mode, expected to go partially online in 2027.

Accelerator-driven subcritical reactors can stop the fission just by hitting the off-switch. There is still the possibility of meltdown due to decay heat unless some other design elements prevent it. They have the potential of burning up some forms of nuclear waste (spent fuel).

[LittleRaven]

We already have better safer reactor designs. The problem is, anti-nuclear environmentalists threw a fit in the 70's and have prevented any new reactors from being built.

That's a problem, but not the problem. If it were, China would be covered with nuclear reactors. (unless you think Beijing is filled with environmentalists) And there are SOME reactors in China, with more on the way. But not that many, because it's just too expensive.

Battery tech was not similarly hamstrung, yet it looks like even the next generation of Solid State batteries will not be enough to make solar or wind viable.

Solar and wind are very much viable right now, there's a reason it's growing so fast. But there are going to be some real limits on how much we can expand use of renewable energy unless we can come up with a much more efficient way to store it.

[Antiboyscout]

We already have better safer reactor designs. The problem is, anti-nuclear environmentalists threw a fit in the 70's and have prevented any new reactors from being built.

That's a problem, but not the problem. If it were, China would be covered with nuclear reactors. (unless you think Beijing is filled with environmentalists) And there are SOME reactors in China, with more on the way. But not that many, because it's just too expensive.

Battery tech was not similarly hamstrung, yet it looks like even the next generation of Solid State batteries will not be enough to make solar or wind viable.

Solar and wind are very much viable right now, there's a reason it's growing so fast. But there are going to be some real limits on how much we can expand use of renewable energy unless we can come up with a much more efficient way to store it.

How much of that "viability" was built on the backs of Gov grants. How's the solar industry in Spain or Germany doing?

[LittleRaven]

How much of that "viability" was built on the backs of Gov grants. How's the solar industry in Spain or Germany doing?

Jesus man. They have google where you live, I promise.

Germany is doing AMAZING.

Germany has crossed a symbolic milestone in its energy transition by briefly covering around 100 percent of electricity use with renewables for the first time ever on 1 January. In the whole of last year, the world’s fourth largest economy produced a record 36.1 percent of its total power needs with renewable sources. But the country’s progress in emissions reductions stagnated for the third year in a row, likely putting its self-imposed 2020 climate targets out of reach.

Spain is doing pretty well too.

SPAIN’S progress to a low-carbon economy has taken a huge step forward with half of all power coming from renewable energy.

Data from Red Electrica de Espana shows that 45.8% of electricity came from renewable resources.

The data, which was taken from January and June, shows an 8.5% increase in renewable production.

This is not 'government grants' in action. This is the free market at it's finest. The cost of producing renewable energy is steadily dropping (economies of scale are starting to kick in) even as the outputs are steadily improving. (our tech is getting much more efficient) There's a reason that TEXAS, hardly a liberal bastion, is being covered in windmills these days. It just makes sense from an economic perspective.

But while everyone in the energy sector is quite certain that renewables are going to be booming for some time to come, we will ultimately run into some roadblocks. Renewables, as they exist right now, are fantastic for a lot of things...like air conditioning. But they're pretty bad at other things...like powering jet liners. They also suffer from a consistency problem - they're AWESOME when they work but sometimes they don't work at all. So we have to find a way to smooth out the spikes and valleys. Better batteries are what everyone is hoping for, but so far, they remain elusive.

But whoever cracks that problem is going to make a mint, so believe me, people are trying. History suggests somebody will eventually succeed.