The subtitle in the article you link is exactly my point. At the moment, we are just now getting better at tracking methane leaks. No one knows for sure how much is leaked from the infrastructure. It may easily be just as bad or worse than coal, and is absolutely "roughly" as bad as coal.
Take the average IPCC meta-analysis numbers [1] at face value: 820 gCO2-eq/kWh for coal, 490 for gas. Those are both extraordinarily high. This is because they both combust carbon in the presence of oxygen to form energy and CO2. They're both very high-carbon fuel sources. If we are trying to reduce carbon emissions, we need to build things that do not combine C + O2 to make CO2 + energy. Options with less than 50g CO2-eq/kWh (in decreasing order of emissions) include solar (41), geothermal (38), hydro (24), tidal (17), nuclear (12), and wind (11).
Given this situation it makes no sense to switch from coal to gas for the sake of the climate. Both endpoints have wholly unacceptably high carbon. If you build a bunch of $2B shiny new gas facilities, as we are doing today, utilities will want to run them for decades. And gas companies are portraying themselves as climate heros, and people are believing them because emissions are going down (again, towards an unacceptable final destination). To me it seems crazy.
Natural gas is roughly half as bad as coal, and it's an easy win, compared to the alternatives. It's also better in terms of particulates.
If we sit around waiting for reduction of energy use and increase in renewables to save us, we are screwed. Gotta take what we can get for now, and continue fighting for even better solutions.
Nuclear would be an example of a good solution that isn't perfect. Natural gas is an example of bad solution, in that it doesn't actually fit the definition of a solution because it doesn't in any way contribute to solving the problem.
> Natural gas is roughly half as bad as coal, and it's an easy win, compared to the alternatives.
This is simply false. Given methane emissions, we don't actually know that it's better at all, let alone half as bad.
> If we sit around waiting for reduction of energy use and increase in renewables to save us, we are screwed.
Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal-improvement-that-might-not-even-be-an-improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable.
> Gotta take what we can get for now, and continue fighting for even better solutions.
Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here?
> This is simply false. Given methane emissions, we don't actually know that it's better at all, let alone half as bad.
Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. It's literally an order of magnitude difference: methane is significantly worse for a short period, but over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse. That lopsidedness gets even worse when you go out to a millenium. Thinking out to a century from now, it's appropriate to more or less ignore methane and focus on carbon dioxide.
> Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable.
"It's unacceptable for ten million people to die, so we shouldn't have a preference between ten and twenty million people dying!"
> Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here?
As someone who has actually worked full-time on climate solutions and whose carbon emissions are in the bottom 1% of Americans, it's presumptuous of you to assume that you're doing more for the climate because you're regurgitating an article you saw on the Facebook newsfeed.
I really respect anyone who's chosen to willingly sacrifice their lifestyle to reduce their carbon emissions. Very few people are actually willing to do that.
So I'm curious about your opinion. Do you think that promoting hope that what we're doing is enough is the right play at this point in time? Decades of warning from the scientific community have yielded effectively 0 progress on halting our exponential march towards ecological collapse. Sure, you can argue for marginal progress here and there. But when the likely end goal remains total collapse of civilization and possible extinction of our species, does it really matter?
I know we tend to think of panic and despair as something that prevents us from finding solutions, or even make the problem worse. But maybe pretending that we're going to mostly be OK and figure out climate change is just causing us to be complacent and procrastinate on the problem until it's too late. It may already be too late due to tipping points being triggered.
Like I said, I'd love to hear your thoughts, but I've increasingly started to believe that panic is an idea worth spreading. It may be the only way we can ever hope to collectively wake up and start making the sacrifices necessary to survive this extinction event.
Well, I used to worry a lot about my carbon footprint. Then I realized that it doesn't matter. I'm always just going to be that weird guy. I told Spanish colleagues I cringed when looking at upcoming transatlantic tickets because of environmental impact and they laughed! They thought I was joking. Honestly, I live in Ireland, Spain is likely to be destroyed, at least if you like producing food.
So I stopped worrying about it. There was a time for that and it's past.
However, more recently, I've been trying to live life like civilization has a decent chance of collapsing, and that has meant coppicing trees for heat, making a home out of materials that might be possible to produce directly (wood, not concrete) etc. - and that happens to be lower carbon. I worry about national defence but can only do so much.
But I still cringe at the thought of flying, especially for work trips of dubious benefit. I am terrified of positive feedback loops - Australian fires igniting coal seams, dark blue oceans at the same time we finish dumping all that energy turning solid water to liquid in tha Arctic, etc.
There was a time to stop the asteroid hitting Earth, but now you're better off trying to be on the other side when it hits.
I used to think like this. Constantly stressing about how I was going to get the hell out of the city and start homesteading to escape the coming collapse.
But now, I feel like that's a waste of time. There's no "other side" of the coming catastrophe to run to. When the gears of global industrial civilization grind to a halt, the resulting chaos will only allow the ruthless or the lucky to survive. And even if you do survive, the world you'll be struggling in isn't something I want to be a part of.
Not to mention tipping points already triggered will likely keep the world warming to the point where humans just can't survive at all and we go extinct. If that's not the case, and our species survives for millions of years, then we've already used up all the easily accessible resources, and won't ever get back to space faring civilization, and eventually we'll go extinct.
The only way out is forward. We either beat this thing and make it out the other side as something greater, more unified, and more enlightened than we've ever been, or our story ends.
We're not going to stop the asteroid, but maybe we can all wake up soon enough to act to soften the blow just enough to survive. We don't have a lot of time.
I worry you're right but I see a range of possible outcomes and yeah, human extinction isn't one I think we'd manage (by definition). but "simultaneous world breadbasket failure" .. maybe. If nobody takes your lovely permaculture smallholding from you that is.
This is a dumb take. Differences at the margin still matter and just because we continue to emit doesn't mean you can abdicate yourself of personal responsibility.
Nice to see the hn ethos of attacking ideas, not people, in action.
It's more like a death row inmate worrying about another cigarette.
Anyway, like I said my current life is fairly low impact. Remote work helps a lot. But it doesn't make any difference, especially inasmuch as me not buying fossil fuels made infinitesimally cheaper for someone else to. It will stay that way until we price emissions appropriately.
Converting a few acres of sheep grazing land to forest could make this chunk of my lifs carbon negative, for that matter. Lamb is especially bad.
I said it was a dumb take, which is an attack on the idea. Saying that one is responsible for ones own impact on the planet isn't a personal attack either.
This is like someone saying that, since other people litter, there's no harm in me littering too. Sure, your individual action doesn't matter but collective action does.
Similarly, by your logic, why should I vote? After all, it is extremely improbable that my vote will have any impact on an election.
Depressingly accurate. We bought a property somewhere in the US that is likely to be least impacted by climate change. Efforts should still be made, but prepare for the worst.
I may be misreading/misinterpreting their comments, but the gist I got was that while natural gas isn't great, it is better than coal. And if we only focused on going for great, we'd still be coal only.
I might be misreading, but I don't think they were advocating avoiding solar/wind/etc. (just that they weren't easy wins).
This is about where I stand. If there's a cheap and easy way to reduce carbon emissions that is already happening because of existing market forces, at the very least we shouldn't stand in its way. I'd even support government subsidies of it, if it helps it kill off coal, but it already seems like it'll do so without any help.
Best would be strong climate change policies that set the price of carbon at its actual (high) cost, and that would naturally drive people from coal to gas and gas to low-carbon approaches, but that doesn't seem like it's in the cards in the short term.
I think the point is that it's not worth celebrating as a win, because the shift wasn't driven by a desire to reduce emissions. It was driven by the fact that gas is cheaper. It's just a nice coincidence that it's lower emissions.
Sure, this is better than nothing, and every little bit counts, but it shouldn't give anyone hope that the tides are changing.
People have been saying we need to avoid scaring people for decades, and look where we are. Panic now, helpfully, to avoid panic later when we are more helpless.
I don't know what other options we have for effective systemic change, and would love to hear from anyone who has a better model. Clearly everything we've tried up until now has not worked.
I'm not sure there's a switch we can flip that turns people from apathetic to supporting a panic-driven set of aggressive and durable legislation to address climate change. The effects of climate change are too long term and stochastic for voters to link policy with their everyday lived experience. Even in Australia at this very moment, only about half of people think Australia should do more about climate change, and it's unclear how many of them would actually prioritize that over other things they value.
I personally believe that a key switch we can try flipping is universal basic income. The reasoning is not obvious.
Basically, I think we live in a world now where almost everyone is stuck in tunnel vision for surviving today. For example, we have studies now that show significant drops in IQ when people are stressed about how they're going to be paying bills. If the vast majority is struggling financially, they literally might be made dumber and less able to think about complex problems.
If we change the rules in a way that effectively says, nobody is getting left behind and nobody is dying of poverty, then maybe, that will be enough to give the masses the breathing room to look up and see long term risks bearing down upon us.
Maybe not, but I think it's worth a shot.
That's why I'm all in on Andrew Yang. He's the only candidate who gives me a semblance of hope for waking everyone up so that we can try to solve these problems.
I also see this connection.
On a game theoretical level, it doesn't pay off for the individual to make a personal effort, unless the right incentives are in place.
The status quo would be a great opportunity for a drastic policy switch: introduce correct pricing of resources (nomore externalizing) and "recycle" the generated income as an UBI.
If you do the pricing only (even if just small amounts), you get yellow vests.
If you do the UBI only, you would likely just boost consumption and even aggravate the ecological problem.
But combined, it could be the solution the world is looking for.
Society is in no way set up to support UBI. Everyone gets $1000 and then rent, food, and everything else become more expensive.
Instead focus should be on guaranteeing necessities like healthcare with Medicare For All, relinquishing student loan debt, and making public college free to attend. Bernie is the only one focused on universal coverage for all of these things.
Yang supports Universal Healthcare as a key attachment to UBI. [1]
He does care about the student loan problem, but has a less aggressive and more nuanced plan than blanket forgiveness. [2]
Traditional college is not a necessity for most people. We should be pushing for more trade school participation like most of Europe does and train people for skilled labor that won't be automated any time soon. [3]
Most importantly, Bernie doesn't seem to even want to acknowledge the coming wave of automation. And somehow, he thinks that a $15 minimum wage won't just accelerate the drive to automate jobs. Higher wages also does nothing to help stay at home parents or caretakers (mostly women) who find themselves completely dependent on their breadwinner.
I think we are stick from a policy standpoint. We have some climate engineering ideas that might work, with the certainty of side effects. Those might keep civilization chugging long enough for fossil fuels to become scarce enough to price themselves out of existence. Even alternative power sources have waste heat, so we have to taper power usage no matter the source, but that is a much longe term problem.
> Decades of warning from the scientific community have yielded effectively 0 progress on halting our exponential march towards ecological collapse.
This kind of doomsday fatalism is both factually incorrect and unhelpful. Between 2005 and 2015, a single decade, the US doubled its use of renewable energy [1]. co2 emissions from energy peaked in 2006 and have gently decreased since then [2]. Compared to significant upward slope before then, and the continued growth of the economy and population, that's a significant improvement. From 2000 to 2008, the number of people bicycling to work increased by 60% [3]. (It's still small in absolute terms, but this is a change that requires significant effort and lifestyle changes at the individual level.) In 2008, 30% of Americans felt dealing with climate change should be a top Presidential and Congressional priority. By 2018, that number was 44%, despite continued well-funded climate denial campaigns.
The world is a giant ship with 8+ billion each with their own oar in the water. A vessel like that turns very slowly and with a danger on the horizon as complex and difficult to understand as climate change, we should not expect everyone to wake up overnight and be all-in on fixing the problem. But almost every trend shows that people are waking up, changing their habits, and shifting their priorities in the right direction. The ship is turning.
Is it turning fast enough to avoid hitting the iceberg? No. But is it plowing full steam ahead? Not that either.
> But when the likely end goal remains total collapse of civilization and possible extinction of our species, does it really matter?
This is simply not true and you are very unlikely to find any reputable scientific source saying that. It is and will be a catastrophe. People have died and more will die. It has and will cause more political uprisings.
But humanity as a species will almost certainly survive and as the reality of the problem becomes more and more apparent, we will put more and more resources into dealing with it. It's going to be bad, yes. But we (as a species and civilization) survived the Last Glacial Period, the Neolithic decline, the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, multiple cholera pandemics, the fall of the Roman Empire, and the Spanish flu pandemic.
We survived all of those with only a fraction of the technology, knowledge, and resources that we have today. Climate change is an entirely solvable problem with the capacity we have right now and we can and will solve as the necessity of doing so becomes more apparent and accepted.
Only a hundred years ago, nearly 5% of the entire human population was wiped out by Spanish flu and today flu innoculation is a minor inconvenience for most and the pandemic is a footnote in history. We've kept humans alive in the hottest deserts, the coldest tundra, across oceans, and on the fucking moon. We are like cockroaches but smarter and better organized.
> The world is a giant ship with 8+ billion each with their own oar in the water.
I agree with most of what you said, except for this. We are much more like a modern cruise ship with a few thousand people on the button for the engine, heading full power towards the iceberg because there's some sweets they want in the same direction. If one of them doesn't collect enough sweets, they usually get sent down to the oars.
There are also 7-8 billion other people with oars in the water, pulling in several different directions, getting told either that they will also get some of the sweets if they row towards the iceberg, or that we wouldn't be in this mess if the just rowed against the engines harder. Obviously, the rowers can't change the direction of the ship - they can either hope that the people controlling the engine change their mind, or they can leave their oars and go take down the engine people en masse.
Point being, the vast majority of people, even pulling together, can't do anything to reverse global warming through direct action. We need to organize and take political action to force governments and companies to act if we are to have any real impact. Of course this will in turn affect us as well (less stuff, less meat, less AC and so many others), but the change must come from the top down at this point. At this point, even if entire countries chose spontaneously to buy half the stuff and eat half the meat, that would probably not have a significant impact on CO2 emissions, given that production would likely continue and switch to more exports.
In my metaphor, I consider both direct action and political action to be "rowing". It's all about what the 8 billion people put their attention, time, and labor into.
Change must and will happen at all levels. While those at the top have more power, they are also dramatically outnumbered. Those at the bottom have greater power if they are organized (which is why those at the top spend so much time trying to keep them disorganized and divided).
> This kind of doomsday fatalism is both factually incorrect and unhelpful. Between 2005 and 2015, a single decade, the US doubled its use of renewable energy [1]. co2 emissions from energy peaked in 2006 and have gently decreased since then [2]. Compared to significant upward slope before then, and the continued growth of the economy and population, that's a significant improvement. From 2000 to 2008, the number of people bicycling to work increased by 60% [3]. (It's still small in absolute terms, but this is a change that requires significant effort and lifestyle changes at the individual level.)
You're basically using a sophist trick here, where you keep taking the rate of change until you get the the positive outcome you want. The problem (global temperature) is still a problem, so you look at the thing causing rise. That (carbon) still rising, so you look at the rate that carbon is rising. That (carbon emissions) is still rising, so you look at a) the rate carbon emissions are increasing, or b) narrow it to the US, where carbon emissions are decreasing. And then if you focus on that, everything looks peachy! Nevermind that the actual problem is still there and getting worse!
> In 2008, 30% of Americans felt dealing with climate change should be a top Presidential and Congressional priority. By 2018, that number was 44%, despite continued well-funded climate denial campaigns.
It takes a special kind of optimism to see a glass 44% full and say it's half full.
> Is it turning fast enough to avoid hitting the iceberg? No. But is it plowing full steam ahead? Not that either.
To put the rate of change thing into your metaphor. We're not slowing down. We're not even taking our foot off the gas--we're still pressing down harder on the gas pedal. What's decreasing is the rate at which we're pressing down harder on the gas pedal. We're still accelerating, we're just not accelerating as quickly!
I agree with the rest of your post: humans will likely not go extinct. But look at what you're comparing this to! The black death might not have been an extinction event, but it was still pretty horrible.
It is a long-term problem, which means sign of the highest derivative is what matters most. If acceleration is negative then eventually velocity will be too, and that means eventually we'll start lowering absolute values.
Since change at human scale is never a step function, signs of progress will always appear at higher derivatives firsts.
> It is a long-term problem, which means sign of the highest derivative is what matters most. If acceleration is negative then eventually velocity will be too, and that means eventually we'll start lowering absolute values.
> The world is a giant ship with 8+ billion each with their own oar in the water. A vessel like that turns very slowly and with a danger on the horizon as complex and difficult to understand as climate change, we should not expect everyone to wake up overnight and be all-in on fixing the problem. But almost every trend shows that people are waking up, changing their habits, and shifting their priorities in the right direction.
We still subsidies fossil fuel extraction! When we stop doing that I'll think the ship is really turning. Other than that I think the bubble of people who care about this in increasing, but not having a huge impact on the direction we are actually moving.
Sadly, I believe nothing will be done about climate change until something catastrophic begins to happen (e.g. millions of people start dying due directly to the effects of climate change). Climate change is way too abstract of a problem for humans to deal with given its large delayed time frames.
Spread fear and despair to everyone you're connected to.
Yes, we need to move rationally and carefully, but we're only going to do that when a tipping point of people start believing this is an existential threat akin to an incoming asteroid that they or their children will be destroyed by.
This is what's driving increasing movements like the Green New Deal. The closer we get to the impact, the more people notice, start freaking out, and demand action. The faster we can make the majority panic and demand change, the more likely we'll have time to do something effective.
Realistically though, it's probably already too late to save our civilization.
Vegetarianism could be fine if it's only with crops grown locally with not a whole lot of transportation involved, but that's not likely to happen anytime soon. Not to mention individuals have very little impact on the actual problem.
Even if we grant that this is all we need to do (I don't believe it is), you can't honestly be suggesting that 8 billion people are going to wake up this year and decide to voluntarily sacrifice such a primal desire.
Without big acts of legislation, this will only become reality when lab grown meat becomes significantly cheaper and available. That could be decades away, which is too late.
> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. I
Except...methane has a shorter residency time is due to it turning into CO2 at a 7 year half-life, right?
I keep hearing this from people who seemingly know a lot more than me about this stuff, and yet prima facie, it seems entirely wrong. It sounds equivalent to "we cause 7X the amount of short-term greenhouse effect, but eventually it drops down to 1X, and that's better than 1X from the get-go".
Does it turn into significantly less amount of CO2? How much less? If you can clear it up for me, I'd honestly really appreciate it.
To elaborate a bit, an atom of carbon in CH4 is around 100x as bad as an atom of carbon in CO2; CH4 is primarily and quickly removed by breaking down into CO2. But the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere as CH4 is much, much less than the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere of CO2. We only care about CH4 because it's 100x as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2. If we released the methane carbon directly as CO2 carbon, it'd be a measurable amount but dwarfed by other sources.
> But the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere as CH4 is much, much less than the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere of CO2
Parent's point is that we don't actually know how much methane is released into the atmosphere due to natural gas fracking.
> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon.
But even with a shorter residency time (I believe it is on the order of 5-7 years) the data that we have shows that methane concentration in the atmosphere [1] is still increasing at a similar rate as that of C02 [2]. Based on this it doesn't seem appropriate to ignore methane. Without better measures to track and prevent methane escaping in to the atmosphere we might not see that trend level off or start to decrease for a significant period of time.
While it's true that methane only lasts for a decade in the atmosphere, it decays in to co2 and water vapor so it's not as though it is better in the long run. It's very bad short term and as bad long term.
> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. It's literally an order of magnitude difference: methane is significantly worse for a short period, but over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse. That lopsidedness gets even worse when you go out to a millenium. Thinking out to a century from now, it's appropriate to more or less ignore methane and focus on carbon dioxide.
1. Methane emissions capture heat energy in the atmosphere, and that heat energy doesn't just disappear after the methane is gone. Methane is also a long-term problem.
2. Methane's residency time ends when it decomposes into carbon dioxide.
Both of these are sort of irrelevant, because we can calculate the long-term effects of methane and see that it does make a significant difference.
> > Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable.
> "It's unacceptable for ten million people to die, so we shouldn't have a preference between ten and twenty million people dying!"
That's a straw man argument.
If we're parodying each others arguments, how's this for a parody of yours? "It's unacceptable for ten million people to die. Saving ten million people sounds hard though. There's something easy we can do, not sure if it will save any lives, but at least I'm doing something!"
> > Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here?
> As someone who has actually worked full-time on climate solutions and whose carbon emissions are in the bottom 1% of Americans, it's presumptuous of you to assume that you're doing more for the climate because you're regurgitating an article you saw on the Facebook newsfeed.
Good on you for what you're doing on here, but I'm not assuming anything or disagreeing with what you do in your personal life. I'm disagreeing with what you're doing here, on Hacker News, where you're promoting a half-assed non-solution to a catastrophic problem.
> 1. Methane emissions capture heat energy in the atmosphere, and that heat energy doesn't just disappear after the methane is gone.
No, that's completely wrong. Methane does not "capture" the heat. Earth is constantly radiating energy out to the rest of the universe. What methane, CO2 and other greenhouse gases do is to change the radiation properties of the atmosphere, resulting in reflecting some of the energy back to earth. This energy ultimately gets radiated out, but more greenhouse gases means more time before it does, which, assuming constant external irradiation from sun, results in higher steady state temperature. When the methane is gone, its effect on warming is gone.
In this case, high-carbon (coal and gas) is the enemy of low-carbon (wind/solar/tidal/hydro/nuclear/geo).
I said this in another thread, but switching from terrible to awful is not something we should take as what we can get. The starting point and the end point are unacceptable in a coal to gas transition. No point celebrating that.
For example, fracked gas is so cheap that it's starting to cause near zero-carbon nuclear plants to close early. Unlike gas, nuclear plants are actually low carbon (12 gCO2-eq/kWe vs. 490 for gas). Thus, fracked gas being cheap and not considered the high-carbon fuel it is is preventing us from reaching our climate goals.
Yes, we're in agreement on that. And "celebrating" gas is a million miles away from my perspective. Every reduction in CO2 emissions today saves lives not just today but a century from now.
Suppose we could instantaneously replace coal with natural gas, today. And we also have a choice of replacing all coal with low-carbon sources, but at some point in N years in the future. How long does it take to break even? 2N years in the future. So even assuming we could fully decarbonize the world economy in 25 years, it'd be a half century before we even get to the break even point in terms of accummulated emissions.
And that doesn't even account for a significant part of the carbon emissions from the first 25 years being absorbed by various processes, or the ability to simultaneously push for low carbon and natural gas energy. Even if natural gas pushes the timeline for full decarbonization from 25 to 35 years out, it's still a clear win.
That scenario I acknowledge is bleak, but bleak is better than... really fucking bleak, which is what we're headed for with coal.
What you say makes perfect sense but when you transpose to the real world the story changes. See how the most vocal and powerful climate activists work day and night to stifle nuclear energy as a perfectly good solution to fight climate change, by far the best solution out there to reduce emissions. Maybe gas is the second best solution to reduce emissions while we develop other solutions in the meantime.
> See how the most vocal and powerful climate activists work day and night to stifle nuclear energy as a perfectly good solution to fight climate change
I don't think that conforms with reality. Off the top of my head, I looked up McKibben and Greta, and both see a role for nuclear power in decarbonization.
The bigger issue is that it's not prioritized because it'd split the environmental movement, but that's a far cry from "work day and night to stifle nuclear energy."
They don't have to work that hard to stifle nuclear because that battle was largely fought and won 3 decades ago. By and large it has remained 'won.' Without splitting hairs the point remains that nuclear was scapegoated sufficiently that even if environmentalist could agree on nuclear and worked day and night to fight FOR it, we're at least a generation away from any new installations much less meaningful adoption within the grid. In the meantime, I think an objective person might say that natural gas -- on balance -- is a preferred alternative to coal (excepting any other viable substitutes).
> we're at least a generation away from any new installations much less meaningful adoption within the grid.
That's just not the case, if sanity prevails at all. We could have much safer Gen IV plants online within 10 years easily. It just takes the will to do it.
And how long before the regulations change to allow it? And how much longer before local zoning allows it? And how much before a utility clears all the build and commissioning hurdles and plant trials? And how long before sufficient quantities are in place to supplant natural gas? I hardly think one should say “if sanity prevails” and “easily” when talking about reviving nuclear. We’ll be on mars before we see meaningful levels of nuclear power.
Until there is a nuclear process that does not produce waste (both spent fuel and the reactor components) that must be stored for tens of thousands of years it is irresponsible to build them.
AFAICT Gen IV is basically the same technology in a brighter wrapper.
There is some hope thorium energy amplifiers (? correct term?) might fit the bill, but I do not know of one that has been built.
Also as the English are finding it is a very expensive way to generate electricity.
Thorium may be a solution. There are also molten salt reactors that are very promising. Unfortunately, when you look at nuclear energy policy, the two people most likely to be willing/capable to create positive policies supporting these new technologies also seem to be against any nuclear development at all [1]. They are talking in terms of 2030 timelines for elimination of nuclear - thus, my comment that we can't expect any new substantial contributions in a 'generation.' If US policy makers are already making plans that go out into the 2030s that do not include nuclear, it will take at least as long to bring it back to the table. How would one even build a test reactor in the US if the energy policies disallow it at commercial scale?
Greta is irrelevant in the US, which is what we are talking about. In the US you need to look at people like AOC and other GND advocates. You’ll find a stark lack of support for nuclear.
The US nuclear industry had a chance at coming back from the dead but blew it. Both Bush and Obama signed subsidies and loan guarantees and plants were ordered by two utilities in the South. One project was abandoned after spending $9B the other is 2x over budget in money and time. The manufacturer, Westinghouse, was forced into bankruptcy over it.
The enthusiasm behind nuclear as a climate solution seems pretty misplaced. With heavy subsidies, it can play a tiny tiny tiny role in solving the problem.
That seems to assume that it's physically impossible to make cost effective, widely popular nuclear power plant that can be built quickly.
In the USA, more than half of the carbon-free electricity comes from 100 GW if nuclear. Globally it has prevented more than 70 GT of carbon emissions. Is there any other low carbon energy source that has approached this yet? I don't think so. Maybe hydro, but it's somewhat hard to wholesale expand.
> That seems to assume that it's physically impossible to make cost effective, widely popular nuclear power plant that can be built quickly.
That is the experience so far. As well as waste that must be stored for generations. Not a lot of waste but even a little bit of some thing that must be stored for more than 10,000 years is a impossible prospect
The problem is how much this is a zero sum game. The $2B invested in the "second best solution" isn't invested in the "third best solution". The arguments above include:
A) What metric are we ordering "second best" by. If it's Carbon and/or Methane (and it should be in discussion of climate impact), natural gas is never our "second best solution" and absolutely a red herring or distraction.
B) This is especially true on the longer time horizon in both cases in both directions as being a worryingly zero-sum game, because 1) today's billion dollar investment is tomorrow's entrenched sunk costs, and 2) without some huge advances in carbon and/or methane capture we can't "take back" emissions and in long term climate control every molecule of carbon/methane we don't produce matters (not even just ASAP, but starting four decades ago when scientists first started warning everyone about this stuff).
I didn't say it was exactly a zero sum game, I said it resembles one, especially in the long term planning horizon.
There are many problems with using Game Theory terms in real world/pragmatic discussion, but yes, clearly among them is that I anticipated this pedantic a response. You are right, it is not exactly a textbook example of a zero sum game and we can't prove it is one. I use the terminology metaphorically and not mathematically.
The question I pointed out is "how much does it resemble one?"
I think that it is much closer to one than not, and I do think there is plenty of reason to suggest that many actors in private capital would prefer money be spent on natural gas over renewables due to vested interests. Vested interests by themselves are something that I have seen modeled as a zero sum game, in theory and divorced from greater context. As just one part of the whole mess of motivations, politics, and sociology in trying to address climate change and energy industry spending, does it mean the entire thing is reducible to zero sum? Of course it doesn't. Does it add evidence that are enough zero sum games and zero sum-equivalent games in play that we can worry metaphorically that the entire thing is one giant zero sum game? Yes, it does, and that's all I was saying.
Given the state of world and history of war in the 20th and 21st centuries, I’m honestly surprised anyone would suggest a centralized energy system that requires the maintenance of a stable state formation for 1-10,000 years. You think the US (or any country) is going to exist at that level for a thousand more years? We’re better off leaving around a bunch of abandoned solar panels than nuclear materials.
If it's really serious then the USA should be emphasizing expanding fracking operations further since that's been their most effective emissions reducer. Most of the country's emissions progress has been due to a mix of increased efficiency across particular consumption mediums (like cars) and natural gas replacing dirtier energy generation methods.
The problem with that is, when you build a gas plant, that's infrastructure that you now have an economic incentive to run for decades. So while switching to these plants might make a small improvement now, it will cause greater pain in the future.
It's not a small improvement though, it's the primary source of the USA's emissions gains. And it comes with the side bonus of promoting energy independence while also creating exportable products.
It's undercutting and killing what makes over 50% of our carbon free energy: our 100 GWe nuclear fleet. Gas is not an ok end point. Nuclear is. Killing an ok endpoint to make small gains while approaching a not-ok endpoint is unwise.
I mean, the reason natural gas makes a difference is because the USA isn't actually trying the cheapest and most effective way: just reducing emissions.
Natural Gas is also load following and plants are efficient at a much smaller scale, which means it is easier on the grid and makes more renewables possible. Moving from coal to gas enables solar and wind.
I personally think the US or Canada should build massive LNG plants in the PNW, and export gas to China. It would help the nasty particulate problems in the cities, and also make their infrastructure more amenable to renewables.
Why would we invest in and build more very-high carbon systems like fracked natural gas when we have so many incredible low-carbon resources around like solar, geothermal, tidal, hydro, nuclear, and wind!? This seems really backwards to me considering the gravity of the climate situation.
Your parent already said why. The ability of gas plants to quickly adjust to changing loads is one of the things enabling those solar, tidal, and wind plants to be on the grid. Nuclear, hydro, and geothermal are great for baseline load, but adjust very slowly to changing load requirements.
Gas is filling a legitimate technical gap right now within the power grid, bridging between slow baseline plants and unpredictable renewable sources.
Even ignoring that we have a well known, much more renewable option on the table (nuclear), it is a technical gap that is also rapidly shrinking from advancements in storage tech (batteries and hydrogen fuel cells).
> Nuclear, hydro, and geothermal are great for baseline load, but adjust very slowly to changing load requirements.
Hydro adjusts very fast, it's literally just letting more water through. Nuclear is slower, but since its fuel costs are so low, you can typically just run it at full power all the time. Of course, with this approach you'll be overproducing, but with efficient spot market for electricity, you'll have businesses taking advantage of this cheap energy during overproduction to generate the necessary load.
It depends, pumped storage can be designed to react very fast. In particular pumped storage plants which were conceived specifically to alleviate surge demand can spend a little bit of energy now to stand ready, no longer storing further energy but with their turbines now "spinning in air" the generator is rotating with no load and then when you actually need that power you drop water through to spin it instead, 16 seconds from zero to 6 x 300MW turbines = 1.8GW at Dinorwig station in Wales.
Gas likewise needs to consider this at design time. The most efficient possible closed-cycle gas turbine setup may take hours to be prepared and spin back up from zero, but obviously you would not choose this configuration if your intent was to use this station to handle surges. Britain's fleet of closed-cycle gas turbine power stations (in the same network as Dinorwig) frequently ramp up and down a dozen GW in an hour across the country.
BTW Dinorwig's fast start isn't really there to manage surges, that's a convenient happenstance, nobody was worried about a duck curve from solar power when it was built. It's there because it's a Black Start facility. Most power stations need outside power to start, it's just easier and they're connected anyway, Dinorwig was chosen to be able to start from nothing if the grid fails, so in that sense it's like the box of matches by the furnace, just in case.
You need some generation source that can quickly be brought online when needed, e.g. to meet peak demand for a few hours a day during extremely hot (or cold) weather, or when it's not windy/sunny.
Natural gas power plants are cheap to build and significantly cleaner than coal plants currently in operation. Nuclear is a fantastic option that I strongly support, but building reactors is a very expensive and multi-year process (if you can even get approval for it).
NG is not the endgame solution, but it is an immediately available solution to fill that gap until grid scale battery technology and sufficient renewable or nuclear capacity comes online.
That would be great. Episode 3 of Netflix's documentary on Bill Gates [0] that gets into his efforts to develop and deploy new reactor tech. While it only presents a small piece of the picture, it at least touches on the political climate surrounding nuclear energy. Worth a watch.
Nuclear is only expensive due to NIMBY regulation and lack of economies of scale. Look to South Korea to see how perfecting a plant design can dramatically lower cost.
The first thing we need to do is reverse the devolution of local control in the United States. If any random neighborhood council can block nuclear development then we aren't going to get anywhere.
Part of the problem is the life of a power plant is on the order of decades. Every new natural gas plant is a plant that will exist for 50+ years. Because investors need to make their money back.
But they also frequently lobby the government in order to ensure that they do.
Nothing good comes from having a large class of investors with significant amounts of money tied up in high-carbon power plants for the next half century.
As often said when trying to push a bad solution instead of a good one. Replacing coal plants with gas plants is a bad solution. Rapid deployment of nuclear+renewables is merely good. Perfect would be overhauling the economy to be less dependent on growth and much less carbon intensive.
> As often said when trying to push a bad solution instead of a good one.
Natural gas isn't meant to be a solution, so it doesn't make any sense of complain about it. The US is switching to it because it's better than coal in almost every way (safer extraction, cost, air population, carbon). We're essentially getting the benefits of natural gas for free.
Not to take away from your main point, but the capitalized total cost of ownership for a pony is _much_ larger than $1000 (which, by the way, is the price for a not-very-good-natured pony; breeds with nice temperaments cost a lot more according to https://pets.costhelper.com/pony.html ).
Doing some quick checking, food for a pony is ~$1-2k per year. Lodging is $2-3k per year. Basic preventative veterinary care is $1k per year; if the pony gets old this could get a lot more.
That's $4-6k a year for upkeep, and ponies live for 20+ years. So the actual cost of a pony, even with discounting and whatnot for future dollars, is probably at least $50k, not $1k.
If you really think through the implications of every individual in America owning a pony, it gets a lot more interesting than that! It means that everyone in every city would own a pony -- would that mean that perhaps a proxy ownership situation would occur, where you had a certificate of pony ownership, but the pony would be housed and maintained anywhere in the country that could do so cheapest? It would cost a lot more than 2-3k/year to house a pony in NYC! Let alone the sudden demand for housing about 5 million of them...
My guess is that these ponies would be kept in horrible conditions similar to the way domesticated cattle are raised for milk and meat. I would hazard that all of our assumptions about the actual price of ponies and maintenance would come down if we all needed to have a pony, and would come down by a LOT.
Gingivitis has been eroding the gum line of this great nation long enough and must be stopped. For too long this country has been suffering a great moral and oral decay, in spirit and incisors. A countries future depends on its ability to bite back. We can no longer be a nation indentured. Our very salivation is at stake.
Natural gas seems like tech dept to me. Take short term gain over long term. Hope that you'll address the tech dept sooner rather then later.
Sometimes that's the right call, and sometime the wrong call. I'm not qualified to tell, but I don't think this is a case of perfect being the enemy of the good, since all the other alternatives aren't perfect either, and seem equally viable, as opposed to a perfect over engineered solution that would never ever be able to actually materialize and ship, which is generally when the phrase perfect is the enemy of the good applies.
> If you build a bunch of $2B shiny new gas facilities, as we are doing today, utilities will want to run them for decades.
Utilities will want to run anything for decades, but gas plants are crazy cheap. A $2B natural gas power plant is inconceivable. A 500MW plant costs more like $500M (probably less), but AFAIU they're typically built smaller. And construction is very fast, on the order of 1-2 years. We've been building many, relatively small plants, which means phasing them out can likewise be done incrementally.
All of which means that even if we need to ditch natural gas, it won't be that painful, ignoring the comparative costs of natural gas itself.
Given the nature of many utility executives of expecting static costs of renewables from old estimates (a problem that also plagued the EIA and IEA), couples with regulations on what sort of profits utilities are allowed to collect, I expect that we will invest in far more natural gas than is economically rational.
And that's excluding the economic externalities of carbon emission; if we properly priced things we'd probably only build natural gas in some very extreme cases, and we'd be retiring far more natural gas.
It's frustrating to have such fast technology change, but have it go unacknowledged by key decision makers and decision influencers in both industry and government.
I'm not disputing that there'll be pain, or that we shouldn't be building them so quickly. I'm disputing how much pain and structural lock-in there'd be.
The article says that "planned investment in new gas power plants and pipelines totals over $100 billion", but that "by 2035, over 90 percent of proposed combined-cycle gas plants, if built, would be uneconomic to run compared to the cost of building a new clean energy portfolio."
Considering how quickly plants can built and how clean they are, at least in the sense of environmental regulations requiring long lead times (and therefore sunk costs) in preparing sites, if the predictions are true then energy executives should be able to pivot rather quickly. Most of the risk in a roadmap for building a bunch of gas plants isn't in being locked into building the gas plant, it's in the opportunity cost of not preparing for whatever the alternative will be. So long as wind and PV have similar initial costs, then pivoting should be easy. "Planning" to build $100 billion in gas plants is alot different than planning to build $100 billion in nuclear or hydro.
FWIW, I'm not disagreeing that maybe we should be incentivizing renewables more, but I can't get too worked up about it, either. The factors that make natural gas easy to switch to also make it easy to walk away from, particularly if you're walking away from planned construction.
If you build a bunch of $2B shiny new gas facilities, as we are doing today, utilities will want to run them for decades.
They'll want to run them for decades if they remain the cheapest options. Any combination of these developments could retire them well short of their technically achievable lifetimes:
- States and municipalities implement more ambitious decarbonization laws.
- Storage-backed clean energy costs fall.
- Natural gas prices rise as unprofitable producers exit the market.
Additionally, gas plant load factors can decline even without shuttering the facility if renewables bid below their pricing much of the time. Burning half as much gas in a year is a big emissions improvement even if the plant remains in business.
Natural gas plants are less "sticky" than coal plants for a number of reasons.
They employ small numbers of people compared to coal plants, so there is less political incentive to subsidize them just to prevent job losses.
There are few, if any, new natural gas plants co-located with gas production facilities. "Mine mouth" coal power plants had an additional element of stickiness because the mining jobs and plant jobs are eliminated together when the power plant closes, amplifying the local incentives to keep coal plants running for jobs.
Natural gas plants are much cheaper to construct than coal plants, so their costs are recouped faster.
Out of curiousity, are the emissions numbers you're quoting for solar, geothermal, hydro, etc accounting for the carbon costs associated with their construction? Additionally, don't those all require at least large-capacity battery systems, if not full nuclear/gas/coal plant backups in case the power can't be generated by those low-emissions systems?
I'm not trying to imply anything, just sincerely curious.
Yes, they are the result of full lifecycle anaysis from mining raw construction materials to final decommissioning.
Yes, for intermittent sources to lead to a low carbon system, vast energy storage or other low-carbon dispatchable load following is required.
Nuclear is the one low-carbon dispatchable source with very low life cycle land & material requirements and high energy return on investment.
For this reason, I like all low-carbon sources, but I love nuclear. Disclaimer: I'm professionally dedicated to solving the cost and public acceptance issues with nuclear.
How come wind is 4x better than solar? I'd image a solar panel would last on average 30+ years with almost no maintenance. Does wind calculation include maintenance, decommission and recycling? Does wind have to work 24/7 to meet this number? Is production the major contributor for solar?
These calculations are full lifecycle including everything listed. I belive the big difference here is related to energy used during fabrication of the solar panels and the mining of raw materials.
These are all per kWh so capacity factor of wind or solar is not relevant for this metric
Let me clarify: Does solar have 41CO2-eq/KWh on average or in optimal conditions? Just wonder if solar panel could possible be worse than gas (Alaska, north facing roof, heavy snow)
Ah yes, you're right. Capacity factor does matter. They give ranges to cover the point you're making. I'm using the medians. This is from Table A.III.2 from [1]. Solar PV utility ranges from 18 to 180. Hydro peaks out at a terrifying 2200 (due to biogenic methane emissions, still being researched).
You can get a solar panel to be worse than gas for sure in Alaska in winter. But we have to assume some intelligence in what people choose to do with their money.
The thing is that while coal plants are tied to coal and can't reasonably be adapted to other fuel sources, gas plants can be adapted to anything that burns - which includes CO2-neutral gas such as methane from biowaste, or methane made from electrolysis H2.
Therefore it is very viable to build gas plants now, especially for peak demand.
There is nothing which stops you converting from coal to natural gas. Plenty of coal plants have it or are in the process. Coal power plants pulverise coal until it is so small that it can be picked up in hot air and blown into the furnace. The already usually use oil or gas to initially warm the furnace.
Burning natural gas is definitely better than burning coal. But unburned natural gas is a much worse GHG than CO2, so if they leak too much when extracting, it could cancel the “climate savings”. (Would still probably mean less noxious air though.)
Unburned methane oxidizes into CO2 in about 10 years, where as excess C02 persists pretty much indefinitely. Calling natural gas "much worse" is misleading. Over a longer horizon, it is about the same as C02.
Methane doesn't entirely oxidize to CO2 in ten years. It has a half-life, so it gradually tails off. The net warming impact of methane over 100 years is 34 times higher than the warming impact of CO2: https://unfccc.int/news/new-methane-signs-underline-urgency-...
This matters, because the big concern with climate is exceeding a tipping point, where natural feedbacks like ice melt, emissions from melting permafrost, and forest fires cause the planet to warm several degrees further with no more help from us. We see that happening several times in geological history, where small amounts of warming kick off a positive feedback cycle that adds several more degrees.
Warming over the next few decades will pretty much determine whether that happens to us. After fifty years, hopefully we'll have a zero-carbon economy, but if we've already tipped into a warming cycle by then, it won't matter.
That can and must happen in parallel with replacement of coal with cleaner sources of energy, even if they involve emissions.
Full decarbonization can't in any sense be considered an intermediate solution, because there's not even a small working example of it anywhere in the world or any plausible proposal to get from here to there on the timescale we need to avoid disaster.
And even if it was, best case scenario it will take a couple of decades to switch away from fossil fuels.
> there's not even a small working example of it anywhere in the world or any plausible proposal to get from here to there on the timescale we need to avoid disaster
Yes but we are in uncharted territory. We don't know how to do it but humanity has to find a way and fracking is certainly not part of where we need to go.
The sensible decision would have been to invest in renewables instead of fracking. Fracking has been a total waste of money even ignoring all the environmental problems it is causing.
James Hansen talked to congress about climate change in the 80s, it's not like this is a new issue.
We have run out of time for intermediate solutions. A reduction of 2% (globally!) would have maybe been sufficient pre-2000. Today we need a reduction of 15% PER YEAR if we have any hope of keeping temperature increase within 1.5 degrees Celsius -- which is already a Very Bad Thing to happen as is.
We need extreme radical measures now. This tiny effect that happens to have occurred despite not changing anything about the fundamental logic of our economy and our relationship to energy is nothing to pat ourselves on the back about.
...assuming we have any skill at maintaining infrastructure, and looking around this country we really don’t. Look at the oil pipeline leaks just in the last year.
Completely agree. But I find that it happens not just on HN, but on other high-quality boards as well. (It would be improper of me to make the remark without confessing that I've done this a few times myself.)
Having lived in coal mining country, and visited a coal mine, I'm not. Methane and other gasses that leak during coal mining are carefully monitored and tracked because they're a hazard not only to the safety of the miners, but to the entire operation.
An explosion can kill dozens, destroy the mine, and leave it burning for decades.
But I will state that I'm an outsider in this field, and I suspect you are, too. Perhaps someone with direct knowledge can comment more authoritatively.
It's closely tracked when it's something that could seriously impact the ability of the operation to continue producing revenue.
But what about when it's simply an environmental externality? Some contaminated water supplies can be conveniently swept under the rug, who's going to know and if they do how are they going to prove that you did it? Much better not to keep records on that type of thing and look the other way.
Having a noxious gas sensor in a coal mine is not at all the same as tracking methane emissions from a fracking operation, which can occur over many square miles of the surrounding countryside (the whole point is to fracture underground rocks containing hydrocarbons, which then seep to the surface).
Trump administration is currently getting rid of all rules about methane emissions, so producers will have zero legal requirement in the USA to track, identify, report on, or prevent any methane leaks.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/natural-gas-re...
Natural gas isn't the ultimate solution, of course, but it's a mistake to treat it the same as coal.