It’s not about the “regulatory environment”, which is almost irrelevant when talking about China. What’s driving this is state-led development with clear goals, like reaching peak carbon by 2030, a claim which they can actually back up with developments like these.
I don’t think Xi cares about carbon. He just wants to build as much power as possible so that China becomes an economic powerhouse (no pun intended). Imagine what would happen in Europe or the US if power is 1/5th the price or lower. It would open many opportunities for building and innovation.
Or he cares about both, but obviously prioritizes domestic energy security. Masses complained about air quality, hence move to renewables. Otherwise no reason to build out new plants that are more efficient / less poluting if old dirty one's suffices for occasional peaking. Or try to shift to renewables so fast that there were power shortages a couple summers ago due to adverse climate effects on generation . Or stop building 100s of billiions of dollars worth coal plants abroad as part of BRI.
IMO Xi/PRC is a little bit TOO magnanimous about enviroment / eliminating carbon. While US continues to increase (and now lead) in oil/lng exports, PRC is leaving good money on the table not building 1000s of coal plants abroad or exporting their centuries of thermal coal stock. That's the kind of irrational behaviour you expect from someone that cares about enviroment.
From what I’ve seen, they’ve extended their environmentalism to beyond carbon into the anti pollution in other forms. I agree regarding power cost though. That’s a huge missed opportunity in the west.
China is all in on renewables because their domestic fossil fuel resources are extremely limited. They import close to 100% of oil and gas and significant coal right now, basically the same situation the US was in before fracking took off. Xi is worried about being cut off from energy by an American blockade.
Correct. They’re building everything, clean or dirty, at a rapid pace. I wonder if they just skip over environmental concerns. In the US these would require a wildlife or wetlands study which take a long time
These coal plants are meant as backups. They specifically invented peakable coal plants so that they can fulfill that role. They even optimized the hell out of these coal plants: new Chinese coal plants are the most efficient in the world. These new coal plants also replace a bunch of older, more polluting plants.
A couple of years ago in China it was cloudy, non-windy, and dry at the same time for an extended period of time.
The energy transition isn't as simple as "build more solar, shut down coal".
Well, the incoming administration seems to be committed to simplifying the regulatory environment in the US too. What's still unclear is if it will also introduce a one-party system to better emulate the success of China?
It has a lot to do with outside groups using the bureaucratic process to slow things down. A popular method is using what it's called environmental impact study. If an EIS identifies that some little field mouse might be harmed if the nuclear power plant is built, an outside organization can use that report to sue to stop the entire project. This tactic has been used countless times to stop everything from copper mining, to solar farms. Worse, still, if a group sues, and they win, the government picks up the tab. It's called environmental justice lawsuits, and they have utterly destroyed most Green projects in America.
I think the Office of Nuclear Energy is trying to get in front of Musk shutting all these projects down and moving the green funding to solar and battery.
The vast amounts of waste in building nuclear power is part of why it is so expensive, with projects traditionally ballooning to triple budget estimates. Exactly the stuff he is required to cut hard by mid-2026. With the numbers in plain sight, arguments of corruption will be rejected, despite the fact he stands to gain billions due to owning the biggest slice of proven, lower cost, less wasteful alternative.
I have given evidence; thus far you offer only personal sentiment. Feel free to explain how increased nuclear energy capacity would even hinder Musk's interests in the first place.
"Operational production reactors coming online in 2040."
That's about a decade and a half too late. We need to be reducing our carbon footprint right now, and we have that ability: wind and solar. Low initial impact, fast to net carbon negative.
Nukes take decades to dig themselves out of their carbon positive holes, if they ever do so at all (the nuclear industry does not account for most of the CO2 generated from supply and operations.)
With all due respect, we really ought to wait on things like this until at least February. While nuclear is likely to continue we must be aware that it's not fossil fuel and not guaranteed.
I don't have any faith in these kinds of plans. The US doesn't seem capable of actually finishing nuclear projects. I assume this is just a grift for someone to siphon away a whole lot of money.
It will probably go down over time. These targets are nice but it takes a long time for those plans to become reality. Plenty of time for changing the plans or cancelling them completely.
Regardless of those plans and whether they are cancelled or not, renewables are going full steam ahead in most of the world and will likely add essentially all of the planned nuclear capacity in a matter of years. And then some.
At this point renewables are, by far, the most cost effective way to generate power. Wind, solar, and battery storage are growing at a ridiculous rate. That's actually causing headaches for plans made years ago for e.g. gas plants and indeed nuclear plants. Some gas plants that opened fairly recently are actually facing early closures because they are no longer price competitive.
In Australia they've started planning for the closure of gas grid connections to people's homes.
Since they were built with the idea of supplying gas for a few decades and will be obsolete before that planned date, they're started to raise the rates they charge to ensure it gets paid off in time. This then accelerates the pace of people moving off gas.
It is worth investing a little more on nuclear in the interest of energy security. It isn't always a race to the bottom.
A diverse and robust energy grid is composed of various generation sources that differ in capacity factors, environmental impact, stability, availability, etc.
Energy security is way more important than people make out. You'd think that politicians would focus on relying less on the countries that they have political tensions with
This is a difficult question because if you build 1 plant, it clearly isn't. But there are large learning effect. Any nation that builds many plants, shares workforce and management rapidly drops cost.
If you look at UAE building South Korean plants, they were finishing plants pretty rapidly and if they had simply continued, they could have turned 100% green in just a few more years at quite a low cost overall.
It also depends on your energy market and financing. If you have a lot of solar, that simply destroys the market during certain periods, nuclear isn't gone be that profitable. But if you don't have a bunch of wind/solar and you actually value stable energy production. Then its much more reasonable.
A nuclear plant can run for 80+ years. So it depends on interest rates you use.
It depends on how you regulate the market. Part of the reason solar is still expensive on the market in Europe is because of regulations. To counter this to not kill growth you have various forms of economic incentives like tariffs for solar where the various government’s subsidies make up for the regulation. It’s to keep the fossil and nuclear energy market in Europe sustainable. Since we still heavily rely on these sources when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
The battery industry is expected to grow a maddening percentage in the coming decade. Germany moving their renewable goal from 60-80% by (I’m not sure about the year but I think it’s 2030), alone increased the expected economic growth for supplying battery storage by 800%. There is nowhere near enough storage to make nuclear and fossil fuels obsolete yet however. Especially not if we also increase the EV market share.
Solar isn’t optimal in very hot regions, however, as the efficiency goes down 0.3-0.5% in efficiency for every degree Celsius above 0 degrees Celsius. So in some regions nuclear is going to be a good option. I’m not personally a fan of nuclear because its safety depends on governments being willing to regulate the safety, but there is no denying that it’s still a much, much, better alternative to fossil fuels as far as delivering power on demand.
This is how it looks in Europe. I have no idea how it looks in the US.
The battery industry being built at the moment in Sweden is having some major issues right now when investment money and subsidizes are running dry. The biggest actor are close to bankruptcy and rushing to find new sources of money.
There seems a general pattern that if you need to build it outside of china, be that batteries, nuclear power plants or solar panels, it becomes too expensive.
The market is consolidating in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the challenges with the global supply lines and the increased interest rates. A lot of the smaller projects backed by semiprofessional investors will be picked up by larger investment fonds.
There is also still a couple of years until the European battery factories that are under construction will actually be operational.
Unless the economy picks up I suspect we’ll see a lot of bankruptcies in the coming five years. Currently it’s not just the price of solar panel production that is an issue, it’s also that you make equal and safer money on other investments. Back when the interest rates were basically 0% the 3-7% returns on solar were very attractive but now that is just not the case. This is why you see Japan picking up as an attractive place for solar these years, because in Japan a 3-7% return is still very good.
France leads the world in this department, with 70% of their electricity generation coming from nuclear, and serving as the world's largest net exporter of electricity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France). The consensus among sources I can readily find is that home consumers pay around 25-30 euro cents per KWh for electricity, and electricity production wholesales at around 8 euro cents per KWh.
I'd say it's competitive, yes.
A lot of French nuclear plants are scheduled to be decomissioned in the next years because these nuclear plants are getting old. There's an ongoing discussion about extending the life of some of those plants. And there are some plans for new reactors with estimated cost currently at ~50 billion euros. Of course that's extremely likely to go up further. Nuclear projects always balloon in cost.
Energy prices are set by the government and don't reflect the actual cost. French tax payers pay for the difference and have done so for years. The cost price probably excludes quite a bit that tax payers are also paying for.
The sad reality with nuclear is that it's a very unprofitable business unless you get governments to sponsor construction, waste disposal, security, etc. and then bail out failing nuclear companies when they fail anyway. All of these things have happened in France. France has nuclear reactors because it regards being a nuclear power as strategically important. Not because it's particularly cheap. It never was.
As of now, that somewhat artificial cost of 8 cents per kwh is actually on the high side for renewables. There are cheaper ways to get power these days.
> > The full cost of existing nuclear power calculated by the CRE amounts to respectively €60.7/MWh over the period 2026-2030
Assuming that price is with a 77% capacity factor there is an easy way to reduce the cost per MWh; get them to run with a higher capacity factor. Finland has achieved 94% over the last few years, and the US is up at 93% I believe. https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Assuming that this is mainly fixed costs the price could be down to 60.7*.77/.94 = 50 EUR/MWh; fuel is a minor input and might bump the price up to perhaps 53 EUR/MWh.
>And the first hit for "wind power cost europe mwhr" shows just how subsidized nuclear is:
This source makes a vague claim about LCOE estimations not taking subsidies into account. It says nothing to establish the amount of those subsidies, or even to quantify the cost of any power source besides wind.
>with none of the massive headaches.
Onshore wind generation has plenty of drawbacks. Much of what's commonly said against nuclear is baseless fearmongering.
Wind has huge headaches.. bird deaths, littering the landscape with ugly windmills. Offshore wind farms also harm whales. The turbine blades end up in landfills.
Why should they not be exempted when we today understand how and why it’s happening and they are following the environmental rules set forth for their operating permit?
For example ensuring plants don’t get built in endangered bird habitats and rules concerning operation during endangered birds migratory periods.
Seems like you want wind power to fail, like nuclear is, and are attempting to sling any potential mud you can find.
> Why should they not be exempted when we today understand how and why it’s happening and they are following the environmental rules set forth for their operating permit?
So we should allow companies to operate unhindered within (evidence based) rules. Seems like an idea. Let us use that approach for all activities, including nuclear power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model is a model with scant evidence in the range relevant to operating a power station. Having said that the ICRP will be updating their model within a decade or so, so perhaps that barrier will disappear.
Let’s remove the Price Anderson act as well and have the nuclear plants insure for Fukushima level accident costs rather than relying on the tax payers to pick up the tab.
The entire industry would shut down tomorrow if they had to pay the true insurance cost.
> have the nuclear plants insure for Fukushima level accident costs
The flip-side of the Price Anderson act is that the NRC is deeply involved in the operations of nuclear power stations.
Why stop at nuclear; why not aircraft, social networks or unvaccinated people? Also make all companies unlimited liability so their shareholders are accountable when something goes wrong.
Now you managed to pinpoint the issue with nuclear power.
Criticism is met with “don’t you dare question the subsidies” and then a stream of whataboutism across completely different industries rather than daring to compare with the alternative: renewables.
Because you already know that comparison makes the nuclear case even worse than it already is.
Renewables don’t have capped liability, at worst if regular insurance coverage is not enough the company will be bankrupted and the assets sold to pay for the damages.
For renewables it is already baked into the price because the risks are near zero.
> For renewables it is already baked into the price because the risks are near zero.
Remind me how much each eagle is worth?
How about power cuts caused by wind farms tripping incorrectly? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49309691 How about disruption caused by failure to provide power in low wind conditions, or is that just a societal risk rather than investor risk?
A recent study found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
> A recent study found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid
Per paper you've linked to :-
For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved
They state that for nuclear to be cost competitive with (per table 2) onshore wind (1.03 MEUR/MW, 0.37 capacity factor), offshore wind (1.90 MEUR/MW, 0.51 capacity factor) and solar (0.6 MEUR/MW, 0.14 capacity factor) it has to have a price between offshore and onshore wind. One also has to wonder why the high nuclear scenario has 9GW of intermittent energy sources in the mix.
Supplementary material chart S1 reveals that the nuclear power is a small part of the overall cost of the energy system. "Transport costs", "remaining investments" and "Operations and maintenance" are over 20B of the 25B EUR cost per year. Figure 6 of the paper needs to be viewed with these totals in mind.
Supplementary material chart S3 shows they model nuclear's availability factor by smoothing outages across the year, only ever producing 6,686MW. EDIT :- actually it goes up to 6,823MW for part of the year, averaging out to 6,743MW.
Overall the paper is rather poor.
EDIT :- Looking at the S3 data again, it appears that heating and unflexible demand add up to at most 9,770MW, so only another 2 nuclear power stations would cover that peak.
> Because Denmark already have intermittent sources covering over half their demand?
So Denmark can not change its energy system from intermittents to nuclear because that's impossible, but it can change from fossil fuels to intermittents because it must be done? Given a 20 year lifetime for intermittents it should be possible to manage their phase-out.
> Then you try to justify enormous nuclear costs because "it is not too bad"
I did point out that the nuclear "is a small part of the overall cost of the energy system"; it is unclear how the authors have justified 80% of the system cost and how that varies with intermittency of energy supply and demand (e.g. reduced transmission cost, scope in the summer to use a excess electricity).
> a complete inability to accept reality
It is unfortunate that the model behind this is not available for peer study; https://www.energyplan.eu/atomkraft is not a live link and the archive.org version of this does not hold a copy of the scenario files. The results depend critically on the model used (and software used to solve it) so in the absence of further information all I can do is look at the results in the paper and point out obvious issues.
I've just spotted the cost modelling of the intermittents; rather than using IAEA LCOE data (or state LCOE directly), table 2 states costs in terms of capital, O&M as a percentage of investment and lifetime. Crunching their numbers (with a 3% interest rate) I come to offshore wind LCOE being 29.75 EUR/MWh, onshore wind 24.41 EUR/MWh and solar 33.44 EUR/MWh. This seems on the low side.
Do you believe that this paper is a good example of energy modelling?
See also Canadian data (https://www.cns-snc.ca/learn-nuclear/basics-of-nuclear/how-m...). We're blessed to have abundant access to hydroelectric energy which is even cheaper to produce here, but otherwise we should be outraged by the decommissioning of nuclear plants - and, indeed, there have been recent campaigns to revive old plants and step up production.
> but otherwise we should be outraged by the decommissioning of nuclear plants
No, we shouldn't. Pull up charts for energy generation by type for the US, Canada, and Europe. Notice that solar and wind (especially wind) has skyrocketed and far eclipsed the capacity loss of nuclear. In the US, 7 times as much wind power is going in as nuclear plants being taken offline. In the UK, 30% of power generation (and growing) is from wind.
Now, who do you think knows better here? The power companies who have been shutting down nuclear and coal plants because they're more expensive than wind and solar? Or...uh...you?
If your answer is "me", then clearly you should get a job in energy production, or become an investor, and make a bazillion dollars knowing more than everyone else in the industry, in nearly every country.
US, EU, UK...all seeing massive capacity growth in wind, far eclipsing nuclear decommissioning. Several countries have hit days in the last few years where they didn't need to have any fossil fuel plants online.
> indeed, there have been recent campaigns to revive old plants and step up production.
That is because the nuclear industry is lobbying desperately to stay alive.
If you need to lobby the government to force power companies to use you while also handing you a big fat check written by taxpayers, that is proof you're not market competitive.
Make a cost calculation of how much solar and battery you need to keep your lights on during peak summer and then do the same calculation for how much solar and battery you need to keep the lights on in the middle of winter when a large scale 5 day blizzard.
Okay, I'm moving my metal foundry to a location that's sunny all year round, just like I've previously moved it to Iceland for geothermal or next to big hydro dams. Cheap energy makes it worthwhile.
Big fat wire to somewhere which isn't in a blizzard.
Or just build the metal foundry in the non-blizzard-prone area in the first place, because the blizzard takes out power lines even if there was a nuclear reactor on the other end.
I've done the maths, and I'd it wasn't for geopolitics, China makes enough Aluminium to make an HVDC grid so thick that it would have so little resistance that they could usefully connect every grid in the world for a cost of 250e9 USD for the Aluminium.
Scaled down to just the USA, no international stuff, it's something you can easily do if someone convinces Trump or Musk to delete any internal obstruction.
If they need to make it a culture war thing, they could just call it the Keystone pipeline of electricity, or the Trump Powerline, or similar.
(As a non American, I may be misjudging this: I don't care too much about US culture wars, they don't connect to me any more than the US or Chinese sports teams whose names I don't know).
You may be correct that I am over-optimistic, though for what it's worth my optimism is not universal to all of the aspects of Musk let alone Trump (mostly pessimistic about him), and not with regard to other greenhouse gas emissions besides electrical, heating, and transportation.
Why don't we just assume that power will be free and infinite and plug our grid into that assumption? We can even write it down on the socket and paint it green, based on how these arguments always read out that's the only thing needed to maintain electrified high tech society.
>"If we buy nuclear power plants on Temu we can have a 1GW reactor for $1000, but most likely it will be on sale (lucky us!) so it's actually more like $400 per reactor. And if we use green thorium then the fuel is $2.50 for ten years"
I reconstructed your argument to be in favor of nuclear power, and because I mentioned Temu as a source it actually have an infinite amount of more ties to reality than your story did.
Wow no wonder people like to argue for green energy if it's this easy to make up arguments for it
You've done as bad a job of that as GPT-2. Not ChatGPT, just 2.
You can very easily look up the resistivity of aluminium, which will tell you that if you want a loop around the equator to have a resistance of one ohm over that length, it needs to be about a square metre cross section. You can look up the density and the cost, too. You get around 250 billion dollars depending on the exact market price when you were looking it up.
You suggest buying 100 million metric ton of aluminium when the global annual production is 70 million. And magically you'll get it delivered as a pre-installed global power grid as opposed to ingots.
Just like when you go for a cup of coffee at a cafe and you only pay the commodity price of coffee beans, which at like $5 per kg and 20 grams of coffee per cup means a cup at starcucks is just 10cents. Right?
> You suggest buying 100 million metric ton of aluminium when the global annual production is 70 million.
How do you think aluminium works, that you burn it? These things last multiple decades, and even then the wires are still around, it's mostly the rest of the stuff you need to maintain — one of the recent-ish fires in California was that the tower on which the wire was strung wore through, the wire fell off, sparked, the wood caught fire.
At the scale I'm describing, even if you spread it over 2,500 parallel paths (which you should, not just for redundancy but also because of the magnetic field it produces if you don't), the aluminium looks like a structural member rather than looking like a wire.
> And magically you'll get it delivered as a pre-installed global power grid as opposed to ingots.
You keep putting words in my mouth. I very specifically and deliberately noted that I was just talking about the aluminium material cost itself.
Also, at this scale, you can basically process the ore directly into the metal in a trench in the ground that (1) becomes your wire immediately as you've finished processing it and (2) supplies the energy to the next section you want to electrolytically extract.
Aluminium is unusually good for this specific task, compared to other metals.
> Just like when you go for a cup of coffee at a cafe and you only pay the commodity price of coffee beans, which at like $5 per kg and 20 grams of coffee per cup means a cup at starcucks is just 10cents. Right?
Not at this scale, no.
If you're drinking at Starbucks, not only are you paying for the rent of the shop to give you somewhere to drink it and the time of the staff to prepare it and clean the place after you (and the seat and cup, if you sat down and got a ceramic cup rather than a disposable take-away), you're also enriching Starbuck's shareholders.
At this scale a grid is an international strategic decision even though it's theoretically in the zone where a corporation could afford it, and the surprise extra costs are the opportunity costs and the political capital gained or spent on proposing the thing on the one side, and of encouraging or allowing it on the other.
The USA right now is terrified of China, and only China can make enough aluminium; having a global grid creates a trade opportunity for those with something to gain, and a new risk factor for those with something to lose. America has stuff to lose, most of the world has stuff to gain.
So, if you want a Starbucks comparison, it's the cost of coffee from the point of view of Starbucks itself, not as a customer.
The price is a function of regulations. It is self imposed, so a concerted effort here could reduce prices.
Also, economics are not equal to climate/carbon. If we want to reduce climate change only nuclear is the way to go - not solar/battery.
I don't think solar+battery is cost competitive if you were to replicate nuclear completely, but I've not looked at the numbers. Need to consider a nuclear plant may have a 60 year life whereas panels would be 20 at best and batteries probably less.
Pricing carbon would mostly drive fossil fuels from the grid (unsurprisingly). It might boost nuclear as a result but it would boost renewables far more.
Ultimately it's about energy return on investment.
Solar + battery requires plenty of materials and energy to put together. It also needs to work in the middle of winter for it to be a fair comparison. When you consider it in that way it favours nuclear. It also has a shorter lifespan than nuclear, so that should be included.
Energy return on investment is pure crankery. It's a meaningless number that has basically no impact on any decision.
And, if you take that crankery seriously, then renewables vastly outperform fossils and are speeding past nuclear on this metric too.
It's basically impossible for energy tech to come down in price by magnitudes and not have increasing EROI as energy inputs cost money. This is predicted to continue.
And despite this metric being great for renewables, you don't hear anyone crowing about it, because it's meaningless.
It's not about cutting corners but regulating nuclear only to the extent that it is as safe as the next best alternative rather than orders of magnitude safer and until the point it is uneconomic.
This is good for regulatory discussions and historical context:
The regulations imposed on nuclear in many places are absurd and not justified by any actual risk incurred. Especially considering the implications if the same regulations were imposed on coal plants - see e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... .
Anyone who cares about numbers isn't going to form their opinions reading HN in 2024, the debate for them has been settled since the 1980s. We're in a 40 year run where people who can invest in nuclear reactors are better off than people who do not.
If there is anything to talk about seriously it hasn't come up on HN in the last few years. The last time something happened that moved the needle on whether there was any real policy question by the numbers was probably Chernobyl.
I wonder though how much is it that nuclear was helping economically, and how much was it that an already strong economy could afford to splurge on nuclear?
Couldn't disagree more. The point you're making boils down to saying that because it's complicated, we can't rely on reason and rather have to go with gut feeling.
The fact is that state of the art research into this does very much consider those points you think aren't being considered, and has been doing so for decades.
You can easily find much more on Google, from US sources as well if you choose to mistrust EU publications.
I'm not commenting with more details ("numbers") because I very much am not qualified to give a detailed, well-founded opinion on this that doesn't randomly leave out half the story.
But I do know enough to tell you aren't either, that the way you are talking about this is way under-complex and totally misses the mark in terms of where the state of the art is. One specific way (possibly of many) in which it does so is in ignoring the absurd exponential learning curve that renewables + storage technology is on.
Meanwhile battery energy storage deployments increase about 100% per year in both China and the US.
That means battery deployments will have tripled in... 2026.
Just to show the difference in growth rate, if batteries would keep increasing 100% annually, installations will have increased 1*2^25 = 300 million times by 2050. So multiple orders of magnitude different is what I'm trying to point out.
The growth rate that the US government sets here is 4% (1.04^25 = 3).
It's meaningless I think. It doesn't move the needle.
Nuclear energy seems to have been mostly opposed by the same people who want green energy. We can have the best of all worlds, no need to slow down on renewables, but there was some serious hesitation on nuclear up until recently. I'm glad that's changing.
The fact that the Green party in Germany is against nuclear power is all you need to know that these people are not serious about climate change.
If your goal is to de-carbonize the economy as quickly as possible, then anything better than natural gas or coal should be good enough. Then, when the last gas plant and the last coal plant have been closed, we can talk about closing down nuclear plants if and when solar PV and wind ramp up to the appropriate levels.
That is what Australia is doing, as it adds more wind and EV production, coal plants are being closed 1 by 1 in an orderly fashion.
Instead in Germany, they did it in reverse and found themselves in a position of weakness when Russia invaded Ukraine.
> That is what Australia is doing, as it adds more wind and EV production, ..
but not (just to be clear) adding nuclear.
There's a solid Australian national science report that's extremely clear that within Australia nuclear makes zero economic sense (for many dull pragmatic reasons).
Largely due to a total lack of at home nuclear experience and talent, a very long run up to any nuclear return, and a booming renewables industry that's growing so fast the race will be over by the time nuclear can deliver anything.
Also, to be clear, there is one side of the political aisle that is championing nuclear .. less as a solution, more as a distraction from their chronic AGW denial and lack of any other strategy.
Their "plan" in a nutshell is "just continue in as we are" until {insert <magic> happens} and "eventually nuclear".
This is less a roadmap and more fairy dust and wishful thinking.
I never said they added nuclear power. I said they close coal plants as they add solar PV and Wind.
I am not advocating for Australia to build nuclear plants. I am simply saying that they are trying to organise the transition properly by not removing coal plants too early.
It was uncertain what you intended re: nuclear with your comment, particularly with the German preamble.
I merely sought to clarify what the actual situation in Australia was for the benefit of third party readers who may have taken an unintended implication from that.
Solar/wind is great if you have practically unlimited, life- and disaster-free deserts to capitalize. Sucks otherwise.
Which is probably why renewables are highly regarded in specifically Australia and US, but not nearly as much elsewhere; stripping vegetations off mountainsides and farmlands to install mega-solars is just man-made disaster, not a positive decarbonization effort.
It can be in places like in the middle of Australia, obviously.
> stripping vegetations off mountainsides and farmlands to install mega-solars
I'm really curious: who is proposing to do that? Ok, there are some solar projects that are installed in fields where you could construe that they could be otherwise used for food production, but guess what? They can still be used for food production - as pastures (https://ruralsolarstories.org/farm-friendly/solar-pastures).
> I'm unsure what planet you're from with that comment.
Let's put it this way: there's that much variance in population density on this planet.
Around myself, personally owned roof is a luxury. A parking lot is a 5-story building if not 5-stories structure directly below a building. On the other hand, to some others, solar panels as sheds in a ranch is just a fancy shed that they're going to need anyway.
Rooftop solar for one household on a midrange under-$1m 50-story mega-condo with 20 rooms per floor reduces power draw of the building by 1/1000th. Outside the mega-city is mountain ranges and water sources. The rest 999/1000th of power has to come from there if it can't be sourced in-city, which means stripping mountains to bare soil and covering lakes in mega floats and dealing with environmental releases all the time, or alternatively just finding a valley in the mountains and building massive metal cans to boil rocks could work too.
Might sound like a William Gibson parody, some places are just like that. Some parts of his works are effectively just portrayals.
> Solar/wind is great if you have practically unlimited, life- and disaster-free deserts to capitalize. Sucks otherwise.
Bit more complex than that: the UK is north of the Canadian-US border and has parts at the same latitude as southern Alaska, has fantastic wind resources, and somehow is managing to do not too badly with PV either.
> stripping vegetations off mountainsides and farmlands to install mega-solars is just man-made disaster, not a positive decarbonization effort.
Human imagination doesn't handle the huge numbers involved very well, maths is necessary.
If we did what you're describing (which we don't need to because PV doesn't have to be in a contiguous sheet and rooftop PV can supply a non-trivial percentage of demand, and also a poor choice geographically, and you wouldn't want to because geographical diversity is good), then the EU could get 133% of its needs from Slovenia, which is one of the smaller countries in the union (only three are smaller), and that's already accounting pessimistically for capacity factor: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=area+Slovenia+*+1kW%2Fm...
If you put a 3m wide strip of PV on or by the side of the EU road network (not rail, not airports, not car parks), that would also meet 96% of current demand by itself. And for the US, that same number with the same assumptions about capacity factor and width would be 87%.
Where PV doesn't work is dense city-states like the Vatican, because rooftop PV is only a "non-trivial percentage of demand" not "all of demand".
What most people fail (or don't want) to see is how long-term decisions about nuclear power are: the three remaining reactors that were finally shut down beginning of 2023 were operated for 10+ years knowing that they will be shut down, so maintenance was deferred, personnel planning was done accordingly etc. If Germany would decide that it wants nuclear power back, it would probably take at least a decade until it has an operational nuclear reactor again.
I don't care about who closed the last nuclear plant. I care that the Greens who are for the de-carbonization of the economy advocated for the removal of nuclear energy and because they needed more energy anyway, they simply decided with the government in power to buy it from Russian oligarchs instead.
They did not have to do this. They could have stopped building new nuclear plants, keep maintaining the ones they had until such a time as the PV and Wind production could replace all the power generated by the nuclear plants and then start decommissioning them.
But they followed ideology instead of logic and ended being at the mercy of Russia and had to scramble to fix that problem in the last few years when this could have been avoided.
In the meantime, they now import a lot of electricity from France which ironically is generating it with, you guessed it, nuclear power. How about that?
Your posts smell bad of the common standard, troll induced, irrational green hate. Die G-grüÜÜüuNnnNeEnn!Discussing nuclear energy is interesting but not at this level...
> In the meantime, they now import a lot of electricity from France
How much of the total is it, 1% or something? That is not "a lot".
Weird that you're praising Australia which has a legal ban on nuclear.
And has a right wing party that is trying to stop renewables rollout with some vague plan to do something with nuclear in a decade or two even though Australia is near perfectly situated in terms of land and resources to take full advantage of the renewables revolution.
The point of my comment was that whether you are trying to move from coal or nuclear or gas, you need to do it in an orderly fashion and not act on ideology like the Green party did.
Instead, they decided to close the nuclear plants without having a back up besides Russian gas. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
That's a fair concern but it seems the tech has matured a lot and it's at least as safe with maybe the dangers of unforeseen natural disasters like what happened with Fukushima.
Solar is still being held back by battery tech, at least for scaling properly from my limited understanding. Then there is the problem of efficiency in places with less sunlight like a lot of northern cities. I think it will definitely be the best option for sunny places once there is cheap and dense batteries.
Land, land, land. There are no readily available, flat, unused land to put up all the solar panels in most developed countries, especially without massive environment consequences.
US is an exception to that, nowhere near the mean.
Musk can't even restrain himself from taking his jet for 15 minute flights to the beach. That's the flight time. That doesn't include the APU running while the pilots get the plane configured/engine warmup time, /taxi time pre takeoff and then taxi time after landing.
It's just about the most CO2-intensive fuck-the-planet way one should possibly travel ~60 miles...and doesn't even get into the pollution aspects of jet emissions at high altitudes.
For 2022, his jet usage equaled 2,100 tons of CO2.
To put that in perspective: if you drive 10,000 miles a year, and get about 25mpg, then you're using about 400 gallons of fuel, which equals 7.6T of CO2.
Just from his flights alone, Musk generates as much CO2 as nearly three hundred cars.
I'm completely fine with the most productive individuals we have in the world being extreme CO2 consumers. Impact on global emissions is, in any case, negligible. However, the impact on having companies like Tesla selling around 2 million electric vehicles a year or more, really compensates for those 2,100 tons of CO2.
I'm not. I believe in people setting good examples. Electric cars like Tesla sell are still completely unsustainable and enormous sources of CO2 and pollutants. They are doing nothing for the larger car problem that we have. Arguably they make it even worse.
Setting a good example by driving an EV, that is right, but what is the alternative for short and quick flights ? At the moment electric airfare is not yet developed so availability is not there.
Everything we manufacture is unsustainable, but some are more than unsustainable than others. EV manufacturing is preferable to ICE. We need to accept that if we want to keep humans on this planets and out of poverty and hunger we need to use our environment in our favor with some degree of unsustainability, there’s no way out of it.
The large car problem is only a problem in cities, and should be addressed there. Countries like Netherlands address it really well: bikes and pedestrians get the space they deserve and cars are isolated in their own infrastructure.
Trump is in favour of nuclear. You can easily find this on Google. The reason to be in favour of oil/gas is because it is a near term solution. Nuclear is a few years out at least.
what do you mean by near term solution? aren't solar and wind the cheapest form of electricity?
It doesn't make sense to focus on gas anymore, unless they are trying to extract as much money as possible before it's over.
> You can’t just snap your fingers and replace millions of cars, [...]
The Chinese are trying to help, but Americans like tariffs more than they hate climate change. (At least that's the preference that their political system expresses.)
Probably the US should mandate (by edict or incentive) its own industry to build EVs rather than importing a strategic asset from a strategic competitor.
Why would you want to be in a trade war, yet alone with the whole world? The US has many friends, there's more than just China.
Also, you suggest that a trade war is bad, because you might no longer be able to buy stuff from other people. But then you suggest that the right way to prepare for a trade war is to pretend that you are already in one, ie do to yourself what the enemy would want to do to you in a trade war? (That being limiting your ability to buy from the rest of the world?)
They did. But the local political dysfunction meant they ended up making Elon Musk the richest man in the world and he's now trying to take over the government in cahoots with someone who is fighting a culture war against EVs, while only getting to 10% EV sales.
China spent similar amounts and has a vibrant, world leading EV marketplace, supplied by their vibrant, world leading battery industry, and 50% EV penetration domestically and export plans that terrify the countries that chose not to follow this path.
Help is an interesting word choice for what is essentially undercutting our entire domestic automotive manufacturers and ensuring, on a pure cost front, that the majority of Americans purchase and rely on maintenance for a product produced in China. Doing so would have major negative consequences for our own strategic interests, hence why there has been such a massive tariff on it for several years now. China isn't being altruistic when they're attempting to sell us their much more affordable EVs. It's not a uniquely US perspective on the threat of Chinese EVs either, as the EU also has lesser but still non-trivial tariffs on Chinese EV brands.
If the US and the EU had invested in EVs 15 years ago like China did instead of scrambling to do so in the last 5, then China would not have the advantage it has now on the other carmakers.
Also if the governments want people to move away from ICE cars, then maybe they should stop putting tariffs on cars coming from China.
At some point, you need to make a decision and stick with it.
The way I see it as a consumer in the EU is that the EU is simultaneously saying we need to transition to a lower carbon economy as quickly as possible but then increases the price of goods that could be used in this transition. Make it make sense.
Is it my fault that the carmakers in the EU failed to invest EV tech?
So why am I being asked as a consumer to subsidize the legacy carmakers who were very happy to rake in billions of euros in the last 10 years while selling Diesel engines all the while knowing the the Chinese EVs were just around the corner?
Well, isn't it a good thing that they can help fight climate change without being altruistic? The entire western capitalist model is based on the premise that capitalism is good because people can help improve society through selfish means. Altruism doesn't scale. It's best when incentives are aligned.
The problem isn't with keeping Chinese cars out through tariffs. It's keeping them out, and at the same time not stimulating domestic green energy development enough. Why should the energy transition be bottlenecked by incumbent interests' profit margins?
> Well, isn't it a good thing that they can help fight climate change without being altruistic? The entire western capitalist model is based on the premise that capitalism is good because people can help improve society through selfish means. Altruism doesn't scale. It's best when incentives are aligned.
Yes, that's why you should let people buy cheap Chinese goods.
> The problem isn't with keeping Chinese cars out through tariffs. It's keeping them out, and at the same time not stimulating domestic green energy development enough.
Didn't you just say capitalism was good, and now you argue the opposite?
Really no idea what you're getting at. It's really simple and not some nefarious scheme. The Chinese government wants to be energy-independent so they don't have to import foreign oil and gas. Developing domestic green energy happens to align with fighting climate change, as well as transitioning the economy to a high-tech based one in order to escape the middle income trap. The incentives with the private sector are also aligned because this development is profitable. So they do it, by whatever means possible.
They sell some cars to Europe and North America, but the amount is negligible compared to what they sell domestically, and still much smaller than what they sell to ASEAN and the Middle East.
It's that simple. This isn't some grand plan to destroy foreign car manufacturers. If foreign car manufacturers get destroyed then that's by accident, as a result of them not staying competitive enough, not because that was the end goal from the start.
Of course it's in western governments' and manufacturers' rights to not accept this fate. But the most productive way to avoid that fate is by increasing their own competitiveness and by moving faster themselves, not closing themselves off while at the same time staying lazy about the energy transition. That's just rent collection.
The Chinese subsidise their own manufacturers of some goods. [0]
They do that partially as you say to develop their own energy independence. But there would be more efficient ways to do that, and specifically they wouldn't need to give gifts to foreign consumers.
I'm not sure why you think that I think it's nefarious? Western consumers (and other foreigners, like in ASEAN and the Middle East etc) get stuff for cheaper, that's nice for them.
The Chinese government subsidises these companies with tax payer money that they take from other parts of the economy; it's a net loss for the Chinese economy overall; but perhaps a net plus, if you focus on just the politically connected companies.
If you want to find anything nefarious: it's that rest of the Chinese economy that's being shafted.
> I'm not sure why you think that I think it's nefarious?
Most conversations on the Internet I've seen about this topic paint Chinese subsidies and Chinese car exports as a grand, deliberate, evil plan to cripple western companies and industries.
> But there would be more efficient ways to do that
I really doubt it. We have not seen any other examples of green energy rollout that is better. The improvement in Chinese air quality in just 15 years is staggering: Shanghai now often has better air quality than Berlin. Health outcomes do not easily show up in GDP figures.
Not when the domestic companies which manufacture the same product wither as a result. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe in defensive national economic policy as a blanket protection we should do to protect all industries, but in special circumstances such as this one where losing all of our electric vehicle production capability and specialization is at play, I think it certainly is in our strategic interest to avoid that from happening.
A company being unable to compete with another one on price will result in a drop in revenue, as consumers purchase the product with the cheaper price. Revenue going down is bad for a business. How exactly is any of what I've just stated wrong? How exactly is another company selling a similar product at a much lower price point good for the company? Perplexing position that somehow introducing a much cheaper product into the market from company B is good for company A.
Who said snap your fingers? we are talking about investment. The US already has enough oil to last until all cars are replaced if that's your worry. The real problem is allowing oil companies to grow even further, putting the public's health and climate at even more risk. The logical (even liberal if you think on $$ terms) choice is to invest in renewable.
Nuclear plants take at least 10 years to be build. During that time millions of cars, stoves and boilers can be replaced. Look at Europe, their natural gas usage peaked in 2010.
> "I highly doubt any new reactor (that's not already in the planning phase) will come online in the US within the next 10 years."
That's a reasonable prediction. The US has essentially regulated new nuclear power plants out of existence over the past generation. That doesn't mean that there's anything about the technology that means it takes a decade to build, though. It's just a policy failure.
Musk is making batteries, they make it match demand.
I've been through Nevada and into Utah, you've got loads of desert, enough to make PV stable.
Wind is much more stable in certain places than others, and certain altitudes than others.
What really makes things unstable is when you don't keep your grid in good shape and it sets fire to a forest. Or acting like Texas and thinking grid connections with other states is somehow bad.
Nuclear plants can't be built instantly; the growth patterns for batteries suggest that by the time new nuclear comes online, there will be enough batteries.
(And I'm saying this as someone who actually likes nuclear, thinks the public perception of the danger is over-stated, and who thinks everyone should have build a lot more reactors decades ago).
Where the batteries end up and how they're used heavily depends on policy decisions between now and then.
I'm expecting most batteries (worldwide) to be used for cars, with bi-directional power so they can function that way (for grid storage) when plugged in. That doesn't say much about what any specific country will do, and as Texas demonstrates, US states can have their own independent energy policies.
No they don’t. They can provide a stable curve during the day at scale. But that doesn’t help with night time or the fact that demand does not peak when the sun does.
Diurnal is too regular for me to count it as "instability", even if we didn't have batteries and other storage, as hourly pricing is already a thing that has often made nighttime cheaper than daytime because supply didn't used to ramp down to match demand without that discount.
Even then, the US covers how many hours of longitude?
Because that's how much extra pre-dawn the west can get from the east, and how much post-sunset the east can get from the west — even just diversifying geographically from San Fran to Cisco Utah* gets you nearly two hours.
* why is a ghost town the most notable place in the area, according to Google Maps?
As a student in non linear complex dynamics & applied mathematics 40 odd years ago in a non US country (Australia) we looked at how repeated iterations of First-past-the-post voting systems tended to converge to two party systems and to blocs that nudged up against each other and didn't particularly represent the demographics of the country.
A result in the vicinity of Hotelling's Law with vote capture rather than profit maximisation.
It's a damnable doom spiral emergent from a system setup by founders largely opposed to party politics.
Require more than two parties, and have proportional representation.
If team "east side" and team "west side" are butting up against each other with the hope of the 50%±1 of the population behind them all being on their side, but suddenly one or both of them has to face factions behind them splitting off — well, it's like how often the US Democrats are upset about the US Green Party "splitting the vote" (do US Republicans have the same reaction to the Libertarians? Libertarians barely get in the news here on the other side of the Atlantic).
I think that without proportional representation, that just pushes the half-way point further from the new party. Can anyone who has actually studied this confirm or refute? I'm in danger of LARPing XKCD here: https://xkcd.com/793/
The problem wit those "old" democracies is that too much within these systems hinges on the participants desire to honor the rules.
This is especially clear if you compare it to more modern democracies who had fallen ill to fascism before and had to harden their rules after the devastations of WWII. I don't think the dysfunctionality of democracy both in UK and the US is a coincidence. Up to a few years ago the last mental hurdles have fallen and bad actors discovered that there are surprisingly little hard rules preventing them to play the game in bad faith — and so they did. The media landscapes in the UK and US (Murdoch!) did their part.
US commentors I discussed with always pointed to free speech, I just don't hope they mean it like Elon Musk: Free speech, as long as it is the right kind, and I am deciding which is.
The comment is less about which of two bad choices floated to the top and more about the system that only coughed up two viable poor choices from a demographic in the hundreds of millions.
Is the german government collapse due to polarization? Was the UK government election of labour due to polarization?
Polarization is a centrist cope that has no actual content. Some people actually have values and there is a sincere disagreement about values for some people. Only centrists who have no values and love the status quo think people having values is a problem.
Trump ran on a pro-coal platform and remains vehemently pro-coal and pro-oil. He's not going to let his lobbyists down by boosting competing energy sources.
Eliminating EPA regulations isn't going to make nuclear more competitive, either.
I do agree and I also prefer electric vehicles, but this massive usage of personal cars should absolutely be reduced. I live in a country with fantastic public transport and regularly travel 150km+ one way(daily, for weeks). To do this in a car would be insane. To do this in comfort on a train is amazing. Don't conflate "electric vehicle" with "personal carriage".
My colleagues wonder how I can spend so much time commuting and don't stay in a hotel like they do. That's because they think like car people. Because 3 hours in car is torture. Being away from your family 5 days a week is preferable to them. Sure, traveling so much is not ideal, but my point is that trains can be far, far superior to cars. Cars only make sense last mile and in rural areas, in my opinion.
- Electric Trains
- Electric Trams
- Electric buses
- Electric cars
- Electric Airplanes
I can't understand the basis for your views. While he has also spoken about increasing oil production, that's about energy security - not about increasing energy consumption or GHG.
Of course he's for nuclear energy; he's not very smart, as witnessed in the emails to other top tech CEOs, disclosed in some recent court cases.
Like most SV types, he doesn't understand that just because there's no CO2 coming out the stack doesn't mean there's no CO2 footprint. The plant construction, operations, and fuel supply all have enormous CO2 footprints.
Nuclear is also the most expensive per kw/hr of any method of generation. As it matured as a generation method, it has only become more expensive.
...which is why nuclear and coal plants have been shutting down across the US and elsewhere; they just don't make good fiscal sense for power companies. Wind and solar have plunged in cost and are almost an order of magnitude cheaper, and energy storage tech is rapidly maturing. And no, this isn't hurting us; we're building out solar and wind at a rate 7 times faster than the nuclear capacity being shut down.
They also don't have any of the security or safety concerns. They can also be distributed far more easily; nuclear power plants are very difficult to site because you have to find an intersection between "the grid can take tens of gigawatts of power being injected here", "there is a plant nearby that can supply the plant with power during standby or for cold start" and "it is geologically stable enough". Contrary to popular rants, the biggest problem isn't NIMBYism.
Further, nuclear can't change load any faster than on a timescale of "many hours" so it's only usable for base load.
> While he has also spoken about increasing oil production, that's about energy security -
You know how you get "energy security"? Diversifying energy sources. IE: Wind, solar, energy storage, and more HVDC transmission lines.
>Like most SV types, he doesn't understand that just because there's no CO2 coming out the stack doesn't mean there's no CO2 footprint.
First off, this is an extremely uncharitable take. Where did he say that there is no CO2 footprint? Second, the CO2 footprint is still much less than for fossil fuels.
>Nuclear is also the most expensive per kw/hr of any method of generation.
This is not even close to true. Not in other countries, anyway. I gave some citations elsewhere in the thread.
>You know how you get "energy security"? Diversifying energy sources.
The idea behind these statements was that Europe should be less reliant on Russian oil and gas. Local production is the most straightforward route. Nothing about that is incompatible with diversification. But you cannot snap your fingers and replace a machine that burns oil with one that runs on electricity.
Maybe it has something to do with being the co-head of the announced Department of Government Efficiency with Vivek Ramaswamy, who he definitely supports, and who yelled at the Republican primary:
“The climate change agenda is a hoax”.
Musk sure criticizes Dems for every single little thing but I haven’t heard any criticism about that…
"The climate change agenda" clearly means something different to him than "climate change". Again: his statements on the record are very consistent, and completely congruent with a belief that other people are wrong about how to solve the problem, while also agreeing that the problem exists.
You know damn well that “the climate change agenda” means an electrical grid like CA, with solar, wind, and batteries, that produces 6x less pollution than coal based grids in the Midwest. EVs and public transit using clean energy as opposed to 20mpg SUVs and trucks.
They’re simply using a wink and a nod with the word “agenda” to fool rubes into protecting Oil and Gas interests, which include dictatorial petroleum-states like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia.
He endorsed a candidate who will eviscerate climate incentives, funded his campaign on a massive scale, and will serve in his administration. Those actions weigh a heavier than his lip service.
Actions speak louder than words is totally true, which is why I trust the guy who made us all drive electric cars over some random internet commentator.
ITT I see many people who seem to believe they can predict the future with perfect confidence, and that supporting evidence is not required for these predictions.
We are not living in a world that was created yesterday. Trump has been president before, we can look to that record when making predictions.
Last time he pulled out of the Paris accords and incentivized increased oil production, while making none of the massive investments in renewables and EVs that the Biden Administration would later make.
Yeah, back in 2017 Musk stepped back from his advisory role for the first Trump administration after Trump decided to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. "Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world." (https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/1/15726292/elon-musk-trump-a...). But still, he decided to throw his weight behind getting Trump reelected. Not sure if his convictions have changed, if he sees Trump as the "lesser evil" or if he hopes to be able to influence him, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see...
The evidence is at every level, there's stuff you can do yourself like the experiments Victorians did with different gasses in glass jars that can trivially demonstrate climate change, and now we've got satellites we can be confident we've also covered most of the feedback mechanisms and not just the direct forcing from the gases we can directly measure that we've added to the atmosphere.
And that's ignoring proxy data that goes back longer than homo sapiens, which we also have.
Given that we know CO2 rates, can you tell me precisely what the average temperature will be next year? How many tons of CO2 equal one degree of temperature change?
What’s the effect of CO2 on forests and agricultural output?
My problem with the climate change agenda is that it’s reductionist: “CO2 bad.” Climate change activists never talk about the bad aspects of windmills. Or the bad aspects of battery mining. Or the bad aspects of buying things from China. Some random town will try to “save the climate” and put restrictions on people, while if that town were wiped off the map, it wouldn’t make a single thousandth of a degree of difference. It’s a bunch of virtue signaling that makes life far more expensive than it needs to be while having a zero measurable positive effect.
The mistake environmentalists have made is that they got mixed up with the Marxist/Communist far left who don’t actually care about the environment as much as they care about shifting control of the means of production. It’s about power, not temperature.
> Given that we know CO2 rates, can you tell me precisely what the average temperature will be next year?
Depends what you mean by "precisely … the average".
If by "average" you mean the test is against a set of 1000 hypothetical worlds starting from the same (to within measurement errors) initial conditions, and by "precisely" you mean to a precision of 0.01°C, then yes, totes.
If by "average" you mean "specifically of this world integrated over that year", then definitely not: El Nino/La Nina by itself has an impact of about ±0.2°C on the global average, which is also why despite this year being over the 1.5°C threshold in the most recent global climate political foo, the people involved aren't anything like as concerned as you might expect.
> How many tons of CO2 equal one degree of temperature change?
I personally can estimate that to be 5.263×10^14 kilograms/°C, I'd have to look up a real research paper to be more accurate and this is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation. (But also: it's not a linear relationship).
> What’s the effect of CO2 on forests and agricultural output?
Varies wildly by region, with huge positives and huge negatives in different places at the same time. Also oceanic primary production is significantly more messy than land-based photosynthesis, due to the complexities of nutrient mixing over the water column and how that changes in response to the weather as well as the climate: https://spj.science.org/doi/10.34133/olar.0066
(Oceanic primary production is my one scientific publication: you can forecast how much octopus fishermen will catch from using wind records combined with satellite-data-based-estimates of chlorophyl levels in the hatching and growth seasons prior to the fishing season itself: https://www.int-res.com/articles/meps2008/362/m362p181.pdf)
Also note that agricultural output is hugely dominated by fertiliser — something like half the nitrogen in our bodies is from the Haber–Bosch process.
> Climate change activists never talk about the bad aspects of windmills. Or the bad aspects of battery mining.
I've been seeing anti-windmill campaigns since the mid-00s, and that's just when I was starting to pay attention to such things. The bad aspects of battery mining only started getting in the news as soon as electric cars stopped being a joke.
> The mistake environmentalists have made is that they got mixed up with the Marxist/Communist far left who don’t actually care about the environment as much as they care about shifting control of the means of production. It’s about power, not temperature.
Aye.
An ex of mine, who is a proudly and literally communist and green (there's a video of her campaigning for the US green party, saying Clinton was so bad that she'd rather people vote Trump), is very vocal about the bad aspects of battery mining… albeit because of how important that is to Musk, whom she loathes.
And in UK politics, despite being green and the coal miner strikes being before she was born, supports the coal miners.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-20/china-app...