There are more than 60,000 power plants in the world, the bulk of which are fossil fuels. Replacing them, with a continually growing power demand as newly middle-class individuals begin to consume more, is effectively impossible without radical change on a planetary level.
Never mind the concrete production for all of the new plants alone would release a staggering amount of CO2.
Even if someone figured out fusion this afternoon, and could start construction of one plant on each continent (sans Antarctica) this year, with the plants going online late next year, we'd still need radical change to hold us over for (likely) the couple of few decades it would take to build enough of the facilities.
Also consider ICE vehicles are still something like 90% of the annual sales in the world too. If you outlawed the production of ICE vehicles in every country in the world today, in 30 years you'd still have many millions of those vehicles on the road being used.
Concrete, plastics, livestock... there are many facets to this problem.
Absolutely. We need all angles at the problem to find a solution. We also need to mitigate the damage we know can't be prevented. Shipping is 12% of CO2 emissions. It's a little bit harder to nail down (found a staggering figure of 46% of all emissions) how much coal contributes but together with shipping they are more than half of all emissions. If you are tackling a hard problem and a solution to half of it is on your doorstep, please answer the bell.
Yeah, sure. Build as much nuclear as you can reasonably integrate into a grid that primarily runs on renewables. But don't trust in Thorium to somehow fix our problem.
Thorcon is using 20% enriched U-235. Their design can accomodate the Thorium fuel cycle in the future but for now it's mostly repurposed nuclear wastes.
I don't remember the figures. There are plenty of videos on Youtube with presentations from the Thorcon team. I think it's 250MW electric, 500MW thermal that the design delivers.
The US uses 4 trillion kWh per year. Assuming 3MW wind turbines at 30% capacity factor, you'll need around 3.5 billion wind turbines. They take around 23 million kWh to manufacture (each), so you'll need to find the energy for that. However, that's not really enough, as the entire economy needs to be carbon-neutral. Electricity usage accounts for about 40% of the total US energy usage, so you'll actually need to multiply everything by 2.5.
Seriously, I understand the "we only have 10 years to do anything" line, but the math is so far from adding up, it completely defeats the point. The only realistic way to achieve the 10 year goal is to radically cut energy usage.
Fair point - I did the calc all at once and screwed up my parentheses. My point still stands. How realistic is it to manufacture 500,000 x2.5 = 1.25 million wind turbines, needing 27 trillion kWh to do so, in 10 years?
That's not going to happen. Nor are thousands of nuclear reactors going to be built in 10 years. Nor is the US going to cut its primary energy use by 60% in 10 years. Nor is the combination of all-of-the-above going to make the US carbon neutral in 10 years. Nor should we give up on continued incremental progress after another 10 years have passed without fully solving the problem.
It's always possible to make climate change even worse by burning more fossil fuels. Regardless of whatever dangerous threshold of emissions has passed in 10 years, it doesn't make sense to resign ourselves to burning the rest of the fossil fuels. I'm afraid that the hardline "we need to have solved this emissions problem in 1X years" rhetoric is counterproductive. It asks too much and will prompt fatalism and/or cynicism when the deadline has passed, there are still billions of living people who need to make decisions affecting the future, and the problem still isn't "done with."
> I'm afraid that the hardline "we need to have solved this emissions problem in 1X years" rhetoric is counterproductive. It asks too much and will prompt fatalism and/or cynicism when the deadline has passed
This is a risk yes, media have a big part to play here to try and build on positive inertia. A good example of the opposite of this is Australia in ~2005 vs ~2015 we went from enough political will to create a carbon tax (that was hugely successful is dropping our emissions in a short period of time) to removing it and likely never going back. IMO this was largely due to medias constant fighting in this direction (to serve those who were lobbying hard in this direction).
The hardline approach does seem to have wakened a larger group of people to speak out and support trying to reduce how much worse the climate crisis will get in the coming decades. That combined with more frequent and intense natural disasters might just keep things moving. However, I've learnt never to be surprised by our collective short term memory when counter narratives are constantly bombarding us through media channels.
I agree with you. I support people doing the right thing even for mistaken reasons. That's why I don't normally criticize comments saying that we need to solve the problem in <some arbitrary number of years> even though I believe that "deadline" approach is technically incorrect. I don't look forward to the backlash after these various deadlines pass in the 2030s though.
Fortunately, there is also a longer term trend of battery storage costs and renewable generation costs continuing to fall. It may be short term reactions to wildfires that guide Australian energy investment in the next couple of years, but it will be the technological improvements that keep low-carbon options on top in the next couple of decades.
The headlines absolutely do not help. They turn off people like me, who care deeply about sustainability, let alone your average reader. Nor do those promoting complex/high-tech solutions, or ideas like "you do your part if you buy an EV". The simple fact is - a sustainable, CO2 neutral civilization essentially only has the energy available daily from the sun to sustain itself (unless you include nuclear). This is orders of magnitudes less than our current energy usage. Unless you want another stone age, a compromise is necessary.
I agree as a population we need to reduce our energy usage but I will point something out.
> CO2 neutral civilization essentially only has the energy available daily from the sun to sustain itself (unless you include nuclear). This is orders of magnitudes less than our current energy usage.
The solar energy hitting the earths surface (forgetting what is absorbed in upper atmosphere contributing to winds) is really quite large. An example is I grew up in a territory/state that is 1.421 million square KMs in area. Taking the global average [0] of solar radiation hitting the surface of the planet the amount daily energy hitting the ground in just that area is 1,421,000,000 (square meters) * 6kWh = 8,526,000,000 kWh or 8.562 TWh each day (on average)
Yes we can only access a small percentage of this through technology and practical land/sea use but that is an awful lot of energy in a relatively small part of the globe (NT Australia). But while "those promoting complex/high-tech solutions" are not always promoting useful things, the history of renewable energy is one of incremental improvement and small gains to efficiency. I agree it won't happen over 10 years, and no single technology will hold the solution to all our problems, but I do believe a combination of social change and iterative technology improvements can work together to greatly reduce us making the problem worse over the coming decades.
Better communication of the science and engineering of what is possible is absolutely needed, but so is communication of the science predicting how bad things can get if we don't do anything.
With an added "and that is at the current buildout rate, which basically keeps every qualified person busy". 10x-ing the rate at which we build reactors would require training more personnel and (depending on the type of reactor you want to build) 10x-ing things like the huge machines we need to forge pressure vessels.
