6 ms·

And two, five, ten years from now we'll all be talking about how the Paris agreement failed and how the <insert name of major city> agreement is a major breakth

• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• xiphias 10y ago
  The only reason why Paris agreement wont fail is that it now makes financial sense to use renewable energy even without caring about the environment.
  • witty_username 10y ago
    Source? IIRC these require government subsidies.
    • stale2002 10y ago
      The source is looking at solar power costs over time for the last 20 years. Costs are still dropping by 30 percent a year.
  • tzs 10y ago
    In the United State making financial sense is not sufficient. It used to be, but that is changing. In 2008, for example, the Republican party platform acknowledged that human activity was increasing atmospheric CO2, and said that it was common sense that the US take measured and reasonable steps to address this. They called for technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change. They said that in the long run we needed to move to zero emission sources, with fossil fuels being a bridge to that emissions free future. It said they would aggressively support technological advances to reduce our dependence on petroleum. It supported raising gas mileage standards for cars and trucks, and was pro electric vehicle. Eight years later, their platform no longer calls for reducing emissions, calls for forbidding the EPA from regulating CO2, and calls for increasing the use of coal and oil. Most of the candidates who ran for the GOP nomination were firmly in the "climate change is not happening camp", and the few who were not were in the "it may be happening, and we may even be contributing a little, but it is not anything we need to do anything about" camp. Unless those Republicans who are not anti-science can somehow move the GOP back toward their 2008 position, where they acknowledge the problem and the need to address it and the need to move to clean energy in the future, where the major difference with Democrats was in how to accomplish these goals rather than on their necessity, I don't see how the US is going to do much about climate change.
    • thaumasiotes 10y ago
      > In the United State[s] making financial sense is not sufficient You follow this with three paragraphs, and yet none of them contains one word in support of this claim. What's standing in the way of people who want to do whatever is cheapest?
      • ZeroGravitas 10y ago
        If a government subsidises the wrong thing, the right thing will no longer make financial sense. If the government bans the right thing, it no longer matters whether it makes financial sense. However, I am slightly optimistic about these things as many city and state governments as well as private corporations are taking steps to do the right thing, even as parts of the government and society take the opposite side.
  • barney54 10y ago
    That is not accurate. It does not make financial sense to use renewables versus natural gas for electricity generation. Here's the data: https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation... Note the report has an important caveat. "The LCOE values for dispatchable and nondispatchable technologies are listed separately in the tables, because caution should be used when comparing them to one another." The reason is that wind and solar are dependent on the weather and the position of the sun. It does not matter how cheap something is if it can't keep the lights on. Wind and solar might seem close in price to nat gas electricity generation, but in reality they need to be much cheaper because there is not such thing as an electricity grid run on wind and solar alone. There is only wind and solar + natural gas for when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
    • diafygi 10y ago
      It's half accurate. The investment firm Lazard has a nice report[1] on comparing U.S. energy costs by source. Here's the costs in the U.S. (without counting subsidies): * Wind: $ 32/MWh * Solar: $ 43/MWh * Natural Gas: $ 52/MWh * Coal: $ 65/MWh * Geothermal: $ 82/MWh * Biomass: $ 82/MWh * Nuclear: $ 97/MWh * Solar+Storage: $ 119/MWh * Diesel: $ 212/MWh Also, and you can get to about 50% penetration of non-dispatchable sources before you have to start adding storage[2]. So renewables are currently cheaper than natural gas for half the electricity, then more expensive for the other half. As storage gets cheaper and the likelyhood of a carbon tax increases, the expectation is that renewables + storage will likely get cheaper than natural gas in the next 5 years or sooner[3]. So, the claim is half accurate in theory, but actually fully accurate in practice since by the time we reach 50% renewable penetration, storage will be by far cheap enough to take up the other half. [1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-... [2]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc_2013.pdf https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc... [3]: http://powerledger.io/energy-disruption-solar-plus-storage-cheaper-grid-2017-2/ http://powerledger.io/energy-disruption-solar-plus-storage-c...
  • Scarblac 10y ago
    The problem is we'll probably use renewably energy in addition to all the fossil fuel we burn...
• ptaipale 10y ago
  The news about the Great Barrier Reef being dead is very much exaggerated, though.
  • phaemon 10y ago
    What is that opinion based on?
    • ptaipale 10y ago
      Plenty of reporting, if you look outside the Twitter bubble that declared it dead. For example, http://www.snopes.com/scientists-pronounce-great-barrier-reef-dead/ http://www.snopes.com/scientists-pronounce-great-barrier-ree... http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/14/us/barrier-reef-obit-trnd/ http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/14/us/barrier-reef-obit-trnd/ The reef is damaged but far from dead.
      • phaemon 10y ago
        I don't use Twitter, and I don't have much time for CNN. I was looking for a link to a scientific paper, but Snopes generally makes an effort so I suppose they'll do. The reef is very badly damaged, and if you'd said that to start with, that would have been fine. Simply stating "the Great Barrier Reef being dead is very much exaggerated" makes it sound as though you're saying everything is just fine with it. Which it clearly isn't.
  • inimino 10y ago
    Not dead, dying.
• arethuza 10y ago
  Nitpick - a lot of the Seychelles are actually fairly hilly which is why their scenery is so spectacular. The Maldives are probably a better example to use!
• the8472 10y ago
  But we already know that the currently set emission reductions targets are not sufficient to meet the stated 2°C and 1.5°C goals. This is even baked into the Paris agreement itself. They will do reviews every few years and ratchet up the commitments necessary to meet the stated goals. New agreements may still be needed since the paris accords lacks enforcement mechanisms. So if we wanted to implement e.g. multi-national CO2 taxes or make some quid-pro-quo deals to get more renewables into developing countries then new deals will need to be made.
• douche 10y ago
  Wait, I thought Kyoto was the latest standard for nonsensical, feel-good non-binding climate change agreements?