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If you look at global power sector emissions from 1998 to 2018, you'll see that while we have dramatically improved upon the energy intensity (energy/capita) an

If you look at global power sector emissions from 1998 to 2018, you'll see that while we have dramatically improved upon the energy intensity (energy/capita) and even are making improvements on carbon intensity (carbon/capita), but the sad reality is this: we are still using around 35% coal power in 2018, the same as we did in 1998. And the power sector is the easiest sector to decarbonize, by the way. If you look at electric vehicles, even if we had the most rapid, insane ramp-up that's beyond even Elon's crazy predictions, we'd still have massive fossil fuel use for non vehicle uses of petroleum for chemical industries, airplanes, plastic production, and for the numerous numbers of legacy cars that will be leftover that are not EV. We need massive innovation across all our uses of fossil fuel. We can not rest on our laurels, saying PV and wind are so cheap now. They are still around 4% of total energy consumption, and when you factor in the decline of nuclear and relative decline of hydropower in the ever-increasing industrial energy base, we see that fossil fuels are basically the same % of our energy mix as they were before 2000. For an energy realist, I recommend checking out Vaclav Smil, who has long been predicting 21st century as the century of natural gas, and who has been skeptical of renewables taking over instantly. It will take us until the 22nd century to truly decarbonize, and by then the seas will have risen over Miami and Shanghai on a regular basis. It's a truly scary future. Get innovating, in your personal lives and in your professional careers, everyone!

the_cat_kittles 8y ago
i dont understand. you completely omit laws in your suggested solution. we need to pass laws that prevent businesses from fucking everything up worse than they already have. you can innovate all you want, but i think you should also not elect people who are fucking STUPID about climate change.
- chosenbreed 8y ago
  > but i think you should also not elect people who are fucking STUPID about climate change. Sure...but that would require getting enough people who are not "fucking STUPID about climate" to vote appropriately :-)
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  This is hard. Like, really hard. It definitely needs to be done, but it takes tens, hundreds really, of millions of dollars and a vast network of candidates who can run for office and win (US-specific outlook). Whereas driving coal and natural gas out of the generation mix is "as easy" as getting PPAs signed with electrical consumers and getting solar and wind installed as fast as possible. You don't need to convince people in this case, as the actors (large corporations and utilities) are economically rational (cheap renewables->huge cost savings->yes please kthx). More of this is needed, for example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-06/negative-prices-in-power-market-as-wind-solar-cut-electricity https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-06/negative-... > Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid > Wind and solar farms are glutting networks more frequently, prompting a market signal for coal plants to shut off
  - picsao 8y ago
    You could euthanize large parts of the physical goods economy with a really good AR Google set. Kind of like the cellphone already made a dent into every carryable daily good supplying information. You wristwatch and paper notebook where are they?
- nutjob2 8y ago
  Great theory, but have you tried to get a climate change law through Congress lately? People vote for people who reflect their views, or at least freely, for whoever they want, so ultimately responsibility rests with the voters for the quality of government.
- CamTin 8y ago
  Laws are a reasonable (thought still incredibly difficult) solution in the parts of the planet that have the rule of law. Large parts don't, and we need different solutions in those places because this is a global problem. As an example, see this report about cheating on an international agreement about CFCs (https://www.nrdc.org/experts/david-doniger/chilling-news-spotlight-illegal-cfc-production-and-use https://www.nrdc.org/experts/david-doniger/chilling-news-spo... which) were supposed to have been phased out worldwide by 2007. Unfortunately, we don't have the international governance in place to attack this problem, and we might not until its too late. Still, you go to war with the army you have, and this is the one we've got.
  - tomp 8y ago
    If Trump was waging a smarter trade war, and EU helped, we could be taxing China and the rest of the "lawless" countries more effectively - e.g. tax all goods (local and imported) based on their carbon footprint - and thus effect global change.
    - tyleraldrich 8y ago
      Unfortunately for us, Trump doesn't think climate change exists, so he would never do this.
  - hodgesrm 8y ago
    The best laws will help guide the economy to find solutions so we get everyone rowing in the same direction. Carbon taxes are an obvious solution though currently hard to pass in many places. BTW I would not assume that just because such laws are hard to pass now that they will be in a few years. Climate changes are reaching a point where an increasing number of people are experiencing the costs directly.
- Woberto 8y ago
  Based on the current political climate, this kind of action also seems to be a ways off. While a clean revolution in laws like that of the 1970s would do much to bring about change, it will be a while before things are bad enough for enough people to care and push for these laws. In a capitalist society, I think money talks more and it talks faster. I think op is right that innovative solutions that are cheap will do more to bring about change.
- steego 8y ago
  I don't understand. You completely omit laws and specific policy suggestions in your criticism. I'd love to see you advance this discussion by adding something to it. What laws and policies would you suggest? If you don't feel like you can articulate your position well, do you have any books/articles you recommend we read?
ebikelaw 8y ago
Is petroleum for chemistry and plastics a GHG source? It seems like the carbon involved stays out of the atmosphere.
- Woberto 8y ago
  "Plastics emit GHG as they degrade": https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/plastics-emit-greenhouse-gases-as-they-degrade-64600 https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/plastics-emit-gre...
  - ebikelaw 8y ago
    According to the last paragraph, the magnitude of the effect is insignificant.
  - gus_massa 8y ago
    Obviously plastics emit GHG as they degrade. If you burn the plastic now, you get all the CO2 now. Some plastic last for hundreds of years, so the same amount of CO2 will be released more slowly. An optimistic view is that half of the "CO2" will be trapped for a few additional hundred of years. A slightly more interesting part is that a part of the emission is methane (that is like 100x worse than CO2), but the article says that the level of methane emission is insignificant anyway.
  - ars 8y ago
    That's because plastics are basically hydrocarbon fuel, in solid form. You can burn them, or manipulate them to make other hydrocarbons, same as you can oil.
carry_bit 8y ago
Is chemical/plastic production really a source of emissions? After all, oil is used in the production of plastic because plastic has a bunch of carbon in it.
- newswriter99 8y ago
  In the US plastic is produced via cracking natural gas into ethane. In Europe and China they still use crude oil and crack it into naptha, but that's starting to decrease as they turn to cheaper natgas.
- Reason077 8y ago
  Yes, it is. The chain of industrial processes that converts oil to plastics are energy intensive, and the chemical processes involved often have direct emissions as well. Not to mention the emissions from extracting, refining, and transporting the oil in the first place.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    > The chain of industrial processes that converts oil to plastics are energy intensive But that energy can come from renewables, no?
- blattimwind 8y ago
  Plastics reactors themselves don't really do much (if tuned properly, most aren't because it's cheaper), the emissions are mostly from the refinery processes before it. You can't make plastics from raw oil. Obviously running these still requires a lot of power for heating, cooling and so on. Large-scale extruders for producing the plastic pellets everyone uses for e.g. injection moulding require a fair bit of electricity as well (think dozens of MW per screw pair / channel).
radicalbyte 8y ago
I've been looking into carbon capture recently because it's going to be vital to slowing down the warming (and buying us another 50 years for the transition). What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country. We need a global carbon tax and we need it now. Heck, even a carbon tax in the EU / US applied to local emissions and, importantly, to imported goods would go a long way to solving the problem. We can't just sleepwalk into oblivion, can we?
- logikblok 8y ago
  Hi are you using any specific UK service to plant trees please?
  - tomgp 8y ago
    carbonfootprint.com offer carbon offset tree planting both in the UK and globally
    - radicalbyte 8y ago
      That's the site I used.
- SamUK96 8y ago
  > sleepwalk into oblivion Tell that to the Egyptians, Romans, Easter-Islanders (debated now, actually), and the countless other human civilisations who didn't really appreciate their impending demise before it was too late. Hell, the Romans hired essentially barbarians (so mercenaries, basically) to defend the northern territories against...you guessed it, barbarians. Just because the bulk of the harmful effects that humans contribute to begin at 50+ years, conveniently after humans have to live through it. Humans still create children to suffer through the hell they created though, how peculiar.
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
BurningFrog 8y ago
I don't think any amount of innovation can have close to the impact of de-tabooing nuclear energy for the next few decades.
- hodgesrm 8y ago
  We need to look at every solution, as the problem is not just energy production. Concrete production produces around 5% of global C02, of which less than half is related to fuel for running furnaces. [0] Deforestation (whether deliberately or by fire) also releases large quantities of previously sequestered C02. Agricultural practices can free sequestered carbon or trap it in topsoil. [1] Greenhouse gases are a big problem any way you look at it. One somewhat heartening thing is that _any_ technique that reduces atmospheric C02 is helpful since it's really just one big budget that everything is contributing to. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
- pjc50 8y ago
  Too late. If you start planning nuclear plants now, they'll take 10 years to build. Also, I'm not sure that the an to build nuclear reactors across Africa, South America, and the middle east will be popular; the proliferation risk hasn't gone away.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    Pretty sure there will still be a huge demand for reliable base load power in ten years, even if there's a seismic breakthrough in battery technology. And no need to build in unstable countries; simply replacing all coal power plants in existing nuclear regions like Europe and China would be massive enough.
  - masklinn 8y ago
    > Too late. If you start planning nuclear plants now, they'll take 10 years to build. Probably more unless you build Gen IIs: because of the ongoing popularity of Gen IIs manufacturers have very little experience building their Gen IIIs (and the building processes have not been de-kinked yet) and Gen IVs are still years away from design completion to say nothing of actually building them.
justsomedude43 8y ago
Also, between 1998 and 2018 we gained almost 2 billion people.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  True, this is a huge aspect that is not discussed enough. Even if we reduce carbon intensity of our energy per capita, we may keep emissions too high simply by providing energy to many more people. I believe a huge aspect of reducing future emission would be educating women and families in developing nations, helping them through the epidemiologic transition to lower birth rates/family size much quicker.
rsync 8y ago
"For an energy realist, I recommend checking out Vaclav Smil, who has long been predicting 21st century as the century of natural gas" My very recent reading on this topic has lead me to believe that while burning natural gas is quite an improvement in carbon emissions vs. burning coal or oil, unburned natural gas traps quite a bit more heat than carbon dioxide does. It was even suggested that pipeline leaks, manufacturing leaks and (other misc. steps in the lifecycle) leaks make natural gas a wash in terms of climate change. I hope this is not the case and I wonder if anyone here can comment further ?
- rosser 8y ago
  "Natural Gas" is primarily methane. In terms of Greenhouse effects, we would do vastly better to "burn off" any leaks than let them leak.
  - rsync 8y ago
    Yes, that's the point of the commentary that I read - there are unintentional leaks in the production, transport and use of natural gas that are much larger than one might assume. Pipelines, for instance, are quite "leaky". These leaks are unintentional and difficult to find/monitor, so they are not burned off ...
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  I believe methane is around 25 times more potent at trapping heat than CO2 (have seen different figures around 25ish). There is a much shorter half-life on that methane, it degrades in the atmosphere much more quickly (<100 vs ~1000 years) than the very stable CO2 molecule. However we have to think of positive feedback loops. The methane will heat us much sooner, which will allow more ice melt, more methane emissions from the permafrost in northern climates, and accelerating the heating we've already seen in polar regions.
tmaly 8y ago
Education is what needs to be innovated. We need more kids becoming scientists. Battery and storage technology need to be improved. We should be taking a multi-prong approach to coming up with working nuclear fusion.
- teachrdan 8y ago
  What if better educated kids grow up to be lobbyists for Exxon? Or work at the Heritage Foundation? Or finance new coal infrastructure at Goldman Sachs? The problem has nothing to do with an insufficient number of smart people being involved. The problem is that coal and oil companies are paying a lot of those smart people a lot of money to make things worse.
- sadris 8y ago
  > Education is what needs to be innovated. We need more kids becoming scientists. Some people cannot just "become scientists". Without the intelligence, even an infinite amount of education would be pointless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jZENi1ed8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jZENi1ed8
johnchristopher 8y ago
> We need massive innovation across all our uses of fossil fuel. I am tempted to say, for the sake of the conversation, that what we need is people in the street. Your post is about getting better tech. Fine. Following posts are about how taxes will solve the problem because incentives. It's a lost cause.
masklinn 8y ago
> we'd still have massive fossil fuel use for non vehicle uses of petroleum for chemical industries, airplanes, plastic production And maritime shipping, upon which pretty much the entirety of our economic system relies.
ZeroGravitas 8y ago
Why does the use of fossil fuels in chemical or plastic production factor into climate change? I've seen this mentioned before and didn't really understand it, and interestingly that person also mentioned Vaclav Smil (in fact, it may have been an article written by him). Is there something I'm missing or is that conflating two realted but different things for no obvious reason? Or does carbon end up in the air due to plastic production and chemical feedstock usage?
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  You'll emit carbon dioxide when you make plastic: https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=30619 https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic...
  - ZeroGravitas 8y ago
    Most of this seems to be the standard carbon footprint of any manufactured good e.g. the diesel used by the trucks delivering things, the coal burnt to generate the electricity to heat the factories. It doesn't seem to be inherent to plastic, though possibly it's impossible to drill for oil/gas without leaking some into the atmosphere. Seems to be a small fraction of the total though.
safgasCVS 8y ago
I think you need to be clearer what you mean by innovation. If by innovation you mean new technology coming to save the day then I'm very skeptical it will work out. Teslas are nice but not a match for 1 billion Chinese entering the middle class. If by innovation you mean a drastic change in how carbon is taxed leading to a sensible focus on how energy is consumed then we may have a chance however it means paying $50 for a bigmac and no more flights to Ibiza for 20 Euros.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  I say innovation in careers and personal lives. We need all sectors to decarbonize, it's not just new tech gadgets and gizmos, but new ways of thinking, servicing, and behaving. Innovative thought is necessary from every corner, both politics for carbon tax, personal diets for less food waste, more muscle-powered transportation (helps with diabetes/obesity too), etc. If we have "business as usual" in too many places, it won't matter if we decarbonize our power sector or our transport. We have to change in thousands of ways.

the_cat_kittles 8y ago

i dont understand. you completely omit laws in your suggested solution. we need to pass laws that prevent businesses from fucking everything up worse than they already have. you can innovate all you want, but i think you should also not elect people who are fucking STUPID about climate change.

chosenbreed 8y ago
> but i think you should also not elect people who are fucking STUPID about climate change. Sure...but that would require getting enough people who are not "fucking STUPID about climate" to vote appropriately :-)
toomuchtodo 8y ago
This is hard. Like, really hard. It definitely needs to be done, but it takes tens, hundreds really, of millions of dollars and a vast network of candidates who can run for office and win (US-specific outlook). Whereas driving coal and natural gas out of the generation mix is "as easy" as getting PPAs signed with electrical consumers and getting solar and wind installed as fast as possible. You don't need to convince people in this case, as the actors (large corporations and utilities) are economically rational (cheap renewables->huge cost savings->yes please kthx). More of this is needed, for example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-06/negative-prices-in-power-market-as-wind-solar-cut-electricity https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-06/negative-... > Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid > Wind and solar farms are glutting networks more frequently, prompting a market signal for coal plants to shut off
- picsao 8y ago
  You could euthanize large parts of the physical goods economy with a really good AR Google set. Kind of like the cellphone already made a dent into every carryable daily good supplying information. You wristwatch and paper notebook where are they?
nutjob2 8y ago
Great theory, but have you tried to get a climate change law through Congress lately? People vote for people who reflect their views, or at least freely, for whoever they want, so ultimately responsibility rests with the voters for the quality of government.
CamTin 8y ago
Laws are a reasonable (thought still incredibly difficult) solution in the parts of the planet that have the rule of law. Large parts don't, and we need different solutions in those places because this is a global problem. As an example, see this report about cheating on an international agreement about CFCs (https://www.nrdc.org/experts/david-doniger/chilling-news-spotlight-illegal-cfc-production-and-use https://www.nrdc.org/experts/david-doniger/chilling-news-spo... which) were supposed to have been phased out worldwide by 2007. Unfortunately, we don't have the international governance in place to attack this problem, and we might not until its too late. Still, you go to war with the army you have, and this is the one we've got.
- tomp 8y ago
  If Trump was waging a smarter trade war, and EU helped, we could be taxing China and the rest of the "lawless" countries more effectively - e.g. tax all goods (local and imported) based on their carbon footprint - and thus effect global change.
  - tyleraldrich 8y ago
    Unfortunately for us, Trump doesn't think climate change exists, so he would never do this.
- hodgesrm 8y ago
  The best laws will help guide the economy to find solutions so we get everyone rowing in the same direction. Carbon taxes are an obvious solution though currently hard to pass in many places. BTW I would not assume that just because such laws are hard to pass now that they will be in a few years. Climate changes are reaching a point where an increasing number of people are experiencing the costs directly.
Woberto 8y ago
Based on the current political climate, this kind of action also seems to be a ways off. While a clean revolution in laws like that of the 1970s would do much to bring about change, it will be a while before things are bad enough for enough people to care and push for these laws. In a capitalist society, I think money talks more and it talks faster. I think op is right that innovative solutions that are cheap will do more to bring about change.
steego 8y ago
I don't understand. You completely omit laws and specific policy suggestions in your criticism. I'd love to see you advance this discussion by adding something to it. What laws and policies would you suggest? If you don't feel like you can articulate your position well, do you have any books/articles you recommend we read?

ebikelaw 8y ago

Is petroleum for chemistry and plastics a GHG source? It seems like the carbon involved stays out of the atmosphere.

Woberto 8y ago
"Plastics emit GHG as they degrade": https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/plastics-emit-greenhouse-gases-as-they-degrade-64600 https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/plastics-emit-gre...
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  According to the last paragraph, the magnitude of the effect is insignificant.
- gus_massa 8y ago
  Obviously plastics emit GHG as they degrade. If you burn the plastic now, you get all the CO2 now. Some plastic last for hundreds of years, so the same amount of CO2 will be released more slowly. An optimistic view is that half of the "CO2" will be trapped for a few additional hundred of years. A slightly more interesting part is that a part of the emission is methane (that is like 100x worse than CO2), but the article says that the level of methane emission is insignificant anyway.
- ars 8y ago
  That's because plastics are basically hydrocarbon fuel, in solid form. You can burn them, or manipulate them to make other hydrocarbons, same as you can oil.

carry_bit 8y ago

Is chemical/plastic production really a source of emissions? After all, oil is used in the production of plastic because plastic has a bunch of carbon in it.

newswriter99 8y ago
In the US plastic is produced via cracking natural gas into ethane. In Europe and China they still use crude oil and crack it into naptha, but that's starting to decrease as they turn to cheaper natgas.
Reason077 8y ago
Yes, it is. The chain of industrial processes that converts oil to plastics are energy intensive, and the chemical processes involved often have direct emissions as well. Not to mention the emissions from extracting, refining, and transporting the oil in the first place.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  > The chain of industrial processes that converts oil to plastics are energy intensive But that energy can come from renewables, no?
blattimwind 8y ago
Plastics reactors themselves don't really do much (if tuned properly, most aren't because it's cheaper), the emissions are mostly from the refinery processes before it. You can't make plastics from raw oil. Obviously running these still requires a lot of power for heating, cooling and so on. Large-scale extruders for producing the plastic pellets everyone uses for e.g. injection moulding require a fair bit of electricity as well (think dozens of MW per screw pair / channel).

radicalbyte 8y ago

I've been looking into carbon capture recently because it's going to be vital to slowing down the warming (and buying us another 50 years for the transition). What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country. We need a global carbon tax and we need it now. Heck, even a carbon tax in the EU / US applied to local emissions and, importantly, to imported goods would go a long way to solving the problem. We can't just sleepwalk into oblivion, can we?

logikblok 8y ago
Hi are you using any specific UK service to plant trees please?
- tomgp 8y ago
  carbonfootprint.com offer carbon offset tree planting both in the UK and globally
  - radicalbyte 8y ago
    That's the site I used.
SamUK96 8y ago
> sleepwalk into oblivion Tell that to the Egyptians, Romans, Easter-Islanders (debated now, actually), and the countless other human civilisations who didn't really appreciate their impending demise before it was too late. Hell, the Romans hired essentially barbarians (so mercenaries, basically) to defend the northern territories against...you guessed it, barbarians. Just because the bulk of the harmful effects that humans contribute to begin at 50+ years, conveniently after humans have to live through it. Humans still create children to suffer through the hell they created though, how peculiar.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago

BurningFrog 8y ago

I don't think any amount of innovation can have close to the impact of de-tabooing nuclear energy for the next few decades.

hodgesrm 8y ago
We need to look at every solution, as the problem is not just energy production. Concrete production produces around 5% of global C02, of which less than half is related to fuel for running furnaces. [0] Deforestation (whether deliberately or by fire) also releases large quantities of previously sequestered C02. Agricultural practices can free sequestered carbon or trap it in topsoil. [1] Greenhouse gases are a big problem any way you look at it. One somewhat heartening thing is that _any_ technique that reduces atmospheric C02 is helpful since it's really just one big budget that everything is contributing to. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
pjc50 8y ago
Too late. If you start planning nuclear plants now, they'll take 10 years to build. Also, I'm not sure that the an to build nuclear reactors across Africa, South America, and the middle east will be popular; the proliferation risk hasn't gone away.
- sjwright 8y ago
  Pretty sure there will still be a huge demand for reliable base load power in ten years, even if there's a seismic breakthrough in battery technology. And no need to build in unstable countries; simply replacing all coal power plants in existing nuclear regions like Europe and China would be massive enough.
- masklinn 8y ago
  > Too late. If you start planning nuclear plants now, they'll take 10 years to build. Probably more unless you build Gen IIs: because of the ongoing popularity of Gen IIs manufacturers have very little experience building their Gen IIIs (and the building processes have not been de-kinked yet) and Gen IVs are still years away from design completion to say nothing of actually building them.

justsomedude43 8y ago

Also, between 1998 and 2018 we gained almost 2 billion people.

WhompingWindows 8y ago
True, this is a huge aspect that is not discussed enough. Even if we reduce carbon intensity of our energy per capita, we may keep emissions too high simply by providing energy to many more people. I believe a huge aspect of reducing future emission would be educating women and families in developing nations, helping them through the epidemiologic transition to lower birth rates/family size much quicker.

rsync 8y ago

"For an energy realist, I recommend checking out Vaclav Smil, who has long been predicting 21st century as the century of natural gas" My very recent reading on this topic has lead me to believe that while burning natural gas is quite an improvement in carbon emissions vs. burning coal or oil, unburned natural gas traps quite a bit more heat than carbon dioxide does. It was even suggested that pipeline leaks, manufacturing leaks and (other misc. steps in the lifecycle) leaks make natural gas a wash in terms of climate change. I hope this is not the case and I wonder if anyone here can comment further ?

rosser 8y ago
"Natural Gas" is primarily methane. In terms of Greenhouse effects, we would do vastly better to "burn off" any leaks than let them leak.
- rsync 8y ago
  Yes, that's the point of the commentary that I read - there are unintentional leaks in the production, transport and use of natural gas that are much larger than one might assume. Pipelines, for instance, are quite "leaky". These leaks are unintentional and difficult to find/monitor, so they are not burned off ...
WhompingWindows 8y ago
I believe methane is around 25 times more potent at trapping heat than CO2 (have seen different figures around 25ish). There is a much shorter half-life on that methane, it degrades in the atmosphere much more quickly (<100 vs ~1000 years) than the very stable CO2 molecule. However we have to think of positive feedback loops. The methane will heat us much sooner, which will allow more ice melt, more methane emissions from the permafrost in northern climates, and accelerating the heating we've already seen in polar regions.

tmaly 8y ago

Education is what needs to be innovated. We need more kids becoming scientists. Battery and storage technology need to be improved. We should be taking a multi-prong approach to coming up with working nuclear fusion.

teachrdan 8y ago
What if better educated kids grow up to be lobbyists for Exxon? Or work at the Heritage Foundation? Or finance new coal infrastructure at Goldman Sachs? The problem has nothing to do with an insufficient number of smart people being involved. The problem is that coal and oil companies are paying a lot of those smart people a lot of money to make things worse.
sadris 8y ago
> Education is what needs to be innovated. We need more kids becoming scientists. Some people cannot just "become scientists". Without the intelligence, even an infinite amount of education would be pointless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jZENi1ed8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jZENi1ed8

johnchristopher 8y ago

> We need massive innovation across all our uses of fossil fuel. I am tempted to say, for the sake of the conversation, that what we need is people in the street. Your post is about getting better tech. Fine. Following posts are about how taxes will solve the problem because incentives. It's a lost cause.

masklinn 8y ago

> we'd still have massive fossil fuel use for non vehicle uses of petroleum for chemical industries, airplanes, plastic production And maritime shipping, upon which pretty much the entirety of our economic system relies.

ZeroGravitas 8y ago

Why does the use of fossil fuels in chemical or plastic production factor into climate change? I've seen this mentioned before and didn't really understand it, and interestingly that person also mentioned Vaclav Smil (in fact, it may have been an article written by him). Is there something I'm missing or is that conflating two realted but different things for no obvious reason? Or does carbon end up in the air due to plastic production and chemical feedstock usage?

WhompingWindows 8y ago
You'll emit carbon dioxide when you make plastic: https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=30619 https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic...
- ZeroGravitas 8y ago
  Most of this seems to be the standard carbon footprint of any manufactured good e.g. the diesel used by the trucks delivering things, the coal burnt to generate the electricity to heat the factories. It doesn't seem to be inherent to plastic, though possibly it's impossible to drill for oil/gas without leaking some into the atmosphere. Seems to be a small fraction of the total though.

safgasCVS 8y ago

I think you need to be clearer what you mean by innovation. If by innovation you mean new technology coming to save the day then I'm very skeptical it will work out. Teslas are nice but not a match for 1 billion Chinese entering the middle class. If by innovation you mean a drastic change in how carbon is taxed leading to a sensible focus on how energy is consumed then we may have a chance however it means paying $50 for a bigmac and no more flights to Ibiza for 20 Euros.

WhompingWindows 8y ago
I say innovation in careers and personal lives. We need all sectors to decarbonize, it's not just new tech gadgets and gizmos, but new ways of thinking, servicing, and behaving. Innovative thought is necessary from every corner, both politics for carbon tax, personal diets for less food waste, more muscle-powered transportation (helps with diabetes/obesity too), etc. If we have "business as usual" in too many places, it won't matter if we decarbonize our power sector or our transport. We have to change in thousands of ways.