6 ms·

Hi, w/r/t your "short-term" comment, please read here: https://ipcc.ch/sr15 https://ipcc.ch/sr15 Particularly the graph in the bottom left corner here: https:/

Hi, w/r/t your "short-term" comment, please read here: https://ipcc.ch/sr15 https://ipcc.ch/sr15 Particularly the graph in the bottom left corner here: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1_figure-final.png https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1... There is no more time left for the fracking/gas transition argument. While the argument is true in the abstract, and was true in a logistical sense 10 - 20 years ago, to continue to advance the argument after that report was published (which to be fair was only a year ago this week) is to be misinformed and spread misinformation. We should have used nuclear and domestic gas to power the 00's and 201X's. We didn't. Its too late now. The remaining available carbon budget does not afford for a two-step transition. All investment in carbon emission producing generation needs to be replaced with investment in non-carbon-emitting generation, starting "in 2020" but honestly that's just politician talk. The real deadline is "fucking yesterday".

rayiner 7y ago
According to that chart, it’s too late to do anything now. (Arguably, it’s always been too late. There is nothing we could’ve done even starting in 1990 that would avert climate change while accommodating the industrialization or China, India, and Africa.) If you turn off the natural gas plants now, the economy shuts down whenever the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. The alternative energy storage you need to back up renewables simply doesn’t exist yet. Yes, we needed to use nuclear back in the 1970s. We would be much better positioned today if we had done it. But the same type of environmentalists that want to ban fracking today are the folks who stymied nuclear uptake. We shouldn’t listen to them this time.
- cagenut 7y ago
  What part of that report, the linked graph, or my comment said anything about turning off the natural gas plants now? Why is it so impossible for anyone to read and understand a graph without engaging in such wantonly shitty logic. That graph says we should stop building NEW gas (and coal and oil) infrastructure. Typical plants and projects are scoped in the 10 - 30 year time range, that graph is a 30 year time range. All that has to happen is we shift what we purchase and invest in going forward. Its such an underwhelmingly simple answer that people seem to miss it in their yearning for a fight.
  - bpodgursky 7y ago
    Fracking in the US is very low-infrastructure. It's not like the 10-30 years it takes to spin up a deep-sea drill rig. It's literally a month or two and a couple million dollars. Here are some actual numbers: https://www.roseassoc.com/the-current-costs-for-drilling-a-shale-well/ https://www.roseassoc.com/the-current-costs-for-drilling-a-s... That's the whole reason it has taken off -- you turn it on when prices are high, you turn it off when prices are low. We aren't committing to 30 years of energy policy by fracking in the US. You're committing a to maybe a couple years to pay off the investment.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    This part? > The remaining available carbon budget does not afford for a two-step transition. All investment in carbon emission producing generation needs to be replaced with investment in non-carbon-emitting generation, starting "in 2020" but honestly that's just politician talk. The real deadline is "fucking yesterday". First, this is a response to someone who suggested we ban fracking. We will need fracking for the foreseeable future to power natural gas peaker plants. So your response to me doesn’t really make sense in context if you’re not actually supporting a fracking ban. Second, until we have replacement technology, we need to replace retiring coal plants with natural gas even as we invest in renewables. Renewables are, at this stage, not stand alone power. More renewables means we need more peaker plants capacity to balance it out. That means fracking will have to continue and even increase over the next 20-30 years as we shift to more renewables.
    - sitkack 7y ago
      The problem isn't really that hard, we need to have vast far reaching austerity measures be put into place immediately or the human race AND human civilization will cease to exist. People that make arguments like yours beg the question as to economic progress and standards of living. Standards of living should drop overall, but should normalize across the population. A smooth transition is not possible.
      - javagram 7y ago
- petre 7y ago
  It's not too late to bootstrap more nuclear, but big nuclear plants don't make less sense economically nowadays. SMRs on the other hand do. NuScale's design is very interesting.
  - cagenut 7y ago
    It is specifically, exactly, too late to wait for that. Did you not look at the graph? I'm all for continued and increased R&D funding, but the best case scenario for SMRs is they help us with the back half of the transition (2035 - 2050) not the front half (2020 - 2035). Anything more optimist than that is simply denying the science (see ipcc report again).
    - petre 7y ago
      I did look at the graph and 2035-2050 is a better scenario than never.
      - cagenut 7y ago
        It is an utterly lost cause to discuss things with people on the internet. I specifically said "wait for" and somehow you turned that into "never". Seriously someone just ban me from this dumb site, no one can read.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> We should have used nuclear and domestic gas to power the 00's and 201X's. We didn't. Its too late now. Should have. But we didn't. So we can either throw our hands up and give up, or continue and try to mitigate some of the damage. Now GP has an important point here, forgetting which does a huge disservice to the climate problem mitigation efforts. Namely: our economy is dependent on fossil fuels right now, and until we transition to 100% renewables, it will be. You cannot just cut out fossil fuels, because that would collapse the economy, kill off most of the population, and forever stop any and all efforts at fixing the damage already done. And since our economy is growing, this means new fossil projects. We absolutely still need to transition off the fossil fuels ASAP. But it's like with operating on a patient with very severe injuries: maintaining life support is more important than fixing the damage. Yes, you want to eventually get the patient off life support, but if you shut it down too early, you'll be trying to stitch up a cadaver.
- cagenut 7y ago
  > Should have. But we didn't. So we can either throw our hands up and give up, or continue and try to mitigate some of the damage. I never said anything about giving up, this is a false-dichotomy you have now used to willfully miss-frame the discussion. That is rather rude of you. > our economy is dependent on fossil fuels right now, and until we transition to 100% renewables, it will be. You cannot just cut out fossil fuels, because that would collapse the economy, kill off most of the population This is another false dichotomy, that we are dependant until we are 100% off. It is absurd on its face if you read it out loud. 100% has a "%" symbol at the end for a reason. The fact that you took it all the way to accusing me of trying to kill off most of the population is extremely rude. > it's like with operating on a patient with very severe injuries: maintaining life support is more important than fixing the damage. You are thinking in false extremes and stories, not numbers and graphs. I hope your job title doesn't have the word "engineer" in it.
  - blix 7y ago
    No one's accusing of you anything... take a deep breath. Being angry on HN isn't going to solve anything. Our economy is ~really~ dependent on fossil fuels. Eneregy is only part of the problem, there's also transportation. We live in a global economy predicated on cheap, oil-based shipping, and electric alternatives are very far off.
pdonis 7y ago
All of these claims about the consequences of various levels of warming, including this "1.5 C is the limit" claim, are based on an assumption of predictive power, not just in climate science but in economics and sociology, which simply does not exist. Nobody knows how to predict what the consequences will be, particularly when you take into account that people will change the way various things are done in order to adapt to change. Indeed, that is happening now (and has always been happening throughout the history of the human race). These are the same people that predicted there would be worldwide famines in the 1980s and that oil and mineral prices would skyrocket by 2000. Their only predictive track record is of entirely wrong predictions. There is no reason to believe them this time.
- JoeSmithson 7y ago
  > These are the same people that predicted there would be worldwide famines in the 1980s and that oil and mineral prices would skyrocket by 2000. Their only predictive track record is of entirely wrong predictions. There is no reason to believe them this time. In what way are these "the same people"? Members of the IPCC previously made predictions about mineral prices?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > These are the same people that predicted there would be worldwide famines in the 1980s and that oil and mineral prices would skyrocket by 2000. Their only predictive track record is of entirely wrong predictions. There is no reason to believe them this time. Predictions not panning out because they were mitigated in time doesn't mean the predictions were wrong. Also FWIW, oil prices did skyrocket in 2000s.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > Predictions not panning out because they were mitigated in time doesn't mean the predictions were wrong. They weren't "mitigated". Nobody took action based on those predictions in order to keep them from coming true. People just continued to improve technology and continued to have fewer children as their standard of living rose--trends that were just as observable when the predictions were made as the trends that the predictions were based on. > oil prices did skyrocket in 2000s Sort of, but then they came back down again: https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha... And the prediction I was referring to, more precisely, was that oil prices would skyrocket by 2000 and then would never come back down again but continue to rise.

rayiner 7y ago

According to that chart, it’s too late to do anything now. (Arguably, it’s always been too late. There is nothing we could’ve done even starting in 1990 that would avert climate change while accommodating the industrialization or China, India, and Africa.) If you turn off the natural gas plants now, the economy shuts down whenever the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. The alternative energy storage you need to back up renewables simply doesn’t exist yet. Yes, we needed to use nuclear back in the 1970s. We would be much better positioned today if we had done it. But the same type of environmentalists that want to ban fracking today are the folks who stymied nuclear uptake. We shouldn’t listen to them this time.

cagenut 7y ago
What part of that report, the linked graph, or my comment said anything about turning off the natural gas plants now? Why is it so impossible for anyone to read and understand a graph without engaging in such wantonly shitty logic. That graph says we should stop building NEW gas (and coal and oil) infrastructure. Typical plants and projects are scoped in the 10 - 30 year time range, that graph is a 30 year time range. All that has to happen is we shift what we purchase and invest in going forward. Its such an underwhelmingly simple answer that people seem to miss it in their yearning for a fight.
- bpodgursky 7y ago
  Fracking in the US is very low-infrastructure. It's not like the 10-30 years it takes to spin up a deep-sea drill rig. It's literally a month or two and a couple million dollars. Here are some actual numbers: https://www.roseassoc.com/the-current-costs-for-drilling-a-shale-well/ https://www.roseassoc.com/the-current-costs-for-drilling-a-s... That's the whole reason it has taken off -- you turn it on when prices are high, you turn it off when prices are low. We aren't committing to 30 years of energy policy by fracking in the US. You're committing a to maybe a couple years to pay off the investment.
- rayiner 7y ago
  This part? > The remaining available carbon budget does not afford for a two-step transition. All investment in carbon emission producing generation needs to be replaced with investment in non-carbon-emitting generation, starting "in 2020" but honestly that's just politician talk. The real deadline is "fucking yesterday". First, this is a response to someone who suggested we ban fracking. We will need fracking for the foreseeable future to power natural gas peaker plants. So your response to me doesn’t really make sense in context if you’re not actually supporting a fracking ban. Second, until we have replacement technology, we need to replace retiring coal plants with natural gas even as we invest in renewables. Renewables are, at this stage, not stand alone power. More renewables means we need more peaker plants capacity to balance it out. That means fracking will have to continue and even increase over the next 20-30 years as we shift to more renewables.
  - sitkack 7y ago
    The problem isn't really that hard, we need to have vast far reaching austerity measures be put into place immediately or the human race AND human civilization will cease to exist. People that make arguments like yours beg the question as to economic progress and standards of living. Standards of living should drop overall, but should normalize across the population. A smooth transition is not possible.
    - javagram 7y ago
petre 7y ago
It's not too late to bootstrap more nuclear, but big nuclear plants don't make less sense economically nowadays. SMRs on the other hand do. NuScale's design is very interesting.
- cagenut 7y ago
  It is specifically, exactly, too late to wait for that. Did you not look at the graph? I'm all for continued and increased R&D funding, but the best case scenario for SMRs is they help us with the back half of the transition (2035 - 2050) not the front half (2020 - 2035). Anything more optimist than that is simply denying the science (see ipcc report again).
  - petre 7y ago
    I did look at the graph and 2035-2050 is a better scenario than never.
    - cagenut 7y ago
      It is an utterly lost cause to discuss things with people on the internet. I specifically said "wait for" and somehow you turned that into "never". Seriously someone just ban me from this dumb site, no one can read.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> We should have used nuclear and domestic gas to power the 00's and 201X's. We didn't. Its too late now. Should have. But we didn't. So we can either throw our hands up and give up, or continue and try to mitigate some of the damage. Now GP has an important point here, forgetting which does a huge disservice to the climate problem mitigation efforts. Namely: our economy is dependent on fossil fuels right now, and until we transition to 100% renewables, it will be. You cannot just cut out fossil fuels, because that would collapse the economy, kill off most of the population, and forever stop any and all efforts at fixing the damage already done. And since our economy is growing, this means new fossil projects. We absolutely still need to transition off the fossil fuels ASAP. But it's like with operating on a patient with very severe injuries: maintaining life support is more important than fixing the damage. Yes, you want to eventually get the patient off life support, but if you shut it down too early, you'll be trying to stitch up a cadaver.

cagenut 7y ago
> Should have. But we didn't. So we can either throw our hands up and give up, or continue and try to mitigate some of the damage. I never said anything about giving up, this is a false-dichotomy you have now used to willfully miss-frame the discussion. That is rather rude of you. > our economy is dependent on fossil fuels right now, and until we transition to 100% renewables, it will be. You cannot just cut out fossil fuels, because that would collapse the economy, kill off most of the population This is another false dichotomy, that we are dependant until we are 100% off. It is absurd on its face if you read it out loud. 100% has a "%" symbol at the end for a reason. The fact that you took it all the way to accusing me of trying to kill off most of the population is extremely rude. > it's like with operating on a patient with very severe injuries: maintaining life support is more important than fixing the damage. You are thinking in false extremes and stories, not numbers and graphs. I hope your job title doesn't have the word "engineer" in it.
- blix 7y ago
  No one's accusing of you anything... take a deep breath. Being angry on HN isn't going to solve anything. Our economy is ~really~ dependent on fossil fuels. Eneregy is only part of the problem, there's also transportation. We live in a global economy predicated on cheap, oil-based shipping, and electric alternatives are very far off.

pdonis 7y ago

All of these claims about the consequences of various levels of warming, including this "1.5 C is the limit" claim, are based on an assumption of predictive power, not just in climate science but in economics and sociology, which simply does not exist. Nobody knows how to predict what the consequences will be, particularly when you take into account that people will change the way various things are done in order to adapt to change. Indeed, that is happening now (and has always been happening throughout the history of the human race). These are the same people that predicted there would be worldwide famines in the 1980s and that oil and mineral prices would skyrocket by 2000. Their only predictive track record is of entirely wrong predictions. There is no reason to believe them this time.

JoeSmithson 7y ago
> These are the same people that predicted there would be worldwide famines in the 1980s and that oil and mineral prices would skyrocket by 2000. Their only predictive track record is of entirely wrong predictions. There is no reason to believe them this time. In what way are these "the same people"? Members of the IPCC previously made predictions about mineral prices?
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> These are the same people that predicted there would be worldwide famines in the 1980s and that oil and mineral prices would skyrocket by 2000. Their only predictive track record is of entirely wrong predictions. There is no reason to believe them this time. Predictions not panning out because they were mitigated in time doesn't mean the predictions were wrong. Also FWIW, oil prices did skyrocket in 2000s.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > Predictions not panning out because they were mitigated in time doesn't mean the predictions were wrong. They weren't "mitigated". Nobody took action based on those predictions in order to keep them from coming true. People just continued to improve technology and continued to have fewer children as their standard of living rose--trends that were just as observable when the predictions were made as the trends that the predictions were based on. > oil prices did skyrocket in 2000s Sort of, but then they came back down again: https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha... And the prediction I was referring to, more precisely, was that oil prices would skyrocket by 2000 and then would never come back down again but continue to rise.