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Won’t be any economy left if the planet is made uninhabitable. It’s like the most sacred thing is profit, not anything about the people that create it. Very odd
by jamwaffles 7y ago
Won’t be any economy left if the planet is made uninhabitable. It’s like the most sacred thing is profit, not anything about the people that create it. Very odd train of thought.
- growlist 7y agoGermany also shut its nuclear power stations in favour of more coal. I don't trust Germany.
- Already__Taken 7y agoEh, nobody gets to make rational evidence based policy with nuclear, that ship has sailed. I think once fusion is cracked the 50-years away joke will just shift into the planning permission department.
- growlist 7y agoI know but to replace it with coal??? Couldn't they have gone for e.g. LNG or more renewables phased in over time? The speed of the shift seemed mighty fishy.
- pgeorgi 7y agoPart of the reason of coal increase is that there were more than enough hold-outs that expected there to be another exit from the exit (2011) of the exit (2010) of the exit (2000) from nuclear, so that they saw no need to actually do something because surely the nuclear shutdown won't _actually_ happen. Well, it does and that assumption cost expensive time.
- jhayward 7y agoGermany did not replace nuclear with coal. Coal consumption is at 50% of pre-drawdown levels.
- oceanplexian 7y agoI mean for power generation, I guess sure. But coal is an essential part of steel production. And steel is the thing that literally all modern buildings and vehicles are made out of. So the whole "Green industry doesn't need coal infrastructure" thing is just BS.
- nl 7y agoWhat are you talking about? The comment was that nuclear was replaced by renewables for power generation. Neither nuclear or renewables replace coking coal. There is a hydrogen steel cycle that can though but not in industrial quantity yet.
- imtringued 7y agoThey added more renewables. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig2a-gross-power-production-germany-1990-2019-1.png?itok=I3-p6ZmH https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
- pfdietz 7y ago"Once fusion is cracked" is almost on par with "once perpetual motion machines are cracked." It presupposes that fusion being "cracked" is a reasonable thing to expect.
- rdtsc 7y agoHuge difference there. Legitimate scientists are working on fusion research and nobody but crackpots are into perpetual motion.
- pfdietz 7y agoYes, the huge difference is the crackpots are not costing society billions of dollars.
- brutt 7y agoPerpetual motion is not hard at all. Satellites are in perpetual motion around globe for decades. It doesn't violate anything. Universe is infinitely old and still moving. Perpetual motion _engines_ violate law of energy conservation, because perpetual source of energy can create infinite amount of energy, thus they are impossible, like perpetual source of water, or perpetual source of anything.
- quickthrower2 7y agoSatellites fall to the ground eventually unless their orbit is adjusted.
- martythemaniak 7y agoThis is either a bad joke, an incredible misunderstanding of physics. "perpetual motion machine" is not compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them. There's many working fusion reactors, we don't know which, if any, designs will be economical.
- pfdietz 7y agoNo, I understand that. What I'm pointing out is that if something has no realistic chance of being economically viable, then from the end user's point of view that's just as bad as if it were physically impossible. The only difference is society is spending billions while pretending an economic miracle will happen, even if that miracle is as implausible as discovery of a violation of the law of conservation of energy.
- outside1234 7y agoI am going go out on a limb and say that fusion is never going to be competitive with solar and batteries.
- i_am_nomad 7y agoFusion is never going to work at all. The only fusion reactor we’ll ever have is 93 million miles away.
- Xixi 7y agoFusion is already working. Not well enough to be commercially viable, but it's already working. ITER will produce more energy than it will be using - albeit only enough usable energy to break even. It's not a matter of making it work anymore, it's only a matter of getting it to work well enough. But maybe all we will ever need are solar panels, after all the sun is providing way enough energy as is... for now.
- i_am_nomad 7y agoLet me be more precise (for you and for the people who downvoted me): fusion will never be cost effective. Ever. There is no conceivable material for the walls of a reactor that could withstand the neutron bombardment from the reaction. Maybe there’s some super-inexpensive way to replace the entire reactor core every 18 months... but I seriously doubt it.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoMaybe we get [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion working in another '50' years? :-)
- pfdietz 7y agoThat's what Lawrence Lidsky was saying fusion people should work on, in his (in)famous 1983 article "The Trouble with Fusion". Then his PhD student Todd Rider shot down the very low neutron fuel cycles. D-3He remains possible, but that still produces neutrons, albeit fewer than DT (and requires mining bodies in space to get 3He).
- Tempest1981 7y agoTerraPower looks promising -- am I too optimistic? https://www.geekwire.com/2019/inside-terrapower-nuclear-lab/ https://www.geekwire.com/2019/inside-terrapower-nuclear-lab/ Safe from meltdown, uses existing nuclear waste as fuel, might be tested in China.
- petre 7y agoThe China thing is doomed after the trade war. I hope it otherwise materializes nevertheless.
- jhayward 7y ago> Germany also shut its nuclear power stations in favour of more coal This is false. Germany replaced their nuclear capacity with, for the most part, wind and solar, plus natural gas. Coal consumption in Germany is down by 50% since they began their nuclear drawdown.
- rasz 7y agoI dont see this 50% drop https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig1-installed-net-power-generation-capacity-germany-2002-2019.png?itok=DEdA2_3B https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g... There might be 50% accounting drop in some reports thanks to all the biomas co-firing making coal plants ECO on paper, at the cost of freshly chopped European forests.
- skrause 7y ago> I dont see this 50% drop Obviously, because you're looking at installed peak capacity, not actual power generation. Here you can see that coal is indeed being used less and less: https://energy-charts.de/energy_de.htm?source=all-sources&period=annual&year=all https://energy-charts.de/energy_de.htm?source=all-sources&pe...
- adrianN 7y agoNow do the same calculation, but instead of replacing nuclear with renewables, replace coal with renewables.
- kaybe 7y agoWe're pulling the coal plants down, and pushing to do it faster. (It may still not be fast enough, ok.) I'm more worried about the countries with no such plans.
- smacktoward 7y agoRelevant: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
- api 7y agoWe do need to phase out fossil fuels, but we must do so in a way that is not only physically and economically but also politically sustainable. As we have seen, big changes of any kind that displace or destroy the livelihoods of vast numbers of people always lead to some form of populist or revolutionary revolt. Whether it takes a "left" (populist-socialist/communist) or "right" (national socialist) form depends mostly on which side is able to field the most compelling demagogue that can best harness the anger of the masses. Abandoning fossil fuels must be done in a way that cushions the public and the economy somewhat or we will have a full scale populist revolt with slogans like "roll coal!"
- AnthonyMouse 7y agoIn this case what "we must" do isn't really in control of a single country. It turns out battery electric vehicles are viable now. Most of Germany's car sales aren't internal to Germany. If they don't produce competitive electric vehicles, Tesla will, or Rivian, or a dozen companies in China and all over the world. Germany's choice isn't to start producing electric cars or to keep producing the same number of ICE cars they always did. It's to start producing electric cars or lose most of the market to new competitors. And that means there are going to be fewer jobs making cars, because it's less labor to make an electric car. But you don't bail out the buggy whip makers, they just start making drive belts, or they go away.
- api 7y agoI'm not sure the buggy whip makers thing is applicable. Industrialization put a ton of people out of work, but growth created new jobs for them. We are now in a near-zero growth environment, so I'm not sure growth will supply a magic bailout this time. Jobs are going to be lost and they may not be replaced by anything.
- AnthonyMouse 7y agoThe thing about jobs is that they mostly balance out. Some people lose their jobs, but that means cars cost less. It means you get the same standard of living with less income. So you take a lower paying job and still have the same life. There are effectively unlimited jobs at low enough pay, so as long as the pay meets the cost of living it's fine, so anything that lowers the cost of living is good. That balance doesn't operate at the individual level. It mostly benefits the people who buy cars and mostly hurts the people who used to make cars. But on net it helps more than it hurts -- it's better to make transportation less expensive than have some more jobs that cause transportation to be more expensive. The biggest problem with this is that it works best when everything gets cheaper at once. Otherwise that individual-level asymmetry starts to become trouble. And what we have right now is a regulatory environment that makes it hard to get cost reductions in certain industries (housing from zoning rules, education from government subsidies, healthcare from a hundred separate causes), so those keep growing as a percentage of income. And that's going to be a problem if we don't do something about it.
- icebraining 7y agoThe article is all about how there's much more at stake than just profits, including thousands of people's jobs. I don't disagree that there's plenty of greed clouding people's judgment, but this cartoonish portrayal is unfair. "Let him who is without an ecological footprint cast the first stone".
- oceanplexian 7y agoThere is pretty much zero chance of the planet becoming uninhabitable in the next few million years, so I'll save you a lot of anxiety. We're gonna be fine.
- juanbyrge 7y agoSource? We are destroying a lot of the negative feedback mechanisms (e.g. clearing rain forests, destroying the tundra, etc) what makes you sure we will be okay? A 4-5 degree Celsius increase in temperature is looking likely by 2100. If that is extrapolated out a few million years doesn’t seem plausible.
- blargmaster33 7y agoThe only solutions suggested is thinly wailed communism...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]