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How long would the atmosphere take to recover from CO2 emissions if we stopped burning fossil fuels today? How many people will have died as a result of climate
by DanI-S 16y ago
How long would the atmosphere take to recover from CO2 emissions if we stopped burning fossil fuels today? How many people will have died as a result of climate change and lung problems before then?
- afterburner 16y agoPeople keep dismissing renewables. Well, they won't get anywhere if we don't invest in them, and that investment has to come from a decrease in spending on other sources. Like nuclear.
- lukeschlather 16y agoIt should come out of coal. If we were willing to nationalize all of our energy, start phasing out coal plants, and go fully nuclear to replace coal, over the next 50 years we could get substantial savings over coal and put those savings into renewables. And in any case, as this graph shows, renewables are not a panacea. Hydro dams cause significant environmental damage, and even wind turbines have their issues.
- afterburner 16y agoSure, from anywhere it can. But a lot of people are talking about ramping up nuclear spending (and the costs are always understated).
- lukeschlather 16y agoYes. Ramp up nuclear, ramp down coal. Potentially it is a very green technology, and at worst it's an improvement over the fossil fuel status quo.
- afterburner 16y agoI'd rather ramp up renewables, ramp down coal, and let nuclear dwindle on its own. Renewables aren't just "potentially" green, they are green, and without the extremely obvious risks that can contaminate a region for decades and increase the entire planet's risk of cancer. Renewables (and the advanced power grid that would support it) have huge room for improvement in generation, nuclear does not have huge room for improvement.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- webXL 16y agoWe do not have a nonfossil alternative that can make up the substantial power needs of the world other than nuclear power. --Glenn Sjoden In other words, unless we litter the plains with windmills (a form of contamination IMO), we cannot get off of coal and NG.
- afterburner 16y agoOh, look at me being downvoted because what I'm saying can't possibly be true...
- maigret 16y agoRight... Renewables + energy savings. It is not that hard to save 15% energy. And it is such a magic field for startups currently. I don't understand why the startup crowd here isn't already working on making nuclear energy unneeded.
- Alex3917 16y agoExactly. This whole chart is irrelevant because what we care about is the expected impact on our health in the future, not the impact on our health in the past. This is why all those people who say we shouldn't decide what to do about building more nuclear power plants until the events in Japan have stabilized are dumb, because the outcome in Japan has zero impact on expected future outcomes.
- thalur 16y agoThe outcome in Japan may have no impact on the statistics, but it will have a massive impact on the opinons and beliefs of the human decision makers. Waiting for it to resolve will allow calmer heads to prevail.
- jshen 16y ago"because the outcome in Japan has zero impact on expected future outcomes." Huh? Expected future outcomes are based on assumptions. Japan gives real data that we should use to recheck those assumptions, and we may learn that some of them were wrong.
- sorbus 16y agoIt gives data about reactors that are, as I recall, 40 years old. That's entirely irrelevant to the designs of newer reactors.
- jshen 16y agonot if the new reactors made the same assumptions. Are you suggesting that it isn't possible, or highly unlikely, that we'll learn anything worthwhile to improve reactor design in the future from this disaster?
- sorbus 16y agoYeah, more or less. We're learning more about what happens when it fails, but it's an old reactor, and we've seen them fail before. We also seem quite unlikely to learn anything especially revolutionary about how radioactive materials behave.