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But a ton of the "clean" power isn't clean. Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts. Those high end molten salt so

But a ton of the "clean" power isn't clean. Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts. Those high end molten salt solar plans take natural gas to startup. Most "wood chip" plants burn the same fast growing trees used by paper mills. CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on. There are so many other forms of pollution that are so much worse. Factory cities in China that have lakes of toxic sludge waste. The massive amount of plastic particles in the ocean. Colossal e-waste from electronics only designed to last two years. Real, meaningful changes that will stop environmental devastation require reduction of consumption. Unless Google finds a way to reduce their data center footprints, the CO2 numbers are most likely just cooked books; displacing CO2 with other environmental disaster. We need to consume less things.

shadowgovt 6y ago
> Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts That's strictly cleaner than running the region on fossil plants only > Natural gas to startup That's strictly cleaner than running the region on natural gas only >CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on. There are so many other forms of pollution that are so much worse. Factory cities in China that have lakes of toxic sludge waste. Lakes of toxic sludge are bad, but they're a localized problem. Atomspheric CO2 balance threatens to crash the global ecology for everything larger than bacteria. Of the things you've listed, the risk factor for killing everyone is CO2 --> ocean plastic --> e-waste --> toxic sludge lakes. > We need to consume less things That'd be cool, but unfortunately, have you met humans? We've been trying the "Consume less things" approach my entire life; it doesn't take. We need the consumption to be more efficient and less environmentally impactful.
- andi999 6y ago
  Looking in the mirror is enough. How much did you (and me, its nit about you specifically) spent as a student? 1k/month? How much you earn after tax? 5k? So if after 10years of work less than half a million on your account you spent on uneccessary things. (Ok... its all spent for the kids...) Why the downvote. Seriously, if we believe we need to consume less, it might be a good idea to put it into perspective what that will actually mean for each individual. I am including myself into this as well.
- wazoox 6y ago
  > > Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts > That's strictly cleaner than running the region on fossil plants only True, but from a CO2 and climate standpoint that's strictly dirtier than nuclear. And reducing emissions by enforcing good insulation norms, taxing the hell out of kerosene, etc.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Nuclear, of course, has its own dirty issue in sequestering byproducts (discounting the occasional meltdown, which---thankfully---is still generally a localized problem relative to CO2 emission's global threat, although it's not very localized... Chernobyl threatened much of west Asia and Europe in the worst-case scenario which, thankfully, didn't materialize). It's a little hard to weigh those costs vs. benefits, since nuclear byproduct sequestration is relatively cheap but the consequences of failure are relatively high (dirty bombs). On the whole, I'd peg the risk factors for solar and wind as lower, but I'd still prefer to see nuclear plants replace fossil fuel plants if other options aren't available.
    - wazoox 6y ago
      This is a problem of means. We don't have infinite resources to spend. For instance Germany spent 300 billions euros on wind and solar power since 2000. They decided to stop using nuclear, and are still burning masses of coal, and are still quite far away from clean electricity. Would they have invested 300 billions in nuclear, Germany would run on 100% CO2 neutral electricity today, with an hefty margin (arguably 200 billions would have been enough). Then while everybody speaks about electricity, they conveniently forget that it represents only 20 to 25% of all of our energy needs. The remaining 75-80% for industry, agriculture and transports are almost 100% fossil-fueled...
- throwaway8941 6y ago
  I understand your argument, but honestly, as someone living in a heavily polluted area, I couldn't care less about the CO₂ problem. When you have the immediate concern of people dying 15 years earlier than they might have, when your throat burns 300 days in a year, and you often can't see much farther than 400 meters, I would be very happy if we could just switch everything coal powered to natural gas.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    As someone who also lives in a heavily polluted area, I agree, but I can also move. Nobody can move away from the consequences of CO2 saturation. There's no second planet to move to.
- V6HBGNQHU 6y ago
  Peaker plants are far dirties than base load plants.
bouncycastle 6y ago
I actually help run a solar farm part time. Most of my work is to use a petrol powered snipper to cut all the weeds that are growing around it, and I wonder if cutting down trees to make way for solar lots is really the future? It's quite a big block of land that could be a forest or a park. Also, the thing is that panels expire after 20 years, so new ones will need to be manufactured and the process to make them and mine the materials to make them is not exactly clean I guess..
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  if not for the problem of mitigating sand erosion, deserts seem well-suited for solar farms. I believe the statistic is that all the necessary power to power double humanity's electric consumption could be generated from a tiny patch of the Sahara---big enough to be seen from space, but tiny in the grand scheme of things (1) (1) This is, of course, the foolish way to go about it, since distribution costs would be enormous and that kind of centralization is dangerous for a robust system. But it's a fun thought experiment to visualize the scale of the problem and the gap between the inefficiency of the modern system and potential improvements.
- gdubs 6y ago
  Hawaii has one of (if the not the) largest solar farms in the world — and they use sheep for weed removal. We definitely should be reforesting land, but land that is already pasture has a lot of potential for regenerative agricultural practices which greatly increase the prairie’s carbon-capture potential. Particularly if animals are incorporated intelligently. One study showed that the panels themselves can actually help improve pasture soil.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Sheep produce methane which is far more harmful per unit mass than co2. I'm guessing sheep (especially plural) are less efficient than a fossil-fuel trimmer (maybe not after accounting for the carbon used to manufacture the trimmer?), but you could probably replace it with an electric trimmer and be even better off. Reasoning about carbon is hard.
boogies 6y ago
> But a ton of the "clean" power isn't clean. Emphasis on a ton — not all. Nuclear basically is. And as of this millennium at the latest it’s been safe. The nuclear deaths in the US add up to a grand total of 0 (zero). That’s better than eg. wind can say — at least one turbine has burst into flame during maintenance, forcing the workers to choose between burning or leaping to death. Google’s Ivanpah solar plant has also killed thousands of birds by burning them so they plummet out of the sky (not to mention the endangered desert tortoises who lose their habitats when land is bulldozed for solar, or human injuries from falling of roofs while installing solar panels). And of course CO₂ danger is exaggerated, most scientists from the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union for the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) don’t believe there will be catastrophic effects of global warming (including from more potent greenhouse gasses like methane) in the next 50-100 years. And deaths from natural disasters are declining.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Both Fukushima and Chernobyl raise serious questions about the safety of nuclear power, unfortunately. > And of course CO₂ danger is exaggerated, most scientists from the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union for the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) don’t believe there will be catastrophic effects of global warming (including from more potent greenhouse gasses like methane) in the next 50-100 years. Have they looked into what's going on in the west coast of the US right now?
  - boogies 6y ago
    Again, as of the last millenium at the latest. Chernobyl was last millenium. Fukushima was a tsunami. There were 0 (zero) deaths from radiation there (and ironically, perhaps there were deaths from irrational fear of it — from the rushed evacuation — perhaps it would be better named FUDushima). And tsunamis don’t happen in the US. The west coast has had catastrophic human intervention in the natural fire cycle, piling up fuel year after year until it was too big of a hazard for humans to handle. https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-paradise-lost-1542068600 https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-paradise-lost-15420...
jefftk 6y ago
> CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on. There are so many other forms of pollution that are so much worse. Factory cities in China that have lakes of toxic sludge waste. The massive amount of plastic particles in the ocean. Colossal e-waste from electronics only designed to last two years. CO2, and other greenhouse gasses, are exactly what we should be focusing on. Sea level rise alone is more urgent than everything else you've mentioned, let alone unpredictable weather changes and their potential for causing war.
danans 6y ago
> Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts. There are lots of known ways to deal with this, including grid scale batteries and demand-response, both of which are now reaching the electricity market. What we need is the political and cultural shift to support massive investment in these technologies. There will be room for natural gas as a bridge fuel, but coal has no future. And yes, it's not happening fast enough, and no snap of the fingers will do it. > CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on Only if you're willing to ignore the clearly visible impacts of global warming amplified destructive events worldwide. The waters are rising and the global warming denial island is getting smaller with every passing year. > We need to consume less things. We need to consume less-carbon-intensive things (hyphenation intentional). We can start by consuming longer-lasting things, consuming things whose materials are more readily recyclable, and reducing waste (where no utility is derived from the consumption). But the first step is to reduce the carbon intensity of things we already consume.

shadowgovt 6y ago

> Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts That's strictly cleaner than running the region on fossil plants only > Natural gas to startup That's strictly cleaner than running the region on natural gas only >CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on. There are so many other forms of pollution that are so much worse. Factory cities in China that have lakes of toxic sludge waste. Lakes of toxic sludge are bad, but they're a localized problem. Atomspheric CO2 balance threatens to crash the global ecology for everything larger than bacteria. Of the things you've listed, the risk factor for killing everyone is CO2 --> ocean plastic --> e-waste --> toxic sludge lakes. > We need to consume less things That'd be cool, but unfortunately, have you met humans? We've been trying the "Consume less things" approach my entire life; it doesn't take. We need the consumption to be more efficient and less environmentally impactful.

andi999 6y ago
Looking in the mirror is enough. How much did you (and me, its nit about you specifically) spent as a student? 1k/month? How much you earn after tax? 5k? So if after 10years of work less than half a million on your account you spent on uneccessary things. (Ok... its all spent for the kids...) Why the downvote. Seriously, if we believe we need to consume less, it might be a good idea to put it into perspective what that will actually mean for each individual. I am including myself into this as well.
wazoox 6y ago
> > Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts > That's strictly cleaner than running the region on fossil plants only True, but from a CO2 and climate standpoint that's strictly dirtier than nuclear. And reducing emissions by enforcing good insulation norms, taxing the hell out of kerosene, etc.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Nuclear, of course, has its own dirty issue in sequestering byproducts (discounting the occasional meltdown, which---thankfully---is still generally a localized problem relative to CO2 emission's global threat, although it's not very localized... Chernobyl threatened much of west Asia and Europe in the worst-case scenario which, thankfully, didn't materialize). It's a little hard to weigh those costs vs. benefits, since nuclear byproduct sequestration is relatively cheap but the consequences of failure are relatively high (dirty bombs). On the whole, I'd peg the risk factors for solar and wind as lower, but I'd still prefer to see nuclear plants replace fossil fuel plants if other options aren't available.
  - wazoox 6y ago
    This is a problem of means. We don't have infinite resources to spend. For instance Germany spent 300 billions euros on wind and solar power since 2000. They decided to stop using nuclear, and are still burning masses of coal, and are still quite far away from clean electricity. Would they have invested 300 billions in nuclear, Germany would run on 100% CO2 neutral electricity today, with an hefty margin (arguably 200 billions would have been enough). Then while everybody speaks about electricity, they conveniently forget that it represents only 20 to 25% of all of our energy needs. The remaining 75-80% for industry, agriculture and transports are almost 100% fossil-fueled...
throwaway8941 6y ago
I understand your argument, but honestly, as someone living in a heavily polluted area, I couldn't care less about the CO₂ problem. When you have the immediate concern of people dying 15 years earlier than they might have, when your throat burns 300 days in a year, and you often can't see much farther than 400 meters, I would be very happy if we could just switch everything coal powered to natural gas.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  As someone who also lives in a heavily polluted area, I agree, but I can also move. Nobody can move away from the consequences of CO2 saturation. There's no second planet to move to.
V6HBGNQHU 6y ago
Peaker plants are far dirties than base load plants.

bouncycastle 6y ago

I actually help run a solar farm part time. Most of my work is to use a petrol powered snipper to cut all the weeds that are growing around it, and I wonder if cutting down trees to make way for solar lots is really the future? It's quite a big block of land that could be a forest or a park. Also, the thing is that panels expire after 20 years, so new ones will need to be manufactured and the process to make them and mine the materials to make them is not exactly clean I guess..

shadowgovt 6y ago
if not for the problem of mitigating sand erosion, deserts seem well-suited for solar farms. I believe the statistic is that all the necessary power to power double humanity's electric consumption could be generated from a tiny patch of the Sahara---big enough to be seen from space, but tiny in the grand scheme of things (1) (1) This is, of course, the foolish way to go about it, since distribution costs would be enormous and that kind of centralization is dangerous for a robust system. But it's a fun thought experiment to visualize the scale of the problem and the gap between the inefficiency of the modern system and potential improvements.
gdubs 6y ago
Hawaii has one of (if the not the) largest solar farms in the world — and they use sheep for weed removal. We definitely should be reforesting land, but land that is already pasture has a lot of potential for regenerative agricultural practices which greatly increase the prairie’s carbon-capture potential. Particularly if animals are incorporated intelligently. One study showed that the panels themselves can actually help improve pasture soil.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Sheep produce methane which is far more harmful per unit mass than co2. I'm guessing sheep (especially plural) are less efficient than a fossil-fuel trimmer (maybe not after accounting for the carbon used to manufacture the trimmer?), but you could probably replace it with an electric trimmer and be even better off. Reasoning about carbon is hard.

boogies 6y ago

> But a ton of the "clean" power isn't clean. Emphasis on a ton — not all. Nuclear basically is. And as of this millennium at the latest it’s been safe. The nuclear deaths in the US add up to a grand total of 0 (zero). That’s better than eg. wind can say — at least one turbine has burst into flame during maintenance, forcing the workers to choose between burning or leaping to death. Google’s Ivanpah solar plant has also killed thousands of birds by burning them so they plummet out of the sky (not to mention the endangered desert tortoises who lose their habitats when land is bulldozed for solar, or human injuries from falling of roofs while installing solar panels). And of course CO₂ danger is exaggerated, most scientists from the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union for the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) don’t believe there will be catastrophic effects of global warming (including from more potent greenhouse gasses like methane) in the next 50-100 years. And deaths from natural disasters are declining.

shadowgovt 6y ago
Both Fukushima and Chernobyl raise serious questions about the safety of nuclear power, unfortunately. > And of course CO₂ danger is exaggerated, most scientists from the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union for the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) don’t believe there will be catastrophic effects of global warming (including from more potent greenhouse gasses like methane) in the next 50-100 years. Have they looked into what's going on in the west coast of the US right now?
- boogies 6y ago
  Again, as of the last millenium at the latest. Chernobyl was last millenium. Fukushima was a tsunami. There were 0 (zero) deaths from radiation there (and ironically, perhaps there were deaths from irrational fear of it — from the rushed evacuation — perhaps it would be better named FUDushima). And tsunamis don’t happen in the US. The west coast has had catastrophic human intervention in the natural fire cycle, piling up fuel year after year until it was too big of a hazard for humans to handle. https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-paradise-lost-1542068600 https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-paradise-lost-15420...

jefftk 6y ago

> CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on. There are so many other forms of pollution that are so much worse. Factory cities in China that have lakes of toxic sludge waste. The massive amount of plastic particles in the ocean. Colossal e-waste from electronics only designed to last two years. CO2, and other greenhouse gasses, are exactly what we should be focusing on. Sea level rise alone is more urgent than everything else you've mentioned, let alone unpredictable weather changes and their potential for causing war.

danans 6y ago

> Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts. There are lots of known ways to deal with this, including grid scale batteries and demand-response, both of which are now reaching the electricity market. What we need is the political and cultural shift to support massive investment in these technologies. There will be room for natural gas as a bridge fuel, but coal has no future. And yes, it's not happening fast enough, and no snap of the fingers will do it. > CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on Only if you're willing to ignore the clearly visible impacts of global warming amplified destructive events worldwide. The waters are rising and the global warming denial island is getting smaller with every passing year. > We need to consume less things. We need to consume less-carbon-intensive things (hyphenation intentional). We can start by consuming longer-lasting things, consuming things whose materials are more readily recyclable, and reducing waste (where no utility is derived from the consumption). But the first step is to reduce the carbon intensity of things we already consume.