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Oh please. I live in a 'developing country' (don't like that term because I have doubts that it's actually developing). A substantial portion of the population
by 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
Oh please. I live in a 'developing country' (don't like that term because I have doubts that it's actually developing). A substantial portion of the population lives in houses heated with coal furnaces. Except that for the past few years coal prices went up somewhat and many people went to burning trash: rubber tires, old rags soaked in motor oil, pieces of bitumen, old plastic bottles, you name it.
In winter air quality is simply horrible (my Grafana instance shows an average of 240 µg/m³ PM2.5 for January of this year). I have a t-shirt that was hung out to try at the beginning of this year and it still smells of burnt coal and rubber.
The government spent a pretty penny subsidizing installation of natural gas furnaces. Guess what, almost nobody is actually using that now since coal is noticeably cheaper, so people went right back to burning it. I understand they don't care about anybody else, but in winter their own kids breathe air that is literally black and reduces visibility to a few dozen meters. Good luck trying to convince them of anything.
- bombcar 4y agoThe solution is to make natural gas cheaper than coal, even free. But the West reacts violently to "installing carbon-emitting natural gas in developing countries" and it doesn't happen.
- jeromegv 4y agoWhy would you subsidize gas, of all type of energy we could subsidize?
- gruez 4y agoI wouldn't, but it seems somewhat plausible to do it if you really care about costs.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y agoSolar and wind costs much less than gas, and we can still increase the % of intermittent energy sources by a lot before we actually need to install stationary storage. Of course people will oppose gas when we have a better and cheaper alternative.
- gruez 4y agoHow does the intermittent nature of solar/wind work for the usages described in this thread (ie. heating, hot water, cooking)? Heating need is anti-correlated with renewables, because it's used at night. I suspect the same applies to hot water (spike of showers in the morning/night), although it's less of an issue because you can save up hot water. Cooking is concentrated around certain time periods (ie. breakfast/lunch/dinner), so that's also a bad fit for renewables.
- hedora 4y agoThe coefficient of power of current heat pumps is over 4 in most operating environments. It doesn't solve the storage problem, but it increases the price differential between electric and fossil fuels. That differential could be used for batteries, solar water heating, etc, etc. Cooking off battery and using a heat pump water heater is pretty feasible at this point (feasible == cheaper than fossil fuels). Heating the house and charging vehicles are the big energy hogs. Unfortunately, they're also big polluters.
- bombcar 4y agoBecause the problem is literally people burning coal at home for heat, and burning natural gas at home for heat is way less polluting, and if you price it right they'll jump at it. If instead you try to build solar or wind and provide electrical for heating, maybe some of the rich will do it, but most everyone else will continue to burn coal (or tires).
- danuker 4y agoNot necessarily subsidize gas. You can also tax coal for its special danger.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y agoI don't think the problem lies in the West. Nobody is going to burn natural gas in our own country when it can be exported at prices that internal buyers would never to able to pay. By diverting it to our own market and subsidizing the price further the government would be losing insane amounts of money. But even building more coal-based power stations and connecting more houses to central heating would go a long way towards improving the air quality (since they use scrubbers to remove particulates from emissions, and the only thing you have to be afraid of are things like SO₂). Nobody seems willing to do even that, the situation keeps getting worse.
- ParksNet 4y agoThe solution is population reduction through medical and social encouragement of having fewer or no children. Its not realistic to expect to modernize 1.3 billion Indians into a fossil-fuel intensive lifestyle. The infrastructure and sophistication also just doesn't exist for highly insulated and heat-pump conditioned homes like in the West. The population of India in 1965 was 500 million. Getting back to this level would dramatically increase the quality of life and resources available to each person.