5 ms·

I read these titles and always facepalm and laugh. If you remove researchers who have differing opinions of course you’ll get the claims you want. Particular

I read these titles and always facepalm and laugh. If you remove researchers who have differing opinions *of course* you’ll get the claims you want. Particularly, when those researchers are funded in a way that incentivizes particular claims. Now to these easily debunked claims, look at energy production vs capacity vs consumption in Germany: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables. This is every country. Because renewable energy comes in bursts. This also doesn’t include the fact it costs a ton of fossil fuel energy to produce a lot of these renewable systems (solar, wind turbines, batteries). I’m not saying this isn’t a “doable” goal, but only way you might get there by 2050 is destroying quality of life, population reduction and investing all resources into this space. You’d also have to force countries like China and Russia with force… so good luck.

yisonPylkita 4y ago
Especially Russia since they’ll only benefit from climate change - destabilisation of Europe via refugees from Africa and more arable land in Taiga
- _ph_ 4y ago
  If you think climate change leads to more arable land in Russia, well, I think you are wrong. And of course, Russia is missing the least arable land. They could do with some airplanes and more population in general though.
_ph_ 4y ago
You are wrong in several points. First of all, if we switch from burning fossil fuels to electricity for providing most uses of energy, energy consumption falls by 2/3rds. Heat pumps are easily more than 4x as effective per unit of energy used than burning fossil fuels. Similar numbers for electric cars and many other usages. So we are litterally looking at a moving goal post :) Renewable energy also doesn't come in "bursts". Yes, the maximum available production varies over time, for that we need to compensate. By storage, by grids, by having more flexible loads (for many decades providers worked hard to make loads non-flexible to make their jobs easier, now it is the other way around). And of course, some amount of power2gas will provide us with perfectly renewable gas which can be easily stored for whenever it is needed - we only want to limit that because it uses more power than using the electricity directly. And no, to get there we are not "destroying quality of life". There is no idication it would even compared to our current quality of life. Quite the contrary, as cheap, clean energy will improve quality of life. You are also missing, that our quality of life isn't given. It currently is constantly reduced by the effects of climate change we are already experiencing. Europe is going through a catastrophic hot and dry summer. With ironically energy shortages as the water cooling for nuclear power plants is failing. Just being able to maintain todays quality of life would be quite an accomplishment, which can only be achieved by cutting CO2 emissions very quickly, if at all.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  I don't think anyone is arguing whether or not they are more efficient. Yet, in practice: >Heat pumps Most governments seem awfully eager on pushing the costs onto individuals. With big inflations and a breakeven point anywhere between 5 and 20 years case-by-case, that's a hard sell for individuals and causes no end of political pressure. In practice, a lot of people are not eager to move to heat pumps in older houses, while (re)building is still severely hampered. >Similar numbers for electric cars and many other usages. Same as above. Electric car subsidies are incredibly limited, used electric cars still have to flow to the market at a rate they become affordable for the less fortunate. At the same time, there's not a whole lot being done about the short duration of generations which is part of what causes environmental issues (goes for everything, not just cars). Of course, combatting that means products have to become more expensive to keep the current cashflow alive, something most stakeholders aren't willing to bet on. Alternatives are cheaper public transit (which would beat out EV altogether, especially if the used vehicles become electric themselves), but again, governments don't seem too eager to invest into it beyond some token experiments. And you can say this for anything. We already have solutions. We have tons of solutions, some for individuals, some for entire communities, some for the rich, etc. We're just not implementing them or trying to implement them without hurting the status quo (or pushing the pain onto specific groups). Which makes everything just not work in practice and we're waiting for the theory to magically solve our disputes, instead of adapting to the theory. Case in point: remote work. If the environment was our biggest concern, remote work wouldn't be a discussion.
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    I am not sure about the point you are trying to make. Yes, politics makes a lot of mistakes and those deserve to be critisized. And the efficiency point I made was about countering the previous posters numbers - which were plain wrong. And of course the end user pays the costs. But if heat pumps are cheaper over the life time than gas, they are cheaper. And they were already pre-war and now are drastically so. By the way there are huge subsidies for heat-pumps in Germany, the state really helped there. Not sure how remote work fits into the discussion about which are our energy sources. Obviously, we should also try to not waste energy - at least until we have a surplus of renewables. Doing more remote work can certainly help with that. Less traffic would be beneficial beyond carbon emissions. Remote work is one thing we should do more, but it isn't applicable in all case and only a part of the solution.
Deltioner 4y ago
Your first sentence is very condescending. Would be fine if your comment would actually criticize something not mention. But it states that they include energy storage. You 'facepalm and laugh ' while probably only skimming the article.
tcfhgj 4y ago
Renewable energy doesnt come in bursts: Wind across big areas (e.g. Europe), biogas, running water, geothermal power, osmotic power, etc. I don't know where you are taking renewable energy capacity from and what are you trying to say. Same goes for producing wind turbines, which actually doesn't require fossil fuel at all. > I’m not saying this isn’t a “doable” goal, but only way you might get there by 2050 is destroying quality of life, population reduction and investing all resources into this space. You couldn't make less baseless comments
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Wind absolutely does come in bursts. Peak production is as much as 4x as much as trough production. There's also hourly variation: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2015.02.25/main.png https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2015.02.25/main.png
  - tcfhgj 4y ago
    Think bigger: Entire continent
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      This is way harder than you think it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o
      - tcfhgj 4y ago
        Entire world vs entire continent (already partly reality in Europe)
        Manuel_D 4y ago
        The lines are just a few hundred kilometers in that video. If your plan is to even out the intermittency of wind and solar with long distance transmission, then you'll need lines that are thousand and tens of thousands of kilometers long. Europe has an interconnected grid, but most of it is in AC lines that have unacceptably larger transmission losses.
naasking 4y ago
> Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables. This is every country. Because renewable energy comes in bursts. Any engineer could have told you that switching to renewables requires grid expansion and ideally energy storage with renewable overcapacity generation. The more grid expansion, the less storage you'll probably need and vice versa. Germany is just another case of politicians not listening to experts.
- lettergram 4y ago
  > Germany is just another case of politicians not listening to experts. The politicians pay the “expert”. So unfortunately, I think you’re mistaken. This was my primary point, you get what you pay for. I totally agree any engineer or frankly anyone with baseline competency and a minor amount of research would come away with the same conclusions. The challenge is these “experts” have every incentive to push the political agenda. Further, they’ll ban anyone who disagrees. How many “global warming deniers” (99% of whom just believe humans aren’t the primary cause) are banned from discussion? All of them. They are all ridiculed, banned, and many can’t get grants or publish. Th challenge is even with storage capacity (even a hell of a lot of it), you’re still going to get issues on the edges. For instance, if a volcano erupts and blacks out a region relying on solar… you’re out of luck.
  - naasking 4y ago
    > How many “global warming deniers” (99% of whom just believe humans aren’t the primary cause) are banned from discussion? All of them. You only have so much time for nonsense. There's no question that humans are driving climate change at this point. Might as well ask why we don't accept papers arguing for flat Earth. > For instance, if a volcano erupts and blacks out a region relying on solar… you’re out of luck. What happens if your primary natural gas supplier starts a war and you have to sanction them? As you can see this is not a problem with renewables so much as with single points of failure. Volcanic eruptions don't stop wind power, or tidal power, or geothermal power, or nuclear power.
  - tzs 4y ago
    > How many “global warming deniers” (99% of whom just believe humans aren’t the primary cause) are banned from discussion? First of all, it doesn't matter if humans are the primary cause. Any negative consequences of climate change affect us exactly the same way regardless of the cause. We are in fact much worse off if humans aren't the primary cause, because it would mean simply reducing human emissions would not be enough. We would need to do things to actively reduce greenhouse gas levels from non-human sources too. Second, humans are in fact the primary cause. We know this because (1) we know what role greenhouse gases play in warming, and (2) we know that the rapid increase in greenhouse gases over industrial times is due to human activity. We know the role of greenhouse gases because we can measure incoming and outgoing radiation at the surface, at various levels of the atmosphere, and in space. We can measure temperatures at those places too. We can literally see incoming radiation heating the surface, being reemitted as infrared, and getting blocked from leaving by gases in the atmosphere. We can measure the spectrum of the radiation at various levels to find out how much is getting absorbed where, and we can look at the absorption spectrum of the various gases there to see which ones are responsible. We know humans are responsible because we can look at the gases involved and check the isotope ratios of the carbon in those gases. Carbon from living or recently living sources has a different isotope ratio than does carbon that has never been involved with life or has not been involved with life for a very long time. This is because cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere convert nitrogen into C14 which gets distributed throughout the atmosphere, and gets included in living things, and gets put back into the atmosphere when living things that breath exhale or when they die and decay unless the die someplace where they won't be eaten or used as fertilizer by some other living thing. Carbon that is not involved with living things has its C14 decay (half life 5730 years). By looking at the fraction of the atmospheric carbon that is C14 we can determine how much of the carbon came from ancient sources. There are geological sources that put ancient carbon into circulation, mainly outgassing from mid-ocean ridges and volcanoes, which do put a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. But their activity has not changed much in industrial times. There is a human source that puts ancient carbon into the atmosphere: burning fossil fuels. That has changed massively over industrial times and correlates nearly perfectly with the increases in ancient carbon in the atmosphere. Hence we can include that the greenhouse gases that are driving climate change in fact come from human activity, specifically burning fossil fuels.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
> Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables. You make a lot of unsubstantiated, untrue and misleading claims, but just to drill into this one for people who haven't seen this classic dodge before: "Primary Energy Consumption" measures all the energy in fossil fuels. About 2/3 of that energy is lost as waste heat when generating electricity which isn't actually useful for "quality of life" but people love quoting it to make renewables seem ridiculous. When in fact, it's one of the main reasons they're a good idea and we should Electrify Everything: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545044/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545044/ https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method
jrmg 4y ago
Can you explain what in the Wikipedia page you linked to substantiates the 60% vs 10% claim? I’m just not seeing it.
- lettergram 4y ago
  Look at the energy capacity data / charts. 60% of the capacity is from renewables (it’s what the German greens promote as well). But if you look at energy consumption, you’ll see only 10% is from renewables.

I read these titles and always facepalm and laugh. If you remove researchers who have differing opinions *of course* you’ll get the claims you want. Particular

yisonPylkita 4y ago

Especially Russia since they’ll only benefit from climate change - destabilisation of Europe via refugees from Africa and more arable land in Taiga

_ph_ 4y ago
If you think climate change leads to more arable land in Russia, well, I think you are wrong. And of course, Russia is missing the least arable land. They could do with some airplanes and more population in general though.

_ph_ 4y ago

You are wrong in several points. First of all, if we switch from burning fossil fuels to electricity for providing most uses of energy, energy consumption falls by 2/3rds. Heat pumps are easily more than 4x as effective per unit of energy used than burning fossil fuels. Similar numbers for electric cars and many other usages. So we are litterally looking at a moving goal post :) Renewable energy also doesn't come in "bursts". Yes, the maximum available production varies over time, for that we need to compensate. By storage, by grids, by having more flexible loads (for many decades providers worked hard to make loads non-flexible to make their jobs easier, now it is the other way around). And of course, some amount of power2gas will provide us with perfectly renewable gas which can be easily stored for whenever it is needed - we only want to limit that because it uses more power than using the electricity directly. And no, to get there we are not "destroying quality of life". There is no idication it would even compared to our current quality of life. Quite the contrary, as cheap, clean energy will improve quality of life. You are also missing, that our quality of life isn't given. It currently is constantly reduced by the effects of climate change we are already experiencing. Europe is going through a catastrophic hot and dry summer. With ironically energy shortages as the water cooling for nuclear power plants is failing. Just being able to maintain todays quality of life would be quite an accomplishment, which can only be achieved by cutting CO2 emissions very quickly, if at all.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
I don't think anyone is arguing whether or not they are more efficient. Yet, in practice: >Heat pumps Most governments seem awfully eager on pushing the costs onto individuals. With big inflations and a breakeven point anywhere between 5 and 20 years case-by-case, that's a hard sell for individuals and causes no end of political pressure. In practice, a lot of people are not eager to move to heat pumps in older houses, while (re)building is still severely hampered. >Similar numbers for electric cars and many other usages. Same as above. Electric car subsidies are incredibly limited, used electric cars still have to flow to the market at a rate they become affordable for the less fortunate. At the same time, there's not a whole lot being done about the short duration of generations which is part of what causes environmental issues (goes for everything, not just cars). Of course, combatting that means products have to become more expensive to keep the current cashflow alive, something most stakeholders aren't willing to bet on. Alternatives are cheaper public transit (which would beat out EV altogether, especially if the used vehicles become electric themselves), but again, governments don't seem too eager to invest into it beyond some token experiments. And you can say this for anything. We already have solutions. We have tons of solutions, some for individuals, some for entire communities, some for the rich, etc. We're just not implementing them or trying to implement them without hurting the status quo (or pushing the pain onto specific groups). Which makes everything just not work in practice and we're waiting for the theory to magically solve our disputes, instead of adapting to the theory. Case in point: remote work. If the environment was our biggest concern, remote work wouldn't be a discussion.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  I am not sure about the point you are trying to make. Yes, politics makes a lot of mistakes and those deserve to be critisized. And the efficiency point I made was about countering the previous posters numbers - which were plain wrong. And of course the end user pays the costs. But if heat pumps are cheaper over the life time than gas, they are cheaper. And they were already pre-war and now are drastically so. By the way there are huge subsidies for heat-pumps in Germany, the state really helped there. Not sure how remote work fits into the discussion about which are our energy sources. Obviously, we should also try to not waste energy - at least until we have a surplus of renewables. Doing more remote work can certainly help with that. Less traffic would be beneficial beyond carbon emissions. Remote work is one thing we should do more, but it isn't applicable in all case and only a part of the solution.

Deltioner 4y ago

Your first sentence is very condescending. Would be fine if your comment would actually criticize something not mention. But it states that they include energy storage. You 'facepalm and laugh ' while probably only skimming the article.

tcfhgj 4y ago

Renewable energy doesnt come in bursts: Wind across big areas (e.g. Europe), biogas, running water, geothermal power, osmotic power, etc. I don't know where you are taking renewable energy capacity from and what are you trying to say. Same goes for producing wind turbines, which actually doesn't require fossil fuel at all. > I’m not saying this isn’t a “doable” goal, but only way you might get there by 2050 is destroying quality of life, population reduction and investing all resources into this space. You couldn't make less baseless comments

Manuel_D 4y ago
Wind absolutely does come in bursts. Peak production is as much as 4x as much as trough production. There's also hourly variation: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2015.02.25/main.png https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2015.02.25/main.png
- tcfhgj 4y ago
  Think bigger: Entire continent
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    This is way harder than you think it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o
    - tcfhgj 4y ago
      Entire world vs entire continent (already partly reality in Europe)
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        The lines are just a few hundred kilometers in that video. If your plan is to even out the intermittency of wind and solar with long distance transmission, then you'll need lines that are thousand and tens of thousands of kilometers long. Europe has an interconnected grid, but most of it is in AC lines that have unacceptably larger transmission losses.

naasking 4y ago

> Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables. This is every country. Because renewable energy comes in bursts. Any engineer could have told you that switching to renewables requires grid expansion and ideally energy storage with renewable overcapacity generation. The more grid expansion, the less storage you'll probably need and vice versa. Germany is just another case of politicians not listening to experts.

lettergram 4y ago
> Germany is just another case of politicians not listening to experts. The politicians pay the “expert”. So unfortunately, I think you’re mistaken. This was my primary point, you get what you pay for. I totally agree any engineer or frankly anyone with baseline competency and a minor amount of research would come away with the same conclusions. The challenge is these “experts” have every incentive to push the political agenda. Further, they’ll ban anyone who disagrees. How many “global warming deniers” (99% of whom just believe humans aren’t the primary cause) are banned from discussion? All of them. They are all ridiculed, banned, and many can’t get grants or publish. Th challenge is even with storage capacity (even a hell of a lot of it), you’re still going to get issues on the edges. For instance, if a volcano erupts and blacks out a region relying on solar… you’re out of luck.
- naasking 4y ago
  > How many “global warming deniers” (99% of whom just believe humans aren’t the primary cause) are banned from discussion? All of them. You only have so much time for nonsense. There's no question that humans are driving climate change at this point. Might as well ask why we don't accept papers arguing for flat Earth. > For instance, if a volcano erupts and blacks out a region relying on solar… you’re out of luck. What happens if your primary natural gas supplier starts a war and you have to sanction them? As you can see this is not a problem with renewables so much as with single points of failure. Volcanic eruptions don't stop wind power, or tidal power, or geothermal power, or nuclear power.
- tzs 4y ago
  > How many “global warming deniers” (99% of whom just believe humans aren’t the primary cause) are banned from discussion? First of all, it doesn't matter if humans are the primary cause. Any negative consequences of climate change affect us exactly the same way regardless of the cause. We are in fact much worse off if humans aren't the primary cause, because it would mean simply reducing human emissions would not be enough. We would need to do things to actively reduce greenhouse gas levels from non-human sources too. Second, humans are in fact the primary cause. We know this because (1) we know what role greenhouse gases play in warming, and (2) we know that the rapid increase in greenhouse gases over industrial times is due to human activity. We know the role of greenhouse gases because we can measure incoming and outgoing radiation at the surface, at various levels of the atmosphere, and in space. We can measure temperatures at those places too. We can literally see incoming radiation heating the surface, being reemitted as infrared, and getting blocked from leaving by gases in the atmosphere. We can measure the spectrum of the radiation at various levels to find out how much is getting absorbed where, and we can look at the absorption spectrum of the various gases there to see which ones are responsible. We know humans are responsible because we can look at the gases involved and check the isotope ratios of the carbon in those gases. Carbon from living or recently living sources has a different isotope ratio than does carbon that has never been involved with life or has not been involved with life for a very long time. This is because cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere convert nitrogen into C14 which gets distributed throughout the atmosphere, and gets included in living things, and gets put back into the atmosphere when living things that breath exhale or when they die and decay unless the die someplace where they won't be eaten or used as fertilizer by some other living thing. Carbon that is not involved with living things has its C14 decay (half life 5730 years). By looking at the fraction of the atmospheric carbon that is C14 we can determine how much of the carbon came from ancient sources. There are geological sources that put ancient carbon into circulation, mainly outgassing from mid-ocean ridges and volcanoes, which do put a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. But their activity has not changed much in industrial times. There is a human source that puts ancient carbon into the atmosphere: burning fossil fuels. That has changed massively over industrial times and correlates nearly perfectly with the increases in ancient carbon in the atmosphere. Hence we can include that the greenhouse gases that are driving climate change in fact come from human activity, specifically burning fossil fuels.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

> Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables. You make a lot of unsubstantiated, untrue and misleading claims, but just to drill into this one for people who haven't seen this classic dodge before: "Primary Energy Consumption" measures all the energy in fossil fuels. About 2/3 of that energy is lost as waste heat when generating electricity which isn't actually useful for "quality of life" but people love quoting it to make renewables seem ridiculous. When in fact, it's one of the main reasons they're a good idea and we should Electrify Everything: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545044/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545044/ https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method

jrmg 4y ago

Can you explain what in the Wikipedia page you linked to substantiates the 60% vs 10% claim? I’m just not seeing it.

lettergram 4y ago
Look at the energy capacity data / charts. 60% of the capacity is from renewables (it’s what the German greens promote as well). But if you look at energy consumption, you’ll see only 10% is from renewables.