15 ms·

Mere ~30 years after discovering the Greenhouse Effect we managed to split the atom, harnessing heretofore unimaginable amounts of energy. Yet almost 100 years

• CRConrad 3y ago
  For values of "~30" closer to 50.
• archerx 3y ago
  While also demonizing nuclear energy.
• grey_earthling 3y ago
  Energy isn't the hard problem; it's materials. We're still consuming materials that we can't (yet?) make without fossil input.
  • madsbuch 3y ago
    Do you have examples of these materials?
    • agos 3y ago
      concrete and steel are quite big
      • madsbuch 3y ago
        Which are these inputs? Any why do they need to be fossil?
        • M95D 3y ago
          You need carbon (coal) to make steel from iron. Cement needs lots of heat to make it - from coal too. Also, cement is made from CaCO3 (limestone, the shell of ancient microorganisms). It releases the CO2 it contains when transformed into cement.
          • madsbuch 3y ago
            My guess is that the coal could come from wood? The heat could definitely come from nuclear power. However, the processing of the limestone might be more difficult. But then again, that also seems like insignificant emissions when the other ones are taken out, no?
            • eppp 3y ago
              Making cement without baking the limestone, which itself releases carbon plus the burning of gas to make the heat, is possible and is being piloted now. We just lack the will to mandate these changes.
          • alephnil 3y ago
            > You need carbon (coal) to make steel from iron. Carbon in form of coal is currently used for three purposes in steel production: 1) Heat up the ore to high temperatures 2) Reduce iron oxide to iron. 3) Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. Only for the third of these carbon is essential, and that requires some tens of kilos carbon per ton of steel as opposed to more than 2 tons carbon per ton of steel. The two first ones can be replaced by electrical heating and hydrogen respectively. There are currently being built some factories in northern Sweden for doing this, using hydrogen produced by hydropower. Without sufficient tax on carbon or customers willing to pay the extra for "green steel", it is not cost competitive for now.
            • deleted 3y ago
              [deleted]
          • Rovanion 3y ago
      • tpm 3y ago
        electric arc furnaces are quite widespread and there is also this: https://www.mining-technology.com/news/green-steel-hydrogen/ https://www.mining-technology.com/news/green-steel-hydrogen/
    • ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
      Most plastics
  • idiotsecant 3y ago
    Its OK to use fossil fuels as chemical feedstock in manufacturing. As long as we don't literally light it on fire for energy we can deal with the resulting reaction gasses. In 500 years the idea that we ever burned our most valuable manufacturing chemical to keep warm is going to seem crazy. Petrochemicals are incredibly useful for making things.
    • grey_earthling 3y ago
      Until they run out. We can't recycle anything 100%. Eventually we'll have to learn to do without.
• Paul-Craft 3y ago
  > Mere ~30 years after discovering the Greenhouse Effect we managed to split the atom, harnessing heretofore unimaginable amounts of energy. That's not correct, unless you mean to say we discovered nuclear energy in the 1880s: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2382758-eunice-newton-foote-the-woman-who-discovered-the-greenhouse-effect/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2382758-eunice-newton-f...
  • gliptic 3y ago
    After the discovery of the greenhouse effect in Earth's atmosphere of course, as per the xkcd.
  • larschdk 3y ago
    Scientific discoveries are not instant, but build upon earlier work. * 1824 - effect proposed (Joseph Fourier) * 1827/1838 - further evidence (Claude Pouillet) * 1856 - Speculation that a high vapor atmosphere would give a warm planet (Eunice Newton Foote) * 1859 - Demonstration that hydrocarbons had a significant effect (John Tyndall) * 1896 - Quantification of the effect and prediction of global warming (Svante Arrhenius) * 1901 - Greenhouse name used (Nils Gustaf Ekholm) The greenhouse effect in itself is critically important in maintaining a liveable temperature on Earth. It's a runaway greenhouse effect causing global warming that is the problem. Anything before 1896 was about understand the basic effect, while after we began understanding that we were affecting the system by emitting gases.
• repelsteeltje 3y ago
  Isaac Asimov in all his optimism predicted we'd drive cars and fly airplanes powered by tiny nuclear engines in the 50s. Foundation even solves military tensions through proliferation and shared knowledge, access to nuclear physics. ...It all seemed so obvious - we partied when we blew up the Bikini islands. Alas
• varispeed 3y ago
  Every theory fails to account for human factor. Oil and gas are convenient and make so much money, it is so easy to "lobby" any government for it to stay that way. We can all be happy clappy about doing something, but it will always fail if we don't have anything to combat corruption and manage greed.
  • T-zex 3y ago
    lobbying == bribing == crime. Unfortunately this equality doesn't hold in reality and on a macro economic scale is a fundamental source of corruption accelerating climate heating, sanctions impact, arms trade, human trafficking, ecosystem collapse, unemployment, etc. Nothing will ever change if we keep tolerating lobbying.
• lm28469 3y ago
  Fossil fuel is a cheat code because you neither have to pay to create it nor pay for the consequences of using it, nature is dealing with both of these. Everything you use from roads to shampoo, toilet paper, clothes, computers, buildings, bicycles, it's all either enabled by fossil or a fossil fuel derivate At planet scale nothing will ever get better than: dig hole, pump oil, burn oil
  • landgenoot 3y ago
    > At planet scale nothing will ever get better than: dig hole, pump oil, burn oil Until the alternatives are cheaper. I would recommend you to read: Not the End of the World, Hannah Ritchie
    • lm28469 3y ago
      > Until the alternatives are cheaper. To get cheaper they'd have to exist in the first place
      • hef19898 3y ago
        They do and they are? As far as electricity is concerned, that is.
        • lm28469 3y ago
          I think you underestimate how widespread petroleum derivates are outside of energy. Construction materials, roads, tires, plastics, cosmetics, cleaning products, paints, inks, dyes, adhesives, sealants, lubricants, clothes, waterproof fabrics, batteries, fertilisers, medicine, tooth paste, shampoos, &c. It's _the_ building block of modern life, unless you're in nature you can bet everything you lay your eyes on is at least partially made of petroleum or its derivates
          • hef19898 3y ago
            I explicitly mentioned electricity, didn't I? And getting rid of burning fossil fuels is a win I'll take every day of the week. Don't let the perfect be the enmy of the good and all that.
• richrichie 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • rcbdev 3y ago
    > Unfortunately, we cannot pick and choose civilisational paths like a buffet meal. In more democratic countries the denizens can indeed pick if they want a government for or against nuclear energy. > We should make it illegal for software engineers to complain about industrialisation unless they give up laptops, gpus, air-conditioning, coffee machines and refrigerators. What a silly needlessly polarizing sentiment. What we should make illegal is for countries that have the means and know-how to provide on-demand emission-free electricity for the grid to remain on coal and gas - lest the institutional and societal knowledge on nuclear power plants completely atrophies.
    • boppo1 3y ago
      >illegal is for countries You can be the first to go fight those wars. There's no 'illegal for countries'.
      • krisoft 3y ago
        There is internal change. We can all take our own countries to account and drive the change we want to. That is how we can achieve the same with no war.
      • rcbdev 3y ago
        For the sake of brevity, read "countries" as "ministries of energy in countries" or "relevant public or privatized equivalents of ministries of energy in countries" - there's many modes of governance when it comes to this. A good example of "illegal for countries" in this sense would be if the EU made their member countries adopt jurisprudence in this matter through implementation via their own respective national laws. > You can be the first to go fight those wars. At the end of the day, a public agency can only act on the basis of laws in their respective country. (Principle of Legality) How national laws are passed however is sometimes influenced through supranational organizations - entirely without the need of a war.
• foofie 3y ago
  > worthless climate certificates I think that carbon offsetting is a good idea in the spirit of a glass half-full. It's unrealistic to expect the world economy to quit fossil fuels cold turkey, and a system that allows those who cannot transition to externalize their ability to reduce or eliminate emissions is a way to get close to the desired result with the constraints we have right now.
  • AlexandrB 3y ago
    I also think it's a good idea, but there are too many loopholes[1] for bad actors to abuse at the moment. [1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/carbon-loophole-why-is-wood-burning-counted-as-green-energy https://e360.yale.edu/features/carbon-loophole-why-is-wood-b...
    • FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Cap/Trade/Offsets/Coupons. Worked for NOx. Remember Acid Rain, it was real, it was solved. Industry was able to work with a cap/trade system.
• CM30 3y ago
  Unfortunately, nuclear seems to get a bad rep from a lot of people. I suspect this is because of a mixture of things: 1. The rare instances of it going wrong look catastrophic, while the many times it does better than coal/oil/gas go ignored. Kinda like how people fear plane travel more than driving, despite the former being far safer than the latter. 2. It's more expensive to setup, so there's an economic incentive to either stick with what's there already (fossil fuels) or try and go with renewable solutions. 3. A certain percentage of the left/environmental movement seem to hate the concept, either because of subtle influencing from the fossil fuels lobby or because the idea of compromising and going with a system that isn't 'perfect' doesn't appeal to them.
  • retendo 3y ago
    Isn't the number one reason that nuclear gets a bad rep because there is no compelling solution for getting rid of the waste?
    • tialaramex 3y ago
      We don't have a solution to the waste from fossil fuels either, so... We just ignore that. Coal in particular results in incredible toxic waste. Even if it was inert (which it very much is not) you get enormous heaps of rock you dug the coal out of and those have to be stored forever. Typically people just leave it in a big pile as somebody else's problem until one day the wind blows and it collapses and kills a bunch of people. Oops. But even for natural gas in the best case your waste is excess carbon dioxide, which renders your planet inhospitable so that's not great either.
    • fsflover 3y ago
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
      • master-lincoln 3y ago
        > As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage. What a comparison... The worry with nuclear waste is of course that the shielding doesn't last long enough and waste then contaminates surroundings with much much higher radiation than in coal ash
• tompccs 3y ago
  Environmental activists are almost entirely responsible for the killing of nuclear energy in the 1970s. Much of the blame for climate change lays at their feet.
  • AlexandrB 3y ago
    > Much of the blame for climate change lays at their feet. That's a bit of a stretch given how much money the fossil fuel industry has spent on misinformation and greenwashing.
  • perfunctory 3y ago
    Funny how environmental activists were powerful enough to kill the nuclear energy but not the fossil one.
    • odiroot 3y ago
      Guess which state earns a lot on Europe staying with fossil fuels but not much if we go all nuclear?
    • weberer 3y ago
      I would bet most of these protests were funded by the fossil fuel industry. The chances of this many people organically being anti-nuclear are near 0%.
    • marcusverus 3y ago
      They were able to kill the nuclear energy industry because the economic cost of killing it was low. The alternative to cheap, reliable nuclear was cheap, reliable coal. They're struggling to kill off the fossil fuel industry because the alternative to cheap, reliable coal/natural gas is expensive (when accounting for energy storage + backup energy production capacity), less reliable renewables. Ironically, they'd have a much easier if the alternative to cheap, reliable coal/natural gas was cheap, reliable nuclear energy!
    • wolrah 3y ago
      > Funny how environmental activists were powerful enough to kill the nuclear energy but not the fossil one. It's a lot harder to affect something that's so firmly embedded in how we do things as a society. Blocking new nuclear developments was a lot easier than undoing generations worth of infrastructure around fossil power. A comparison can be drawn to the USA's short-lived attempt at prohibition of alcohol versus the long-lasting prohibition of marijuana which is only now finally calling apart. The one our society has been at least partially built around for generations has its problems normalized and mostly disregarded until something unignorable happens, which still often gets swept under the rug, where the alternative gets constant scrutiny and has to meet standards the established norm has never been held to.