Quote:
Originally Posted by aerohead
I would make two points:
Secondly,as it's been technology which has gotten us to this juncture, we may rely on technology to move us off our current trajectory.We have the technology.Congress and special interests have been the issue.
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Unfortunately this is commonly repeated but doesn't tell the whole story. Green advocates constantly state that we have the technology to just totally replace all of the carbon energy to get all we need using solar and wind. They have been repeatedly and erroneously told that all we would have to do is to choose. And that it is the continued profit interests of fossil energy corporations that hold it back. But there is a complete lack of understanding by pretty much everyone of the scale of what we are using. If we were to scrap or retrofit and perform a perfect electrification of all of the $100's of trillions of built out machines, processes, buildings, ect, that run on and were built by the current carbon energy bolus we have been accessing for the last 70 years, The efficiency gains would still leave us needing 9TW average. Lack of understanding of this scale leads to unjustified animosity toward "the evil white men" who are said to refuse to leave carbon in the ground.
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Civilization has undergone a "Great Acceleration" for 70 years building to 17.5 TW and 100 million barrels a day and cannot undergo any diminished access to energy without a complete crash of the world economic system and large scale human misery. There is no feasible wind and solar build out that can take us to 9TW average and the complete electrification that is need to go with it will take decades and still not do as much as we are doing now due to storability and intermittency constraints. Just leave it in the ground is not so easy. People need to learn about the entire system of energy, economy, human behavior, resource depletion., and start informing others so that we can take the heartfelt energy from the climate protests and add real, pragmatic solutions.
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Which will involve human activity eventually getting much smaller to fit with the real time solar flows that we can access.
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Stating that we have 12 years to reach net 0 carbon or we will go "extinct" is just on the face of it obviously not possible. On either count. And just fosters denial and push back.