The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[Xist]

Nothing that you say that I don't like is true.

[freebeard]

That simply isn't true. No matter how often you repeat it.

True or not, it's tedious. Tue or not it's probably based on faulty modeling, c.f. the 'clothesline paradox'.

It used to be easier to change the built environment than people's behavior, as Bucky Fuller observed. Today you can move the public by reordering the search engine results on carefully chosen subjects. ...based on the social profile of who's asking the question. Not skeery at all!

RedDevil — 'Divide and conquer' vs 'Where we go one, we go all."

The sooner we accept this and quit relying on a false hope of rebuildables replacing 17 TW, the sooner we can make plans on how to [not] get there as humanely as possible.

You do know that's a straw man argument, right?

[RedDevil]

IOW "Shut up and ditch all your renewables so we can humanely save the world"...

Every single line in that manifesto is opinionated. Follow the money.

[sendler]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

IOW "Shut up and ditch all your renewables so we can humanely save the world"...

Every single line in that manifesto is opinionated. Follow the money.

The math is correct for the quantity of rebuildables required regardless of what you think about their recommendation that nuclear makes more sense. Except for my mistake in copying this:
"The $15.2 Trillion price for the bare-bones Roadmap also leaves out the new
transmission corridors required to connect its 50,000-plus wind and solar farms to the
national grid."
.
I should have said that it takes 5,000 (not 50,000) 500MW SolarStar or Topaz sized solar farms. Which will average .5TW.
.
But it does take 1,000,000 2.5 MW wind turbines (5MW wind turbines are too large to handily transport via highway and will be more applicable to offshore installations) to make .8 TW. And then 75 million 10kW roof top systems to make another .15 TW, plus keep all of the hydro that we have.

[freebeard]

Straw man? Dead horse?

We're [all] the victims of [someone's] limited thinking. For example, this notion of building windmills outdoors. It's getting out of hand, mega-towers anchored offshore.

Compare the indoor windmill that Buckminster Fuller alluded to. Elon Musk said "I don't have time to build an Hyperloop" and businesses sprang into being as a result.

Imagine that a project like Bucky's Old Man River project for St. Louis were built. The power harvestable at the summit would power the whole town. And that's scalable.

Quoting Critical Path:

It is moon-crater-shaped: the crater's truncated cone top opening is a half-mile in diameter, rim-to-rim, while the truncated mountain itself is a mile in diameter at its base ring. The city has a one-mile (1.6 km)-diameter geodesic, quarter-sphere transparent umbrella mounted high above it to permit full, all-around viewing below the umbrella's bottom perimeter. The top of the dome roof is 1,000 feet (300 m) high. The bottom rim of the umbrella dome is 500 feet (150 m) above the surrounding terrain, while the crater-top esplanade, looks 250 feet (76 m) radially inward from the umbrella's bottom, is at the same 500-foot (150 m) height. From the esplanade the truncated mountain cone slopes downwardly, inward and outward, to ground level 500 feet (150 m) below. The moon crater's inward and outward, exterior-surface slopes each consist of fifty terraces - the terrace floors are tiered vertically ten feet above or below one another. All the inwardly, downwardly sloping sides of the moon crater's terraced cone are used for communal life; its outward-sloping, tree-planted terraces are entirely for private life dwelling.

[Xist]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

Follow the money.

To Al Gore's beachside mansion?

[RedDevil]

To the nuke industry
Al Gore is smart btw. The time to enjoy that beach is now; it will be gone in 30 years.

Look, 100% renewable is a pipe dream. It can't be done in our lifetime.
Nor can 100% nuclear or 100% oil or 100% coal, whatever.
What can and must be done is shifting the balance away from fossil fuels towards renewable and nuclear to break the trend of continuously rising carbon dioxide levels.
Getting 80% of our energy from renewables and nuclear combined, that's feasible.

It will take a lot of effort. And take huge amounts of money.
But - we also spend huge amounts of money to keep up the fossil fuel infrastructure. Oil is now expensive enough to get drilling in the North Sea again: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oi...th-Spiral.html.
All those billions are not wasted of course. They create jobs and drive industry and economies. Yet - that is just as true when setting up and maintaining renewable energy sources. The jobs may be different, the effect on the economy is the same.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

All those billions are not wasted of course. They create jobs and drive industry and economies. Yet - that is just as true when setting up and maintaining renewable energy sources. The jobs may be different, the effect on the economy is the same.

That's not likely. While the market isn't perfect, it's usually more correct than any individual or group's opinion of what is best for the economy. It is more likely that if there was even equal profit to be made in renewables as fossil fuels, that industry would be larger.

The time will come, but it's not here yet, and not due to lack of will, or conspiracy. Tough problems take time. Their solutions are normally found in many evolutions of various technologies; a process that is time consuming.

[sendler]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

It will take a lot of effort. And take huge amounts of money.

Now we are talking. A transition to a sustainable society will be very, very, hard. We have to do everything different and focus. The market is way too short sighted in it's investment decisions for it to be the guide. We are caught in a monkey trap of increasing debt and it will be very painful to let it go. But the sooner we do it and get to a new system of level ground, the less suffering there will be.

[RedDevil]

It is not hard, but it is expensive. Some nudging is required.

PV home panels have a long ROI against the bare cost of electricity, but we pay 12.5 cent energy tax per kWh at the plug which makes it worthwile for many.
Or we can buy shares in local PV plants or wind farms and deduct our shares worth of their output from our energy tax.

The high cost of electricity would kill the EV market, if not for the even higher tax on gas & cars that use gas. So there are quite a lot of Teslas on the streets here.

Taxation forces us toward green technology. I'd rather see our govt use a more positive approach or spread its taxation scheme to businesses too, but hey.