The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[RedDevil]

Raise taxes on the bad stuff, bit by bit it will shift the balance to greener technologies and reduce excessive wasting of energy.

Guess what European gas taxes did for the sales of pickup trucks.

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

Raise taxes on the bad stuff, bit by bit it will shift the balance to greener technologies and reduce excessive wasting of energy.

Guess what European gas taxes did for the sales of pickup trucks.

Look what that accomplishes.
Everyone who needs or wants a vehicle gets ones, virtually all of these vehicles still burn gasoline or diesel. That's not green technology, it's just smaller pieces of machinery that uses marginally less fuel.
Germany and the EU are burning more coal then just a few years ago, your tax and redistribution of wealth ponzi scheme has failed and it was never designed to fix anything. It was just a feel good bandaid that was eventually going to fall off.

[RedDevil]

But we use half the energy per capita - without being less wealthy or having a worse life for it.
On the contrary, rather; smaller cars cause less road noise and wear. Better insulated houses are more constant in temperature. And so on.

Tax paid isn't just gone but gets spent by the government, creating jobs and improving life.
We're not deprived of anything. Rather, we evolved.

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

... ponzi scheme has failed and it was never designed to fix anything ... feel good bandaid that was eventually going to fall off.

Nasty...
We're not doing too bad, according to this stat:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ife_expectancy

We can tax and subsidize. We can fare war. We can deny there is a problem. There may be more options still. What to do?

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

I'm thinking of all batteries. We need breakthroughs in cost, because it isn't economically justifiable right now to store renewable energy in batteries. We just fire up the existing power plants and crank out the shortfall in electricity.

EVs have essentially a $10,000 fuel tank, which is smaller "capacity" than regular $100 fuel tanks, which takes hours to fill, which degrade over time, which require thermal management, which weigh a lot...

Huge hurdles to overcome. We'll get there eventually.

This may be of interest.
I've been transcribing long-term road test data from CAR and DRIVER,ROAD & TRACK,AUTOMOBILE,MOTOR TREND,etc.,and have discovered that some presently sold EVs already have greater 'CITY' range than many ICE automobiles,selling at a greater price.
Presently, there are also ICE automobiles which possess less 'HWY' range than some EVs currently on the market.
When the gen-II TESLA Roadster debuts,there will be even more ICE automobiles with less HWY range,selling at much higher prices,whose fuel will be more expensive for the same distance.
There appears to be an inflexion point looming in the near future (2025 has mentioned),at which time,ICE automobiles will no longer be able to economically compete,either in price,or performance with EVs.
I had no idea until I started doing the numbers.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Nuclear.
If it can be done yes.
Right now there is just barely enough batteries available for building 1 or 2% of all vehicles sold to be electric.
Maybe the glass matrix electrolyte battery will pan out and we can just use actual lithium metal in a secondary cell with out it accidentally turning into a firebomb. Use sodium metal batteries for grid storage.
Right now making grid batteries would only drive up the price and availability of materials for traction batteries.

I can't speak for my neighbors,but I'd put up with nuclear in my own backyard,even if it were just a bridge,while we worked out some balance in total load.
I worked on the Palo Verde reactors,west of Phoenix.Al Lipske,our company president, worked out some passive,thermal,convection-driven magic in the containment vessels to help with reactor safety.I don't believe there's ever been an incident associated with the three reactors out there.
Spent fuel rods are an issue I know.And they'll need to be baby sat,and processed,but I've seen so much innovation in my life,that for the long-term health of the planet,I'd be willing to take the gamble for the transition.
The Chinese,I think,are leading the planet,in grid-scale power storage technology (and many other technologies).They may isolate a best-fit battery strategy unlike what we'll use in cars.Size and mass wouldn't be an issue.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Based on the behavior of the believers it looks Ike there is no will to try and change.
We have the solution, its called nuclear energy.

All you can do,is make the best argument that you can,and after that,it's up to those folks to decide.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by sendler

Our 100% Clean Energy Vision - The Solutions Project
,

There is an incredible amount of dreamy dialog that fails to address the issue of scale or a practical implementation. I understand that they are somewhat intentionally misleading us to try to steer the conversation for good. But sappy optimism will prove just as dangerous as denialism as it will lead to complacency and ineffective decisions on infrastructure that requires decades to construct. And our fossil energy endowment that is required to build big things will soon start to slip away.
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The USA is using over 3 TerraWatts average. The world is over 17 TW. How much lower could this be using the pen of government mandates before martial law is required? What happens when the contraction of energy consumption obsoletes the debt based economy? Absolving world debt with the stroke of a pen also absolves all personal wealth that exists in currency or digits as one monetary marker is called in and replaced by a newer one.
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For modern countries to even cut energy to 1/2 of what is currently being used would require everything to change. All built out ICE machines. Living space. Food. Working. "Jobs". Income distribution. Government.
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1.5 TW is still huge. If you add it up as MacKay said, to power a country on rebuildables requires that they are country sized. Where do we get all of this stuff?
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One million 2MW on shore wind turbines make .6 TW. How many days to build and install each turbine?
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Four thousand 500 MW Topaz sized solar farms if located in the desert make .5 TW. How many years or months to build each farm? Double the number of panels and count on many days of zero output in the winter for any that are located in the North East USA or Europe where it snows.
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You have heard of the BigF'nBattery in Australia. It takes three hundred thousand of these to store just twenty hours of a 1.5 TW rate. Just for the USA. This is the entire annual output of the GigaFactory for eight hundred years to make this many batteries.
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I agree.
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These dreamy writers of renewable plans need to find an engineering major (or High School student) to do the math.

Look around you,and see if you don't observe uses of energy that we all could live without.And we could die with.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by sendler

Most studies ascribe a 2:1 efficiency increase when replacing all ICE and thermal machines and processes with electric. Of course they never get into how to go about replacing or retrofitting the world's $100 trillion in built out infrastructure. Or storing and transporting all of this electricity to make it useful. And even if we could do all of this it will still leave an 8 TeraWatt average consumption to try to supply.

Only in the context of a hands-off-the-energy-load scenario, could I agree with the appraisal.There's massive amounts of waste associated with this consumption.
If you put Spaceship Earth in a post-cryo-stir Apollo-13 scenario,you'll have the Flight Directors throwing circuit breaker after circuit breaker until they can get the electrical load down to mission critical minimums.It ain't pretty,but it gets the job done until you're out of harms way.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

This thread hasn't got my pulse up at all, because I don't care if I'm right; I merely enjoy the discussion. So far I would say I've learned the most from Sendler and that has slightly moved my opinion on things. freebeard goes above my head usually, and I don't currently have a lifetime of free time to catch up. References are sometimes too obscure for me to grasp without extensive goog... er, duckduckgoing.

aerohead makes it clear that if the issue is existential in nature, then everything is on the table as possible solutions. Most people, including climate scientists, don't regard the problem as existential.

I don't know what your sources are,but as far as I've read,the entire climate change dynamic IS predicated upon an existential threat.
The absolute time frame cannot be reliably predicted.That's the only certainty.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Higher capacity wind turbines don't really undermine what Sendler was getting at. Suppose we're using 8 MW turbines instead; that's still 250,000 individual turbines. Since they are larger, they are more labor and materials intensive. It might not be as difficult as building 1M smaller turbines, but it's not significantly easier.

Where's the storage? If no storage, where is the backup generation coming from when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining?

International grid-inter-ties could mitigate some of the issue.N-S,E-W.