It's all over but for the sweating?

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by Der Spiegel in their first paragraph

has put together a manual of practical tips on how everyone can make small, everyday contributions to the shift away from nuclear power and toward green energy.

I knew it would be an uphill slog at this point. "Let's all do what we should have done first." Later the article mentions "On a sunny summer day, the two children inside had to keep the lights on -- which drives up the electricity bill...". There's a lot that's wrong there, but it doesn't have to do with bureaucrats piling on surcharges.

The experts propose changing the system to resemble a model long successful in Sweden. If implemented, it would eliminate the more than 4,000 different subsidies currently in place. Instead of bureaucrats setting green energy prices, they would be allowed to develop indepedently on a separate market. The report's authors believe the Swedish model would lead to faster and cheaper implementation of renewable energy, and that the system would also become what it is not today: socially just.

Trouble Paying the Bills

I see there's more but what's the point. I'll trust Arragonis' assessment.

Electricity courses through your body and the environment all the time. To me, rent-seeking is divorced from the technical aspects. We all know the story of Tesla and J.P.Morgan.

Originally Posted by cbaber

I'm not going to read 45 pages of this thread

Why Not? We did it all just for you. Actually I'd like to see a way to collapse a full multi-page thread into a single text document. I'd throw that at the Mac OSX service Summarize Text. It's awesome.

Skip all that and watch this:

They Want to Blame You - (A21CS Section 1.2)

It explains that any 'Anthropogenic Warming' is actually working against the trends Solar System wide. The climate is getting more chaotic. The increase in record highs and record lows isn't keeping pace with record precipitation.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by cbaber

I'm not going to read 45 pages of this thread

Lightweight

Originally Posted by cbaber

but I'll respond to the original post by saying that globals temps have actually increased slower in the past 10-15 years....

Apparently anyone who suggested that was wrong according to the mighty Skeptical Science website, at the same time however scientists have been putting forward loads of peer reviewed fully scientific papers trying to explain why there is a "pause" in the warming trend.

You know, the pause that isn't happening.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

No offense taken. I enjoy your posts with no exception.

Thanks, but I can be a prat and I was just then ( @me)

Originally Posted by RedDevil

But, err... What point then? I seem to have missed it, please enlighten me...

This is your future if you try and rely on "renewable" energy. Germany is only halfway down that track now, it will get a lot worse.

Contrast the "heat vs eat" balance with the lower energy costs in the US.

[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

This is your future if you try and rely on "renewable" energy. Germany is only halfway down that track now, it will get a lot worse.

Contrast the "heat vs eat" balance with the lower energy costs in the US.

One of my friends lives there, and last July when I was over we came to talk about the German energy politics.

The energy costs in Germany are not that high, just comparable to what we have here in Holland.
The main difference is the way solar power gets promoted. The subsidies between the dikes are scarce and even if you can get it it hardly reduces the cost.
In Germany they cover most of the cost. The result is that you see solar panels on a lot of houses, shops, factories, etc. over there.
On sunny days they provide so much power that there is no such thing as a power peak at work hours, very unlike our situation.

On the whole, he was quite happy with the situation and felt it is the way to move forward. No doomsday thinking there.

Of course there are some problems.
The German law that 'green' power must always be put into the net (cannot shut off windmills in a power overage) for instance does cause trouble on days that are both windy and sunny. A bit more flexibility there could keep overall cost down and stability up.
The missing power cable to Borkum is a stupid planning mistake - or a calculated blockade of the aforementioned law. Green power on itself cannot be blamed for that, nor the rest of German green policy.

[NeilBlanchard]

Renewable energy will be here as long as the sun lasts - about another 5 Billion years. We can have sustainable abundance with renewable energy.

Fossil fuels will not last much longer, and if we do not switch over to renewable energy, we will really be up the creek. And the piper of fossil fuels has not been paid, yet.

[Arragonis]

The world has voted.

I suppose they aren't convinced.

[Occasionally6]

Three of those things rated as higher priority than climate change depend on climate change being addressed:

Affordable and nutritious food.

Access to clean water and sanitation.

Protecting forests, rivers and oceans.

[Arragonis]

None of those depend on "climate change being addressed".

We could address all of those (and much more) and use less resources through development and increasing wealth.

Is it really moral to spaff a sizable percentage of the world's GDP on this "problem" which (according to the original post that started this journey) it is already too late to address or which has gone away for nearly 20 years ?

[NeilBlanchard]

Life is what provides clean air and clean water and food, and life depends on the climate. Changing the climate means that the things we depend on have changed.

There is no Planet B.

[Arragonis]

I would think the other way round - life depends on clean air and water.

There is no evidence that climate change, anthropogenic or otherwise, has caused unclean air or water.

We (as humans) have.