Anthropogenic Climate Change

And there I was thinking that India had great potential for nuclear power...

Besides, whether an all-renewable grid is possible or not is an open question, not a settled fact like that op-ed is claiming. Nor it is proven fact that building new coal fired plants is faster than setting up renewable energy resources on the same scale.

Truth be told, investment in renewables and Nuclear has gone up substantially. The problem is, it's still nowhere near enough for the projected energy needs.

So the Energy Ministry is taking the shortcut. Not pleasant.

Meanwhile, they're killing their own grandchildren.

Trust me, if we had a dollar everytime a politician took the easy but destructive route to gain political points, I think we would have our elder days secured.

So, question here from someone on the right. Given that man-made climate change is happening, and will have radically negative consequences for the planet and our species, what can realistically be done to address and reverse it?

By realistically, I mean taking the following factors into account:

1. Cost. How much will it cost, and what impact will it have on developing economies and poverty? If we want to, for example, radically cut carbon emissions, how will this impact rural communities in India and Brazil who increasingly rely on fossil fuels? 2. What are the proposed alternatives to fossil fuels, and much less are they environmentally costly? Solar panels, for instance, require gigantic lithium mines and colossal infrastructure to support them. 3. How severely will this transition impact our dietary habits, energy consumption, birth rates, and manufacturing? This is similar to #1 but is more indirect.

I'm open to all takes and would like know what you all think. :)

It's not really reasonable to think of it in terms of cost alone, for several reasons...

• Clean energy is not adding onto existing power infrastructure, but replacing it. Every solar plant or wind farm is an oil or natural gas plant we don't have to build, or can take out of service.
• There isn't some mythical sinkhole down which all this money is being poured. Clean tech jobs are as good as any other jobs, bringing income to workers and prosperity to local economies. Indeed, they are often better (safer, healthier, higher paying) than fossil fuel jobs. For every oil or coal job lost, we can add a green job. At worst it's a lateral displacement.
• Clean energy is already cost competitive with fossil fuels in most areas, and cheaper in some. If it weren't, then people wouldn't be putting solar panels on their homes that pay for themselves in comparison with grid power.
• Fossil fuels are already heavily subsidized by governments, both directly and indirectly. If we truly accounted for these costs, the difference would be even starker.
  • Direct subsidies are straight-up payments, price controls, and/or tax breaks given to the industry and people who buy fuel.
  • Indirect subsidies are policies that do not take into account the additional economic costs of fossil fuels, such as reduced quality of life, chronic disease, early death, environmental damage, and climate change.
• If you're worried about digging lithium out of the ground, aren't we already digging oil, coal, and natural gas out of the ground? Even in the worst case, it's going to be roughly even, but with solar it comes with the benefit of emitting no carbon once it's up and running.
  • FYI: Lithium is the third most common element in the universe. We aren't running out of it any time soon.

In the absolute worst case, clean energy has about the same infrastructure and mining cost as fossil fuels, with the benefit of not emitting carbon after it's set up.

As far as social benefits go, seven million people per year not dying from air pollution (WHO) is a pretty good start, no matter how you feel about climate change.

For businesses and individuals, installing their own on-site power generation and storage means they are less dependent on local electricity supply, which should be quite the boon to those who have philosophical concerns about being "on the grid" and "connected".

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 14th 2019 at 3:33:48 PM

What are your thoughts on nuclear?

Go thorium reactors! <unironically waves support flag>

Well, longer version: nuclear power has a lot of undeserved bad press combined with horrendously bad NIMBY public reactions. Yet, we're going to have to bite down on that bullet: mixed energy is just more stable.

As long as the infrastructure dealing with the nuts and bolts of supply and waste management isn't completely privatised or left to decay to utter uselessness, that is.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Oct 14th 2019 at 8:27:19 PM

Nuclear power, especially in the form of modern reactor designs, is safe, efficient, and barely pollutes. Many concepts for a clean energy future involve some degree of dependence on nuclear to provide a backstop to renewables, in case (for example) there's a long period of reduced solar output. It's also highly likely that future attempts to leave Earth will depend on nuclear fission for a good portion of their power needs.

Frankly, the largest obstacle to widespread adoption of nuclear power is resistance from people who see it as evil. There are other problems as well:

• Waste disposal is a huge NIMBY issue, with nobody willing to let spent fuel be dumped in their neighborhood. Besides just burying it, there are other options: different types of reactors can be made to use waste fuel.
• Accidents, while rare, can be catastrophic, and so there are strong political headwinds that don't accurately reflect the safety of these plants.
• They are very expensive to build, and these fixed costs take a long time to amortize. Ergo, it's solely the domain of governments and major corporations, and people have reasons to distrust those, both valid and invalid.
• Certain types of reactors can be used to make weapons-grade nuclear fuel. This is less of a problem with modern designs, but it's still a fear in the public mind.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 14th 2019 at 3:32:09 PM

Thank you for all the info! I'll read into the points a bit more and come back with more questions.

Edited by TheThoughtAssassin on Oct 15th 2019 at 9:36:28 AM

1) Electrify everything (starting with transportation and manufacturing)

2) Continue to subsidize renewables

3) Invest heavily in electrical storage research

4) Starting building nuclear plants. A lot of them (we can't "overproduce" power, so...)

About nuclear, is availability of fuel an issue? I imagine not all countries have access to decent amounts of whatever the preferred fission materials are?

Uranium can be extracted from seawater if necessary (although that will not be cheap); that means any non-landlocked country has access to some supply of uranium.

"Heavy" building of nuclear plants is expensive and time consuming. It'll take many years to bring them on line. We should do it if we can, but we can't depend on nuclear as a backstop to renewables on a mass scale for at least a decade. In the meantime, we can replace a substantial chunk of the existing generation capacity with solar and wind. Geo- and hydrothermal also take a bit longer to build but are worthwhile investments due to their stability.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 14th 2019 at 10:07:44 AM

There's also the effort to try and make a profitable Thorium Reactor, but that's one of those things stuck in Development Hell.

@The Thought Assassin

Maybe I have a bit more pessimistic view, but I'll still try to come up with a viable plan of action.

1) Know how to pick your fights:

As someone from a developing country, I have to agree that CO2 emissions will be directly linked with the rise of an economy in some cases. Infraestructure, for instance, produces emissions from the production of cement, the use of building machinery and by maintenance eventually.

Mind you, there is hybrid machinery -I actually just found about it- but consider that most projects are done with an already tight budget so their adoption will need sponsorship.

Given that there's no way around contamination, the only route left is to minimize it in the timeframe, and by that I mean to smooth out the length of the project so that it is done as fast as possible while at the same time ensure that the quality of the work allows for a long life period of each building. Finally, put legal frameworks so that politicians can't touch works that are already done and have been verified to have been correctly done.

Also, try not to support nuclear power in an open manner: no matter how many arguments can be done in favour of nuclear power, the first thing people will think about will be Chernobyl and the humungous clusterfuck it meant in cleaning and containing that disaster, not to mention the fact that it still costs a quarter of Ukraine's anual budget.

2) Prepare in advance:

I have to disagree with @Fighter in his point that says the worst thing that can happen is lateral displacement. Consider that your worst scenario is that people will protest against the new power plants because outsiders -either from the same country or from other countries- will gobble up all the available job positions, regardless of how true that statement is.

You need to set up the change by promoting courses and studies in these new job positions for the technicians and the professionals prior to the announcement of any new plant. It's imperative that you give a reasonable frame of time so that you have a group of locals ready before you start any new plant project.

Remember, the moment people think their livelihoods are threatened is the moment when you will hit a rock, and no amount of arguments or climate solidarity will move it. The idea is to prevent the rock from blocking your path before you get there to avoid using force to continue.

3) Don't spare on marketing:

This is a lesson I took from the Architectural and Engineering careers: If you don't know how to sell yourself, you won't get reception even if you are the best.

The same applies to clean energy, you need to ingrain in the population the idea that using solar power, hydroelectric plants, wind farms and, down the line, nuclear power is ultimately better in terms of health and safety. Also, you need to make the message clear that sustainable energy can be both efficient and cheap, that last one is very important.

This turned out be longer than I expected, but I hope this helps you.

Edited by raziel365 on Oct 15th 2019 at 12:46:16 PM

I do remember watching an interview/discussion on this (on Novara Media's channel I believe) that argued that it would be effectively colonialist to demand that developing countries stop exploiting their resources in the same we had during the industrial revolution - and the way to stop e.g. Brazil from burning the Amazon was to either pay them not to do it, either through outright cash money or through providing green tech to them they could use to develop without having to go through the same cycle of consumption the developed nations took to get where we are - and that it could be thought of as a sort of reparation for how the global north exploited the global south during the colonial era. I quite liked that.

Also, they were talking about renovating every house in Britain to become more energy efficient, and not only would this cause less carbon footprint and cost everyone less in energy bills in the long run, it would also create a ton of jobs to complete that undertaking, full training and all.

Developing nations also tend to be the worst-hit by climate change, so they're doubly shooting themselves in the foot with that thinking. But yeah, no-strings-attached foreign development aid to bring them to clean industry faster is certainly indicated.

" In the meantime, we can replace a substantial chunk of the existing generation capacity with solar and wind."

Depending on what you mean by "substantial" the barrier is storage technology, which just isnt up to the job right now for anything like a cost effective basis. If it takes ten years to build enough nukes (or even 20) best get started now.

That pretty much hit the nail right at the centre, asking developing countries to not exploit their resources while not giving them an alternative to develop is seen as haughty and oppressive.

I would prefer the idea of giving technology, but cash could work as well, besides, this could be an effective way to mend bridges between the first world and the third world.

Edited by raziel365 on Oct 15th 2019 at 7:52:36 AM

I said tech more than cash, because let's be blunt, that money would get stolen ASAP.

I suppose the issue there is making sure the money goes where it's supposed to *without* coming off as oppressive or domineering.

Outcome 1 is your hands-off, and the money goes in the pockets of corrupt druglords and their bought politicians.

Outcome 2 is your hands-on, and get accused of reviving colonialism and imperialism by trying to exploit the countries' resources for your own gains, even if you actually aren't.

Seems a catch-22 here.

Unless you earmark 15% of it for independent auditors.

That’s why you need excellent diplomats, so that you can smooth out what you want to do without any chance of Loophole Abuse.

Edited by raziel365 on Oct 15th 2019 at 7:47:10 AM

Well there would also be the challenge of competing interests, correct? From China, Russia, etc. wanting to get a chunk of mineral/oil rights? To me, personally, it doesn't seem as simple as having skilled diplomacy. There's a definite realpolitik to how climate is being addressed.