Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View
October 28, 2022 10:35 AM Subscribe
Just a few years ago, climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic, with most scientists warning that continuing “business as usual” would bring the world four or even five degrees Celsius of warming. ...
Now, with the world already 1.2 degrees hotter, scientists believe that warming this century will most likely fall between two or three degrees. ... Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years.
For decades, visions of possible climate futures have been anchored by, on the one hand, Pollyanna-like faith that normality would endure, and on the other, millenarian intuitions of an ecological end of days, during which perhaps billions of lives would be devastated or destroyed. ...
Neither of those futures looks all that likely now, with the most terrifying predictions made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.
For decades, visions of possible climate futures have been anchored by, on the one hand, Pollyanna-like faith that normality would endure, and on the other, millenarian intuitions of an ecological end of days, during which perhaps billions of lives would be devastated or destroyed. ...
Neither of those futures looks all that likely now, with the most terrifying predictions made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.
Beyond Catastrophe for the Global North, perhaps, but hardly for the South - this article is hopepunk fiction masquerading as long-form journalism.
posted by aeshnid at 10:48 AM on October 28, 2022 [15 favorites]
posted by aeshnid at 10:48 AM on October 28, 2022 [15 favorites]
Billions will suffer and die! Thousands will profit! And for the rest of us, it'll be the status quo only worse! Hooray!
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:51 AM on October 28, 2022 [23 favorites]
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:51 AM on October 28, 2022 [23 favorites]
lol we're already 1.5 degrees too deep but good news -- we might only triple it.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:53 AM on October 28, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:53 AM on October 28, 2022 [4 favorites]
Thanks for sharing this interesting article. Although it would be better if we didn't have this problem at all, it's good to see that some of the things being done are able to help mitigate the problem if not eliminate it completely. We have no excuse for either complacency or nihilism.
posted by rpfields at 11:00 AM on October 28, 2022 [24 favorites]
posted by rpfields at 11:00 AM on October 28, 2022 [24 favorites]
We have no excuse for either complacency or nihilism.
I agree!
I do think it's astounding that renewable prices have fallen by 85% in 12 years. Too few people understand this... and too few understand that both governments and private industry are now massively shifting their plans and investments toward green energy and other forms of emissions reduction.
Of course we're way behind the curve. And there are still major disruptions coming down the pike because of years of inaction. But we're starting to move in the right direction, and we're picking up speed fast.
Boy oh boy, though... some folks really don't want their doomerism challenged by, you know, new facts. *shrug*
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:06 AM on October 28, 2022 [38 favorites]
I agree!
I do think it's astounding that renewable prices have fallen by 85% in 12 years. Too few people understand this... and too few understand that both governments and private industry are now massively shifting their plans and investments toward green energy and other forms of emissions reduction.
Of course we're way behind the curve. And there are still major disruptions coming down the pike because of years of inaction. But we're starting to move in the right direction, and we're picking up speed fast.
Boy oh boy, though... some folks really don't want their doomerism challenged by, you know, new facts. *shrug*
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:06 AM on October 28, 2022 [38 favorites]
I think people get a little too caught up on the idea that the worst case scenario has been avoided, and assume this is a cheerful piece of writing--someone in the other thread called it a "neoliberal apology," here it's being called "hopepunk." There is no good news in this article. Unless you see the establishment of an authoritarian police state that is always playing catch-up to recover after disasters as a bright and hopeful future, in which case, great news everyone!
posted by mittens at 11:10 AM on October 28, 2022 [26 favorites]
posted by mittens at 11:10 AM on October 28, 2022 [26 favorites]
this article is hopepunk fiction masquerading as long-form journalism.
Spoken like someone who hasn't actually read the article.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:15 AM on October 28, 2022 [12 favorites]
Spoken like someone who hasn't actually read the article.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:15 AM on October 28, 2022 [12 favorites]
I think people get a little too caught up on the idea that the worst case scenario has been avoided, and assume this is a cheerful piece of writing--someone in the other thread called it a "neoliberal apology," here it's being called "hopepunk." There is no good news in this article.
I agree with your first sentence. I do not agree with your second sentence.
I think this quote from the article sums up the kind of measured attitude that is called for:
I agree with your first sentence. I do not agree with your second sentence.
I think this quote from the article sums up the kind of measured attitude that is called for:
"The West has always had a problem with millenarianism — the fall, Christianity, all that,” says Tim Sahay, a Mumbai-born climate-policy wonk and co-founder of the new Polycrisis journal. “It’s ineradicable — all we see are the possibilities for doom and gloom.” The challenges are real and large and fall disproportionately on the developing world, he says, but they are not deterministic, or need not be.posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:19 AM on October 28, 2022 [9 favorites]
The organism of capital will self-regulate to maintain an increase in warming at a level that is sufficient to return (record) profits to equity holders.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:35 AM on October 28, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:35 AM on October 28, 2022 [4 favorites]
In much the same vein--except with fun animation--Kurzgesagt did a video about six months ago noting that the curve is starting to bend. Like the NYT piece it's not good news but it was nice to see various actions beginning to add into a sense of momentum towards actually addressing climate change. They made the video before Biden passed the IRA bill, as well. I feel energized by the confirmation of real movement, is my point. Balance the dread a bit.
posted by greenland at 11:46 AM on October 28, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by greenland at 11:46 AM on October 28, 2022 [6 favorites]
Yeah, "good news / bad news" is a weird and unhelpful frame for this article, which I appreciated. It actually does balance some tricky things:
- There is some reason to believe that the absolute worst case scenarios (in terms of overall temp change) might not happen. This is important, and good to know, and a good antidote to the kind of catastrophic thinking that leads to inaction. And it reflects real progress which we can build on. (this is new-ish news)
But it's not actually *good news* because:
- We have already steamed past anything resembling an "OK" scenario. Way too late. (this is not new news but it's important)
- We are learning that both our current reality and the medium-bad scenarios (which are now the most likely) are, in practice, even rougher and scarier than we had previously thought. (this is new-ish news)
posted by feckless at 11:52 AM on October 28, 2022 [13 favorites]
- There is some reason to believe that the absolute worst case scenarios (in terms of overall temp change) might not happen. This is important, and good to know, and a good antidote to the kind of catastrophic thinking that leads to inaction. And it reflects real progress which we can build on. (this is new-ish news)
But it's not actually *good news* because:
- We have already steamed past anything resembling an "OK" scenario. Way too late. (this is not new news but it's important)
- We are learning that both our current reality and the medium-bad scenarios (which are now the most likely) are, in practice, even rougher and scarier than we had previously thought. (this is new-ish news)
posted by feckless at 11:52 AM on October 28, 2022 [13 favorites]
I struggle to understand how anyone could take the fact that we've cut prospective warming by half in just the last 5 years as anything other than good news.
That's not to say there isn't plenty of bad news too... as the article discusses, in extensive detail!
But it's become more and more clear to me that many people really have an absolute death grip on their cynicism and pessimism. I find that weird, and frustrating... but if I try to be more empathetic about it, I just find it sad.
I guess it's rooted in a fear of being naive or complacent, and/or of ignoring the suffering of others. I can understand those impulses.
But to me, there's something deeply dysfunctional about honoring only those impulses, to the exclusion of legitimate scientific findings that give us real reasons to be encouraged -- not because we've already "solved climate change", but because we've proven that we can change things for the better, pretty tremendously and pretty quickly.
Take the win, folks! And then gird your loins to continue the struggle, because nobody is saying this is over.
Anyway, I'll stop threadsitting now.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:03 PM on October 28, 2022 [49 favorites]
That's not to say there isn't plenty of bad news too... as the article discusses, in extensive detail!
But it's become more and more clear to me that many people really have an absolute death grip on their cynicism and pessimism. I find that weird, and frustrating... but if I try to be more empathetic about it, I just find it sad.
I guess it's rooted in a fear of being naive or complacent, and/or of ignoring the suffering of others. I can understand those impulses.
But to me, there's something deeply dysfunctional about honoring only those impulses, to the exclusion of legitimate scientific findings that give us real reasons to be encouraged -- not because we've already "solved climate change", but because we've proven that we can change things for the better, pretty tremendously and pretty quickly.
Take the win, folks! And then gird your loins to continue the struggle, because nobody is saying this is over.
Anyway, I'll stop threadsitting now.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:03 PM on October 28, 2022 [49 favorites]
What, good news on Metafilter??
posted by Melismata at 12:03 PM on October 28, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by Melismata at 12:03 PM on October 28, 2022 [7 favorites]
This article was posted in this thread yesterday. Maybe the mods can combine the two posts?
posted by rog at 12:11 PM on October 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by rog at 12:11 PM on October 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
A distinction is being made, Artifice_Eternity, between ‘good’ and ‘less bad’. The rate of change of atmospheric CO2 is decreasing (second derivative negative), but the amount is still increasing (first derivative positive). This is both a quantitatively and qualitatively different situation from having a negative or zero first derivative. It is also both quantitatively and qualitatively less bad than having the second derivative as well as the first derivative be positive, which is where we were not too long ago. Harm reduction doesn’t mean that no harm is happening (good news); though the existence of some harm also doesn’t mean that harm reduction (less bad) isn’t important.
posted by eviemath at 12:12 PM on October 28, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 12:12 PM on October 28, 2022 [9 favorites]
When you’re bleeding out, and the blood is still coming out, but it’s coming out slower… that’s not necessarily good news.
posted by notoriety public at 12:13 PM on October 28, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by notoriety public at 12:13 PM on October 28, 2022 [8 favorites]
I remember when there was a massive hole in the ozone layer, and then we did something about it and now we don't talk about it anymore. Perhaps we have a shot at global warming.
posted by Chuffy at 12:25 PM on October 28, 2022 [16 favorites]
posted by Chuffy at 12:25 PM on October 28, 2022 [16 favorites]
Following that metaphor, if the tourniquet is at least slowing the bleeding, that means that you need to keep pulling it tighter, not give up (either out of denial that you're bleeding, false claims that the tourniquet isn't helping, or despair that there's any chance of treating the wound).
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:26 PM on October 28, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:26 PM on October 28, 2022 [11 favorites]
I'm in Louisiana. Hope is perpetual. We can't stop living. We've been dead since 2005. I have seen towns evaporate into willows and water in the last ten years. What is the world, even?
But the IRA bill is such a giveaway to the oil industry, and constrains the very renewables the article places hope on, in order to fluff coal prices, and give oil producers more levers of price control than even exporting the US gasoline and gas has given them.
US BOEM is set to give Exxon even more control of Wind Power development in the Gulf of Mexico.
I hope people realize that Exxon or Chevron et al, aren't just going to let "the market" put them out of business. Look what they did to us. They have depopulated our state.
Is this going to go how slavery ended in Haiti, where the people had to pay France for their right to exist as a nation, until the end of time?
posted by eustatic at 12:26 PM on October 28, 2022 [12 favorites]
But the IRA bill is such a giveaway to the oil industry, and constrains the very renewables the article places hope on, in order to fluff coal prices, and give oil producers more levers of price control than even exporting the US gasoline and gas has given them.
US BOEM is set to give Exxon even more control of Wind Power development in the Gulf of Mexico.
I hope people realize that Exxon or Chevron et al, aren't just going to let "the market" put them out of business. Look what they did to us. They have depopulated our state.
Is this going to go how slavery ended in Haiti, where the people had to pay France for their right to exist as a nation, until the end of time?
posted by eustatic at 12:26 PM on October 28, 2022 [12 favorites]
Spending all your time about how good or bad this news is is really no more useful than pretending the problem has been solved and requires no further action.
Too get away from the "Hooray...Question Mark?" nature of the discussion here, it's worth focusing on what this news means for where people should be directing their advocacy and organizing efforts. The important point for the politics of saving the planet is that cost of renewables is no longer a viable excuse as a barrier to action. In my on-the-ground experience, the next big hurdle is NIMBY attitudes about the installation of generation facilities in rural areas and offshore.
If you want a tangible way to have an impact, keep an eye out for applications to install turbines and solar farms in your region, and organize people you know to support their approval by local planning and regulatory boards. Because opponents will also organize, making it really easy for local officials to deny them.
And you know, keep trying to overthrow capitalism while you're at it.
posted by dry white toast at 12:29 PM on October 28, 2022 [23 favorites]
Too get away from the "Hooray...Question Mark?" nature of the discussion here, it's worth focusing on what this news means for where people should be directing their advocacy and organizing efforts. The important point for the politics of saving the planet is that cost of renewables is no longer a viable excuse as a barrier to action. In my on-the-ground experience, the next big hurdle is NIMBY attitudes about the installation of generation facilities in rural areas and offshore.
If you want a tangible way to have an impact, keep an eye out for applications to install turbines and solar farms in your region, and organize people you know to support their approval by local planning and regulatory boards. Because opponents will also organize, making it really easy for local officials to deny them.
And you know, keep trying to overthrow capitalism while you're at it.
posted by dry white toast at 12:29 PM on October 28, 2022 [23 favorites]
The important point for the politics of saving the planet is that cost of renewables is no longer a viable excuse as a barrier to action.
Indeed. And that's a point that needs to be hammered and hammered and hammered at every opportunity, because the Murdoch Death Star and its assorted think-tank toadies are still fully committed to pumping out the lie that more renewables = increased energy prices.
posted by flabdablet at 12:38 PM on October 28, 2022 [8 favorites]
Indeed. And that's a point that needs to be hammered and hammered and hammered at every opportunity, because the Murdoch Death Star and its assorted think-tank toadies are still fully committed to pumping out the lie that more renewables = increased energy prices.
posted by flabdablet at 12:38 PM on October 28, 2022 [8 favorites]
But the IRA bill is such a giveaway to the oil industry, and constrains the very renewables the article places hope on, in order to fluff coal prices, and give oil producers more levers of price control than even exporting the US gasoline and gas has given them.
Some giveaways to the fossil fuel industry had to be included in the bill to get it past Manchin.
But what I think a lot of people who maybe don't follow the energy industry and energy policy closely (as I do for my job) don't understand is that, by and large, the die has already been cast in favor of renewables.
There are massive, decisive investments being made right now in renewable energy of all kinds, all around the world, by both governments and industry. We're not going back to the 20th century energy model.
A few crusts thrown to petrochemical companies in the IRA unlocked a much more meaningful array of subsidies and policies that will enable the construction of vast solar and wind arrays, and the grid to support them.
I realize that, viewed in isolation, any incentives at all for the fossil fuel industry seem objectionable. But because of the mind-boggling drops in the prices of solar, wind, and battery tech in the last decade, fossil fuels are really just not going to be that relevant in the future. Renewables are destined to win.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:48 PM on October 28, 2022 [30 favorites]
Some giveaways to the fossil fuel industry had to be included in the bill to get it past Manchin.
But what I think a lot of people who maybe don't follow the energy industry and energy policy closely (as I do for my job) don't understand is that, by and large, the die has already been cast in favor of renewables.
There are massive, decisive investments being made right now in renewable energy of all kinds, all around the world, by both governments and industry. We're not going back to the 20th century energy model.
A few crusts thrown to petrochemical companies in the IRA unlocked a much more meaningful array of subsidies and policies that will enable the construction of vast solar and wind arrays, and the grid to support them.
I realize that, viewed in isolation, any incentives at all for the fossil fuel industry seem objectionable. But because of the mind-boggling drops in the prices of solar, wind, and battery tech in the last decade, fossil fuels are really just not going to be that relevant in the future. Renewables are destined to win.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:48 PM on October 28, 2022 [30 favorites]
When you’re bleeding out, and the blood is still coming out, but it’s coming out slower… that’s not necessarily good news.
As I tried to express previously, but evidently not clearly enough: What makes this latest news good is not just the news itself, but what it tells us about our capacity for continuing, major, rapid positive change.
Given what we've accomplished in the last decade, what can we do in the next two decades? There's now every reason to believe we can do a tremendous amount more than we thought we could.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:51 PM on October 28, 2022 [12 favorites]
As I tried to express previously, but evidently not clearly enough: What makes this latest news good is not just the news itself, but what it tells us about our capacity for continuing, major, rapid positive change.
Given what we've accomplished in the last decade, what can we do in the next two decades? There's now every reason to believe we can do a tremendous amount more than we thought we could.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:51 PM on October 28, 2022 [12 favorites]
A_E, might I gently suggest that after providing almost a quarter of the comments on your own post, you give some space to others, even if those others do not see a story that includes lines like this as unalloyed “good news”?
posted by pwe at 1:22 PM on October 28, 2022 [7 favorites]
“Second, and just as important, the likeliest futures still lie beyond thresholds long thought disastrous”If people read stuff like the above in a story that is extremely split between “shit is baaad” and “shit could be worse, because we’ve made some progress,” and don’t come away celebrating the progress, that doesn’t mean they have a “death grip on their cynicism and pessimism.” It just means they disagree with your interpretation of the story.
posted by pwe at 1:22 PM on October 28, 2022 [7 favorites]
The other thing is that nobody knows everything that the future will bring.
There was a great comment by roolya_boolya in the recent Ukraine thread about the effect of the war on energy policy:
Neither of those things - the effect of the war in Ukraine on global energy supplies, or the swift deterioration of the US-Saudi relationship - were predictable a year ago.
I am one of those people who needs SOME good news to help me keep advocating for change. Seeing Earthjustice laud the Inflation Reduction Act and its projected 40% reduction in emissions by 2030 makes it possible for me to believe my actions can make a difference - and in this multi-generation, global catastrophe, any differences, any change for the better, is a good thing.
The challenge of our times is this: how do you tell the truth and fully present the devastating impact of what's happening WITHOUT driving people to despair?
From the article:
This article, for me, is a very helpful companion to articles like World close to ‘irreversible’ climate breakdown, warn major studies. (As is Carbon emissions from energy to peak in 2025 in ‘historic turning point’, says IEA.)
Articles like this help me build a clearer picture of the complexity of what we're facing - and remind me of all the hard work people are doing, in advocacy and research and creating green energy technology - to reduce the harm that's coming.
I really appreciate this article, Artifice_Eternity, and I doubt I would have seen it without you sharing it here. Thank you so much for the thoughtful post, and for your voice here.
posted by kristi at 1:25 PM on October 28, 2022 [20 favorites]
There was a great comment by roolya_boolya in the recent Ukraine thread about the effect of the war on energy policy:
Politico.eu name Putin as number one on their inaugural green list.Between Putin weaponizing energy in Europe - leading to an accelerated commitment to green energy - and the recent conflict between the USA and Saudi Arabia over energy policy, more people are starting to really understand the extent to which greener energy is a matter of national security.
It took a war criminal to speed up Europe’s green revolution.
By invading Ukraine and manipulating energy supplies to undermine European support for Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved something generations of green campaigners could not — clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security.
Neither of those things - the effect of the war in Ukraine on global energy supplies, or the swift deterioration of the US-Saudi relationship - were predictable a year ago.
I am one of those people who needs SOME good news to help me keep advocating for change. Seeing Earthjustice laud the Inflation Reduction Act and its projected 40% reduction in emissions by 2030 makes it possible for me to believe my actions can make a difference - and in this multi-generation, global catastrophe, any differences, any change for the better, is a good thing.
The challenge of our times is this: how do you tell the truth and fully present the devastating impact of what's happening WITHOUT driving people to despair?
From the article:
“We live in a terrible world, and we live in a wonderful world,” Marvel [Kate Marvel of NASA, a lead chapter author on the fifth National Climate Assessment] says. “It’s a terrible world that’s more than a degree Celsius warmer. But also a wonderful world in which we have so many ways to generate electricity that are cheaper and more cost-effective and easier to deploy than I would’ve ever imagined. People are writing credible papers in scientific journals making the case that switching rapidly to renewable energy isn’t a net cost; it will be a net financial benefit,” she says with a head-shake of near-disbelief. “If you had told me five years ago that that would be the case, I would’ve thought, wow, that’s a miracle.”I want to do what I can to help shape the world to come, with open eyes and open heart.
This article, for me, is a very helpful companion to articles like World close to ‘irreversible’ climate breakdown, warn major studies. (As is Carbon emissions from energy to peak in 2025 in ‘historic turning point’, says IEA.)
Articles like this help me build a clearer picture of the complexity of what we're facing - and remind me of all the hard work people are doing, in advocacy and research and creating green energy technology - to reduce the harm that's coming.
I really appreciate this article, Artifice_Eternity, and I doubt I would have seen it without you sharing it here. Thank you so much for the thoughtful post, and for your voice here.
posted by kristi at 1:25 PM on October 28, 2022 [20 favorites]
METATFILTER: And you know, keep trying to overthrow capitalism
posted by philip-random at 2:00 PM on October 28, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by philip-random at 2:00 PM on October 28, 2022 [9 favorites]
Accusing David Wallace-Wells of climate-change hopepunk is the funniest and most irritatingly MeFite stance of an incredibly competitive week.
Wallace-Wells' extremely-famous climate change book was about the possibility of complete eradication of the human race. This article is comparatively "positive" in the sense that a half-century of human misery experienced simultaneously by literally every person on the planet is better than the literal end of the world.
I, for one, see that as motivation to keep fighting. Because I don't think we'll have overcome the worse demons of our nature by 2030, or by 2040 for that matter. But it turns out I can muster the energy and motivation it'll take to fight for a better future for decades and decades, likely till my dying day. The thought of absolute unavoidable species eradication is about the only thing that plunges me into such nihilistic despair that my soul outright leaves my body.
Yes, this is "good news." Good news for those of us who fight. Good news for those of us who've spent the last decade slowly preparing that to be a fight that lasts for (and defines) our entire generation.
It's wild that some people find it irresponsible for Wells, an exceptionally bleak reporter, to say that things are only 85% as shitty as the worst-case scenario would have been. Especially after some fairly comprehensive evidence that "climate despair" is partly mass-manufactured by BP and Exxon et al, who have data correctly showing that people expecting the end of the world stop fighting them as hard.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 2:21 PM on October 28, 2022 [40 favorites]
Wallace-Wells' extremely-famous climate change book was about the possibility of complete eradication of the human race. This article is comparatively "positive" in the sense that a half-century of human misery experienced simultaneously by literally every person on the planet is better than the literal end of the world.
I, for one, see that as motivation to keep fighting. Because I don't think we'll have overcome the worse demons of our nature by 2030, or by 2040 for that matter. But it turns out I can muster the energy and motivation it'll take to fight for a better future for decades and decades, likely till my dying day. The thought of absolute unavoidable species eradication is about the only thing that plunges me into such nihilistic despair that my soul outright leaves my body.
Yes, this is "good news." Good news for those of us who fight. Good news for those of us who've spent the last decade slowly preparing that to be a fight that lasts for (and defines) our entire generation.
It's wild that some people find it irresponsible for Wells, an exceptionally bleak reporter, to say that things are only 85% as shitty as the worst-case scenario would have been. Especially after some fairly comprehensive evidence that "climate despair" is partly mass-manufactured by BP and Exxon et al, who have data correctly showing that people expecting the end of the world stop fighting them as hard.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 2:21 PM on October 28, 2022 [40 favorites]
Something I think about a fair amount is I live in the first world and am middle class. Obviously all our lives, even if we are rich, are constrained by the rules of capitalism and law to say nothing of social mores that for example, prevent many of us from lying down in front of the bulldozers or whatnot, but one thing we with some relative ease do have some agency about is being smart about public policy. It's totally understandable yet completely terrible that people with relative priveledge are just so resistant to any change in their lifestyle. I"m not talking about personal choice to like, not drive or be a vegetarian, but fighting for policy changes that ban cars and make meat harder to access/more rare, for two impactful examples that people even who understand climate change have extreme resistance to. Nothing gets my coworkers more riled up than how little parking there is on our campus. I completely get that people naturally respond to the challenges of daily life, and would say we should fight hard for a free, frequent, reliable, safe transit plan along with hitting hard on restricting cars (funding would have to be massively increased on the state and federal level along with incentives/requirements about transit worker compensation, rapid bus lines, disability access, economic equity in route, etc) but we just do. not. have. time to fuck around saying like, "well until there are better bus lines we need a new parking lot." We are dying of cars (in the immediate sense too - auto deaths are up), and even if we switched to all electric cars tomorrow, we actually don't have the lithium to make that conversion work on an individual level - we need to use that lithium for mass transit vehicles - and it feels like a basic fucking thing we all here like, on metafilter should do is advocate to ban parking minimums, ban freeway expansions, ban new parking lots, support zoning reform to build housing on former parking lots, support funding for transit, etc...
posted by latkes at 2:57 PM on October 28, 2022 [10 favorites]
posted by latkes at 2:57 PM on October 28, 2022 [10 favorites]
Actually, Chuffy, we still have a huge hole in the ozone layer. The good news is, it's getting smaller. It peaked at 28.4 million square kilometers and is now 23.2 million square kilometers. The problem is the chemicals that caused the hole in the first place last for decades.
We'll see similar issues with CO2. Even if we achieved net zero today, warming would continue. For example, the Thwaites Ice Shelf, holding back the so-called "doomsday glacier" could disintegrate within five years, and then we'd be looking at sea-level rises for many years to dome.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 3:11 PM on October 28, 2022 [10 favorites]
We'll see similar issues with CO2. Even if we achieved net zero today, warming would continue. For example, the Thwaites Ice Shelf, holding back the so-called "doomsday glacier" could disintegrate within five years, and then we'd be looking at sea-level rises for many years to dome.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 3:11 PM on October 28, 2022 [10 favorites]
and then we'd be looking at sea-level rises for many years to dome.
Mistype, or or most likely solution?
"People worked hard on doing things and now the future is materially better while still remaining bad" is no more "hopepunk" than an article which focuses on the worst-case scenario is "disaster porn". Different audiences react to different framings, and it's not a bad thing to be mobilizing people who react best to "hey, we did a thing and it helped, let's do more things" as well as the people who need to be shaken until their teeth rattle by raw apocalyptic visions.
I feel like this is the same debate we see around different political issues - "if you'd only written it this way, ALL the fascists would be convinced!". "If you don't write about the Ukraine war this way, everyone will stop supporting them!". There's no perfect approach. There are genuinely bad approaches, sure, but there's a range of ways to write a Good Article on this stuff. This article looks well within that range to me.
posted by AdamCSnider at 3:29 PM on October 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
Mistype, or or most likely solution?
"People worked hard on doing things and now the future is materially better while still remaining bad" is no more "hopepunk" than an article which focuses on the worst-case scenario is "disaster porn". Different audiences react to different framings, and it's not a bad thing to be mobilizing people who react best to "hey, we did a thing and it helped, let's do more things" as well as the people who need to be shaken until their teeth rattle by raw apocalyptic visions.
I feel like this is the same debate we see around different political issues - "if you'd only written it this way, ALL the fascists would be convinced!". "If you don't write about the Ukraine war this way, everyone will stop supporting them!". There's no perfect approach. There are genuinely bad approaches, sure, but there's a range of ways to write a Good Article on this stuff. This article looks well within that range to me.
posted by AdamCSnider at 3:29 PM on October 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
The author doesn't seem to be very good with science journalism, as politely explained here.
https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-explain-what-new-york-magazine-article-on-the-uninhabitable-earth-gets-wrong-david-wallac—wells/
But that was about his previous work. So I took 30 minutes to read the NYTimes piece and while some of it is interesting, it doesn't come across as a piece that scientists have vetted. It reads a lot more like the journalist's personal feelings after he talked to a bunch of specific experts that he chose, and repeated what they said as factoids. It's not very rigorous journalism. It's spinny writing; the author saw fit to remind the reader 3 times that Pakistan is 1/3 flooded.
Nowhere in the article is a primary argument made that solar energy technology is chiefly responsible for the revised climate estimates. Actually, the article later has several places warning that the estimates could still be totally wrong. But it's just not the point of the piece.
When I was in grad school over a decade ago, an expert came in and gave a talk about projected improvements to solar cell technology. He said that solar tech was on the cusp of huge improvements in price vs efficiency. So I don't disagree with that part of the prediction. But to say that renewable energy is the solution to the polycrisis, for example, is to ideologically misrepresent the NYTimes article.
So people should read the rest of the article if only to see how the title doesn't reflect the article. Oh, and the NTimes Reader's Picks comments offer pretty good criticism.
posted by polymodus at 4:00 PM on October 28, 2022 [8 favorites]
https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-explain-what-new-york-magazine-article-on-the-uninhabitable-earth-gets-wrong-david-wallac—wells/
But that was about his previous work. So I took 30 minutes to read the NYTimes piece and while some of it is interesting, it doesn't come across as a piece that scientists have vetted. It reads a lot more like the journalist's personal feelings after he talked to a bunch of specific experts that he chose, and repeated what they said as factoids. It's not very rigorous journalism. It's spinny writing; the author saw fit to remind the reader 3 times that Pakistan is 1/3 flooded.
Nowhere in the article is a primary argument made that solar energy technology is chiefly responsible for the revised climate estimates. Actually, the article later has several places warning that the estimates could still be totally wrong. But it's just not the point of the piece.
When I was in grad school over a decade ago, an expert came in and gave a talk about projected improvements to solar cell technology. He said that solar tech was on the cusp of huge improvements in price vs efficiency. So I don't disagree with that part of the prediction. But to say that renewable energy is the solution to the polycrisis, for example, is to ideologically misrepresent the NYTimes article.
So people should read the rest of the article if only to see how the title doesn't reflect the article. Oh, and the NTimes Reader's Picks comments offer pretty good criticism.
posted by polymodus at 4:00 PM on October 28, 2022 [8 favorites]
I completely get that people naturally respond to the challenges of daily life, and would say we should fight hard for a free, frequent, reliable, safe transit plan along with hitting hard on restricting cars (funding would have to be massively increased on the state and federal level along with incentives/requirements about transit worker compensation, rapid bus lines, disability access, economic equity in route, etc) but we just do. not. have. time to fuck around saying like, "well until there are better bus lines we need a new parking lot."
The problem is that your coworkers do actually need to eat every day, and presumably pay rent. Under our current system, they have to meet these needs by working. So if there really aren't public transit solutions to get them to work, but car access is restricted or even eliminated, what exactly are you expecting them to do?
"This problem is too important to worry about your continued ability to feed yourself" isn't exactly a winning pitch if you're serious about changing public policy. These are complex problems, you can't address them in isolation like this then also wonder why you would ever meet resistance.
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:13 PM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
The problem is that your coworkers do actually need to eat every day, and presumably pay rent. Under our current system, they have to meet these needs by working. So if there really aren't public transit solutions to get them to work, but car access is restricted or even eliminated, what exactly are you expecting them to do?
"This problem is too important to worry about your continued ability to feed yourself" isn't exactly a winning pitch if you're serious about changing public policy. These are complex problems, you can't address them in isolation like this then also wonder why you would ever meet resistance.
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:13 PM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
Well I'm thinking about my coworkers in particular. I'm in a union environment and the lowest paid staff earn a living wage and have a strong benefits plan and they don't want to walk a couple blocks from their cars. I'm actually very sympathetic.. life is fucking hard finding tiny amounts of ease is a very human need and lots of folks have mobility limitations but this is not a can't eat situation. Anyway my point is not that we should rely on individual choices that's a dead end but about supporting policies. We could fight for better shuttle service instead of more parking spaces.
posted by latkes at 5:01 PM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by latkes at 5:01 PM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
If people read stuff like the above in a story that is extremely split between “shit is baaad” and “shit could be worse, because we’ve made some progress,” and don’t come away celebrating the progress, that doesn’t mean they have a “death grip on their cynicism and pessimism.” It just means they disagree with your interpretation of the story.
What this fails to take into account is that at every turn since climate change became a buzzword the growth in renewables has far outpaced even the most optimistic projections. In some places we already have days when renewable production far outpaces electricity demand. That's good because the free to negative price of energy during those periods makes things like CCS and hydrogen production to replace fossil fuels for things that are hard to electrify viable options for slowing or even reversing the trend without requiring much change on the individual level.
Like it or not, there are a lot of selfish assholes around, so the less we have to make wholesale changes to get carbon emissions under control the easier it will be. In a perfect world I'd love to get more walkable cities, less carnage from cars, etc, out of the deal, but if tying those goals to climate change makes it harder to get things under control, it isn't worth slowing progress on climate change.
That said, no matter what we do, there's a bunch of sea level rise baked in. We could return carbon dioxide concentration back to preindustrial levels tomorrow and we're still in for 50-100 years of that, so don't think I'm being pollyannish about our prospects.
posted by wierdo at 6:10 PM on October 28, 2022 [6 favorites]
What this fails to take into account is that at every turn since climate change became a buzzword the growth in renewables has far outpaced even the most optimistic projections. In some places we already have days when renewable production far outpaces electricity demand. That's good because the free to negative price of energy during those periods makes things like CCS and hydrogen production to replace fossil fuels for things that are hard to electrify viable options for slowing or even reversing the trend without requiring much change on the individual level.
Like it or not, there are a lot of selfish assholes around, so the less we have to make wholesale changes to get carbon emissions under control the easier it will be. In a perfect world I'd love to get more walkable cities, less carnage from cars, etc, out of the deal, but if tying those goals to climate change makes it harder to get things under control, it isn't worth slowing progress on climate change.
That said, no matter what we do, there's a bunch of sea level rise baked in. We could return carbon dioxide concentration back to preindustrial levels tomorrow and we're still in for 50-100 years of that, so don't think I'm being pollyannish about our prospects.
posted by wierdo at 6:10 PM on October 28, 2022 [6 favorites]
This year the main sponsor of COP27 is none other than Coca Cola.
posted by tarantula at 6:11 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by tarantula at 6:11 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
One other spot of good news is that despite high fossil fuel prices thanks to the war in Ukraine, the oil and gas companies aren't bothering to invest nearly as much in exploration and production as they have even in the recent past. They seem to see the writing on the wall and are responding by letting production plateau and fall so they can squeeze out more money per unit of production. Government can try to sell all the leases they want, but it doesn't mean shit if the energy companies aren't willing to make the long term investments necessary to make use of the opportunity. They don't want more stranded assets, so they probably won't take the bait because developing new fields, especially offshore, is stupid expensive, has a high level of risk, and takes a long time to pay off. Most likely they'll continue to make relatively small investments in maintaining production in existing fields and hope that keeps prices high enough to maintain profits.
Overall, that's a good thing because it makes investment in all the non-fossil energy sources that much better and will lead to even greater investment in production capacity for those energy sources and the raw materials needed to make them.
posted by wierdo at 8:22 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
Overall, that's a good thing because it makes investment in all the non-fossil energy sources that much better and will lead to even greater investment in production capacity for those energy sources and the raw materials needed to make them.
posted by wierdo at 8:22 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
... even if we switched to all electric cars tomorrow, we actually don't have the lithium to make that conversion work ...
I see this line of argument a lot, and I think it leaves people feeling stuck more than it does good. Which, as Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted correctly points out above, is absolutely by design: "if we were to do X tomorrow it would cause chaos and destruction, therefore we should not fund X but double down on present practice instead" is a form of argument used all the time by fossil fuel propaganda shills.
Look for that pattern in media discourse and pay attention to which side it comes from - I bet you'll find it's always from people with a vested interest in staying on the wrong side of every issue. Frustratingly for me, it often happens that the person on the other side of whichever debate then picks up on it and tries to argue against it in its own frame of reference, with predictably disappointing results, and yet again the right-wing noise machine scores a discourse framing win.
The thing to keep in mind about changing the direction of massive interconnected policy and practice systems is that it almost never does happen tomorrow. It happens over years to decades, and in general we don't know what all the options before us are going to be for the majority of that time.
There will not be a "switch" from fossil fuel burners to electric cars. What there already is, though, is an ongoing shift in that direction that might look a lot like a switch when viewed from two to three hundred years into the future.
And yes, the present lithium supply issue is real but no, it probably isn't going to be a bottleneck by the time the majority of road vehicles have batteries in them. Sodium-ion batteries are already a thing and manufacturers are already designing around them. Unlike fuels, lithium doesn't get consumed by end use in vehicles and can be recovered at the end of its service life within them. We're going to need much less lithium than a simple forward projection of today's per-vehicle requirement onto tomorrow's expected vehicle numbers would suggest.
There's also a lot of good work being done on extracting lithium efficiently and cheaply from seawater which, given that the concentration of lithium ions in seawater is exceedingly low to begin with, is going to make fuck-all difference to the biological value of any seawater fed through any such process unlike e.g. a desalination plant processing any comparable quantity of it.
Likewise there's a lot of doomsaying about the frankly insane amount of energy storage that a fully electrified world powered from renewable energy flows is going to need. And it's the same pattern: project a massive number on the basis of assumptions that future energy supply requirements are going to look just like today's only bigger, then try to sound like a credible expert while using the impossibility and/or massive expense of meeting those projections as an argument for following some far more destructive path instead.
But as Amory Lovins has been consistently pointing out since the Seventies, this way of trying to understand the future is simply not fit for purpose. Today's energy consumption patterns have co-evolved with today's energy production patterns and there is no good reason to assume that they would not continue to do so.
In particular there is really no sound reason to expect that industrial processes would not continue their present shift toward making stuff at high rates when energy is cheap and low rates when it's expensive. Solar PV and wind generation are are far and away the cheapest forms of renewable energy conversion that humanity has ever devised. Both are getting cheaper every day. Both are predictably intermittent (n.b. not "unreliable") and there are already times of the day and times of the year when they provide energy at rates so cheap that their fuel-burning competitors can't compete and get spun down. If you were designing new industrial plant in that energy supply climate you'd be missing a huge competitive opportunity not to orient it toward taking advantage of those predictable, ongoing, reliable price collapses.
As Lovins says, nobody actually needs an energy supply per se. What we need is the end use services that energy supplies facilitate, and what we need to be projecting into the future are the ways we could be getting those services at least cost - economic and environmental and security/cultural.
... the oil and gas companies aren't bothering to invest nearly as much in exploration and production as they have even in the recent past. They seem to see the writing on the wall ...
One of the most effective things that many of us can do to engage with these policy issues is to keep the writing on that wall as big and clear and legible as we can.
posted by flabdablet at 1:24 AM on October 29, 2022 [24 favorites]
I see this line of argument a lot, and I think it leaves people feeling stuck more than it does good. Which, as Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted correctly points out above, is absolutely by design: "if we were to do X tomorrow it would cause chaos and destruction, therefore we should not fund X but double down on present practice instead" is a form of argument used all the time by fossil fuel propaganda shills.
Look for that pattern in media discourse and pay attention to which side it comes from - I bet you'll find it's always from people with a vested interest in staying on the wrong side of every issue. Frustratingly for me, it often happens that the person on the other side of whichever debate then picks up on it and tries to argue against it in its own frame of reference, with predictably disappointing results, and yet again the right-wing noise machine scores a discourse framing win.
The thing to keep in mind about changing the direction of massive interconnected policy and practice systems is that it almost never does happen tomorrow. It happens over years to decades, and in general we don't know what all the options before us are going to be for the majority of that time.
There will not be a "switch" from fossil fuel burners to electric cars. What there already is, though, is an ongoing shift in that direction that might look a lot like a switch when viewed from two to three hundred years into the future.
And yes, the present lithium supply issue is real but no, it probably isn't going to be a bottleneck by the time the majority of road vehicles have batteries in them. Sodium-ion batteries are already a thing and manufacturers are already designing around them. Unlike fuels, lithium doesn't get consumed by end use in vehicles and can be recovered at the end of its service life within them. We're going to need much less lithium than a simple forward projection of today's per-vehicle requirement onto tomorrow's expected vehicle numbers would suggest.
There's also a lot of good work being done on extracting lithium efficiently and cheaply from seawater which, given that the concentration of lithium ions in seawater is exceedingly low to begin with, is going to make fuck-all difference to the biological value of any seawater fed through any such process unlike e.g. a desalination plant processing any comparable quantity of it.
Likewise there's a lot of doomsaying about the frankly insane amount of energy storage that a fully electrified world powered from renewable energy flows is going to need. And it's the same pattern: project a massive number on the basis of assumptions that future energy supply requirements are going to look just like today's only bigger, then try to sound like a credible expert while using the impossibility and/or massive expense of meeting those projections as an argument for following some far more destructive path instead.
But as Amory Lovins has been consistently pointing out since the Seventies, this way of trying to understand the future is simply not fit for purpose. Today's energy consumption patterns have co-evolved with today's energy production patterns and there is no good reason to assume that they would not continue to do so.
In particular there is really no sound reason to expect that industrial processes would not continue their present shift toward making stuff at high rates when energy is cheap and low rates when it's expensive. Solar PV and wind generation are are far and away the cheapest forms of renewable energy conversion that humanity has ever devised. Both are getting cheaper every day. Both are predictably intermittent (n.b. not "unreliable") and there are already times of the day and times of the year when they provide energy at rates so cheap that their fuel-burning competitors can't compete and get spun down. If you were designing new industrial plant in that energy supply climate you'd be missing a huge competitive opportunity not to orient it toward taking advantage of those predictable, ongoing, reliable price collapses.
As Lovins says, nobody actually needs an energy supply per se. What we need is the end use services that energy supplies facilitate, and what we need to be projecting into the future are the ways we could be getting those services at least cost - economic and environmental and security/cultural.
... the oil and gas companies aren't bothering to invest nearly as much in exploration and production as they have even in the recent past. They seem to see the writing on the wall ...
One of the most effective things that many of us can do to engage with these policy issues is to keep the writing on that wall as big and clear and legible as we can.
posted by flabdablet at 1:24 AM on October 29, 2022 [24 favorites]
"German utility RWE is dismantling a small wind turbine farm (so far, only 8 turbines) to make room for the expansion of an open-cast lignite coal mine"
posted by jeffburdges at 1:52 AM on October 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by jeffburdges at 1:52 AM on October 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
There are massive policy differences between the first derivative vs second derivative being negative: A second derivative tells you about what new plants gets built, which a first derivative being negative requires coal and gas plants going off line, which requires scraping the Energy Charter Treaty etc. We seem fairly far from the basic policy moves that'll make real reductions possible.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:12 AM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by jeffburdges at 2:12 AM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
"German utility RWE is dismantling a small wind turbine farm...
... which is completely consistent with what we already know about the short-sighted bastardry of fossil fuel energy companies everywhere. Bastard Company Is Bastard is anecdote, not data, and not much of a basis for forming a view about the trajectory of change.
The point of good public policy is to keep on ratcheting up the pressures that make it harder for bastards like the bastards who run RWE or Manchin or Santos or Whitehaven to keep on making money through the kind of unsustainable, destructive, boneheadedly counterproductive extractive practices we've so far been giving them license to indulge in. And yes, it really is only second derivatives that are unequivocally pointing the right way at present but that's only ever a reason to push harder, not to throw up our hands in despair and declare the job Too Hard. Do that, and the bastards win. Keep on pushing back and we do.
There are more of us.
posted by flabdablet at 2:49 AM on October 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
... which is completely consistent with what we already know about the short-sighted bastardry of fossil fuel energy companies everywhere. Bastard Company Is Bastard is anecdote, not data, and not much of a basis for forming a view about the trajectory of change.
The point of good public policy is to keep on ratcheting up the pressures that make it harder for bastards like the bastards who run RWE or Manchin or Santos or Whitehaven to keep on making money through the kind of unsustainable, destructive, boneheadedly counterproductive extractive practices we've so far been giving them license to indulge in. And yes, it really is only second derivatives that are unequivocally pointing the right way at present but that's only ever a reason to push harder, not to throw up our hands in despair and declare the job Too Hard. Do that, and the bastards win. Keep on pushing back and we do.
There are more of us.
posted by flabdablet at 2:49 AM on October 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
The thing about first derivatives for systems as large as global energy is that once they do turn around and start pointing the right way, the second derivatives behind that turnaround have to have become so huge as to be completely unstoppable.
And there are more of us, and we can make that happen.
posted by flabdablet at 2:53 AM on October 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
And there are more of us, and we can make that happen.
posted by flabdablet at 2:53 AM on October 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
We seem fairly far from the basic policy moves that'll make real reductions possible.
They're mostly going to shut down all on their own because we are rapidly approaching the point where the cost of fuel for gas and especially coal plants is higher than the all in cost of renewables. It already is a lot of the time, and that trend is only increasing as more solar and wind hey built and battery storage costs drop.
Even if sodium, flow batteries, etc don't manage to go anywhere, the consistent 1-2% annual increase in the energy density of lithium batteries alone is driving radical change in the energy sector. If better (read: cheaper) technology comes along for stationary storage, the outlook improves further.
I'm actually a bit surprised that nobody is investing in solar thermal since solar thermal plants can store enough heat during the day to keep generating power for several hours after the sun sets while demand is still high and prices are at their daily peak in systems with lots of PV.
posted by wierdo at 3:16 AM on October 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
They're mostly going to shut down all on their own because we are rapidly approaching the point where the cost of fuel for gas and especially coal plants is higher than the all in cost of renewables. It already is a lot of the time, and that trend is only increasing as more solar and wind hey built and battery storage costs drop.
Even if sodium, flow batteries, etc don't manage to go anywhere, the consistent 1-2% annual increase in the energy density of lithium batteries alone is driving radical change in the energy sector. If better (read: cheaper) technology comes along for stationary storage, the outlook improves further.
I'm actually a bit surprised that nobody is investing in solar thermal since solar thermal plants can store enough heat during the day to keep generating power for several hours after the sun sets while demand is still high and prices are at their daily peak in systems with lots of PV.
posted by wierdo at 3:16 AM on October 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
We've far too little investment in solar variants across the board. It's just Heliogen and Solpart, plus more exploratory academic projects. We'd rather not make steal or glass with electrical heating, due to the energy losses, but we could presumably devise reaction processes that permit ovens that cool down at night, which then permits reflected solar heating.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:31 AM on October 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by jeffburdges at 3:31 AM on October 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'm actually a bit surprised that nobody is investing in solar thermal
That surprise might be your cue to have a think about the actual vs perceived value of centralized thermal storage, and the economic advantages of generation plant designs that can be scaled up as required without major redesign of their most expensive parts.
As the energy supply mix continues its present shift from baseload plus daily peaking toward predictable intermittency, we are indisputably going to need more energy storage. But there are very large and very important questions about the distribution of that storage, and I suspect that quite a lot more of it is going to end up on the demand side of the supply grid than much of the writing on this topic seems to presuppose.
My own house is a case in point: we have a couple of air-sourced heat pumps that we use for taking the chill off when it's cold and making the interior tolerable again when it's stinking hot outside. We don't make any attempt to maintain a constant interior temperature with those because we'd got used to not doing that before we got the heat pumps; in any case, I experience living in a perfectly consistent temperature as alienating and draining to an extent that makes the entire idea of an "optimally" comfortable temperature nonsensical. I'm happier with a range: anywhere from 13°C to 27°C indoors and I have nothing to complain about.
Now that we have our heat pumps, they're lovely and I enjoy them but exactly because I'm not trying for a steady interior temperature I have the freedom to use the whole house's thermal mass as an energy storage bank for day-to-day peak shaving.
My chosen energy retailer passes through the wholesale electricity supply cost, in the same half-hour blocks that all the retailers buy it in. Amber doesn't mark the wholesale cost up before reselling to me. Instead, they make their money off a fixed monthly subscription that's the same for all customers. That means they have no direct interest in maximizing the amount of electricity I buy from them, which is nice. It also means that on days and at times when there's lots of renewable supply active in the grid, my price per kilowatt hour can get very low indeed.
The usual price per kilowatt hour in these parts, from traditional retailers, is around forty cents. Yesterday the Victorian grid was fed by about 50% renewables from 08:30 to 16:30, and Amber's price was 14 cents or lower from 07:30 to 15:00, 10 cents or lower from 08:30, five cents from 10:00, three cents from 11:00 and for half an hour at 12:00 it was two cents. This kind of pattern happens frequently through the sunnier months and occasionally in winter when it's windy.
And if it happens on days that are going to be particularly cold or particularly hot, we run hour heat pumps flat-out to store some warmth or cool in the house's interior for as long as the juice is cheap, and turn them off when it isn't. Which means the house gets cooler than our neighbours' do before the summer afternoon price peaks as everybody else turns their aircons on, and a little warmer later, but stays well inside our comfort zone all the time at very low cost.
The afternoon peak - where everybody gets home from work and turns on the aircon because the house is too hot - is largely an artifact of habit. I can think of no good reason why most houses could not be run as energy storage banks in the same way we run ours, once energy prices that track supply cost at least as well as Amber's do become the norm and especially once electricity price APIs become standardized enough for appliance manufacturers to start supporting.
In fact many homes already run quite a substantial energy storage bank fed by selectively cheaper electricity, in the form of off-peak electric hot water services. These were initially envisioned as a way to soak up the overnight production from coal-fired thermal generators that couldn't be spun all the way down without incurring very large restart inefficiencies and costs, but I can see no strong impediment to having them controlled by a ten cent microcontroller that interrogates a spot price API rather than a ten dollar mechanical timer.
Which brings us to the perennial argument about intermittent renewable generators and their supposed inability to supply "baseload" electricity. In fact the entire notion of "baseload" rests on assumptions about the minimum rate at which large coal-fired generators can be operated economically, and the infeasibility of spinning them all the way down for a next-day restart as a matter of course. There is no reason in the world why we shouldn't be talking about cheapload and peak load instead of baseload and peak load and the assumptions made about the nature and amount of supply-side storage we actually need would become much more realistic if we did.
posted by flabdablet at 4:43 AM on October 29, 2022 [10 favorites]
That surprise might be your cue to have a think about the actual vs perceived value of centralized thermal storage, and the economic advantages of generation plant designs that can be scaled up as required without major redesign of their most expensive parts.
As the energy supply mix continues its present shift from baseload plus daily peaking toward predictable intermittency, we are indisputably going to need more energy storage. But there are very large and very important questions about the distribution of that storage, and I suspect that quite a lot more of it is going to end up on the demand side of the supply grid than much of the writing on this topic seems to presuppose.
My own house is a case in point: we have a couple of air-sourced heat pumps that we use for taking the chill off when it's cold and making the interior tolerable again when it's stinking hot outside. We don't make any attempt to maintain a constant interior temperature with those because we'd got used to not doing that before we got the heat pumps; in any case, I experience living in a perfectly consistent temperature as alienating and draining to an extent that makes the entire idea of an "optimally" comfortable temperature nonsensical. I'm happier with a range: anywhere from 13°C to 27°C indoors and I have nothing to complain about.
Now that we have our heat pumps, they're lovely and I enjoy them but exactly because I'm not trying for a steady interior temperature I have the freedom to use the whole house's thermal mass as an energy storage bank for day-to-day peak shaving.
My chosen energy retailer passes through the wholesale electricity supply cost, in the same half-hour blocks that all the retailers buy it in. Amber doesn't mark the wholesale cost up before reselling to me. Instead, they make their money off a fixed monthly subscription that's the same for all customers. That means they have no direct interest in maximizing the amount of electricity I buy from them, which is nice. It also means that on days and at times when there's lots of renewable supply active in the grid, my price per kilowatt hour can get very low indeed.
The usual price per kilowatt hour in these parts, from traditional retailers, is around forty cents. Yesterday the Victorian grid was fed by about 50% renewables from 08:30 to 16:30, and Amber's price was 14 cents or lower from 07:30 to 15:00, 10 cents or lower from 08:30, five cents from 10:00, three cents from 11:00 and for half an hour at 12:00 it was two cents. This kind of pattern happens frequently through the sunnier months and occasionally in winter when it's windy.
And if it happens on days that are going to be particularly cold or particularly hot, we run hour heat pumps flat-out to store some warmth or cool in the house's interior for as long as the juice is cheap, and turn them off when it isn't. Which means the house gets cooler than our neighbours' do before the summer afternoon price peaks as everybody else turns their aircons on, and a little warmer later, but stays well inside our comfort zone all the time at very low cost.
The afternoon peak - where everybody gets home from work and turns on the aircon because the house is too hot - is largely an artifact of habit. I can think of no good reason why most houses could not be run as energy storage banks in the same way we run ours, once energy prices that track supply cost at least as well as Amber's do become the norm and especially once electricity price APIs become standardized enough for appliance manufacturers to start supporting.
In fact many homes already run quite a substantial energy storage bank fed by selectively cheaper electricity, in the form of off-peak electric hot water services. These were initially envisioned as a way to soak up the overnight production from coal-fired thermal generators that couldn't be spun all the way down without incurring very large restart inefficiencies and costs, but I can see no strong impediment to having them controlled by a ten cent microcontroller that interrogates a spot price API rather than a ten dollar mechanical timer.
Which brings us to the perennial argument about intermittent renewable generators and their supposed inability to supply "baseload" electricity. In fact the entire notion of "baseload" rests on assumptions about the minimum rate at which large coal-fired generators can be operated economically, and the infeasibility of spinning them all the way down for a next-day restart as a matter of course. There is no reason in the world why we shouldn't be talking about cheapload and peak load instead of baseload and peak load and the assumptions made about the nature and amount of supply-side storage we actually need would become much more realistic if we did.
posted by flabdablet at 4:43 AM on October 29, 2022 [10 favorites]
... even if we switched to all electric cars tomorrow, we actually don't have the lithium to make that conversion work ...
I see this line of argument a lot, and I think it leaves people feeling stuck more than it does good.
I point out that we will run out of lithium (and also lithium mining has it's own human costs) not to say we shouldn't try or to say there is not hope, but to saywe in the first world will have to change our lives to make a more livable world and that's really hard for people, even those of us who feel like we get it, to get.
We cannot survive a world where everyone has a car. Period. We cannot survive continuous growth. Period. We are living through a mass extinction event. Wildlife populations have decreased by 70% in 50 years. Microplastics in breastmilk. Etc etc. Single family homes, two (or even one) car per household, these are not sustainable life-ways. We have to be willing to give up some of how we live - that is the the flat facts. The changes we need will be uncomfortable. What I'm speaking to that I find really hard to strategize around is the personal changes that will be needed under more sustainable policies: and how those of us with relative privileged are in such denial about this reality.
posted by latkes at 8:43 AM on October 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
I see this line of argument a lot, and I think it leaves people feeling stuck more than it does good.
I point out that we will run out of lithium (and also lithium mining has it's own human costs) not to say we shouldn't try or to say there is not hope, but to say
We cannot survive a world where everyone has a car. Period. We cannot survive continuous growth. Period. We are living through a mass extinction event. Wildlife populations have decreased by 70% in 50 years. Microplastics in breastmilk. Etc etc. Single family homes, two (or even one) car per household, these are not sustainable life-ways. We have to be willing to give up some of how we live - that is the the flat facts. The changes we need will be uncomfortable. What I'm speaking to that I find really hard to strategize around is the personal changes that will be needed under more sustainable policies: and how those of us with relative privileged are in such denial about this reality.
posted by latkes at 8:43 AM on October 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
I agree that we're unlikely to survive for long in a world where ten billion of us have cars. Half a billion cars I think we could just about cope with. But then, I've long been unconvinced about the sustainability of a biosphere with ten billion H. sap occupying it at all.
That said, what I was trying to do above was use the lithium thing as an example of a particular style of bad argument, the kind that says that policy supporting X at the expense of Y should be off the table because we currently rely on Y to such an extent that if we were to replace it with X tomorrow then everything would immediately fall to pieces. Those arguments are almost always bad because it's almost always the case that achieving the entirety of the proposed replacement at speeds high enough to produce the threatened convulsions would be, with the best will in the world, impossible.
Policy that supports X at the expense of Y will cause a ramping-up of X and a ramping-down of Y over time and there will generally be plenty of opportunities, often quite lucrative, for dealing with the way that any such shift would mess with Z along the way. So whenever it becomes clear that continuing with Y is fucking up everything for everybody then the best time to start replacing it with X was twenty years ago and the second best time is right now, and that should be the end of any such policy argument.
There is no Y built so deeply into the structure of human commerce and culture that it can't be superseded by a less damaging X eventually. Fossil fuels, in particular, are not exceptional in this regard.
We cannot survive continuous growth. Period.
Agreed. Analogies that I frequently wheel out for this include cancer, algal blooms and mouse plagues. It would be great if humanity, on a species level, could see its way clear to maintaining its numbers in smarter and more compassionate ways than any of those three things. As far as I'm currently aware it's a problem that's only ever been solved locally, by civilizations that have occupied the regions they developed within for tens of thousands of years.
We are living through a mass extinction event. Wildlife populations have decreased by 70% in 50 years.
Not only are we living through that event, our sheer numbers are its principal driver. It would be great if humanity, on a cultural level, could see its way clear to understanding that we are part of nature and not in any way separable from it. Again, this is a pretty widespread understanding within indigenous cultures.
Microplastics in breastmilk
are but one example of the damage we've done by adding novel, stable chemistries to the biosphere at rates that far exceed its ability to adapt to them. It would be great if humanity, on a technological level, could see its way clear to making biocompatibility the first criterion against which the materials and processes we propose to use are judged.
The changes we need will be uncomfortable.
Only if we go about achieving them in the most aggravatingly stupid ways possible (which, sadly, the history of colonialist, expansionist, privilege-seeking societies suggests that we will continue to do for quite some time yet).
Living in unprecedented comfort and security is completely achievable, but only when that comfort and security is equitably distributed. So for a start, billionaire personality disorder really needs to become seen as something to be cured rather than aspired to.
Western Civilization really would be a good idea.
posted by flabdablet at 9:42 AM on October 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
That said, what I was trying to do above was use the lithium thing as an example of a particular style of bad argument, the kind that says that policy supporting X at the expense of Y should be off the table because we currently rely on Y to such an extent that if we were to replace it with X tomorrow then everything would immediately fall to pieces. Those arguments are almost always bad because it's almost always the case that achieving the entirety of the proposed replacement at speeds high enough to produce the threatened convulsions would be, with the best will in the world, impossible.
Policy that supports X at the expense of Y will cause a ramping-up of X and a ramping-down of Y over time and there will generally be plenty of opportunities, often quite lucrative, for dealing with the way that any such shift would mess with Z along the way. So whenever it becomes clear that continuing with Y is fucking up everything for everybody then the best time to start replacing it with X was twenty years ago and the second best time is right now, and that should be the end of any such policy argument.
There is no Y built so deeply into the structure of human commerce and culture that it can't be superseded by a less damaging X eventually. Fossil fuels, in particular, are not exceptional in this regard.
We cannot survive continuous growth. Period.
Agreed. Analogies that I frequently wheel out for this include cancer, algal blooms and mouse plagues. It would be great if humanity, on a species level, could see its way clear to maintaining its numbers in smarter and more compassionate ways than any of those three things. As far as I'm currently aware it's a problem that's only ever been solved locally, by civilizations that have occupied the regions they developed within for tens of thousands of years.
We are living through a mass extinction event. Wildlife populations have decreased by 70% in 50 years.
Not only are we living through that event, our sheer numbers are its principal driver. It would be great if humanity, on a cultural level, could see its way clear to understanding that we are part of nature and not in any way separable from it. Again, this is a pretty widespread understanding within indigenous cultures.
Microplastics in breastmilk
are but one example of the damage we've done by adding novel, stable chemistries to the biosphere at rates that far exceed its ability to adapt to them. It would be great if humanity, on a technological level, could see its way clear to making biocompatibility the first criterion against which the materials and processes we propose to use are judged.
The changes we need will be uncomfortable.
Only if we go about achieving them in the most aggravatingly stupid ways possible (which, sadly, the history of colonialist, expansionist, privilege-seeking societies suggests that we will continue to do for quite some time yet).
Living in unprecedented comfort and security is completely achievable, but only when that comfort and security is equitably distributed. So for a start, billionaire personality disorder really needs to become seen as something to be cured rather than aspired to.
Western Civilization really would be a good idea.
posted by flabdablet at 9:42 AM on October 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
I should've made a Simon Michaux post instead of burying him inside the Nate Hagens post, but his work gives an interesting take on minerals limits.
I'd love to see a discussion between him and someone more optimistic though, likely the minerals optimists are wrong, due to ignoring things like some being harder to access, but maybe not..
posted by jeffburdges at 2:56 PM on October 29, 2022
I'd love to see a discussion between him and someone more optimistic though, likely the minerals optimists are wrong, due to ignoring things like some being harder to access, but maybe not..
posted by jeffburdges at 2:56 PM on October 29, 2022
We cannot survive a world where everyone has a car. Period. We cannot survive continuous growth. Period. We are living through a mass extinction event. Wildlife populations have decreased by 70% in 50 years. Microplastics in breastmilk. Etc etc. Single family homes, two (or even one) car per household, these are not sustainable life-ways. We have to be willing to give up some of how we live - that is the the flat facts. The changes we need will be uncomfortable. What I'm speaking to that I find really hard to strategize around is the personal changes that will be needed under more sustainable policies: and how those of us with relative privileged are in such denial about this reality.
I'm sure we agree, but then again maybe we don't.
None of my children or their spouses want cars. Most of them can't drive. They don't think of cars as part of their future successful growth. But they do imagine they will be succesfull.
My breastfeeding eldest is in a research program that specifically adresses micro plastics in breastmilk. but it turns out that her demographic, the cohort that does not think of cars as part of their future succesfull growth, also make other choices that mean they don't ingest microplastics. Which is good for them, but sad for the researchers, they need to find people in poorer suburbs, which I guess says everything.
The changes we need will mean different lifestyles, but those different lifestyles may be very attractive for younger people. When my daughter was 15, she wanted to live in a big house with a garden in a suburb. Now she has just bought a tiny apartment in the city, and she isn't even considering the suburban home, which would be cheaper and obviously larger.
We share a farm that is as far away as anyone can get, and for her, I don't think that will ever be an option as their home, but for her younger sibling, their partner and their kids, it might become their home. Things change, they have changed the last twenty years, and they will change again.
posted by mumimor at 1:58 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'm sure we agree, but then again maybe we don't.
None of my children or their spouses want cars. Most of them can't drive. They don't think of cars as part of their future successful growth. But they do imagine they will be succesfull.
My breastfeeding eldest is in a research program that specifically adresses micro plastics in breastmilk. but it turns out that her demographic, the cohort that does not think of cars as part of their future succesfull growth, also make other choices that mean they don't ingest microplastics. Which is good for them, but sad for the researchers, they need to find people in poorer suburbs, which I guess says everything.
The changes we need will mean different lifestyles, but those different lifestyles may be very attractive for younger people. When my daughter was 15, she wanted to live in a big house with a garden in a suburb. Now she has just bought a tiny apartment in the city, and she isn't even considering the suburban home, which would be cheaper and obviously larger.
We share a farm that is as far away as anyone can get, and for her, I don't think that will ever be an option as their home, but for her younger sibling, their partner and their kids, it might become their home. Things change, they have changed the last twenty years, and they will change again.
posted by mumimor at 1:58 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
CheeseDigestsAll - I understand that the hole didn't just disappear. My comment wasn't to suggest that the hole in the ozone layer isn't an issue, just that some of our efforts actually worked out net positive. I have been pessimistic about the climate for 30+ years now, so whenever I see any win, however small, I give optimism a chance to shine a little...
posted by Chuffy at 10:16 PM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Chuffy at 10:16 PM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
the hole didn't just disappear.
Actually, this is the first year they can measure some positive effect.
But I always use this example as well.
posted by mumimor at 1:03 AM on October 31, 2022
Actually, this is the first year they can measure some positive effect.
But I always use this example as well.
posted by mumimor at 1:03 AM on October 31, 2022
Spoken like someone who hasn't actually read the article.
A_E - just for the record, not only did I read Wallace-Wells long article 'shot' in the NYT in its entirety, I also read Bret Stephens 'chaser'. Taken together, these imply that two people who were poles apart only a couple of years ago are now almost of like mind. As a scientist working on adaptation/mitigation of climate impacts (which are already blighting all our lives), I'm calling b-s on this NYT campaign of climate-response gradualism which is, as has been pointed out by many others, simply the new benchmark for climate denialism in the mainstream media. What really disappointed me about the Wallace-Wells article was the acceptance that incrementalism is now our only option to avoid risks with existential consequences. What is needed is rapid change, linked to deprecation of fossil fuel use. Anything else is a recipe for imminent disaster which will have consequences for all of us, no matter where we live on the planet.
posted by aeshnid at 4:42 AM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
A_E - just for the record, not only did I read Wallace-Wells long article 'shot' in the NYT in its entirety, I also read Bret Stephens 'chaser'. Taken together, these imply that two people who were poles apart only a couple of years ago are now almost of like mind. As a scientist working on adaptation/mitigation of climate impacts (which are already blighting all our lives), I'm calling b-s on this NYT campaign of climate-response gradualism which is, as has been pointed out by many others, simply the new benchmark for climate denialism in the mainstream media. What really disappointed me about the Wallace-Wells article was the acceptance that incrementalism is now our only option to avoid risks with existential consequences. What is needed is rapid change, linked to deprecation of fossil fuel use. Anything else is a recipe for imminent disaster which will have consequences for all of us, no matter where we live on the planet.
posted by aeshnid at 4:42 AM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'm calling b-s on this NYT campaign of climate-response gradualism which is, as has been pointed out by many others, simply the new benchmark for climate denialism in the mainstream media.
I think this drastically overestimates the degree to which articles in the NYT are part of coordinated campaigns of any kind. They employ thousands of people to write about all kinds of things, and there's often overlap. My wife just wrote a personal essay for them (as a freelancer), and a week later, one of their op-ed columnists wrote about the exact same topic, with no reference to my wife's well-read, popular article at all. I'm not saying there's never any degree of editorial coordination, but quite often, the left hand doesn't know (or care) what the right hand is doing.
What really disappointed me about the Wallace-Wells article was the acceptance that incrementalism is now our only option to avoid risks with existential consequences.
As I've discussed here many times, there are some pretty massive shifts happening right now, both in terms of government policies and investments of private capital. But if that all looks like "incrementalism" to you, then you're always going to be disappointed. There will be no grand millennarian moment of repentance and enlightenment where humanity collectively recognizes the folly of its ways, and abruptly changes course, no matter how much some people want this. Gradualism is pretty much always how change happens. It can be sped up to some degree (and right now, lots of institutions are trying to make that happen (and having some success)). But there will be no climate revolution/rapture/singularity that fixes everything.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:01 PM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
I think this drastically overestimates the degree to which articles in the NYT are part of coordinated campaigns of any kind. They employ thousands of people to write about all kinds of things, and there's often overlap. My wife just wrote a personal essay for them (as a freelancer), and a week later, one of their op-ed columnists wrote about the exact same topic, with no reference to my wife's well-read, popular article at all. I'm not saying there's never any degree of editorial coordination, but quite often, the left hand doesn't know (or care) what the right hand is doing.
What really disappointed me about the Wallace-Wells article was the acceptance that incrementalism is now our only option to avoid risks with existential consequences.
As I've discussed here many times, there are some pretty massive shifts happening right now, both in terms of government policies and investments of private capital. But if that all looks like "incrementalism" to you, then you're always going to be disappointed. There will be no grand millennarian moment of repentance and enlightenment where humanity collectively recognizes the folly of its ways, and abruptly changes course, no matter how much some people want this. Gradualism is pretty much always how change happens. It can be sped up to some degree (and right now, lots of institutions are trying to make that happen (and having some success)). But there will be no climate revolution/rapture/singularity that fixes everything.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:01 PM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
I certainly agree humanity won't "collectively recognizes the folly of its ways", but realistically incrementalism only adds renewables, increasing total consumption by Jevon's paradox, and cannot actually shit down coal plants, refineries, etc. We'll therefore hit real tipping points and mass starvation.
Actually emissions cuts require compulsion by governments, mostly native, but often by foreign. There are nations who're threatened much sooner, and who also hold the military tools to speed up ending growth and decarbonization, although doing this most effectively requires finesse too. At present there is no strong international pressure like this, so yes incrementalism shall continue.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:53 PM on October 31, 2022
Actually emissions cuts require compulsion by governments, mostly native, but often by foreign. There are nations who're threatened much sooner, and who also hold the military tools to speed up ending growth and decarbonization, although doing this most effectively requires finesse too. At present there is no strong international pressure like this, so yes incrementalism shall continue.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:53 PM on October 31, 2022
cannot actually shut down coal plants, refineries, etc
But...coal plants are actually shutting down? Am I wrong about that?
posted by mittens at 5:54 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
But...coal plants are actually shutting down? Am I wrong about that?
posted by mittens at 5:54 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
but realistically incrementalism only adds renewables, increasing total consumption by Jevon's paradox, and cannot actually shit down coal plants, refineries, etc. We'll therefore hit real tipping points and mass starvation.
Actually emissions cuts require compulsion by governments, mostly native, but often by foreign. There are nations who're threatened much sooner, and who also hold the military tools to speed up ending growth and decarbonization
I'm not sure what kind of "compulsion" you're talking about. Coal plants have been shutting down, at least in the U.S. And it's happened incrementally, as coal has become increasingly uneconomical. Certainly, pollution control requirements have played a role in making it uneconomical, and that's arguably a form of "compulsion". But also, other energy sources are just cheaper now.
Talk of the need for "compulsion" reads to me like a longing for an authoritarian climate transformation. And that strikes me as a subset of the climate rapture/revolution/singularity fantasy scenario.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 5:58 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Actually emissions cuts require compulsion by governments, mostly native, but often by foreign. There are nations who're threatened much sooner, and who also hold the military tools to speed up ending growth and decarbonization
I'm not sure what kind of "compulsion" you're talking about. Coal plants have been shutting down, at least in the U.S. And it's happened incrementally, as coal has become increasingly uneconomical. Certainly, pollution control requirements have played a role in making it uneconomical, and that's arguably a form of "compulsion". But also, other energy sources are just cheaper now.
Talk of the need for "compulsion" reads to me like a longing for an authoritarian climate transformation. And that strikes me as a subset of the climate rapture/revolution/singularity fantasy scenario.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 5:58 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Electricity production by source: China, India, lower-middle income, upper-middle income, world
We've outsourced emissions from high-income countries, which flattened electricity demand. We'd a retirement wave for coal plant built in the 1960s, thanks this flatter demand, environmental regulations aka coercion, and yes ready replacements by gas plants and renewables.
Yet supposedly, coal plants from the 80s could realistically run into the 2040s, which gives a nice leisurely (for us) timeline for adapting our demand to renewables, but not so leisurely if you live in Pakistan. In other words, we should expect many current coal plants continue operating despite renewables being cheaper either somewhere else, or even locally but not always available.
Any real solution should cut demand that does not fit renewables, like maybe imposing tariffs across many/most imports while also mostly outlawing night shifts, aka require that products be made during sunlight. And gasoline, meat etc. should be made very expensive too, all heavier handed government policies. We've so far avoided anything so painful, hence my comment about coercion by foreign governments.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:11 AM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
We've outsourced emissions from high-income countries, which flattened electricity demand. We'd a retirement wave for coal plant built in the 1960s, thanks this flatter demand, environmental regulations aka coercion, and yes ready replacements by gas plants and renewables.
Yet supposedly, coal plants from the 80s could realistically run into the 2040s, which gives a nice leisurely (for us) timeline for adapting our demand to renewables, but not so leisurely if you live in Pakistan. In other words, we should expect many current coal plants continue operating despite renewables being cheaper either somewhere else, or even locally but not always available.
Any real solution should cut demand that does not fit renewables, like maybe imposing tariffs across many/most imports while also mostly outlawing night shifts, aka require that products be made during sunlight. And gasoline, meat etc. should be made very expensive too, all heavier handed government policies. We've so far avoided anything so painful, hence my comment about coercion by foreign governments.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:11 AM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
An interesting thread: A few words about decoupling of CO2 emissions from GDP. (tldr: "some, not all, rich & highly industrialised countries are reducing emissions from insanely high levels to less insanely high, but still higher than most of the rest of the world [...] most other countries are on GDP growth and CO2 growth tracks which are very far from decoupling.")
posted by mittens at 5:55 AM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by mittens at 5:55 AM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
(oh god, i'm so dumb! i'd been thinking, hey, that tim sahay fellow from the article sounds interesting, i'll subscribe to his newsletter, which i did. only to realize, just a few minutes ago, that he's actually 70sBachchan on twitter, who i've been following for YEARS! he's so smart! his megathreads are so good! follow him!)
posted by mittens at 6:48 AM on November 4, 2022
posted by mittens at 6:48 AM on November 4, 2022
"The former BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin has spent his career talking to scientists. Now they’re telling him they’re scared of what they’re seeing"
(Actually not about the tipping points thread results)
posted by jeffburdges at 9:35 AM on November 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
(Actually not about the tipping points thread results)
posted by jeffburdges at 9:35 AM on November 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
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