The Montreal Protocol was a landmark environmental success
news.nationalgeographic.com
news.nationalgeographic.com
Not only did the lobbyists fail, they didn't get a single vote in the Senate:
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/15/science/treaty-on-ozone-is...
One important difference between the CFC ban and carbon emissions caps is the availability of inexpensive alternatives: HFCs.
In a twist of irony, though, these HFCs themselves appear to be contributing as greenhouse gasses:
http://research.noaa.gov/News/NewsArchive/LatestNews/TabId/6...
But if it's not used as a refrigerant, the exact same substance is labeled as HFC-134a. This is what is in most of those "compressed air" duster cans.
Giving up coal for electricity production would be roughly the same health benefit as everyone in the country giving up smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and eating fast food combined and save 10 billion dollars a year.
Imagine just the healthcare cost savings and the productivity gains alone from using cleaner power generation.
Phasing out coal power is a no brainer because there are plenty of alternatives to use, and renewable energies like solar will make our grid more resilient by making power generation more diffuse.
Electrifying cars is a longer-term issue. But if you can electrify cars, you can power them from cleaner sources. Even if you don't power them with cleaner sources, you'd still get less localized particulate pollution.
Whether or not you care about global warming or the planet itself, you'd get big benefits personally for your health and your family's health if we had cleaner power generation.
http://www.carbontracker.org/in-the-media/phasing-out-coal-p...
http://www.carbontracker.org/in-the-media/phasing-out-coal-p...
The issue is that they're mostly escaping market forces due to how they are regulated:
"“Merchant” coal owners operating in competitive wholesale markets have lost nearly half their value in the last two years amid fierce competition from cheap gas and renewables. However, two thirds of coal plants are “regulated” and receive government-approved prices which cover their costs. This means that consumers rather than shareholders pick up the bill for supporting uneconomic coal plants."
Once you start counting actual externalities you get numbers like $5 Trillion a year subsides for fossil fuels globally, as estimated by the IMF, 7% of global GDP:
http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sonew07...
After much kicking and screaming, they were forced to put precipitators on the stacks to remove the sulfuric acid.
Which they then sold for more money than it cost to add the precipitators.
Oops.
These people pollute and lie about even when they would make more money by not polluting.
A very important thing to note about the difference is that CFCs and HFCs are produced by the same corporations.
Du Pont fought tooth and nail against a CFC ban until it was shown that HFCs would work in the same applications, at which point they turned about face and supported it.
That's not it. There are no good alternatives to CO2 emitting fuels. So it became a whole anti-human thing where people are told "you are horrible, stop consuming, look at Africa they use less energy than you", etc, etc, etc.
All in order to make people feel guilty and thereby get people to reduce their usage. Once that happened there was a backlash, that backlash needed a target and the science was chosen.
But it did not start by distrusting science. You see people saying "why don't you trust science, it's the same science that gives you computers", and wondering why that doesn't convince anyone.
The reason it doesn't is because it has nothing to do with science, it has to do with making people feel guilty, about existing, about using things, about traveling, or having an A/C.
If I could give once piece of advice re CO2: Stop making people feel guilty about using energy. Just focus on finding alternatives, and playing up how awesome plentiful cheap, clean energy will be.
But completely stop the other side of things, it's not helping.
But you should feel guilty about using energy.
No, I absolutely refuse. I refuse to such a degree I'm not even going to ask you why I should feel guilty.
I have zero desire to live in that kind of world. The more energy we use the better the world becomes.
We should spend our effort on finding good sources of energy (i.e. cheap, and clean). Not on using less energy.
I don't mind spending some effort on efficiency, if it doesn't impact me (for example more insulation, but zero desire to drive less).
I'm as anti-judgy and anti-bad argument as anyone but this seems a bit silly. Yes people are awful at convincing other people of things, but it's entirely unreasonable to expect anyone to package up knowledge in a way that soothes peoples' feelings.
Most of us just aren't buying what you're selling, that's all. From an energy standpoint, we want a certain amount of work done. We don't care if the energy generation is CO2 producing or not. Make it cheaper and more plentiful. We want to live in the future, not the stone age.
Cheaper and more plentiful? Sure, those are helpful to talk about. Whether the government should be subsidizing particular things? Also useful.
"Making me feel guilty" or the science? Probably not productive.
No it did not. It said "stop using guilt to try to change behavior".
People hate that, and it turned this subject in a political issue (which it should never have become) instead of the engineering issue it should have been.
Guilt -> backlash -> people reject science. That sounds an awful lot like you're saying science would drive progress but people aren't changing behavior because "you're" making them feel guilty.
It's not _just_ an engineering issue, but if you believe it is why on earth are you contributing to the politics?
Let's play "trolley problem".
There is a switch in your house, as there is in every house in the City Of Hypothesis. It has two settings. "Safe" and "Unsafe". Every day you have to put a dollar in the machine or it trips back to "Unsafe". Every day, if less than (say) 1% of the population put a dollar in the machine, a random person in the city falls down dead. Nobody is quite sure what would happen if we tried to do away with the switches, but everyone thinks it would be terrible.
Do you have a moral obligation to put a dollar in the machine? Sometimes? Ever?
Does it matter how big the percentage is? At 1% I suspect enough people would do it every day that it would never be a problem. What about 10%? 50%?
(People have suggested centrally monitoring the switches, but this has been rejected on grounds of privacy. You don't know who's setting the switch unless you look in their house.)
It's a science and engineering problem, not a moral one. The religious fervor around much of the environmental movement (complete with significant social virtue signaling) turns me off both the person and the message by association.
I do think it's a little short sighted to the ignore moral/philosophical implications of anything that effects large groups of people. But it doesnt really matter if you can stay reasonable The kneejerk "don't tell me what to feel guilty about or I'll do the opposite" reactions are pretty funny, though.
Unfortunately, communism-induced disaster in 1986 and then more recent Fukushima failure have had created an opinion split in our society on the use of nuclear energy; there are countries like Germany which banned building of new nuclear plants because of that.
But sure, it is not hard to not to be communists and not to build nuclear plants in the zone of continious seismic activity.
Have you heard of Flibe Energy [1]? They are working on LFTR technologies. The founder (Kirk Sorensen) is an outspoken nuclear energy advocate, I'd definitely recommend checking out his work/lectures [2].
If it was a non-profit/federal program that could do things properly you'd have far less material that you had to bury in the desert.
The idea was that after they dropped the bombs they'd simply fly around over enemy territory just to spew radioactive garbage all over the country.
If we started planning a new nuclear reactor in the US today, by the time it completed, a wind farm with 3+ days of storage attached will be cheaper than that nuclear plant.
Nuclear's days are done. We could have avoided massive amounts of CO2 emissions if we had been able to build them in the 80s (which is a pig-headed and poorly innovating industry's fault just as much as anti-nukers), but we can't go back in time unfortunately.
Nuclear isn't done, it's just having a PR problem.
What I was told was the case was that a modern reactor was incapable of failing in the way that Chernobyl failed. And that all modern reactors were designed to fail safe, so even if things did go awry, the reaction would stop because of structural constraints. Then Fukushima failed, and the story changed; that particular reactor was not designed for the particular disaster that struck, and did not fail safe.
I live near three nuclear plants (Indian Point, Tom's River, and Limerick), all of which are huge producers of cheap power for the grid. But what assurance do I have that these plants are not susceptible to a catastrophic failure due to some unexpected event? The answer is that I do not have the information to judge, but I have no reason to believe that they are resistant to local low-probability events than the residents around Fukushima did.
If someone were to try to build a new nuclear plant anywhere near me, I would oppose it as much as I could because I no longer have faith that the engineers designing these plants have taken sufficient precautions.
• living in an apartment in a city
• eating less meat
• getting to work via bike, walking, public transport, or telecommuting
• using renewably-sourced energy for heating and cooling
a lot of people could cut out the vast majority of their personal emissions and live very comfortably. The above changes also mean far, far less land dedicated to asphalt, which means we can leave more land in its natural state (or rewild it if need be).
It's sad to kill Earth no matter what, but it's especially sad that we're destroying the world not to keep 7 billion people alive, but to keep one or two billion in profound decadence.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/every-time-you-fly-you-...
If there were a decent internet connection and I could work remotely I wouldn't mind a slow container ship for international travel.
Never mind that it's not practical, it's also simply not moral. Rich people in the west probably could and should use less energy, but something like 3/5ths of the world are entering the global middle class, and it's just wrong that we sit in out Teslas and tell them to forego the comfortable high-energy lifestyles that we've benefitted from.
Statistical morality is not something that humans or even moral philosophers are very good at, but that doesn't mean it can be ignored. Statements like "the probability of a flood exacerbated by sea level rise causing X million people to die in Bangladesh goes up by Y for every liter of gasoline you use". Y is very small but it's not zero. Does that mean that if some disaster happens everyone who uses gasoline is very slightly culpable? It's difficult to talk about.
> forego the comfortable high-energy lifestyles
One interpretation of the IPCC reports might be that "if all 7bn+ people on earth use American levels of energy from fossil fuels then the average temperature will rise by an amount which will cause massive crop failures". That is, it might be impossible as a matter of physics for everyone to have comfortable, cheap high-fossil-energy lifestyles while still growing enough to eat.
It's better than our "solution" of not good enough incremental progress on reduction and not good enough incremental increases in renewable energy. Neither of those baby steps deal with the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere.
Well, yes, that's the trillion dollar question. How do you get it funded?
Change in behaviour is not what humans are good at. Proof: "Thou shalt not kill".
Just launch the damn solar shade already!
WHY is it political? It's because instead of dealing with this as an engineering problem we turned it into a human behavior issue.
It's not about the tone of the message - there should be no anti-human message at all.
The tone is irrelevant, just stop telling people to use less energy. Instead meet their need with better energy.
I don't even know who you are talking about that is placing the blame for all of this on the consumers, if you have some specifics I would like to know because I would like to chastise them too. Being energy conscious and trying to increase efficiency where possible at the consumer level is part of the solution but most people have no choice at all in where they get their energy (my state doesn't even have the option of purchasing renewables, I have to use renewable energy certificates if I want to do anything with my actual power bill to help). In fact, my power company has a stranglehold over much of the Southeast and many of the state governments that allows them to continually increase their rates while also not offering many renewable energy alternatives.
You need an alternative! Telling people to not use the product (conserve) will NOT work.
All those UN treaties about reducing this or that are a total waste of time, and are just there to make people feel like we are doing something.
They should do one thing, and one thing only: Fund research on alternatives.
(By people who oppose government investment into renewable research.)
Hmm, without the protocol, the average daytime temperature would be (287K)*0.25 = 71.75 K hotter [1]. Phew :) I wonder what the article is trying to say.
[1] Using an average surface temperature of 14 degrees Celcius.
"By 2070 the world would have been 4.5 degrees F (2.5 degrees Celsius) hotter, a level most experts agree is disastrously high"
So, I assume the actual increase the estimated for a situation without the treaty, in 2017, is somewhere between 0 and 2.5 C.
Perhaps the 25% meant that the increase would have been 25% bigger than the increase we actually had?
Welcome to Australia.
Then I got to Australia and UV is 13 or 14!
The US EPA scale runs to 11 [1].
Yep. I actually wish the ozone hole was over a significantly populous region - maybe people would give more of a shit about the stuff we pump into the atmosphere then.
We have to be careful with what we say and how we say it - advocates for action on climate change need to be accurate most of the time, climate deniers only need to sow doubt by latching onto mistakes we make and using that the try and cast doubt on everything we say.
I can echo the "sorry from the USA" sentiment though, I'm very embarrassed by our actions.