Gas would be a huge ecological improvement to coal. Nuclear power is too expensive and much of the costs are externalized. It will only be able to compete if you weight co2 beyond any other influence.
I think this is mainly US propaganda to be honest. The pipeline isn't needed for a long time to meet demands.
Normally I don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, but we need to ramp down emissions quickly and natural gas doesn’t get us near enough to the goal line. This seems like we need to be going for bust on clean energy, but it will be expensive.
> I think this is mainly US propaganda to be honest.
How do you figure? My post didn’t have anything positive to say about the US (because for some reason it reduces one’s credibility to acknowledge anything positive that happens in the US), but only that the result seems to be desirable.
We cannot ramp down co2 emission to zero. The co2 balance of building nuclear power plants will only amortize when we already hit 1,5°C warming and it is questionable if it helps at all considering the unknowns about operating periods and other influences.
Overall if we just look at Germany it wouldn't even matter, the nation is too small, it wouldn't even make a dent. It is still necessary to reduce emissions, but if you zero them all, it would be less than 2% of overall world wide emissions, even if it is on place 6. Not for long though and it will be completely dwarfed by the US, China and India.
Every nation is saying this, including US pointing to China. China is then saying they use less per capita and started producing CO2 decades after western nations.
Congratulations, we're not doing anything collectively. I'm sure that'll excuse us to the inhabitants of earth in 50-100 years.
China's emissions are skyrocketing, while already being drastically greater than the US or EU. While the US and EU emissions have been declining gradually.
If you have 1.4 billion people, you don't get to have the same (high) per capita emissions output as a nation 1/4 your population size. The world didn't force China to have 1.4b people, it's their responsibility. The fair target isn't parity per capita with the US, it's China being allowed to have no more than 1/4 the per capita emissions of the US. And that's still a terrible number, the US is the drop dead line for where we don't want other large countries going beyond. The problem is China is already double that and heading a lot higher yet.
We don't have to urgently care if Estonia were to have the highest per capita output of emissions, they can't destroy the planet with their emissions no matter what they do. China can due to their population. It would be a different context if China's emissions were declining.
With regards to China's CO2 emissions for example, how much more dire can it get?
The relevant metric is the rate of change of emission--are we putting more or less carbon into the atmosphere year over year, and by how much? China is continuing to increase its emissions year over year, while the US emissions are falling (though not quickly enough).
Another interesting metric is the consumptive emissions--how much emissions are generated from trade (e.g., when an American buys something produced in China, the carbon involved in manufacturing that item is emitted in China, but the American benefits from the pollution as well). I actually expected the US to have much higher consumptive emissions relative to China, but it looks like the consumptive emissions pretty closely track the productive emissions while being just a bit higher at 5.77 billion t/yr (falling gradually since 2005), while China's are at 9.86 billion t/yr and climbing.
On the note of consumptive emissions, the United States should not only implement its own carbon pricing scheme, but it (along with other rich countries) should also implement a border adjustment so countries like China don't enjoy unfair competitive advantages because they pollute. This would incentivize China to reduce its Co2 or suffer heavy economic losses. It would also increase manufacturing in countries that are more responsible.
That said, to your point, the Democratic Party pays lip service to environmental concerns (the current $3.5 T budget bill is making expensive token gestures to the environment which will cost polluters virtually nothing) and the Republican Party isn't even doing that. So yes, America has a lot of room for improvement (but at least America isn't arguing that we should be allowed to increase our emissions, contrary to Chinese arguments).
You guys just signed the Paris Agreement this year.
>cumulative contributions isn't useful for anything
It's the reason we're in the predicament we're in.
>long before climate science existed or before technology existed anywhere to reduce emissions.
You've known about it since the 80s. You haven't reduced emissions since then. Technology has existed for a long time to reduce emissions.
I said this twice up thread but you were unsatisfied and continued your anti-American rant. Whatever, I'm glad that we agree now.
You're back-pedaling. I was explicitly critical of US climate policy. My two claims have consistently been: "The US isn't doing enough" and "the US is still doing better than China, which continues to increase its emission rate". You brought up cumulative numbers as a rebuttal to those claims.
This is why it’s sad to decommission existing plants, but I don’t think there’s any legitimate question as to whether nuclear is harmful. It’s a pretty well-understood quantity, but I’m not sure which “factors” you’re describing.
> Overall if we just look at Germany it wouldn't even matter, the nation is too small, it wouldn't even make a dent. It is still necessary to reduce emissions, but if you zero them all, it would be less than 2% of overall world wide emissions, even if it is on place 6. Not for long though and it will be completely dwarfed by the US, China and India.
No Germany alone won’t make a dent directly, but it can model leadership. It’s a lot easier for other countries to get on board when someone has paved the way.
Nuclear has some advantages for base loads in some scenarios, but it cannot really compete with renewables down the road.
Sadly, I assume you're correct.
> Nuclear has some advantages for base loads in some scenarios, but it cannot really compete with renewables down the road.
To be clear, I would love it if we could power everything off of solar and wind, but we still don't have any scalable technology for storing weeks worth of energy which means that solar and wind cannot be used for base load generation. Hydro simply doesn't have the capacity. Nuclear is the only clean energy option for base load for the foreseeable future. Hoping for a storage tech breakthrough in the coming decades isn't a plan; we should really be investing in nuclear and storage in case one of those two don't pan out.
Even today, there are some interesting Small Modular Reactor (SMRs) which allow nuclear plants to be built more quickly, safely, compactly, and efficiently than traditional nuclear plants. We should build some of these and iterate on them while simultaneously investing in solving the storage problem.
Why would we need to store weeks worth of energy? Wouldn't a more realistic amount be just a couple of days, or even less?
Also the environmental and economical cost and waste management.
Nuclear plant construction is too expensive, sure. Running existing nuclear plants instead of shutting them down before EoL is not too expensive. What we are talking about in Germany is the latter.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-ge...
> Even today, there are some interesting Small Modular Reactor (SMRs) which allow nuclear plants to be built more quickly, safely, compactly, and efficiently than traditional nuclear plants. We should build some of these and iterate on them while simultaneously investing in solving the storage problem.