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What might also happen is some sort of "risk compensation": the fossil fuel industry, politicians, and regulators will relax their stance against fossil fuel extraction because "CC takes the CO2 off the atmosphere" - like they did with plastics - and when we notice it, the net emission of CO2 per year will never decrease.
Those are real dangers.
Keep the oil in the ground.
* effective carbon capture, a theorectical notion of which no examples have yet been demonstrated, and
* performative aka theatrical carbon capture as demonstrated at scale by several LNG companies to date.
It's sensible to oppose ineffectual carbon capture that achieves nothing of substance that is used for appearance, for excusing more of the same old fossil fuel usage expansion, and for pimping for carbon credit tax cuts.
I agree that effective, at scale, carbon capture is highly desirable.
I look forward to seeing some in practice.
Yeah, we can spend money “developing renewables” now. But we are basically out of time already. Nuclear is something we could have deployed at the national grid scale 50 years ago, which would’ve been impossible with renewables. Now, anything we do—barring a major advance in carbon capture—will be too little too late.
Even as of 2022, Germany gets only 40% of total power consumption from wind, solar, and hydro. It will take Germany until probably 2030 or so to get to the same place France was at in 1990.
Love it how the only feasible way forward from where we stand now, aka massive investments in renewables of all kinds, is always countered by what we should have done decades ago, usually by die hard nuclear fan boys. Just a very lazy way of argueing with 20/20 hindsight.
1. Promoting a global cooling theory to prime the public with a theory that’s easily discredited so that people think “those scientists don’t know anything”
2. Funding greenpeace and other environmentalist groups that were anti nuclear
3. Funding politicians who promoted an anti nuclear message.
It is a bit of a conspiracy theory to link each individual point together into a narrative, but I believe #1 and #2 are generally known and have evidence for while #3 is probably a conjecture on my part.
Anyway, global warming was a known issue since the 1970s. Heck - I did a report for geography class on how big a problem global warming would be in the mid 90s.
Regardless, I’ll counter and say that nuclear is still cheaper than solar which is about competitive only if you exclude storage. So from that perspective, combined with Whrite’s law, bucket nuclear is still the better investment option. The only challenge is we’ve killed our nuclear manufacturing industry so hard there’s going to be an extra cost to spin it up again.
Edit:
Nuclear is more expensive than wind and solar, based on auction prices for projects since 2017 (?). Nuclear net capacity gains are miniscule for decades now, and will for decades. Most new reactors replace old obes. At the same time glovally more wind and solar capacity is installed in a month than nuclear in more than a year (look up the numbers for yourself).
Anti-nuclear movements were a result from Chernobyl, and they were, violently at times, oppossed by govenrments. The reason why not more goes into juclear projects is easy: the ROI is too low.
The prices I refer to so, are real world costs and feed prices for real world projects. Unless you believe people calculating those professionally don't know what they do, I hope we can agree that the are correct and can serve as valid basis for comparisons and discusion.
Almost every place that goes all in on renewables inevitably uses fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro to backfill the baseload demand (and usually fossil fuels since nuclear has very few projects and hydro is very regional and maxed out wherever practical).
What other factors? Solar variation accounts for a much smaller change over the span of the decades long solar cycle. The total solar output hitting the Earth doesn't really change. What does change is how much of that heat is retained.
What other extra planetary events are you referring to? Meteorites? The numbers look high, but the total mass (~15000 tons/yr) is miniscule compared to what volcanos produce.
Are you talking about any other specific "extra planetary event" that affects the climate?
It boils down to a simple problem with two avenues of action.
Problem: climate will change, it always has.
Solution A: control the climate.
Solution B: adapt.
Which to you think is honestly achievable?
If the latter, well, I don't know what to tell you. I showed you the numbers. Not sure what else I can do.
If the former, that is a matter of opinion. Humanity has overcome problems before, and it is my opinion that we will solve this one too.
> It boils down to a simple problem with two avenues of action.
That is a false dichotomy. Depending on how things play out, it can also be a blend of the two.
> Which to you think is honestly achievable?
Both? We are already changing things at an accelerating rate and will continue to do so. Fossil fuels are getting increasingly phased out. It won't happen overnight, but it is happening. There is already exponential adoption of solar (and hopefully nuclear in the coming years) way beyond estimates from just a decade ago.
Yes, humanity will adapt. But it also gets a lot easier to adapt if we reduce how much we are making it worse.
What? No, of course you're not allowed to try more than one.
Honestly all those non-arson factors that cause oxidation means it's pretty brain dead to assume me setting a fire had anything to do with it. You're probably just going to have to live with all your stuff being on fire, just a hazard of living in a oxygen-having environment.
At this rate, we're going to kill each other fighting for scarcer resources, and the rest of us the planet's going to finish off.
But hey, I'm sure you know better than all the morons.
What part of your anatomy did you pull that silly strawman from?
But I do assert the the current change in global climate parameters as observed over the past 50 years are overwhelmingly due in toto to human activity driven changes to the atmosphere.
I catagorically reject that extra planetary changes account for more than a tiny percentage of those changes.
I catagorically reject that changes in heat from the core has had any significant effect during that time period.