[HN Gopher] Europe's energy crisis is about to go global as gas ...
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Europe's energy crisis is about to go global as gas prices soar
Author : OJFord
Score : 219 points
Date : 2021-09-27 11:05 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| EricE wrote:
| Bet more than a few in Germany are going to regret shutting down
| nuclear....
| Shadonototra wrote:
| France pushed for nuclear energy for decades, only to get pushed
| down by "allies", now they will all get their juicy contracts
| with American's companies.. what a sad story
| Proven wrote:
| Thanks to climatists and various government busybodies.
|
| President Biden has been particularly effective in making energy
| less affordable and more expensive.
|
| CLIMATE CHANGES!!!
| woodgrainz wrote:
| https://archive.ph/NSmoA
| finiteseries wrote:
| The rest of the world minus North America*, whose main problem
| seems to be selling too much of it!
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| The USA imports about 3.7 million b/d in 2021.
|
| Russia is now the second largest supplier at 844,000 (May
| 2021).
| finiteseries wrote:
| This crisis is about natural gas, not oil, as described in
| the article.
|
| The USA imports ~0% of its natural gas from Russia, >98% from
| Canada, all dwarfed by its exports though making it one of
| the LNG sellers Asia and Europe are turning to, as described
| in the article.
|
| That's assuming the DoE doesn't at some point need to
| prioritize domestic needs over exports like Russia did
| however, as described in the article.
|
| My comment was also about North America, which includes
| Mexico and critically Canada. But if you'd like more about
| the US, here's a nice recent overview of its natural gas
| trade: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49156
| danans wrote:
| > The USA imports ~0% of its natural gas from Russia, >98%
| from Canada, all dwarfed by its exports
|
| Be that as it may, natural gas is a globally priced
| commodity [1], so US consumers won't be shielded from
| prices increases, unless the government decides to
| subsidize it.
|
| 1. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/natural-gas
| golemiprague wrote:
| Maybe moving away from coal was a bit premature? there are pretty
| good technologies this days so even coal energy can be pretty
| clean. We should stop being afraid of some climate speculations
| and start to deal with the current problems we have. Everybody
| trying to hide it but inflation is raging and this will make
| things much worst, at the end of the day it will also damage the
| environment and make global warming worst because poor countries
| will make it their last priority and we are all becoming poorer
| with this crazy inflation.
| malchow wrote:
| Natural gas from trash is undergoing a rapid growth period:
|
| https://www.archaeaenergy.com
|
| Details:
|
| https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_628372108fa37c6495a97d...
|
| As ever, the cornucopians will win and the Malthusians will lose
| !
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The US has long been in the dark ages for this. Northern Europe
| uses a lot of "district heating" [1], which often is trash
| burning (or other renewable source) plants used to heat water
| and distribute heated water to residences for area heating and
| hot water purposes. It's a classic example of having subsidies
| for traditional/polluting energy and having very few subsidies
| for newer forms of cleaner energy.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
| lettergram wrote:
| It's self created...
|
| Nuclear is a great option; unfortunately renewables need a high
| amount of storage capacity AND expensive other minerals AND space
| AND particular environments.
|
| That being said, renewables are great if you can set them up. For
| instance, I'm building a hydroelectric & solar system on my farm.
| That does not mean I think it's for everywhere.
|
| Nuclear, Coal and Natural Gas are going to be necessary for
| northern climates and many regions due to environmental factors.
| qayxc wrote:
| It takes at least a decade to build a modern nuclear power
| plant from planning to regular operation.
|
| A modern reactor block has a net capacity of about 1.3 GW. Last
| year, 1.4 GW net have been installed in just wind power in
| Germany. Sure that's not a good comparison, since both over-
| provisioning and storage have to be accounted for, but it just
| goes to show how quickly alternatives can be scaled up (side
| note, the newly installed capacity in 2017 was 5.3 GW).
|
| The problem with nuclear power is logistics and time. There's
| only so many specialists for planning and building nuclear
| facilities plus most countries simply cannot afford to have
| more than dozen or so under construction at any given time.
|
| The countries that'd benefit the most from cheap and reliable
| electricity ae incidentally countries that can neither afford
| nor operate nuclear power for various reasons. That's not just
| political instability and lack of expertise, but also
| geography. You need stable ground and cooling, so dry regions
| with seasonal flooding are off the table.
|
| Not to mention the enormous amount of additional
| infrastructure, from substations to stable grids. Oh, and
| nuclear reactors are crap at load following so unless you have
| substantial baseload (e.g. heavy industry), you'd need
| somewhere to dump excess electricity.
| cm2187 wrote:
| > Not to mention the enormous amount of additional
| infrastructure, from substations to stable grids. Oh, and
| nuclear reactors are crap at load following so unless you
| have substantial baseload (e.g. heavy industry), you'd need
| somewhere to dump excess electricity.
|
| That's not true. Modern nuclear power plants can move at 5%
| of full load per minute up and down. France is doing load
| following country wide with its nuclear reactors.
|
| In fact the French must be laughing at this energy debacle
| with their 75% share of nuclear energy.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Nuclear is a great option
|
| It's not, for a multitude of reasons:
|
| - New ordinary reactor projects (EPR) are ridiculously
| overrunning timelines and budgets, they are putting Berlin's
| infamous BER airport to shame
|
| - New revolutionary concepts (MSR) are at the moment vaporware,
| not to mention the unsolved proliferation issues
|
| - Europe (unlike the US, Australia and Russia) doesn't have
| remote places to safely dump all the nuclear garbage
|
| - Most of Africa and South America are politically too unstable
| to do anything involving nuclear. Last thing unstable narco
| countries or war zones need is to worry about terrorists
| snatching up nuclear material and building dirty bombs
|
| - Most of the world's uranium production comes from
| dictatorships and has intense environmental concerns
| surrounding it, making it an ethically questionable fuel source
|
| - Even our existing nuclear plants are _plagued_ with
| mismanagement, cost-cutting and accidents (see e.g. the
| infamous Sellafield plant in UK), not to mention they are
| _extremely_ old. Many have been placed in geologically
| questionable areas, further increasing the risk of a repeat of
| a Fukushima-style incident.
| Jensson wrote:
| > - Europe (unlike the US, Australia and Russia) doesn't have
| remote places to safely dump all the nuclear garbage
|
| You mean if you exclude places like northern Scandinavia,
| Greenland and Svalbard?
| qayxc wrote:
| Greenland hardly counts as "Europe" - that's mostly an
| historical curiosity.
|
| And Svalbard - sure! - let's dump our garbage in one of the
| few remaining somewhat pristine Arctic islands. Brilliant!
|
| As for other places in northern Scandinavia, ask the
| natives whether they're cool (pun not intended) with
| becoming the dumping ground for the rest of the continent.
| cm2187 wrote:
| And you don't need a remote place to store nuclear
| material. You need a stable geological stratum.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| Lets just blame it all on brexit, it's much easier!
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| After reading this article, I am now informed that there has been
| a price rise in natural gas. My next question is why? Demand must
| be up, or supply must be down, or both. What's driving the
| changes in supply and demand? For example, this article says
| China has imported 2x as much LNG as last year, but still doesn't
| have enough. How is that even possible?
| bumbada wrote:
| It is a complex issue. Usually gas is extracted as a byproduct
| of coal or even oil. No coal being extracted, no gas. No
| supply, big demand. Prices go up.
|
| Also gas tankers have waited for years on the sea without
| entering port because of COVID. Lots of companies have gone
| under and the supply has been disrupted.
|
| It takes months for a gas tanker to move and global transport
| right now is chaos.
| kragen wrote:
| [citation needed]
| taylodl wrote:
| Why? Colder-than-average winter last year, warmer-than-average
| summer this year. Demand is holding steady, or even increasing,
| and Texas shut down supply during their freeze.
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-the-natural-gas-...
| gwright wrote:
| https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-9-20-renewable...
| sschueller wrote:
| I have read that Russia had to use a lot for them selves this
| summer because it was so cold this year.
| dtech wrote:
| Several reasons are given in the article. Hydro and wind are
| down, nuclear is being phased out, coal plants are converted to
| gas, among others.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I doubt the amount of megawatts add up to this simplistic
| conclusion of this being because of renewables failing us or
| Europe abandoning nuclear. Plenty of wind here in Germany in
| the last few weeks. Hydro in Norway is a thing but it's
| actually not that big of a portion of the grid across Europe
| and the output is fairly stable. Nuclear has been on the
| decline for many years but not that many plants actually shut
| down recently. It certainly pales in comparison to the amount
| of wind/solar coming online every year. Coal decline is much
| more significant since the amount of that disappearing from
| grids is a lot higher in recent years.
|
| The amount of gas usage for electricity production isn't
| actually increasing that much either because coal capacity is
| actually mostly being replaced with renewable energy instead.
| There are maybe a few new gas plants coming online recently
| but overall the proportion of gas is barely growing in the
| European electricity market (unlike renewables). E.g. Germany
| has actually seen a slight decrease in the overall amount of
| gas consumed over the last 20 years or so:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/703657/natural-gas-
| consu...
|
| However, the problem is not shortages or blackouts but high
| prices of gas specifically. There are no blackouts in Europe
| right now. Just people getting frustrated with having to pay
| more for their energy.
|
| Partially the high prices are because of a global shift in
| demand and partially this is because of e.g. CO2 emission
| pricing, which is a thing in Europe. But a big part is also
| that Covid lockdown restrictions have been lifted in the last
| few months and economic activity and associated energy
| consumption is a lot higher all over the world. Large parts
| of Europe use gas for heating much more than for electricity.
| Gas shortages would be a problem for that reason
| specifically. So, I expect Russia will have a great year for
| gas exports as they will be able to charge a premium.
|
| This report has a nice summary of the energy market in Europe
| last month: https://aleasoft.com/beyond-price-records-august-
| good-month-...
|
| Wind in Germany was actually improving during August. Solar
| was pretty decent too though July was a bit off compared to
| previous years. It's autumn now so that usually means more
| wind and less solar. Lots of rain too. Good news for wind and
| hydro in other words. I'm not aware of any seasonally unusual
| drought or low wind predictions for the next few months.
| belorn wrote:
| It is important to note that construction of wind farms is
| not down. 2020 had an increase in capacity of 20 GW with $31
| billion of investment in offshore wind alone.
| Macha wrote:
| It's less about quantity of wind plants being built, but a
| unusually long period of quiet weather has led to output
| being down significantly from those already in place at
| time where gas was the only option to pick up the slack.
| imtringued wrote:
| Raw renewable share:
|
| Month August,September
|
| 2021: 52%,40%
|
| 2020: 48%,44%
|
| 2019: 46%,48%
|
| 2018: 38%,41%
|
| The thing about gas is that you can store it. If August
| produces too much you can use less gas in August and use it
| in September. If you take both months they average to 46%
| which is the same as 2020. 10% less renewables in this
| specific month isn't enough to cause price explosions
| especially when the previous month had been at an all time
| high.
|
| Data: https://energy-
| charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...
| Ekaros wrote:
| I have understood that storing gas and even reducing
| production by a lot is not exactly simple process at scales
| we use it. Same goes for oil.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Sure, but I would expect those to be part of forecasted long
| term trends, and thus to be priced in gradually. I wouldn't
| expect an acute shortage to result from these reasons. (I
| mean clearly my expectations are wrong given what is
| happening but this doesn't match my prior understanding of
| how things are supposed to work.)
|
| I wonder if this type of event will presage a shift back to
| nuclear for Europe. Nuclear and renewable are basically
| Europe's only options for energy independence. A price rise
| like this might make them rethink their current fuel mix.
| jdhn wrote:
| Unless all the heat in Europe switches over to electric
| powered, you're still going to have natgas crunches from
| time to time during the winter.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Supply of gas isn't endangered currently, on the
| contrary. There are parties competing to sell ressources.
|
| What drives energy prices in central Europe are
| investments in changing the infrastructure to renewable.
| Yes, that isn't cheap. But not really a crisis in the
| common sense. Some people would like to see the gas
| prices inflated perhaps.
| nicoburns wrote:
| This will happen eventually for climate change reasons,
| but I think it's going to take a while.
| fmajid wrote:
| The French government is massively subsidizing
| conversions from oil or gas furnaces to heat pumps, and
| their electricity is majority nuclear.
| fsslrisrchr wrote:
| " I wouldn't expect an acute shortage to result from these
| reasons. (I mean clearly my expectations are wrong given
| what is happening but this doesn't match my prior
| understanding of how things are supposed to work.)"
|
| Coal is actually pretty important to smooth out energy.
| There was something fascinating I learned during the Texas
| outage last year. At the time I was privy to private
| exchange emails among power engineers.
|
| One engineer explained that one of the problems they were
| having is that, with the closing of coal plants, the
| reliability of the grid goes down. And with a very good
| reason: You can store a massive pile of coal next to the
| plant for (basically) free [1].
|
| oil, by comparison, is expensive to store, natgas more
| expensive still. What happens is, in the winter, the
| pressure of the natgas lines goes down as consumers drive
| up their thermostats. Therefore, natgas plants can't
| deliver the power required _beacuse the gas isn 't there_.
| So, in the N. East of the USA where there are nasty cold
| snaps, power operators have piles of coal ready to be
| burned in coal plants.
|
| Most of the power is still from natgas throughout the year,
| but coal bails you out when it gets super cold (note, the
| midwest doesn't need this because it's always nastily cold
| there -> the natgas lines are built accordingly).
|
| [1] Some, having read the popular press explanations of the
| outage, will complain that renewables delivered 90% of what
| was requested. That's true, but only half of the story. The
| 90% figure was a _de-rated_ amount of energy [2]. Basically
| dispatchers knew that renewables weren 't going to deliver
| and adjusted their predictions accordingly. The blackout
| happened, therefore, because the power source that was
| expected to show up and deliver in this situation tripped
| over itself. There's no doubt natgas can deliver - it does
| every winter in the North - but it can't if it's not
| implemented properly, or if there's not enough gas pressure
| in the lines to deal with a massive sure.
|
| [2] None of this is meant to be a dismissal of renewable
| energy. Texas leads in renewables, and why shouldn't they?
| It's a resource that (can) cleans up our environment. But i
| power we can't treat things like panaceas and have to be
| realistic about where we stand.
| sentinel wrote:
| About coal: 2030 seems to be the deadline to close all coal
| burning power plants in Europe. Every year more coal power
| plants will be shut down. This year was a deadline year for
| some countries in the EU.
|
| It was all a long term plan, but poorly executed.
|
| Nuclear would be great. I'm not sure how many reactors are
| gen 2 or gen 3. Gen 2 reactors are still risky.
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| > thus to be priced in gradually
|
| well, then, it is priced in, maybe just not that gradually
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Because China isn't importing coal from Australia
| gego wrote:
| Entrepreneurs sold off supplies and want importers to offer
| more for cheap...
| eptcyka wrote:
| Coal plants are being shut down and there is a drive to resume
| economic activity (or even push harder to catch up) since covid
| is being managed better and there's plenty of pent-up demand to
| meet. That's how I see it, at least.
| kasperni wrote:
| Nothing conclusive, but some believe it is Russia squeezing the
| prices [1][2]. In order to get Nord Stream 2 started.
|
| [1] https://www.ft.com/content/5ec6b18d-c855-408d-acad-
| cb5779d10...
|
| [2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/us-blame-
| russia...
| masswerk wrote:
| However, another super power promised that it would satisfy
| any demands. So that can't be it... ;-)
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| Russia fulfilled each and every contract, as said in above
| mentioned articles
| jeltz wrote:
| That does not contradict that theory. If they fulfilled
| their end the more reason to put pressure on Germany.
| croes wrote:
| Russia delivered what was ordered and the price is way
| lower than the current one.
|
| "Gazprom Germania is keeping a low profile when asked
| about the reasons for the largely empty Rehden storage
| facility. Injection and withdrawal volumes were carried
| out by customers, a spokesman said in response to a
| query. "Therefore, we also cannot forecast how the
| development will look in the future."
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| Pressure Germany WITH WHAT exactly? I failed to see how
| one could pressure Germany, and WHY Germans won't report
| that "pressure"
| throwaway832939 wrote:
| Just passing on what I've read...
|
| They want Germany to fire up Nord Stream 2, from which
| point onwards they can say "as seen in 2021, we can't
| meet your needs without it" and it never turns off again
|
| https://archive.is/Dt0FH
| sergeykish wrote:
| Regarding Europe - Russian Federation wants additional leverage
| against Ukraine, to crush its economy. Recently Putin has
| claimed Ukraine transit would remain if it would disarm itself.
| That's words of occupant country to occupied country (15
| thousands died, 1.5 millions have lost home).
|
| RF has built NS2, purely political project, and now wants to
| certify it.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also oil price is normalizing after period of low demand which
| drove it down. This might not be big impact directly, but it
| also affects in general.
|
| And winter is coming, which means more demand for energy in
| general and less supply from solar specially.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Germany has a mechanism to couple gas prices to oil prices, a
| contractual requirement to appease corporations building pipe
| lines.
| zz865 wrote:
| Will EU ever allow fracking? I guess its still easier to import
| fracked gas from other countries. Blessed to have $$$ and keep
| the EU environment clean.
| BenoitP wrote:
| https://archive.fo/2HDlM
| axus wrote:
| Is archive.fo different from archive.is?
| gego wrote:
| ...actually there should be no shortage... It's the invisible
| hand of the market... it was just that those who should have
| stored gas for winter use sold it of because of demand and
| prices- and are now trying to pressure Exporters to offer
| additional gas for cheap to fill up their tanks again... and yes,
| with North Stream 2 completed, Russia could benefit from this,
| too...
|
| So through gas market liberalisation it got very difficult to
| keep reserves against the will of entrepreneurs, who decided that
| their profit is more important than freezing EU citizens. Now
| they want to distract from that by blaming Exporters and mainly
| Russia, who delivered on time and the agreed upon amount, for not
| offering more cheap gas under market value... Peak Capitalism ftw
| qeternity wrote:
| The difference is that under capitalism, these types of
| resource shortages are so rare that we all freak when they
| occur. The rest of the 99.99% of the time, commodities have
| never been as cheap or as plentiful.
|
| Under every other system, people just came to expect shortages
| of basic essentials like food and fuel.
|
| It may not be perfect, but it's the least worst system we have.
| sentinel wrote:
| I've been following this story a bit and here's what I've
| noticed:
|
| 1. The causes seem to vary depending on who you ask. There seems
| to be a combination of CO2 taxes going up, a hard winter last
| year that diminished the strategic reserves, incompetent
| (corrupt?) gov't institutions that didn't replenish them in
| summer this year, combined with a general trend of relying more
| on gas and less on coal (and nuclear to some extent).
|
| 2. The EU came down with a heavy hand on coal producing
| countries... which does make sense, climate change is an issue.
| However, this is going to disproportionately hit the poorer
| countries in the block, those that still relied on antiquated
| coal burning power plants. Germany has Nord Stream + some
| investment in renewables, so they don't care much, France is
| mostly nuclear, so again, they don't care, Italy and Spain are
| warmer countries that could get fine through winter. Poland,
| Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia etc. where coal plants were closed
| will be hit the worst by this.
|
| 3. The EU doesn't negotiate as a block on gas prices. Each
| country deals with Russia individually - e.g. Nord Stream being
| built between Germany and Russia. That also means that the
| smaller countries are at the biggest disadvantage, or are reliant
| on either Germany's or Russia's benevolence in dictating gas
| prices.
| pornel wrote:
| Poland is in a tough spot politically. Dependence on Russia is
| a touchy topic, but now there's also a rising anti-EU sentiment
| from the populist-nationalist government. If something is seen
| as EU/Western middling then Poland will double-down on doing
| the opposite (in this case rejecting renewables in favor of
| coal with plans for nuclear), and still blame the EU for it.
| Jiejeing wrote:
| France is mostly nuclear, but most of the heating is using
| natural gas (it has gone up more than 30% in price this year
| alone for consumers).
| Daniel_sk wrote:
| 2) Slovakia will be launching 2 new reactor blocks (Mochovce 3
| and 4), one by end of year and next one within 2 years. Even
| the existing two blocks create 84% of our energy and with the
| next two we will become energy independent. Adding those two
| blocks equals about 2 milion personal car emission "saved"
| compared to having same amount produced by coal power plants.
| And that's just one power plant for whole country of 5.5
| million. Fortunately we didn't go the German route and we also
| get a lot of pressure from Austria to shut down our power plant
| (even though it passed all strict checks and is a very safe
| design). Last coal mine will be closed in 2027, but most of
| them already sooner.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| When did Slovakia begin to build those reactors ? Trying to
| compare with Belgium.
|
| Who is building them and for how long are there planned to
| run ? How much did it cost ?
| angelzen wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mochovce_Nuclear_Power_Plant
|
| > power plant consisting of four VVER 440/V-213 pressurized
| water reactors [Russian]
|
| > Construction of Units 3 and 4 restarted in November 2008.
| They were planned initially to be completed in 2012 and
| 2013,[2] but the completion date was shifted to 2016 and
| 2017.[3] More recently the completion date has slipped to
| 2020 and 2022.
|
| > [Reactor 1 & 2 have a 60 year commercial lifetime]
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/slovakia-
| nuclear/update-1-sl...
|
| > Estimates from 2019 put the cost at nearly 5.7 billion
| euros ($6.89 billion).
| qayxc wrote:
| > Fortunately we didn't go the German route
|
| You're missing the fact that _all_ German nuclear power
| plants are already beyond their initial lifespan and that
| there simply has been no renewal of operation licenses.
|
| No new reactors have been built since the mid-1980s so this
| isn't exactly a recent trend. The same applies to France,
| btw. The newest reactor in France started construction in
| 2007(!) and is expected to become operational in 2023(!).
|
| The next newest French reactor started construction in
| 1991...
|
| So much for the state of nuclear power in the world's
| posterchild of nuclear power.
| chelical wrote:
| And yet France still has half the CO2 emissions per capita
| of Germany and significantly cheaper energy.
| empiricus wrote:
| it seems that we become too dumb to build nuclear stations.
| this is worrying
| sentinel wrote:
| Thanks for this perspective - I was not aware of this.
| Definitely a good idea and I'm personally happy to see a
| resurgence in nuclear as a green solution to the climate
| issue.
| qwytw wrote:
| Coal is still the source of 20 to 30% of all energy used in
| Germany, I doubt they don't care.
| sentinel wrote:
| Fair - I suppose my point is that they've set themselves up
| for an out better than others have.
| teekert wrote:
| Would we be having this crisis if it wasn't for the decisions to
| close nuclear reactors and the US sabotaging the Nord Stream gas
| pipeline? [0]
|
| [0]: https://freewestmedia.com/2020/07/06/us-intensifies-
| pressure...
| sentinel wrote:
| Europe can probably get dirt cheap gas from the Russians, the
| question is - at what cost?
| sergeykish wrote:
| Belarus gets gas quite cheap. The cost is independence, that
| brings RF standards of living under autocratic regime which
| "fights" against entire world (while its leaders gets
| enormous wealth).
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Personally I think closing the nuclear reactors is a terrible
| idea, considering nuclear is the only clean base load
| generation we have. But stopping a Russian gas pipeline seems
| eminently desirable considering that fossil fuels and Russian
| hegemony are both really bad things. Perhaps the US ought not
| to have interfered, but it seems like a desirable outcome
| nonetheless. Hopefully the energy crisis will result in the
| recommissioning of those nuclear reactors (if that's even
| possible) or some better alternative.
| DeWilde wrote:
| > Personally I think closing the nuclear reactors is a
| terrible idea, considering nuclear is the only clean base
| load generation we have.
|
| Yes
|
| >Perhaps the US ought not to have interfered, but it seems
| like a desirable outcome nonetheless.
|
| No, freezing in an European winter isn't an desirable
| outcome.
|
| Yes, gas bad and Russia evil, but shooting of your arm
| because your fingers are broken isn't a smart thing to do.
| Gas is already expensive in Europe and there aren't any
| viable cheap alternatives, both green and non-green. Curently
| at least.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > No, freezing in an European winter isn't an desirable
| outcome.
|
| This is surely theatrics. Europeans will pay more for
| heating than they usually do, and that will be the extent
| of it.
| qaq wrote:
| There is plenty of pipeline capacity.
| the-dude wrote:
| > Russian hegemony
|
| What does this mean?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Ask a Ukrainian!
| datameta wrote:
| Or a Georgian, or a Chechen.
| the-dude wrote:
| Can we conclude from your example and your parents' that
| for Germany the term is hyperbole?
| datameta wrote:
| I am not quite sure what you are saying or implying.
|
| What parent comment is pointing out is that Russia has
| invaded sovereign nations (cultural and economic allies)
| in the 21st century. In one instance of such it would go
| on to vehemently deny its involvement.
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| Looks like US and NATO doing it all the time - well, till
| someone like taliban kicks them out
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > well, till someone like taliban kicks them out
|
| You might want to learn your history if you think Russia
| has never been kicked out by "someone like the Taliban".
| Mind you, Afghanistan was a much more peaceful country
| before the USSR invaded, but I won't fault a country too
| harshly for the impossible-to-predict consequences of
| meddling; however, I _will_ fault a country for the
| motives of their meddling in the first place. E.g., does
| a country meddle to support or overthrow a violent
| regime? Do they aspire to liberate or oppress?
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| > Mind you, Afghanistan was a much more peaceful country
| before the USSR invaded
|
| Really? Where did you get that notion? As far as I know,
| it was under military junta rule
|
| > E.g., does a country meddle to support or overthrow a
| violent regime?
|
| And? Daud regime in Afghanistan was violent, isn't it?
| the-dude wrote:
| That is not a hegemony right?
| datameta wrote:
| From wikipedia:
|
| > Hegemony is the political, economic, or military
| predominance of one state over other states.
| the-dude wrote:
| So it isn't. Why don't you answer the question yourself?
| datameta wrote:
| Please explain how an invasion of a sovereign nation does
| not qualify as military predominance.
| teekert wrote:
| Yes, and then we ask an Iranian what being influenced by
| the US means, and we stop all international collaboration
| and just focus on the EU. But then we shouldn't ask
| southern Europeans what northern European influencing
| is...
|
| I get that horrible things have happened, and nations did
| horrible things to each other. But we are citizens and I
| wish nothing but the best for citizens of other
| countries. I don't want war or influencing. I would like
| my gas to be a bit cheaper and preferably cleaner.
|
| Power to Iranian, Ukranian, Russian, EU and US (and all)
| citizens. I hope we can one day untangle our leaders from
| the companies in our countries and just make them do what
| is best for us.
| datameta wrote:
| I can see your words are amicable but drawing an
| equivalence of wrongdoing to another wrongdoer does not
| exonerate the former (Russia).
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| > but drawing an equivalence of wrongdoing to another
| wrongdoer does not exonerate the former (Russia).
|
| Incorrect, it completely exonerates them if you are going
| to merrily let the the other wrongdoer carry on with the
| offending behaviour.
|
| If you disagree, ask what's the moral case for _not_
| dealing the other wrongdoer tomorrow morning?
| datameta wrote:
| My deep embarassment at the peace wrecking actions of the
| other wrongdoer (USA) as a citizen of the country in no
| way diminishes my absolute condemnation of Russia's
| actions toward Ukraine, as someone whose ancestry is from
| both the perpetrator and victim nation.
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. So lets deal with Russia today, and
| de-fang the USA tomorrow at 9am.
|
| No? Why not?
|
| See?
| datameta wrote:
| I'm not quite sure if you followed what I had said. Let
| us assume one can directly measure wrongdoing and
| correlate a level of condemnation. For the sake of
| argument let us say the USA is deserving of 100 units of
| condemnation, whereas Russia is only fit to receive 50.
| This is not an equation that becomes 50 and 0. All that
| Russia is responsible for is still equally hegemonic,
| internationally illegal, amoral, and unethical.
|
| In so many words I am essentially saying that
| whataboutism does not add to the discourse and in fact
| derails and detracts.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The "other wrongdoer" isn't doing harm on the order that
| Russia is (indeed, the "other wrongdoer" does a
| tremendous amount of good globally that we all
| collectively ignore) but more saliently the "other
| wrongdoer" supplies Europe with an order of magnitude
| less natural gas than Russia.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| To your point "influence" itself isn't bad, but who you
| are influenced by is significant. And if you think the US
| and Russia are comparable then I don't have hope for a
| reasonable conversation.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| "Russian influence" would probably been a clearer choice of
| words.
| the-dude wrote:
| So what is exactly wrong with some Russian influence? As
| a Dutchie I am continously influenced by Americans,
| Germans, Frenchmen etc.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Russia controlling much of your energy supply that they
| can turn off at will gives them _power_ over you.
|
| Very different from choosing to watch American movies or
| cooking French food.
| the-dude wrote:
| They can only do this one time.
|
| AFAIK they do not have a history of doing this, only when
| terms of actual gas deals are not met. Which is common
| business sense.
|
| edit: you are downplaying US influence. Are you aware The
| Netherlands is a host for US nuclear weapons?
| datameta wrote:
| They used natural gas as a political lever with Ukraine
| on a constant basis. The same would be the case with
| Belarussia if they weren't forcefully aligned as
| political allies (an attempt at which is one of the main
| reasons of the Ukrainian invasion).
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Some bitch wanted to get rich. Played with the mafia,
| been a puppet for another player. Abused her position.
| Vendor of warez blocked even more corruption. Bitch
| shrieked in frustration. Another player saw his chance.
| Vendor of warez had enough of the pranks. Disruption...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulia_Tymoshenko
|
| also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otpor
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Let's not pretend there was no fuckery on the Ukrainian
| side.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_
| dis...
| the-dude wrote:
| Do you have sources Russia used this lever even though
| all terms of the deal were met? ( basically, the bills
| were paid ).
| datameta wrote:
| The gas bills had a strange ability to grow of their own
| accord, almost seemingly to the whims of the natural gas
| supplier. On several occasions Russia cut off supply
| during winter after disputes, which affected not only
| Ukraine but Europe. This was a two pronged maneuver which
| was meant to sour Europe-Ukraine relations and keep
| Ukraine dependent on Russia. Ukraine's attempted aligment
| with Europe is perhaps the main driver of the 2014
| invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
| anticodon wrote:
| _the main driver of the 2014 invasion of Ukraine by
| Russia_
|
| There was no Russian invasion. There was a coup and
| installation of Nazi government in Ukraine in 2014. Big
| percent of population in Ukraine is Russian. They do not
| want to live under Nazi regime that praises Hitler and
| forbids to speak Russian language. Also, Ukraine has
| plans to build concentration camps for Russian
| population.
|
| So they decided to leave Ukraine and join Russia.
| the-dude wrote:
| So you have no sources I presume? And the bills were not
| paid.
| anticodon wrote:
| Russia is not obliged to pay Ukrainian bills. They're
| unreliable partners (both for EU and Russia), they have a
| history of blackmailing EU with threats to stop gas
| transit (Ukraine, not Russia threatened EU!), they're
| stealing transit gas all the time.
|
| Besides, they're used as an enemy, as cannon fodder
| against Russia. Why would Russia feed them using our
| natural resources? What's our obligation? It's not their
| gas, it's not their pipeline (it was built by "soviet
| occupants").
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Moreover, we're not talking about the Russian people,
| we're talking about Russia, the dictatorship. The US
| isn't assassinating dissidents in EU countries, after
| all. It's also not installing dictators in your
| neighboring countries.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| but they not have problems dropping bombs to children's
| in other countries.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Russia backs Assad in Syria, who routinely _deliberately_
| bombed his own civilians. That seems strictly worse.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think we can all agree deliberately bombing other
| countries civilians is much worse than your own. And USA
| is clearly doing it.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I don't agree with that at all. Governments should
| protect their own citizens first and foremost, but
| _deliberately_ killing civilians anywhere is abhorrent,
| and the US _does not_ deliberately target civilians. When
| civilians are killed by the US, it 's an accident. Assad
| kills civilians to send a message.
|
| That said, the US should absolutely work to reduce its
| collateral damage, but let's not pretend that
| accidentally killing a civilian and bombing a city
| (because they are disproportionately critical of your
| dictatorship) are morally equivalent.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I would trust USA lot more if everyone from bottom to top
| involved in any "accident" was summarily executed. Or at
| least judged by peers of their victims. Like for latest
| case I say ship everyone in chain of command and involved
| in manufacturing to Afghanistan and have the local
| government there deliver the justice they deserve.
|
| I would also expand this to known supporters and voters,
| but that can be next step.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > I would also expand this to known supporters and
| voters, but that can be next step.
|
| So you would massacre tens or hundreds of millions of
| civilians because _accidentally killing civilians_ is
| bad? This is the most heinous thing I 've ever read on
| HN.
|
| > Or at least judged by peers of their victims. Like for
| latest case I say ship everyone in chain of command and
| involved in manufacturing to Afghanistan and have the
| local government there deliver the justice they deserve.
|
| Ironically Afghanistan no longer does trial by peers,
| they do door to door executions without any kind of trial
| (certainly not trial by jury of peers).
|
| And of course, you're notably silent on _deliberately
| targeting_ civilians in their thousands, which is what
| Assad has been doing and the Kremlin implicitly supports.
| Ekaros wrote:
| They kept voting in these bad actors. They clearly
| support these policies. Otherwise they wouldn't have
| voted for them.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| So that's a "yes" to my question?
|
| > So you would massacre tens or hundreds of millions of
| civilians because accidentally killing civilians is bad?
| Ekaros wrote:
| At this point I think they could reasonably be considered
| combatants. After all they have done nothing to prevent
| murder of civilians even if they have had tools like
| second amendment exactly designed for this purpose. And
| no it's not massacre, it's justified death penalty for
| mass-murderers.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This is the most abhorrent thing I've ever read on this
| (or perhaps any) forum. I'm done with this thread.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Still doesn't even compare to calling mass-murder
| "accidents"... Or maybe 9/11 were accidents to you too.
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| > accidentally killing civilians ?
|
| When you are killing children using rocket propelled
| explosives deliberately launched into crowded urban
| areas, from high-altitude unmanned vehicles, operated by
| professional soldiers an ocean away, on intelligence only
| you have, you are as far away from an _accidental_
| killing as is possible.
|
| It you hadn't passed another law threatening the
| Netherlands with an invasion, you might finds yourself
| having to answer for it.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Just to make sure I understand you correctly:
| accidentally killing a civilian in a strike on a
| terrorist is _exactly as bad_ as (or perhaps worse than)
| directly bombing hundreds or thousands of civilians on
| purpose?
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| No.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Okay, I'm glad we agree.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Russia doesn't have either.
| anticodon wrote:
| _Russia doesn 't have either._
|
| Do you have proofs? Anything comparable to killing 4
| millions in Vietnam, 600,000 in Iraq (probably more),
| etc, etc.
| lostmsu wrote:
| You appear to have an agenda, because you took the
| Vietnam number from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam
| _War_casualties#Total_n... and
|
| a) picked the "high estimates" - really bad choice for
| the sake of an Internet discussion
|
| b) you rounded it up!
|
| c) you presented that number as civilians killed while it
| is total deaths on both sides
|
| d) you tried to present that number in the context of
| children killed
|
| e) you assume these were all killed by US, which they
| weren't
|
| Considering grossness of the misrepresentation in your
| comment, I don't think it makes sense to argue with you.
| However, there's plenty of proofs for Russia not minding
| killing children in its war efforts as recent as 2014,
| including MH17 which had 80 children on board.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Hrm. Hm. Hm...
|
| Julian Assange? Edward Snowden? If they could 'the US'
| would very much like to disappear them, by whatever
| means.
|
| Furthermore
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio seem just
| like the tip of an iceberg.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Of course those two are still alive and there's no
| evidence at all that the US would like to assassinate or
| "disappear" them. On the contrary, it's relatively easy
| to assassinate or even kidnap someone--Russia had agents
| spread nerve agent on a target's door handle and shoot
| another target in the street. Certainly these things are
| well within the US's capability.
|
| I think you're confusing "extradition and trial by jury"
| with "assassination" or "disappearing".
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| I think you are confusing plausible deniability with the
| propaganda you're fed. Besides that I can't confirm nor
| deny having access to sources behind transtemporal
| channels, or having signed NDAs with blood. Yada Yada.
|
| kthxbye
| Ekaros wrote:
| I do clearly remember however them allying with dictator
| in neighbouring country, even after massive invasions and
| extensions far beyond their border...
| anticodon wrote:
| _The US isn't assassinating dissidents in EU countries,
| after all. It's also not installing dictators in your
| neighboring countries._
|
| This is absolutely not true. US is assassinating
| dissidents all over the world all the time.
|
| US is installing puppet governments and staging
| revolutions all the time to pursue its economical
| interests.
|
| BTW, none of the alleged Russian assassinations were
| proven. There're only "highly likely" arguments without a
| single piece of evidence. And when there're counter
| arguments, they are not printed in the western press.
| E.g. how Germany was preparing for investigation of
| "poisoning" of Navalny, before it was known that he was
| "poisoned".
| the-dude wrote:
| You must be joking. The US assassinates people almost on
| a daily basis, has installed dictators in numerous
| countries and Russia is not a dictatorship, how much you
| disagree with Putin.
|
| Futhermore, the US has been involved or started numerous
| conflicts in the EU backyard, which we are forced to
| cooperate in, and have no choice to take care of the
| refugees.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The US assassinates _terrorists_ (and not remotely on "a
| daily basis" although the US assassination attempts have
| too much collateral damage). Russia assassinates
| _dissidents_ (critics of Putin and his regime) on EU
| soil.
|
| Russia is _absolutely_ a dictatorship. They just rigged
| their most recent election (jailed the leading rival
| politician and banned apps that informed people on how to
| use their vote strategically to minimize Putin's party's
| power).
| 988747 wrote:
| America labels its critics as "terrorist" and critics of
| Russia as "dissidents". Russia of course does the exact
| opposite.
|
| As for "rigged elections" all the US elections in the
| last 50 years were rigged as well - think about
| gerrymandering and deliberately blocking black and Latino
| minorities from voting (by making it hard for them to
| obtain proof of identity, or making them wait hours in
| line at the polling stations).
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > America labels its critics as "terrorist" and critics
| of Russia as "dissidents". Russia of course does the
| exact opposite.
|
| "Dissident" is just a critic of a policy or regime. It
| doesn't improve Russia's hand at all to say that it only
| assassinates _critics_ , and it certainly isn't an
| exclusively US-held position that Alexander Litvinenko,
| Boris Nemtsov, Alexei Navalny, etc were _critics_ (as
| opposed to bonafide violent terrorists).
|
| As for "America labels its critics as 'terrorists'": can
| you name any critics that the US labeled "terrorists" and
| consequently assassinated, especially on EU soil?
| anticodon wrote:
| _Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Nemtsov, Alexei Navalny_
|
| There's no evidence that Putin is related to death of
| these persons. BTW, Navalny is alive and well and all the
| evidence shows that he was probably "poisoned" by the CIA
| to create another "victim" of Putin's regime.
|
| Besides, Navalny is a terrorist on CIA payroll. He's
| working on destroying Russia from within. He was
| recruited and trained abroad and most of his "donations"
| are coming from western governments and spy agencies.
| Nobody trusts him here.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| That's _quite_ the conspiracy theory...
| Aunche wrote:
| The irony here is that the US is the one pressuring the
| EU to sanction the Nord 2 pipeline. They have little to
| lose from its suspension. Russia is unlikely to willingly
| cut off gas to Western Europe because they're hurting
| themselves just as much.
| adventured wrote:
| The US does have something to lose. The US is now a large
| natural gas exporter, and that demand pulls away from our
| domestic market, which forces our prices higher. When
| European natural gas prices are 4x-5x that of the US, the
| foreign demand for cheaper US imports can become a
| frenzy. While US prices may seem cheap by comparison to
| what Europe is seeing, when you triple those prices
| versus a year ago, US consumers feel that hit
| significantly (with many population centers in the US
| having quite cold Winter weather, expectations right now
| are for a quite expensive Winter season in the US for
| natural gas prices). And the US has also become a lot
| more dependent on natural gas as an energy source over
| the last 15-20 years, so it's increasingly sensitive to
| such large price spikes; far more so than back in the
| commodity bubble years of 2005-2008 which saw US natural
| gas prices climb to about 3x where they're at now (before
| the supply boom in the US crushed prices).
|
| If natural gas prices in the US keep soaring, you can
| expect the Biden Administration to look into turning off
| exports via whatever justification they can come up with
| to make it happen.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| As much as I am wary about Russian influence (we were
| under their yoke 1948-1989, with an outright invasion in
| 1968), Gazprom never fooled around with gas deliveries
| into Western Europe.
|
| They know that they need to maintain spotless business
| reputation, precisely because Europe is already on the
| fence _re_ doing any business with Russia at all and
| because gas exports are the most reliable source of hard
| currency for Russia.
|
| Turning gas off is a nuclear option for Kremlin. Not
| unthinkable, but very extreme.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I agree that turning off the gas completely would be
| extreme, but it doesn't have to be "turning off the gas",
| it can just be meddling with the gas prices, specifically
| as a lever against potential sanctions (Europe will be
| less likely to sanction Russia if Russia can retaliate
| where Europe is weakest).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Oh yes, that is very possible. OPEC 2.0.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's also pretty easy to build storage facilities so they
| have to turn the gas off for a long time before the
| effects are felt. Storage of LPG for an entire winters
| use by a country isn't super expensive.
| makomk wrote:
| As far as I can tell, Europe has storage facilities but
| they let Gazprom run a lot of them and for some reason
| Gazprom has let them run down rather than refilling them
| like they usually would over the summer...
| Sebb767 wrote:
| A theory I heard was that all the gas was bought up by
| speculators (that seems true, actually) and now they're
| slowly delivering the gas as needed to avoid speculators
| eating all the cheap gas up and then blaming Gazprom once
| no gas is left for the winter.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Technically yes, NIMBYs might be a problem.
| glogla wrote:
| It's not just the risk of the strategically turning it
| off. It's also creating a dependence and giving Putin
| money. Those are bad by themselves.
| matmatmatmat wrote:
| I'm not in favor of giving Putin money, but I am in favor
| of dependencies. Dependencies are what keep people from
| invading each other's countries when there's trouble.
| People are unlikely to start bombing their customers.
| makomk wrote:
| The trouble with Nord Stream 2 is that it removes the
| dependencies which keep Russia from invading Eastern
| European countries like Poland by creating a route to
| sell gas to the richer parts of Europe that doesn't go
| through them, whilst also creating a dependency that
| would make it painful for the rest of Europe to take
| action if Russia did such a thing. This is probably not
| good for peace in Europe.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I take your point and I sort of agree, but I'm really
| excited for how the transition to clean energy will
| reduce the Kremlin's influence. Even without exporting so
| much energy, I suspect/hope Russia's remaining economy
| will still be too dependent on exports to risk attacking
| anyone (especially considering that China et al would
| probably strongly oppose an attack on its most lucrative
| clientelle, however much it might otherwise detest them).
| anticodon wrote:
| _I suspect /hope Russia's remaining economy will still be
| too dependent on exports to risk attacking anyone_
|
| Why would Russia attack anyone? What would be the point
| of such an attack?
|
| Why US is allowed to attack anyone, destroys whole
| countries and kill millions of people, including hundreds
| of thousands of civilians and everybody is ok with it
| (recent examples: Libya, Afghanistan, Syria)?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Why would Russia attack anyone? What would be the point
| of such an attack?
|
| I was responding to the GP's hypothetical.
|
| > Why US is allowed to attack anyone, destroys whole
| countries and kill millions of people, including hundreds
| of thousands of civilians and everybody is ok with it
| (recent examples: Libya, Afghanistan, Syria)?
|
| If you can rephrase this so it doesn't sound like overt
| flame bait, I might respond. Otherwise we risk a flame
| war and I don't have energy for that.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Dependencies run in both directions. Russia is very
| dependent on its fossil fuel exports.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Not much different from other sources, Europe is not
| resource/energy rich like the US.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| A polity which is not energy rich should have a diverse
| energy portfolio so one country doesn't have too much
| power. As it stands, 40% of European natural gas comes
| from Russia and virtually none from the US. Investing
| _more_ in Russia gives Russia tremendous power over
| Europe. Diluting that investment with natural gas from
| the US or some other suppliers means that Europe can
| afford to walk away from any deal with any of them at
| small cost to itself. Further still, divesting itself of
| nuclear also worsens EU energy security, because nuclear
| doesn 't require a pipeline from anywhere (yes, you have
| to import Uranium, but its _very_ cheap to import per
| unit energy, even at its current elevated price point).
| interactivecode wrote:
| The same issues apply to American control over European
| power supplies or Norwegian control over European power
| supplies.
|
| They aren't anymore dangerous for Europe. The main
| difference is our existing trade deals with the US are
| more embedded into the European economy than any of the
| other countries. We like the US now, they are our
| friends, but because they are more connected, we are more
| reliant on them than others, which is dangerous in and of
| itself.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| We Canadians felt this deeply when US kept all their
| domestically-produced vaccine doses for themselves in
| early 2021. We had grown accustomed to the flow of goods
| and services between US and Canada being uninterrupted.
| So for many of us, it was a shock and a disappointment
| when the US decided to _turn off the tap_.
| coryrc wrote:
| It was the Canadian government which rejected allowing
| Michigan to deliver vaccines to Canadians:
|
| https://www.wjtv.com/health/coronavirus/canadian-
| government-...
| smnrchrds wrote:
| I am talking about the US allowing vaccine shots to be
| exported to Canada, which should have been a million
| doses per week. Your link is about Canadians lining up at
| the border to be vaccinated in the US, which at best
| would have been in the order of a few hundred doses per
| week. Even if that plan went ahead, the number of
| American doses getting into Canadian arms would have
| been, approximately, a million doses a week short of
| expectation. If the expectation is 1 million doses and
| you get a thousand doses, you would be the same amount of
| disappointed as getting 0 doses.
|
| Also, the decision to bar people from getting vaccinated
| on the other side of the border was not solely a Canadian
| decision. US disallowed Canadians going there to get
| vaccinated too. There was a very short period of time
| between the time Canadians started going to the US for
| vaccines and the time US banned this practice.
|
| Also, your link is from July. That was right around the
| time vaccines became abundant in Canada and vaccination
| was opened to all regardless of age and health status.
| The disappointment was in early 2021, when Canada was
| still vaccinating 80+ people and US decided to vaccinate
| all 16+ people before allowing vaccine exports here so we
| can at least vaccinate people in elderly care homes.
|
| > _Canadians hoping to cross the border for the sole
| purpose of getting a COVID-19 vaccine will be turned
| away, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection._
|
| https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/confusion-
| abounds-...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Honestly, I don't know why this would be so surprising.
| You're comparing the flow of goods _in a stable supply
| chain_ with the unprecedented demand for a novel vaccine
| for which no existing supply chain existed. _Of course_
| there wouldn 't be a ready flow of vaccine immediately,
| and _of course_ every country prioritizes its own
| citizens first and foremost.
|
| Now that demand has eased considerably, the US is now
| donating more doses of vaccine than all of the other
| countries on the planet combined.
| adventured wrote:
| You're being downvoted because you're not allowed to
| point out on HN that the US is donating more vaccine
| doses than the rest of the world combined.
|
| Just like the US donates as much food to the rest of the
| world as all other nations combined and has been doing it
| for a century now.
|
| US bad.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It certainly _feels_ like there 's a lot of unjustified
| pressure on this forum to portray the US as categorically
| worse than every other country. I have other
| controversial opinions which are at least met by
| understandable rebuttals, but this "America doesn't do
| everything horribly" seems to violate some sacred taboo
| (and I suspect particularly so with the European and
| progressive American cohorts).
|
| In whichever case, a few Internet Points is a small price
| to pay. :)
| smnrchrds wrote:
| The problem was, when vaccines were in short supply, the
| US decided to prioritize all Americans, including healthy
| 16 year olds, over other countries' most vulnerable and
| elderly population. In early 2021, if N vaccine doses
| going to another country who would have saved 1000 lives
| because they were still vaccinating the most vulnerable,
| the same N doses used in the US would have saved 1,
| because the most vulnerable were already vaccinated and
| the vaccines were being used for younger not-at-risk
| population. Why should any country not criticize the US
| for prioritizing one American life over 1,000 non-
| American lives?
|
| This compares to the EU which allowed vaccine exports.
| Thousands of Canadians are alive today that wouldn't have
| been if the EU acted like the US.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Admittedly the United States' rollout wasn't _optimally
| efficient_ , and they prioritized American lives early on
| (before we knew exactly how mass vaccination would play
| out, mind you--much of your criticism benefits from
| hindsight). But it's unfair to criticize the US for
| prioritizing American lives over foreign lives when it's
| doing far more than all other countries _combined_ to
| minimize the loss of foreign lives. I could spin that
| into a divisive shot at Canada or the EU as you 've done
| with America (and I think I could make a much more
| compelling case), but I don't see the point in being
| divisive when we have nothing to gain and everything to
| lose from it.
|
| Yes, the early days of COVID vaccination were predictably
| rocky. What's the excuse _today_ for not working together
| to vaccinate the world?
| BBC-vs-neolibs wrote:
| Yeah, bring that argument when Norway occupies the
| Crimean peninsula.
| gego wrote:
| ...this is not what happened - Russia did deliver on time
| and the reserves were sold off. Now those same people cry
| wolf and want Exporters to offer more for cheap...
| Asmod4n wrote:
| There is no solution to deal with the life killing waste of
| nuclear power plants.
| eropple wrote:
| Depends on where you are. How deep a shaft can you reliably
| bore into the Canadian Shield or the Scandes?
|
| I'm very pro-renewables, but nuclear power's problems are
| organizational rather than waste-related, at least in much
| of the developed world.
| Bayart wrote:
| Put it in a place where there's no life, seismic stability
| and no ground water. Which is what we're doing. Nuclear
| waste is remarkably dense and containable, far more than
| any other kind of power-generation byproduct.
| Asmod4n wrote:
| You don't know if that place on earth will still be there
| or in the middle of an ocean in the time the waste is
| till toxic.
|
| We have solutions right now to get rid of coal, atom etc
| completely in a couple of years, new inventions take too
| much time to be ready for the market when we need them by
| 2030.
| qwytw wrote:
| Maybe you don't, but I would expect the people designing
| the sites know the half life of the materials they are
| storing. Plutonium-239 for example has a halflife of
| 24,000 years which is not that much in geological terms..
| Asmod4n wrote:
| Do you honestly belive we can build something to keep
| radioactive and toxic stuff sealed for tenthousand years?
|
| By the time it's still bad for carbon based lifeforms
| it's as old as todays archaeology!
| qwytw wrote:
| Sure why not, the great pyramid is close to 5000 years
| old, I'm sure with modern knowledge humans can build
| something that will last much longer. In any case the
| damage it can do is fairly limited compared to burning
| coal.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > We have solutions right now to get rid of coal, atom
| etc completely in a couple of years,
|
| No we do not. Renewable energy is unreliable and
| unsuitable for base load generation. Until we can figure
| out how to store _weeks_ worth of energy, nuclear is the
| _only_ clean option for base load.
|
| > You don't know if that place on earth will still be
| there or in the middle of an ocean in the time the waste
| is till toxic.
|
| We do have a pretty good idea, and to the extent that we
| don't, it's climate change. Pretty ironic to use climate
| change as a reason to forestall nuclear considering it's
| our best shot at mitigating climate change pending a
| renewable energy storage miracle.
| Asmod4n wrote:
| Renewables are the only energy source we can afford to
| use in the next few years, there is no alternative to
| that.
|
| We tried to make nuclear energy a thing for over 50
| years, it only shows we aren't able to a) make safe use
| of it and b) get a solution for the waste.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > We tried to make nuclear energy a thing for over 50
| years,
|
| No, we didn't. Nuclear was and is _unpopular_ for reasons
| that aren 't justified by the evidence.
|
| > we aren't able to make safe use of it
|
| This is _entirely_ untrue. Nuclear is the _safest_ energy
| source _by far_ , even more so than wind or solar:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-
| worldw...
|
| > we couldn't get a solution for the waste.
|
| We know the solution for the waste, we just have to act
| on it. And anyway, we have to solve for the existing
| waste and once you have to dig a big hole for a little
| bit of waste you can use that existing hole for a _whole
| lot of waste_ with virtually no economic impact.
| shakow wrote:
| > we aren't able to a) make safe use of it
|
| Nuclear power was one of the safest energy source in the
| last century. Even hydroelectrical power, which is quite
| safe, has been much deadlier than nuclear accidents, and
| don't get me started on the consequences of carbon-heavy
| production methods.
|
| > b) get a solution for the waste.
|
| There is a solution for the waste: deep burial in stable
| geological conditions. The only people saying there are
| no solution do not have any other argument better
| "dangerous green-glowing slime makes me afraid,
| Greenpeace plz help".
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| > Pretty ironic to use climate change as a reason to
| forestall nuclear considering it's our best shot at
| mitigating climate change pending a renewable energy
| storage miracle.
|
| I think you're looking at this the right way. We aren't
| "on the verge" of climate catastrophe, or "at the edge":
| we are already over the cliff, and the rocks are getting
| closer by the second.
|
| Our only chance is to de-carbonize energy _now_ , and the
| only technology that gets us there is nuclear.
| thecopy wrote:
| Drill a 5km deep hole, drop it in there.
| Asmod4n wrote:
| You can't predict if that hole will be there for the
| trillions of years it's toxic.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > You can't predict if that hole will be there for the
| trillions of years it's toxic.
|
| Trillions of years is the wrong timescale. The earth is
| only a few billion years old, and anyway the nuclear
| waste won't be radiotoxic in 1-10 thousand years much
| less 1 trillion. I'm pretty sure the Earth won't be
| habitable (as we understand 'habitable', anyway) in 1
| trillion years. Anyway, climate change poses an
| existential threat in _decades or centuries_.
| [deleted]
| Asmod4n wrote:
| while uranium isn't that toxic compared to the other
| stuff it has a half-life of 4 billions years.
|
| And while the earth has long forgotten about humans other
| species will still be endangered by it.
| reddog wrote:
| So your worried about how uranium will effect the
| Morlocks and the Elois? Isn't uranium a naturally
| occuring element that already exists underground all over
| the globe and has for billions of years?
| panzagl wrote:
| Uhh, you know there's already uranium under the ground,
| right?
| qwytw wrote:
| Still infinitely preferable (even if the number was
| accurate) to poisoning earth's current inhabitants by
| burning coal .
| wins32767 wrote:
| Half-life and danger from the emitted radiation are
| inversely correlated. Decay is the thing that emits
| radiation, so if that takes forever, it's not emitting
| much per second.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The half-life isn't the relevant metric--you don't need
| the radioactivity to decay to zero (you're exposed to
| non-zero levels of radiation just walking around
| outside). You need it decay to environmentally tolerable
| levels (roughly "the level of uranium ore").
|
| Anyway, far more species are far more endangered by
| climate change right now than any future species will be
| by nuclear waste.
| jl6 wrote:
| IMHO it would be better to store nuclear waste in well
| guarded sheds. There isn't _that_ much of it (less than a
| million tons; a few football fields worth of sheds), and
| accessible above-ground storage means you can easily
| monitor it and maintain its container over time. Who
| knows what will happen 5km down, out of sight?
| thecopy wrote:
| Relying on society is too risky. Drop them in a bore
| hole, fill it up again. Done.
| jl6 wrote:
| I do worry about bad guys digging it back up again.
|
| The search for waste storage that lasts forever feels
| like the search for data storage that last forever. In
| the latter case, no storage medium is reliable enough in
| the long run, and the better strategy is continuous
| active management, moving from one storage medium to
| another as technology evolves and as old media expire.
| shakow wrote:
| Of course there is; actually dangerous materials are
| produced to the rate of a few cubic meters a year: just
| sink them in lead and concrete and put them at the bottom
| of a mine shaft.
|
| Compared to the result of having billions over billions of
| over wastes in the atmosphere, I can't even understand how
| people pretend it's not a no-brainer question.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > just sink them in lead and concrete and put them at the
| bottom of a mine shaft.
|
| That is, frankly, _moronic_. All you will end up with is
| your groundwater leeching out the waste. We have exactly
| this problem in Gorleben, and now have to spend a
| boatload of money in recovering all the waste from the
| former mine.
| shakow wrote:
| > All you will end up with is your groundwater leeching
| out the waste
|
| No yo won't, because you will think just a bit before
| drilling the mine shaft over an aquifer (https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository)
|
| > We have exactly this problem in Gorleben
|
| Looks like the only problems you have in Gorleben are a
| handful of medical-grade wastes badly conditioned and a
| very vocal populace.
| [deleted]
| Asmod4n wrote:
| The radiation in Gorleben is already destroying the salt
| dome.
| shakow wrote:
| Would you mind sourcing that? The documents I can find (h
| ttps://www.bgr.bund.de/EN/Themen/Endlagerung/Downloads/De
| sc...) seem pretty happy with the current situation.
| eropple wrote:
| This is an important thing, IMO - aquifers go a lot
| deeper into the Earth than maybe most folks realize.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Put it deep enough in bedrock where there is no
| groundwater, like the Finns
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel
| _re...
|
| There is still the issue of how to communicate "Danger:
| Nuclear Waste" to the people who will encounter the waste
| storage facility over the next 10,000-100,000 years, but
| for now we can safely store waste.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Put it somewhere extremely hard to get to without
| industrialized tools. Assuming civilization doesn't
| collapse, any society with the kind of resources to want
| to go back in and extract the radioactive was is going to
| know what radioactivity is. If you assume it does
| collapse, the protection you get from a lack of power
| tools and logistics makes breaking into the waste
| repository prohibitively expensive. I doubt an agrarian
| or non-industrial society would be able to bankroll an
| expedition to a place like, say, Antarctica or the
| Atacama Desert and then being digging thousands of feet
| down using hand tools and ropes to find magic rocks.
|
| An example I'd like to cite is how one of the Sultan's of
| Egypt tried to dismantle the pyramids and failed horribly
| because of all the manpower involved.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Menkaure
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Pretty sure in 10K years the nuclear waste will no longer
| be radiotoxic.
|
| > The radioactivity of nuclear waste naturally decays,
| and has a finite radiotoxic lifetime. Within a period of
| 1,000-10,000 years, the radioactivity of HLW decays to
| that of the originally mined ore. Its hazard then depends
| on how concentrated it is. By comparison, other
| industrial wastes (e.g. heavy metals, such as cadmium and
| mercury) remain hazardous indefinitely.
|
| - https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-
| fuel-c...
|
| The above is probably some nuclear power lobby (vested
| interest and all that), but I think the point is a good
| one.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Yes. The better idea is to sink them in lead and leave on
| the surface.
|
| This way if something happens to external core, you can
| cheaply fix it, instead of recover them from deep mines.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Yes, the parent was being overly simplistic. You have to
| be choosey about where you put your waste, but experts
| currently recommend deep geologic repository as the
| safest solution. In whichever case, the salient point is
| that however you manage the waste it's still far less
| harmful than spewing co2 into the atmosphere. Radiation
| only _seems_ scarier because it is much more direct.
| Jedd wrote:
| > nuclear is the only clean base load generation we have.
|
| I'm assuming from your phrasing that you're using nuclear to
| refer exclusively to nuclear fission.
|
| Are you really suggesting that it's 'clean' in the sense of
| no greenhouse gas emissions, or radioactive (negative health
| impacts) from the acquisition of the necessary fuel, the
| building of fission power stations, or the operations of
| same?
| belorn wrote:
| In comparison to burning fossil fuels which is the basis of
| the energy crisis, the emissions, radiation, acquisition of
| fuel, and operate seems all cleaner for a nuclear reactor
| than the fossil fuel which it replace.
|
| Per GW/h, a fossil fueled power plant is producing a lot of
| pollution that goes into the air and poison the people and
| land around it. The outcome from this can be plainly seen
| in the death per GW/h produced.
|
| The only "100%" clean base load generation we have is
| actually hydro, but there are a few problems with it. We
| have already maxed out, and even if we tried to build more
| it would cause significant amount of greenhouse gas
| emissions from topsoil decomposition. It also happens to
| have one of the highest deaths per GW/h, although
| thankfully we tend to attribute that to the weather rather
| than the technology itself.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| This.
|
| Nuclear fission isn't "perfect" due to the potential
| risks involved, but it's one of the best things we have
| going for us _right now_. The climate crisis is here, and
| we have to do something pretty much immediately. We don
| 't have time to argue over what's best anymore. Build
| things we know work and replace those with something else
| when something better comes along.
| nradov wrote:
| Clean enough compared to the alternatives.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It is on par with solar with respect to the emissions per
| kW. Nuclear power plants emit virtually no radiation when
| properly operated and maintained (indeed, coal power plants
| emit more radiation into the environment). In rare cases,
| accidents happen, but the risk adjusted cost of those
| accidents is negligible compared to fossil fuel power. I'm
| not sure what "radioactive impacts" derive from mining
| Uranium, but I doubt it's non-negligible compared to the
| harm imposed my fossil fuels.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| And compared to solar, they produce power even during
| cold, winter nights, when you need heat the most.
|
| It's not the most efficiant way to heat your homes
| (fission -> heat -> water -> steam engine -> electricity
| -> heater), but it brings autonomy to each country (so
| global issues don't affect your country), and with heat
| pumps, it's not even that bad at heating.
| coryrc wrote:
| Add in district heating and you get cheap heat too.
| Europe is often dense enough for this to work...
| bialpio wrote:
| I was under the impression that the last step can
| potentially be made pretty efficient if it's "electricity
| -> heat pump" (but that depends on the conditions). Also
| - can nuclear power plants operate in combined heat and
| power mode to provide district heating? That'd probably
| require them to be close to highly populated areas
| though.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| Nuclear (fission) beats out solar for the most part in
| terms of CO2 equivalent per kW/h of energy generation.
| The 6-grams CO2 equivalent per kW/h figure assumes the
| panel is in ideal conditions (receiving sun for all sun-
| up hours during the year at equatorial to middle
| latitudes and operating at a fixed temperature). For a
| place like Finland, Norway, or Sweden, this goes up
| 50-grams CO2 equivalent per kW/h (less power produced
| over lifespan given a fixed manufacturing footprint).
| Nuclear is at 4-grams per kW/h. Wind is also about
| 4-grams per kW/h (again, assuming ideal conditions).
|
| Meanwhile, the most efficient coal fired plants are like
| 700 grams of CO2 per kW/h and most are at 1000-1200 grams
| per kW/h...
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| yes, I meant kWh. I picked up kW/h as a nasty habit from
| my previous power company's billing statements.
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| I realize you didn't invent these terms, but is kW/h the
| right metric? A plain reading of the units provided
| suggests 700 grams of CO2 is released every hour for
| every kW generated, but that seems unlikely. Where does
| the per hour figure in?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It's almost exactly 1kg per kw/h, at least in the US:
| https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
|
| But yes, "per hour" is necessary because you can't
| instantaneously emit a certain mass of co2. You emit over
| time, just like you generate power over time.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I meant kWh. The units derivation is as follows if I
| remember correctly:
|
| The SI unit for some absolute quantity of energy is the
| "Joule".
|
| 1 watt = 1 joule per second (1 J/s)
|
| Watts can sort of be thought of as the rate at which some
| absolute quantity of energy is available or able to be
| consumed.
|
| Since energy sources are usually rated in terms of their
| ability to supply an instantaneous amount of power, in
| order to get back to the absolute amount of energy, you
| need to multiply by the time in order to get back to just
| some multiple of joules.
|
| 1 watt-second = 1 J/s * s = 1 J.
|
| So the concept holds that if we are going to measure some
| amount of something (other than power) produced by a
| power plant, it should be measured against the absolute
| amount of power produced. Obviously this doesn't take
| into account the fact that pollution generated by some
| forms of power aren't linearly correlated with the power
| produced - e.g. fossil fuel plants produce less
| particulate pollution the hotter the fire burns, meaning
| they get dirtier vs the power output the lower the output
| power is set. Hence why gas turbines burn cleaner that
| gas-fired steam generators (hand waving over the
| efficiency differences of direct fired turbines versus
| steam generation).
|
| Another data point is that natural gas turbines (again,
| averages from the US) produce 550 grams per kWh, and
| combined cycle (adding a second turbine that runs off the
| exhaust heat of the first) are 435 grams CO2 per kWh.
|
| But the numbers I posted are what I meant. In the US, an
| average of one kilogram of CO2 is emitted per kilowatt-
| hour of energy (3.6 * 10^6 Joules) generated. Nuclear is
| two orders of magnitude less carbon emission (versus
| coal), wind and solar are comparable if deployed under
| ideal conditions. Even under non-ideal conditions, they
| still offer an order of magnitude improvement.
| jeltz wrote:
| I suspect it is a typo and that it should be grams per
| kWh.
| coryrc wrote:
| Nit: it's kWh (kilowatts x hours), a unit of energy (like
| joules or calories), not kW/h, which doesn't map to a
| physical concept
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| Ah! Sorry, it's a nasty habit I picked up from my
| previous power company's billing statements.
| CyanBird wrote:
| > Personally I think closing the nuclear reactors is a
| terrible idea, considering nuclear is the only clean base
| load generation we have
|
| I am very against nuclear power, on both the economic aspect,
| and the health and hazards side of things, specially nuclear
| waste for which there are no cold long term repositories
| which inspire much trust in me
|
| This said, I am fully on board on keeping existing nuclear
| reactors working, BUT I learned recently that radiation
| itself damages/corrodes/degrades the containment vessels of
| nuclear reactors over time, to the point where what was once
| strong steel or titanium becomes as fragile as glass or sugar
| glass (!!!)... Which is just not something that you can
| repair as the damage happens at the molecular level so then
| the entire reactor building needs to be basically scrapped
| for the most part and the vessel rebuilt
|
| So, when nuclear scientists and engineers say that x reactor
| has a y lifespan, they are being very serious about it
|
| I am despite all of that fully on board with extending the
| lifespan of nuclear reactors as long as possible
| raxxorrax wrote:
| The energy crisis is because of prices, not necessarily
| because of ressource limits. The ressources are only a tiny
| amount, the rest is investments.
|
| 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.
| himinlomax wrote:
| Nuclear, externalized? that's the exact opposite, as the
| waste is left in the hands of the users, as opposed to
| dumped in the atmosphere.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Gas would be a huge ecological improvement to coal.
|
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Given the fact that the market with gas is global, that
| the EU has almost no local sources of gas under its
| control and that gas availability / price is fluctuating
| rather heavily, I would try avoiding reliance on gas too.
| As of today, it isn't any more reliable than wind.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I meant the article and its framing, not your post.
|
| We cannot ramp down co2 emission to zero. The co2 balance
| of building nuclear power plants will only amortize when
| we already hit 1,5degC 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > The co2 balance of building nuclear power plants will
| only amortize when we already hit 1,5degC warming and it
| is questionable if it helps at all considering the
| unknowns about operating periods and other influences.
|
| 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.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I agree, I think from a technical perspective most of
| these plants are fine and they could be used for an
| additional time. Since the last will shut down next year,
| I would assume the plans are locked in by now.
|
| Nuclear has some advantages for base loads in some
| scenarios, but it cannot really compete with renewables
| down the road.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Since the last will shut down next year, I would assume
| the plans are locked in by now.
|
| 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.
| cesarb wrote:
| > but we still don't have any scalable technology for
| storing weeks worth of energy
|
| 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?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| You have to account for increasingly frequent continent-
| scale weather patterns which can last for weeks in
| extreme cases. "Weeks" is a figure I heard a few times in
| the media, but even "days" is a herculean task
| considering we're presently at "minutes" or worse. Note
| also that part of solving for emissions means
| "electrifying more applications" which means it's not
| sufficient to store days or weeks of _today 's energy
| demands_, but rather days or weeks of _future energy
| demands_ which will be much higher (e.g., today our
| entire transport industry isn 't electrified--in the
| future our grid will need to supply the energy to move
| cars and trucks and trains which means the overall demand
| is much larger and consequently we'll have greater
| storage demands).
| dtech wrote:
| > Overall if we just look at Germany it wouldn't even
| matter, the nation is too small
|
| 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.
| adventured wrote:
| It doesn't matter what China says, what rationalizations
| are used. What matters is the total emissions output and
| the direction.
|
| 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?
|
| https://i.imgur.com/B6W1S3q.jpg
| soperj wrote:
| US is the richest nation on earth and is more responsible
| for the current problem than any other nation on earth.
| They have the means to reduce their emissions drastically
| but choose not to.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The US should absolutely do more to reduce its emissions,
| but the actions or inaction of one country doesn't impugn
| or absolve others. Otherwise any country can and will
| point to some other country and use some contrived
| rationale like yours to justify inaction. At the end of
| the day, we need all countries to meet their emissions
| targets, otherwise we'll just be pointing fingers at each
| other while society crumbles around us.
| soperj wrote:
| US is one of the main countries trying to justify
| inaction. They've still cumulatively contributed nearly
| double the amount of Co2 to the atmosphere as China.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This is silly. The US isn't trying to justify inaction,
| and cumulative contributions isn't useful for anything.
| Of course the United States' total emissions are higher--
| it industrialized nearly a century before China, long
| before climate science existed or before technology
| existed anywhere to reduce emissions.
|
| 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).
| soperj wrote:
| >The US isn't trying to justify inaction
|
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Which elements of nuclear are externalized?
| goodpoint wrote:
| The environmental and economical cost of excavation.
|
| Also the environmental and economical cost and waste
| management.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The environmental cost of excavation is externalized, but
| it's negligible compared to that of fossil fuels
| ("economical cost" is nonsense), but the environmental
| cost of managing waste very much _isn 't_ externalized.
| At least not in the West (less sure about China, but I'm
| guessing they do roughly what we do).
| scythe wrote:
| >Nuclear power is too expensive
|
| 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...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Also, from my sibling comment[0]:
|
| > 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.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28671870
| Arnt wrote:
| Yes, probably. Closing many reactors has been decided and close
| dates have been set, but so far few have been closed. And
| there's enough other pipeline capacity, technically speaking,
| except that the British probably disagree. But limited capacity
| into Britain does not cause a global problem.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Putting diplomatic pressure to stop relying on Russian gas,
| after Russia invaded a neighbor, is not sabotage.
| teekert wrote:
| I think it's more complicated than that, and if we're going
| to call nations on "invading other countries", or meddling in
| countries internal affairs, we would not be going for US LNG
| either.
|
| Edit: And I think the EU is capable of putting pressure on
| Russia by itself, as they/we did. The US pressure is purely
| self serving and for their own economic wins. Which is fine I
| guess, I just would like it if we were not so sensitive to it
| here in the EU. It would save us citizens a lot of money
| right now.
|
| Edit 2: the Russians would like it too:
| https://www.rt.com/business/476844-eu-russia-us-sanctions/
| farmerstan wrote:
| Exporting natural gas is extremely difficult so the US
| isn't profiting from it economically. That's why natural
| gas is distributed via pipelines. Sending canisters of
| natural gas back and forth isn't efficient.
| teekert wrote:
| It depends on your goals, maybe the goals are political
| (and very long term economical), not economic (in the
| short term).
|
| Many wars turned out to not be economic in the short
| term, but one can argue that the US has benefited from
| the rubblization of the middle east (like the shenanigans
| pulled in Iran among others, as described in "confessions
| of an Economic Hitman.")
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Hrm. Hr. Hm. Why do they say so differently then?
|
| https://www.lngfacts.org/
| true_religion wrote:
| The US is the ally of most of Western Europe (this is
| important because when the US invades a country, it does so
| with the help or at least foreknowledge of its allies)...
| Russia is a neighbor at best.
|
| However, if the US invaded Italy with little warning and
| took over Florence because it felt it needed warm water
| port in Europe, or access to a better wine supply then
| Western Europe would rightly panic and wonder how they can
| disentangle themselves from US influence.
|
| The reason the US is allowed so much influence in the first
| place is because its stays out of territorial disputes in
| Europe---heck even if one occurs, it historically drags its
| feet for years.
| kongin wrote:
| If the US invaded Panama to secure it's warm water ...
|
| Oh wait.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| .... That's the whole point the USA doesn't invade it's
| European allies.
| Ekaros wrote:
| But it has allied itself with those who did. And then did
| not fight to liberate them...
| anticodon wrote:
| USA invaded Europe during WWII and never left. I still
| consider Italy and Germany occupied countries. They are
| not independent, they're occupied for 76 years.
|
| Why and how US will invade its colonies? Italy and
| Germany cannot resist any decision made by US. They have
| US military bases on their soil and their own army is
| deliberately made smaller and weaker than personnel of US
| military bases.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| Why are you leaving out the context that the principal
| defense alliance is _with_ America specifically in defense
| against Russia? Furthermore, it 's not just US pressure,
| much of Eastern Europe has been pushing against the NS2.
| Claiming that the US is acting purely in self serving
| motives is wildly disingenuous.
| bumbada wrote:
| >Why are you leaving out the context that the principal
| defense alliance is with America specifically in defense
| against Russia?
|
| Specifically against the Soviet Union, a communistic
| totalitarian regime that does not exist anymore.
|
| Specifically it never included Ukraine as member, and
| specifically the US promised that NATO will never expand
| to more than the original members.
|
| The only countries in Europe that are against the NS2 are
| those that have already pipelines or interests and are
| economically harmed by more competence.
|
| >Claiming that the US is acting purely in self serving
| motives is wildly disingenuous.
|
| Claiming that the US is acting purely in self serving
| motives is telling the truth. The US can mind its own
| business.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Specifically Russian Federation has invaded Ukraine.
|
| Specifically after signing Budapest Memorandum (Ukraine's
| nuclear disarming).
|
| Specifically after signing Russian-Ukrainian Friendship
| Treaty.
|
| Specifically without even admitting invasion!
|
| This totally invalidates all the claims regarding NATO.
| That's defense alliance, everyone who has missed
| opportunity to join is a total fool.
|
| Russian Federation is autocratic regime, just look at the
| last "elections".
|
| East Europe countries were under USSR occupation for 40
| years. Poland is going to switch to LNG to break
| dependency on RF gas.
| anticodon wrote:
| Specifically after Ukraine attempted to join NATO since
| 1991.
|
| Specifically after Ukraine made speaking Russian illegal
| and started treating Russian speaking population as
| second class citizens.
|
| Specifically after Ukraine made plans to give Crimea to
| US to build a US military base.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/25/basic-notes-on-
| victo...
|
| ctrl-f color revolutions
| kongin wrote:
| Because no one could be bothered closing NATO after 1993
| when the USSR stopped existing?
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| You know? It's not like the already existing pipelines
| into those countries are made obsolete by NS2. It just
| robs them of some...let's say 'leverage' or even
| extortion. If they don't like the pipelines they can buy
| LNG on the world market from whomever?
|
| Where is the problem with that? Cry me a river!
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Yes. That's the point. I don't even think it's a hidden
| thing, or something to be "diplomatic" about. The issue
| with NS2 that I have heard, explicitly states that it
| reduces the amount of geopolitical strength Poland and
| Ukraine have against Russia, while increasing the
| leverage Russia has against them and the rest of Europe.
|
| Russia is openly an economic adversary of Europe and the
| United States, and is openly hostile to several countries
| in the east. Germany "went it alone", as far as I know,
| in order to get better prices.
|
| My understanding of this topic is limited, so I admit my
| ignorance here. It simply doesn't make sense to give
| geopolitical strength to a rival by handicapping your
| nearer neighbors.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| Having the transit pipelines going through Eastern Europe
| meant that Russia cannot sell to their most lucrative
| customer, Germany, while not selling to Eastern Europe.
| Isn't it a peculiar coincidence that the moment the US
| withdrew their opposition to NS2, Russia has supply
| issues? With NS2 up and running they'll sell just enough
| to Germany to put pressure on the Baltic states, Ukraine,
| and Poland.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Russia has no supply issues. Gazprom is providing
| infrastructure, and other suppliers pump it empty like
| mad. Another one called Uniper, the largest AFAIK was at
| 77% full about 2 weeks ago. Hoarded. If you were Gazprom,
| and so far delivered according to contract, and even
| more, would you still deliver more to the conditions of
| those contracts, just so that other leeches can suck it
| out, and get rich quick on a crazy market? Why?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Who are the countries which haven't invaded other
| countries? As sordid as the Iraq war was, it seems strictly
| better to to topple an oppressive dictator than to go
| around annexing territories (or assassinating dissidents in
| EU countries, or installing dictators in foreign countries,
| or meddling in foreign elections, or jailing rival
| politicians in your own country, or so on). I think
| comparing countries' sins is pretty fruitless in general,
| but I hope we can agree that whatever criticism you may
| have for the US, Putin's Russia is on another level.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| The Russians could make the same argument of the US
| meddling in Ukraine, before Crimea happened. Nato denies
| it, but from their perspective it can make sense. Perhaps
| they only perceived it that way when the US got involved
| in the Maidan protests. That said, wrong perception is
| sometimes an excuse.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| What kind of meddling did the US do that is on the same
| level as a full-scale invasion? Moreover, while it's
| flat-out ridiculous to argue that the US and Russia are
| in the same ballpark in terms of harm to Europe (or
| anyone else), we don't need to fixate on this comparison
| as though there is a dichotomy.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| You don't have to compare the steps they took, you have
| to think about what the US would do if Russia gets
| involved in elections in Mexico or Canada.
| scythe wrote:
| Why go as far as Mexico? Russia has influenced, and
| continues to influence, elections in the United States.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Why? The US doesn't get involved in European elections
| (so your hypothetical doesn't even make sense), but
| that's besides the point. What does the US have to do
| with whether or not Europe gets its energy from Russia?
| Europe doesn't have to choose to put its energy supply in
| the hands of Russia or US, there are other suppliers and
| diversification is a really good alternative.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| They don't need to, because they have the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantik-Br%C3%BCcke and
| other similary undemocratic institutions influencing the
| shit out of anything via side-channel attacks.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I skimmed your link, but I didn't see anything damning or
| undemocratic. Where are the Lukashenko-esque dictators
| that the US installed in Europe? Which dissidents have
| the US assassinated on EU soil?
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Are you dumb, or what? I've written they don't need to
| because they have other means, which at the end of the
| day amounts to 'the same shit, but different' for the
| influenced vasall states.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| You wrote:
|
| > They don't need to, because they have the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantik-Br%C3%BCcke and
| other similary undemocratic institutions influencing the
| shit out of anything via side-channel attacks.
|
| Which _clearly says_ that the US has "undemocratic
| institutions" influencing Europe, but the link doesn't
| support the idea that the A-B is antidemocratic (there's
| nothing inherently "antidemocratic" about fostering
| international partnership and cooperation).
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Look...I may be naive, but if you have institutions which
| push policies, empower candidates beyond the scenes, via
| whichever circles, then this is undemocratic, or
| otherwise called 'framing', 'setting the goal posts' to
| 'game' the rules into your favour. Or cheating, or fraud,
| or whatever. Which means candidates prepared that way,
| and then presented as the only option(s) to give the
| deceived masses the illusion of choice is simply a lie.
|
| edit: Of course this is not exclusive to the US, let's
| just say they lead the market of political BS, k?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > if you have institutions which push policies, empower
| candidates beyond the scenes
|
| There's nothing in your article that suggested that the
| organization in question was some sort of propaganda arm
| of the US government, and there's nothing undemocratic
| about advocating for one's interests. You might not agree
| with the advocacy, but "democracy" doesn't demand
| agreement.
|
| > Of course this is not exclusive to the US, let's just
| say they lead the market of political BS, k?
|
| I don't buy this at all. There are nations with actual
| propaganda departments, state-run censorship, bot nets,
| etc who actually directly attempt to influence elections.
|
| Like all other countries, the US _does_ advocate for its
| own interests abroad--this is called "diplomacy" and
| it's generally the least-bad kind of advocacy. However,
| unlike other countries, the US does possess a lot of
| clout (the world depends on America in large part for
| security and prosperity, however loath we are to admit
| that America or Americans serve a useful purpose).
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| By the great gods of Gonzo!
|
| I'm not here to spoon feed, mentor, or lecture you on
| every single point you question. Furthermore it would be
| disrespectful to disturb your blissful ignorance.
|
| Dream in peace.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Literally every single political institution in the
| world, from sports clubs to town councils to national
| governments, have back channels and organizations that
| promote agendas. It is the means by which those agendas
| get put through governments that make something
| legitimate or not.
|
| But we're going down a rabbit hole. The point is that
| Russia now has more economic leverage over eastern
| Europe, and for what?
| sergeykish wrote:
| Show me US invasion forces in Ukraine.
|
| Democracy support is not meddling. RF has done a lot of
| harm to Ukraine even before 2014. Euromaidan was a
| response against RF puppet Yanukovych. RF has used gas
| prices to influence election results. Leonid Kuchma who
| has built oligarchy regime elected with the help of
| Kremlin. His opponent, Viacheslav Chornovil, was killed.
|
| It is mafia. And in RF mafia has got its own state.
| teekert wrote:
| Just read this book [0], sure the Chinese are doing it
| too now, they read the book, the EU as well probably.
|
| I think it would be good to have good relations with
| Russia, "where goods cross borders, armies do not."
|
| There are probably a lot of nice people living in Russia,
| and I bet they love their children too.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Econ
| omic_Hit...
| raxxorrax wrote:
| We had a far better relation to Russia in the early 21st
| century and a lot of stability with that. Somehow that
| got blown up without any discernible reason from my
| perspective.
| yurish wrote:
| The reasons are quite obvious I think. Expansion of NATO
| to the east and western supported color
| revolutions/arabian springs after which those who rule
| Russia started to understand that it is not enough to
| possess nukes and be safe because you can be overthrown
| from inside.
| anticodon wrote:
| _As sordid as the Iraq war was, it seems strictly better
| to to topple an oppressive dictator_
|
| I think that 600,000 Iraqis killed in that war (lower
| bound) would have different opinion.
|
| Besides, does population of Iraq live better now? I
| seriously doubt that.
| Tomte wrote:
| Germany does not rely on Russian gas. It's even building
| expensive infrastructure for American liquified gas.
|
| Germany simply wants to have both options. America doesn't
| want that, because in "good times" Russian gas is much
| cheaper.
| akmarinov wrote:
| Yeah, it "only" imports 40% of its gas from Russia. 29%
| from the Netherlands, 21% from Norway.
|
| The US doesn't even register, so it's lumped in with
| "others".
| Tomte wrote:
| So what? It can start buying American gas within what?
| Weeks?
|
| All the infrastructure for the ships and further
| distribution is being built right now.
|
| Anerica is under "others", because it's too expensive.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| There isn't enough LNG import capacity at present to
| replace Russian pipeline exports. There are quite a few
| slated to be built but these projects take a long time to
| get built.
|
| Also, even if there was sufficient capacity to import an
| equal volume of LNG there's still the problem of
| distributing it. Pipelines and other infrastructure have
| to be built to take care of new chokepoints.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Isn't there? If I look at the not up to date maps from
| https://www.gie.eu/publications/maps/ there is since
| years.
|
| We can import gas which is delivered as CLNG via
| Rotterdam, Zeebrugge, maybe even Dunkerque. The
| infrastructure is there since years, and has enough
| capacity. What is happening at the moment is just caused
| by speculation, hoarders, and politics.
|
| All this crying is from the uninformed, multiplied by the
| presstitutes.
| oezi wrote:
| 29% gas from netherlands is Liquified Gas, which might as
| well be from the US or Qatar.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > Putting diplomatic pressure to stop relying on Russian gas
|
| Economic sanctions and legal threats towards executives of
| any companies working on the project go a bit further than
| diplomatic pressure. It's probably the closest things to an
| act of war you can do without doing one.
|
| Interfering in the international dealing of a foreign country
| can definitely be seen as sabotage. I personally stoped
| viewing the USA as an ally of the EU after this intervention.
| But to be fair I already had serious doubt after they
| crippled our diplomatic efforts in Iran.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| reminds one of Napolean
| tablespoon wrote:
| > [0]: https://freewestmedia.com/2020/07/06/us-intensifies-
| pressure...
|
| Might want to be careful with that source. It looks like it's
| run by a "Swedish nationalist politician"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1vra_Suk) and appears to
| be running stories based on the Russian government-owned TASS
| newswire (e.g. https://freewestmedia.com/2021/09/24/unionists-
| rise-up-again...).
|
| Also this article shows a pretty bizarre misunderstanding to
| push an Ivermectin angle:
|
| https://freewestmedia.com/2021/09/26/french-doctor-violently...
|
| > The Associated Press has meanwhile tried to claim that the
| doctor was not arrested for prescribing Ivermectin and that
| this was "fake news" but patients treated by the physician
| confirmed that Theron had been prescribing the alternative
| life-saving treatment.
|
| The AP article says he was arrested for assault, after throwing
| things at someone who was delivering documents to him about an
| investigation into problems with his medical practice. "Free
| West Media" seems to be trying to imply his Ivermectin
| prescriptions are proof he was arrested for doing that, but
| that doesn't follow _at all_. The Ivermectin prescriptions and
| assault seem like they 'd be legally independent events, and
| it's quite plausible he'd never have been arrested if he hadn't
| been so unreasonable as to throw things at people.
|
| Also, here are some of their most recent editorials:
|
| The Covid Lie grows like Pinocchio's nose
| (https://freewestmedia.com/2021/09/27/the-covid-lie-grows-
| lik...)
|
| Vetting Afghan immigrants for a religious comorbidity (Islam)
| (https://freewestmedia.com/2021/09/23/vetting-afghan-
| immigran...)
|
| Terrorists in Daraa, Syria hoarding large amounts of cash
| (https://freewestmedia.com/2021/09/16/terrorists-in-daraa-
| syr...)
|
| Daraa appears to be city that was recently captured by the
| Syrian government from the rebels. Calling the rebels
| "terrorists" seems to indicate a strong pro-Assad orientation.
| makomk wrote:
| Probably, but maybe not now. Russia has plenty of pipeline
| capacity to export gas that they could be using but have
| decided not to, and the general consensus seems to be that
| they're likely doing this to put pressure on Europe to approve
| Nord Stream 2. The thing is, they have a history of using their
| gas supplies as a political weapon, so if it wasn't this...
|
| Nord Stream 2 and the cementing of European dependence on
| Russian gas it represents seems like a terrible idea
| geopolitically. The thing is, the more powerful European
| countries like Germany which pushed for it didn't think they'd
| be the ones it'd hurt.
| Sideyon wrote:
| But Russia actually increased its natural gas exports in 2021
| by quite a lot [1]
|
| [1] http://www.gazpromexport.ru/en/presscenter/news/2543/
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| > they could be using but have decided not to
|
| This magical euro-thinking just boggles my mind. Do you
| really think if some euro-fokks somewhere in Straussburg make
| a wish for cheap NG, billions of cubic meter, then gas should
| immediately appears and be available for a penny per cm?
| Really?
| makomk wrote:
| Well, if the gas doesn't exist and can't be produced in the
| first place then it hardly matters whether Nord Stream 2 is
| up and running does it? The only reason the non-operation
| of Nord Stream 2 would matter is if Russia had gas
| available but was constrained in getting it to Europe by
| pipeline capacity, which they're not - there's an unusual
| amount of capacity just going unused. Yet they've been
| dropping not-so-subtle hints that the problem would just go
| away if Europe approved Nord Stream 2. The only way for
| that to work is if Russia could sell Europe gas but
| intentionally chose not to for geopolitical leverage
| reasons.
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| > Well, if the gas doesn't exist and can't be produced in
| the first place
|
| It does exist and could be produced. But it requires
| discussions, contract(s), signatures, obligations, CAPEX
| (and quite a lot of it), bank loans, development in the
| field etc.
|
| Not a magic wish by someone.
|
| Right now Gazprom is quite busy filling up storage in the
| Russia in preparation for the winter.
|
| > "the problem would just go away if Europe approved Nord
| Stream 2"
|
| Really? Care to provide Putin/Miller statements?
|
| Export plan is already known and published. And problem
| won't go away, they are much more serious that this bs
| about gazprom and Russia
| r00fus wrote:
| It's not magical thinking if you see hidden agendas and
| corruption as the root-cause of the mis-planning.
|
| Gray's law applies to political corruption:
| http://wikidumper.blogspot.com/2007/07/greys-law.html
| jeltz wrote:
| No, but German could just have not shut down their nuclear
| power plants.
| bildung wrote:
| _> Nord Stream 2 and the cementing of European dependence on
| Russian gas it represents seems like a terrible idea
| geopolitically._
|
| Why? Central Europe isn't _that_ dependent on that gas,
| because Russia isn 't the only source. OTOH Russia now has an
| incentive to keep the gas and thus the Euros flowing.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Part of the problem in the UK is limited gas storage capacity.
| Another problem is the slow adoption of wind and solar
| generally. A third is the slow pace of construction of
| interconnects between the various national grids. The arguments
| about solar not being available at night and the wind not
| always blowing would be mitigated if we could more easily
| transport energy to where it is needed.
|
| The crisis, if it really is one, is mostly caused by blinkered
| politicians and short term business thinking.
|
| But you are right in a sense; Russia is just making it clear
| that they can turn off, or change the price of, the gas supply
| whenever they feel like it which makes the idea of being even
| more reliant on it rather scary to me.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| How would solar ever be a good option in the UK?
| pornel wrote:
| Plants use solar, and it's pretty green here ;)
|
| Annual average kWh/m^2 in the UK ranges from 50%-75% of
| what you'd get in Spain or Italy. That's enough even for
| domestic solar panels to pay for themselves.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| I'm happy about this. The EU wants to have its cake and eat it
| too by making trade deals both with the US and some really
| terrible regimes. One of Merkel's final desperate acts on her
| way out was to try and push through a mega trade deal with
| China which was thankfully shot down by other EU members over
| Xinjiang. My own country, Denmark, gleefully agreed to push
| Nord Stream 2 pipe through its waters.
|
| The EU may commit the fewest atrocities but they sure do love
| putting money in the coffers of those who commit them.
|
| Here's what we can try doing instead: build more nuclear
| reactors, stop funding our democratic oases by throwing money
| at autocratic regimes, and stop pissing in each other's milk so
| we can become a real global power that doesn't have to kowtow
| to the awful to make ends meet.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| So you don't own any electronics with Chinese components
| then? Nothing is as black and white as this..
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Of course I do. But making deals with autocratic regimes is
| not the way forward for the EU, at least not if we hope to
| practice the democracy we preach.
| tda wrote:
| Even with the recent rise in prices, energy prices are still way
| to low to actually influence choices most people make. Trains are
| still more expensive than car travel by car, flying is still
| cheaper than rail, I still don't know how much I pas to heat my
| house because it is negligible compared to what I spend on other
| things....
|
| Energy is so important, yet so cheap. I still hear people flying
| in for a two hour business meeting, or commuting by car tens of
| kilometers. Only when that ceases to be economically viable we
| should call the price high. Until then, I'm happy it finally
| makes economical sense to reduce CO2 output.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Energy is so important, yet so cheap.
|
| If you want a good economy you have to make the inputs flow
| unimpeded. People need food, and everything else runs on
| energy. It has to be a commodity.
| jtbayly wrote:
| It is in part the push to reduce CO2 that has caused these
| prices to rise. The obvious solution is to _increase_ CO2
| production (ie burn more coal and oil) to get the price back
| down. That 's the opposite of it making "economical sense to
| reduce CO2 output."
| fsslrisrchr wrote:
| Let me guess,
|
| You work from home and/or you make much more than an average
| person your age. Maybe you're a programmer.
|
| Ok let's make energy more expensive. I think it's only fair
| that the pain is distributed equitably, so let's put a $0.1/Gb
| tax on bandwidth [1], the cloud being one of the largest
| growing emitters of CO2.
|
| Frankly, I liked the 90s low bandwidth internet more than
| today's, everything valuable we can do today the 90s had enough
| bandwidth for. Everything that is unhealthy about the internet
| today typically takes bandwidth. So, I think $0.1/Gb is not
| enough.
|
| Do you agree?
|
| [1] $0.1/Gb for data flowing to the end user and $0.2/Gb for
| data crossing country borders. So the cloud folks don't syphon
| off all the personal data of my citizens.
|
| [EDIT] I think only unethical_ban understood the point of this
| post. That's it's easy to propose a tax for the poor for their
| poor behavior. Tax yourself first! I disagree with
| unethical_ban that it's a bad example - its purposely a glib
| and capricious indirect carbon tax.
| swsieber wrote:
| That makes no sense to me. I would think you'd impose a
| carbon tax or something and let the consumer prices sort
| themselves out.
| pkaye wrote:
| Why not tax Cloud providers instead? The compute part is what
| takes the most power. And maybe exclude those who use green
| energy sources.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Thanks for making this so concise. It's always easy to look
| at something and say "well these people are _weak_, because I
| can do without it, so I'm ready to tax/punish this behavior".
| It's true that society right now has lots of profligate
| energy waste, but without a path to transition out of this
| wasteful energy regime, the rise in prices will affect the
| most vulnerable in society.
|
| Sadly, historically, when society was undergoing large
| changes, such as industrialization and urbanization,
| marginalized peoples were never really considered. We can't
| have fear of change hold back our progress, but we do need to
| be careful to offer marginalized peoples ways to ease
| transition into lower-energy regimes.
|
| Aside: I didn't even register the sarcasm in this post when I
| first wrote it :D
| paulsutter wrote:
| Much more direct to put a carbon tax on the energy used to
| power the datacenters. Some datacenters are on hydro power,
| and some are on coal. Penalize the coal
|
| Charging for bandwidth doesn't align incentives to solve the
| problem
| tombert wrote:
| I agree, it seems like an energy tax would be more directly
| addressing the environmental impact, and the cloud services
| would in turn be forced to raise their prices to a
| something more accurately reflecting the cost of cleanup.
| tomp wrote:
| This is the reason why people hate "green solutions".
|
| You blame the cloud but you want to tax bandwidth. As if I
| can't upload a tiny bit of code that uses tons of compute.
| And again to "protect privacy" - as if exporting personal
| data takes a non-negligible amount of traffic compared to
| Netflix/BitTorrent.
|
| The only way that taxing externalities makes sense, is taxing
| at the source. If cloud "takes too much energy" then tax
| energy! And make it revenue neutral otherwise you're just
| incentivising the government to increase taxes and waste even
| more money/resources.
| iso1210 wrote:
| Yup, tax carbon use of energy on the way into the data
| centre, let microsoft, google, amazon etc work out how they
| want to charge it.
|
| Data centers in say south island new zealand powered by
| hydro will have near-zero carbon cost and thus be cheaper
|
| The biggest issue with a carbon tax and data centre usage
| is how to charge tax on the 'import' of services.
| robocat wrote:
| > Data centers in say south island new zealand powered by
| hydro will have near-zero carbon cost
|
| This is an incorrect mental model that is unfortunately
| repeated by so many people.
|
| All1 of the NZ hydro power is currently used by
| consumers.
|
| If we add some extra load, then the marginal increase in
| kWh is 100% generated by gas (or maybe even coal at
| Huntley).
|
| The same problem occurs when you buy "green" energy:
| unless you are careful to ensure your purchase creates
| new green generation, then it is just greenwashing
| (fooling oneself). This is a significant problem with CO2
| credits (not saying you shouldn't try, but don't be
| surprised that CO2 production remains the same even if
| you try to offset).
|
| 1 There may be short periods when the lakes are full, and
| water is spilled instead of being used for electricity
| generation, but that certainly isn't common.
| heisenzombie wrote:
| You're not wrong.
|
| Perhaps the most charitable interpretation given they
| specify the South Island is they're assuming that we
| would displace the energy use of the Tiwai Point
| aluminium smelter. Given that's about 13% of our total
| energy use, is powered by hydro dams without the grid
| capacity to transport to population centres, and run by
| Rio Tinto who keep threatening to throw their toys and go
| home...
|
| (Of course, the other option would be to build the bloody
| grid capacity to get energy to where we need it, but
| that's a different story I guess.)
| tombert wrote:
| > Ok let's make energy more expensive. I think it's only fair
| that the pain is distributed equitably, so let's put a
| $0.1/Gb tax on bandwidth [1], the cloud being one of the
| largest growing emitters of CO2.
|
| Even if I grant that, I suspect if you're working from home
| and not business traveling, it's still a net negative of CO2
| being emitted. I would think that nearly everything that the
| "cloud" replaces cost more in CO2 than the "cloud" itself.
|
| But I realize that your point is that it's easy to come up
| with arbitrary taxes that hurt the poor, and that's a
| reasonable criticism, but I don't think that that implies
| that we shouldn't do _any_ kind of externallity tax on
| carbon. Instead, we could use tax incentives to give a rebate
| to disproportionately affected poor people for gas, or we
| could use the extra revenue from the taxes to give rebates
| for electric cars.
|
| I'm not claiming this is a perfect system, and there will
| definitely be people who slip through the cracks, and that
| sucks, but the cost of not doing enough about climate change
| is substantially worse.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Well, energy prices rising would affect cloud providers and
| their costs, which would be passed on to their clients, which
| would be passed on to the end user eventually.
|
| You tried to make a point, but your example failed.
|
| I see what you're saying: The parent is being glib in your
| case, not realizing that a blanket increase on energy prices
| would hit the working class much harder than those with the
| privilege of staying home or making more money.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > the cloud being one of the largest growing emitters of CO2.
|
| I'm sure it is, but this misses the point. If someone can
| work from home or have a conference call rather than travel
| for a meeting, the emissions savings are huge.
|
| However liking a video and clicking an advert generated by a
| algorithm that tracked habits...
| hbrav wrote:
| > I'm happy it finally makes economical sense to reduce CO2
| output.
|
| I'd be happy with this too. What concerns me is that some
| people will look at this and say "It makes economical sense to
| burn more coal".
| rafale wrote:
| It wouldn't make more economical sense if we taxed the
| externalities. Right now, the coal plants are "using" (read
| destroying) resources (air, water, ...) for free. A tax
| should price in the cost of that harm in a way that make
| green alternatives more competitive.
| The_Double wrote:
| A part of why gas prices are so high right now in the EU,
| is because of ETS (emission trading scheme) prices. EU
| industry has to buy CO2 emission rights, and the prices are
| at an all time high right now, causing coal plants to stop
| production. If the high gas prices cause more production
| from the coal plants, this will push the prices up even
| more.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I disagree. You must enact a ban with a firm deadline,
| otherwise you end up in cryptoland where you're using
| country-level amounts of energy because someone, somewhere
| is willing to burn up fiat on it. This is of course
| expected in late stage capitalism where trillions of
| dollars are chasing returns, physical realm consequences be
| damned.
|
| Countries are already enacting deadlines for banning
| combustion vehicle sales [1], it is straightforward to
| enact fossil combustion electrical generation bans in
| similar fashion. The communicates to the market to no
| longer fund or implement combustion generation facilities,
| and investment will flow away from existing facilities
| towards renewables and energy storage (whether that's
| batteries, green hydrogen and/or ammonia, pumped hydro
| storage, etc). Most new generation is already renewables
| (due to cost, see Lazard's LCOE [2]) [3] [4] [5], what I
| discuss in this comment rapidly pulls forward fossil
| generation retirement (from 2030-2050 to something more
| reasonable, such as no latter than 2030).
|
| In short, outlaw fossil combustion, and investment will
| flow into clean alternatives. The planet doesn't care about
| your fiat and economic system.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-
| out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
|
| [2] https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-
| cost-o...
|
| [3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896
|
| [4] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416
|
| [5] https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2021/Apr/W
| orld-...
| epistasis wrote:
| You are correct, gentle supply and demand will operate
| too slowly to correct the market.
|
| A huge problem with the current market is that it's not
| very free, entrance is too difficult for new players, and
| the entrenched players have excessive political power
| through regulatory capture. There are far too many
| players with massive amounts of assets that would be
| stranded and devalued, if they were allowed to be exposed
| to competition.
|
| But even if there were a more free market, the speed of
| capital on these sorts of scales is very slow. So even
| though it may be more economically efficient to abandon a
| bunch of bad coal plants and do massive deployments of
| new technology, the amount of capital necessary makes it
| difficult to make the transition at the economically most
| cost effective pace.
|
| Look at all the coal plants that burn coal, despite
| losing money at it.
|
| https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-
| insights...
| bojangleslover wrote:
| But nobody can quantify the cost of those externalities
| hbrav wrote:
| It's not an easy task, but you can certainly try. For
| example:
| https://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/publication/the-
| econ...
| hbrav wrote:
| Oh I 100% agree with you.
|
| But imagine you're the government of a country that is
| struggling to provide heating over the winter. It would be
| very tempting to think "Hmm, we could recommission that
| coal power plant..."
| candiodari wrote:
| Whereas people here are suggesting "only 1000 people will
| die if we don't. That'll save MORE carbon too!"
|
| It is not reasonable to seriously cut energy usage. It
| will make the lives of the poor unliveable. Also any
| meaningful decrease will make 90% of people's lives
| unliveable.
|
| No, we clearly need innovation to make this happen, not
| force. You cannot expect people to make these sorts of
| sacrifices, it's not going to happen.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| While I fully agree on substance the market mechanisms mean
| that if oil and gas are pricey all prices go up. So in a
| country like Spain or Romania they are already seeing a risk of
| 'energy poverty' for winter heating. Not to mention all the far
| more numerous poor people who won't be able to go to work,
| drive the bus that earns their living, etc.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Yay poverty?
| choeger wrote:
| Think again. These rails you seem to favor need energy to be
| built: Steel needs to be made, a track has to be cleared,
| machines need to operate, workers need to get to the
| construction site and so on and so forth.
|
| Unless you propose to decide top-down which projects deserve
| cheap energy and which don't, you cannot avoid the fact that
| building roads and allowing car ownership is under certain
| circumstances more economical than building lots of railroads.
|
| On top of that, imagine how commuting 10km by train vs. car
| work out: By car it's a 10min ride, assuming no congestion.
| Whereas the door-to-door train trip will take the better part
| of an hour.
|
| There is a similar advantage for flying. Yes, kerosene is
| comparatively cheap. But flying has an even more important
| advantage over trains and that is flexibility. The network of
| airports multiplies the number of potential connections whereas
| train stations can only lead you along railroads. In a region
| with fixed, medium-range traveling routes, say France or Japan,
| the train wins, otherwise the plane is just more efficient.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| You're not making a coherent argument here. If you want to
| get a holistic picture of what these systems actually cost,
| it comes down to up-front investment vs ongoing costs. Rail
| needs to pay high costs initially in purchasing cars,
| acquiring land, and laying down track, but from there it just
| becomes about maintenance costs. When it comes to roads, it's
| usually a smaller one-time cost to acquire land and lay down
| road, then ongoing maintenance on the road itself (which is
| worse than track wear-and-tear since there's more surface to
| fix, hiring crews to come into the area is more complicated,
| and because conditions of usage on a road aren't as tightly
| controlled.)
|
| To make matters complicated in practice, gas in the US (since
| that's where this argument makes sense) has long been
| considered the holy grail of the economy, and gas taxes have
| not been raised to account for inflation since 1990. Since
| the 1980s, the US has politically favored cars and airplanes
| over trains and buses. Roads are never expected to make a
| profit, though most transit in the US is. Aviation has had
| things like the Essential Air Service that offer subsidies
| for rural air routes and carriers that serve rural airports,
| whereas the closest thing that transit has to this is Amtrak
| mandates to service cities; these are hamfisted mandates that
| Congressmen stuff into spending bills to make their
| constituents happy but don't actually create the kind of
| healthy market you would need to offer quality service.
| Moreover Amtrak track is often leased from freight carriers
| _because_ America apportions less money to rail than it does
| to roads and transit, so Amtrak trains often must yield and
| wait for freight trains to go first. That and the fact that
| externalities from emissions aren't accounted for mean any
| alternatives to the plane and the car in the US are at a
| heavy disadvantage.
| jltsiren wrote:
| If there is no congestion, there is no railway connection,
| because the number of commuters is too low to support one.
|
| A 10 km commute by train typically takes 30-40 minutes door-
| to-door. For driving, the normal time might be 20-30 minutes,
| but the variance is often much higher than by train. If
| driving is consistently faster or slower than that, people
| tend to switch between train and car or otherwise change
| their commuting habits until congestion is back to "normal".
| lumost wrote:
| Energy is cheap in that most sources have low marginal cost and
| high CapEx. Building energy capacity is largely an exercise of
| capital formation and deployment. These capital expenditures
| have fixed capacity, and lifetimes. If the capital formation
| and deployment process breaks down for some reason, then there
| will be an energy crises as demand outstrips supply. The cost
| of energy in such a market is not the marginal cost of an extra
| kWh but instead the marginal ability for energy purchasers
| ability to pay which for many use cases is orders of magnitude
| higher than the former number.
| zthrowaway wrote:
| You're unhappy people aren't forced to live like it's 1850? How
| about we have alternative energy that can satisfy CO2 concerns
| and provide the current standards of living we all enjoy first.
| jacobolus wrote:
| No, people are not unhappy that energy is cheap, but rather
| that _externalities are not priced in_. The result is that
| activities and goods that seem trivially cheap (so people
| consume them far in excess of their needs without worrying
| about the expense) turn out to have disastrous large-scale
| consequences.
|
| Our economic system has no affordances for making choices
| based on true costs - only sticker prices. When these are
| systematically distorted, it causes a huge collective
| problem.
| thedrbrian wrote:
| Can we price in the carbon cost of raising a child to the
| age of 18?
|
| If we're going after all the fun stuff I don't want the
| parents to get away scott free.
| lostlogin wrote:
| If items had the externalities priced in, the cost of
| having a child would go up, but only in that outgoings
| would increase. I suppose you could bill them based on
| their CO2 and methane output.
| imtringued wrote:
| You can do that but it's not the parents that emit the
| CO2.
| greenonions wrote:
| Future people will likely be carbon negative.
|
| Shall I give you my Venmo?
| newt_slowly wrote:
| Since you didn't go into detail, I'm going to guess that
| you are referring to atmospheric CCS being widely
| deployed in the future. Unfortunately CCS is not and will
| not be practical. [1] [2]
|
| I can explain my critiques in more detail if you clarify
| exactly what your argument is.
|
| [1] https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/08/09/the-
| improbability-of-c... [2] Comical, but fact-based take:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8
| [deleted]
| tjader wrote:
| We should price in the externality where it is caused. I
| don't think raising a child emits any CO2 by itself.
|
| If we price in the emissions where they happen it will be
| priced in for all consumers of the products that cause
| them.
| phdelightful wrote:
| I want a small discount for sequestering carbon in my
| child's body mass for several decades!
| tshaddox wrote:
| The average adult human contains what, like 30 pounds of
| carbon? That's very little money according to the carbon
| offset prices I have seen.
| pzo wrote:
| You have to account for:
|
| - all the meat and diary your child is going to consume
| in those 18 years
|
| - all diapers that are going to be produced and disposed.
|
| - all methane and CO2 you child produced on an a daily
| basis for those 18 years (exhaling,
| digesting/pooping/farting)
|
| - concrete used for building this extra room for your
| child
|
| ...
|
| just to name a few.
| tjader wrote:
| Not if the externality is priced in for each of those
| products.
| tombert wrote:
| I don't think they're complaining that the prices are cheap
| exactly, I think they're complaining that the prices are, in
| a sense, inaccurate.
|
| No one here is saying we should all be Amish, but if gasoline
| is $3 per gallon, but it costs $3 to remove the CO2 from the
| atmosphere (making both these numbers up, I don't own a car),
| then there's a good chance that the gas is effectively too
| cheap, and the rest of us are going to have to pay to clean
| it up later. If we taxed gas to be its _true_ price (cost of
| extraction + refining + shipping + profit-margin +
| environmental cleanup), it would help incentivize cleaner
| fuels.
| epistasis wrote:
| And to quantify this a bit more, current costs for direct
| air extraction and sequestration of CO2 are about $6/gallon
| of gas. Climeworks is charging early customers $600/ton of
| CO2 [1], and about 100 gallons of gas convert to a ton of
| CO2.
|
| This sort of direct air capture will be absolutely
| necessary in the second half of this century for all of our
| current oaths to keep warming to 1.5C, according to the
| IPCC SR1.5 report. And though many parts of the supply
| chain of CO2 direct air capture might get cheaper with
| time, the actual sequestration part might get harder and
| more expensive with time.
|
| Chevron had promised to capture only a small amount of CO2
| as part of a LNG project in Australia, but is facing
| massive fines because they didn't understand the geology
| enough to actually sequester CO2.
|
| So while I'm fairly confident that we could eventually get
| the tech for CO2 capture down to maybe $1/gallon of gas,
| the actual sequestration is only going to get more
| difficult with time.
|
| Every gallon of gas burned today makes 20 pounds of CO2
| that will need to be removed in the future we are burdening
| future generations with an incredibly difficult debt that
| we don't yet know how to pay down.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/9/22663597/largest-
| direct-ai...
| PeterisP wrote:
| Hey, I've always had a question which perhaps you can
| answer.
|
| In essence, we're still burning lots and lots of carbon
| just to extract energy. Thermodynamics says to reverse
| the process and get carbon from CO2 we need to put all
| that energy back, with a hefty bonus due to
| inefficiencies.
|
| So how can it be feasible to afford enough energy to
| "unburn" a century's worth of burnt carbon if we can't
| even get enough energy to avoid burning new carbon in the
| first place? Like, our energy generation might double in
| a few decades, but this "unburning" would require _so
| much_ spare energy that it doesn 't seem likely to
| achieve as soon as the second half of this century.
| tombert wrote:
| I could be wrong, but I think what you're referring to
| would be to convert it back to _raw_ carbon. I believe
| that "carbon capture" would be literally taking out the
| raw CO2 and leaving it as-is, presumably holding it
| underground or something, which I don't think would take
| nearly that much energy.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The physics of storing equivalent weights of gas versus
| solids - the volume and/or pressure containment required
| - make it quite impractical to store meaningful amounts
| (on the scale of billions of tons) of it as gas; the fact
| that CO2 is just 28% carbon and 72% oxygen is comparably
| a lesser issue but doesn't help as well.
|
| Perhaps you can avoid "unburning" it by some other
| chemical process (which is why I was asking this) but
| simply pumping the CO2 somewhere does not seem a
| reasonable option, the only place on Earth that can
| easily hold that much of CO2 gas is the general
| atmosphere where it already resides.
| epistasis wrote:
| I agree that sequestering co2 gas is a losing game, and
| that's why I think all the fossil fuel companies' plans
| for CCS are pure bunk.
|
| Climeworks' proposal to pump it into basalt caverns,
| where it chemically reacts and becomes solid, is one way
| around that.
|
| Carbon Engineering is doing gas to liquids, and claims
| that they need ~2.25 kWh of electricity to convert
| atmospheric CO2 to 1 kWh worth of liquid hydrocarbons. We
| will see.
|
| We will need gigatons/year of sequestration in 2050. It's
| going to require a ton of innovation to get there.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Gasoline is high-energy-density using a high-power-
| density portable quickly-starting/stopping engine. These
| advantages can overcome the minuses in some applications.
| (Fewer after the recent advances in batteries, etc.)
| PeterisP wrote:
| My question was more about the fact that we're still
| burning extreme amounts of carbon _purely_ for energy,
| not for density of energy or density of power or
| portability of engines - we 're burning coal for
| electricity, we're burning gas to heat homes.
|
| We'd need to pay back all that energy, but in the coming
| decades we can't even afford the energy cost of the
| relatively much simpler solution of "simply" not burning
| bulk carbon for heat.
| abecedarius wrote:
| I don't think new coal plants are rational at all.
|
| Re gas heating, I sure could've used some just this past
| winter during the Texas snowpocalypse. My apartment uses
| electric power for heating/cooking, so electricity was a
| single point of failure. Resiliency through diversity is
| a point I missed above.
| newt_slowly wrote:
| > So how can it be feasible to afford enough energy to
| "unburn" a century's worth of burnt carbon if we can't
| even get enough energy to avoid burning new carbon in the
| first place?
|
| It isn't, and it won't be. Carbon capture is a pleasing
| myth we tell ourselves to avoid the massive and immediate
| actions that would be necessary to avert catastrophe.
|
| We're addicted to fossil fuels, telling ourselves that
| when we eventually sober up we can undo the damage we've
| done to ourselves.
| imtringued wrote:
| Carbon capture will never lead to negative emissions.
| What it will do is merely capture CO2 at central
| locations for processes that have no alternative.
| epistasis wrote:
| I like the other answers you got, but will add one
| observation. Once we get energy fro, non-carbon emitting
| sources, it's possible to put energy into capture without
| emitting more CO2 at the same time. So whether it takes
| 0.5 kWh or 10 kWh to capture the amount of CO2 that
| produced 1kWh for us originally, as long as it came from
| renewable resources, we can largely do it.
| PeterisP wrote:
| My question is more about expectations of scale. If
| currently renewable energy (not just electricity -
| heating etc matters a lot) is something like 10% or 12%
| of total energy; and we need to go to something of 300%
| or even much more (to cover energy spent not on current
| needs but solely to cover the "unburning" the excess of
| previous century, "repaying the debt" much quicker than
| we accumulated it), then that extreme growth of renewable
| energy generation doesn't seem plausible to achieve in
| the timeframe you suggest.
| epistasis wrote:
| It's been a while since I ran through the napkin math,
| and I'm on mobile and can't pull up the backing links,
| unfortunately, but I believe we are just barely on track
| to replace all energy use with renewables in 15-20 years.
| After which we should have spare production capacity,
| assuming there is wind/solar close enough to the carbon
| sequestration points.
|
| The gist is that if you look at the exponential curves of
| growth of both wind and solar deployments, and assume
| that we don't back off from those, you get X amount of
| TWh/year in 2040. Combine that with conversion of heating
| and transport to electrification, which provides huge
| efficiency boosts and requires only 1/3 to 1/4 the energy
| (most fossil fuel energy is just wasted). Then add in all
| the parts of the developing world which will increase
| their energy use to EU/China standards, and we are just
| barely there.
|
| However I think we are likely to see big gains in
| production capacity as the developing world ups their
| game. They will be consuming more electricity, but also
| be immensely more productive.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _Thermodynamics says to reverse the process and get
| carbon from CO2 we need to put all that energy back, with
| a hefty bonus due to inefficiencies._
|
| The key insight is that you don't need to turn carbon
| dioxide back into carbon. You just need to store those
| carbon atoms it in a stable form that keeps them out of
| the atmosphere. The most plausible way of doing that at
| large scale is to accelerate the reaction of naturally
| occurring silicates from rocks with atmospheric CO2.
|
| "From a thermodynamic point of view, inorganic carbonates
| represent a lower energy state than CO2; hence the
| carbonation reaction is exothermic..."
|
| That's from chapter 7 of the IPCC Special Report on
| Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage, which I recommend
| reading for more details.
| specialist wrote:
| Yes and:
|
| IIRC 1 ppm of CO2 is ~1 gigaton of carbon. Roughly the
| weight of Mt Everest. We're adding ~26 Everests annually.
| soperj wrote:
| 1 ppm of C02 ~ 2.13 gigatons of carbon, which is ~ 7.8
| gigatons of CO2. (1) We add about 43 gigatons of CO2 to
| the atmosphere per year 55% of which is absorbed by
| natural sinks. We're definitely not adding 26 ppm of C02
| to the atmosphere each year.
|
| 1.https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=45
| pfdietz wrote:
| Mt. Everest has a mass of about 6 trillion tonnes.
| specialist wrote:
| Ugh. Stupid brain. Trying to get sense of the challenge,
| I worked some numbers to try visualizing how much carbon
| we're talking about. I'll refind my notes or recreate.
|
| Thanks.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > 100 gallons of gas convert to a ton of CO2
|
| Gasoline is about 87% carbon and 13% hydrogen by weight.
| And its density is around 700 kg/m^3. 100 gallons is
| 378.5 liters, which is 265.0 kg. That is 230.5 kg of
| carbon. C is 12.011 per atom, O is 15.999, thus that
| converts to 844.6kg, not a ton. Rounding up by >15% to
| make numbers more impressive is not nice when we are
| taking science
| epistasis wrote:
| A gallon of gas converts to 20 pounds of CO2, and there
| are 2000 pounds in a US ton. My first web search hit,
| just to make sure my memory was not faulty, was this
| explanation:
|
| https://climatekids.nasa.gov/review/carbon/gasoline.html
|
| Using imperial units is always unfortunate, but when
| dealing with the typical unit of gasoline in the US, it's
| inevitable.
|
| Not sure where you are getting your numbers, perhaps
| you're using a UK gallon or something?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| I gave all my numbers making it trivial to check that I
| am using the us gallon and. Perhaps a cite for kids that
| you cited isn't using more than one sig fig?
| lostlogin wrote:
| When I search I get a variety of answers, with the bulk
| being around the same or lower CO2 emissions than your
| calculation. Why does it the answer vary? Does it change
| depending on the grade of the fuel?
| epistasis wrote:
| I have not found a single page with estimates as low as
| dmitrygr's 18.6 pounds per gallon. The numbers from the
| top hits ina web search for me:
|
| 19.64 - http://www.patagoniaalliance.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/08/...
|
| 20 -
| https://climatekids.nasa.gov/review/carbon/gasoline.html
|
| 20 - https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/contentincludes/co2_
| inc.htm
|
| 19.6 (converted from grams) -
| https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-
| equivalencies-ca...
|
| "Just over 19" -
| https://epicenergyblog.com/2013/05/24/how-many-pounds-of-
| car...
|
| The next hit isn't about CO2 from burning Gas, but about
| the upstream emissions that go into producing gasoline,
| which it pegs at 3.3 to 6.7 per gallon -
| https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/ask-mr-green/hey-mr-
| green-...
|
| What sort of estimates are you getting?
| tombert wrote:
| I'm not 100% sure why you're downvoted, but I don't think
| we disagree with anything. As I said on my previous post,
| I was just making up the numbers, and so if it costs
| $6/gallon-o-gas for CO2 extraction, then my previous
| point is even more accurate (though I might not have said
| it very clearly).
| epistasis wrote:
| Yes, I totally agree with you, did not mean to come
| across as contradictory in any way.
|
| I do not fear being downvotes at all on this topic. If
| I'm not getting downvoted by the few persistent anti-
| climate-change voters here, then IMHO I am not pushing
| forward the truth enough! People, even here, have a lot
| more to realize about the technological, economic, and
| political implications of the transition that we must go
| through in the coming decades.
| conductr wrote:
| I realize this is a bit of a political point, but at least
| in the US, we should factor in the cost of military
| spending related to oil producing regions as well. I don't
| know the truth, but it's not uncommon for one to believe
| that the majority of policies since 9/11 were to protect
| oil interests and terrorism was a convenient scapegoat.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Historically energy usage has been used to track "human
| progress" (e.g. a society that is more advanced uses more
| energy), but I think this is a failed dichotomy as it doesn't
| account for technology become more efficient at using energy.
| If we don't price petrol/gas properly (in the face of
| externalities, energy security, and possibly limited supply),
| there's no incentive for academia and industry to think
| ourselves out of a gas-guzzling society.
| Pick-A-Hill2019 wrote:
| There exists a world beyond your experience. A world in which
| people on low incomes have to chose between heating and eating.
| Sure - there are those that fly to meetings but there is also a
| world less represented/vocal here on HN for whom this could be
| (probably will be) a crisis.
|
| Yes, Global Warming is a problem but the people trying to keep
| themselves from freezing contribute a much smaller amount than
| Big-Tech and industry as a whole.
|
| Trying to shift the blame from corporations on to people just
| trying to survive the winter is a tale of corporate white-
| washing/green-washing/hand-waving/lobbying.
| tshaddox wrote:
| These are two separate concerns which can be dealt with
| independently and simultaneously. A society which can afford
| to prevent its members from suffering due to lack of food or
| home heat ought to do so, and can do so via means very much
| unrelated to the costs and negative externalities of jet
| fuel.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| And how do you do that?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| One popular approach is to add a massive tax/duty on e.g.
| CO2 emissions, but redistribute the revenue equally to
| all citizens.
|
| If everyone were consuming the same amount/causing the
| same amount of emissions, this would be a no-op. However,
| since the rich tend to consume more, this will be a net
| positive for poorer people, and at the same time it will
| make decisions about activity that causes emissions more
| meaningful.
|
| It's also much more palatable than bans or rationing,
| reasonably easy to implement, and avoids the trap of
| populist "ban highly visible thing of the day" approaches
| that tend to lower quality of life without addressing the
| real issue.
| woodpanel wrote:
| > _And how do you [reconcile extreme green policy goals
| with income losses for the poorest]?_
|
| There are no answers given usually, less so convincingly,
| mostly because the ones demanding scarcity are usually
| not the ones affected by it.
|
| Just trying to find one member of the working class /
| blue collar amongst ExtencionRebllion and the like will
| be a tedious task. Not so much if you look for kids of
| millionaires, or of bilionaires. Or Millionaires and
| Billionaires themselves.
|
| As of now I can only see two outcomes:
|
| They either start making these scarcity demands a part of
| their foreign policy (meaning getting tough on the actual
| global polluters, not their domestic poor people who
| barely can afford one cheap vacation to the Balears per
| year).
|
| Or we just start naming what we would have called it 150
| years ago: A top-down class-war.
| nradov wrote:
| The usual approach is some form of income redistribution.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Nationalize the railroads?
| saeranv wrote:
| I'm a little confused at how you think the previous comment
| somehow is shifting blames from corporations to people. While
| true that rising energy costs will effect consumers, it's
| also one of the ways we can change the incentive structure
| for corporations!
|
| For example: No one should be choosing between heating and
| eating, from a thermodynamic perspective. It's trivial to
| drastically cut heating energy through very low-tech methods:
| increasing insulation in the walls, and add extra layers of
| glass to your windows. The reason it's not done is because
| real estate developers have no incentive to increase their
| construction costs by some marginal amount since they know
| that natural gas cost is so cheap no customer is going to
| care about heating energy reduction. Not only that, most
| customers strongly prefer the cheaper construction once
| they're shown how many decades it would take for the better
| building envelope to pay for itself via energy bill
| reductions. Same reason there isn't a incentive to switch
| from (dirty) gas to electric, install solar panels, switch to
| heat pumps etc etc.
|
| Now consider how building related carbon emissions make up
| about 40% of the total emissions, and you'll see how much of
| an infuriating obstacle cheap energy is in cutting carbon
| emissions.
|
| Yes, there will be low-income people for who this will be a
| crisis, but that can be dealt with separately: government
| subsidies, or government subsidies of envelope retrofits
| (great stimulus idea). There is no reason frame this issue in
| a us versus them manner.
| tda wrote:
| These high energy prices mostly hit wasteful industries like
| greenhouse tomato growers. That is because they gave always
| relied on cheap, subsidized natural gas. Consumers pay
| approximately 75% energy tax already so even a 100% rise
| before taxes results in only a 25% percent rise after.
|
| I live in a 100 year old, poorly insulated house with my
| family of 4, and we manage to use half of the average for a
| family house here. And we are not really trying, only thing
| we do is limit what parts of the house we heat (not the
| bedrooms) and set the temperature smartly.
|
| I cycle 30km to my work on an electric bike to exercise and
| limit car usage.
|
| So yes, I really don't think the price rise will have too
| much impact on consumers directly. I think most people in the
| Netherlands can halve their energy consumption here with very
| limited impact on QoL just by heating less and using their
| car less. And if the price really gets problematic our gov
| could just lower the taxation
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I cycle 30km to my work on an electric bike to exercise
| and limit car usage.
|
| In most of the US that's a good way to land in the ER.
|
| source: son t-boned on his e-bike 6 months ago
| dude4you wrote:
| "wasteful industries"
|
| ROTFL. Like fertilizer production?
| whearyou wrote:
| Sounds like you guys are ok with the cold. When I lived in
| cold climates I tried what you're describing to limit
| spending. Living in cold indoors wrecked my mood even more
| than winter generally did so I gave up on it and accepted
| having to spend more on heat and save elsewhere. I guess
| what I'm saying is that your approach probably wouldn't
| work for everyone. Fortunately I live somewhere warmer now.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| You might find this interesting:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Sources_of_hydr
| o...
| yxhuvud wrote:
| > I live in a 100 year old, poorly insulated house
|
| Have you investigated if it is feasible to retrofit proper
| isolation? It has been fairly common here in Sweden, though
| I'd expect that by now most of the housing stock has good
| isolation. Stuff like triple layers of glass in the windows
| also helps a lot.
| tda wrote:
| Technically feasible sure, but I thibk I used 1100m3 gas
| last year (would have to look it up teo be sure). So to
| invest 30000 euro to save 50% of that makes no economical
| sense. Only when the windows need replacement anyway I'll
| upgrade to the latest and greatest. But for now I'm
| conetemplating investing in a moderate air/air heatpump
| (about 5000 euro, 5kw or something). I think that will
| also reduce my gas consumption considerably for all but
| the coldest days. Because labour is so expensive and
| replacing all windows is so wastefull (they are all
| oldish double layered windows) better insulation is not
| so appealing.
|
| I must say though that a properly insulated house can
| have a better climate in winter as you can keep the
| humidity much higher.
| bserge wrote:
| How long does it take you? I do 14km in ~40 minutes on a
| normal bike, was thinking an ebike would be way better.
|
| I was hoping to make my own, but maybe I'll cave in and
| just use a Swapfiets electric...
| frenchy wrote:
| 14 km/40 minutes is 21 km/h. Assuming you don't live in
| hilly terrain, if you use an e-bike with a 25 km/h
| limiter, you can probably go a little faster, but it
| won't make huge difference.
|
| It will probably will mean that you get less tired and
| exercise less, which may be good or bad depending on your
| opinion.
| tda wrote:
| Used to take 45-55mins on a speed pedelec (45km/h) but I
| sold it and bought a regular ebike set at the US speed
| limit of 32 km/h. Depending on wind it takes me 60 to 70
| minutes for 28.7 km.
| xxpor wrote:
| I do ~15 km in ~31 minutes on an ebike. About ~1/3rd of
| the time is spent sitting at stoplights, as measured by
| Strava (18 minutes moving time, 31 minutes total time).
| bojangleslover wrote:
| Yeah why can't the "heating vs eating" people just take
| 2hrs to bike 30km to work every day like we do?
|
| On the flip side I respect your dedication to bike that
| much thru Dutch winter!
| tda wrote:
| I don't think there are more than a handful of "heating
| vs eating" people in the Netherlands. On the contrary;
| poverty is positively correlated with obesity.
|
| We do have lots of baby boomers in big houses that they
| heatup just for themselves. My mom has 4 times my heating
| bill by herself than I have with a family of four. It
| would solve a lot of problems if the elderly move to
| smaller houses and leave the bigger houses for families
| that need them.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > It would solve a lot of problems if the elderly move to
| smaller houses and leave the bigger houses for families
| that need them.
|
| A lot of places make that kind of swap uneconomical. From
| paying capital gains now instead of later, to loss of
| property tax increase exemptions to loss of property tax
| deferrals. Some places exempt gains on housing gains but
| not other gains (kinda a problem if you downsize and take
| a windfall)...
|
| Many places ignore housing wealth when it comes to social
| assistance, but include everything else.
| the8472 wrote:
| How about not letting high income people use the baseline
| needs of low income people to deflect responsibility for
| their freely made choices? Especially when they're
| responsible for a much larger fraction of the carbon
| footprint. It's not _only_ on corporations.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| It's pretty sickening when hundreds of billionaires and
| celebrities and rulers fly their private jets to these
| secretive conferences where they decide exactly how
| horrible and greedy Joe Coalminer is, and what penance he
| must pay for his sins.
|
| I can't believe people try to shrug it off as no big deal
| because the absolute carbon output is small, or postulating
| that they must have offset it. If there are two things
| people react badly to, it is injustice / unfairness, and
| hypocrisy. The ruling class has done more to turn the
| average person against their climate change proposals than
| just about anything else, in my opinion. Quite probably by
| design, such is the blatant audacity of their double
| standards.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| What else is new? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wasser_p
| redigen_und_Wein_trin...
| pier25 wrote:
| I live in Mexico and there are still millions here that need
| to use wood to cook or heat water.
| epistasis wrote:
| Wood is not a fossil fuel, so as long as forests are not
| being destroyed overall for the fuel, the are carbon
| neutral.
|
| However, people's health would probably be increased if we
| could provide people electric heat.
| Aulig wrote:
| That's why i like the idea of a "climate dividend". Everyone
| will pay a carbon tax, which then finances the climate
| dividend, which is evenly paid out to the population. So if
| you emit below average amounts of carbon, you will actually
| be better off financially.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| I wonder whether this will be like income tax,
| theoretically proportional, but practically affecting the
| rich less than the poor, and companies even less?
| rovolo wrote:
| Just to clarify this point, the income tax is progressive
| and affects the rich more than the poor _on income_. A
| software developer making $150k will pay 24% on
| additional income while someone making $30k will pay 12%
| on additional income.
|
| The distinction in the US is whether you make your money
| through labor (max 37% tax) or capital gains (max 20%
| tax). There is a lower tax rate for capitalists (who make
| money via ownership of capital) vs laborers (who make
| money through labor income). Furthermore, capital gains
| can be delayed until you realize your gains (sell your
| capital). This distinction is what practically gives the
| rich lower taxes than the poor.
| imtringued wrote:
| All this nonsense should be rolled into a single income
| tax and then the overall tax rate should be lowered. Yeah
| sure there might be good reasons for a low capital gains
| tax but if that is the case then there are good reasons
| for a low income tax as well. The only thing the income
| tax should be doing is discourage employers from piling
| up all the work on as few people as possible.
|
| Employers prefer keeping people full time and full time
| unemployed because it is more efficient per worker and
| the bargaining power of the unemployed doesn't exist. If
| everyone were to work according to their own demand for
| labor then this bargaining power cliff wouldn't exist and
| a whole lot of welfare programs could be abolished.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| I like the idea. However, I am afraid this would lead to
| people with no children being disadvantaged again.
|
| Increased prices would clearly make it more expensive to
| raise children. This would lead to more social care towards
| people with children. How would you recommend solving that?
| conductr wrote:
| I would think the carbon tax part would be based on
| carbon usage which is a factor of consumption. The entire
| family's consumption. So if the rebate is $1000 per
| person a family if 4 gets $4000. However the net
| gain/loss is only calculated after knowing what your
| family consumes. A family of 4 bicyclists may come out
| ahead while a family of 4 SUV drivers may have a net
| loss.
| piokoch wrote:
| Someone who works as a delivery guy needs to drive a car a
| lot, such person would have to pay big climate dividend. Is
| that ok? Probably not.
|
| Taxation is a road to nowhere as rich people will always
| either find the way to avoid taxes or find the way to throw
| the costs of those taxes on the poor. This happens with
| every kind of tax.
|
| The only solution to decrease CO2 emission is to behave in
| a rational way and use the only practical, tested and
| available now clean energy source - nuclear power plants.
| No amount of eco-talk will change reality that neither
| solar nor wind energy plants will be able to power modern
| economy. Europe is learning this the hard way right now.
|
| Maybe Europe will do the suicidal jump with the ideas like
| "Fit for 55", and will kill its economy to lower global
| emission by 0.05% but the rest of the World, which emits
| much more CO2 and will emit even more when all production
| will be moved from Europe to Asia or USA cannot care less.
| imtringued wrote:
| >Taxation is a road to nowhere as rich people will always
| either find the way to avoid taxes
|
| The entire point of CO2 taxes is that you are supposed to
| avoid them.
| tapas73 wrote:
| There is more than one way to avoid taxes. (hollywood
| accounting)
| davidw wrote:
| > Someone who works as a delivery guy needs to drive a
| car a lot, such person would have to pay big climate
| dividend. Is that ok? Probably not.
|
| It gives the delivery company a big incentive to switch
| to electric vehicles or ebikes or something more
| efficient. This harnesses market power to push companies
| to be more efficient with their resources: the ones who
| are more innovative at avoiding CO2 usage will see
| financial benefits.
| EricE wrote:
| why are you assuming an electric car will be an overall
| reduction in CO2?
| davidw wrote:
| It's not an assumption. Of course, it depends on a lot of
| things, but broadly speaking, they use less CO2. And the
| great thing about a carbon tax is that this shakes out
| through the system: if they're not reducing CO2, you
| would see it in costs and could react accordingly. This
| price signal is a lot more convenient than having to, as
| an end user, try to figure out what the best and worst
| things to do in terms of CO2.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Company will just hire the delivery drivers as
| contractors a la Uber and pass the costs onto them.
| davidw wrote:
| Same logic applies though. If you're a contractor and it
| costs too much because gas is expensive, you either don't
| do it or demand more money. Or maybe only people with
| low-emissions vehicles get into it.
| soperj wrote:
| >Someone who works as a delivery guy needs to drive a car
| a lot, such person would have to pay big climate
| dividend.
|
| Delivery emissions should be attached to the person
| getting the delivery. Otherwise you could just skip most
| of your emissions by having everything delivered.
| newt_slowly wrote:
| It would be far to complicated to try and count every bit
| of emissions like this. Instead, the emissions are taxed
| at the source - when buying fuel. Therefore, the delivery
| company would be paying the carbon taxes, and they could
| choose to either pass those costs on to you, or to, for
| example, switch to electric vehicles to be more
| competitive against their rivals.
|
| Either way, it changes your behavior, because if delivery
| is more expensive (to factor in the externalities it
| causes) you will either consume less, or pay more. This
| ultimately "attaches the emissions to the person getting
| the delivery" but in a far less complex and less game-
| able way.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| I go into the store and buy a pair of shoes. Am I given a
| bit of the emissions of the supply chain that delivered
| it to the store from the manufacturer?
|
| If I order something off Amazon, do I get a say in where
| the package is shipped from to control "my" emissions.
| aembleton wrote:
| > Am I given a bit of the emissions of the supply chain
| that delivered it to the store from the manufacturer?
|
| Yes, you would have to use some of your carbon credits to
| pay for the delivery and manufacture of the shoe. The
| product would have both a monetary and a carbon price. If
| you don't have enough credits, then you can buy some on
| the spot market from someone who isn't using theirs up.
|
| This would incentivise repair of the shoe, as it may
| require fewer carbon credits.
| PeterisP wrote:
| If delivery services emit a lot of CO2, then making
| delivery services (which is not about "someone who works
| as a delivery guy" but rather about the company selling
| delivery services) much more expensive is a key part of
| ensuring that delivery services get used less and only by
| those needs where those delivery services are relatively
| more important i.e. those who would be willing to pay the
| significantly increased price of deliveries.
|
| After all, the whole point of carbon tax is to reduce
| usage, not to gain revenue or penalize some people; so it
| works if and only if it meaningfully changes behavior,
| i.e. if the tax significantly raises prices of some
| specific market goods/services and thus drives people to
| use less of those specific goods/services. A simple
| income-proportional tax or just "tax the rich" doesn't
| incentivize reducing emissions, so it's useless for that
| goal; it's perhaps useful for social equity and wealth
| redistribution, but that's something not directly linked
| to climate change goals.
|
| It's not about money, it's about CO2; driving deliveries
| needs to emit less CO2 so the goal is to either get more
| efficient deliveries (e.g. electric vehicles) or less
| deliveries (putting some of those delivery drivers out of
| jobs), and "who's paying for that" is just choosing the
| most effective means to achieve these goals.
| jhgb wrote:
| > Someone who works as a delivery guy needs to drive a
| car a lot, such person would have to pay big climate
| dividend. Is that ok? Probably not.
|
| Probably yes, because that the whole point of Pigouvian
| taxes.
| 5560675260 wrote:
| This would also greatly help with social coherence. First
| make living costs so high, that they are unaffordable for
| the underclasses, leaving them no other choice than
| complete reliance on the state payouts. Then make subsidies
| conditional, tiered, assigned on sufficiently complicated
| rules (as a side effect this would improve employment
| opportunities is public sector). And finally, whenever
| serfs would choose to misbehave, there wouldn't even be a
| need to intimidate - just dangle a possibility of freezing
| to death in winter.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... Have you looked on the situation of ex-criminals?
|
| I really fail to imagine an unconditional transfer (like
| the one you are replying to) turning into a monster of
| untraceable rules.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| >And finally, whenever serfs would choose to misbehave,
| there wouldn't even be a need to intimidate - just dangle
| a possibility of freezing to death in winter.
|
| This is reality today under capitalism. What happens to
| me if I don't choose to work?
| dnautics wrote:
| you have so many no-work options. You can be nice to
| people and live off their (informal) charity. You could
| probably work out an arrangement where you barter
| services for lodging. You could go live with relatives
| that work.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Same argument applies to the quote I'm responding to.
| Jackbooted gubmint thugs cut your power in winter? Go
| live with relatives that have power, or get charity, or
| barter things for firewood.
| esalman wrote:
| We used to have one hour of electricity supply followed by one
| hour of blackout during the day in Summer. I'm talking about 10
| years back in the Indian subcontinent- halfway around the world
| from US where I live now. Sometimes 1 hour blackout would turn
| into two. A large part of the time we had supply was spent
| pumping and storing water. Come to think of it, we made sure
| that every drop of that water and every minute of that
| electricity supply was used efficiently. I am sometimes
| reminded of this memory these days when I let my standard-size
| SUV idle with the AC running while waiting for a latte.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Or when you talk to someone in California
| mint2 wrote:
| It wasn't California that had its utility execs patting
| themselves on the back during testimony that they were so
| fast in getting the power back on to the 95% of customers
| at the 7 day mark as if a whole week without power is good
| and the fact that means 1 in 20 ppl took more than a week.
|
| Oh and if you're thinking I'm talking about Texas, I'm not.
|
| My point is why do people think these issues are just
| California?
|
| Global warming and extreme weather is causing power issues
| in your backyard too.
|
| Why do people love bashing california over issues in their
| own back yard?
| jjoonathan wrote:
| The problem with inelastic demand is that the severity of the
| problem goes from 0 to 100 very quickly as supply falls past
| the inelastic threshold. Lead times are years in the energy
| space, so if we don't react to forecasts and instead wait to
| feel the pain we will be signing up for years of severe pain.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| The problem with this idea is that it was cheap energy that
| gave rise to the middle class during the industrial revolution.
| Energy acts as a force multiplier on human labor. Without it,
| you need many more humans to accomplish tasks like farming and
| construction. And many things just become physically
| insurmountable. We just wouldn't have professions like software
| engineering or even yoga teachers (the way they exist today)
| without cheap abundant energy.
|
| Remember that it was cheap energy that allowed people to
| migrate and settle in the city of their choice and thus free
| themselves from the landowning class.
|
| With housing costs the way they are in certain cities, this is
| still relevant today.
|
| The solution isn't to make energy more expensive, but to make
| things more efficient, and to change where we get our energy
| from.
| bserge wrote:
| On that note, these days even a few lead acid batteries and a
| few solar panels at home are enough for a lot of things.
|
| LED lights, battery power tools, laptops, these are very
| efficient compared to just 20 years ago.
|
| Don't really need expensive Li-Ion when you have the space
| for big and heavy, but cheap SLA batteries.
| empiricus wrote:
| but far from enough during the winter, when you need much
| more energy. for 70% of the year, yeah, a few solar panels
| are enough.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Yeah. There's so many subsidies and tax laws etc as well. It
| seems it's really hard to refactor so the incentives would make
| sense, while still keeping all groups even relatively content.
|
| Mass air travel will resume now that the pandemic is subsiding.
| Saw plenty of airplanes on sunday already... That's a massive
| fuel sink, and as far as I understand, with very low tax rate
| and fuel cost.
| [deleted]
| yodelshady wrote:
| Nuclear provided c. $50-60 /MWh in the past and even the worse
| recent versions are ~$100. They're mostly that high because
| investors don't trust the respective governments to not find some
| arbitrary roadblock 5 years down the line.
|
| This on a continent with a proven track record of managing
| construction projects taking _over a century_ for solely
| religious purposes.
|
| At some point going cold whilst simultaneously cooking the planet
| is a choice. Fine, make it, but it _was_ a choice. We 're not a
| victim of circumstance.
| paganel wrote:
| That's what divesting from coal gets you, more expensive energy.
| Of course this hits the poor classes a lot harder compared to the
| middle-classes who pride themselves in recycling and driving an
| EV that costs several tens of thousands of euros but that's
| unfortunately the way the world runs, the poor get almost all of
| the hardships while the better-off get to dictate the discourse.
| Still sucks, though.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > That's what divesting from coal gets you, more expensive
| energy.
|
| Only if you ignore its externalities and let someone else pay
| for them. Coal is wickedly expensive if you consider its costs
| beyond mining/transportation/storage/combustion.
| paganel wrote:
| I agree, but right now the externalities are also supported
| by the better-off, as they can also get cancer and what have
| you from dirtier air, that's one of the prime reasons for
| this push. In the new regime almost all the weight falls on
| the less-off.
| kragen wrote:
| Almost all the cancer falls on the poor, not just because
| they tend to live closer to power plants (unlike carbon
| dioxide, CFCs, and even sulfur dioxide, the pollution that
| causes cancer is fairly localized) and work in coal mines,
| but because there are more of them.
| kragen wrote:
| In most of the world fossil-fuel energy are more expensive than
| renewable energy, which is why more coal power plants are being
| shut down than built (in 02020, outside PRC; in 02021, in the
| world). The advantage of fossil fuels is mostly that they're
| more predictable. Britain (and the Netherlands, Germany, and a
| few other places) have a particularly bad version of the
| problem because they have so little sunlight.
|
| But the problem Europe is hitting right now is not unexpectedly
| high prices, but actually running out. Blackouts, fuel pumps
| running dry, empty inventories, maybe a lack of natural gas.
| Such shortages can happen in one or another place because
| someone gambled and lost, but when they happen systemically,
| it's because of price controls; I wonder why those aren't
| mentioned in the article? The international LNG market isn't
| subject to price controls, but retail utility markets are
| typically heavily regulated, to the point of routinely forcing
| electricity distributors into unprofitability from time to
| time, usually temporarily.
|
| Climate change is likely to cause a lot of hydroelectric
| disruption over the next century as rainfall patterns move the
| rainfall from where hydroelectric dams have been built to where
| they haven't.
| supperburg wrote:
| Poor people also were against EVs before they went mainstream,
| so does that count for anything? I would evangelize Tesla and
| EVs in general in 2010 and the overwhelming majority of people
| who thought that EVs were "dumb" were poor and lower class. A
| poor person has the exact same opportunity as a rich person to
| say the words "that makes sense, let's try it."
| api wrote:
| Cheap gas over the past 10-15 years has driven divestment from
| coal as much as a push for renewables.
|
| As for EVs: they require a tiny fraction of the maintenance of
| ICE cars and so they will eventually be far cheaper. Used EVs
| are already an incredible deal in many areas. Where I live you
| can get a used Leaf with 60-80 miles range (enough for daily
| commute) that requires basically zero maintenance for <$8000.
| Charge it at home or at work and the fuel cost is tiny too.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Most of the people in the world aka energy consumers are not
| wealthy, if the price doesn't impact the "poor" you can't make
| people consume less really.
| fsslrisrchr wrote:
| The poor, in democracy, will vote for their interests. So,
| unless you abandon democracy, you won't get the poor to vote
| carbon taxes.
|
| How about we start by putting a $1000/flight tax? Seems only
| fair that the rich, mobile class start reducing their
| emissions. After all, it's actually the upper classes that
| consume (by far) energy in _gross terms_.
| nivenkos wrote:
| This just punishes those with family abroad and reduces
| economic mobility.
|
| It'd be hard to tax private jets, so much like the EU has
| just done with fuel duty, they end up exempting the super-
| rich and hammering the working class with more taxes.
| mint2 wrote:
| It's actually more efficient for a person to fly 400mi in a
| reasonably full plain than it is to drive solo in an
| average American car
| elevaet wrote:
| The worlds poorest use far less energy than the worlds
| wealthiest. If we want a world where the worlds poorest can
| rise, energy policy needs to be softer on the poor, and the
| richest will have to pay more of the cost. The rich countries
| rose to the top on the back of historically cheap energy, to
| some extent.
|
| "The average US citizen still consumes more than ten times
| the energy of the average Indian, 4-5 times that of a
| Brazilian, and three times more than China"
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access#per-capita-
| energy-c...
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Of course individually they consume less, when talking
| about the mass and big numbers, ultra wealthy are a
| statistical anomaly.
| elevaet wrote:
| Ultra wealthy aside, this is about comparing the world's
| wealthiest economies to the world's poorest. There's a
| 10:1 ratio of energy usage in USA vs India for example
| (per capita).
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Most of the poor energy footprint is not optional:
| commuting (most can't live in expensive districts),
| heating a single small apartment, basic food, buy a few
| leisure things.
|
| Almost all the wealthy footprint is discretionary: air
| travel, luxury purchase, package holidays...
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0579-8
|
| Your "statistical anomaly" is not anecdotal, it's the
| very symbol of a broken system that was designed not to
| care.
|
| In this situation, I cannot expect the non-wealthy to
| make big efforts to reduce their consumption while the
| ultra rich continues to casually destroy the environment.
| We're letting the rich take almost all the profit but we
| ask the poor to work harder only because they're more
| numerous. This can only end with violence or a
| catastrophe, IMHO.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Right, but then what are options? Everything hits the
| poor I agree but if you don't want to then we will just
| let the global warming to run rampant and watch?
| mint2 wrote:
| You know what will impact the poor a lot more than it will
| impact rich people? In the form of crop failures,
| desertification, water scarcity, land degradation etc...?
|
| Climate change.
| paganel wrote:
| So they should market those measures for what they really
| are, i.e. regressive taxes/measures that, by definition, have
| a bigger impact on the poor than on the wealthy. The "let's
| save the planet!" discourse controlled by the wealthy fails
| to mention that (with few exceptions, lately).
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Why am I constantly berated with articles about how renewable
| energy accounts for a large part of European energy? Are all of
| these just sensationalist? I'm asking a serious question because
| it seems that their renewables just aren't cutting it.
|
| There seems to be a large push to force America on to the same
| "green" plan. If the choice is between not having enough energy
| and being able to get fossil fuels from your own nation's land,
| being mostly self-sustaining. I know what I'm choosing.
|
| Putting all your eggs in one basket just seems like a bad idea.
| Yes invest in green/renewable energy but this idea that we can
| just cut out fossil fuels doesn't seem to hold up.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > I'm asking a serious question because it seems that their
| renewables just aren't cutting it.
|
| Right, renewables don't cut it, and they won't without
| magnitudes more investment. However, notice that France doesn't
| have these problems.
|
| We cannot keep planning to use weather-dependent energy sources
| when our climate is rapidly changing in unpredictable ways.
| koheripbal wrote:
| > Are all of these just sensationalist?
|
| Yes
| Jensson wrote:
| Texas 6 months ago had a worse energy crisis than western
| Europe have had in a very long time. Seems like America is way
| ahead of Europe in terms of unreliable power generation.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| That's because they got hit by an extremely rare ice storm
| they weren't adequately prepared for. It really had nothing
| to do with having more/less renewable energy.
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/in-
| depth/news/nation/2021/02/16/tex...
| Jensson wrote:
| I didn't say it had anything to do with renewable energy,
| just that they had less reliable power production. And no,
| it had little to do with that storm, Texas face power
| problems almost every year. It is systemic, and largely due
| to politics of them cutting themselves off from other grids
| and how their energy sector works.
|
| Europe is way more robust since the net is extremely well
| connected between countries, and I don't think that
| factories can buy up all available electricity like they
| did in Texas causing power outages for homes. Rather Europe
| would shut down the factories and let people have
| electricity in their homes. Homes losing power for a few
| days is a huge problem, factories shutting down for a few
| days isn't a big deal.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Ok sorry I misunderstood your comment. I thought you were
| blaming it completely on not having enough renewables.
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