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posted by janrinok on Friday December 23 2016, @10:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the pause-for-thought dept.

Bridging the gap between left and right. I came across this clip showing Glenn Beck and Samantha Bee, and thought that this SoylentNews story / comment thread should be stickied till the new year so we have an ongoing conversation. It's a short clip from her show where Glenn Beck is a willing guest; the key point is they are trying to find common ground. Beck points out that Bee is following some of his own patterns of crying "catastrophe" but they really don't provide much insight beyond the significance of their little coming together moment.

The divide is clear and present on this site as most everywhere else, I would like to see a meta discussion where we fact check each other and drill down through the rhetoric until we get some straightforward lists and proposals on how we can move forward together. What are the fundamental blockers? Which ideas do we consider to be too outrageous for credibility? Many here are guilty of attacking each other — can we try and Spock it out for about a week?

I'll start us off with my supposition:

Climate change is real and human activity has an important effect on it. We must agree on this point in order to move forward, and social/economic issues must be handled after needed environmental changes."

If you post as AC — try and behave as if you were logged in — reduce the flames for better quality discussion.


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  • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday December 23 2016, @11:42PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Friday December 23 2016, @11:42PM (#445294)

    Gobal warming adds more energy to the system, making more places insane to live in. Fort McMurry mentioned in the article is about 58 degrees north. Do you expect us all to move north of the Arctic (or south of the Antarctic) circle?

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  • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday December 23 2016, @11:53PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Friday December 23 2016, @11:53PM (#445298)

    Actually, this ties in with Economic migrants already.

    People are leaving the middle-east in droves.

    It is difficult to pin down exactly how much of the political unrest is exacerbated by climate change.

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:21AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:21AM (#445309) Homepage Journal

    What I expect is that a species as adaptable as human beings will find a way to live on a planet that has supported life quite well at much higher levels of greenhouse gasses than are currently present or even predicted.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:07AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:07AM (#445334)

      And of the species that we are dependent on? Are they as adaptable?

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:17AM

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:17AM (#445340) Homepage Journal

        Doesn't matter. We'll adapt.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by coolgopher on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:21AM

          by coolgopher (1157) on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:21AM (#445362)

          I don't doubt that humanity will adapt. However, the likely result is that before that millions if not billions will starve, because the temperature change is too rapid for the ecosystem to adapt and thus for us to maintain our crop levels. If we're really luck we'll manage to engineer around it, but with the amount of denial that we'll even have to do that, and the subsequent lack of focus/investment, I'm not encouraged.

          A shortage of food will naturally lead to even more conflict, and this is where I have my beef - I don't want another $!^!# world war. Given the current world "leadership" with their trigger happy fingers and refusal to accept responsibility even for their own direct actions, I'm *really* not encouraged. (Also, I like beef, I'd like to be able to keep eating it now and then.)

          On the energy front I am rather encouraged; while political leadership is largely absent, the market forces are starting to swing in and driving down the cost of renewables. Whether one accepts human carbon emissions as substantially influential when it comes to the climate or not, nobody argues that the resulting emissions are bad for human health. Moving off burning fossils is a good thing, regardless. Unless you're one of the elite luckies with only oil up your reservoir, but meh, you'll adapt too.

          • (Score: 1) by jrmcferren on Saturday December 24 2016, @10:25PM

            by jrmcferren (5500) on Saturday December 24 2016, @10:25PM (#445666) Homepage

            It is rather important that we reduce our use of fossil fuels, but we MUST ensure that while doing so that we don't cause energy to become so expensive that only the elites can afford to light or heat their homes or take public transport (let alone drive their own cars). At the same time, we can't stop progressing on clean energy. This is a very delicate balance of maintaining and/or improving standard of living (by cheap energy) and reducing our use on fossil fuels.

            The key innovation for the near term is energy storage. In order to continue our solar energy buildout, we need to keep the incentive of net metering. To make net metering viable both economically and technically in the long term, we need to be able to store energy. This can be installed by the electric company at key points on the grid, or installed by the people with solar installations to allow for even better demand and generation management. Large scale storage is also going to be needed to continue wind energy buildout.

            Renewables and storage alone will likely not be enough to provide the power needed in many countries, especially when heating and transportation is considered. These needs will still need to be handled by fossil fuels (especially for heavy goods long distance transportation) and nuclear (additional power for heating).

            This brings up nuclear. There is very promising nuclear technology on the horizon if we develop it. If this technology is developed it will render all existing plants obsolete, in addition as a bonus for the US we would be able to use more of our rare earth deposits as the contamination (thorium) will be usable as fuel.

            That leaves the last major use of fossil fuels and actually it isn't for energy. Modern chemistry is reliant on petroleum, by reducing the demand for petroleum energy we should have sufficient oil for these chemicals including plastics.

            This is great, and you are now wondering how to get the government to get this moving? This is the answer that will shock everyone here. The government needs to be very selective on what actions are taken. In the immediate term (next 4 years), we need to take efforts to increase production of fossil fuels (sad reality) and to look into changing the nuclear regulations to allow for easier development of new technologies.

            What do I dream of the future being like energy wise? By the 2050s (when I hope to retire) I dream of not only having access to clean, reliable, and mainly renewable energy from the power grid, but to be able to store enough to ride through power outages. I dream that electricity will be so cheap and plentiful that consumption will actually be promoted again like it was in the 1950s. Every home will be able to generate power, store power, and if needed buy power. Heating, cooling, and even the car will be fully electric. Fossil fuels will be expensive, not because of carbon taxes, or short supplies, but of low demand. Smart homes will have the choice of demand response options if the grid is overload. They can reduce demand by allowing the heating or cooling to be delayed, use power from the home's batteries until more energy is available, or wait for a better incentive. Speaking of how inexpensive the energy will be, heated sidewalks and driveways will be common, no snow or ice would accumulate, possibly have this technology in the roads too.

            In my dream, energy may actually become too plentiful and the grid will need to be able to dump the excess. Imagine incentives for making your home cooler in the summer or warmer in the winter for a few hours, street lights may come on at noon to help reduce the overage. Snow melt systems may activate on mild days. Remember this is with clean renewable and nuclear energy.

            TL;DR we need more fossil NOW, but with proper application of government action and more importantly proper application of government inaction will allow for future development of clean energy.

            • (Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday December 24 2016, @11:37PM

              by coolgopher (1157) on Saturday December 24 2016, @11:37PM (#445678)

              I don't see anywhere in your argument why we'd need more fossil fuel right now - the world is happily producing the energy we currently need, and installations of renewables are being added faster than coal fired plants (largely because the former now have a better ROI).

              You're spot on both that developing countries are likely to still need to use a fair bit of fossil fuel, and it would be blatantly unfair for the developed nations to deny outright deny them seeing as the developed nations have already had the advantage of said fossil fuel. That said, the need should be a lot smaller, with newer, cleaner tech being available and, many times, even cheaper. We are truly at the dawn of an energy revolution, I believe. Things will massively change over the next decade or so. As you say, the grid will become far more decentralised, and many times quite likely be needed to dump excess energy, as opposed to being the One True Source of consumer electricity.

              Nuclear is an interesting idea. I personally like it as a baseload provider in the interim at least, with the longterm hope that we won't need it for terrestial use. The two or maybe three big problems I see are, in order: The NIMBYs, who I have a certain amount of sympathy for, but only because the bureaucracy/beancounter mentality tends to hinder proper engineering/safety. Then there's the financial viability; The last couple of articles I read were claiming that it is not profitable to build new nuclear plants. And finally, there's the thorium tech. It always looks great on paper, but somehow still seems to be 5-10 years away from production.

              Energy storage is of course a key component, especially long term. I was reading an interesting article just the other day about a new large solar installation in QLD, Australia next to a disused gold mine, where they were going to couple the solar with traditional hydro storage using a pair of differentially elevated dams at the gold mine. Hydro can easily be used for baseload (and has as good response time as e.g. gasfired turbines), and if the hydro installations can be done in areas already messed up environmentally - excellent!

              • (Score: 1) by jrmcferren on Monday December 26 2016, @08:55PM

                by jrmcferren (5500) on Monday December 26 2016, @08:55PM (#446145) Homepage

                I must have forgotten that key point! The reason we need more fossil fuel energy now is to increase supply and reduce prices. If we concentrate this on the electricity grid we can become a more electrified society (more electric cars, more people using electric heat, etc). We need to move more of the utilization of energy to electricity to increase the impact that renewables will have on our energy grid. You however said something that may actually make this rather unnecessary.

                If Thorium is only 5 to 10 years (let's say 15 years to give a buffer) away, we can probably avoid building new coal plants as long as we don't regulate the larger plants to death until thorium is ready to be deployed. In my part of the Mid Atlantic of the US the majority of the coal plant shut downs have been the smaller 200MW or so coal plants that have been running for many decades already. In the short term we need to keep the larger coal plants such as Homer City online though and build natural gas plants for additional capacity.

                You mention Hydro, I'd like to see more hydro as well, Hydro is CHEAP power. There are some hydro plants within maybe 50 miles or so, but these are in the 1MW range. Hydro storage will also be a good idea short term until we can get the cost of grid scale batteries down. Like I said though, I eventually dream of a day that on mild winter days I set my heat to 72 and then I get a steep discount to let the utility turn the heat up to 74 (both in *F).

                The irony of developing nations is that the masses will probably be using more renewables and fossil fuels will become obsolete long before the masses will need to consume them at the level we do in the industrialized world. Another example is that telecommunications in developing countries is mainly wireless. Another older example. Europe has a newer power grid as they had to rebuild after WWII, while the US stayed at 120 volt for many things, Europe skipped to 220 since they had the technology to adopt the higher voltage easier (EG 1940s vs 1900s).

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:30AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:30AM (#445456) Journal

    Gobal warming adds more energy to the system, making more places insane to live in. Fort McMurry mentioned in the article is about 58 degrees north. Do you expect us all to move north of the Arctic (or south of the Antarctic) circle?

    And so what? Extreme weather is not that big a deal for wealthy societies! The fossil fuel processes that allegedly contribute to an increase in extreme weather also contribute to making societies wealthy and far more capable of dealing with the harm of extreme weather.

    • (Score: 2) by tathra on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:53PM

      by tathra (3367) on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:53PM (#445594)

      Extreme weather is not that big a deal for wealthy societies!

      the billions in repair costs, maintenance, hospital bills, portable generators, etc, certainly are a big deal. tax increases will be necessary in order to have the funds to cover all those costs, are you fine with that? and thats not even covering the human costs (lost manhours at work, misery and grieving for those killed, riots and looting, etc) that come along with it, especially if the money to effect repairs and keep society stable in the meantime isnt there.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 24 2016, @11:57PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 24 2016, @11:57PM (#445685) Journal

        the billions in repair costs, maintenance, hospital bills, portable generators, etc, certainly are a big deal.

        That is pocket change to a developed world country. And note that hospital bills are much lower than in a country that is completely unprepared for extreme weather.

        tax increases will be necessary in order to have the funds to cover all those costs, are you fine with that?

        Again, keep in mind just how little extreme weather actually costs.