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