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2016 was the third year in a row that global carbon emissions remained stable, even as the overall economy grew. Although 32.1 Gigatonnes of emissions is certainly not good news for future climates, there is some cause for optimism within the numbers, as some major economies saw their emissions drop. And controlling emissions didn't come at the expense of the world's finances, as preliminary estimates show that the global economy grew by over three percent.
[...] China was one of those countries, starting up five new reactors to increase its nuclear capacity by 25 percent. Nuclear combined with renewables to handle two-thirds of the country's rising demand. China also shifted some of its fossil fuel use from coal to natural gas. The net result was a drop in emissions of about one percent, even as demand grew by over five percent (and the economy grew by nearly seven percent). Gas still represents a small fraction of China's energy economy, so there's the potential for further displacement of coal.
In the US, the process of shifting from coal to natural gas is already well advanced. Coal use was down by 11 percent last year, the IEA estimates, allowing natural gas to displace it as the US' largest single source of energy. This, along with booming renewables, allowed the US to drop its carbon emissions by three percent in 2016. That takes emissions to levels not seen since 1992, even though the economy is now 80 percent larger than it was then.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/global-carbon-emissions-continue-to-stabilize-us-has-3-drop/
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday March 22 2017, @10:46PM (3 children)
I'm intrigued! Pray tell how a stick stuck in the ground, rotating together with Earth, get's to "US fully on solar"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Wednesday March 22 2017, @11:43PM (2 children)
http://www.space.com/25120-pillar-to-the-sky-book-william-forstchen.html [space.com]
Space elevators are magick 100 billion dollar sticks that make energy rain. Getting closer and closer to the carbon nanofiber threads that would be needed.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 23 2017, @01:30AM (1 child)
Mmmm... I see: not only the nanofibers are missing, but also superconductivity. Missing the latter, one may try to beam the energy down by microwaves. Umm.. Die another day?
Speaking of Die another day... The stick's not gonna happen soon. Letting aside the materials (we'll get there eventually, will be harder with religious nuts cutting R&D budgets), the international tension nowadays is high enough** and a $100B is quite a hard structure to defend. Especially if its distal end gets militarized, which I reckon is very likely to happen to a US-controlled stick.
** China grumbles at the deployment of a THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea. Also China was banned from space collaboration with US.
Russia is testing NATO-s periphery: remember Ukraine? (even now I wonder who was the moron who decided stirring/arming Syrian rebels would be a good idea? Of course Russia wasn't going to like its strategic military bases there being dismantled).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Thursday March 23 2017, @05:48AM
Not going to disagree with you on any of that. Stipulation a few points up was about our options if politics were not hindering progress.
I guess regardles of anything, ITER is moving forward quite well, and the developments of that German Wendelstein-7 reactor are quite cool too.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam