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from the did-you-check-to-turn-the-lights-off dept.
Germany's economy nowadays emits as much carbon dioxide as it did in the 1950s, when it was 10 times smaller.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), carbon dioxide emissions trends for 2019 suggest clean energy transitions are underway. Global power sector emissions declined by some 170 Mt, or 1.2%, with the biggest falls taking place in the advanced economies of the European Union, Japan and the United States. There, CO2 emissions are now at levels not seen since the late 1980s, when electricity demand was one-third lower.
In these advanced economies, the average CO2 emissions intensity of electricity generation declined by nearly 6.5% in 2019. This is a rate three times faster than the average over the past decade.
This decline is driven by a switch from coal to natural gas, a rise in nuclear power and weaker electricity demand, combined with the seemingly unstoppable growth in renewables. These now constitute over 40% of the energy mix in Germany (wind power +11%) and the United Kingdom, where rapid expansion in offshore wind power generation is happening.
The bummer lies with the rest of the world.
There emissions continue to expand with close to 400 Mt last year. About 80% of that increase is happening in Asia. Coal demand here continues to expand, accounting for over 50% of energy use.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday February 12 2020, @06:32PM (62 children)
US carbon emissions dropped by 2.9% which is good, but nearly enough to slow down global warming.
Mostly driven by Trump's failure to bring back coal (thankfully). Coal Power Plant Shutdowns Surge Under Trump [fortune.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday February 12 2020, @06:35PM (1 child)
...NOT nearly enough, d'oh!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @06:57PM
New rules implemented by the EPA: no take backsies!
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @06:55PM (43 children)
Trump repairing Obama's broken economy allowed coal to die a natural death because it is not an efficient form of energy. By telling coal workers he would try to help instead of telling them their jobs are worthless and that they should learn to code made them feel heard and he gained a solid voting base. Sadly the democrat's can't think past just demonizing their opponents so they are driving everyone away.
The stronger the economy, the more renewable happen. Renewable energy is desired by the market and it's additional costs are okay when people can afford it. The more people that can buy in the cheaper the prices will be and the better it will compete against traditional fuel sources. Trump has done more to save the environment than Obama ever did and he didn't even have to address it directly.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:02PM (37 children)
"Trump repairing Obama's broken economy"
Why must you r-tards always get it backwards? Obama managed to pull the US out of a devastating economic depression and Trump got to ride that wave through his first term. The rate of job growth has slowed, and as many economists point out we have to wait a few years for the effects of policy to spread through the economy.
Apologist lackey, you likely know this and are deliberately sowing misinformation to push your agenda. Amazing how FUD has made the typical patriotic American turn into boot lickers for authoritarian traitors.
Trump will even get the support of the entire corporate world to spread misinformation, FUD, and literally cheat the elections with voting machines and other bullshit. The fact that you assholes must cheat to win probably burns you deep down, thus all the self-felating bluster.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:13PM (31 children)
Funny how the rhetoric changes so quickly. Go back to right before the election. Remember, if Trump gets elected the economy is going to crash imminently according to just about everybody on the left. The New York Times went so far as to suggest it might literally never recover if Trump was elected. Now after incredible growth and the lowest unemployment numbers literally ever, it's all "oh err.. i mean, we all knew he'd just ride the Obama economy.. yeah!"
It's okay to disagree with somebody, even vehemently, and simultaneously acknowledge their successes. Trump's economic policy has seen results far beyond what anybody could have expected.
Partisanship makes people so stupid. Or stupid people are partisan. I don't quite have the direction of causation down yet, but that link is inextricable.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:21PM
Can't discuss with crazies :(
"Funny how the rhetoric changes so quickly." go gaslight somewhere else asshole
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:23PM (13 children)
Trump's policies (tariffs, natural gas) did for free in a few years what the democrats said would cost one trillion dollars per year to do for the foreseeable future. Now that he became more democrat last year emissions are going back up though:
https://i.ibb.co/gD01GqN/temp-By-Pres2019.png [i.ibb.co]
These people are simply wrong about everything.
(Score: 5, Informative) by meustrus on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:37PM (12 children)
What you're seeing there is a graph of infrastructure build-out and associated economic growth.
Funny how it goes up in Democrat years, but mostly stays flat in Republican years.
It also fluctuates seemingly randomly from year to year, so we really don't have the data yet to make any clear statements about trends during the Trump presidency.
Also, it's not Democrats who claim that stopping climate change "would cost one trillion dollars per year". That's FUD from the climate change deniers, and it has literally zero basis in fact.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:44PM
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/pete-buttigieg-unveils-1point1-trillion-climate-change-plan.html [cnbc.com]
"Sanders has proposed the largest federal investment in combating climate change, laying out his plan for a $16.3 trillion outlay over 15 years in renewable energy and public infrastructure.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who dropped out of the race last week, had been the next closest candidate, with her proposal for a $10 trillion "moonshot" plan for the next decade."
Those are democrats. You are a liar.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:45PM (2 children)
So you think government activity causes climate change?
False.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/527196/how-much-will-it-cost-to-solve-climate-change/ [technologyreview.com]
https://www.axios.com/climate-change-costs-wealth-carbon-tax-303d7cff-3085-49d9-accb-ec77689b9911.html [axios.com]
Etc, etc. This has been repeated over and over so you just have no idea what you are talking about.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Sulla on Wednesday February 12 2020, @08:47PM (1 child)
Wew thats expensive when we could go with better sources for cheaper.
2018 Numbers
Currently fossil fuels represent ~60% of US power generation, with ~30% of that being from Coal. Nuclear power is 20% of current power generation at 98 operating plants.
New nuclear plants cost between 6 and 9 billion each for a 1100 MW plant. If we wanted to take that 60% fossil and convert to Nuclear it would cost 2.352 Trillion on the low end and 3.528 Trillion on the high end.
I will vote for anyone who ran on this platform.
If we were to just replace Coal it would cost between 882B and 1,323B, also very reasonable.
As a side benefit it would bring the cost of consumption as well
Economic growth due to cheaper prices
Energy independence
No need for foreign oil wars
Clean
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @11:52PM
It is about siphoning off large sums of money. As is exemplified by totally opposing nuclear energy which could give those results in a practical, tried way, and instead peddling one expensive physics-defying fantasy scheme after another.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by meustrus on Wednesday February 12 2020, @09:17PM (7 children)
Responding to myself to respond to both comments:
- Whoever moderated me +1 Informative is wrong. Read my signature.
- I have not read any of the linked articles. I'd moderate people +1 Informative myself if they weren't deliberately misrepresenting what the reports claim and who is behind them.
- The linked articles are not from Democrats, but from non-partisan international groups primarily concerned with energy security, not climate change.
- The linked articles are about total economic cost including "real-world factors", not about direct cost to the government which is what I thought we were talking about.
- The linked articles also claim that the total economic cost of inaction is significantly higher (at least $54 trillion).
- If we're being honest, the total economic impact predicted by these articles would be (total economic cost of action - total economic cost of inaction), which is at least a $10 trillion surplus.
- Government policy affects economic growth, for better or for worse, and economic growth is directly correlated to energy consumption which is directly correlated with carbon emissions which is directly correlated with rising temperatures.
- Sanders' plan is for climate change and public infrastructure, not just climate change.
- Sanders is not a Democrat (he's a registered Independent, and he calls himself a Democratic Socialist).
- Any current plans are based on needing to make up for lost time, which is expensive, and I might still be 10 years in the past when it comes to what I think effective climate change policy looks like.
- I was responding to the false equivalence between Trump's policies and Democratic plans. Trump's policies did not accomplish anywhere near what anybody's trillion-dollar infrastructure plan would accomplish.
This post is not any better researched than my original post, so while I've made what I consider to be rather obvious counterarguments based on a cursory evaluation of the quoted articles, there may still be details I have missed. I encourage the reader to dig deeper into all available evidence and its origins.
I'm always happy to have public conversations with known Soylentils, even known trolls. I'm even willing to admit that I'm wrong and consider new evidence. Moving forward, however, I will not be returning to refute any more bad-faith claims from anonymous cowards.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @10:58PM (5 children)
All the same globalist powergrabbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @12:21AM (4 children)
Is there any conspiracy you don't like?
Personally I'm putting my money on "its a Russian troll sowing FUD".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @12:35AM
Yea, the fake one where Trump colluded with the russians. These people can't even come up with a good conspiracy.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 13 2020, @01:42AM (2 children)
The one where the DNC rigs the primary for Biden seems to have fallen out of favor!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @05:23AM (1 child)
Where have you seen that? They clearly tried to fix it for him or buttigieg and then moved onto something else because Biden isn't worth it anymore.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 13 2020, @12:09PM
The primaries aren't over yet, and if the current pattern of results continues the Democratic Party will wind up in a brokered convention. Then the super delegates will come into play and it will be a whole new level of rigging. They could anoint Joe Biden then, or anyone they want, really. They could even anoint Hillary for a do-over of 2016.
The DNC has been rigging the contest against Bernie the whole time, and they will keep doing as much as they think they can get away with. I suspect they have already conceded the election to Trump and are now focused on defending the DNC from the progressive base so that they can remain in power as the gatekeepers.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 14 2020, @10:50PM
Thanks for this meta-analysis, and for the links.
Agreed that the bad faith actors are not worth ... well I'll stay polite.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by meustrus on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:32PM (15 children)
Right before the election, the New York Times and the rest of the "MSM" also thought that Hillary was inevitable. This despite the well-known facts that the presidency tends to switch parties when there isn't an incumbent, especially when the same-party candidate is perceived as establishment like Hillary was and is.
Just because people got caught up in a reality distortion field doesn't mean the facts weren't there. I for one have always believed that Trump getting elected would result in a short-term stock market boom because finance people have an irrational love of Republican fiscal policy. Then at some point in the future, somewhere between 1-10 years after his election depending on how bad Trump actually is at business and finance, the economy will crash again.
It's been 3 years. Some parts of the economy are doing very poorly due to the trade wars, but the overall economy hasn't crashed yet. We shouldn't be surprised or confused that 1-10 years != 1-3 years. The crash is still coming, and it will probably be blamed on the next president, not this one. Heck, there's a good chance that it will happen immediately after the election (you know, when literally nothing has changed yet) when the financiers wake up from their GOP fever dream, look around, and realize that their assets are not as secure as they had assumed. Expect at the very least the stock market to take an immediate dip in anticipation of tax law changes hurting the shareholder class.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:53PM (7 children)
Why do you assume it will crash down instead of up?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by meustrus on Wednesday February 12 2020, @09:42PM (6 children)
Crash...up?
My assumption is that trickle-down economics achieve short-term gains by boosting the capital available to the stock market, but result in long-term losses due to deferred maintenance and lack of investment in community resources.
This leads me to expect that trickle-down economics will largely be good for the president that implements them and bad for the president that follows them.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @10:43PM (3 children)
Look at Venezuela: https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/IBVC:IND [bloomberg.com]
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday February 13 2020, @03:26PM (2 children)
You're going to have to explain what I'm looking at there. I still don't understand what crashing "up" means, and now I'm even more confused any of this has to do with Venezuela.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @08:04PM (1 child)
There is numerator and denominator for the y-axis.
When the numerator crashes, the crash is down. When the denominator crashes the crash is up, like in venezuela. You get hyperinflation and shortages of everything.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday February 14 2020, @03:03PM
Now I'm not sure what you mean by numerator and denominator. I mean, I know what those things are in general. You just haven't told me where those numbers are coming from.
But I think I'm starting to get what you mean about the market. You're suggesting that the opposite of the market crashing "down" (i.e. long-term investments are worth less) is hyperinflation.
If that's what you're saying, you're wrong. Hyperinflation is better understood as a crash in currency value. It's often associated with general market crashes, rather than being some alternate form of them.
I would go on, but I'm not an economist. There is probably some theoretical framework I'm not aware of where crashing "down" or "up" is a meaningful distinction, but frankly if it exists, its theoretical jargon is so far removed from common English that its terminology is meaningless outside the context of the framework itself.
If you're applying some specific theoretical framework here, you've left no clues as to what the theory is or where I could go to find out; please point me somewhere with something more instructive than 4 sentences of unexplained metaphor. If not, would you please stop repurposing the English language into jargon of an academic field you invented in your own head? We have enough real indecipherable academic jargon without all the not-textbook-writers vying to redefine market crashes and depressions.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 13 2020, @12:11PM (1 child)
It's not trickle-down economics when the people at the bottom of the pay scale are seeing gains in wages that are the best in history.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday February 13 2020, @03:47PM
[citation needed]
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 13 2020, @04:16AM (3 children)
Right before the election, the New York Times and the rest of the "MSM" also thought that Hillary was inevitable. This despite the well-known facts that the presidency tends to switch parties when there isn't an incumbent, especially when the same-party candidate is perceived as establishment like Hillary was and is.
It seems to me that what the Democrats really failed at was learning from the past, and the quite recent past in fact: Obama's (first) election. It should have been a case study for them, but instead they ignored it, it seems.
Bush was elected over Gore because we had already had 2 terms of Clinton (D), and Gore had some pretty glaring flaws and wasn't all that likeable. People liked Bush. Then after 4 years of the disaster that was Bush's first term (including starting not one, but two wars), they picked John Kerry to run against him. They couldn't have picked a more wooden and unlikable candidate. And being so wealthy, he really screamed "limousine liberal". So, he lost, and we got 4 more years of Bush. Then, the DNC tried to push Hillary on us, and some unknown upstart came out of nowhere and beat her in the primaries, though it's pretty obvious the party wasn't too happy about that. What did Obama have that Hillary didn't? He was likeable, he made great speeches, and the young voters loved him. Also, his pedigree was that he was a "community organizer"; maybe it doesn't sound all that serious, but it sure sounds better to energetic young voters than "someone who gives speeches to Goldman Sachs about how great they are". So he won, by a very good margin. I won't go into his actual Presidency here, but when his 2nd term was over, what did the DNC do? They tried to go right back to their old formula: find someone completely unlikable and seemingly bought off by wealthy interests, and then wonder why young voters aren't hyped and why their candidate loses.
It seems like they're trying again with Biden, but so far it looks like the primary voters aren't going for it this time. It'll be really interesting to see who wins the nomination this time.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 13 2020, @01:36PM (2 children)
It won't be Bernie. The DNC will throw everything including the kitchen sink at him to stop him. Even if he went into the convention with enough delegates to take the nomination outright, they'd find a way to deny him. They are bracing themselves for the rioting and backlash that will unleash from Bernie supporters and the rest of the progressive base, but they have stopped trying to beat Trump and are now trying to save their party from the dirty plebes. They have a very good, very lucrative scam going that the progressive base fall for over and over and over again, and they'll fight to the death to keep it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday February 14 2020, @01:15AM (1 child)
Not disagreeing, but can you elaborate more on the "very lucrative scam going"?
As for the progressive base falling for them, it's not like they have much of a choice. We have a two-party system guaranteed by Duverger's Law, so naturally progressives (just like any voting group) have to pick the party that's closest to their ideals if they want a chance of winning, and obviously that isn't the GOP. The problem for the DNC is that voters don't *have* to pick the lesser of two evils here: they can just get fed up and not vote, or they can vote 3rd-party (usually Greens). The latter, while it pretty much has zero chance of resulting in a win, is a way of expressing dissatisfaction with the two parties. One thing it seems many keep forgetting, or never noticed about the 2016 election was that the Greens and Libertarians got more votes than ever, IIRC, and if most of those votes had gone to Hillary she would have won.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 14 2020, @03:16AM
In a word, it's influence peddling. They write the laws to benefit monied interests that are the 1%/Deep State/[insert whichever term you prefer]. If they control the party machinery, they control all down-ticket races too. So they don't want populists like Bernie upsetting the apple cart. It's bad for business.
We can expand on that at length, but I hope that suffices.
Most registered voters are independents now. More have been walking away from the Democratic Party since they lurched to the intersectional Left. (I am one of them, incidentally) At some point their network decoheres and the party falls apart. It has happened before. Last time it was the Whigs that died. It's time for the Democratic Party to die.
The Green Party and Libertarian Party are not very strong alternatives, in my opinion. The Green Party is perpetually trapped in the purity spiral that is killing the Democratic Party now. The Libertarians are too ideological, being too far from the lived experience of most people.
My personal preference would be for a reprise of the Progressive Party of 1912 (the "Bull Moose Party"), whose party platform of that year reads like it could have been written yesterday in how it diagnosed the ills in our society and the common sense remedies it proposed. In fact those remedies comprise the social reforms considered the best of the 20th century, from child labor laws to the 40-hr work week to the FDA. It was populist and pragmatic.
Sadly, the solid, honorable term "progressive" has been irretrievably tainted by what the Democratic Party has devolved into; it is freighted with overtones of transgenderism, victim hierarchies, and toxic veganism. Far from being the rallying cry for regular Americans who want their government to work for them, it is a shrieking, gibbering freakshow that sane people would rather euthanize than listen to.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 13 2020, @05:56AM
If a heavy favorite wins as expected, most of the market change due to the new office holder will happen in the months prior to the election and we'd probably not see much of a change at all at election time.
Presently, I could see a large drop in markets, if Trump is somewhat favored to win, and someone far more adverse to businesses, like Sanders gets elected instead. There won't be anything irrational about that drop either. But
You'd be right no matter who is in the office. Recessions happen every few years no matter what. A long stretch without a recession is unusual. In particular, the high end of your duration range, ten years hasn't happened in the past 80 years except for now! That is, we haven't had a decade long period of uninterrupted economic growth in the past 80 years except for the Obama/Trump stretch that we see now. But I think that's more due to the awfulness of Obama's administration towards business and economics slowing growth than any competence on anyone's part. I'd rather have a few bouts of strong, unsibsidized growth punctuated with a couple of minor recessions than what we had.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @08:21AM (1 child)
Mostly because Trump is complete idiot when it comes to actually governing. He can get almost nothing done. So everything is running basically on momentum and Trump just manages to fuck up a few things that are not important in short term. His fuckups are mostly important in long term, like rampant debt accumulation that only accelerated again under Trump as he gives himself taxcuts.
But as with Hitler, who was also an imbecile, be careful. They learn after few years of failures. If Trump is by whatever means elected again, US is basically fucked. It already is as Trump appoints one lackey after another that does nothing but destroy the institutions of America. Just now he's meddling in justice department to help out his other criminal lackey.
Imagine if a democrat did *any* of this shit.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 13 2020, @01:55PM
By what measure? Obama got almost nothing done because the Congress was blocking him almost the whole time. Even the Affordable Care Act was gutted from becoming real national healthcare (thanks a lot, Max Baucus, you suppurating piece of shit).
Trump, on the other hand has accomplished a great deal of what he set out to do despite total opposition from the legislative branch and career bureaucrats inside his own administration. He re-negotiated NAFTA, is building his border wall (whatever you think of that project, it's happening), and is pushing back hard on China.
Hitler was evil, but he was not an imbecile. He was intelligent, effective, and determined. Perpetuating cartoonish stereotypes of him and the Nazis obscures how they rose to power and did what they did. Try watching Triumph of the Will and reading Mein Kampf and get their take on what they were about. It ought to unsettle you how easy it is for any of our societies to slip into catastrophe.
Sigh. OK. Every president gets to, and does, appoint his "lackies" to positions in his administration. It's one of the perks of winning that office. The losing side always laments that as "destroying the institutions of America!!!"
You're only overlooking the peccadillos of Democrats because you choose to ignore them, not because they have not happened. (Bill Clinton "running into" Obama's Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the airport tarmac to "talk about their grandkids," anyone? Obama assassinating American citizens with drones, anyone?)
Give it a rest. We've seen and heard it all before from both sides for too long. It's stupid kabuki theater.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by fustakrakich on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:48PM (3 children)
Obama managed to pull the US out of a devastating economic depression
Yeah, Trump is riding coattails, but Obama merely paid ransom to Wall Street and gave some of their people cushy government jobs, Holder being a kind of famous one, and they put a tiny part back into the economy. Obama is hardly a hero.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday February 12 2020, @11:20PM (1 child)
Eric Holder never worked for Wall Street [wikipedia.org]
Got any other lies for us?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday February 12 2020, @11:38PM
Covington & Burling LLP is Wall Street. Check their history your own self.
And what did he ever do to prosecute the criminals that caused the "recession"? And those illegal foreclosures? Sorry, he's Wall Street all the way.
Oh dear! [wsws.org]
:-) Keep on covering for them! You are a most loyal servant to the Party. Some day you might get a plaque
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @12:24AM
Flamebait
Uh oh! Here come the democrats with a fresh batch of points! Now watch the magic!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by istartedi on Wednesday February 12 2020, @11:49PM
Obama managed to pull the US out of a devastating economic depression
Other than not being hated by the Federal Reserve, Obama didn't really do much. The Fed's QE policies have driven this economy. Global flight to quality has caused the world to buy and hold our bonds also, keeping interest rates low. Deficit spending continued to pump the economy through the last administration and well into this one. That force is so powerful that it counterbalances Trump's trade policy, which so far isn't really as drastic as he wants it to be. US debt to GDP ratio is at levels last seen shortly after WW2, which is what really lifted us out of the Great Depression. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. This time the rest of the world hasn't been bombed into oblivion leaving us with the best industrial base--not that we haven't been slinging an awful lot of lead around. Debt to GDP ratios can hold well above 100 for a long time before inflation spoils the party, so it's probably too soon to bet on stagflation, hyperinflation, or a recession. Anyway, the POTUS is, IMHO not as big a player as people think. They don't have *no* influence, it's just that they pale in comparison to the Fed and the global economy.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:05PM (1 child)
Um... what?
First off, without Obama's seed money (remember the demonized solar city?) the renewable market wouldn't have had the required jump start to compete with traditional power on price.
Those windmills, and solar installations drove further investment and now, the subsidies are barely needed.
Coal might be dying under Trump, as the market has moved on, but the market moved on to NG more than renewables, which is... better, but not great.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Wednesday February 12 2020, @08:09PM
>but the market moved on to NG more than renewables, which is... better, but not great.
Actually, it's much worse than that. Natural gas (methane) is an extremely potent greenhouse gas in its own right, which eventually breaks down into CO2 in the atmosphere after many years.
For a shift to methane to be an improvement from a climate perspective, you need to have well-to-combustion leakage below... I want to say it was around 12%. U.S. infrastructure currently leaks at around twice that rate, meaning that the shift is actually making things worse.
At least natural gas is far cleaner in every other way - no strip-mining or toxic settling ponds, fewer toxic hydrocarbon combustion byproducts, less radioactive waste (lots of nasty stuff in coal)...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 13 2020, @04:05AM (2 children)
Sadly the democrat's can't think past just demonizing their opponents
Sadly, the Republican voters have extremely poor English skills.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 13 2020, @02:00PM (1 child)
Even sadder is that today's Democrats have got nothing but grammar nazism and effete disdain. Higher education has replaced critical thinking with glib intersectional taxonomy and made all of them stupider.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @04:47PM
Ok boomer
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:44PM (3 children)
I have a simple question for on global warming. When do you think humanity started having a meaningful contributing role? You need to think carefully about this question because the implication is somewhat surprising. Let's say you pick an absurdly late date and say 1990. Alright. Here [wikipedia.org] are a list of national emissions data. In 1990 global emissions were 22.7 gigatons. Today (as of 2017) we're up to 37 gigatons. The US emits about 5 gigatons. Do you see the issue?
If we magically cut our emissions to 0 overnight, the world would be down to 32 gigatons - far higher than it was in 1990. In fact we're just a hair's breadth away from being able to state that if the US and China both brought their emissions down to 0, we'd still be well above 1990 levels. And of course the 'correct' answer to my question is not 1990. It's supposed to go really far back, perhaps as far back as the industrial revolution. And the further you go back, the lower emissions were, which makes this simple logic all the more interesting.
And I'm sure you're aware that climate change is not "reflexive." What I mean is that if we dropped emissions down to 1880 levels, the heating would not stop nor would temperatures trend to 1880 levels. All that would happen is that the rate of growth would decrease. Suffice to say, trying to fight global warming by reducing our emissions is a rather illogical proposal. And as India and even Africa continue to develop (let alone Asia!), it's only going to become more futile.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday February 12 2020, @08:39PM (2 children)
>What I mean is that if we dropped emissions down to 1880 levels, the heating would not stop nor would temperatures trend to 1880 levels.
Actually they would - just not immediately. There's roughly a 50-year lag on CO2 absorption - i.e. if we cut global emissions to 1880 levels today, it would take 50 years for atmospheric CO2 levels to return to 1880 levels, at which point the planet would be well on its way to cooling back towards 1880 temperatures. The total energy influx from the sun remains relatively constant, and the atmospheric greenhouse gas levels determines how hot the planet has to be to radiate the same amount of energy back into space to maintain equilibrium.
Of course that assumes that we haven't crossed any environmental tipping points that will keep accelerating things without us - which is a far more complicated question since we really don't understand all the processes that well. The consensus still seems to be that we haven't done so yet though, with the tipping point somewhere in the range of +4C to +8C over pre-industrial global temperatures, while we're still creeping up on +2C
The rest of your argument about other countries roles are reasonably valid, though it's worth noting that the U.S. , EU, and China combined make up over half of the total emissions, and China is committed to making the shift as well - they're already responsible for more annual solar buildout than any other nation - they are just also building a lot of fossil fuel generating infrastructure as well.
And you have to figure that most of the problematic nations are relatively poor - and as market forces drive renewable energy below the cost of fossil fuels, they will naturally shift over. That's already beginning to happen - as the lifetime cost of solar becomes cost-competitive with coal, an increasing amount of new buildout is favoring solar rather than fossil fuels. But the poorer you are, the more important the up-front cost is compared to the lifetime cost. As technology improves, driven by demand in the developed nations, the cost of solar will steadily get closer to the up-front cost of new coal plants. But that only happens if the wealthy nations, who already had their industrial revolution that got us into the current situation, keep investing heavily in renewables (and energy storage) to keep driving the cost down.
And of course, totally aside from the environmental considerations, the faster we get off fossil fuels, the sooner we eliminate the ongoing environmental devastation associated with fossil fuels. Not to mention greatly reducing the international tensions and warfare revolving around securing access to energy sources.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @08:25AM (1 child)
Err.... what have you been smoking? And who the fuck is stupid enough to mod this "Interesting".
Learn the fuck about Carbon Cycle.
https://scied.ucar.edu/carbon-cycle [ucar.edu]
Those thousands of millions of tons of coal are not going to sequester themselves in 50 fucking years. It will take closer to 50,000 years for CO2 levels to return to 1880 levels.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday February 13 2020, @03:37PM
Nope.
Try learning a little more yourself - whoever you've been listening to is giving you a ridiculously pessimistic assessment.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 12 2020, @08:11PM (2 children)
All the reduction efforts are good, but I question the accounting to 1950s levels...
Are they counting the carbon emission changes from Germany's population increase? Supply of food to the people? Etc.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday February 13 2020, @06:31PM (1 child)
I can't say anything about the 1950s quote as reference figures are behind a paywall, but note that there's another (surprising, to me) quote i.e. CO2 emissions are now at levels not seen since the late 1980s, when talking about advanced economies. There are some data [iea.org] going back to 1990 here. For at least that quote, they're referring to total CO2 emissions, and not only emissions associated with energy (electricity) production.
Initially, this surprised me too, but thinking about the latest large appliances I bought (an oven and a fridge), it shouldn't: energy efficiency is a big differentiation point for long-term purchases like these.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 13 2020, @06:53PM
LED lighting has had a huge impact. Insulation in homes is starting to get traction, I'd guess that industrial processes are cleaning up. However, I don't see any less concrete being poured, or less traffic on the highways and seas, and steel shipping containers seem to be barely reused before scrapping...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by choose another one on Wednesday February 12 2020, @09:33PM (8 children)
Well if Germany going back to 1950s isn't good enough, try UK which has gone back to 1880s levels and is on target for 1850s levels by 2030.
Of course the US isn't doing sh*t to help, but then it never really does until someone makes a big bang in its back yard, nothing new there, Europe is used to it...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @11:19PM
Every country should do something to bring their emissions down as far as practical, but the US and a few large nations have a disproportionately large portion of the responsibility here both in absolute and relative terms.
For some nations though, that might mean a net increase in emissions as they get their economies functioning at the level needed to lift people out of poverty. In most cases though, they should be able to skip the worst emissions as they'll be able to benefit from higher efficiency equipment that wasn't available when the US was building at its greatest rates.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 13 2020, @01:03AM (6 children)
The UK has gone back to 1880s levels how? Are they outsourcing all manufacturing and then not counting that, nor the shipping costs?
Just the trucks and cars and paving projects in todays' U.K. should exceed 1880s levels, if you count the cost of making and disposing of the trucks and cars.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday February 13 2020, @02:41PM (1 child)
Have you seen our government?
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 13 2020, @03:06PM
Fair enough, but I thought Brexit was engineered by the same shadow group that put Trump in... they seem a little too business friendly to stop or even slow the expenditure of energy, nor expend un-necessary cash in the generation of that energy. Why work today when you can put off the costs until tomorrow?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday February 13 2020, @09:17PM (3 children)
> The UK has gone back to 1880s levels how?
Short answer: Coal.
Longer: Less coal, mostly. A lot lot less coal.
We used to dig and burn a shit ton of the stuff, back in the 1880s for (a) heating houses and (b) transport - trains, steam, lots and lots of, in the 1970s we still used it for power generation (to run the electric trains and electric heating). Look at the carbon emissions charts by sector - buildings, transport and power generation are big ones.
Thatcher started the de-coaling, and the getting rid of much of the heavy industry too - result is CO2 emissions falling from the 1970s onwards.
I don't think any country's carbon figures include international aviation or shipping or offshoring of manufacture (or of waste disposal for that matter) - I agree it should be accounted for somewhere but there doesn't seem to be any agreement on how to do it.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 13 2020, @10:15PM (2 children)
That could do it, but I still have a hard time believing that a population half the size - without proper home heating (well, maybe that was a factor, too...) and extremely limited access to transport would create more CO2... I guess twice as much per capita isn't too hard to believe, if they burned coal in stoves to keep drafty houses warm.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday February 14 2020, @02:38PM (1 child)
To give you an idea, my 3-bed terraced house was built 1850s, would've had 8 fireplaces (or similar - one has a cooking range in it) originally (most bricked up now). The old coal cellar is approx 3 x 6 x 10? ft, goes out underground to the street and has a hatch so coal could be delivered direct from the street. Drafty? - it would have been, would've had large single-glazed sash windows, still has solid stone walls and (ground) floor. Every house on the street from that era is the pretty much the same same.
When we cleaned up domestic heating, partly to combat urban smog, we really just moved the coal burning to the power stations, in huge quantities - large earth-moving (well, coal-moving) vehicles look tiny on a power station coal pile. All that is gone now, last 40yrs or so.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 14 2020, @04:46PM
I live in a port town, and we had a coal burning electric plant about 1km inland from the port, they built a conveyor belt from the port to the plant including a highway overpass... That plant is decommissioned now, thankfully. Too bad its nuclear replacement is stalled in construction - that would close a great many more fossil fuel plants.
🌻🌻 [google.com]