We've spent way more than that on CO^2 via the Kyoto accords etc. Of course the problem isn't solved, but that's because it's a way bigger problem. We've acted even more on CO^2 than CFC's, but the problem of CFC's was much smaller and easier to solve.
1. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/17/science/grappling-with-the...
The problem with CO2 is that a lot of the energy requirements are solved by the equations:
coal/petrol/gas + O2 --> CO2 + H2O + energy
energy --> money
whatever --> CO2 + money
But most of the alternative methods are more expensive than a good old coal plant (if you ignore the social cost of pollution and the dangers of coal extraction). I think that nuclear and hydroelectric are cheaper, but they also have some hidden cost.
In 2000, the IPCC gathered the available evidence for a special report which concluded that tree-planting could sequester (remove from the atmosphere) around 1.1–1.6 GT of CO2 per year. That compares to total global greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 50 GT of CO2 in 2004.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/nov/29/planting...
http://climatica.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/IPCC_WG3_... (FOLU is forestry and other land use)
<ost of the so-called skeptics don't know any economics beyond basic things like how to find equilibrium pricing between supply and demand curves and some outdated macroeconomic myths, but they know that the majority of people don't get economics and can be easily scared with threats of recession. That's how we wound up with a President that claims climate change is a myth created by the Chinese to steal their jobs and a dominant party that's champing at the bit to sweep away any and all environmental regulation so they can make a quick buck.
In general, it seems the people who are complaining about government subsidies for renewable energy development have no problems with massive government subsidies to the nuclear power industry.
I'm not anti-nuclear, per se, but given the huge potential downsides and massive lead times of current nuclear projects I don't think it's at all "ready to tackle this problem". But we should absolutely fund research into technologies like MSR, thorium, etc. We do need something to replace base loads, and I don't think biomass is going to cut it.
[0] http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us...
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20170213025941/https://www.resear...
"France’s Nuclear Storm: Many Power Plants Down Due to Quality Concerns"
by Lee Buchsbaum - Power Magazine - (12/01/2016)
http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pla...
There is often a reluctance to support more costly non-CO2 producing approaches to energy production given that those approaches have been around longest and are often cheapest.
Some renewable energy technologies are gaining market acceptance and are cost-competitive with hydrocarbons, but unless Tesla and its peers take off in a big way, hydrocarbons unfortunately aren't going away.
"Green" parties and organizations are infiltrated by double-game lobbyists and influencers from all fronts trying to save their own industry's interests.
What's the easiest way to defeat an adversary? Play it against itself. The same way governments will want to make rebellious opposition groups into violent terrorists, it makes all the sense in the world to make ecologists into irrational, counter-productive idealists.
What kind of powerful (=wealthy) organization benefits short to mid-term from reducing pollution? I fail to see any. The issue of ecology is IMO the hardest fight humanity has had to fight.
Because for ordinary people, the CFC story is a wonderful one. Multi-national co-operation has halted and begun to roll back a serious environmental degredation.
For a small number of people who are slightly less rich thatn they might otherwise have been, though, it was a catastrophe, something that must never be allowed to happen again; much like the public health victories areound tobacco and lead, it energised a small slice of the world to make sure that future efforts (in the current case, the damagfe of greenhouse gases) are never again repeated. No matter what the cost.
Global warming, on the other hand, is a slow death by a thousand cuts. Extreme weather events grow more frequent, fishing becomes less productive, desertification takes more land, the sea rises a little higher, and so on - and the endgame is more complicated and less understandable, too. It's easier to ignore.
From my reading of it, nuclear waste is a thorny political issue, not a technical issue. There's pleny of reasonable solution.
One of my favorites was mixing it into molten glass, pouring that into a steel torpedo shaped tube, and dropping them in the ocean near a subduction zone where there's a few inches of silt per year.
By the time they hit they have enough speed to sink in 10s of eet, won't rupture any time soon, but when they do they will be buried even deeper by silt. Of course eventually they will enter the subduction zone.
On the energy generation side, it's taken pretty advanced tech to get efficiencies upto acceptable levels in Solar and Wind.
Nuclear unfortunately has proven to have drastic fast acting negative externalities on failure (mass evacuation, increase in cancer rates) and tbe Industry has consistently shown lack of competence in preventing failure. So it's no surprise people have soured on it.
Given the trajectory of tech development, I'm fairly confident we'll get there - hopefully before we screw up our climate too much.
With CO2 emissions, serious impacts are all long-term, across multiple generations. On short time scales, it's nontrivial to detect effects, and methodology and measurements are readily disputed.
The truly insidious aspect, though, is how thoroughly committed to massive and persistent change the climate system becomes, before any serious impacts are apparent.
Nuclear power is not a panacea. It looks good on paper but in practice there are tons of hidden costs and failures can be catastrophic. It also pretty much demands hefty regulation, which further adds to the cost in both monetary and social ways.
Finally there is a whole geopolitical order built around fossil fuels. Changing our energy system would fundamentally alter the power balance of the world.
The solution to resource depletion and pollution is to give people what they want in a way that's actually sustainable. Build thicker walls and floors to block sound and conserve energy. Design more efficient lighting and appliances. Develop renewable energy. Etc.
Everything non-essential to human survival is everything that makes us human.
My main concern, and maybe I misread your first comment, is that forcing or guilt-tripping or shaming people into less fulfilling lifestyles is not going to be very productive, IMO.
CO2 produced/energy * energy/person * people on Earth
I know it feels like I'm oversimplifying it, but of course this equation just reduces to the total amount of CO2 produced by humans. There is a ceiling to the rate we can produce it that is compatible with life as we know it on this planet, and we are over that ceiling.
We can tune each of those. CO2/energy - solar, wind, and short term bridge of nuclear; energy/person - more remote work, car sharing, more insulation; # of people - vaccines, birth control access, and other programs to slow population growth.
You have to understand, I believe there is a very harsh reality that we have limited time to solve this problem before we are facing an irrecoverable disaster. Best regards.
> Its failure in 1975 caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history at an estimated 171,000 deaths and 11 million displaced.[1] The dam was subsequently rebuilt.
By the time the flood wave rolled past Baghdad and exhausted itself, as many as one and a half million people could be dead.
1 - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-proble...
While a dam failure may kill more people, a nuclear disaster can leave a place uninhabitable for a thousand years. Radiation sickness and damage is also arguably scarier to the public than risk of physical harm from a dam failure.
A lot of people have some religious argument against Nuclear power - I'm not one of them, but a lot of other people seem to downplay the real risks.
Now im being downvoted because dams kill more people when they fail. I'm sure they do! But that doesn't change the fact that [people other than myself] will continue to oppose nuclear because of its negative PR
I think the issue is that nuclear power is intimately linked to nuclear weapons. As a result, you end up with images like these in the public imagination (Simpsons clips), which have no foundation in reality:
Nuclear fission, right? And let's not forget that coal mining accidents are equally catastrophic for the families of the victims.
>theres no clear reason why humans should be consuming so much electricity and energy
On the contrary, we have no choice but to consume more power. This isn't just a matter of wanting more things: it's about survival.
The talk is about climate change and animal extinctions right now but there's an unlimited number of additional environmental problems to solve if we and our fellow organisms are to survive. Warming, meteor strikes, supervolcanoes, the next ice age -- these are are just four of the known problems.
So we have no choice but to continue to increase our scientific knowledge, technology and wealth. This entails the efficient and safe wielding of greater and greater quantities of energy.
Over the long term, there is no shortage of energy. Unless you're going to argue about Dyson-sphere limits, the Sun provides an amount of energy far in excess of what we'd need. On that scale, the total energy available through fossil fuels and nuclear fission is a drop in the proverbial ocean.
Secondly, many people have become rich due to oil. Those same companies and tycoons pay off politicians hugely.
I completely agree on your second point. It is all about profit.
it is all about the profit for them. genuinely scared of how powerful they are
In my comment, I described that some business owners who fund right wing politicians feel that there is a globalist conspiracy to cut into their biz profit margins, by penalizing carbon waste.
Hence, they feel (((regulation))) is a conspiracy against their personal business empires.
This is all my analysis. It is not to say that I believe people who believe in regulations are Jewish, and that they should be penalized for this.
So I am upset that people downvoted me, if they thought I am an anti-semite
To confirm this, you could just look at the politicians they fund. Hint, they aren't pro-Globalism.
So I don't appreciate that people are downvoting me for using ((())) when I was using it to describe someone's views, not my own
When dealing with politics, people signal who they are based on what actions they actually do. When you research people who are anti-regulation, you may notice some trends.
Since you believe in censoring my discussion of these types of people, the reader will need to google this elsewhere, since apparently to satisfy you, I must not inject one word of potentially controversial information that might offend even just one person
If that level of restraint doesn't interest you, HN might not be the place you want to discuss these types of topics. Regardless of your position, HN members will downvote and flag uncivil and flamewar inciting language.
one day it will be ((())), the next day, someone may be offended that someone is criticizing their company for a product failure, such as at Samsung. This stifled debate of any kind, in my opinion, because there will always be someone who stands to lose something and therefore be offended by a debate that affects their vested interests negatively
If this is something you're concerned about, I suggest taking some time away from commenting on contentious issues (even those you may only suspect are contentious) until you get a better understanding of HN community standards and behavior. For example, if you're going be offended if people downvote your comments and continue to comment on being downvoted, you're going against community guidelines and likely going to attract even more downvotes.
I'm time people will solve these problems. However it's best not to worry because co2 is a natural element that the environment naturally soaks up. I don't think CFCs are naturally absorbed either
Amazon rainforest is being cut enormously. About 90% of cut Amazon is solely for beef production and soy exports for USA beef production.
Of course, the enormous convenient life of average USA citizen might need more government control (24/7 AC, cars everywhere, heavy reliance on animal agriculture etc.) and that stuff costs but it is long-term investment. Of course, no one sees 100 years as long-term, 100 years is invisible. Huge amount of forest also cut for palm oil. The new plant oil that ends up everywhere (sunflower oil turned out more expensive in this millenia).
I've heard from many parents that they don't care if their lifestyle habits promote the business-as-usual culture.
If we get a direction of such a large processes wrong, how the hell are we so sure that CO2 level is even a source of problem instead of being a result?
It's a feedback loop. The warmer it gets more CO2 gets produced, not just by humans but by nature. The melting of ice caps will produce about 100 years of human CO2 equivalent methane (CO2 yearly production of 2016, I believe).
Humans are the source of the problem. They can remove themselves from the equation but it requires a less convenient life for most.
http://www.thecattlesite.com/news/50023/cme-how-much-brazili...
>Although the maximum limit of Brazilian beef exported to the US could be 64,508 mt, based on market competition it is very unrealistic to think Brazil would overtake the full quota. Longer term (in 2020) these TRQ’s are scheduled to change, and could give Brazil a higher volume ceiling.
>To put this in perspective, in 2015 the US imported 570,740 mt of beef from Australia, 299,955 mt tons from New Zealand, and 285,036 mt from Canada (to name our top 3 sources) for an annual total of 1.5 million mt.
I'd imagine Asia is the major importer of Brazilian Beef, I could be wrong, but don't think so
Brazil (with Argentina) is main soy exporter for most of the worlds livestock.
In the documents below you can find clear numbers of how much hectares is used for pasture, corn, soybean etc. and how much stays forest.
The cause of that deforestation is clear, it is soybean + corn + beef = animal agriculture. Brazil has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world.
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/758171468768828889...
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/1...
China buys about 60 percent of soybeans traded globally.
In 2011, China accounted for 43% of Brazilian (top destination) and 25% of Argentinean soy exports
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/soy/fa...
Now would you care to back up your statement
>About 90% of cut Amazon is solely for beef production and soy exports for USA beef production.
Nothing you've supplied comes close to asserting this statement
As for the beef and soy exports it's not enough to check just the exports number. The most important number is beef consumption. Per capita the US has a pretty small consumption. But compared to EU or China, the US is leading, extremely in absolute amounts.
http://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-per-capita...
I can't understand why has it been so hard recognize and act on CO2.
And it's not only the industry and politicians. Green parties have been the craziest in actively blocking nuclear power.
Why has this been so hard to see?