The alternative is what? Contract GDP in every nation until carbon emissions are below target? You think people will allow you to go through something larger a great depression in order to meet climate targets? Did you not see the shitshow that happened in Chile and France when those governments tried to hike gasoline taxes by a small amount?

There is very little we can do over the next few decades to curb emissions. Solar and wind are not viable replacements for coal and natural gas (and are disastrous for the environment due to the requirement for exotic minerals and land-use requirements). Nuclear power is, but the environmental movement is actively blocking re-investment, and we're so far behind that it would take decades to jump-start the industry. Outside of energy generation, freight (sea and air), as well as air travel have no obvious non-fossil fuel alternatives. There are also thousands of petroleum products that don't have obvious alternatives either.

OK... so let's act. What do you do?

That isn't true. With desire and enough money, we could be churning out small modular reactors (SMRs) by the thousands. ThorCon, Nuscale, Terrapower and many others have designs.

In fact, that's my recommendation for the conservatives/populists. Take climate change away as an issue by promoting the only workable plan - a massive shift to nuclear power generation along with "renewables".

Even if global warming isn't an emergency, clean air is a good thing, and so is cheap, plentiful power.

well in rich nations yes but of course it'll absolutely never ever ever happen. people holding out hope for renewables are deluding themselves. i's just not happening. i don't know what the value of "remaining hopeful" is.

Source on this? (Especially first sentence)

My preferred way of visualizing it is the first, third and fourth set of graphs here: https://ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics

Its pretty insane what we have to do now because we've wasted so much time "debating".

Here's the manual: http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/node/277 (Disclosure: I took a Permaculture course from Farmer Dave Blume years ago, and IMO he knows what he's talking about; but I'm not affiliated with him or his site or book. I just think it's a really good way to take constructive direct action to counter CO2 and climate change w/o giving up quality of life.)

> Alcohol Can Be a Gas! (subtitled Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century) is an information-dense, highly readable, profusely illustrated manual, covering every aspect of alcohol fuel from history through crops, hands-on fuel production, and vehicle conversion. It's the first comprehensive book on small- to farm-scale alcohol production and use written in over 90 years.

> Internally divided into six books, the single volume contains 640 8.5" x 11” pages, with more than 500 illustrations, charts, and photos. It sports a 700-word glossary and a full index. It retains the original 1983 foreword by R. Buckminster Fuller. Alcohol Can Be A Gas! is a complete toolbox for farmers, green entrepreneurs, and activists to wrest control of our energy system from the Oilygarchy and put it back in the hands of the public.

All the nutrients and trace minerals stay on the farm: the molecules of alcohol are made from atoms that come from the air and water. In effect the farm is exporting sunshine in the form of reconfigured air and water.

But there's a huge existing fleet of internal-combustion engines in vehicles, generators, and tools like chainsaws and leaf blowers, etc. A locally-produced ecologically benign carbon-neutral fuel source is an important part of the solution, eh?

As for efficiency, consider: Scenario A: grow a crop of corn and feed it to pigs. Scenario B: grow a crop of corn ferment it and extract the alcohol and feed the leftovers to pigs.

In B you get two crops for the price of one. (Alcohol is produced by yeast from sugar. The leftovers are protein, the bodies of the yeast. The corn is a better feed after fermentation and alcohol extraction.)

As for land use in a permaculture farm you would be growing more than one crop on the same land at the same time. You might have two or three crops that produce food and some yams or sugar beets for fermentation.

Also, a lot of things you might not realize can be feedstocks. Pretty much anything with sugar or starch. Farmer Dave had a deal with a donut bakery to get their scrap dough for fermentation and fuel production.

Farm equipment is far more expensive than solar panels and batteries, not to mention the amount of man power to deal with the scale needed for fuel production. Plus the extraction equipment.

In option B you end up with a shit ton of fermented waste. The amount you’ll have to grow for fuel will feed 20x more animals than you’d have in a local/small farm.

You’ll need a lot more land than usual to try this. The soil will be depleted in a few years even if you try crop rotation as your options are limited for fuel production.

Unless you show me an example of this system working I’m very skeptic, a lot of wishful thinking.

Dude, there's a whole book about it.

> an example of this system working

And, yes, Farmer Dave did it. For all I know he's doing it right now. I haven't talked to him in years.

You can contact him right now and ask him to put you in touch with the people who are already doing this.

Indicates that baseline is 2T/year/human (in Spain).

840lbs to 6710lbs (resting to active) exhalation. Which means, not below 0.5T/year/human. We are at 20T/year/human here in Canada -- but, of course, at 8953 trees/human, with each tree absorbing 48lbs of CO2/year, Canada absorbs 215T/year/human (carbon negative in Canada by 195T/year/human).

What action would you like? Carbon tax? We have that. Eliminate oil production? Working on that (no pipelines being built, tar-sands bitumen not being sold to anyone but the US).

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/9789264279612-en/index.h...

Personally, I prefer not to freeze, so burn natural gas to heat my house. Really big country, need transport.

I imagine that I could use wood heating could be used - 2 cords per season should be sufficient (6 to 20 trees, depending on diameter - 8 to 14 inches). I previously (20 years ago) converted all wood burning to natural gas, but could convert back. I no longer own enough land for my tree needs but (afair) 2 acres for food, 4 acres for fuel, so 6 acres of land of be sufficient for my needs.

This would reduce my carbon footprint, but would be more polluting -- which would you prefer?

Scientifically speaking we are on target for something over 2C but below 4C. Keep in mind that what we're seing today (puerto rico, california, australia) is 1C. 2C will be terrifying, so the news that we will likely not break 4C is very very mild comfort. Its just that anyone talking about 5, 6, etc is negative-spiraling in a way unsupported by the research and current economics.

Why not the 'realist' side?

>wind, solar, and batteries have invalidated several of the assumptions about future growth in coal and oil demand.

Did they now? Coal and natural gas growth have outpaced solar and wind deployments. There is still no grid-level storage solution to actually make solar and wind viable replacements, and there isn't one forthcoming anytime soon (right now, places like California, and Germany simply use natural gas backup).

Are you sure? (I'm a "doomer" I admit, but I think the science is there.)

From Dr. Gwynne Dyer – "Geopolitics in a Hotter World" – UBC Talk Transcribed (Sept. 2010)

https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo...

> All of these numbers are fairly fuzzy, but what happens around 2 degrees is that the natural–the consequences of the warming trigger natural processes that contribute further to the warming (positive feedbacks as they are called) in which the permafrost melts and releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere; in which the surface waters of the oceans become so warm they can no longer contain all of the carbon dioxide they absorbed earlier–high school physics, right? Warmer water can contain less dissolved gas. Buy yourself a beer and you’ll see what I mean: if you don’t drink it, it goes flat as it warms up.

> So, all of those feedbacks kick in around 2 degrees and then you’ve lost control, to the point where you may not be able to stop the warming process, even if you stop all of your own emissions.

However that's not scientific research published in peer reviewed journals and then aggregated into UN reports. That's just some professor telling plausible stories in a confident tone of voice.

Specifically the big distinction you will notice between the former and the latter is the latter always depends on "feedback loops" which are un-researched speculation that things will get exponentially worse faster than expected in some way. Now, I don't deny the basic premise of what feedback loops are and how they can work, but if you don't have any research or science to back it then talking about "feedback loops" is functionally just a fancier phrase for "depressive negative spiraling".

Its not that its not plausible, its that its a story, not science.

another point to consider, IPCC reporting is typically condensed into 3 scenarios 33%/66%/99% probabilities of staying below 2C. the most quoted carbon budget numbers come from the 66% scenario. is that wise? if we are talking planet-wide death & destruction then shouldn't we be aiming for 99%. if you consider that IMO IPCC is too timid on this issue and is essentially making a case of massive geoengineering when the 'faster than expected' becomes really bad.

how is terrifying any less provocative than "doom"? i'm just as concerned about terrifying circumstances as i am about being doomed? more likely person you responded to is just as terrified as you are and simply remembered the wrong figure (6 instead of 4).

i'm not a denialist but i do think we're doomed.

We are not (yet) doomed.

there's literally nothing that suggests otherwise, other than that it's physically possible to reduce consumption (i.e. it's not counter to the laws of physics). there is zero political or practical plausibility for reducing consumption to the extent that is necessary to avoid 4 degrees. you're holding out hope for something as unlikely as a miracle.

edit: there was a talk given years ago (i forget where/which channel) where the speaker said that to avoid warming we'd need to mobilize on the scale that we did for ww2 i.e. factories would need to be repurposed and laborers re-skilled. in that scenario it would be plausible. ww2[1] mobilized roughly 7 million people. if today we applied that kind of effort to the problem then maybe we'd have a chance. i don't know i'm not an economist but it's a unilateral effort on that scale that's necessary. and if you look around you can see it's not happening.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_home_front_durin...

2T/capita is extremely ambitious, but not inconceivable.

EDIT: By the way, it is notable that even before climate was a concern, CO2 emissions in developed countries were largely falling, since the 70s. This was a result of the oil crisis and other energy security issues pushing greater efficiency, plus the replacement of coal with gas for air quality and economic reasons.

This isn't an obstacle, given electric cars and clean electricity generation. As I said elsewhere, nuclear is the only viable answer. Sadly, it has been demonized, and that needs to be reversed.

ThorCon's efforts in Indonesia will be interesting to watch. I'm not sure I like its current plan of siting the reactors like oil platforms in coastal waters though...

The best approach is underground siting, with no or very little water cooling requirement.

There is no form of transport that will fix poor urban planning.

And it's _possible_ for public transport to work for fairly low density suburbs; I think some places have had success with small feeder buses feeding larger buses or trams.

Also, of course, urban planning can be improved. And tastes can change too; my impression is that the very large McMansion type houses are getting somewhat less popular in the US now, and they're a big contributor on two grounds (they exacerbate the low density problem, and they're expensive to heat and cool both due to sheer size and to generally relatively cheap construction prompted by the sheer size).

This is what I was sceptical about, but I haven't looked at these kinds of projects yet. I will 'research' more in to it. Thank you for these directions.