Carbon dioxide peaks near 420 parts per million at Mauna Loa observatory

Re:Carbon dioxide peaks near 420 parts per million at Mauna ... by remir on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @05:52PM (#27441406)

People manifest in the streets because they have to put on a mask to stop the spread of COVID. A simple mask is seen as anti-freedom.

Now, just so we're clear, I'm not judging these people and I don't want to polarize COVID and the government response in any ways.

But if wearing a mask is seen as restrictive, imagine the societal changes required to truly address climate change.

Folks, the party is over. The response to climate change will make COVID measures seem like a day at the water park.

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Re:Carbon dioxide peaks near 420 parts per million at Mauna ... by pirate787 on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @06:29PM (#27441920)

Nope. For about the same cost as the Covid stimulus we could have converted the entire US electrical grid to renewables.

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Re:Carbon dioxide peaks near 420 parts per million at Mauna ... by idiotsecant on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @06:49PM (#27442110)

That's not even within an order of magnitude of being true. Renewables are, with some partial exceptions, not dispatchable energy sources - you need massive amounts of storage and transmission capacity. Solar, for example, has a capacity factor in the neighborhood of 10%. That means that for every watt of natural gas generation you want to replace you need 10 watts of geographically distributed solar energy with storage and massively upgraded transmission networks to move all that power around. You could maybe start to work on a china-style HVDC network with that kind of money but that's not even close to all you need to integrate renewables on a massive scale.

Fixing the american power grid for the challenges of the next 500 years is a multi-generational project that will cost way more than a few trillion dollars.

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