this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Its like watching a train speeding towards a barrier, steadily accelerating faster and faster, full throttle, and saying well it takes time to come to a full stop. No brakes applied, no taking the foot off the gas. Im not even accusing him of doing nothing, he's actively worsening climate change.
Except the foot is being taken off the gas, or in the analogy coal is beyond fed in slower, or some coal is beyond replaced with renewables, but you're amazed the train is still going. Like Geez industrial and power momentum is freaking hard to change, we're not going to turn off all the fossil power plants, ice cars, and change every industrial process in a measly 3 years.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-u-s-oil-production-reached-an-all-time-high-in-2023
You're blinded by the D next to his name, never in the history of the world have we been worsening climate change faster.
Taking foot off the gas is emissions peaking, remaining steady, not being higher than the previous year. Hitting the brakes is reducing emissions to less than the previous year. We have to do that for a long time before we stop contributing to climate change, as it's all cumulative.
I think you, like many, expect the entire freaking world to change in a couple of years. You have no idea how much there is to do and how much industry there is out there. You have to keep voting it in for decades. It's not one and done. Sorry but you have no idea how the world works. But go ahead and don't vote in stupid protest and we can start again from scratch in 8-16 years (remember it's been 23 years since we could have started with Gore, but go ahead and don't vote.)
And BTW I didn't say hitting the brakes, I said less coal being put in. Momentum is a bitch. That's what the world is. Buut you don't seem to realize that and just want to complain. Chow.
PS you're the one actually blinded by a D next to the name because you expect everything to change because of that D in 2 freaking years (when he had control of the house).
And this is the reason it’s a crisis. Climate change is a long process, as is changing the entire world economy to face it. It’s not a crisis because of disruptive weather this year, but because we’ve already set in motion changes to the atmosphere that will inexorably make much more serious changes for at least the next century. Even changing just one small sector of emissions, changing internal combustion to battery electric vehicles, will take a couple decades, and is facing constant resistance by conservatives. One small sector. We have to change the entire world economy. There is so much work ahead and we’re already out of time to prevent serious climat consequences. Starting a couple decades earlier would have made a huge difference (although EV technology wasn’t up to it, so we’d focus on other things).
People can’t seem to look at a graph and internalize what it means when the line keeps going steeply up into the future, but Al Gore clearly could. People can’t seem to conceptualize that some actions have long term results, but Al Gore clearly could
Agreed. On batteries this is where I go back to the 70s. When the oil embargo happened they should have been R&Ding hard for better batteries (and solar and nuclear and fusion). If they started some serious battery R&D back then we would be incredibly better off.
And we should have gone off coal in the 80s. AFAIK there was enough NG to replace it, at least in North America.
Getting off coal would be the thing. I don’t know if they would have been able to advance batteries quickly enough regardless of investment, but getting off coal was quite doable. Nuclear fission was still in ascendancy and could have continued ever upward. Wind power was quite practical, even if not at the scale and cost of today. Solar water heating, weatherproofing, and passive solar design could have brought energy needs way down. In that era we had just gone through a radical downsizing of cars from an energy crisis, and we could have required that continue. We had made progress on many pollutants and started recycling: its not difficult to imagine carbon being recognized as a pollutant and efforts started to control it.
Just one thing, wind without batteries or some kind of balancing can actually be quite bad because you have to quickly turn on and off other power sources, which means they're inefficient. My dad says (way back then) they actually found wind increased carbon production because they had to quickly turn on inefficient generators when the wind died down.
Maybe. My parents at that time were on time of use metering, but it was fixed time. For example the water heater was on a timer to turn on at 11pm when electric rates went down.
Put those two together and you could have dynamic demand response even without grid scale batteries