One of the first human tasks was to harness fire
Our next crucial step is to douse the flameshttps://t.co/pQEcPoqD2U— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) March 18, 2022
A must-read. I pulled a few excellent sections of this very informative piece, hoping to intrigue you enough to read it all.
Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker’s newsletter on the environment.
On the last day of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most dire report yet. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, had, he said, “seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this.” Setting aside diplomatic language, he described the document as “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” and added that “the world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.” Then, just a few hours later, at the opening of a rare emergency special session of the U.N. General Assembly, he catalogued the horrors of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and declared, “Enough is enough.” Citing Putin’s declaration of a nuclear alert, the war could, Guterres said, turn into an atomic conflict, “with potentially disastrous implications for us all.”
What unites these two crises is combustion. Burning fossil fuel has driven the temperature of the planet ever higher, melting most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic, bending the jet stream, and slowing the Gulf Stream. And selling fossil fuel has given Putin both the money to equip an army (oil and gas account for sixty per cent of Russia’s export earnings) and the power to intimidate Europe by threatening to turn off its supply. Fossil fuel has been the dominant factor on the planet for centuries, and so far nothing has been able to profoundly alter that. After Putin invaded, the American Petroleum Institute insisted that our best way out of the predicament was to pump more oil. The climate talks in Glasgow last fall, which John Kerry, the U.S. envoy, had called the “last best hope” for the Earth, provided mostly vague promises about going “net-zero by 2050”; it was a festival of obscurantism, euphemism, and greenwashing, which the young climate activist Greta Thunberg summed up as “blah, blah, blah.” Even people trying to pay attention can’t really keep track of what should be the most compelling battle in human history.
So let’s reframe the fight. Along with discussing carbon fees and green-energy tax credits, amid the momentary focus on disabling Russian banks and flattening the ruble, there’s a basic, underlying reality: the era of large-scale combustion has to come to a rapid close. If we understand that as the goal, we might be able to keep score, and be able to finally get somewhere. Last Tuesday, President Biden banned the importation of Russian oil. This year, we may need to compensate for that with American hydrocarbons, but, as a senior Administration official put it,“the only way to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependency on oil.” As we are one of the largest oil-and-gas producers in the world, that is a remarkable statement. It’s a call for an end of fire.
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The constant price drops mean, Farmer said, that we might still be able to move quickly enough to meet the target set in the 2016 Paris climate agreement of trying to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “One point five is going to suck,” he said. “But it sure beats three. We just need to put our money down and do it. So many people are pessimistic and despairing, and we need to turn that around.”
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Harder to solve may be the human-rights challenges that come with new mining efforts, such as the use of so-called “artisanal” cobalt mining, in which impoverished workers pry the metal from the ground with spades, or the plan to build a lithium mine on a site in Nevada that is sacred to Indigenous peoples. But, as we work to tackle those problems, it’s worth remembering that a transition to renewable energy would, by some estimates, reduce the total global mining burden by as much as eighty per cent, because so much of what we dig up today is burned (and then we have to go dig up some more). You dig up lithium once, and put it to use for decades in a solar panel or battery. In fact, a switch to renewable energy will reduce the load on all kinds of systems. At the moment, roughly forty per cent of the cargo carried by ocean-going ships is coal, gas, oil, and wood pellets—a never-ending stream of vessels crammed full of stuff to burn. You need a ship to carry a wind turbine blade, too, if it’s coming from across the sea, but you only need it once. A solar panel or a windmill, once erected, stands for a quarter of a century or longer. The U.S. military is the world’s largest single consumer of fossil fuels, but seventy per cent of its logistical “lift capacity” is devoted solely to transporting the fossil fuels used to keep the military machine running.
The entire article is worth your time.
I like the vlogbrothers. Hank and John create videos for each other, every morning-ish. And Hank here is my energy whenever anyone tells me they must, must, must, have a gas stovetop. And knowing that utilities are charging hefty fees to disconnect (not remove) a gas line to your home and convert stoves and furnaces to electricity, gives you an insight into their fear of renewable energy.
Let the arguments commence (but I do urge you to read the article before condemning it).
(x-posted at Living Lightly)
Dorothy A. Winsor
The John in that pair is John Green, a popular YA novelist. Among other things, he wrote THE FAULTS IN OUR STARS.
NotMax
Dragged up from downstairs.
How do you say “Hot enough for ya?” in Penguin?
TaMara
@Dorothy A. Winsor: OMG, I did not know that, I knew he was a writer…their videos are both hysterical and informative. Adore them.
Urza
99% tax on all fossil fuel profits in countries willing to save the planet. Dare any country to say they’re against saving the planet. All those profits contributed to a global fund for getting off fossil fuels. Bonus effect, gas prices will plummet.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
Ban fossil-fuel “exclusives” like oil and gas in new construction, and subsidize/encourage phasing them out of existing housing, especially in large-scale facilities.
Don’t shame people for their personal choices – the best thing that ever happened for the anti-environmental movement was for individual choices and virtue-signaling to dominate the conversation about environmental solutions back in the 80s.
TaMara
In the fire-damaged areas of Boulder County right now, homeowners are protesting the new “green” (oh, how I hate that term) requirements because of how costly they can be and insurance is already not covering the excessive building costs.
But if the state and feds were committed to the climate crisis they would offer grants to cover those overages. It seems like a simple solution that has somehow eluded those in charge. I’m out of can’t evens.
BlueGuitarist
@TaMara:
Highly recommend, in addition to the excellent, The Fault in Our Stars:
Hank Green’s novels An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, and the sequel, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
John’s non-fiction, The Anthropocene Reviewed and his other novels, most recently, Turtles All the Way Down (which is not about Moscow Mitch).
Brachiator
Very interesting article. Much good stuff to consider.
Thing is, though, you have to dig up more lithium. And there is the increasing problem of dumping of used batteries and other poisonous materials.
TaMara
@Brachiator: He addresses that as climate triage – meaning we have to solve the problem in front of us, while also looking to the future to solve the problems those solutions might cause.
Ruckus
I’m not sure if I’d be considered an old but at 72 yrs, I’ve seen the oil industry grow to dominate the world because we have developed most of the world around burning it. As we see in Russia, the money that it can make is way too much to spend to ruin the world in a different way. Right now gas here in SoCal is $4.50- $5+ per gallon. For those of us on a fixed income, even with a rather decent milage car, it’s a lot. And I drive a car that can get over 40 mpg but averages just over 30. And it’s not going to get a lot better because the companies are still selling gas because most of us have no other choice. Gas operated cars have gotten about as good as they are going to get, and with so many more people we are now burning even more.
How much does a big tanker ship cost to build and operate, burning oil, just to move oil so that someone else can burn it and cause more pollution? Think how long it will take to replace all this oil burning. And who is going to lose in this race? The people who make serious currency in selling and moving it. Like vlad.
At some point we will stop burning it because it will be too expensive, too rare, what will the world do at that point if we don’t start the process now? It’s taken a bit over 100 yrs to get to this point, what do we do if we don’t change the process until we start running out and how far out will that be? Just a side note, anyone else live in CA 40-50 yrs ago and see what burning oil does to the air we breath? I did, and I can tell you if you didn’t know, it ain’t good for you. Automotive technology has gone about as far as it can go designed around burning oil. It isn’t going to get a lot better. Some of you have children and grand children and possibly great grand children, what are you leaving them?
eclare
Stupid question…why would you pay to disconnect a gas line to your home when you can just turn off the gas? Even I know how to do that.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
You don’t dump them, you recycle them, reuse the materials. In the past that was not considered nearly as much. It is now, it will be even more in the future. Now some stuff is more difficult to recycle but it can be done. If it was assembled by man in the first place it can be separated into it’s parts by man. It just has to be desired to be done. The plastic in soda bottles is recycled and is being made into thread that can be woven into car/other upholstery that lasts a lot longer and which can be recycled at the end of it’s life. And it is rather nice upholstery as well. Motive car batteries can be recycled into home battery systems that fill in for when the sun don’t shine. And they can be recycled at the end of that life for their next life. They don’t get burned, never to exist again, except as chemicals that kill living things.
Ruckus
@eclare:
If you leave it hooked up to the house, even shut off, it can leak, the line can be accidentally broken and leak and/or catch fire. If you are no longer going to burn natural gas in your home, do you still want it connected, still want an account with a minimum monthly charge for having the line/service?
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
The new series The Gilded Age had a recent episode that showed the first time that Edison illuminated an office building and street in 1882. Oil and electricity transformed the world and generated tremendous wealth, even though these products had been considered useless or of little value for hundreds of years.
New technologies will be similarly transformative. And profitable. The trick will be to make sure they are clean and that we look beyond just the immediate and short term benefits.
Southern California is in a kind of basin. Because of this and weather patterns, you even had periods of bad pollution from the time of Native Americans generating smoke from burning wood. Later population growth and industry made it worse, but it has always been a problem.
But since the 70s, pollution controls and agencies like the Air Quality Management District (AQMD) have seen a tremendous reduction of air pollution. I remember when 3rd stage smog alerts meant that school kids could not play outside.
Hopefully we have learned from past mistakes. If so, we can create a better world for ourselves and for future generations.
jonas
At some point, the insurance (and esp reinsurance) industry is going to determine that their business model is no longer sustainable in a world where we don’t price for climate change and try to mitigate it. The problem is right now, the insurance industry is compensating for massive weather-related losses by doubling down on investment in fossil fuels.
eclare
@Ruckus: That makes sense. Thanks!
brantl
@Ruckus: Tell them you are terminating their service, and that they need to remove their property from your property.
The Up and Up
A friend of the family got an email from McKibben back when he ran a monthly community newsletter. Bill wanted everyone to know about his climate concerns back in 1995, perhaps publish his op-ed. Nothing has changed on fixing or reducing emissions since then. I get grief from people for not doing enough, not being like Greta Thunberg. However I was Greta’s age once and advocated the same stuff she does now. And no one listened nor did anything. My father supported President Carter’s efforts in the 1970s. He dreamed of driving solar powered cars, even trying to get funding directed to a local professor, Michael Seal. Alas …
mrmoshpotato
Do NOT use headphones for this video!
mrmoshpotato
@TaMara:
What are these requirements?
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I figured you knew all this and I’m agreeing with you that we made those changes – because we had to. I was born in Los Angeles, I’ve lived in the area for all but 17 yrs of my life (OK the 3 I spent in the navy as well… so 20 yrs) and I understand the reason for the buildup that was, and sometimes still is, noticeable. We used to rate a smog day by how far we could see from the shop just south east of downtown LA. The San Gabriel mountains? A very good day. Some summers that would be maybe twice a summer. The tall buildings down town, a couple of miles away? Just a normal LA day. Not being able to see that far? Yeah that’s fucking smog. But right now the population of LA county is larger than 40 states. Of course that may change but it also is not going to become a lot less.
My point is that it took a long time to get to where we are today, a lot had to happen to get us here but the timeline is no longer reasonable to be 100 or more years. We’ve squandered the time, we’ve waited for too long to wait for the wind to blow the smog out to sea or to someplace else. We are effectively killing ourselves burning oil, a resource that will still be necessary in the future but can be replaced with other ways and means to transport people and things and to heat food. A commodity that causes the issues that oil does, and the profits we all have to pay to others willing to make the world worse for that profit is not a good thing. It’s a thing we’ve arrived at because of the profit, not because of the overall benefits. Ask a simple question, will air travel go away or will airplanes fly long distances by other than fossil fuel power in the lifetime of anyone currently living? I’ll say likely not. Will short distance flights change to some other form of transportation? I believe most will, and likely it will be electric trains, because they work and are reasonably more efficient than short jet plane service.
Jager
When we bought our house (it was built in 1991) 2 years ago, it had 25 electric yard lights. On the home inspection sheet, it was noted that 6 needed to be replaced and part of the system had to be rewired. I had a guy come out, he wanted a grand to do the job. I said to hell with it. I ripped them out, replaced them with solar lights from Lowes on sale for $14.95 each. They work like a charm and I saved 700 bucks.
Mike E
@Brachiator: There are real solutions that recycle used lithium batteries efficiently.
mrmoshpotato
@Jager: I assume you’re talking about decorative yard lights like for dimly lighting a walkway.
Jager
@Ruckus:
We’ve lived in SoCal for 17 years, I used to travel out here on business, the air is much, much better. When I was racing sailboats off Marina del Rey, you could look back at the shoreline and still see the pollution. Same when you look out over the city from the Getty Museum. I know guys who grew up in the valley, they said when they were kids, they didn’t know the sky was blue until they went to the beach. My first trip to LA was with my parents in the 50s, my dad’s aunt lived in Santa Monica, I remember taking streetcars to downtown LA to go shopping with Aunt Emily. We drove down to San Diego on that trip, once you got south of Long Beach, it was all farms of one kind or another.
Sure Lurkalot
Ike told us we were addicted to war. Jimmy told us we were addicted to fossil fuels. Would that we would have listened to these warnings.
Jager
@mrmoshpotato:
Exactly, driveway and garden lights.
Ruckus
@Jager:
My folks moved into the first home they owned, 2 days after I was born. Mom came home from the hospital to a new home. It was in what was then the eastern edge of population growth in the San Gabriel valley. A friends family moved in about a mile east a mile or so east a couple years later and told me that it was orange groves as far as one could see, literally across the two lane street corner they lived on. The land had been cleared of orange groves to build their house and those east of us. The elementary school I attended had as a neighbor, a dairy. Aww the smell of fresh cow shit will always remind me of kindergarten. One did not want to lose a ball over that fence.
Millions of us grew up in smog and pollution. Once, when in premed I went to USC for a seminar on med school. In the afternoon we split into small groups and a med student gave us a tour, including the cadaver lab. He pulled out the gentleman’s lung to show us and the bottom 1/4 was gray rather than the pink of the upper 3/4. Someone asked if he was a smoker and our guide said no, he had just lived in LA. If he was a smoker his entire lung would be gray. That was about 1976. Yes it has gotten better. 11-12 million people still create just a touch of pollution. I still see smog on some days. Not thick, like a dingy, dirty brown gray mile high blanket over everything but still, smog.
jonas
@Ruckus: My parents and other relatives still live in SoCal and while the smog has gotten way better compared to, say, the 70’s (I too remember those 3rd-stage smog alerts in the summers), it’s starting to get bad again in the Inland Empire with all the distribution warehouses and thousands of big rigs coming and going 24/7. Electrifying the trucking industry would be a major boon for LA air quality.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
But it didn’t take a long time. Los Angeles, for example, was still a small cow town in 1920. From cows and horses to spaceships in a hundred years is remarkable.
The main thing is that technology, oil and electricity, have connected almost the entire world in about a hundred years. And this takes into account the sad fact that for a good chunk of that hundred years, the most advanced nations exploited and oppressed much of the rest of the world.
The challenge is to create a livable future for everyone, not just the few.
If I understand you, you are concerned that the huge profits of oil and other industries will oppose efforts to create new, cleaner technology. Yeah, that has always been the case. But it is also true that new and useful technology displaces old technology. We don’t have a whaling industry supplying oil to cities. Despite all of the Trump and Joe Manchin bluster, the hard fact is that coal has been in decline since the 1940s. It ain’t never coming back.
Air travel and ocean shipping will continue to be important. Electric planes don’t seem feasible anytime soon, but who knows?
To me, trains still seem like a nineteenth century solution to 21st century problems, even electric trains, mainly because laying and maintaining track is expensive. But again, who knows?
Bill Arnold
Nice rant by Bill McKibben. He’s a little sloppy with assertions (e.g. covid-19 deaths vs fossil fuel-caused deaths in 2020), and the quote of Naomi Klein was jarring (she’s a full-on nutcase anti-vaxxer now), and there was no mention of storage, which has it’s own technology curves, and that last in particular will be used by pro-gigadeath fossil-carbon-combustion propagandists to try to dismiss the piece.
Good to see that J. Doyne Farmer is keeping seriously intellectually busy.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=list_works&hl=en&hl=en&user=Rk7g1U0AAAAJ&sortby=pubdate
This might be the preprint/working paper that McKibben is talking about; not sure.
Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition (PDF, Rupert Way, Matthew Ives, Penny Mealy and J. Doyne Farmer, Sept 14th, 2021)
Jager
@Ruckus:
An old motorhead in our neighborhood has a restored 55 Chevy Belair 2 door hardtop, restored as stock. It’s a thing of beauty, but after he drives down the street you can smell the unburned fuel for 20 minutes on a day with no wind. Those old cars only used about 40% of the energy in a gallon of gas, we’re up to over 60 now. Formula 1 engines are well over 90% efficient, but you could never run that kind of a design on the street.
Geminid
@Bill Arnold: That’s all good stuff, but a small quibble: you may have the “good” Naomi, Naomi Klein, mixed up with the “bad” Naomi, anti-vaccer Naomi Wolfe. Last I saw of Wolfe before she got banned from Twitter was her and her partner blasting away at a bunch of trees with assault-type rifles. Bad Naomi! Bad Naomi!
Another good article that gives a good big-picture analysis of the challenge of combating global warming is Myles Allen’s “The Green New Deal: a View from Across the Atlantic,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists February 2019. Allen is a British climate scientist who helped write the IPCC’s October 2018 report calling for a carbon neutral world economy by 2050.
E.
@eclare: you can shut the valve but are still charged a service fee until you have them “disconnect” which in this case means “leave connected but shut off.”
E.
@Bill Arnold: wrong Naomi. By a mile.
Dan B
Our gas stove’s oven died so I looked at induction stoves. They were very spendy so I got a gas stove. And I got a countertop induction “burner” and a couple pans. Then I got another plus a set of pans from AvaCraft that are amazing. I use the gas burner or oven once every ten days or so.
Induction has an issue. In the inexpensive units there is no adjustment since they are on full and then cycle on and off. Delicate sauces are not possible. Otherwise induction is great. They are easy to clean and heat fast and cool off fast.
Unique uid
@E.:
hi E. – are you a baker? Reading this thread?
E.
@Unique uid: Yup.
Geminid
@Brachiator: There is a company in British Columbia that has flight tested an Otter seaplane that runs on batteries. The plane is intended to be used for short commuter flights along the coast once it is certified by aviation authorities.
Airbus says it is working on large hydrogen powered passenger and cargo jet. Some might be flying sometime in the 2030’s. The aviation agency representing EU countries has ambitious plans to zero out carbon emissions in air travel using hydrogen and carbon neutral liquid fuels.
There is a lot of skepticism about hydrogen as a major fuel source, but the EU seems to think it will be a major component of it’s future energy economy. This would be “green” hydrogen produced by electrolysis using power from wind and solar generation. A few months ago I read of a pilot project initiated by a large electrical coperative based in Valentia, on the west coast of Ireland. It will start out producing fuel for hydrogen powered ferry boats. The idea is to eventually produce hydrogen on offshore platforms that would be transported on tankers like liquified natural gas is now. The west coast of Ireland has plenty of wind but is distant from the rest of Europe and it’s electrical grid.
I find a lot of interesting stuff by googling “clean energy or “photovoltaic” and “wind energy.” One good article featured a really big tidal generation unit recently installed in a Scottish river. It was fabricated at a nearby port that used to be a shipbuilding center. The barge built to transport the generator was the first significant maritime construction there in 50 years. The reporter wrote that between wind, solar and tidal power Scotland is already generating over 90% of it’s electricity from renewable sources.
Unique uid
TaMara: thanks for starting this thread!
I always come back to CO2 as the most important issue facing humans. But sometimes hard to remember in daily actions. Personally I think we are far closer to 1.5 than we know and the situation is already dire.
Dan B
@Geminid: I believe there are some electric airplanes being tested in the Seattle area and bigger companies are buying the small startup manufacturers. Things are happening
The other issue is pulling CO2 out of the air. Kelp sounds promising. Tree planting is looking less promising.
Unique uid
@E.: I was first actively lurking on this blog about two years ago. I think it was you that was quite worried about not being able to buy flour, and then the “lockdowns”. Just wondering how you made out, it sounded like your bakery is still going? If you wrote up your experience somewhere I would like to read it.
It would have been my first post (didn’t make it thru moderation), but I was looking around my area for flour and trying to find a truck to head your way.
E.
@Unique uid: Actually our last day is April 2. I’m currently trying to give it away because I cannot bear to see it go out the door piece by piece, to an auction house. But that will likely be its immediate fate.
Unique uid
The two things I could do to reduce CO2 are putting in home solar, and an electric vehicle. I was quite excited a year ago for the improved tax credits for both of those in BBB. Especially the refundable credit vs regular credit, now that I’m retired don’t think I’ll be paying much Federal tax to get the credits as currently done.
And then BBB didn’t advance. Still hopeful for that next year.
Recently I’ve been meaning to research community solar. Eyeballing a back field on my acreage. But my rural county in Michigan had a wind turbine field go in about seven years ago. Lots of complaints about that from the locals, now they need special permission to install. And over the last three years the largest solar panel arrays in the state have been installed in this county. Now lot’s of “No Solar Farms” and new zoning with special permission for arrays over 20KW on the ground.
lowtechcyclist
The good news is that, according to McKibben, it’s become cheaper to stop burning stuff for fuel than to keep on doing it. The bad news is, our movers and shakers insist that we keep on.
I just keep wondering: do the people at the top of the fossil fuel business have grandkids?
I know, I know, they figure they’re rich enough so that their children and grandchildren will still be rich and insulated from the consequences of global warming. I think they’re fooling themselves: systems will break down in ways that leave everyone poorer, and the 21st century toys we’ve come to take for granted will be gone with the wind by the time the 22nd century begins.
Unique uid
@E.: Oh no, so sorry to hear!
Is it poor business prospects from COVID, or whatever?
Sometimes I think about a bakery, but I’m probably not a good candidate.
lowtechcyclist
I don’t understand why they aren’t giving it another push right now: ISTM that the best way to do without Putin’s oil and gas is to move to electric cars, and solar and wind power, as fast as possible.
And we tell people that if they want to keep their gasoline-powered SUV, fine, once us libs are driving EVs, low demand for gas will be good for them too. Win-win.
Geminid
@Dan B: U. Mass. economist Robert Pollin commented on tree planting, or “aforestation,” in a March 2019 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article titled “We Need a Better Green New Deal.” Pollin said that while some proponents saw the potential to offset 30% of carbon emmissions through aforestation, studies he trusted pegged the number closer to 10%. But a resolution of the greenhouse gas problem will require both “negative” methods that remove carbon, like planting trees and fostering kelp beds, alongside reductions of emissions through both greater efficiency and replacement of carbon fuels with carbon free technologies.
Pollin’s Bulletin article-actually an interview by a Bulletin editor- gives an excellent overview of the potential and challenges for the clean energy transition in the U.S. Pollin is knowledgeable in this field and has helped draft clean power plans for several states.
Unique uid
@lowtechcyclist:
Think we are on the same page here. I forget the exact saying “hard to convince a man something’s a bad idea when his job depends on it”. Even worse when it is a 1%ers profits.
Maybe he is a bit of a crackpot(?), but I like to follow Peaksurfer blog / “The Great Change” / Albert Bates. He seems to think that bio-char could be part of the solution.
Another Michigan bad example is Line 5. Oil pipeline through the Straits, 70 years old, owned by the company that dumped a million barrels in the Kalamazoo River. Most of the oil in Line 5 goes to Ontario/Toronto, very little benefit to Michigan. Current argument is leave it alone/shut it down/or build a tunnel under the straits to prevent spills. But the tunnel won’t be finished until ’28 at the earliest – we need to be at 50% oil reduction at least by then!
I’m also reporting that the comment editor is intermittently screwing up. Twice it has come up blank, and doesn’t allow text entry in the visual tab.
Geminid
@Unique uid: I think that some of the BBB’s clean energy elements will get passed this year. Democratic Senators and Representatives are not saying a lot about it, but they’re working on some of the initiatives. As you say, more could be done in the next Congress.
evodevo
@eclare:
the gas companies have gotten smart about that…at least for commercial setups like our store…they charge an arm and a leg for meter service. The gas we used in Jan was $20; the meter charge was…$84….
Ruckus
@Jager:
And even with that efficiency it’s still burning oil. We will never be at or even all that close to zero emissions but if we don’t eliminate or massively reduce them the world will change in ways that make life for all the many people there are and especially all there will be rather difficult. And any change as massive and difficult as this takes time, which we are running out of.
Chris T.
The sad thing is, we’ve had the tech for this for decades. It could have been cheap enough to seriously displace fossil fuels 15 years ago, if it were not for Reagan and other “seed corn is tasty” types. (It’s now cheap enough to happen on its own, it’s just that it’s such a big emergency to get it done within the next 15, or 5, or maybe even negative-5 years that it’s a big problem now.)
(That time budget of minus-five-years to get it done may be optimistic: it seems like the tipping point for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, i.e., Gulf stream and so on, may have been 2012. So that would be a time budget to reverse the trend of minus-10 years.)