It has not made much news domestically, but China is going through an extremely severe drought:
China, the world’s second-largest economy, is now 74 days into its longest and most intense heatwave in more than 60 years, with about 4.5 million sq. km or nearly half of its total land area under the grips of extremely high temperatures, according to the World Meteorological Organisation. This is compounded by a severe drought that has shrunk several rivers including Asia’s longest and the world’s third largest river, the Yangtze, leading to the closing of shipment ways in sizable tranches of the crucial trade waterway.
On Tuesday, August 23, four government departments issued a joint warning that China’s autumn harvest, which constitutes 75 per cent of the country’s annual grain produce, was under “severe threat” from the heatwave and drought.
While high temperatures continue, the National Meteorological Center put out on its social media channel that the heat was expected to fall in parts of central China by Wednesday, and in Sichuan and Chongqing from August 29.
It’s very serious:
Intensity, impact, scale and duration of #China's heatwave this summer has broken all records
It lasted 64 days (as of Aug. 15), with record incidence of temperatures above 40°C. The heat continues
⤵️China Meteorological Administration at https://t.co/9Gkj4RFkMM#StateofClimate pic.twitter.com/FMcA45ieqS— World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) August 22, 2022
Beyond the obvious problems with a drought like this (the human toll, crop loss), there are a number of other problems that a drought like this can cause. Much of China’s power is generated from hydro, so they are burning more coal and we can probably see a spike in oil prices from this. Another issue is that it is simply impossible to keep factories open:
The loss of water flow to China’s extensive hydropower system has sparked a “grave situation” in Sichuan, which gets more than 80% of its energy from hydropower.
On Sunday the provincial government declared it was at the highest warning level of “particularly severe”, with water flow to Sichuan’s hydropower reservoirs dropping by half. The demand for electricity has increased by 25% this summer, local media reported. The reduction in hydropower has also reportedly affected downstream populations, including Chongqing city and Hubei province.
Last week Sichuan suspended or limited power supply to thousands of factories and rationed public electricity usage due to the shortage. Toyota, Foxconn and Tesla are among companies reported to have temporarily suspended operations at some plants over the last fortnight. On Sunday the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported plans to restart production this week had been postponed.
The Yangtze is the world’s third largest river, providing drinking water to more than 400 million Chinese people, and is the most vital waterway to China’s economy. It is also crucial to the global supply chain, but this summer it has reached record-low water levels, with entire sections and dozens of tributaries drying up. Water flow on the Yangtze’s main trunk is more than 50% below the average of the last five years. Shipping routes in the middle and lower sections have also closed, the SCMP reported.
Beyond the human misery, expect supply chain issues in the short term future (yet another reason the CHIPS act is something that was vital to national security and the American economy).
And then the final blow- after sustained periods of drought, when the soil is basically baked into clay tiles, when the rain does come, it is not able to absorb the rainfall as it normally would, which will lead to horrific flooding. We’re already seeing something like this in Pakistan and India.
Baud
If we can keep Dems in control, maybe the next few years will see a new international effort on climate change. No one is safe, as the weather is making clear.
germy shoemangler
So… Biden’s fault again?
That’ll be the talking point anyway.
E.
We need to stop calling this “drought” because that word presumes a termination of the condition it describes. Our condition is not that. In our current reality every year is more likely than not wetter and cooler than the the year to come.
Wyatt Salamanca
Good discussion this morning on my local NPR station about China’s heatwave
h/t https://www.wnyc.org/story/chinas-unprecedented-heatwave
WereBear
I saw a demonstration with the difference a normal, dry, and baked soil is about absorbing water, and the difference is startling. This was an drinking glass, so once it’s multiplied, it’s floods. Nowhere else to go.
Another Scott
Yup. The flooding in Pakistan is quasi-biblical-scale.
https://www.dawn.com/trends/flood-emergency
Relieftweb.Int satellite-data map (Yellow is more severe than Red).
That’s cloud-free areas that the satellites can see. There was an estimate on the BBC news that 30M are actually affected.
Because of the geography, much of the water will sit there for months. It’s a huge disaster. And more water is coming.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
matt
With Ukrainian food exports limited, I expect this to have a continuing effect on food prices worldwide. Thanks Biden!
brendancalling
Every time I see articles like this, I am reminded of my time knocking on doors for Greenpeace in 1991-1992. Back then climate scientists were saying we a had decade or so to do something about global warming (as it was then called), and then it would soon be irreversible.
In my lifetime, I’ve seen winter disappear entirely from Philadelphia, PA—in 1999, when I moved here we had about three months of every season. Now, we have very long summers and spring. Winter is all but gone. My kid in Montreal is seeing it too. Vermont was bone dry when I went back a week or so ago to get my stuff. It’s coming for all of us.
Kelly
Greenland is melting faster than expected.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/29/greenland-ice-sheet-sea-level/
Brachiator
It is astounding that you have a drought in China while there are floods in Pakistan, which is at least a geopolitical neighbor. BBC News showed an ancient temple now exposed because of the massive drop in water level of the river in China. They also showed people walking along a dry, flaked riverbed.
germy shoemangler
@Brachiator:
MomSense
@WereBear:
We had flash flooding on Friday with a brief thunderstorm. We also were in severe drought conditions when the storm hit.
Eolirin
I’m not sure how we’re going to be able to navigate the food or refugee crises coming out of these sort of weather patterns becoming a common occurrence.
And that feels baked in now. We don’t have a couple of decades to figure out how to avoid them. Things are going to get very scary very quickly.
trollhattan
China has begun taking positive steps to fix…what am I saying?
The Moar You Know
I have taken a ferry across the Yangtze. You could not see the other side from the embarkation point. It took over an hour to cross at a fairly decent rate of speed.
I cannot imagine sections of it “drying up”.
Geminid
@matt: The UN reports that shipments of grain from Ukraine through the Black Sea totaled 1 million metric tons in the 28 days since an agreement brokered by Turkiye and the UN went into effect. The UN’s World Food Program is now purchasing Ukrainian grain for relief efforts in Ethiopia and Yemen.
Kropacetic
Things don’t have to dry out completely to affect hydroelectric potential.
Geminid
@trollhattan: On the other hand, China has a very ambitious program for nuclear power plants. They’ll take a while, but the nation seems committed to building out nuclear electrical generation on a very large scale.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
The American West, Europe, India, China… I try not to let this overwhelm me.
Fair Economist
Continuing LA Nina is predicted, for an unprecedented 3rd year. That most likely means another year of drought here is CA, after 2 very dry years in a row.
Oh, and we can grow bananas here since it doesn’t freeze anymore. Or, rather, we *could*, had we the water for them.
Gin & Tonic
@Geminid: That’s stored grain. I’d expect this year’s harvest to be significantly lower than last year. Hard to plow a field full of land mines.
becca
If people think inflation is high now, tighten your seat belts cuz climflation is just kicking into high gear. Hoo boy!
Kelly
@Kropacetic: Lake Powell may be Glen Canyon National Park in my lifetime. That’ll be a lot of hydro power lost.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2022/08/29/how-long-can-drying-west-keep/
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2022/08/28/glen-canyons-side-canyons-spring/
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150249/lake-powell-still-shrinking
bbleh
And as a consequence of power loss, factory closures, crop losses, floods, and likely at least some hunger and disease, China may very well see significant … political instability! Wouldn’t that be … interesting? [crawls under bed]
Kropacetic
@bbleh: Yeah, keep that hush. You think Republicans are dug in about not acting on climate change now? Wait til they get it in their heads they can use climate change to conquer China without firing a shot. It’ll be deemed a civic duty to spend two hours every day feeding a coal fire.
jonas
@germy shoemangler: Trump would have threatened them with tariffs and told them to make it rain more and they would have immediately done it. Sleepy Joe just doesn’t have the cojones to step up like that.
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: Oh, I know that Ukraine’s grain exports will be depressed. But the commenter seemed to blame Biden (I guess for his support of Ukraine) so I thought I should push back. And not everyone knows about the exports under the Turkiye-UN brokered agreement.
Ken
@jonas: I wonder if this might be an opening for recovery of some of the Chinese market for US agricultural products? It was hit hard by the Trump tariffs (OK, technically Chinese response to the Trump tariffs).
Ruckus
I’m wondering if the climate folks miscalculated the arrival of massive upheavals of anything resembling what we all consider normal. We are seeing record temps, lasting not days but at least weeks. We are seeing drought conditions and massive rain storms with flooding on the same day. We are seeing water receding from rivers and lakes around the world and it seems to be evaporating rather than sources drying up, which would make sense from the temperatures we are seeing around the world. Haven’t we been told that the average temp only has to go up between 1 and 2 deg to be a problem? Is it doing that now, instead of the few years from now that we have been told? I live in SoCal and walk my 2 miles in the early morning because of the daytime heat. The humidity is in the 80-90% range at 6am by by 10am it is around 60% and it keeps dropping throughout the day, down to single digits. That’s not runoff, that’s evaporation. Which is not necessarily building clouds above where the water is evaporating but will as the upper atmosphere gets more humid. And as that seems to be happening at an accelerated rate……..
I’m just asking the question, have those who have been telling us global warming is coming soon, miscalculated and global warming is here now?
bbleh
@Kropacetic: True that. Good thing political instability in the country with the largest population and the second-largest economy in the world, who is one of the US’s largest trading partners, is in the middle of a long expansion of their military capabilities and international political influence, and oh yes, has a lot of nuclear weapons, couldn’t possibly have any effect on the U.S. of A.!
IIRC the same clear thinking was prevalent among Republicans in the late 1930s concerning some dust-up an ocean away in Europe.
Jeffery
Shortfalls in grain crops around the world look to be the norm this year. Things are going to get ugly.
Damien
In news that can’t possibly be related, Millennials and Gen-Z are less interested in having children than their parents and grandparents.
HumboldtBlue
@Geminid:
You don’t get the sarcasm in that statement? You don’t recall “thanks Obama”?
Geminid
@HumboldtBlue: It could have been sarcasm. That wasn’t so obvious to me. Maybe the commenter will set me straight.
Kropacetic
@bbleh: Nuclear winter is one solution to climate change.
Eolirin
@Ruckus: Lots of scientists have been saying it’s here now for years. Some highly regarded climate scientists have been complaining about the models being presented at international forums and UN working groups being too rosy for like a decade plus at this point.
We’ve been failed by the political side, not the science side.
Baud
@Kropacetic:
Biden. Didn’t. Even. Try.
Kropacetic
@Baud: He’s famously deliberative. Give him some time.
John Cole
@bbleh: China (and Russia) is already in an what appears to be an unrecoverable demographic slide. No empire has ever recovered from a population drop this rapid.
https://www.grid.news/story/global/2022/07/12/the-end-of-chinas-population-boom-has-arrived-how-will-the-countrys-changing-demographics-shape-its-future/
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid: The best time to start building nuclear power plants was two decades ago, the second-best time is now…
trollhattan
Scientists being scientists, the published predictions have been conservative (in the old sense of that word) because despite the complexity of the models, they only feebly represent actual conditions given the planet is so much more complex and so much is still unknown. (This is perhaps a Levenson topic.)
Reporters and headline writers do NOT understand the built in conservatism and have not done a good job communicating the range of outcomes.
In sum, we’re decades ahead of what we’ve been reading the last twenty years.
When I read of the many tipping points we’re approaching it seems more a gamble on which one(s) hits first. Then it’s too late to claw things back.
different-church-lady
I’m so happy to have lived in the tiny little blink of human history where we became so clever we fucked ourselves into oblivion.
different-church-lady
@Ruckus:
Predictions are difficult, especially about the future.
different-church-lady
@HumboldtBlue:
Look, not everyone can spend all their time keeping up with all internet traditions. Jeez…
J R in WV
If anyone wonders where I’ve been, our internet has been down since a storm last week! Still is as stuff melted…
bbleh
@John Cole: Re China, has any country ever deliberately taken similarly drastic steps to reduce its birth rate? Given that they seem to think — or at least at times to have thought — that some population reduction (or at least growth reduction) would be a good thing, maybe historical parallels aren’t quite as reliable. And in an era of shrinking resources, a lower population might actually reduce the potential for political instability.
Russia OTOH … talk about disintegration. And they have even more nukes! [pulls slippers next to bed so nobody can see]
Typhoon
Though neither as devastating from a world economic standpoint, nor in a human cost, Spain his undergoing their worst drought in recorded history. Spain produces half of the world’s olive oil and there will be widespread global shortages of olive oil next year.
frosty
@Ruckus: We’ve known all along that there are tipping points – at a certain level of warming, positive feedback occurs that drives more warming. Two of those are happening now: loss of arctic sea ice so less reflected sunlight; and burning of the boreal forest, releasing stored carbon. I’m not surprised about the weather and climate news. I fear we’re too far into the feedback loop.
ian
@John Cole:
China itself has experienced this before, with plague outbreaks in the 400s and 1400s. The eastern Romans survived a similar demographic plunge in the 500s (which created the ground for the expansion of Islam in the 600s). Persia experienced mass depopulation during the Mongol conquests, Britain and France each lost a third of their populations during the 100 years war from the plague outbreak of 1358 (and kept fighting!). There are many examples of countries and empires losing large chunks of their population and continuing in some form.
Geminid
@Major Major Major Major: I don’t have my notes at hand, but I believe the Chinese have 17 nuclear power plants under construction, 47 in the permit process, and over a hundred more proposed. They believe they can build a plant from start to finish in six years or less. years.
different-church-lady
@frosty:
My gut says we were too far into the feedback loop 30 years ago and we just didn’t know it.
Of course, next year we’ll get a lot of rain and climate change will be fake again…
Kropacetic
Climate change will be fake until we need desperate measures to address it, a final solution of sorts.
different-church-lady
Y’know, if this were LGM, we’d be exactly like this except it would all be immediately followed up with, “Here’s a photo of the microbrew I’m drinking after another awesome show from the Drive By Truckers.”
frosty
@different-church-lady: I think you’re right; I just didn’t want to say it.
different-church-lady
@Kropacetic:
Oh, so it’s fake right now.Got my snark upside-down: we’re well past the point where the desperate measures need to get going.
Kropacetic
@different-church-lady: To (R)ight thinking people, yeah.
catclub
@frosty:
I keep hoping/expecting to see a year that is back to moderate… and it has not happened. Every year seems either still bad or worse.
Ken
@different-church-lady: How silly. Don’t they have any pet pictures?
Kelly
@trollhattan: Plus the scientific predictions about global warming we’re always presented as a range. The nasty problem now is the worst case scenario seems to have been the correct one.
Gravenstone
Well intentioned, yes. But it’s important to point out that chip fabrication is a very water intensive application. This is likely to have an impact wherever the proposed new facilities are sited.
cain
@Brachiator:
Not that hard to believe .. we had a ton of rain in the northwest while California has challenging conditions
Baud
I read on Reddit that the country with the world’s lowest birth rate is South Korea. Some ridiculously low number.
Brachiator
@Geminid:
Don’t you sometimes need a lot of water to cool nuclear plants?
Really not sure about this. Just throwing a question out there.
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid: Dunno the exact numbers, but yeah they’re making a big push, good for them!
@Kelly: We are nowhere near the worst-case scenarios. We’re probably looking at about 2.5 degrees celsius, maybe less:
And that’s from the guy who wrote The Uninhabitable Earth.
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: Depends on the reactor design. China is building several different kinds.
cain
@Kropacetic:
Right by then the older generations would have exited and the younger generations will be left to carry on the grim work of adapting ..
Kelly
@Major Major Major Major: yep. The thing is when presented with a range most people tend to think the center of the range is the likeliest outcome when there isn’t any reason to think the center is the likeliest
bbleh
@cain: serves them damn kids right for what they done to my lawn all them years …
Prometheus Shrugged
@trollhattan: There are multiple different concepts to unpack in this entire discussion–I am a climate scientist in my day job, so i have to resist the temptation to reply to every message in the thread!–but here’s a counter-example from my former colleague Tim Barnett (who just recently passed away, but not before witnessing the realization of his prediction from 2008)
http://ww2.kqed.org/climatewatch/2009/11/05/when-will-lake-mead-go-dry/
lowtechcyclist
@Kropacetic:
Kinda like a slo-mo murder-suicide.
bbleh
@Kelly: The Broder Center officially disagrees and expresses its Material Concern (level 2 of 4, brows wrinkled but not furrowed, minimal chin-scratching) over your assertion.
JoyceH
@Brachiator:
Do we really want to go nuke? When we’re seeing right now that a reckless invader in the vicinity of a nuclear plant can potentially poison a continent?
I just don’t understand that decision, since it seems to me that solar and wind would be cheaper to build, can go ‘online’ early with only a partial build and then be expandable. Not to mention the fact that China already has the world’s largest solar power facility. That’s apparently not a well-known fact, the place is way over in the western region, and I just happened upon it watching a documentary on the Silk Road. I went ‘really?!’ and googled it, and sure enough. China has the largest solar generator and India has the largest wind generator.
Somehow, we need to make getting off fossil fuels to have the same national pride force that the ‘space race’ achieved back in the 60s. The entire process of going to the moon certainly gave us technological advancements to the extent that the program paid for itself many times over, but the stated goal ‘a man on the moon’ had no real intrinsic value or purpose, other than national bragging rights. And yet we (and the Russians) dumped massive amounts of money and attention into the project, which was frankly way too ambitious for our then current level of technology, and we made it to goal in under a decade.
How do we get that back? I understand our current push to the moon was at least partially predicated on the fact that China is planning to go. So let’s challenge them to a clean power race. And our OWN people! Hey, do we want China to have the largest solar plant in the world? We’re the US of A, the best in the world… something like that.
Kropacetic
@lowtechcyclist: We’re talking about people who believe consequences won’t, or shouldn’t be allowed to, reach them.
bbleh
@different-church-lady: And I swear once you mentioned LGM the first thing I thought of when you said Drive-By Truckers was that stoopid “People’s Convoy.”
Perhaps a couple of politics-free weeks … sorta like a Dry January … yeah, that’s it.
Miss Bianca
@lowtechcyclist: I’m not sure how slo-mo it is, actually…
Eolirin
@Major Major Major Major: There is significant uncertainty in the models about what happens at even 1.5 degrees of rise; if there are sufficient feedback effects at that level, and there may be, we really don’t know when they happen, it won’t matter if we hit net zero. Temperature rises will become self sustaining.
But even that’s kind of besides the point because it’s unclear whether human society as currently constructed can survive the disruption caused by what’s already happening, if it continues for just a few too many years in a row.
If droughts like these go on for a few years straight the food shortages alone will throw the entire world into chaos. Let alone the supply chain disruptions.
We’re so far behind on preparing for this and doing what’s necessary to mitigate the consequences that we now have to get lucky even if we manage to start doing things correctly (which is far from guaranteed).
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
Don’t I know it. I sometimes have trouble predicting what day tomorrow is going to be.
My point that I didn’t try to make at all was that it may be too late to do much about global warming any longer except maybe do the most we can instead of the least so that it isn’t AS horrendous as it could be. I’m not holding my breath for humanity to do the right thing. I’d rather live longer than 60 seconds.
Citizen Alan
@Damien: I think it’s a sin to bring children into the world if you think there’s a good chance they’ll die of starvation before they reach the age of 50.
Anonymous At Work
Chinese agriculture is also dependent on multiple growing seasons to produce enough for itself and to export. Rising food costs again mean death.
Rising technology brought a lot of farmers into the cities to work [cheaply under deadly conditions] in factories for export but that led to social unrest and strained infrastructure even without an economic slowdown or COVID.
Finally, multiple growing seasons, especially water-heavy rice crops, take a toil on the soil and required controlled flooding and other measures to replenish the soil without leaving it fallow for months.
With all of this happening, plus worries about the general state of the Chinese economy (i.e. bills coming due and banks being worthless), things could get “interesting”.
lowtechcyclist
@Damien:
If I were of the age to start a family, there’s no way I would until I could see that we were dealing with climate change on an appropriate scale. Why would I bring a new life into the world if I thought the level of environmental catastrophe in the world during that child’s lifetime might well dwarf what we’re looking at right now?
Ruckus
@frosty:
I didn’t spend too much time above the Arctic circle but I did spend more than most people will ever do and I don’t recall a lot of sun.
sab
@Gravenstone: Ohio is still pretty wet. Intel is putting a plant in in New Albany, near Columbus.
Eolirin
@Ruckus: Given the sheer scale of how much arctic ice is gone now, it doesn’t require there being much sun to make a huge difference.
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
Add in the concept of why we reproduce in the first place, along with higher average lifespans, and all the other issues of living in the current future world and is there a need for nearly as much replication as humanity has normally done? I know quite a few people who have one or no kids, because they just didn’t see the need. And I’m one of them. Between myself and my 2 siblings, we have one child. OK he’s grown now but still. I know a number of others my age who are in the same boat.
Mel
@J R in WV: Are you and yours okay? Hope everything is getting sorted out and back to normal!
Jinchi
The solution to global warming is to stop burning fossil fuels.
More nuclear power plants simply put more electrons on the grid. That doesn’t solve the global warming problem unless we explicitly take coal and oil power offline every time we switch an equivalent nuclear power plant online. As long as nuclear is more expensive than fossil fuels this is not going to happen, at best it simply shifts the emissions from the developed countries to places that can’t support nuclear.
Eolirin
@Ruckus: There’s not, but there are intense logistical challenges to severe population declines that we need to figure out how to solve, and if we don’t do it before it becomes a serious issue it is likely to get really ugly.
Bill Arnold
@Brachiator:
Cooling towers work for thermal plants (of any sort). They just cost more money than pumping free cooling water.
trollhattan
@Prometheus Shrugged: Yeesh.
I work for a large water purveyor and perhaps most concerning is as we transition from snow to rain, the ability to store and deliver water consistently through the year diminishes, and no amount of dam building can substitute for the water storage the snowpack represents.
Repeating the winter of 1861-62 is the other side of that coin–how much of the Central Valley becomes uninhabitable?
Ruckus
@Eolirin:
I’d say that’s reasonable. And I’m not saying there was no sun, but I’ve been about half way between the Arctic Circle and the polar ice on several occasions and just do not recall a lot of sun and temps well below freezing.
Geminid
@Jinchi: The Chinese did the math and they seem serious about replacing their coal power with nuclear while continuing to build out solar and wind power.I think they decided that wind and solar would not be sufficient for their needs. They can always scale bac, not build the last 50 or so nuclear plants.
Major Major Major Major
@JoyceH: The thing about a heavy dependency on solar and wind is that you need some things:
or coal.stinger
@JoyceH: Excellent comment!
trollhattan
@JoyceH: Nuke plants are too expensive for what they deliver. The twin units at Diablo Canyon produce 2,200 MW; while CAISO is getting 10.6 MW from natural gas ATM.
A two-reactor plant being built in Georgia lends some data on what it costs to build in the 21st century. Their design output is the same as Diablo Canyon: 2,200 MW.
Scout211
Deleted. Wrong thread.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
this thread has me thinking I was too hasty in quitting smoking 25 years ago
also, looks like I picked the wrong lifetime to quit sniffing glue
Eolirin
@Major Major Major Major: Battery storage is also a solution.
Mel
@Ruckus: Same here. Our biological family ends this generation, with neither my sib nor myself having biological children. He has two stepsons that we love dearly, but for a lot of different reasons neither of us made the choice in the end to have biological kids.
It wasn’t an easy choice for me and my spouse, and there is grief and a very real sense of loss sometimes, but when I look at what’s taking place, and think about what my sib’s stepkids and their little ones are going to be facing…
Ruckus
@Eolirin:
Part of what I’m saying is that many people I know of have been solving the issue for decades. Remember I’m in my early 70s. And I’m the youngest in my family. Of my 8 cousins and 2 siblings there are 7 kids, OK now adults. I know a number of those 7 have no kids as well. I have a number of friends who have zero children. What I’m saying is that a lot of people have already been making the decision not to have or to have a limited amount of kids. It will take time but if my experience is any indication the birthrate from my generation is already lower than previous. If the next few generations have the same level as most of the people I know, we are already on the road to fewer or at least a noticeably lower growth rate than my parents and prior generations.
trollhattan
@Geminid:
They’re still building new coal plants, and accelerated over what was planned in 2021.
What could help is Australia halting coal exports. Maybe now that Morrison is gone?
Kelly
@Ruckus: Google climate change Arctic amplification it’s a big topic
Major Major Major Major
@Jinchi:
See how silly that sounds?
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
Peaking plants are never coal because it takes too long to fire them. Natural gas does fit the bill.
lowtechcyclist
@Major Major Major Major:
Seconded.
@JoyceH:
Yes.
Think of it this way: a hundred Chernobyl-level nuclear accidents would mess up a good chunk of the world.
Global warming would mess up all of it.
At least, that’s the crude cost-benefit analysis that’s been floating around my brain for a good number of years now. And it’s why I’ve done a total 180° about nuclear power. If nukes can help save us from global warming, then let’s build lots of nuclear power plants.
ETA:
@Major Major Major Major:
You beat me to it.
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan: Ah, I thought coal was part of Germany’s peaking infrastructure, but you’re right, they’ve decided to simply run those all the time.
This graph of German power sources over the course of a day is a little confusing then, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant#/media/File:Tagesgang_engl.png
Geminid
Eolirin
@Ruckus: I’m talking about the macro effects, not the individual decision making. A lot of the systems that we use to keep society running break if there’s suddenly a lot more seniors than people of working age. There’s strain on medical systems, pensions, supply chains, distribution of goods, etc.
Automation helps take some of the pressure off, but it’s not evenly distributed.
Prometheus Shrugged
@trollhattan: This is exactly right and also something that has been clear from the snowpack and spring melt pulse data for at least 20 years (I know I’ve been presenting this perspective in my classes for that length of time.) My sense is that much of the confusion for many people, and the media, stems from the tendency to focus only on the precipitation part of the water balance/cycle, whereas it’s clear that the melting and evaporation part is, in many regions of the world, the dominant driver of water availability trends and water management headhaches. But it’s also these trends that are actually fairly direct predictable consequences of warming.
Anyway, I don’t envy the job of a water manager anywhere in the U.S. these days!
cain
@John Cole:
I read the article – and the Indians have been doing the same stupid shit when it comes to aborting and self selecting sex. They’ve been prioritizing boys over girls and now the demographics have changed.
Now it looks like that some family is sharing girls between brothers – eg one wife, two husbands or something like that. Girls are also more selective, and they are also no longer dependent on her in-laws families and so she can easily tell them to piss off if the family stuff becomes too much.
The end result is that the Indian population is also going to suffer, but also it’s improving the political and financial power of women. So, overall and improvement.
We need to severely reduce our population and if we can’t do it, climate change will do it for us and that’s going to be either through war over food/energy or simple drought/death. Either way it’s going to be ugly.
RaflW
Jason Karsh linked to this from British economist Umair Haque. It’s depressing, but I think realistic. I’m curious to read more about Macron’s speech. But I agree with Haque that ‘supply chain disruptions’ will be the watchword for years to come. And a risk/inflection point for (formerly?) liberal democracies.
The End of the Age of Abundance (and the Beginning of the Age of Scarcity)
… This speech is speaking of a major, historic paradigm shift. It’s not all the way there, quite yet — but for the leader of a rich nation, one of the world’s most successful societies, to speak in such frank, brutal terms, about a mega-paradigm shifting — from abundance to scarcity, and all that entails, from economics to society to culture to social contracts to finances and beyond? It’s a remarkable thing. To put it in context, in Britain, leaders are still playing the Brexit fools’ game of scapegoating Europeans, while the nation falls into abject poverty, and in America, Biden’s suddenly woken up, but he’s not speaking remotely like this.
Macron joins a small but growing list of leaders who are converts. They’re beginning to get it. Get the 21st century — and how everything is now changing, suddenly, catastrophically, irrevocably. He is precisely, exactly correct when he says that Age of Abundance is over, and the Age of Scarcity is here
Dan B
@Brachiator: When you add more moisture, and heat, to weather systems they get bigger. The low pressure systems, wet systems, vacuum up moisture from farther away so the high pressure, dry, systems also expand. The Jet Stream is weakening so it’s more likely for systems to move slowly or stall. Agriculture is not prepared or capable of withstanding the changes or the unpredictability. Politics is not capable of keeping pace with the beast.
Geminid
@trollhattan: I know that China is still building coal plants. This does not contradict my point about their future plans.
trollhattan
@Geminid:
Given they can control everything from siting to design to construction, to operations, to waste management, they have far fewer hurdles than exist in the West, to building a fission infrastructure. One hopes all that unified oversight doesn’t fall prey to hubris and shortcutting.
Ruckus
@Mel:
What you said.
My generation is the post WWII generation and there was, as far as I can tell/remember a great push towards growth. Most everyone I know in my generation or younger, if they have kids, it’s one or two at most. And many, as I said in #99 are at none. I know of no one with more than 2 kids and I’ve been to parties for our HS class celebrating our 65th Bdays, HS grad 50th, 70th Bdays, and we have another next month, just for good times sake. We’ve lost a few, every party but the numbers of us still around actually amazes me.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
Last time I checked, France was also planning to increase the proportion of its electricity generated by nuclear power. So I assume they can do it safely and reasonably cost-effectively, otherwise they’d get clobbered at the polls. (China being an authoritarian state doesn’t have to worry as much about such niceties.)
Bill Arnold
@JoyceH:
Part of China’s plan (such as it is) for non-carbon-based power is rapidly-built nuclear power plants. This is fine. Nuclear power plants are not going to kill billions of humans even with a Fukushima-level accident every few years; CO2/methane will, at least without major international political effort to prevent mass starvation and mega-death-by-Black-Flag-weather.
China is getting an unwelcome taste of what global heating will do to agriculture, namely break it. Agriculture depends on predicable rainfall levels (or dependable irrigation) and predicable growing season starts/ends. We (humanity) have been destroying and continue to destroy predicable weather patterns. (Fisheries, a major source of protein, are also in serious heating-caused trouble. Y’all like eating jellyfish?)
RaflW
Also on the scarcity/disruption/hydro theme: Norway may have to significantly curtail electricity exports, right as RU gas taps shut. Norway hasn’t got the rain it expects, and their hydro dams, esp in the south, are quite low. And they just built an undersea trunk line to send juice to Denmark and Germany a few years ago, and have been sending terawatts of power.
Could get pretty bumpy over there in late fall!
Major Major Major Major
@Eolirin: Battery storage and massive transmission infrastructure are required to scale renewables, and managing it all gets pretty damn complicated the higher % of renewables you’re using.
One of the reasons Manchin’s demand for a permitting-reform vote is good. On energy twitter you’ll see people say “the only thing harder to build than nuclear is transmission.”
@lowtechcyclist: I believe India has also made some big nuclear buys.
RaflW
@Bill Arnold: There’s a reason William Gibson’s characters eat (and loathe) krill in his not-too-distant futures.
SteveinPHX
@trollhattan:
One would hope these newer nuke plants will have a longer life-span. “Life-extension” would help in getting these things paid for.
ALSO, newer, cheaper-to-run, safer-to-operate designs would help.
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major: ATM California’s biggest electricity source is solar, at 13.3k MW. Not bad for 1/9 of the US population.
Large battery arrays are just coming on line and lots are under construction, and will become a helpful part of the mix. Offshore wind will follow.
Ken
Don’t sell the anti-vaccination movement short!
Kelly
@trollhattan: Snowpack declines faster in burned areas. More of that kind of terrain every year. Currently sitting under the haze of the rum Creek fire yet another fire on my beloved rogue River
Another Scott
@Ruckus: The models keep being refined, and are holding up. And, yes, the physics is going as we knew it would. The world is still on a dangerous path if CO2 emissions do not start falling.
Michael Mann at RealClimate (from August 2021):
The right-most portion of the final graph in this Ars Technica piece from November 2021 shows (yet again) that the next few decades will determine whether the global average goes up 2+C or 6+C from pre-industrial levels. It’s a blink of an eye, so everything we can do now should be done…
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan: are you sure? Wikipedia says 48.5% gas, 15.4% solar.
Also, ah yes, California, land of consistent and reliable power supply.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
One of the things we need is home – and business solar with batteries. There is a fair bit of it around me in SoCal but we need a lot more.
Dan B
@Ruckus: The climate crisis is just doing previews most likely but the “previews” may become much more frequent. What this tells us us just how cautious scientists are to make predictions without rock solid proof. They’re also extremely reluctant to scare the public or to make politicians anxious. Funding can be denied if the public is panicked, or even slightly disturbed.
This is a test of human civilization and like animals who rush towards a forest fire we’re looking confused.
I’ve been studying climate change for three decades and the absurdity of 1.5°C has been apparent. We’re talking about warming the entire surface and atmosphere. Imagine warming an entire city by one degree and extrapolate. It won’t cool for decades even if we pulled all of the excess CO2 out immediately.
There are amazing, inexpensive, and rapidly deployable energy storage systems being built. CO2 and sand storage systems take weeks to build, not years. They can moderate the peaks and valleys of renewables and of fossil fuel generation. That could rapidly increase available heat and electricity without adding generation. With extra renewables and conservation we could reverse our current course.
lowtechcyclist
@Major Major Major Major:
I’ve been wondering about transmission. If there was nearly loss-free electricity transmission over long distances, you could count on what was happening with solar and wind in different parts of the country to even out: who would care if it were cloudy in Georgia if the sun were shining in North Dakota? But if good long-distance power transmission is harder than nukes, then that sunshine in North Dakota doesn’t help Georgia much. So it definitely strengthens the argument for more nuclear power.
But may I ask what you (or Manchin) mean by permitting reform? This is apparently a topic that I’m ignorant about.
Brachiator
@JoyceH:
I think that solar and wind have two big problems. I think you do damage to the environment in digging up the materials to make solar panels, and create waste when disposing of or recycling used solar panels.
I also think that a big expansion of solar and wind will require a great leap in innovation with respect to battery power. And there will also be the issues of disposal and recycling.
You have similar issues with respect to electric vehicles.
By comparison, nuclear power is more efficient. But yeah, you have issues of safety and handling radioactive materials. But there are always tradeoffs.
Good point. At some point we will need a global cooperative venture to try to transform the world. If we succeed, that really will be something.
ETA. I am not an expert on any of this, just a layperson with observations and questions.
RaflW
@Geminid: If Gov. Ron DeSantis can just fire elected officials outside his chain of command at will, with minimal pushback, don’t we all know that President for Life®℠ Ron DeSantis can just order new nukes anytime and anywhere he wants?
Authoritarianism FTW! Coming in a matter of scant years.
Eolirin
@Major Major Major Major: If we can do battery/energy storage at scale, can’t that just replace baseline generation? Like you wouldn’t need to connect the generation that charges the storage to the rest of the grid? You can just go from the storage out, and then as long as you can store energy in excess of the total demand I don’t see how that leads to exponential grid complexity? You’re distributing the generation, so you do need to handle that, sure, but you can reduce that down to the storage before it hits the rest of the grid and then get a stable baseline load from there.
We do need better storage technology to make that viable though. And I’m sure it’s less efficient, but, I think it has the potential scale better and that may be more important here?
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
Quite sure.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx
cain
@Ken:
ha! Yes, they’ll self destruct – still can’t believe that basic medical practices are being questioned.
Major Major Major Major
@lowtechcyclist: there are some technical issues, but it’s mostly that transmission is subject to NIMBYism at every mile, whereas for a nuke plant you only have to beat them once. Hence, permitting reform—and why AOC is on board.
catclub
@Another Scott:
If only they could pipe it uphill to the himalayas and freeze it there.
Dan B
@catclub: Add in the permafrost melting and the methane clathrates in shallow Arctic waters and we’ve got gasoline added to the fire. Much of that methane will be from Russia – Siberia – and will cause regional heating with forest fires and burning tundra. Remote communities will lose roads and landing strips to melting permafrost. Will Putin swoop in to save them? Will Lisa Murkowski realize that Alaskan First Peoples need emergency preparations? Will the (Not) Supremes allow necessary measures?
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan: that’s right now—the sun is shining. Scroll down and look at nighttime. Here’s the breakdown of all annual energy production. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_California
cain
@Dan B:
Which we will never will get off the ground with the congress we have. It is filled with people who have grown up in a different time that cannot relate to the issues we are having and are not tied to its ramifications. We really need to get younger people who know that climate change affects them.
Not people like Dianne Feinstein.
catclub
@Dan B:
I was just reading/youtube watching stuff about sand storage of energy. Not terribly complicated.
Ken
Thank you for surprising me. Usually when that phrase is used, the name “Nikola Tesla” also appears.
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major: Which is what I said–“ATM California’s biggest electricity source is solar, at 13.3k MW.”
Find me another group of 40 million people, at work, at school, where that large slice of the grid is supplied by renewables.
cain
@RaflW:
I can’t help but remember Jimmy Carter’s address to the nation in a sweater – and how it was taken advantage of by Ronald Reagan. Carter was right, and I hope that we don’t punish politicians like Macron for being right – luckily for us – you can’t deny the changing weather patterns now. But will the population be able to adjust to a new reality?
I think the older civilizations will adapt faster – we’re talking about the middle east, southeast Asia, and so on. Reverting to the cultural norms of my father is all it requires. Hell, even I – in India, we used no plastic, and just about everything was made of natural things. I think western society is going to be the biggest problem – we are used to our things.
Geminid
@Eolirin: We can also use excess wind and solar power to produce hrdrogen (and oxygen) through electroysis and burn the hydragen when needed to generate electricity.
horatius
@Geminid:
The way the Chinese look at it, disposing off the radioactive materials in troublesome provinces like Xinjiang and Tibet will solve those problems permanently. Two birds with one stone.
cain
There is a lot of people who doesn’t want to do any of that – they just want lower taxes. They don’t want to do anything aspirational – other than weapons. They see all the above and think “I don’t want to pay for that, I want lower taxes – I’m already paying too much – what does it do for me?”
catclub
@Eolirin:
I would guess that Humans, and human civilization will survive. the question is whether it will come with reduced population. Which has probably never happened in the last 8000 years.
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan: pretty misleading statement IMO!
Australia is up there—25% total renewables—and they are having some major growing pains with their smart grid.
And again, California, very famous for not having enough electricity during times of high demand.
catclub
@cain:
This. They see educated children becoming productive citizens and think the same.
Major Major Major Major
@horatius: we had a really good nuclear waste storage plan here but Harry Reid killed it.
It’s not actually that hard to deal with. Yucca Mountain was probably overkill anyway. In the Netherlands you can tour storage facilities.
citizen dave
I think the electric supply model may turn out to be like water utilities, reservoirs of water/electricity. I haven’t heard/read of anything substantial changing on transmission siting, but happy to learn. States guard their siting like a MFer, and it would be huge news if Congress takes that away. Congested corridors, backstop FERC authority, sure. But I don’t think they went to the FERC pipeline sighting method for electric transmission facilities. Hell they can’t even get the Federal entities like TVA and BPA into RTOs.
Myself I don’t buy into the massive transmission buildout groupthink that is happening in much of the industry today. Instead thinking local production/storage/consumption.
horatius
@Geminid:
Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store and is extremely flammable. It also has the annoying habit of leaving the earth’s atmosphere and gravitational field entirely. Not something we want to start an exponential process around.
cain
@catclub:
What they don’t understand is that things like the space race is why we have 200+ tv channels, microwave ovens, and a bunch of things that they depend on as part of their lifestyle.
How many new businesses were created because of the money that govt pored into innovation as part of going to the moon or the space shuttle program?
horatius
@Major Major Major Major:
The waste is not so much a problem as the amount of freshwater that nuclear plans require. It’s way past time we transitioned off of power generation mechanisms that require water in any form.
Dan B
@JoyceH: I like your thinking, a lot! Right now the messaging is focused on 1. Catastrophe (or not, you libtard Chicken Littles!) 2. Sacrifice (must give up your car, cash, and comfortable life).
The solutions and, the people developing them, are awesome. They need more publicity and cheerleading.
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
Tell me what’s misleading, please.
pluky
@Baud: 0.81. For reference, a stable population requires ~2.1.
citizen dave
Per Elektrek: Renewables provided over 25% of total U.S. electrical generation in first half of 2022.
In March this year the Southwest Power Pool set a record with 90.2% renewable sources; 88 5% with wind. Grid worked fine. “.. we regularly exceed 75% without reliability concerns.”
Major Major Major Major
@cain: NASA only costs like $10 anyway. It’s so weird that some people oppose it. It’s neat if nothing else!
one of my favorite stories: in the 80s there was that senator famous for the line-item “your tax dollars going to (some ‘bullshit’)” shtick. He took aim at SETI one year. But a senator from Utah saved their funding, since finding aliens would be a big boon to Mormonism!
pluky
@Kelly: Mean, mode, and median. All are averages, not necessarily equivalent.
Ruckus
@Dan B:
Absotivalutely.
I don’t believe that we can reverse as far as some seem to think we can because so many of our citizens seemingly want to move backwards in time to a time before they lived when white was the only color and racism was a far more openly practiced specialty. They know they are shit, no matter their color and they do not want, and can not change, seeing as how they have their heads up, if not their own then someone else’s ass. They don’t understand anything past 1950’s jr high science, the politics of the south in 1850 nor food of any higher quality than a day old McD’s hamburger, which is neither ham nor burger. And worse, they don’t want to move forward one micron from their ideal. All things considered I’d say that there is a sizable percentage of this species on any piece of land big enough to hold 10 human bodies anywhere in the world. Standing up.
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan: pretty sure you know! “Right now”, to most people, when discussing trends and planning, probably means something other than “literally right now at noon on Monday”. Perhaps “today”, or “this year”.
Not like it matters in any way since we got to the bottom of what you meant :D
lowtechcyclist
@Major Major Major Major:
Thanks for the explanation! Yeah, in so many ways, NIMBYism ties us in knots. So permitting reform sounds like a good thing to me. And if it’s something Manchin and AOC both agree on…well, how often does that happen?
Bill Arnold
@lowtechcyclist:
Fukushima-level, more like. (maybe 10 percent of Chernobyl). The reactor core’s graphite moderator caught fire at Chernobyl, contributing to the spread of radioactive material. Water-moderated reactors don’t have this failure mode.
(FWIW, worst case is dispersal of the entire reactor core with a thermonuclear device. Nuclear war planners take this into account.)
Dan B
@Ruckus: The loss of ice on the Arctic Ocean is reducing albedo and warming the water ever so slightly. Despite the low sun angle it is making a difference. The northern latitudes are warming five times faster than the rest of the world. This is throwing the Jet Stream into turmoil which makes heat domes and stalled low pressure systems much more likely.
Ken
@catclub: The Black Death of the 14th century is estimated to have reduced world population about 20%, though there’s a lot of uncertainty in those numbers.
brendancalling
@different-church-lady: what is with the BJ/LGM rivalry? These are two of my favorites sites to read and comment, along with Progress Pond (full disclosure, I occasionally write for PP).
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
I think permitting is also a big reason we can’t have trains.
lowtechcyclist
@catclub:
In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive…
Been thinking for several months that the year 2222 is exactly two centuries off, and that would be a good hook for predictions about what life might be like then if we didn’t bother to do anything about climate change.
JoyceH
@Brachiator:
Okay, here’s something I don’t understand. All the new development of solar power I’m seeing is photo-voltaic. Why PV and not solar thermal? With solar thermal, you don’t need all those rare minerals, you just need shiny surfaces. The sunshine is collected to heat water and after that it’s a basic steam generator. And with modern insulation methods, the water tank can be maintained at hundreds of degrees to continue generate power for hours past sundown. I remember reading an article about solar thermal a decade or more ago, but I don’t see solar thermal power projects being constructed. Am I just missing them?
BruceFromOhio
@Damien: Both of my grown daughters have looked at their mother and responded with variations of “AYFKM?” when asked about grandchildren.
Major Major Major Major
Honestly, the best thing the US could do to reduce global carbon emissions would be helping poor countries not use coal.
BruceFromOhio
@different-church-lady:
Wow, harsh. Frosty, too. Not inaccurate, tho.
Booger
@JoyceH: You can’t monetize solar thermal and you can’t rent-seek from it. Capitalism sees no use for it.
matt
@Geminid:In 2021, Ukraine exported an average 4 million tons of grains (wheat, maize and barley) per month
matt
@Geminid: that was a joke, based on the old ‘Thanks Obama’ memes.
Gravenstone
@sab: I’m originally from Ohio so I know what natural resources the state can provide. That said, Ohio won’t be the only state these plants will go into. And not all have access to the volume of water the Great Lakes states might offer.
I just found it ironic JC sighted the CHIPS act when referring to a nation dealing with ongoing water shortages, knowing that the industry CHIPS targets uses lots of that resource.
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
CAISO reports in real time, which are the metrics I watch, my workplace watches. Data are updated every five minutes. It’s a great resource because the calendar allows review of any time, any day, going back as far as 2018, giving insight on how the supply and demand shift seasonally.
CEC reports on systemwide emissions, useful in visualizing peaks and valleys in fossil fuel demand on a day/hour basis. (March through June show best performance, unsurprisingly.)
BruceFromOhio
@RaflW:
S. A. Corey’s space-based characters eat a lot of mushrooms.
JoyceH
@Booger:
I don’t understand that, mainly because I don’t know what rent-seek means. As for monetizing, you create electricity and you sell the electricity, how complicated is that?
Booger
@catclub: You know, we’re on track towards global euxinia, where we’ve broken the oxygen producing part of our ecosystem and unleashed the H2S-generating part of it.
Nothing aerobic will survive that, not plant, not animal. Once that’s done, nothing larger than small bugs will make it, because the H2S cycle doesn’t yield much energy.
Ken
@JoyceH: Tunisia is building a lot of solar thermal. They’re also putting in a giant transmission cable to Italy/Europe.
Geminid
@horatius: I did not realize there will be exponential processes involved in the clean energy transition. There will be a lot of savings through conservation so our total energy footprint will not be so much greater than our current one.
Your criticism of hydrogen as a fuel is one of many that I’ve read. It would seem to be an impossible, hopeless endeavour. Yet, the EU projects a significant role for hydrogen in their economy of the next half century. Someone is wrong here.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: Permitting is a huge reason we can’t build trains, but we also need to fix the part where it costs us $100 million for a mile of high-speed rail in California–or $300 million/mile to refurbish some Amtrak lines–or $2.5 billion/mile for a NYC subway extension. (Spanish HSR is 6-19m euros/km; Madrid metro extension costs 85m euro/km.)
Booger
@JoyceH: You’re not making electricity to sell, you’re making hot water…which doesn’t go anyplace.
Bupalos
@Brachiator: Please don’t take this as more harsh than I intend it…but people not connected to or educated in the various energy production methods really need to be careful about just passing on some stuff they think they heard. So much of the prepackaged “research” comes from motivated industry sources (because that’s where the money is.)
In this case, you’ve stated that solar and wind have these mining and disposal or recycling issues, and that on the flip side nuclear is “more efficient.” I mean, I don’t know where to start there. Is it your impression that nuclear does not require mining? Do you think it has comparatively lower disposal or recyclability issues? Do you think it uses turbines that need less rare earth minerals than wind?
I mean, I’m fine with someone making any of those arguments if they really are ready to present the numbers and considerations. But just kind of repeating the vague stuff that has plagued renewable adoption for 40 years, most of which is really just an argument for sticking with the problems we now contend with rather than switching to a net-lower set of problems… I don’t know. I feel like this is the tail end of disinformation.
But please, I’m not looking for a fight. Just consider whether you really believe the things you’re writing there and what the basis of that belief is.
cain
@JoyceH:
I think I interpreted ‘rent seek’ as being a middle man – clearly, nobody can block the sun and make you pay access to its energy.
Dan B
@Bill Arnold: I had cold Jellyfish salad at a Korean restaurant several decades ago. The quantity of raw garlic was astounding and it was still bland. I hold some hope in more enjoyable foodstuffs prepared from perennial cereal crops that require much less water. We have solutions to many of the challenges we face but the biggest may be to thought processes that tell us that big central power plants and huge water projects – pipeline from the Columbia to supply water for California and Arizona’s mega agribusiness and Las Vegas swimming pools. These massive projects can suck up all the money and public awareness of smaller, more nimble, projects like CO2 abd salt storage systems combined with renewables.
trollhattan
@JoyceH:
IDK of any under construction, but a few are in operation:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/solar/solar-thermal-power-plants.php#:~:text=Solar%20thermal%20power%20systems%20use%20concentrated%20solar%20energy&text=In%20most%20types%20of%20systems,a%20generator%20to%20produce%20electricity.
Once worked on permitting for a parabolic trough plant, near Coalinga, CA I think, that was an opportunity to dig into how they operate. At night the mirrors invert to not collect debris and there were scrubbing robots to clean them intermittently. Found that amusing to envision.
It had the capacity to store surplus heat during the day and keep generating after dark, one big differentiator from PV.
cain
@Major Major Major Major:
What are driving those costs? The only thing I can think of is that you’re building on property owners and so you got to get them to sell the land in order to build rail corridors.
Martin
No. The climate folks predict the delivery of change – which is probabilistic. They don’t predict the consequence of that change – that’s supposed to be up to various other people – infrastructure experts/engineers, policy people, etc.
I think for those of us who tend to think in terms of systems, we’ve been running around hair on fire for quite a while now. See, when temps go up, the ability of the atmosphere to hold moisture also goes up, so evaporation happens on a larger scale. The higher temps and higher humidity cause us to use water faster, so you’re getting depletion on both sides of the equation. Yeah, states like CA are drawing less water from the rivers, but we’re drawing it faster from the aquifers as a result, so they’re going to collapse faster.
And of course that atmosphere that can hold more moisture can drop it at higher rates as well – so floods in Kentucky, floods in Pakistan, California risks mega floods as well.
The problem is that people don’t think in terms of systems, and so that 1 degree C warming doesn’t sound like anything, but you hold 5% more water here, use 5% more there, drop 5% more there – it all rapidly adds up to catastrophes.
And we don’t have the policy authority that we need. CA needs to stop growing certain crops like, today. We don’t have the water for them, we’ll never have the water for them, and every year we keep growing this stuff, we accelerate ourselves to the point of food shortages, cities without any water, etc. I mean, the pilot project to cover the aqueducts in solar panels is nice, but they need to skip the pilot and just do it. Even if the results aren’t as significant as modeled, they’ll still be significant, and we’re running out of time. Everything needs to be happening WAY faster.
Major Major Major Major
@cain: Land use is part of it, but there are a lot of ways America, ah, ‘stands out’ here. Alon Levy has been a good source on this for years; here’s a recent publication. https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/levy-infastructure.pdf
geg6
As someone who lives within 5 miles of both a coal-fired plant and a nuclear plant, which have both had safety issues (though the nuke is now decommissioned), and in a state in which the US’s worst nuclear accident happened, I find this blithe waving of your hands more than a little upsetting.
trollhattan
@Bupalos: Underappreciated is how much CO2 is created making lime for concrete. Massive construction projects such as concrete dams and nuclear plants require like massive amounts of concrete.
Bupalos
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by this. Solar thermal means running a steam turbine. Any turbine (including coal or ng) requires rare earth minerals especially neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. You’re also always talking about a huge installation and thus long distance transmission, so throw in a massive amount of transmission. Photovoltaic really doesn’t require much in the way of rare minerals. You may be thinking of the batteries that are often used in combination?
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: Also, one degree is global average temperature, not uniform, all the time, everywhere. If only! Much like sea level rise, this leads to catastrophic surges and associated downstream effects.
Major Major Major Major
@geg6:
…you’re breathing radioactive waste. From the coal plant.
catclub
@Booger: But enough happy talk….
This is related to the observation that we WILL solve the climate problem and then the ecosystems which produce all the food will all break.
cain
@Major Major Major Major:
Thank you, will take a look!
geg6
@brendancalling:
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I do check out LGM every day. But there are FPers I won’t read because they are just too holier than thou for me. And I avoid the comments like the plague. And I find it to have the worst comments section anywhere in the liberal blogosphere. GOS comment sections are better. Much too bro-ey and convinced of their superiority. Shockingly so the last time I waded in and what convinced me to stay out.
Matt McIrvin
@JoyceH: Solar thermal is way more mechanically complex than PV–lots of moving parts. The mirrors have to track the Sun, there’s a steam turbine. It was the cheaper option decades ago because PV cell prices were very high, but it got overtaken–PV prices came down by orders of magnitude and thermal did not
PV plants can also easily scale down–you can build a hundred tiny ones scattered over a wide area and the economies of scale don’t kill you. I think this is actually really important, makes PV more attractive than a lot of other technologies because there’s less capital commitment, you can install it gradually. It requires a lot of land but the land can be in small parcels.
BruceFromOhio
@Booger: “The last ones to starve will be the first to suffocate.”
geg6
@Major Major Major Major:
Most likely from both. There were leaks from the nuke over the years.
Dan B
@Brachiator: Please look up sand energy storage and CO2 energy storage systems. You tube has some great videos on each. They can be built in a few months from standard parts. They cost about ten million dollars with big capacity. They don’t require rare earths. There are projects underway to make solar panels that can be recycled plus projects to economically recycle existing panels.
High voltage DC can transmit electricity with very low losses over great distances.
We have solutions that need to be brought to scale and brought into everyday consciousness. Massive centralized power projects brought us into the crisis and repeating that pattern is likely to extend the crisis since they involve huge financial institutions that favor profits for stockholders over the community.
catclub
I would put it as European companies are building those plants in Tunisia.
Martin
@cain: Combination of land and legal costs. CA HSR insists on controlling the right of way, and for good reason – the freight railroads that own the existing track won’t allow passenger trains on. UP has kept the Tehachapi pass deliberately below passenger grade for 40 years so Amtrak has no ability to reach SoCal from the north. And the Feds can’t force them.
CA HSR is having to buy right of way for 400 miles of track. In the Central Valley, there’s a road crossing every mile that needs to either be eliminated or grade separated. Hundreds of them. There are canals that need to be crossed, agriculture crossing that need to be allowed, other utility crossings. And every land owner gets their day in court. Some of the original challenges from the original 2008 ballot measure are just now getting resolved because they’ve been appealed constantly, new cases filed, etc. And it’s wildly complicated. You buy out the land from the farmer, but what of the water rights below that land? HSR doesn’t need them, can the farmer retain those? etc.
And that’s when you don’t have cities and counties fighting it, the utilities fighting it, the other railroads fighting it, etc. The engineering is fairly straightforward, but large. The track is elevated 5-10 meters above the valley floor (see my post above regarding potential mega floods – the Central Valley used to be an inland sea and has returned to that state temporarily in the last few hundred years) so you have significant soil relocation. You have a lot of heavy concrete engineering, which given the scale is actually straining the contractor talent in the state – we have a lot of freeway expansions also taking place. There are stations to build, CalTrain is being largely redone so it can share track with HSR and handle local services so HSR doesn’t need to.
CA HSR is saddled with a very odd constraint – per the ballot initiative, the train needs to get from Union Station LA to SF in 2hr 40min. How direct the route is impacts the time. The number of stations impacts the time. What the track is shared with impacts the time. How quickly the train can embark/debark along the way, acceleration rates, etc. How much time does the train spend at 220 MPH vs 110 in urban areas, etc.
And the state isn’t just building the HSR, but the project is also designed to connect it to supporting mass transit, so it needs to hook into a dozen other transit systems run by a dozen other agencies. They’ve had to get exemptions for the various transits from the feds because they don’t meet federal crash standards which are designed for being stuck by a 3 mile long coal train (which this will never share track with).
Overall the project is going fairly well, but it’s just a ton of unnecessary complications. The feds should simply revoke all of the rights of way given to the railroads over the last 150 years, use those rights of way to quad track for freight and high speed rail. You’d have a hell of a takings case to fight, but after that you could build with minimal complication. But no, we gotta let UP and BNSF make this as difficult as possible.
catclub
@geg6:
yes both, but the basic calculation of C14 release from burning coal suggests far larger radiation doses from that than the nuclear plant. If you HAD gotten equal doses, the alarms from the nuclear plant ( which does measure radiation outside the container) would have been deafening.
Martin
@geg6: Nuclear works great so long as you don’t privatize it. The navy has no problem running nuclear plants safely (modern carriers have 4 on board, subs have 2) and France has had no problem. All of the problems come when the state isn’t the operator, when profit motives surface.
I won’t back any nuclear production until it’s all federalized.
cain
That would be what we should do. These folks have done nothing with it. Unchanging for years and years. Hell, in most countires, those tracks are all electrified. Nobody is even using diesel. Now given that the goods trains are super long it still makes sense to switch to electric.I suspect that the effort vs politics to muscle in is probably too much – but the railroad barons need to STFU now and make way for progress. We need a serious infrastructure bill that can move people quickly and cleanly.I think once it gets in – it’s going to be something people will cherish.
ETA – and potentially, it could be privatized rail companies as well. Pick two + AMTRAK to keep em honest.
Ruckus
@Ken:
We had a lot of health/death problems during the time of people living. let alone the Black Death of the 14th century. People like me. And several others on this blog. I believe there were 3 vaccines when I was born, smallpox was the one that had created so many issues before the vaccine, which came out not that long (150 yrs) before I was born. But polio, measles, etc, etc came later. I do not remember anyone not wanting to be vaccinated when I was a kid. It wasn’t that we liked shots it’s just that we saw what those diseases did to people. I know 4 people that lived within 4-5 miles of me that had polio. I know one is still living, she’s a neighbor. I know 2 of them didn’t live all that long, they were 2 moms of friends of mine, had iron lungs in their front rooms. The forth I saw for the last time in the late 70s and she walked normally without braces or crutches. My neighbor is now confined to a wheel chair. As far as I can tell, in the US there are two people known to be living in an iron lung. one man, very recent report, the other report I saw was about a year old and the woman was still alive. So I’m saying two in iron lungs and at least one I know of in a wheel chair.
Bill Arnold
@Bupalos:
Fossil fuel players (including nation states) have generated /funded the generation of, and distributed, some, perhaps much, of the propaganda against both nuclear power and renewables. To fossil carbon extraction interests, they are both enemies of their short-to-mid-term gains.
So yeah, but thoroughly take blinders off and evaluate all such information, including the anti-nuclear information.
Even in the renewables/storage space, there are all sorts of professionally hyped early, unproven technologies. This hyping is necessary in our systems to gain enough funding for large scale prototypes, and true, many viable technologies wither due to lack of funding, but one must be alert.
Long distance HVDC transmission seems an overall proven winner, FWIW.
trollhattan
@catclub: Also, mercury for everybody, no extra charge!
Dan B
@catclub: Thanks for researching sand energy storage systems. They’re very simple to build. CO2 systems are a bit more complicated since you have to chill the CO2 to liquid and then pump it to run turbines but you capture CO2 so it’s a twofer and can be built at coal and gas plants to capture their emissions and utilize their transmission lines.
And there are solar PV panels that utilize much more of the spectrum but those are only being done in the lab along with things like graphene batteries. How many of these will make it out of the lab and into our lives? It’s an exciting time but we are racing against the climate reaper and fossil fuel troglodytes.
geg6
@Martin:
Agreed. When the nuke here was first built, it was the first in the nation and was under Admiral Rickover. That was eventually decommissioned and a new one under Duquesne Light (now First Energy) went live and that’s when the problems of leaks happened. Not to mention other things regarding safety there that I only learned from friends who worked there. Lots of stuff never got reported. It was frightening. No more nuke plants here, thank you very much.
Bupalos
@lowtechcyclist:
People really want nuclear to be a free lunch. I feel like they want to believe in that. It isn’t. Uranium mining is incredibly destructive. Reserves of Uranium in the few incredibly (un?)lucky spots on earth to have it at economically recoverable concentrations are only 90 years AT CURRENT USE RATES. A rapid expansion would mean you were scrambling for uranium about the time you got done building your plants.
Nuclear flat out isn’t currently better than solar, and there’s a lot more room for improvement in solar and battery technology and energy storage than there is on the nuclear side. I guess other than maybe figuring out technologies to use some of the 60% of lower grade thermal energy that is currently wasted in nuke plants. Or maybe being able to extract uranium from sea water, I guess that could make it a good conversation.
Photovoltaics are actually really good and still improving, and the ability to site them at or near point of use would be considered dispositive if we didn’t have a (crumbling) existing infrastructure to nurse along.
Martin
@JoyceH: So, rent-seeking means that the owner of the plant can forever extract revenue from it.
The complication is that electricity has very little value. A large solar + battery plant will cost $0.025/kWh to build and have virtually no recurring costs. So the wholesale cost of electricity is going to approach that kind of number. What’s more, once you shift your electricity production from marginal to capital costs – from forms of production that require fuel, and therefore an ongoing cost for each unit of electricity to something like solar or wind that once you build it, it costs next to nothing to operate, such that it’s more expensive to turn the thing off than it is to simply sell the power at $0/kWh, then you get the problem of where you basically can’t make money from it.
The places where you do make money is if you also have a retail operation. My power might costs $0.03/kWh to produce but it’ll cost me $0.30 to buy. That $0.27/kWh delta covers the transmission cost, but also covers the stranded assets of the gas or coal plant that you retired before it was paid off.
The venture capital folks in CA are looking to partner clean production with something else of value. For instance, if you build that clean energy plant to zero out the power cost of water desalination, you make your money off selling water, not power.
Bill Arnold
@Booger:
We (humanity) really should be planning a fleet of 10s of thousands of nuclear carbon sequestration engines to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere. Or their other-tech equivalent. Perhaps also actively discouraging the operation of coal power plants(then methane-burning plants), commercial aircraft, unnecessary transportation, etc.
Martin
BTW, the nuclear energy generation and high speed rails are symptoms of the same problem. In the US, large scale projects are increasingly difficult to complete because the legal and regulatory system are so easy to abuse. These large projects have a zillion different points of attack, and so if you want to stop them (say, if you are a competitor) then you can basically do that forever, and inexpensively.
The projects that are much more successful are the smaller distributed ones. Solar can be deployed entirely distributed. If I want to put solar on my house, I’m too small of a target for anyone to care about and block. And if there’s a million such projects, you just can’t target more than a few of them.
Nuclear is an ‘all your eggs in one basket’ kind of problem. It takes forever to build, is a huge carbon emitter until it goes online so it provides negative benefit until it’s active, and all too often, they don’t ever turn on because the legal challenges succeed in bankrupting the various parties. Mass transit is similar.
If the US wants to succeed at these kinds of things, then we need to reform the legal process for challenging these projects and require both that challengers bundle their challenges together into a handful of cases that can be expedited, and that the losers cover legal costs in the case of bad faith challenges.
Major Major Major Major
@Bupalos:
Everybody remember Peak Oil? Was supposed to happen in 1970? Then 2000? Now 2040? Keeps getting pushed back because of new discoveries, new technology, and rising demand making different extraction methods economical. No good reason to think uranium will be any different. There is, literally, thousands of years’ worth of uranium in seawater, and that number is assuming we never figure out breeder reactors.
Dan B
@Booger: Eric Sciliano wrote a book about that, ‘Under a Green Sky’. Gave me the creeps. Our atmosphere is vanishingly thin. The brown layer of peel on an onion is much thicker by comparison to our breathable atmosphere. Altering it is much easier than most people think.
Dan B
@Ken: Solar thermal may be much better than PV for Tunisia because PV doesn’t do well at high temperatures but thermal just gets more productive.
Bill Arnold
@catclub:
Nit, but pretty sure that coal has no carbon 14. It has all decayed in the past few hundred million years. (C14/C12 ratios are one way to identify CO2 from fossil carbon sources.)
There are other radioactives, though: Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials in Coals and Coal Combustion Residuals in the United States (2015)
Major Major Major Major
@Bill Arnold: Recapture/sequestration is definitely something we should throw more research money at. I’m not convinced it’s up to the scale of the problem, but R&D costs are really just not that high so we should go for it.
Isn’t algae better than any machine for this, though?
Bupalos
@Booger: I’m not sure I understand this. A thermal solar installation is certainly easier for financial interests to capture, control, and manipulate than distributed pv generation is.
I think we’d be better in general getting away from the massive, centralized energy projects and moving toward distributed and user-owned installations.
Bill Arnold
@Major Major Major Major:
That was included in my “other-tech”. This is the biotech+AI century, so I’d expect some engineered biology efforts being devoted to some aspects of global heating mitigation including carbon sequestration. (Also food production (not just better crops), maybe even crazy stuff like more robust plankton/coral.) A lot of ML effort, including a lot of hardware, is being devoted to biology/biotech. Currently most computation being done by/on behalf of humans is SHA256 (in ASICs) for bitcoins, but biology/biotech research/development may catch up.
Ruckus
@cain:
I live in SoCal and about 1/2 mile from me is a diesel/electric commuter train that goes from San Bernardino to Union Station. It runs on the UP tracks and there are 7 different lines that feed a fair bit of LA county. We also have 6 all electric commuter lines, one of which I ride semi regularly with the closest station 2 1/2 miles away, and some of which are still being built out. I’ve been using these for a number of years and I am not alone. Now of course they never go exactly where you want but the bus systems are pretty good and often run in pretty good pace with the trains. And it’s cheaper than buying gas, even for an economy car.
Dan B
@Bill Arnold: Also Kelp, specifically restoring Kelp forests. I recall a program about Kelp forests being many times as powerful at sequestering carbon as trees. And there’s less risk that they’ll fail due to drought, extreme weather or fire.
James E Powell
@Gravenstone:
Rust Belt Rescue?
Dan B
@James E Powell: You want to keep rust away from chips…..
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: Stuff is expensive, film at 11.
Replacing the WW Bridge across the Potomac River (and 4 adjacent interchanges) cost $2.42B.
Sounds like a lot, until you compare it to the cost of the MGM National Harbor Hotel Casino right next door, at $1.4B. 308 rooms, 135,000 square feet of gambling space. For a hotel that will probably we worn out in 20 years. Compared to a critical infrastructure project that will last for 50 years or more.
Big Scary Number Cost is not a reasonable reason not to do necessary infrastructure projects. The BigDig in Boston $14.78B or $22B or $24B, depending on which source you like on Wikipedia. It needed to be done.
Get on with it – it will only be more expensive later! :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
KenK
At what point does China consider creating Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere II to mollify their issues?
NoraLenderbee
@Major Major Major Major:
California is famous for warning that power outages may happen. Rolling blackouts really are not a thing. My experience living here for 30 years is that, in fact, the power is consistent and reliable.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott:
Lol. Ok. And here I am wanting our stuff to not randomly cost 2-4x what it does in comparable countries so that we can build 2-4x more stuff. Silly me. Nothing to see here, I guess. Enjoy your one mile of subway extension, San Francisco, it’s the last you’ll see in my lifetime.
Brachiator
@Bupalos:
One of the great things about Balloon Juice is that often, there are people who either work in a field that is in the news, or have some relevant knowledge, have done some related research, etc.
But no one is delivering technical papers here (that’s reserved for the health insurance threads). It’s just general conversation. And I was clear to note that I am a layperson mainly asking questions.
So, I welcome insights and corrections.
Geminid
@Bill Arnold: One of the best overviews I’ve read of the challenge of achieving a carbon neutral economy is Myles Allen’s article “The Green New deal: a view from across the Atlantic,” published in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists February, 2019. Allen is a British climate scientist who contributed to the UN’s 2018 IPCC report which called for a carbon neutral world economy by 2050.
Allen stated that in simple terms, the world was producing ~44 gigatons of carbon emissions each year and that emissions had to be reduced 2 gigatons year over year. He expressed the opinion that the wealthier countries would have to implement negative carbon technologies to help achieve this goal but did not specify which ones, perhaps because they are still in development.
Non-technological negative carbon modes might include afforestation and regenerative agriculture. Some have suggested that simply spreading freshly ground rock dust over agricultural fields would provide a substantial carbon sink as well as improving farm yields.
Ocean fertilization is a highly controversial approach and research has been strictly limited by the UN for various reasons. Still, volcanoes do it from time to time and can provide data. A researcher from the Columbia University Climate Lab teamed up with one from the Scripps Institute to study the effects of the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the 1990s. A review of their paper in Physics.org said that they found that atmospheric CO2 remained flat the year after.
The Myles Allen article I reference above is a very informative read I think.
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid: The latest Neal Stephenson novel is about a future where a rogue billionaire in Texas decides to start shooting a bunch of sulfur into the stratosphere since we didn’t manage to get anything else under control. He names his facility Pina2bo. Interesting read.
Geminid
@Bill Arnold: Air transport accounts for 4% of global emissions, but it is a very “charismatic” target for climate warriors. I think this is one reason they find high speed rail so attractive. But aircraft can be flown on carbon-neutral fuel, just at a higher cost.
And Airbus says that it is in first stages of developing hydrogen fueled airplanes, although it is yet uncertain if this idea will ever “fly.” Still, the EU’s aviation industry trade group includes hydrogen powered planes in their mix for achieving carbon neutral air transport by 2050.
Geminid
@trollhattan: Estimates of the contribution by the concrete industry run to about 8% of world wide carbon emissions. There is a lot of work being done to reduce it per ton produced, as well as into alternative materials, and there is a lot of reporting on this.
Geminid
@Major Major Major Major: I get the concept. But that’s a dead end technology which will never be used because it’s not neccesary. That is, unless you had a world community that was in fact passive about the threat of global warming, which is not the case now.
Have you read the Myles Allen article I reference at #234? It’s a good short overview of the challenge the world faces.
Ruckus
@NoraLenderbee:
Two weeks ago we had notice from SoCal Edison that we had to reduce our power usage on a specific date by x%. (No I don’t remember the number…) and that was because it is/was rather freaking hot here and they wanted us to run our AC a hell of a lot less. I normally run my AC to 75 deg but I ran it to 79 that day. Aww good times….. They have also done rotating power outages here in eastern LA county once in a while. I haven’t seen this in a while but It has happened.
Another Scott
@Bupalos:
[ Insert Thorium Will Solve All Our Problems. ]
[ Narrator: Thorium will not, in fact, solve all our problems. ]
Yeah, TANSTAAFL.
Another thing that I think we need to keep in mind: The USA is about 4% of the world population. Yes, we’re a big fraction of the world GDP, but the best thing the USA (and the West) can do is the R&D and initial mass-production of energy efficient technologies that can be rapidly ramped-up around the world.
China has stolen our thunder in a lot of these areas, but there’s still a huge amount that we can do on the efficiency side, new technology side, and new organizational side (“Rush Hour” should not be a thing in the 21st Century) that will not somehow destroy the American Dream. Waste doesn’t make things better; it makes them worse.
(Remember when air pollution controls were going to make cars too expensive to drive, kill engine horsepower, and emissions and safety and all the other regulations were going to mean that everyone would have to drive a LeCar??)
We can do this, but we’ve got to do the work. There’s no One Weird Trick.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: I think we all want to be sensible with the public purse. There are ways to manage big projects to minimize over-runs.
A big fraction of the costs of lots of these projects is interest costs. A national Infrastructure Bank would help with that (but not eliminate the issue).
My poorly stated main point is – our decisions today determine the kind of world we’ll have tomorrow. I don’t think that we’ll be driving single-passenger 3-ton cars in SF in 200 years, probably not in 50 years. We know that there will be a need for greatly expanded mass transit and different private transportation. We know that cars and pickups cause too many problems to keep using them as our main transportation vehicle. We need to do the work to get it done, because build-out takes a very long time.
Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway bill in 1956. It was “complete” in October 1992. Wikipedia:
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@Another Scott: The Infrastructure bill enacted last fall includes a lot of investments in mass transit, $10 billion for New York’s MTA alone. Also $60 billion for AMTRAK. The head of AMTRAK said that exceeded total investment in the system since it was created, and would be “transformational.”
The new Woodrow Wilson bridge you mention above was already in the financing pipeline, but the bill will fund many similar bridge and other projects around that will produce similar efficiencies in transportation.
I mention this because for various reasons that Infrastructure Act has been very much underrated, even dismissed. And I think it will contribute to Democratic success these midterms.
Bill Arnold
@Geminid:
Yeah, true (even less than 4%). I’m mainly ranting about how the measures being proposed are an order of magnitude or three less serious than the hellish future that we are smashing ourselves into.
KSR’s “The Ministry for the Future” features the “Children of Kali” prominently but (mostly) in the background, a well-organized/competent OPSEC/COMSEC group (emerging from a megadeath Black Flag Weather incident in India) that uses assassination of fossil fuel villains and similar violent means to encourage decarbonization; such organizations are in our future, IMO. As is geoengineering, maybe of more than one flavor.
Geminid
@Bill Arnold: A group of scientists met at the Woods Hole, Massachusetts oceanographic center in 1988 to discuss impending climate change caused by greenhouse gases. A specialist in Southern ocean plankton famously said, give me a ship full of iron ore and I can produce another Ice Age. He argued that the southern oceans get so little mineral fertilization that if artificially fertilized plankton growth would sequester prodigious amounts of carbon.
As I said above at #234, this is a very controversial proposition and ocean fertilization is very tightly regulated by international authorities. A group of German scientists carried out an interesting experiment about ten years ago that seemed to prove the concept. And volcanic eruptions provide data as well.
One reason people are reluctant to pursue such approaches at this time is that we can and must reduce emissions, not just suck them up through geoengineering. But if we do achieve a carbon neutral economy by 2050, and I think we can, judicious use of carbon-negative modalities could play a role in bringing global temperatures back to levels that would make life more sustainable. And by then we will have a better idea of what works best and without negative consequences.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
The energy concepts of this country need to be far better thought out but we have so many people that regard any change worse than a 6 in knife in the gut. It’s our politics, it’s our energy usage, it effects every bit of our lives. Conservatives think that the world of 1939 was great and we should go back there. Or possibly 1850 because of how much and what has changed since then. Of course if we did return to that they would howl like air raid sirens when they found out how actually shitty life was for all but the very few. You know the people who now have 25,000-50,000 sq ft houses with all the amenities including other houses because they have to have more than anyone else. Like John McCain not having a clue that they owned, I think, 11 homes. I’d like to think that we could have a law that no one could serve in congress that has over some amount of money. I wonder if that was anything like a reasonable amount that no one in congress now would qualify. But we should at least have term limits so that it’s not a lifetime, stay till you drop, even if you can’t remember your own name or sit still for more than 15 minutes without falling asleep.
Another Scott
@Geminid: The iron fertilization story sounded plausible to me when I first heard about it, but I’m convinced that it’s good to be skeptical about it.
ScienceDaily from 2020:
IMO, it’s good for people (especially engineers!) to be humble about how much we really understand about this stuff. Life has had hundreds of millions of years (or more) to tweak the tweakable chemistry to make things as hospitable as possible. There’s unlikely to be a “just turn this knob and everything will be great” solution for any problem – especially one as complex as the biosphere and what humans are doing to it.
But more research to understand all the intricacies is almost always better.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@Another Scott: A drawback of any geoengineering solution is that it could distract people from the task of reducing net carbon emissions. That is one reason for some of the hostility towards the idea of ocean fertilization.
Also, it just might not work, and if it did there is the possibility of unintended consequences. So research in ocean fertilization will proceed slowly and cautiously. I doubt if any large scale utilization of the method will occur before 2040, and then not as a substitute for carbon emission reduction but rather as a supplement to other actions like afforestation and direct air capture that can reduce CO2 in the atmosphere.
But the subject of oceanic fertilization has very interesting aspects, like the role sperm whales played before their population was reduced by hunting, and the way volcanic eruptions off the Pacific Northwest seem to be followed by good salmon runs.