Most of these journalists have never set foot outside of their hotels in Delhi or Mumbai.
Travel 5km outside of urban core and India remains the same as it always has been. It's a tropical country so of course its going to get warm.
What has happened is really awful urban planning with zero account on the laws of thermodynamics. So you have European style urban heat effect from concrete but worse since its India.
The solution is already in the pipeline with insane growth in solar power.
As climate change heats up ( pun intended ) India is not going to be the biggest loser here due to the monsoon. It gets more rainy and the weather stays stable overall.
The most destabilization of weather is going to happen in Russia, EU, Canada, Australia and North America. So please try to fix your own backyard first ( since you guys shat your pants in the first place anyway ).
What journalists? Sources for this article are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.. a whole lot really, not one thing coming from a journalist.
> Last year, there were 484 official heat waves across India, up from 21 in 2010.
That's by definition of the the Indian government, not journalists that have never left their hotel.
> Last year, there were 484 official heat waves across India, up from 21 in 2010.
Does it mean India is unlivable ? What if we changed the headline to USA being unlivable ? how often has CNN published USA being unlivable ?
CNN is responsible for climate change as much as any large oil company, they have always invited climate change denialist on their network.
There is also a undertone to 'India being unlivable' that rubs some people the wrong way. They said the same thing about Africa / India being unlivable for white colonist 300 years ago. So CNN should try to be neutral and informed in their writing - they could have said "North Indian cities like Delhi are becoming unlivable".
Putting all of India in one basket when India has extremely varied climate, make it seem they are much more uninformed.
No, of course not. The headline isn't to give a yes or no answer, but to simply explore the question, list some things we know and some studies.
I guess as Indian you get to read a lot of patronizing shit on the web, and I totally respect your resentment, but this article was submitted by someone from MIT, it wasn't written by their staff.
> how often has CNN published USA being unlivable ?
Not unlivable, but literally searching for "cnn when will the us become unlivable" I found these for example:
> More than 200 countries pledged to take action on climate change under the Paris Accord struck in 2015. The agreement pushed signatories to work together to keep temperatures from rising more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. However, there are no binding targets, and the US later pulled out, dealing a blow to global efforts to form a united front against climate change.
I have no love for the CNN either (mainly for their cheerleading for and getting fat off war, as I see it), but here I have to say, fair enough?
> There is also a undertone to 'India being unlivable' that rubs some people the wrong way.
As I said above, in general being pissed off by that is something I totally understand (not as in "I know what it's like", but you know what I mean I hope), but this is about the wet bulb temperature, so "literally unlivable", not colonialist attitudes.
> So CNN should try to be neutral and informed in their writing - they could have said "North Indian cities like Delhi are becoming unlivable".
I agree that most headlines suck (and that's not to excuse it), but just as I checked the article to quote the relevant bits (which are more nuanced than the headline was), I realized they changed it to "Are parts of India becoming too hot for humans?", which is at least something.
By the time this shit really hits the fan, however bad it gets, the people who caused the most harm will be dead and gone either way. Even you and me won't see the worst of this, this could get centuries deep, and industrialized civilization might as well get used up in war, leaving "us" (humanity) with fuck all.
FWIW, I think "the West" kinda owes a lot of reparations, to a lot of countries, I don't hold your anger against you at all. But we need to be sober and fierce more than anything, though not for us little people to bicker, and not to be bitter. I guess it's patronizing and easy to say for me, but I can't change where I was born. We just have to roll our sleeves up wherever we are, and then we'll still get enough people who will genuinely resist the inconveniences (or taxes) coming out of the woodworks. There'll be plenty of battles ahead, let's not have needless ones.
Majority of journalists write about things they have no idea about, and often don't care too. It's not about US reporters getting confused about India, it's the normal mode of media industry functioning.
I am not sure if you a Brit, you sure do sound like one.
You are ignoring 400 years of trade history here.
Britain was known for imposing unfair trade treaty on the rest of the world, ( so called 'unequal treaty' in the case of the China ).
In the case of India, Tata was forbidden from selling steel in india, causing the indian steel industry to collapse.
Same for textile, boats, ... shall I go on ?
If you are so found of free trade, allow indians free visas to travel to the UK ? let's watch most brits try to compete with your 1.4 billion, 2 dollar a day indian labour ?
So there is more nuance then "muh can't sell ARM chips !"
Read my comment again, it's got nothing to do with 400 years of trade history, it's about temporary measures having a habit of becoming permanent.
Where did you get the idea I was so fond of free trade? (disclosure: I am in favour of free trade) I described international markets as rapacious. Plus free trade is about trade. Freedom of movement is about people. You can be in favour of free trade, and against freedom of movement, ask any Brexiteer.
BTW not all Indians are on $2 a day, and most that would come to the UK would be on significantly more, and we have a minimum wage so they wouldn't be competing on $2 a day anyway.
"Tata was forbidden from selling steel in india, causing the indian steel industry to collapse.
Same for textile, boats
"
Any decent write ups on this? Not something I'm really aware of.
> "Plus free trade is about trade. Freedom of movement is about people. You can be in favour of free trade, and against freedom of movement"
Why ? Humans are a form of "good" so is capital and natural resources. You cant leave 1 out of 4 - the EU single market was created with this in mind. Some countries have excess capital, some have excess labour and some have excess natural resources.
Its awfully convenient for you to leave out the ONE thing that a country like India has a surplus in and leave in the thing India is deficit in.
> and we have a minimum wage so they wouldn't be competing on $2 a day anyway.
Says who ? it depends on enforceability, ask any Indian or any Brit who lived through the Empire. Minimum wage is just a form of price control.
> Any decent write ups on this? Not something I'm really aware of.
- The Indian rupee used to be similar to the swizz franc.
- people around the world used to hold on to the rupee since it didn't suffer from rampant inflation which even many european currencies did.
- India was a major exporter of goods to SEAsia, Middle East, Europe and Africa, and imported very little.
- All of it changed when the Brits arrived.
Which comes back to my original point.
You turn forward the clock 100 years and its quite likely every Brit would be singing a different tune, high tariff on Indian semiconductor, Indian medical devices, .... . They already sing a very different tune compared to just 15 years ago with Brexit today. Where are your open markets now ?
Its awfully convenient to sit atop 400 years of plunder and loot and claim fair treatment and 'free market'.
"Humans are a form of "good" so is capital and natural resources"
Exporting humans is generally a bad thing for the exporting country (brain drain), exporting goods is generally a good thing. Goods can have tariffs applied, how would that work for humans. Immigration is much more politicised than free trade. 3 reasons why they aren't the same.
"Says who ? it depends on enforceability"
You could say that about anything. Murder is illegal, that needs to be enforced.
"ask any Indian or any Brit who lived through the Empire"
What has that got to do with anything? Did they have minimum wage legislation during the days of the empire? Because they didn't in Britain.
"Minimum wage is just a form of price control"
And what's that got to do with anything. Why are you getting all Randian, when you were complaining about me being pro free market in your last comment?
"Its awfully convenient to sit atop 400 years of plunder and loot and claim fair treatment and 'free market'"
So Italians should be apologising for what the Romans did, and Mongolians for what Mongols did, and don't get me started on the Germans. I'm sure India has it's fair share of dark chapters, its history, I wasn't born, my Parents weren't born, and my Grandparents who were born when India was in the empire are now dead, get over it.
PS I didn't 'claim free trade' or 'fair treatment', try reading my first post again, and my explanation of what I said in my 2nd post.
> Exporting humans is generally a bad thing for the exporting country (brain drain), exporting goods is generally a good thing. Goods can have tariffs applied, how would that work for humans. Immigration is much more politicized than free trade. 3 reasons why they aren't the same.
Goods are just one part of the overall economy, and an increasing small part of it. A large part of the economy is services that involves humans.
Would you consider there to be a goods drain ? or a petroleum drain ?
Exporting humans is fine if you have a surplus of them, they are just another input like capital, energy and iron. It's not the human that matters, it's the system that is capable of producing them. Your solution of nations restricting movement of its citizen is denying them their right of self determination. Would you rather keep them chained to certain countries against their will ?
> Immigration is much more politicised than free trade.
Who said ? its not as charged in many Arab Countries who are much more conservative. You could issue 10 year passport with limited voting rights. There are many types of visas you could issue based on what your society finds acceptable.
> So Italians should be apologizing for what the Romans did, and Mongolians for what Mongols did, and don't get me started on the Germans. I'm sure India has it's fair share of dark chapters
Who said anything about an apology ?
India is not some marginalized group in western society that is asking for handout. It's a nuclear state with the second largest standing army in the world.
It does not matter what I think or you think. Your original comment is ignoring what India is.
Imagine for a second if every African country joined and formed a single country, suddenly Africa would have a lot more leverage in trade. They can get things horribly wrong but they can still come out ahead and bully countries like Switzerland. Africa could introduce 100% external tariff while Switzerland could be at 0% and Africa would still come out ahead. If Switzerland went ahead and introduced 100% tariffs their economy would collapse, because Africa in total has so much buying power.
"Goods are just one part of the overall economy, and an increasing small part of it. A large part of the economy is services that involves humans"
We were talking about immigration not services, remember you mentioned visas?
"Would you consider there to be a goods drain ? or a petroleum drain"
No because I said they were different, if a 20 something emigrates, the country they grew up in has spent years educating that child, keeping it healthy, supporting the parents while they bring up the child, then just as the payback should be starting the child leaves. Its analogous to spending time and money drilling an oil well, and building a refinery, just to see the petrol walk out the door with no money coming back to you.
"Who said ?"
I did.
"India is not some marginalized group in western society that is asking for handout"
I never said it was. You're the one whose got a Bee in their bonnet about British colonialism.
"Your original comment is ignoring what India is"
I've reread my original comment and its clear enough what I said. I've also clarified what I said, so why do you keep ignoring what I have actually said in favour of what you imagine I said?
> No because I said they were different, if a 20 something emigrates, the country they grew up in has spent years educating that child, keeping it healthy, supporting the parents while they bring up the child, then just as the payback should be starting the child leaves.
See this is where we fundamentally disagree.
What if the private sector / government is unable to provide them jobs ?
India adds 1 million new white collar graduates to its workforce every month ! do you think the government would really care if 1 million of them just left ? there would be another 1 million added next month.
In fact the Indian government actively wants to send more young people to every part of the world - latin america, middle east and europe. Since those worker send back forex income.
Most of these young gradates end up working in call centers or their talent get wasted doing other low productivity work. The Indian economy cannot absorb so many graduates.
> I've reread my original comment and its clear enough what I said. I've also clarified what I said, so why do you keep ignoring what I have actually said in favor of what you imagine I said?
Your original comment states that India should open its market, you do not have to be an Indian to understand how deeply offensive it might be to people of the subcontinent ( China too ). It's like talking about 'states right' to African americans.
Let me break down the history behind your argument.
- During WW2 the Brits used 'free markets' to argue taking rice from India to Britain during a famine where 3 million people died. They used British guards to protect grannies from civilians dying outside. I have spoken to people who were alive during that famine, how well do you think they will react if you made your argument about opening India to 'rapacious global market'.
- The brits heavily taxed Indian merchant ships, selling of Indian boats - just to keep their seamen and dockworkers in london employed. While Indian workers in Mumbai couldn't sell boats to Indian merchants in their own country !
- When the brits first came to India, India was the textile factory of the world. The arguments the brits make is that their superior 'technology' and 'industrial revolution' caused the collapse of the Indian textile industry. The reality was quite different that what British historian have been pedaling. Firstly, innovation in textile has been happening for 2000 years, there was no reason for India's textile industry to suddenly collapse just when the brits started ruling over India. The height of British colonial horror was cutting off the fingers of 300,000 textile workers.
So Britain's modern success has a lot to do with actions of its rule during 'Empire' ( which need I not remind you existed just one generation ago ).
> do you think they'd want to risk sinking it (hows that for a mixed metaphor!) by exposing it to the rapacious global market?
The real 'rape' here was India's inability to protect it's interest.
How long do you think Britain will take to recover if some foreign power cut of the fingers of 300,000 bankers and coders in London ?
India needs tariffs since without it, a large number of its smaller manufacturing operations would collapse.
The best example is agricultural produce, India has high tariffs on foreign agri goods ( especially American ones) , because a country like America can just dump its large agricultural surplus onto India. This would increase rural poverty and increase rural unrest, (families earning 2 dollars / day would earn 0 dollars / day) - something India has been working towards improving.
We already know US has been subsidizing its agri sector for more than 100+ years. 100 years ago India was at the height of its colonial exploitation.
We can also examine Mexico where NAFTA increased Mexican rural poverty, increased inequality and made Mexico dependent on American food production ( something the americans would never tolerate happening to them ).
The price saving on buying American agri produce in India is also not extremely different that buying locally produced food. So its anyway a small subsidy from the well off to the peasant class.
Do you still think India should just abandon its 800 million farmers ? and introduce them to 'rapacious global market' - when their families didn't even have one generation to build equity ?
Also, when India became independent the brits thought India would collapse within 10 years, it's been 70 years and India's economy is the second largest in GDP/PPP. It's sending satellite to space and doing mars mission, and also has lifted the most people out of poverty after China.
So maybe they do not need your advice ? maybe they are doing something right ? The Ministry of Finance in India are not run by idiots, maybe finally the democratically elected government of India is doing what is best for it's people ?
Tariffs, markets and money are just tools and should be slave to national interests. In this particular case, india need to develop its own semiconductor capabilities. If it means stealing IP, tariffs, industrial espionage then so be it.
We can clap at the Brits making ARM chips, but the Indian government won't allow Britain a perpetual monopoly to sell chips in India, especially if it harms it's balance of payment.
Having said that, India normally plays by the rule much more than China due to being a democratic government ( which I think was wrong, India should have done what China did, but that is my personal opinion ) - only exception being pharmaceutical and nuclear weapons in 1990s ( both were existential threats, one to it's trade deficit and ther other to the state itself ).
The only reason why I spent so much energy on this topic is because it always hits my nerve, its deeply offensive to ignore the legacy of colonization in India when discussing free trade. It's like me trivializing north sea fish quota to Brexiteers.
Can you elaborate? I'm reading your argument as "This is not such a big deal because there are other horrifying things that are an even bigger deal", but I'm guessing that's not what you mean. Are you saying this will resolve itself _naturally_ in time? And if so, what gives you confidence?
> "This is not such a big deal because there are other horrifying things that are an even bigger deal"
If India was Syria, then it would be a bit more horrifying, as even simple rain harvesting wont solve the problem in Syria.
India is filled with problems, let me put it this way, if India was blessed with the amount of freshwater as Canada, India would still misuse it terribly.
Its a good thing there is no petroleum.
The problem here is not rain, or climate change or drought - but politics, corruption and bureaucracy. India needs its own Meji Restoration - some type of shock therapy - or else the suffering will just continue to get worse.
> Last time I checked the Swizz, Germans and Brits were major players in drug and medical R and D.
Where do you think those European drug companies get the bulk of their revenues from to do that R&D in the first place?
They make their money off the U.S market!
> Drug development in the US is expensive due to the dysfunctionality that exists within the FDA.
No, drug development is expensive because it's expensive. The EMA & co. are not substantially different in their requirements and expense than the FDA is. Regardless, even still, half of the R&D conducted in the entire world is funded directly by the US.
A large component of the dutch GDP as well as population is below sea level. They have been building dykes since centuries. Considering the large coastline of the US, there is definitely a huge cost to climate change induced sea level rises, so some poorer settlements will likely be given up but on the other end I doubt that e.g. downtown boston will be one of those settlements. It's more a question of how economical mitigation measures are vs resettlement. Overall the costs and damages will vastly outnumber the (massive) investments that we'd have to do now to slow down climate change.
Living for today and profit today is a common human trait. We (unfortunately) think in human lifespan as a "long time" and many don't care what happens to future generations after they are gone :(
Sooo... invent technology to make rich people live forever for them to start to think on long term scales? Or they'll just build their mansions on the hills while the poor valley dwellers drown and die of old age? Interesting question.
The article mentions several prognoses for a timeline. It seems still we decades away from getting into the 3-4 feet range. Not that I personally think there is urgency for mankind. But not so much maybe for the wealth of a billionare.
>Moving vast quantities of water - 9 trillion m3 per year - is the main energy requirement of the project. Desalination, at this scale and its current rate of energy efficiency, would itself require 10.8 tw of additional solar capacity, compared to 6.4 tw of total global power capacity in 2016. While this energy requirement dwarfs the energy of constructing and maintaining the system of reservoirs, the millions of drones necessary to do this will add significant additional energy requirements.
Comparison for the water - an Olympic size pool is 2,500 m3. That's 3.6 billion Olympic size pools, annually, for that proposed solution to the problem and would require more energy than we current produce just to pump the water and handle the necessary desalination.
And like I told Sam last summer when disagreeing about this as even a remotely plausible idea - this solution is almost certainly going to cause drastic global weather pattern changes and it is worth noting the Sahara actually fertilizes the rain forests of South America so this project could have potentially devastating consequences on its own.
This is arguably the simplest solution that we currently have on paper and likely the 'easiest' to do. However simply producing the materials needed would add a staggering amount of CO2, the concrete you'd need to pour for the thousands of power plants to power it would, you'd have to do something with all of the brine from the desalination process and dumping it back into the ocean would absolutely destroy any local habitats, you're going to change weather patterns and likely start dumping a lot more rain somewhere, you're going to stop fertilizing the rain forests of South America, and you're going to have to do something with the insane amount of algae you are growing to actually sequester the carbon (plus you'll have to be introducing enough minerals into the water to allow the algae to grow, something that would require massive strip mining).
Unless a fleet of alien trade ships show up in orbit soon and go "hey we have these machines, they'll process the carbon out of the air and make solid carbon cubes, don't worry they have power cells that will last centuries. But, in exchange, we'd like extrasolar rights to your greatest sitcoms and 3/4 of the carbon cubes" then, we probably aren't going to fix the problem.
To even retard the problem, we need to immediately stop using all fossil fuels. Instead China is still getting 70%~ of its power from coal, is still building hundreds of coal power plants, is putting millions of new drivers on the roads each year and is building an insane number of new roads and bridges that are using insane amounts of concrete and asphalt. Not to mention all of the other countries. It's just not realistic to cease all greenhouse gas emissions short of perhaps a CME forcing us to by frying most of the world's electronics.
It is a gloomy situation and it is going to likely require tens of revolutionary inventions in the very near future if we want to get back to even how it was 10 years ago.
It’s because if people were actually serious, they’d either stop using 90% of the power they use or be investing heavily in nuclear power, both making it cheaper and safer. There’s no short or mid term solutions for large scale batteries that will make renewables a viable alternative. But if we’d started moving from coal to nuclear when this crisis first was understood, it’d already be over.
The world has billions of people that don't know the first thing about climate change or the dangers of global warming. There are billions of people that simply do not know how much greenhouse gasses are produced as a byproduct of their daily choices in life, or what the consequences are.
Even talking to some incredibly wealthy people that want to try and solve this, you quickly realize they just do not understand.
Take YC, YC came out with the page I linked in my previous comment last year yet they continue to fly founders out for in-person 10-minute interviews when they could do it via skype. One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or to San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person, a 10-minute skype chat would be insanely less as 1GB of data transfer is roughly 1kg of CO2. YC knows carbon is an issue but then prefers in-person interviews for 'finalist' startups as they've stated it works better than video for their needs and this goes for many other companies, individuals, agencies, governments etc.
People are like 'yeah, I drink free trade coffee, I recycle, I ride share to save the environment' then you pull up their dating profile and/or social media accounts and here they are in one photo with penguins, three photos later they are in a jungle with an elephant, 2 photos later they're on a ski slope with a caption "3rd country this year, 17 total!"...
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The problem is, people aren't going to care until it is already too late (which is in the next 5-10 years if we don't drastically change). When multiple seasons of crop failures drive up food prices, when heat waves kill millions, when droughts and water shortages start affecting millions, when flooding seriously hurts crops...
Wait, Australia was about 20% light on grains last year. Most of the midwest has had insane rains this year which is directly impacting crop planting. Cities in India are literally running out of water. Heat waves in France are threatening to shut down a nuclear reactor as cooling water runs out.
Oh.
It's already happening. Most people don't know and don't care.
I know and I care but short of looking at myself and my family and implementing better life style practices that we may or not be able to afford what do I do?
I vote and I know the biggest impact has to come from world governments but even voting seems like a small, hollow step that does nothing in the short run to help the situation.
There's a lot an individual can do to minimize their own impact (but sadly, unless we get a significant percentage of the population to change, it isn't going to matter much). Here are a few off the top of my head:
- Give up meat. If you don't want to give up meat, chicken = far less greenhouse gasses than beef per measure of meat (Beef requires "around 28 times more land than the other options, 11 times more water and resulted in 5 times more greenhouse gas emissions" https://www.iflscience.com/environment/new-study-says-beef-1... ).
- Try and buy local
- Try and buy with minimal packaging, buying bulk can help a lot with this. 50lb bag of rice instead of 1lb, 10lb bag of beans instead of 1lb, etc.
- Find fun things to do locally instead of deciding you just HAVE to fly to Antarctica to see the penguins because your buddy Greg and his girlfriend did.
- Turn off lights when you aren't in a room, unplug stuff with phantom loads when you aren't using it, when appliances die replace with energy efficient models
- Make fewer trips to the store, don't order something on Amazon every day or multiple times a day as it is going to increase the chances you'll be getting multiple packages from multiple delivers and try and limit yourself to once a week or better - never.
- Instead of going to see the 376th Avengers film in the cavernous air conditioned theater with Dolby THX Rumble Bumble Ultra Eardrum-rupture Super Sound TM, watch it at home. ("figure out the energy costs, let's reference a 2011 Slate article that compares the energy costs of watching a DVD at home versus going to the theater.6 The technology at commercial cinemas eats up lots more energy than your puny flat screen. The precise amount can vary by projection bulb and by how brightly the cinema chooses to screen the film. Usually, it falls between 3.1 and 10.5 kilowatts. A typical machine projecting at a medium brightness for the running time of Green Lantern would consume about 9.6 kWh." https://business.directenergy.com/blog/2018/february/how-muc... then of course factor in driving all of those speakers, the air conditioning/heating for that cavernous room etc)
- Waste less, "food loss at the retail and consumer levels, corresponded to approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010" https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs.
Well I won't respond to every item on your list but I do most of them or am close to being better in terms of how we as a family follow these guidelines. Some examples - I'm vegan, have been since before I worried about meat's impact on climate change. The rest of my family is not but they are pretty health conscious and eat less meat than the average I believe and do prefer chicken over red meat generally.
I am obsessive about turning off things we aren't using, more for the money saved but I recently keep harping on everyone about how it helps the planet too (a little). I could be a lot better at what you called "stuff with phantom loads" though!
I do try to buy bulk, we do a lot of shopping at Costco and this also helps keep the number of round trips down.
As for having fun, lucky for the planet I can't really afford plane trips or even long car rides for vacations so we mostly do stay-cations... :-)
Last one I'll address is the movie bit; again, lucky for the planet, I've come to loathe the theater experience as I get older and prefer waiting until I can watch at home. Even my younger children have come to see this is as a good thing as it means family time and, usually, some snacks.
Anyway, thanks for the response. It helps knowing that my efforts to follow these basic rules is something others think about too. Sadly I agree that we are too few at the moment to make much difference.
I think his main point was that even those who claim to know and have more than the resources and the knowledge necessary to enact change (even just at an individual scale) still have problematic behaviours. Behaviours in a day more impactful than what someone earning a dollar a day can make in a year.
Exactly. Besides, the people living in poverty are largely living as carbon neutral lives as possible (with the exception of using fossil fuels or wood for cooking and heating) by necessity as they can't afford cars/travel/air conditioning/beef/etc.
China is preparing to allow massive amount of immigration from neighboring Muslim countries.
I have been following local news in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia.
The Chinese leadership is well aware of their demographic cliff problem, this is why they relaxed their one child policy.
A single generation ago they were freaking out about over population, so they are not anywhere near running out of people.
The Muslim reeducation camps are trail runs for future policy to bring large numbers of Muslims living in proverty today into china, to work in their factories.
Realpolitik international relations. Different parties having different interests doesn't mean there is nothing the US government can do to achieve better conditions for US companies.
People on HN hate it when you say we have to change our whole society to deal with this problem. I agree with you though. I don’t think we’re willing to do what is necessary to avoid serious catastrophe. We’ve done a good job demonstrating that for 50+ years so far.
> People on HN hate it when you say we have to change our whole society to deal with this problem.
We obviously don't have to change our whole society to deal with that problem.
1) I've been told that renewable are now grid competitive in cost and the power system is switching over to them naturally.
2) At any point we could go nuclear - even the most pessimistic anti-nuclear activist would have to admit that the risks from nuclear power are localised and that the raw volume of pollution rounds to 0 compared to what we do now.
It would take a couple of breakthroughs in battery technology to solve the transport problem and the whole thing might get solved in the background without much more serious effort. Most people wouldn't even notice.
You'd be surprised how much anti-nuclear activists would disagree with your second point. I'm sure I know a couple that would rather watch the world burn than vote for someone that will build a single reactor.
I think once an issue like that becomes a left/right black/white thing all logic just goes straight out the window. You can't even say the word nuclear without hearing a cacophony of statements about the price of nuclear vs renewables, as if those claims don't need any actual numbers to go along with them.
No it wouldn't. The assumptions made in that video are ridiculous.
You don't need to have storage for all your solar; you turn other sources off when you have excess supply. Or you can switch them off simply by covering them. Batteries are not the only form of storage. Hydro exists and is in use already. You are allowed to import electricity. There are other renewables besides solar and wind. etc etc etc...
I disagree. Assumptions made in the video are realistic. You kinda need battery storage for your solar/wind.
Other sources can be hard/impossible to stop.
Batteries are the only form of storage that's scalable. Hydro exist, but you can't expect to just add another hydroelectric dam, whenever your solar overwhelms your current capacity. Hell even storing gravitational energy probably requires frankly massive amounts of development.
You are allowed to import/export electricity, but the assumption is others will have similar power sources, no? When there is the excess sun in one area, it's either going to be excess in nearby areas (because day happens nearby at the same time). Sure, you want to export to countries without sun, but the loses are probably going to be huge (loses mean infrastructure is stressed additionally).
What other renewable resources?
- Hydro? Destructive for the environment kills migrating fish, ruins ecosystems and not available everywhere.
- Geothermal? Only available at a few places can possibly lead to earthquakes.
> I disagree. Assumptions made in the video are realistic.
Nope, they're the opposite of realistic because they disagree with reality.
> You kinda need battery storage for your solar/wind.
You kinda don't. Here in Scotland, we've gone from around 15% renewables in 2007 to 70% in 2017. We closed our last coal station in 2016. Guess how many battery storage facilities we have? None. There are plans to build one in the near future. And yet we have a perfectly fine and consistent electricity supply. When reality disagrees with your theory, it's your theory that's wrong.
The other obvious renewable in California would be tidal.
Oh, and you can get rid of all your hydro when you no longer have any need for water. I swear sometimes people forget what dams are actually used for.
> Nope, they're the opposite of realistic because they disagree with reality.
Or, your premises are different. From what I see Scotland derives like 90% of its power from Wind, which is possible its unique property. Another thing to take into consideration is that California has a larger population than Scotland.
But overall I get what you are saying. I still suspect going 100% renewable won't be feasible for most countries.
2. Even if nuclear were not controversial, it cannot be deployed quick enough. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080304100413.h...
I recall seeing a calculation that it would require us to turn on a new nuclear power plant every day for the next several decades. That's obviously not going to happen, when countries are currently decommissioning nuclear plants.
> the whole thing might get solved in the background without much more serious effort. Most people wouldn't even notice.
Frankly, this is a ridiculous and dangerous assumption. Globally, we have a limited carbon budget remaining in order to prevent catastrophic warming. That means we must be decreasing emissions on the order of at least 10% per year until we're at zero emissions, and then continue taking carbon out of the atmosphere. Such a scale requires massive transformation across all sectors of society.
> I've been told that renewable are now grid competitive in cost and the power system is switching over to them naturally.
These are more lies and half-truths, for the most part. Wind and solar as always quoted on a "nameplate" basis - how much power they can theoretically produce under ideal conditions. But most don't produce anywhere near that, on average, and I suspect that many can't even make their "nameplate" promises either. Add in the fact that they will have to have more traditional power plants as backup for when they fail to produce, and actual costs are easily a multiple of what is currently being quoted, perhaps a relatively high multiple at that.
Greed seems to be the primary engine driving humanity as a whole.
IMO the most viable path forward is to find some overlap between our desire to obtain and consume more, and the pressing need to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Maybe if we find a way to make carbon capture super lucrative or something?
It's really easy to implement a carbon tax. And it solves the problem. But what politicians want is more power grabs, not solutions. All of our wars on poverty, drugs, terror etc are intended this way. They are wars on people. This is the same. These people dont give a fuck about you. That's rarely ever been the case.
Every president has been essentially increasing taxes in the sense that they are raising spending, and spending increases are tax increases. People just dont want their gas prices to go up. Their fine with ignoring a financial catostrophe for the next generation which is the national debt. They are also very happy to soap box and advertise that they care about the next generation by talking nonsense about global warming.
You don’t need more taxes (on net) at all. You just do a carbon tax and distribute all the money equally. Rational people would reduce their spending on items that put a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Ideally nobody pays the tax at all. That’s the whole point of it.
Sanders is the last person to do any reform ( real reform would come most likely from somebody like Andrew Yang ).
Education is first and foremost extremely political, almost everywhere and every country.
Milton Friedman knew it 40 years ago.
Letting a free market in education to exist would put a lot of service jobs at risk.
Education is how people who support a candidate get a job after elections are over.
Many prominent lieutenant and donors in the Democratic party end up in the educational sector, same applies in every other party in so many other countries it's unreal.
In Islamic countries, trying to reform education is much much harder than other areas. Everybody wants a say in what goes in the heads of other people's kids.
Ideally avoid news about India from CNN,BBC,...
Most of these journalists have never set foot outside of their hotels in Delhi or Mumbai.
Travel 5km outside of urban core and India remains the same as it always has been. It's a tropical country so of course its going to get warm.
What has happened is really awful urban planning with zero account on the laws of thermodynamics. So you have European style urban heat effect from concrete but worse since its India.
The solution is already in the pipeline with insane growth in solar power.
As climate change heats up ( pun intended ) India is not going to be the biggest loser here due to the monsoon. It gets more rainy and the weather stays stable overall.
The most destabilization of weather is going to happen in Russia, EU, Canada, Australia and North America. So please try to fix your own backyard first ( since you guys shat your pants in the first place anyway ).