To Hit Climate Goals, Bill Gates and His Billionaire Friends Are Betting on Energy Storage (qz.com) 225
Akshat Rathi, writing for Quartz: The world needs radical new energy technologies to fight climate change. In 2016, Quartz reported that a group of billionaires -- including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson -- launched Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) to invest at least $1 billion in creating those technologies. Now, 18 months later, Quartz can reveal the first two startups that BEV will be investing in: Form Energy and Quidnet Energy. Both companies are developing new technologies to store energy, but taking completely different approaches to achieve that goal.
The way to reach the world's climate goals is straightforward: reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions to zero within the next few decades. But the energy technologies that can help us get there tend to need lots of money and long lead times to develop. That's why many conventional investors, who are looking for quicker returns, have burned their fingers investing in clean tech. The wealthy investors of BEV want to remedy that. Their $1 billion fund is "patient capital," to be invested in only companies working on technologies capable of cutting global carbon emissions by at least 500 million metric tons annually, even if they may not provide returns on investment for up to 20 years.
The way to reach the world's climate goals is straightforward: reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions to zero within the next few decades. But the energy technologies that can help us get there tend to need lots of money and long lead times to develop. That's why many conventional investors, who are looking for quicker returns, have burned their fingers investing in clean tech. The wealthy investors of BEV want to remedy that. Their $1 billion fund is "patient capital," to be invested in only companies working on technologies capable of cutting global carbon emissions by at least 500 million metric tons annually, even if they may not provide returns on investment for up to 20 years.
Reducing polution can mean more money. (Score:5, Insightful)
Energy storage technologies are about increasing efficiencies of power generation. So power companies are paying less in fuel for power that is just wasted.
Renewable more than Fossil Efficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
Energy storage technologies are about increasing efficiencies of power generation.
Partly but the other big reason is that the two major forms of renewable energy - solar and wind - both rely on intermittent power sources which are not always available. If you can store this energy for use at night or on a calm day then there is no need to burn any fuel at all.
However, I am a little concerned about the "pressure water" storage system which replaced reservoirs with high pressure underground storage. This might work but it seems that you are replacing the limitations of reservoirs with the complications of fracking which has been shown to cause severe, localized earthquakes. Batteries seem a far safer way to go if you need to overcome the limitations of pumped storage schemes.
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Partly but the other big reason is that the two major forms of renewable energy - solar and wind - both rely on intermittent power sources which are not always available. If you can store this energy for use at night or on a calm day then there is no need to burn any fuel at all.
This is a huge win, to be sure. Of current power technologies, only solar scales to 10 billion people consuming at American rates. But solar only scales with energy storage that scales with it.
However, I am a little concerned about the "pressure water" storage system which replaced reservoirs with high pressure underground storage. This might work but it seems that you are replacing the limitations of reservoirs with the complications of fracking which has been shown to cause severe, localized earthquakes. Batteries seem a far safer way to go if you need to overcome the limitations of pumped storage schemes.
You're just proving that hippies are going to complain about every solution, so best just to ignore their whining.
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Not simpler (Score:2)
Wouldn't really hurt us to live a simpler life that didnt demand a gigawatt of power for a family of four.
Apart from the fact that you are about 6 orders of magnitude off I think your concept of a simpler life is not actually any simpler. It's far simpler to buy groceries once a week and store them in a fridge or freezer. It's simpler to use electric lights instead of oil lamps and candles (not to mention safer). It's a lot simpler to have a central water or air based heating system that uses electric pumps/fans to circulate air instead of having to have fires in each room that need regular deliveries of coal
Usages Zero on Calm Nights? (Score:2)
Not really. If you plot the curves of solar and wind, it closely matches the actual power consumption of end users.
Really? So demand for electricity varies according to the wind with more electricity being used on windy days than on calm ones? Not to mention that usage will have to drop to zero on a calm night.
I think there is some averaging going on in whatever comparison you are referring to and to average out fluctuations in power consumption and generation you need storage.
Benefits for many things (Score:3)
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Energy storage technologies are about increasing efficiencies of power generation. So power companies are paying less in fuel for power that is just wasted.
Enabling "renewable" power sources to be base load is a big win, and requires energy storage if you don't have other sources able to take up the slack.
But it won't get us off fossil fuels entirely. A big chunk of consumed power (about a third IIRC) is "primary thermal". From blast furnaces in a steel mill to home heating with gas, we burn a lot of fuel in ways that electricity is never involved. Especially for heavy industry, it won't all be solar.
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Well, can't think of any obvious way to get around the need for blast furnaces, but it IS possible to heat your home with electric rather than gas. Currently very expensive compared to gas, but it's doable, especially if electricity prices go down fairly dramatically as a result of the transition away from fossil fuels....
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Gas is amazingly cheap, while replacing the furnace in the attic is all kinds of impractical. I expect new houses will be built with gas heating for some time to come, mostly because gas stoves are popular and once you've run the gas line to the house, heating everything else with gas makes sense.
A great gesture, give more (Score:2)
It's a great start, 1 billion for that group is such a small number though, for Bezos alone it's less than 1% of his net worth. Why not invest 1 billion EACH, then another 1 billion EACH giving away free solar and wind installations for schools, libraries, and parks, get the ball moving faster...
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Re:Reducing polution can mean more money. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being after leaving the Paris Accord, the US still has to oblige its promises until 2020. Also being the political nature, most companies would be an absolute idiot to go in full pollution mode, only to have the rules put back in the next 3-7 years. Regulations is rarely a problem for companies, it is the change of regulations. If these companies begin a process of lowering their carbon. They will probably continue on, if the rules are not set back, then they can breath a sigh of relief if their investment doesn't meet target. But if it goes back, they don't have to start over from scratch again.
Re: Reducing polution can mean more money. (Score:2)
I think Tesla's storage packs and the effect they are having in Australia is a good indicator of your point.
Come to think about it, why aren't these billionaires just purchasing Tesla packs and installing them? From what I recall, they purchase energy when it is cheap, and sell when it is expensive, makes them both profitable and environmentally sound, since they reduce the utility's peak power requirement, and level out demand on power plants.
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Instead of moving it around, storing it in batteries and getting it when you need it makes a lot of sense...
Moving it around is the way to go, when that is all you need. 800 KVDC long distance lines lose very little power, even a 3000 km run loses less than any form of storage. And you do need to move it around anyway, better to build a robust modern system to do this (though high voltage DC transmission is a technology that has been in use for almost a century).
What we need is some way to store energy in addition to just moving it around. A collection of the most cost-efficient options (generation, transmission
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Re:Yes, fine, "storage" (Score:5, Interesting)
Winding down the fossil fuel economy means more than just making bigger batteries.
Storage is a big part of the solution.
A gas turbine can spin when demand is high, and slow down when it is low.
Wind turbines don't work that way. They spin when the wind blows.
There are alternatives to storage:
1. Long distance HVDC transmission, to move supply to demand over a larger area.
2. Flex-pricing, to shift demand instead of shifting supply.
These will help, but you still need storage.
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The best alternative is probably 250 million electric cars with their 100kWh batteries. My back of the envelope calculations (250 million cars, 125 million households, ~30kWh/day/household) means that's enough storage to run the entire residential load for almost a week.
Other interesting thing about cars, is that they tend to congregate where the people are, which is often where the power use is.
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Storage is a big part of the solution.
A gas turbine can spin when demand is high, and slow down when it is low.
Wind turbines don't work that way. [youtube.com] They spin when the wind blows.
FTFY.
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Just be patient for PV to get cheaper until you can fill a desert with it. There's still lots of room for it to get cheaper.
Storing water in oil wells (Score:2)
This doesn't sound like a good idea to me:
Instead, it uses excess electricity to pump water into the underground shale rock found in new wells dug for the purpose or in abandoned oil-and-gas wells. After water fills up tiny cracks in the rock, forcing more in creates pressure, which compresses shale like a spring.
I known nothing about this at all, but... won't the water come back contaminated with oil? Will that contaminated water get dumped into a lake or river? This doesn't sound like a good idea. Can someone explain?
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The would be moving water back and forth between surface reservoirs and the deep well bed. No need to dump any water.
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I imagine that they would have a water tank on the surface; once the well is full they start pumping in water from the tank up to whatever pressure the system can handle. Then they release the pressure, sending the water back into the tank through a turbine. In theory there would be no reason to dump the water anywhere, it would essentially act like a closed system.
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I would be more worried about earth tremors resulting from repeatedly compressing and releasing pressure on the underlying shale formation.
There have already been problems with earth tremors in fracking zones, and this sounds like lots of fracking cycles in the same place.
Short term strategies ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... are responsible for bad ideas like shitting in your mess kit.
Shareholders, CEOs, and investors are, more often, manic about asymptotic profits over nanosecond time frames.
Economies built around such shortsightedness are like train wrecks: It doesn't end well.
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The pressure for companies to deliver regular results is one of the things driving our economies (read: quality of life) so much higher. If you were smart, you'd demand the same thing of your software projects and force a regular production deployment.
If you're just going to complain about how things are
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Absolutely correct.
Kinda like celebs spouting wisdom far outside their wheelhouse.
Invest in my House (Score:2)
I'm willing to accept a solar and battery install from Bill Gates in my house, to help his investment in energy storage, of course.
Existing technology underutilized (Score:2)
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but I haven't heard anything about using them in the US.
Must not have looked very hard. Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Facility [wikipedia.org]
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Molten salt batteries only store heat, and hence you can basically only use them to heat houses or, if you want to generate electricity from it, you lose 60% due to thermodynamics.
It makes no sense to use excess ELECTRIC POWER to heat up molten salt storages, unless you have absolutely no other option.
Molten salt batteries and storage (Score:4, Informative)
I think you and headwind are talking about different things.
You are talking about eutectic salt thermal energg storage: https://energydesignresources.... [energydesi...ources.com]
He is talking about molten-salt electrolyte batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Completely different things.
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Interesting link!
Did not know we have rechargeable ones now!
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It makes more sense if the electric power is basically free and you have no other use for it and it would just go unused otherwise.
Sure, electrical batteries make more sense than generating heat if you have the batteries. I'm guessing there's some kind of spreadsheet analysis to be done to figure out where the cost/benefit curve is of megawatts of relatively expensive lithium batteries vs. relatively cheap vats of molten NaCl when the energy generation cost is essentially zero.
I'm always surprised when peo
Battery tech (Score:3, Informative)
Storage can achieve 70-80 percent efficiency with compressed air, which is fairly tech driven, but modern tech patents can achieve 60-80 percent themselves.
Even pumped water up an incline, which works both with dams (and has the lowest impact for mini-hydro) and solar water distillation, is fairly efficient. If coupled with renewables, which tend to overproduce at certain periods, this allows you to achieve 120 percent renewables, allowing for variation, and export of the stored energy.
Large trains and trucks are optimized for large-scale fuel cells, but if you want to reduce GHG emissions, you shouldn't be using methane, other than as a capture technology to remove it from escaped gasses, such as with landfills, algae, and, yes, diapers on cows (it's more of a building capture method, really).
The major missing part, as it was with renewables before, is the lack of capitol. So Gates is spot on by leveraging capital here.
The next Chernobyl (Score:2)
Nothing Like Chernobyl (Score:3)
However, the more import question is why would you put all these batteries in one place though? A f
More Tripe from Mr. Gates (Score:2)
While I am okay with new technology, I am very sure this will instead become something of a venture that will just be used like a utility in the future.
Lets just have everyone have solar on their roofs and a battery to store it and all connected to a grid with other supplementary forms of power generation to offset times when solar does not generate enough energy. Between a mesh electrical network, storage, solar, and supplementary power generation we should easily have a very fault tolerant, difficult to
Solar on the roof plus batteries = bad idea (Score:2)
We'll need nuclear power (Score:3)
We are not going to get a carbon neutral electrical grid without nuclear power.
Smart grids and energy storage can do a lot on making wind and solar more viable for producing reliable energy but it can't do it all. Storage also adds cost to energy sources that are already more expensive than nuclear power. I know people will claim that wind and solar will get less expensive with advancements in technology but then so can nuclear power. We've been building windmills and solar collectors for a very long time now. We used to build a lot of nuclear power plants but we effectively stopped for four decades. Now that we've started building nuclear power plants again we can expect the prices to come down.
Storage also helps nuclear power as much as wind and solar. Any steam based energy source does not follow load well, whether that steam is produced by natural gas, coal, solar collectors, or nuclear fission. If we are going to add energy storage to the grid then nuclear power starts to look even better. We saw something like this happen in Australia when a coal fired plant failed unexpectedly and a battery pack designed for storing wind power picked up the slack and likely saved the nation from a widespread power outage.
Wind and solar are expensive, more expensive than nuclear. Prices will come down for all of these energy sources in time. I see no reason to expect that the development of solar will allow for energy cheaper than nuclear any time soon. Wind is pretty cheap but it needs storage. Once we start adding storage to the grid then cheap energy sources we already have now start to look even cheaper, like coal, nuclear, and natural gas. If the goal is to replace coal and natural gas then the technologies that replace them will include nuclear power.
Not using nuclear power means increased prices, brownouts and blackouts, or burning more natural gas.
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You are correct, I didn't point that out. Here's a few links to put the waste problems of solar and wind power into perspective.
https://instituteforenergyrese... [institutef...search.org]
https://www.nationalreview.com... [nationalreview.com]
http://dailycaller.com/2017/07... [dailycaller.com]
https://thoughtscapism.com/201... [thoughtscapism.com]
Wind and solar have far greater waste problems than nuclear. Can we reduce the waste from wind and solar? Sure, just as we can learn to reduce the waste produced from nuclear energy. Can we improve the methods of recycling and disposing of waste pr
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Wind and solar have far greater waste problems than nuclear.
Nuclear literally has no method for dealing with the waste stream right now. Reprocessing spent fuel is not an option because of nuclear treaty obligations....and even if we ignore that, "build a second nuclear plant" isn't exactly an inexpensive solution. Millennia-long storage is a political nightmare that is not going to happen, because politicians like not getting voted out of office.
So, your concerns about waste stream seem a tad myopic.
Wind does kill birds but birds are jerks
I love when people trot this out. Household cats kill 1000 to 1
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I love when people trot this out. Household cats kill 1000 to 10,000 times more birds than wind power generation. Yet I don't see the same people so worried about it in wind generation propose banning cats.
House cats don't kill falcons, vultures, eagles, and other large birds. In fact its the other way around, these large birds have been known to hunt small cats. I love it when people trot out the greater threat household cats pose to birds over windmills as it demonstrates an obvious lack of comprehension of the problem. Birds have evolved to manage the threat cats hold to them but windmills are a new threat. Perhaps in time birds will evolve the means to manage the threat windmills pose to them but cons
Re:We'll need nuclear power (Score:5, Informative)
I think your post managed to get every single point wrong. That's an impressive achievement.
Storage also adds cost to energy sources that are already more expensive than nuclear power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Natural gas, solar and wind cost about the same per kWh. Natural gas is slightly cheaper, wind and solar obviously only work part of the time.
Then comes coal, more expensive than all three.
Then comes nuclear, more expensive than coal.
We've been building windmills and solar collectors for a very long time now.
Grid-scale wind and solar are still relatively new. Most have been built in the last 10 years. That's not a "very long time now".
Now that we've started building nuclear power plants again we can expect the prices to come down
Sorry, we stopped again. Turns out pretending nuclear is cheap is not an optimal strategy. And now Westinghouse is going bankrupt.
We saw something like this happen in Australia when a coal fired plant failed unexpectedly and a battery pack designed for storing wind power picked up the slack and likely saved the nation from a widespread power outage.
Um...no. There is part of a grid in Southern Australia grid that was rather unreliable, mostly due to the limited power generation on it. The battery is designed to 1) level out the brownouts and 2) allow wind-generated power to be used more often.
A plant in this area of Australia's grid failed, and the battery supplied power until other generators came on-line. It did not "save the nation", because the grid we're talking about serves a relatively small part of the nation. Without the battery, there would have been a brownout or blackout in that small population, but the rest of the nation wouldn't have cared - their grids would have disconnected from the shitty one as had happened many times before.
Wind and solar are expensive, more expensive than nuclear.
You're wrong on this. Nuclear is twice the cost of solar and wind. Citation above. There's also the non-trivial matter of the waste stream, which is not covered in the pricing in that citation.
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You're wrong on this. Nuclear is twice the cost of solar and wind. Citation above.
Your citation only shows nuclear being twice the cost of solar and wind when comparing the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) case numbers from a single source. EIA shows wind and solar being far more expensive as do numerous studies from other nations. There is still the matter of the cost of the storage.
There's also the non-trivial matter of the waste stream, which is not covered in the pricing in that citation.
Every nuclear power plant in the USA, and in most nations in the world, are required to pay in advance for the cost of decommissioning the plant at the end of its life. In the USA the gove
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Second, there's no guarantee costs should come down.
There is no guarantee that wind and solar prices will come down either.
We've been trying to make solar power viable beyond pocket calculators and communication satellites for a very long time now, and we've come a long way. The problem is that even with massive economies of scale, excessive government subsidies, and decades of pouring money into research, solar power still produces a fraction of a percent of the energy we consume today.
Wind energy has come a long way in recent times and I believe it can be
Sunny D (Score:2)
Energy storage allows the purchase of cheap, low-efficiency popcorn solar cells and whatnot to charge on sunny days. It also allows long-distance electricity with inefficient loss because who cares when the sun is doing it.
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Can't tell if that's a serious statement or not...
But there isn't always a single path forward... FTFS:
"Both companies are developing new technologies to store energy, but taking completely different approaches to achieve that goal"
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Tesla did use 18650 cells, but their new factories and cars use the new and bigger 21700 cells.
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Yep! Probably a new flavour with less sugar and no HFCS, too!
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They should consult Tesla. Elon Musk has excellent battery technology and has it all figured out already.
Tesla does use some nice technology, but their showcase application requires high power to weight, where for utility-scale electrical storage weight is not a big issue, while cost and cycle efficiency is much more of an issue. Lithium's greatest asset is low mass, not low cost.
In any case, as one of the other commentators noted, it's worth looking at multiple technological solutions, rather than fixating on just one approach.
Performance versus cost (Score:2)
quote>Tesla does use some nice technology, but their showcase application requires high power to weight, where for utility-scale electrical storage weight is not a big issue, while cost and cycle efficiency is much more of an issue. Lithium's greatest asset is low mass, not low cost.
Cost has a lot more to do with scale than it does anything else. And there isn't just one type of Lithium Ion battery out there. Li-Ion is a family of battery chemistries with varying performance and price points. There i
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People are doing just that. But do not discount the economic value of standardizing on a common technology even if it isn't optimal for a given use case.
Why doesn't your car battery use the same battery chemistry as your flashlight flashlight, and neither one the same chemistry as your mobile phone?
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Nickel-Iron batteries [wikipedia.org]
Lots of people trying to build them in their backyards though. These would be shiit for a car or your cellphone (energy density is too low) but for energy storage for a house it seems perfect, as long as you have enough room that is. The battery life is in decades, even with constant charging and discharging.
Why
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Why did they stop making them?
From your link: Due to its low specific energy, poor charge retention, and high cost of manufacture, other types of rechargeable batteries have displaced the nickel–iron battery in most applications.
Re:Tesla (Score:4, Interesting)
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Nickel Iron Batteries problems (Score:2)
Why did they stop making them?
They didn't. But their price to performance [rpc.com.au] for most applications isn't very good so there have never been a lot of them. They are expensive, they have relatively low energy density and low specific power, they charge slowly and discharge slowly (not good for large sudden power draws), they product a lot of hydrogen requiring ventilation, their charge characteristics are challenging with solar inverters, they require frequent and routine inspection and maintenance to maintain performance, and they are ver
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The initial cost is at least 30% over a high-end Lead Acid battery of comparable size (considering usable energy)
Initial cost 30% higher than lead-acid? That's a bargain! Considering the lead-acid battery "longevity", an incredible one, in fact, unless all you want is occasional backup as opposed to a regular source of electricity.
Nickel-Iron batteries have lower energy density and lower specific power compared to lead-acid batteries (or in layman's terms are less efficient).
Perfectly suitable for stationary storage. And you're not going to discharge them at more than, say, 0.1-0.2C anyway. Not if you want to get through the night, for example.
They produce a lot of hydrogen, daily gassing is required to get the expected performance. Hydrogen gas is explosive, therefore good ventilation is imperative.
That's a design feature that has to be taken into account when designing a whole
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Investment advice for free [Re:Tesla] (Score:2)
The stock is up 20% this week so I have switched my short TSLA positions to long! Gooooo Tesla!
If your investment strategy is that you've been going short before the stock goes up, and now that it went up you're going long, you're doing it backwards.
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I guess the fact that most new technologies are more efficient and environmentally friendly is lost on you.
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This is why I'm not worried about climate change getting out of hand.
That is not so simple, climate has quite an inertia, and true the Earth was worm in the past but not with 7+bln people mostly leaving at the coastal areas. There are estimated maps available online, which shows coastlines depending on average temperature increase.
There is no need to impose hardship on anyone when the solutions are more desirable on their own.
Yes, that what we always worry about - the hardship of coal industry. The fact that green-energy industry employs people the same way, giving additionally savings due to clean environment benefits on health, not to mention costs of rebuilding coast
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This is why I'm not worried about climate change getting out of hand.
It already has.
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None, since that never happened? Water is the low-energy waste product of many chemical reactions. You might as well try to burn ashes.
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One of the major problems we have is population control, people keep fucking and breeding, I don't see the solution other to impose some hardships, like China did with their one child policy
Actually we know how to solve this. Education, especially of women.
It results in women having far fewer children, to the point where many first-world nations are below replacement rate, 2.1 children per woman (1 to replace the woman, 1 to replace the man, and 0.1 for infertility and death before reproduction).
France is at 2.01, US is 1.84, UK is 1.81, Germany is 1.5, Japan 1.46. Their populations are stable or growing only because of immigration (except Japan, which shuns immigrants).
In Africa, programs t
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What do you do with countries which are beyond the tipping point such as Burundi? Where overpopulation already makes any chance of developing a decent economy a pipe dream and TFR is 6?
I see only three solutions for a country like Burundi, mass displacement of people which risks destabilizing any country they move to and setting it on the same path, Malthusian collapse or some kind of top down imposed limit on their population growth. The last one seems to me it would cause the least human suffering, shame
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Erm, isn't this a problem all over the world, Millennial's who grew up with helicopter parenting and living on their cell phones? It's not just China facing this problem.
The real reason China "woke up" was because they realized that they had an aging workforce nearing retirement, with not enough replacements. That is also why they did a lot of stuff by hand instead of automating as much as they could, they had the manual labor workforce to pull
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That's economists. Meanwhile cornucopians will say more people will mean more innovation, will mean better lives. While liberals will say you're racist.
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Nature on average is very slow giving time for living things to adapt and change. Climate change is suppose to occur on the scale of thousands of years but we're seeing effects on the scale of decades which is hundreds of times faster than normal. No surprise since we're adding carbon into the air that's been locked in the ground for millions of years. We're already causing such a huge animal extinction event that it's big enough event to match the extinction of dinosaurs. There's so much plastic in our
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Nature on average is very slow giving time for living things to adapt and change. Climate change is suppose to occur on the scale of thousands of years
Temperature drops can be very fast during each wave of glaciation in our current ice age. Temperature rises are what's typically slower, although there are some spikes in the ice core records.
We're already causing such a huge animal extinction event that it's big enough event to match the extinction of dinosaurs
Maybe it will go that far, but it hasn't yet. Mostly we're affecting other species by taking land for our needs.
I'm not sure if people can honestly sacrifice their standard of living even slightly to accomplish a reversal until it practically blows in their front door.
I'm not sure they should. At any rate I'm sure that people should decide democratically, not have any reduction in standard of living imposed on them by some aristocracy.
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The other issue is that I'm not sure if people can honestly sacrifice their standard of living even slightly to accomplish a reversal until it practically blows in their front door.
That's a false dichotomy.
We can both improve our standard of living and reduce the impact we've had on the environment. We do this with nuclear power. Perhaps in the future we will have another choice but right now the choice is petroleum (and the effects that has on the environment), reducing our standard of living, or nuclear power. I may have just given my own falsifiable set of choices but you've only given the first two in my list, oil and ecological disaster, or wind and sun and reduced quality of
Re:Just Curious (Score:4, Informative)
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist. ...
That is wrong. They would swing back and forth, like they always did.
This is not in dispute.
Obviously there is nothing to dispute about the fact that you are simply wrong.
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The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist.
That is wrong. They would swing back and forth, like they always did.
Yes Mr. Pedant, over a timescale of multiple tens and hundreds of thousands of years that's obviously true.
I thought it was understood that the time frame under discussion is the one which climate alarmists talk about which is the next few hundred to a thousand years following our relatively recent emergence from an ice-age.
Thanks for trying to muddy the waters though, that's what's needed for people to come together on rational strategies.
Strat
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The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist.
The bold part is wrong (unless you are referring to the sun exploding into a red giant). So why are you thinking I'm mudding the water?
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The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Are you referring to the fact that the sun is getting brighter at a rate of about 1% every hundred million years? That is true, but has nothing to do with the time scale of human civilization.
Eventually temperatures will rise to and exceed the levels we've been told are bad, it's simply a matter of how quickly they get there.
Yes, in a few hundred million years we may need to worry.
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I get that you hate Microsoft, rich people and especially Bill Gates. But these Billionaires are throwing money at a problem that benefits everyone and you still criticize them.
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... to make more billions #ftfy
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I'm still confused. Even if they do make money doing it if we all benefit it's still a bad thing because...?
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I'm all for making a buck but the use of "benefit" here is a loose term depending on which end of the technology ladder you're on. When it comes to the current philosophy of renewable energy storage there's a little problem. [washingtonpost.com] Anybody who doesn't grasp this is kidding themselves.
Always examine all the surrounding information. (Score:2)
Also, lithium ion batteries age and lose storage capacity. They are very expensive to buy and replace.
That is an example of an issue I mentioned. Always examine all the surrounding information.
Part of his investment in time is abusive, IMO. (Score:2)
I did not criticize the "other billionaires".
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Who has a better life? A surfer who pays his parents $500 per month to live in their basement, or a billionaire? A serious investigation of all the associated details may sometimes indicate that the surfer has a better life.
Shit, I've been doing it wrong all along?
1) Get Basement and deadbeat Millennials.
2) ???
3) Profit