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Climate Change(d)?

The "climate crisis" is such a pantomime.
The vast majority of governments are likely to miss a looming deadline to file vital plans that will determine whether or not the world has a chance of avoiding the worst ravages of climate breakdown. Despite the urgency of the crisis, the UN is relatively relaxed at the prospect of the missed date. Officials are urging countries instead to take time to work harder on their targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions and divest from fossil fuels.

Teh Gruaniad

"Fossil fuels" are not going away anytime soon.
Yeah, I've been saying we have been paying lip service to actually dealing with the problem for a long time now. You're just showing an example of it. What you are failing to see is that kicking the can doesn't make the problem go away. People's beliefs do not make reality go away.
 
Protests outside Shell's headquarters in London attended by folks from the Philippines.

For two days and two nights, Ronalyn Carbonel and her four children clung to the roof of their home as a huge storm raged around them. With the wind battering her village of Rizal, about 10 miles east of Manila in the Philippines. Carbonel was speaking to the Guardian as Greenpeace activists and youth leaders from the Philippines protested outside the oil firm Shell’s headquarters in London on Wednesday demanding “accountability from major polluters and justice for all the loss and damage they have caused”. Bon Gibalay, a youth leader from Bohol in the Philippines, who was part of the protest, said: “For far too long communities like mine.

Teh Gruaniad

No mention of how these brave climate warriors got from the Philippines to London but I suspect that "fossil fuels" played a part in their journey.

What does that have to do with the overall situation we are in?
The right approaches so many problems with a basis of if you get everyone to say X it will be true.
 
Meh. Swiz will wake up and roll out of bed if/when fossil fuel energy becomes 3-4 times as expensive as wind and solar.
It’s already there vs nuclear, but trumpsuckers are instructed not to go there.
 
Meh. Swiz will wake up and roll out of bed if/when fossil fuel energy becomes 3-4 times as expensive as wind and solar.
It’s already there vs nuclear, but trumpsuckers are instructed not to go there.
Nuke has effectively been regulated out of existence by catch-22 safety rules. If it's competitive that's evidence that more "safety" (no--there comes a point where failure of the safety systems becomes a threat) can be added and thus it's unacceptable.
 
Nuke has effectively been regulated out of existence by catch-22 safety rules. If it's competitive that's evidence that more "safety" (no--there comes a point where failure of the safety systems becomes a threat) can be added and thus it's unacceptable.
I suppose there's infinite regress available to naysayers. If the system threatens failure and the failure warning system fails and the warning system failure alert fails, and the backup warning systems fail, and the back up warning system failure alarm fails, it could get bad if all that happened at once.
So add a backup warning system failure warning signal failure warning system that continuously tests itself. And a warning system in case the testing system stops testing itself. And three single new hires to monitor the little red blinking self-testing failure warning system light 24/7.

If it's still selling electricity competitively, probably best to just bomb the fucking thing.
 
I suppose there's infinite regress available to naysayers. If the system threatens failure and the failure warning system fails and the warning system failure alert fails, and the backup warning systems fail, and the back up warning system failure alarm fails, it could get bad if all that happened at once.
So add a backup warning system failure warning signal failure warning system that continuously tests itself. And a warning system in case the testing system stops testing itself. And three single new hires to monitor the little red blinking self-testing failure warning system light 24/7.
...and then the naysayers say "well, if it's so inherently safe, why does it need all these expensive warning systems???".

It's literally impossible to win this game; IMO the industry should just refuse to play. No more safety features, unless and until the design can be shown to be less safe than an equivalent non-nuclear generating technology.
 
the industry should just refuse to play.
Then they will be disallowed altogether.
They are only in the game at all because the threat to fossil fuel interests that nukes represent is so diminished.
 
The "climate crisis" is such a pantomime.
The vast majority of governments are likely to miss a looming deadline to file vital plans that will determine whether or not the world has a chance of avoiding the worst ravages of climate breakdown. Despite the urgency of the crisis, the UN is relatively relaxed at the prospect of the missed date. Officials are urging countries instead to take time to work harder on their targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions and divest from fossil fuels.

Teh Gruaniad

"Fossil fuels" are not going away anytime soon.
Yeah, I've been saying we have been paying lip service to actually dealing with the problem for a long time now. You're just showing an example of it. What you are failing to see is that kicking the can doesn't make the problem go away. People's beliefs do not make reality go away.
This is like the Social Security shortfall. TSwizzle's logic would make one believe there is no upcoming shortfall in Social Security funding because Congress isn't doing anything to address it.
 
I suppose there's infinite regress available to naysayers. If the system threatens failure and the failure warning system fails and the warning system failure alert fails, and the backup warning systems fail, and the back up warning system failure alarm fails, it could get bad if all that happened at once.
So add a backup warning system failure warning signal failure warning system that continuously tests itself. And a warning system in case the testing system stops testing itself. And three single new hires to monitor the little red blinking self-testing failure warning system light 24/7.
...and then the naysayers say "well, if it's so inherently safe, why does it need all these expensive warning systems???".

It's literally impossible to win this game; IMO the industry should just refuse to play. No more safety features, unless and until the design can be shown to be less safe than an equivalent non-nuclear generating technology.
What we need is some Bill Nye-like folks to be able to tell the public that we've been wrong about nuclear. And that nuclear is the only way to manage our future carbon problem. Solar and wind can help in a transition, but until we have a few cult of personality types who can convince the general public that it is nuclear or we are fucked, it isn't going to happen.

TSwizzle is right in that fossil fuels aren't going away, best case scenario. Electric cars have a major problem, the battery. So we need to cut back in fossil fuel use as much as we can, which means our electric grid and home heating. Make cars more fuel efficient, use less gasoline, produce fewer emissions. Stop pretending we can recycle car batteries without actually having the tech, which might not be possible. We really need too much change in too little time.
 
TSwizzle is right in that fossil fuels aren't going away,
It will simply get more and more expensive. But as long as a drop of oil can be found and sold, the people selling it will keep doing what they’re doing, and will keep driving up the cost of other energy sources.
 
TSwizzle is right in that fossil fuels aren't going away,
It will simply get more and more expensive. But as long as a drop of oil can be found and sold, the people selling it will keep doing what they’re doing, and will keep driving up the cost of other energy sources.
Inertia is very powerful and also what prevents the "free market" from ever existing.

What we need Governments to draw up a large, but simplistic plan that overviews our global energy use (transportation, power generation, production/shipment). And how we can reasonably drop carbon emissions without gimmicks.

You want jobs? This is jobs! Millions of them to build out a nuclear and renewable system. But most of these people are lawyers and they suck at science. And many of them could be just like TSwizzle, remarkably incapable of understanding how small changes to massive systems aren't actually that small. And how change can be progressive and snowballing.
 
the industry should just refuse to play.
Then they will be disallowed altogether.
They are only in the game at all because the threat to fossil fuel interests that nukes represent is so diminished.
The problem is that we come to safety decisions bass-ackwards. Safety measures are mandated based on a cost-benefit analysis of that case. They should be based on the objective (the product people are actually using, in this case kwhs), not the task. The whole regulatory system has to a large degree been captured by the status quo.
 
Due to the extremely warm temperatures that we had in early February, some of the local birds were breeding. I know this because I found two tiny broken eggs that had fallen out of a tree, after we had a bad storm Saturday night. Now we are heading towards a week of very unseasonably cold temperatures for several days. What will happen to the birds who have been building nests so early, and the trees that have been budding extremely early? I've never seen anything quite like this winter and it's very sad to see how this is impacting nature. Humans have a long history of destroying their own habitats. It's sad that we're also destroying the habitats of so many animals as well.
 
I'm in the small area of America where it is actually a little cooler than average, on a whole. Been a relatively white winter, but nothing nutty with snow fall accumulations.
 
Carbon is just the most obvious one.
And the largest, most ubiquitous and afaik the easiest to mitigate. From what I read, it’s less than a quarter of all US greenhouse emissions but it’s the lowest hanging fruit.
 
The whole regulatory system has to a large degree been captured by the status quo.
… status quo meaning “oil and gas industry fatcats”.
I mean a lot more than just big carbon.
Who else then?
Carbon is just the most obvious one. Regulators pretty much never destroy industries in favor of safer options.
Really? Who is still making or using CFCs in the USA?
 
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