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Darth Walrus posted:How much of an impact on climate change has deforestation had, then? Genuine question. iirc land clearing as a whole contributes a double digit percentage of effective greenhouse gas emissions (includes deforestation, but also things destabilising peatlands, which in some ecosystems such as tropical lowland forests can be a secondary effect of deforestation). Planting trees is not entirely useless when it comes to removing co2 from circulation by increasing standing biomass, though it's not going to be nearly sufficient on its own obviously.
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Sep 24, 2017 19:44
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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I think deforestation is a bigger deal with regard to the shape of the land and the destruction of ecosystems and loss of stability, than it is with regards to atmospheric carbon. Unfortunately, most forests that get cut down just end up being replaced by fields full of cows, and we all know how good cows are for the planet (they're the worst thing for the planet). Some fundamentals with regard to deforestation to keep in mind are that a forest will not continue to sequester carbon after it reaches it's climax ecology. Once that forest is grown it has taken in a certain amount of carbon, and will simply release the same amount of carbon back into the atmosphere as it takes in, as trees die and decompose while being replaced. So planting a forest isn't going to make a continuing difference in the carbon composition of the atmosphere, it will take out a certain amount and then stop. That's why people talk about theoretical underground vaults of trees that are not being allowed to decompose. That way the carbon does not go back into the atmosphere, it just stays underground in the form of a shitload of pine trees, and that land can be used to grow pine trees indefinitely and just cut em down and bury them. There is physically no reason why we couldn't build such an underground vault and irradiate all the trees going in so that nothing remains alive to decompose them. I dunno what the cost would be though, probably prohibitive. As an aside, it's an interesting note that the reason carbon was put into the ground in the form of fossil fuels is that once upon a time millions of years ago, life forms had not yet evolved to break down dead plant matter in the same way they have now, so that's why the carbon from all those plants ended up stuck underground in the form of coal and oil, rather than being put back into the atmosphere like it would be today. This also means that our planet will never again generate fossil fuels, even if the humans all died and you look forward 400 million years, there will never again be oil and coal once we run out of it.
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Sep 24, 2017 19:59
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call to action posted:You're dumb as gently caress if you think planting trees accounts for consequential carbon sequestration, sorry man if you think I'm a hick for knowing that. Trees burn and decay, city slicker. DURRR I've always been confused by the kind of personality that, without understanding even the most trivial and superficial aspects of an issue, feels compelled to stake out a position and defend it to the hilt. I mean you'd think you could at least go through the effort of glancing at a wikipedia page before demonstrating to everyone that you are an idiot, but even that appears to be beyond many.
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Sep 24, 2017 20:07
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Darth Walrus posted:Anyone care to give me a lowdown on the relative pros and cons of nuclear and renewable energy as the technologies exist today? I've had difficulty finding information from sources who don't have skin in the game. Renewable (solar panels/wind): Good: * individual solar panels/wind turbines are dirt cheap and are available off the shelf/can be quickly built. Every utility company and any homeowner/mid-scale landowner can buy some and expect to generate income or at least reduce annual electricity expenses by producing their own electricity in the short term. Often, this income will be high enough to make solar panels and wind turbines profitable. * historically, green energy subsidies have been necessary to prop up the profit margins (then again, most forms of electricity generation receive direct or indirect subsidies). However, because R&D efforts have not yet run out of low-hanging fruit, better cheaper products get released regularly and will most likely continue to be released for years to come, meaning that we're starting to see wind and especially solar that can compete in the free market without subsidies. * NIMBYism against them is only moderate, and since individual units are relatively small and cheap it's somewhat feasible to invest around the loudest NIMBY idiots Bad: * both take up relatively large amounts of space * they get completely wrecked by Hurricanes, there goes your profit margin * solar panels are so cheap because Chinese companies are churning them out by the million while dumping the resulting toxic waste in the nearest river instead of properly disposing of it like they'd have to in most western countries * to the great disbelief of economically liberal politicians, the free market isn't actually perfect and regularly fails to price externalities (ie side-effects that are spread out across larger areas/populations or across time) into the product and reflects current conditions instead of future goals  . The large and to some extent unpredictable variability of wind and solar makes large amounts of either storage (battery, hydro, ...) or quick peaking powerplants (mostly natural gas) necessary if you want them to make up most of your power grid. Nobody, not even renewable-friendly Germany, can be bothered to invest sufficient money to prop up a storage or peaking power industry.Renewable (concentrating solar): Good: * designed from the get-go as large powerplant-scale renewable energy source * designed from the get-go to have a modest amount of integrated storage (large vats full of hot liquid that can continue driving generators overnight) Bad: * seems to be more expensive than anticipated so nobody can be bothered to build anything beyond heavily subsidised prototype power plants (plus the free market fails to pay for the provided storage capacity )e: this might be changing, see Trabisnikof's post below * takes up large amounts of space Renewable (biomass): Good: * in principle allows you to turn any sort of organic trash into electricity * is basically a classical powerplant with different fuel, and therefore can provide predictable and constant output * farmers loving love it (but see below) Bad: * many types of organic trash can't actually be turned into electricity very efficiently in exiting biomass powerplants, so powerplants don't want them * somehow the free market fails yet again: it's often more profitable to produce biomass powerplant fuel instead of food or timber (let alone designating protected areas for conservation), leading to large-scale land clearing for agriculture and lovely shrub forestry to produce the most efficient cash crop to burn in a powerplant * even if you regulate the market, there is only so much organic trash you can burn and a lot of that organic trash could be more efficiently (in terms of CO2) used for other purposes, so only limited amounts of biomass powerplants are sensible to run Renewable (hydro): Good: * very predictable and rapidly controllable output * is its own storage, and can provide storage as a perfect companion for wind/solar * you can build giant pumped hydro basins on hills to soak up excess wind/solar during sunny windy periods, and pumps/hydro generators are also super efficient (like 80% round trip iirc) compared to many other types of large scale storage * river-rich countries like Norway can run almost entirely on hydro Bad: * most countries aren't Norway and have few major rivers * climate change may dry out your rivers enough to make hydro power nonviable in the future * building giant dams through rivers is an expensive infrastructure project and attracts the NIMBY crowd, leading to ridiculous construction costs (e.g. approaching the price of nuclear reactors in Germany in recent projects, leading to nobody wanting to build them anymore  )* building giant basins on hills is even more expensive, so while it's simple in principle nobody actually does it at a useful scale * hill tops and rivers are often valuable ecosystems, and if you dam every major river in your country you also ruin every major river ecosystem downstream of a dam in your country (you can avoid totally exterminating migratory fish by providing fish passages through dams, but the entire water regime downstream from the dams as well as oxygenation etc. will still be ruined, killing off entire river basin ecosystems). This is ok if you're Norway and have hundreds of surplus rivers all over the place, but most countries still aren't Norway. Renewable (wave/geothermal/random stuff everybody stops building after trying out the first prototype/SOLAR loving ROADWAYS): Good: * taps into a wider range of energy sources * often less variable and more predictable than wind/solar Bad: * often more expensive/less effective than initially assumed outside of specific areas (e.g. Iceland for geothermal), or in some cases (SOLAR loving ROADWAYS) a stupid loving idea from the get-go * often limited in the total energy that could be extracted, so even in the case of a wildly successful deployment the total contribution to the power grid is still small (e.g. coastal wave power) * often requires sites in particularly valuable habitats that would get ruined by any large-scale rollout (e.g. coastal wave power anywhere that isn't already a port) THE MIGHTY ATOM (classical big nuclear power plants) Good: * big with lots of megawatts output * very loving stable baseload generator, which by itself requires virtually no storage to support a whole power grid and therefore has less externalities * if you have a nationalised energy sector and can build a large series of nuclear plants, huge nuclear reactors are probably the most efficient and effective way to decarbonise your electricity grid * modern models are able to ramp up and down relatively quickly, and could therefore work well with wind/solar and a very modest amount of hydro * runs for a long time (expected lifetimes even for lovely 1970s nuclear reactors are 40-80 years and some US reactors may well end up running for a century) * basically an indestructible bunker that will survive any storm (except piece-of-crap Chernobyl-type RBMK plants because lol Soviet nuclear weapons program design decisions resulted in the shittiest containment buildings ever) Bad: * Cold War-era plants were not designed to ramp up and down quickly, and most big nuclear power plants in western countries are lovely Cold War relics * capital cost is high, and construction takes about 5 years even under ideal conditions. The free market fails to take the long-term and grid-wide advantages of nuclear plants into account , coupled with quick changes in electricity price and the difficulty of predicting electricity demand over the next 20 years needed to pay off the capital investment this means no private company wants to build a big nuclear power plant in a deregulated electricity market* nuclear anything is top-grade NIMBY bait, resulting in costly delays as everyone and their mother goes wild filing lawsuits to stall the power plant construction ($billions per year wasted after construction has started) * big infrastructure project construction in western countries has become an expensive mess in general, adding more delays and increasing cost overruns * if your country doesn't standardise on one or two reactor designs which get built one after the other by a standing experienced nuclear workforce (among the "old" nuclear countries South Korea did this very well, Japan did this sort of ok, everyone else completely stopped doing it after the Cold War ended), every single power plant is effectively a one-off prototype plant with high R&D expenditure and even more delays in construction. Overrated issues (may still present political obstacles though): * nuclear waste: the amounts of actually dangerous high level waste from commercial power reactors are relatively small and the recently-opened nuclear waste repositories in Sweden/Finland have effectively solved the problem of long-term safe burial. In addition, you might want to reprocess and recycle your nuclear waste in breeder reactors (see below) anyway, completely eliminating the need for long term storage beyond what we'd do for generic heavy metal waste *  ATOMZ WILL KILL US ALL WHEN THE NEXT REACTOR DOES A NUCULAR EXPLOSION : the impacts of even the two big nuclear disasters people have heard of (Chernobyl and Fukushima) aren't exactly "millions of people died". Chernobyl, being the shittiest most poorly contained reactor model in the world, did spread a fair amount of radioactive crap across Europe. However, the radiation levels outside the exclusion zone were largely small enough that even assuming the linear no threshold model of radioactivity loving up people, only a few thousand people can have died from it (this is less than the hundreds of thousands of people dying from lung cancer due to coal every year, and is probably still less than the number of people who'd die from Chinese chemical waste disposal/falling off railings while building a 100% solar/wind grid, and in any case the LNT model is very likely an overestimate of the effect of very small radiation doses). The Fukushima reactor failure was basically a non-event except the poorly organised evacuation of people living around the reactor literally killed hundreds of them while the radiation will most likely end up killing nobody.THE MIGHTY ATOM (small modular and non-PWR/BWR reactor types) Good: * very loving stable baseload generators * many models are breeder reactors that can recycle nuclear waste and transmute whatever remains into short-lived isotopes that will be safe (in terms of radiation) in a few hundred years instead of after tens of thousands of years. * many models smaller and cheaper than classical nuclear reactors and designed to be mass-produced like a car, meaning is less of an obstacle: just order an off-the-shelf reactor with overnight shipping, connect it to the grid, and keep adding more as long as that remains profitable. If electricity prices drop, just stop ordering reactors for a while and continue generating revenue from the ones you already have, instead of pulling the plug on a half-built reactor after you've already spent five billion dollars.* You know you want to buy a Rolls Royce, even if "you" is actually "your utility company" and "Rolls Royce" isn't a car but a nuclear reactor Bad: * still NIMBY bait * mostly still in the prototype or development stages, may require state funding for initial deployment, not supposed to come online in western countries before the 2020s. e: CANDU exists, CANDU is awesome, CANDU is love, CANDU is life, but CANDU is still pretty huge and therefore nobody in North America or Europe wants to build more A lot of very promising work was done up until the end of the cold war in many western countries, a lot already got slashed due to not directly contributing to nuclear bomb production, and the rest got slashed along with other big physics experiments in post-Cold War spending reductions (plus the French Superphenix and the Japanese Monju reactors were unreliable pieces of poo poo that had to shut down due to various faults all the time, and the German breeder reactor managed to set itself on fire even without ever having nuclear fuel loaded). The limited-scale Russian effort did, however, continue and has produced results in the form of two reliable prototype breeder reactors BN-300 and BN-600, recently joined by the world's first commercial-scale nuclear waste-burning breeder reactor BN-800. The BN-800 is now connected to the grid and gearing up to gobble up leftover weapons grade material from the Cold War. An actual commercial BN-1200 is planned for the 2020s, which would allow Russia to close the nuclear fuel cycle as envisioned by nuclear engineers (and prevented by lack of political interest) since the 1970s. China and India are also interesting: India wants to become energy-independent and is sitting on the worlds largest accessible amount of Thorium ore. India is currently building a large-scale prototype Thorium reactor while slowly rolling out various types of either Thorium-compatible (CANDU and domestic derivatives) or other reactors. China is currently engaged in a large-scale nuclear rollout and just got done buying a small series of every type of commercial nuclear reactor in the world, and is now standardising on its domestic current-gen reactor. At the same time, China is developing or starting to build every type of advanced reactor design they can get their hands on (breeder reactors abandoned by everyone except Russia, Thorium pebble bed reactors abandoned by Germany, wackier small modular/other modern reactor designs, etc.). suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Sep 25, 2017 |
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Sep 24, 2017 21:54
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omg you people are idiots. trees decomposing is a good thing. many soil microbes live exclusively on earth enriched by rotting wood, and fallen trunks provide shelter and nutrition for growing seedlings. as the wood rots it also generates moisture, which is obviously going to get more and more important as time goes on. fallen trees in a functional forest don't need to be buried, they get buried naturally, that's what forests do. talking about stuff like irradiating dead trees so they don't rot just proves to me that goons live in a box and have actually never seen a tree in their drat lives. rotting trees are the cradle of existence you fools
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Sep 24, 2017 21:54
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Squalid posted:DURRR No u (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 24, 2017 21:55
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the old ceremony posted:omg you people are idiots. trees decomposing is a good thing. many soil microbes live exclusively on earth enriched by rotting wood, and fallen trunks provide shelter and nutrition for growing seedlings. as the wood rots it also generates moisture, which is obviously going to get more and more important as time goes on. fallen trees in a functional forest don't need to be buried, they get buried naturally, that's what forests do. talking about stuff like irradiating dead trees so they don't rot just proves to me that goons live in a box and have actually never seen a tree in their drat lives. rotting trees are the cradle of existence you fools omg you are totally missing the point "throwing trees down a mineshaft" isn't supposed to produce a healthy forest ecosystem, it's supposed to be an emergency measure to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere because right now we don't know how to build industrial-scale CO2 sequestration plants but we do know how to plant trees, chop down trees, and throw things down mineshafts
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Sep 24, 2017 21:59
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well that's not going to work and is a stupid plan, especially when those trees could be much better put to work creating a healthy forest ecosystem
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Sep 24, 2017 22:00
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^ yes. a healthy forest ecosystem won't sequester carbon at the rate required. It's not a bad idea but it's not accomplishing what it is being proposed to do.the old ceremony posted:omg you people are idiots. trees decomposing is a good thing. many soil microbes live exclusively on earth enriched by rotting wood, and fallen trunks provide shelter and nutrition for growing seedlings. as the wood rots it also generates moisture, which is obviously going to get more and more important as time goes on. fallen trees in a functional forest don't need to be buried, they get buried naturally, that's what forests do. talking about stuff like irradiating dead trees so they don't rot just proves to me that goons live in a box and have actually never seen a tree in their drat lives. rotting trees are the cradle of existence you fools But that's not the context in which they're discussing trees decomposing. Nobody denies all this nonsense because it's orthogonal to the point of the discussion: that the process of microbial respiration during decay releases some of the "sequestered" carbon back into the atmosphere again. Gunshow Poophole fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Sep 24, 2017 |
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Sep 24, 2017 22:01
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the old ceremony posted:omg you people are idiots. trees decomposing is a good thing. many soil microbes live exclusively on earth enriched by rotting wood, and fallen trunks provide shelter and nutrition for growing seedlings. as the wood rots it also generates moisture, which is obviously going to get more and more important as time goes on. fallen trees in a functional forest don't need to be buried, they get buried naturally, that's what forests do. talking about stuff like irradiating dead trees so they don't rot just proves to me that goons live in a box and have actually never seen a tree in their drat lives. rotting trees are the cradle of existence you fools That has nothing to do with atmospheric carbon, you fuckin idiot. Nobody's saying all trees everywhere should be put in a anti-rot vault, we're talking about forests as a form of continuing carbon capture.
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Sep 24, 2017 22:01
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the old ceremony posted:well that's not going to work and is a stupid plan, especially when those trees could be much better put to work creating a healthy forest ecosystem extremely high CO2 levels are not conducive to the existence of healthy forest ecosystems
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Sep 24, 2017 22:01
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just so you know i'm desperate to continue this argument but i have to go revegetate a riparian zone now, i will return in many hours and bring you dolts to the light of heaven, broad sunlit and eternally leafy
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Sep 24, 2017 22:16
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I'm gonna go ring-bark a bunch of trees to spite you
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Sep 24, 2017 22:18
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Ol Standard Retard posted:^ yes. a healthy forest ecosystem won't sequester carbon at the rate required. More to the point, today nothing can "sequester carbon at the rate required" to offset what we are now emitting, nor is it probable any practical system will exist in the near term. Putting the carbon genie back in the bottle is tremendously difficult; the only reasonable conclusion is that we must first stop releasing it before putting any effort into capture.
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Sep 24, 2017 22:33
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Squalid posted:More to the point, today nothing can "sequester carbon at the rate required" to offset what we are now emitting, nor is it probable any practical system will exist in the near term. Putting the carbon genie back in the bottle is tremendously difficult; the only reasonable conclusion is that we must first stop releasing it before putting any effort into capture. Yeah. And whatever, old ceremony, you can go revegetate my rear end in a top hat because we're not actually having an argument. we're just stating facts that you are interpreting as an attack on your actions. Which I think are cool and good, but don't meaningfully address atmospheric carbon budgeting.
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Sep 24, 2017 22:39
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there is no budget (left). do stuff that helps (kys).
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Sep 25, 2017 01:55
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Darth Walrus posted:Anyone care to give me a lowdown on the relative pros and cons of nuclear and renewable energy as the technologies exist today? I've had difficulty finding information from sources who don't have skin in the game. Nuclear energy is best because it can be used to make nuclear weapons, which are the only known cure for industrial civilisation.
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Sep 25, 2017 03:21
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blowfish posted:Renewable (concentrating solar) Most of the rest of that effortpost seemed up to date and accurate (ty for the effortpost!) but this part stood out to me as possibly outdated. There have been two major CSP prototypes in the US: Ivanpah and Crescent Dunes. Ivanpah came online first, has no attached storage and seems to have flopped due to underestimating startup heat needs (and contrails). Crescent Dunes came online later, has storage and last I can tell has been considered a success. SolarReserve, the company behind Crescent Dunes is planning to build 10 new towers in NV (1.5+GW total, and that's with 8 hours of storage), Chile has orders for 450MW, they've partnered with a Chinese firm to build 1GW in China, and they just set a new CSP record for cheapest contracted power at $0.06kwh for a 150MW plant in Australia. They're contracting for base-load levels of capacity factor, to directly replace coal plants. quote:SolarReserve has broken a solar price record with its 20-year contract to supply the South Australian government with dispatchable solar at a levelized cost between $75 and $78 per megawatt hour (MWh) in Australian dollars, which itself is a world record low price for CSP. So while some CSP designed have shown to be too expensive, there are CSP plants being built right now that are as cheap as a new coal plant. The rest of the pros/cons seemed accurate afaik.
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Sep 25, 2017 04:11
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hello, i just spent five hours weeding a tomato bed because the community garden is the only part of the wetlands that gets funding so all the volunteers who signed up for reforestation are sent there instead and i am too dismayed to post about trees at the moment they were making me pull out the clover! it fixes nitrogen!!
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Sep 25, 2017 04:18
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Trabisnikof posted:So while some CSP designed have shown to be too expensive, there are CSP plants being built right now that are as cheap as a new coal plant. Neat, I didn't know Crescent Dunes had turned out so well.
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Sep 25, 2017 07:07
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Squalid posted:More to the point, today nothing can "sequester carbon at the rate required" to offset what we are now emitting, nor is it probable any practical system will exist in the near term. Putting the carbon genie back in the bottle is tremendously difficult; the only reasonable conclusion is that we must first stop releasing it before putting any effort into capture. Well, I don't know about "any practical system". On the face of it, there are a lot of very fast-growing trees and other vegetation that we could *massively* farm to sequester in abandoned mineshafts (if that's the thing we're discussing). I mean, I don't think there's been a lot of study done on the feasibility of something like that, and I can imagine a number of ways of doing it that would be quite effective at getting CO2 out of the atmosphere to at least the point of nullifying our baseline emissions (as in, emissions we currently can't do without). The problem would be implementing it. It would have to be a massive, massive work program the likes of which the world has never seen. I'm talking full on a goodly percentage of the population doing this. A lot of the actual work could be carbon neutral (most of it would be planting, which you do on foot), but would require a lot of man-hours. We would probably have that kind of labour capacity in the face of widespread automation (which is happening, to be fair) but it would require a lot of political will and would likely be impossible within a strictly capitalist system - it would be profit-less and paid for by taxes. Sure, in an ideal world we could automate half of all jobs and just have half the human population working to sequester carbon - which it probably would take at this point - but our current economic system would not support that. It really comes down to the fact that every extreme or wide-scale effort is incompatible with our curret market capitalist system. We would need a literal actual socialist revolution worldwide seizing every means of production and a full scale plan economy based mostly around stopping carbon emissions and a sustainable society. Which means that the thread title is actually really apt.
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Sep 25, 2017 09:54
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If the ocean is dying anyway we could also just try turning it into an algae sludge through nutrient seeding.
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Sep 25, 2017 14:41
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Nice piece of fish posted:It really comes down to the fact that every extreme or wide-scale effort is incompatible with our curret market capitalist system. We would need a literal actual socialist revolution worldwide seizing every means of production and a full scale plan economy based mostly around stopping carbon emissions and a sustainable society.
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Sep 25, 2017 15:34
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blowfish posted:This is ok if you're Norway and have hundreds of surplus rivers all over the place, but most countries still aren't Norway. Maybe the Germans and the French could work together and create the Rhine Rift Valley Reservoir to stabilize production in the heart of the EU. It'd only flood about 15-20 times the area of the Three Gorges Dam, and assuming they could scale up peak production equal to that, it would triple German installed capacity. That's a lot of clean energy, with absolutely no downsides.
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Sep 25, 2017 16:08
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Sent to Steve Jurvetson, who's on Tesla's Board. The opportunity for Tesla in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. This is a chance for Tesla to do good and a long-term business opportunity as well. Electrical rates in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico were around 30˘/kwh prior to the hurricane. I understand that Solar City charges 6.66˘/kwh when they own the panels. To make this work, you would need the Tesla Powerwall too. So perhaps this could come in at 12˘ per kwh. Could be great for all. Replacing unreliable electrical grid with residential and community solar in a timely fashion would be an amazing achievement.
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Sep 26, 2017 06:47
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How can I help while I'm a student? I find myself gravitating toward botany and soil science. They're my favorite classes by far, but I don't know how to translate them into a degree or a field that is actionable.
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Sep 26, 2017 18:44
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RobotDogPolice posted:How can I help while I'm a student? I find myself gravitating toward botany and soil science. They're my favorite classes by far, but I don't know how to translate them into a degree or a field that is actionable. The most obvious career paths would be ag or to become an "Environmental Scientist" specialized in something like environmental compliance. To get a job doing the latter it would help if in addition to your hard science courses you could take at least a basic intro to environmental law and permitting, plus maybe over the summer get certificates in wetland delineation and HAZWOPPER. I won't vouch for whether this course of action counts as "actionable" or not.
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Sep 26, 2017 19:36
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VideoGameVet posted:Sent to Steve Jurvetson, who's on Tesla's Board. And then you get to sell the solar panels again the next time there's a direct hit from a tropical cyclone!
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Sep 26, 2017 19:37
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RobotDogPolice posted:How can I help while I'm a student? I find myself gravitating toward botany and soil science. They're my favorite classes by far, but I don't know how to translate them into a degree or a field that is actionable. While you're a student? Probably most effective is be a good student. Botany and soil science are two areas both hugely impacted by climate change and also important in our responses to climate change. There are many research niches in those fields that let you apply those fields to something related to climate change. Both fields are massively important on the modeling side (describing plants and soils and their changes with our climate), the adaptation side (how do we make sure these plants or soils survive the changes to our climate) all the way to the bioengineering end of the spectrum (can we use plants or soil changes to better mitigate emissions) and a billion other ways. But climate change is the biggest human crisis in history, so even if you decide you prefer Psychology, Physics, Poetry or Polish there will be ways you can apply the knowledge/skills you gained towards the challenges of climate change.
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Sep 26, 2017 19:44
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Good lord, why would any nerd ever think irradiating buried trees is a good idea? I'm phone posting, but on YouTube, you can find a documentary by PBS called "Earth From Space" which takes satellite imagery of things like oxygen and lightning and plankton activity. 75 minutes in, the documentary explains the Amazon rainforest doesn't sequester carbon or help produce oxygen, but it feeds nutrients into the river delta, producing massive amounts of plankton. The plankton dies quickly and falls to the bottom of the ocean. You know, doing what you crazy people want to do but in a non-crazy way. Most forests feed rivers in a similar way. I mean Jesus loving Christ, you all think Earth just has extra forests lying around to toss down mineshafts??
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Sep 26, 2017 21:50
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Billzasilver posted:Good lord, why would any nerd ever think irradiating buried trees is a good idea? No it's called agriculture and forestry. As in, you take lovely already-deforested areas and plant the fastest growing trees/other plants known to man on them, and cut them down after whichever interval maximises biomass output/time. The whole idea is doing literal factory farming, and it obviously shouldn't be implemented on land that still has conservation value.
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Sep 26, 2017 22:03
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RobotDogPolice posted:How can I help while I'm a student? I find myself gravitating toward botany and soil science. They're my favorite classes by far, but I don't know how to translate them into a degree or a field that is actionable. Luckily, there's probably a dozen different paths just related to those classes. Off the to of my head, you could examine soil erosion, soil micronutrients, soil pH, plant hardiness at high temperature and low moisture, foodcrop availability, and varying rates of photosynthesis. You'll follow up these topics depending on if you have a preference for research or community outreach or administration or field work. Paid internships are usually prestigious enough that you can try out what kind of work you enjoy, and hit the ground running with decent job offers after graduation.
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Sep 26, 2017 22:05
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Billzasilver posted:Good lord, why would any nerd ever think irradiating buried trees is a good idea? What is it with these ridiculous loving dipshits who think that anyone anywhere wants to stop all trees from rotting everywhere? It's a fuckin carbon capture idea, not a new way of managing the forests of the world. Do you have any idea how much fuckin land there is on the planet that's already been turned into grazing for cows? Get rid of all the cows and replace them with pine trees that don't get to rot, suddenly you've turned land that produces atmospheric carbon at an astronomical rate into land that sequesters it. Nobody wants to sterilize and imprison all the loving biological matter on the planet you loving idiot.
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Sep 26, 2017 22:13
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I understand what the idea is. It's a hilariously bad carbon capture idea. Without hyperbole, it might be the worst idea I've ever heard. Do you honestly support it in any way?
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Sep 26, 2017 23:29
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Billzasilver posted:I understand what the idea is. It's a hilariously bad carbon capture idea. Without hyperbole, it might be the worst idea I've ever heard. Why are you so certain it is inherently worse than other carbon capture methods? This article makes the case that harvesting wood can increase the sequestration capacity of forests and potentially be cheaper than other CCS options: quote:We have developed a dynamic model for carbon storage in forests and harvested wood as an active CCS strategy. With harvest parameters limited by the need to conserve the forests, applications of the model show that in a 100 year perspective the capacity of harvested wood is 1–1.5 GtC per year, and the total sequestration including storage in living trees is on average more than 2–2.5 Gt carbon per year. This is in fair agreement with the previous estimate of Zeng [12], but it also indicates that the harvest estimate is at the upper edge of what is possible without a serious reduction in total forest areas. Already it is better than any new technology, since the technology to harvest trees then put them where they won't rot and emit greenhouse gasses is a known technology. edit: from the above cited Zeng paper https://cbmjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1 quote:The wood burial technique uses natural tree growth to capture CO2 from the air at nearly no cost, thus making it significantly more economical than other carbon capture methods. For storage, past focus has been on geological formations and in the ocean. Storing carbon by wood burial under soil will not only cut down atmospheric CO2, but also relieve the CO2 burden on the ocean where acidification is of major concern [39]. The traditional carbon sequestration techniques tend to be industrial scale, while the present proposal is a distributed approach. This has both advantages and disadvantages that need to be sorted out. It is likely that many of these methods will be practiced to some degree, but the merits of wood burial make it an attractive option: low tech, low cost, distributed, easy to monitor, safe, reversible, thus a no-regret strategy. On the other hand, forest is a precious resource Mother Nature endowed upon us that serves many critical ecosystem functions and human needs. Care needs to be taken in pursuing such a strategy at large scale. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Sep 26, 2017 |
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Sep 26, 2017 23:38
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Billzasilver posted:I understand what the idea is. It's a hilariously bad carbon capture idea. Without hyperbole, it might be the worst idea I've ever heard. There is no good carbon capture option, the entire idea is based on the fact that we're never going to stop emitting carbon. If you've got the blueprint to a magic machine that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere at such a scale as to be even nearly as efficient, by all means let us know, but I haven't seen anything promising.
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Sep 26, 2017 23:53
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hobbesmaster posted:And then you get to sell the solar panels again the next time there's a direct hit from a tropical cyclone! Or not: Antigua's well-built PV systems sustain impact of hurricane Irma Antigua at only 50 km distance from the eye of the storm and well within the devastating display of natural forces suffered less damage, but was affected seriously as well with sustained winds exceeding at times 275 km/h. This devastating natural disaster has even more underlined the importance of a diligent and reliable approach in terms of planning and installing PV solar systems in hurricane-prone regions. Since the clean energy provider PV Energy has already beforehand adapted the design, mounting and structuring of its solar power racking systems and solar panels to the potential risk of hurricanes almost all solar systems designed and installed by PV Energy sustained the devastation through Irma. Designed to withstand hurricanes of up to the category 4, each of the 55 solar power installations on Antigua, ranging from several kWp to the 3 MWp and 4 MWp utility scale installations at the international airport of Antigua and in the Lavington/Bethesda region with a total of 38,000 panels mounted, have survived hurricane Irma without damages or substantial system failures. One of these PV systems, based on a 50 kWp sun2safe hybrid converter, was even able to generate 25% of its maximum expected performance during the worst hours of the hurricane, thanks to its proprietary MPPT tracking algorithm which is able to optimise the production even under extreme weather conditions. "This experience confirms our commitment to supplying tier one equipment only and adopt proven, reliable and diligently calculated and designed engineering solutions", states PV Energy's Chief Technical Officer Thomas Beindorf. Load test for racking systems, ramming depths for the pillars of the substructures as well as reinforced frames and modules are just a few key factors to be considered for planning and installing robust solar energy plants.
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Sep 27, 2017 00:25
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Billzasilver posted:Jesus loving Christ, you all think Earth just has extra forests lying around to toss down mineshafts?? It does have one thing going for it: Throwing bamboo down mineshafts for carbon credits is very funny. Accretionist fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Sep 27, 2017 |
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Sep 27, 2017 01:49
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I'm just waiting for the next crash to fully extinguish any hope for fixing this problem
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Sep 27, 2017 02:28
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| # ? May 15, 2024 07:41 |
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VideoGameVet posted:Or not: That's loving amazing. Generating at 25% of capacity while in the poo poo of a cat 4 hurricane? 
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Sep 27, 2017 02:59
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