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enraged_camel posted:Not directly related to climate change but still... that dude that owns the recycling business is just rich. Talking about how things aren't going to get recycled anymore. Bullshit. Recycling is such a loving scam. Receiving huge government grants to collect garbage to ship to third world countries. The article doesn't even bother to describe why China is banning the recycling in the first place. It's because China is starting to become more green, and that poo poo we'd dump on them was barely being "recycled". Just a bunch of garbage contaminated plastics. Useless. Can't wait till Africa becomes the new leader in recycled plastics. You already have parasitic fuckshit second hand stores like Value Village selling their garbage to developing countries, completely saturating their local economies with poo poo third hand clothing. Recycling in a capitalist economy is already such a loving joke. And now that China is banning their imports, it'll expose how bad the industry really is.
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Dec 10, 2017 13:58
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I get poo poo on super hard whenever I explain why recycling is a complete lie and how most of it is just burned, so have fun with that post. PP: We're seeing the same on this side of the Rockies. We've been fluctuating between -2 at night and +11 during the day for weeks here, punctuated by an occasional outflow that will drop temps massively. We got hit by a day of -18 in the mountains just after Halloween and that was alarming. Huge 2m snowfall dumps which are melting out a week later.
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Dec 10, 2017 17:00
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Rime posted:I get poo poo on super hard whenever I explain why recycling is a complete lie and how most of it is just burned, so have fun with that post. My understanding is that recycling metal is always worth it, glass almost always worth it, but plastics basically never.
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Dec 10, 2017 17:25
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Aluminum is one of very few that people still go out of the way to recycle, while paper-based containers will at least degrade over time. Glass may be recycled, but it would be better if we reused it to refill products instead of buying disposable containers everywhere. It lasts for loving ever, if it ain't recycled - like a million years. So, if you say buy a drink at a store, opt for aluminum cans and then recycle it over plastic or glass. If you buy soft drinks, get the 12/24 pack cans and recycle those instead of the plastic bottles; their cardboard boxes degrade rather quickly. 'Waxed' cartons (milk/juice) will degrade quickly as well, if they are not recycled, but they contain plastic instead of wax these days. Avoid plastic and you avoid a lot of waste, but pretty much everything comes in plastic these days, as it's a cheap and effective barrier. Evil_Greven fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Dec 10, 2017 |
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Dec 10, 2017 18:37
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Evil_Greven posted:Avoid plastic and you avoid a lot of waste, but pretty much everything comes in plastic these days, as it's a cheap and effective barrier. The first people/creatures to evolve to eat plastic like bacteria evolved to eat wood will live like kings. Hint, it won't be us. We're doomed to choke on our own waste materials. What's the over/under on CO2 vs Plastics?
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Dec 10, 2017 22:17
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so in regards to germanies shift back to coal. Once more, better, some storage technologies become available they can continue their slide to full renewables?
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Dec 10, 2017 23:32
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Rime posted:I get poo poo on super hard whenever I explain why recycling is a complete lie and how most of it is just burned, so have fun with that post. Everyone loves recycling because it means they don't have to think about reducing or reusing - i.e., they only care about their comfortable way of life and anything that means they can continue living that unsustainable lie with absolute minimal effort and assuage that guilt will be latched onto and viciously defended. Personally I still live the wasteful first world life, I just feel guilty doing it.
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Dec 11, 2017 02:54
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dbukalski posted:so in regards to germanies shift back to coal. Once more, better, some storage technologies become available they can continue their slide to full renewables? You'd need some sort of breakthrough on the storage front to accomplish that. Batteries are woefully inefficient and current renewable operations rely on coal or natural gas to supply baseload power. There's some interest in the use of molten salts for storage in solar thermal, but thermal is a tiny part of the market compared to the far more popular and economical solar PV and (especially) wind, which cannot use this storage method. Essentially - it's doubtful.
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Dec 11, 2017 15:32
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Thug Lessons posted:You'd need some sort of breakthrough on the storage front to accomplish that. Batteries are woefully inefficient and current renewable operations rely on coal or natural gas to supply baseload power. There's some interest in the use of molten salts for storage in solar thermal, but thermal is a tiny part of the market compared to the far more popular and economical solar PV and (especially) wind, which cannot use this storage method. Essentially - it's doubtful. The Charge/Discharge efficiency with LiOn batteries is well over 90%.
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Dec 11, 2017 17:56
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VideoGameVet posted:The Charge/Discharge efficiency with LiOn batteries is well over 90%. I mean they're woefully insufficient as a source of grid electricity. They have EROI of around 3-4, making them essentially uneconomical. If there's a big breakthrough maybe they can work but in practice they're not even close and the solution for renewables' indeterminacy is reliance on coal and gas. Thug Lessons fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Dec 11, 2017 |
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Dec 11, 2017 21:17
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Ganson posted:The first people/creatures to evolve to eat plastic like bacteria evolved to eat wood will live like kings. Plastics are much much more chemically diverse than wood though, so there won't be one golden set of enzymes to degrade all plastics. And microorganisms already degrade many man made plastics, but chemical and design properties that make plastics useful and environmentally resistant also make them hard to degrade by microorganisms without pretreatment. An example of this is that plastic objects are often hard, solid, relatively chemically inert and with a very smooth surface, properties which all make microbial degradation much less efficient. With current level of biotechnology humans could definitely help to make the process much more efficient. Though I highly doubt there is much money in this specific application as one would currently never be allowed to create and spread a biologically competitive custom tailored GMO specifically targeting a broad range of common plastics.
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Dec 11, 2017 22:15
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Thug Lessons posted:You'd need some sort of breakthrough on the storage front to accomplish that. Batteries are woefully inefficient and current renewable operations rely on coal or natural gas to supply baseload power. There's some interest in the use of molten salts for storage in solar thermal, but thermal is a tiny part of the market compared to the far more popular and economical solar PV and (especially) wind, which cannot use this storage method. Essentially - it's doubtful. is there something stopping the Germans using pumped hydro? seems like it gets pretty wet over there.
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Dec 11, 2017 22:18
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Salted_Pork posted:is there something stopping the Germans using pumped hydro? seems like it gets pretty wet over there. I would guess bad compatibility with a decentralized power generation coupled with non ideal geography simply making it a bit too costly for them. But I also know little about the specifics regarding Germany's green power generation scheme.
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Dec 11, 2017 22:35
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VideoGameVet posted:The Charge/Discharge efficiency with LiOn batteries is well over 90%. Like Thug Lessons pointed out this is an almost comically in-efficient solution and even if we ignore the economic arguments there is nothing sustainable about manufacturing batteries at the scale that would be required even for just Germany's needs.
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Dec 11, 2017 23:38
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MiddleOne posted:Like Thug Lessons pointed out this is an almost comically in-efficient solution and even if we ignore the economic arguments there is nothing sustainable about manufacturing batteries at the scale that would be required even for just Germany's needs. Except EROI isn't really a sensible measure of efficiency for batteries. Batteries don't generate energy so sure, they'll be net consumers of energy over their lifetime. The point is that batteries, and all storage, let us generate electricity when we can and use it when we need it. We don't need new battery technology to make battery assisted high renewable penetration grids work, we need new battery technology to make battery assisted high renewable penetration grids cheaper than natural-gas assisted high renewable penetration grids with a cost of carbon emitted at 0. This is a regulatory issue not a technology one.
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Dec 11, 2017 23:47
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I mean both you don't need lithium ion batteries for power storage on a grid scale and EROI is a loving weird metric for measuring a property of batteries.
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Dec 11, 2017 23:58
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It's not that you should expect an EROI from batteries, but that the reliance on batteries to offset intermittancy pushes the full renewables system from a relatively efficient means of power generation to one that's hopelessly uneconomical.
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Dec 12, 2017 04:06
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There are other ways to store energy beyond batteries. Large-scale solutions include molten salt and dams. Flywheels are an interesting way of storing energy, as they could be used at a distributed level.
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Dec 12, 2017 05:55
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Thug Lessons posted:I mean they're woefully insufficient as a source of grid electricity. They have EROI of around 3-4, making them essentially uneconomical. If there's a big breakthrough maybe they can work but in practice they're not even close and the solution for renewables' indeterminacy is reliance on coal and gas. energy return on investment? The ratio of lifetime energy compared to the energy to produce the 'source'. Batteries don't produce energy. Wind Turbines, Solar Panels do. The quoted EROI numbers for solar (4? Seriously??) are to be technical, rubbish. Maybe in 1980 they were correct. Things have improved/. Looking at the bulk of the research, it’s more likely that solar panels, over their lifetime, generate 10-15 times as much energy as it takes to produce them and their associated hardware. That number may be as high as 25. And it’s rising over time. Factoring in the batteries is complex. If you had a better grid, with wind deployed offshore and in the belt from Canada to Texas, you would need less storage. And for larger projects, there are cheaper storage systems.
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Dec 12, 2017 06:49
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Evil_Greven posted:There are other ways to store energy beyond batteries.
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Dec 12, 2017 06:58
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People can dispute it but barring a breakthrough we're going to keep using coal and natural gas to make up for renewable intermittency because current battery technology doesn't cut it. That's now it's done. Molten salt is something that works with solar thermal, which is a tiny market compared to solar PV, which is in turn a tiny market compared to wind.
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Dec 12, 2017 07:27
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I really don't see any future for clean energy outside of hydro being left as it is for the most part, wind, solar, and geothermal taking over in all parts of the world in which they are plausible, and nuclear being used as a stopgap in areas where other sources are not accessible. Batteries simply are not going to be good enough to make renewables plausible in areas where they perform poorly any time soon. People keep praying to their ridiculous false gods of unstoppable acceleration of technological advancement in the hope that it's going to save us all, but the truth of the matter is that solar power and batteries are probably not going to meet the standards we need any time soon. Not that any of that is relevant in the real world where politics are taken into account, nobody's ever going to stop fossil fuels in time for it to make a difference anyways.
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Dec 12, 2017 07:36
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ChairMaster posted:I really don't see any future for clean energy outside of hydro being left as it is for the most part, wind, solar, and geothermal taking over in all parts of the world in which they are plausible, and nuclear being used as a stopgap in areas where other sources are not accessible. Batteries simply are not going to be good enough to make renewables plausible in areas where they perform poorly any time soon. People keep praying to their ridiculous false gods of unstoppable acceleration of technological advancement in the hope that it's going to save us all, but the truth of the matter is that solar power and batteries are probably not going to meet the standards we need any time soon. What? I'm as much of a nihilist as anyone but this is hogwash. Renewables in all markets are accelerating far past linear and far faster than expected. The areas where we're failing miserably are more in the Land Use category.
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Dec 12, 2017 08:01
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Zudgemud posted:Plastics are much much more chemically diverse than wood though, so there won't be one golden set of enzymes to degrade all plastics. And microorganisms already degrade many man made plastics, but chemical and design properties that make plastics useful and environmentally resistant also make them hard to degrade by microorganisms without pretreatment. An example of this is that plastic objects are often hard, solid, relatively chemically inert and with a very smooth surface, properties which all make microbial degradation much less efficient. And at that point modern society is kinda hosed because the same bacteria will eat most of our water pipes, medical devices, food storage, etc etc.
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Dec 12, 2017 08:08
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We are going to burn literally every last pound of coal and every single barrel of oil in the Earth and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.
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Dec 12, 2017 08:11
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Zudgemud posted:I would guess bad compatibility with a decentralized power generation coupled with non ideal geography simply making it a bit too costly for them. But I also know little about the specifics regarding Germany's green power generation scheme. We actually tried to build a new generation of large-ish hydro dams but it turned out that 1) if you're currently really inefficient at building big infrastructure projects in general (they tend to blow their budget severalfold and get finished years behind schedule) then that'll also be true for dams and 2) dams are NIMBY and environmentalist protestor bait, so everyone sort of gave up trying to build more.
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Dec 12, 2017 10:04
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Stereotype posted:We are going to burn literally every last pound of coal and every single barrel of oil in the Earth and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. We literally won't because there's coal and oil where it would take more energy to get them than you could get out of them. Easily accessible coal and oil, sure
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Dec 12, 2017 12:49
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Stereotype posted:We are going to burn literally every last pound of coal and every single barrel of oil in the Earth and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. Nah the state is very good at deploying violence to stop people from doing things. You just need to take over the state.
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Dec 12, 2017 13:01
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recently I've been hearing about using  science  to convert CO2 to plasma as a way to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. what are the unmentioned downsides to this method, assuming that the research checks out (inefficient to scale up/insane power reqs/plasma has xyz side effects/...)
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Dec 12, 2017 13:38
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double nine posted:recently I've been hearing about using  Oookay, let's do some quick googling...alright, I found a research writeup from 2015 that seems to be what you're describing: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep18436 In this experiment, they use microwaves to create an exotic CO2 torch. If this is the technology you've been hearing about, I have no idea how you feasibly turn that into a carbon capture mechanism. As the paper discusses, not only is the concentration of your target CO2 in the atmosphere relatively low, but in order to guarantee you're breaking up most of the carbon dioxide in your target zone you need to generate a temperature roughly equivalent to the temperature of the surface of the sun, which then creates a pretty halo effect around your torch caused by most of the carbon monoxide generated re-attaching to most of the lone oxygen atoms created, with some amount of O2 and C2 remaining stable after the reaction. I'm not entirely up on the math of what proportion of each of those you get, but I'm thinking that given the EXTREME amount of energy input required in order to break up very small amounts of CO2, I uh, I kind of doubt that there's any way to scale up that up to anything approaching usable, while remaining at least carbon neutral, in the timeframe required to prevent catastrophe. It really is true what keeps being said in the thread; people keep looking for carbon capture magic bullets, and it's really not working.
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Dec 12, 2017 15:10
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from the stuff I've read the spawn is mostly from a university of antwerp paper (regurgitated in belgian media): https://www.uantwerpen.be/popup/nieuwsonderdeel.aspx?newsitem_id=3050&c=LANDP305&n=106844 abstract: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/cs/c6cs00066e#!divAbstract I'm not holding much stock in it but you never know, hence my question.
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Dec 12, 2017 15:21
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It is a neat and cool science/engineering technique that I had not heard of before. It is also fairly new and has a lot of reasons that it is probably not a feasible carbon recapture mechanism even if it didn't likely need at least a couple of decades of development in order to shine, like the fact that it still needs a fairly high amount of energy input and still isn't especially efficient at capturing carbon. I'm sorry if I came across as dismissive, my last comment wasn't meant to be directed at you specifically. It's just sort of a running theme that people are desperate for some kind of reliable carbon capture science so that we never have to change or improve or challenge disposable culture or late-stage-capitalism or global politics at all, but every approach ends up being a bust. Global warming is a reality, and can only be partially mitigated (if at all) by radical changes to human civilization that there just isn't much political will to implement at this moment.
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Dec 12, 2017 15:35
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Relying on "civilizational changes" is a much a fantasy as relying on technological breakthroughs. Probably moreso.
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Dec 12, 2017 15:45
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It's taken for granted that most "miracle" drugs or cancer breakthroughs breathlessly reported in the media usually don't pan out due to the initial results based on statistically small samples or unforeseen difficulties moving from lab testing to actual implementation. This is when they're not outright scams ie the basis of every nutrition-oriented MLM ever. These stories persist because disease (esp cancer) is a constant threat to our happiness and there's a lot of public interest in a miracle cure or treatment that will just make it go away. As the effects of climate change become more obvious the number of reports carbon capture breakthroughs will likely increase for similar reasons. The point is to be skeptical of any approach that hasn't at least been demonstrated on a reasonably large scale. Also here's a relevant quote from the excellent New Yorker article on carbon capture posted here recently: The New Yorker posted:This is where A.D.M. came in; the plant converts corn into ethanol, and one of the by-products of this process is almost pure CO2. In a later stage of the project, during the Obama Administration, a million tons of carbon dioxide from the plant were pumped underground. Rigorous monitoring has shown that, so far, the CO2 has stayed put. Note that these are scientists talking about their own work and a certain degree of optimism about the future significance of your results is necessary to survive in research. Personally I question whether large-scale underground CO2 storage is really effective on long time-scales and won't have unintended consequences. It's also gross to endorse anything that aligns with the interests of the corn-lobby. However the basic point is large-scale carbon capture is probably feasible right now (if very expensive), and any further breakthrough in carbon capture technology simply reduces the cost. If this is true then the decision to not implement the system on a wide-scale is a political decision rather than one dictated by technological constraints. The political decision amounts to whether the current or future generations pay for the cost of wide-scale fossil fuel usage, and the current consensus is pretty clear. edit: as always it should be mentioned that just not putting any CO2 into the air is cheaper than any carbon-capture tech, it's clear how that's going. Nocturtle fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Dec 12, 2017 |
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Dec 12, 2017 15:57
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The science of CCS is sound. It may not stand up over extremely long time scales, but you're talking about thousands of years. We need less CO2 in the atmosphere right now. That said I'm not that optimistic on it, because neither CCS or bioenergy seem to have caught on commercially. I would actually be more worried on the bioenergy front because burning biomass to create heat is a terrible method of power generation and isn't likely to compete with any of the other sources.
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Dec 12, 2017 16:14
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I'm currently paying about $0.14/kWh in San Diego ... much to deal with the "too cheap to meter" muck up at SONGS. Meanwhile in Mexico the latest solar plant is setting their rate at $0.018 or so.
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Dec 12, 2017 17:07
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Nocturtle posted:It's taken for granted that most "miracle" drugs or cancer breakthroughs breathlessly reported in the media usually don't pan out due to the initial results based on statistically small samples or unforeseen difficulties moving from lab testing to actual implementation. People love the "medicine is fake' meme, but a lot of the drug breakthroughs you hear about totally do come out. There is tons of types of cancer that have gone from guaranteed death to 51+% survival rate. There is tons of types of cancer now where if you get it you are more likely to survive than die. Cancer treatment still sucks and having a high death rate sucks but the number of cancers and stuff that went from no real treatment to real treatable disease is really giant. Like there is absolutely overhyped medical news that just is nothing. But people overplay that card to try and pretend like all medicine is fake. All medical research is fake. Doctors lie all the time and they just want to pump autism in your kids and hype up fake breakthroughs that aren't even real.
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Dec 12, 2017 17:26
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A lot of that is probably just the old belief that there is a cure for cancer. But cancer, or uncontrolled cell replication, is not a single disease. It is like finding a single fix for "my car engine will not crank when I try to start it." But the whole war on cancer basically assumes there is a single fix for uncontrolled cell replication.
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Dec 12, 2017 20:39
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golden bubble posted:A lot of that is probably just the old belief that there is a cure for cancer. But cancer, or uncontrolled cell replication, is not a single disease. It is like finding a single fix for "my car engine will not crank when I try to start it." But the whole war on cancer basically assumes there is a single fix for uncontrolled cell replication. From what I understand that's more of a 'public misconception', medical professionals know that. Or at least the medical researchers I know are aware of that.
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Dec 12, 2017 20:51
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Ganson posted:The first people/creatures to evolve to eat plastic like bacteria evolved to eat wood will live like kings. There are already bacteria who can eat plastics, just not a whole lot right now -until very recently, there wasn't much in terms food around for them to eat, after all. I think there are plans to breed them artificially, to get rid of plastics the way nature intended, but don't quote me on that, my knowledge about this matter stems from some old, half-remembered science articles.
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Dec 12, 2017 21:06
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