Climate Change: Post up your Phd. dissertation, coward

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ChairMaster: Aug 22, 2009; by R. Guyovich

I mean if they can get enough power to places that don't get a lot of sun or wind then that'd be great, but it seems unlikely to me. Solar and wind are definitely preferable, and if they end up being good enough to work worldwide then nuclear wouldn't be necessary, but I've not seen much that shows that the current demand can be covered cleanly without nuclear, much less the rising demand of the future.

If anyone's got a link to a study or something i'd be interested to read it.

# ? Apr 11, 2018 21:32

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# ? May 15, 2024 08:04

call to action: Jun 10, 2016; by FactsAreUseless

Of course, why would anyone do this poo poo? Even if it were implemented in the US (lol), it would just put us at a competitive disadvantage compared to other countries that didn't.

# ? Apr 11, 2018 21:55

ChairMaster: Aug 22, 2009; by R. Guyovich

call to action posted:

Of course, why would anyone do this poo poo? Even if it were implemented in the US (lol), it would just put us at a competitive disadvantage compared to other countries that didn't.

Because capitalism and greed are illegal now and we'll nuke you if you disagree. Everyone will be forcibly pulled into the future by the might of the nuclear powers putting their petty bullshit behind them and instituting mandatory quality of life minimums and zero tolerance for fossil fuel burning by 2030. The wealthy nations will finally decide to make a sacrifice for the good of the world and construct clean energy across the globe for the enrichment of all humanity.

Or maybe nobody will care and we'll all die instead, I dunno. Who cares.

# ? Apr 11, 2018 22:01

StabbinHobo: Oct 18, 2002; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

call to action posted:

Environmentalists functionally don't exist on the political stage in the US, to such an extent where when people blame 'greens' in the US for the lack of nuclear, I suspect that they're not American at all.

its not that they're environmentalists, its just the strongest vein in the nimby impulse. like you see what suburban white ladies do about the thought of low income housing being built within a ten minute drive of where they live. nuclear is that x10.

# ? Apr 11, 2018 22:59

Arglebargle III: Feb 21, 2006

China Mieville, New Weird author and socialist politician posted:

The Limits of Utopia
BY CHINA MI�VILLE

Dystopias infect official reports.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) demands a shift in our emissions by a third to avoid utter disaster. KPMG, in the leaden chattiness of corporate powerpoint-ese, sees the same horizon. NASA part-funds a report warning that systemic civilizational collapse �is difficult to avoid.�

We may quibble with the models, but not that the end of everything is right out there, for everyone to discuss.

The stench and blare of poisoned cities, lugubrious underground bunkers, ash landscapes... Worseness is the bad conscience of betterness, dystopias rebukes integral to the utopian tradition. We hanker and warn, our best dreams and our worst standing together against our waking.

gently caress this up, and it�s a desiccated, flooded, cold, hot, dead Earth. Get it right? There are lifetimes-worth of pre-dreams of New Edens, from le Guin and Piercy and innumerable others, going right back, visions of what, nearly two millennia ago, the Church Father Lactantius, in The Divine Institutes, called the �Renewed World�.

[T]he earth will open its fruitfulness, and bring forth the most abundant fruits of its own accord; the rocky mountains shall drop with honey; streams of wine shall run down, and rivers flow with milk; in short, the world itself shall rejoice, and all nature exult, being rescued and set free from the dominion of evil and impiety, and guilt and error.
And it�s never only the world that�s in question: for Lactantius, as for all the best utopias, it�s humanity too. The world will rejoice because we at last will be capable of inhabiting it, free from the evil and impiety and guilt and error with which we�ve excoriated it. The relationship between humanity and what we�d now call the environment will be healed.
But so rich a lineage has hardly stopped countless environmentalisms from failing, not merely to change the world, but to change the agenda about changing the world.

We who want another, better Earth are understandably proud to keep alternatives alive in this, an epoch that punishes thoughts of change. We need utopias. That�s almost a given in activism. If an alternative to this world were inconceivable, how could we change it?

But utopia has its limits: utopia can be toxic.

What price hopelessness, indeed? But what price hope?

-

In 1985 the city government announced that it would locate a trash incinerator in South Central Los Angeles, a year after California Waste Management paid half a million tax-payers� dollars to the consultancy firm Cerrell Associates for advice on locating such controversial toxic facilities. The Cerrell Report is a how-to, a checklist outlining the qualities of the ��least resistant� personality profile�. Target the less educated, it advises. The elderly. �Middle and higher-socioeconomic strata neighborhoods�, it says, �should not fall at least within the one-mile and five-mile radii of the proposed site.�

Target the poor.

That this is the strategy is unsurprising: that they admit it raises eyebrows. �You know,� one wants to whisper, �that we can hear you?�

In fact the local community did resist, and successfully. But what are sometimes called the Big Ten green groups � The Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the National Resources Defense Council, the Wilderness Society, and others � refused the request to join the campaign. Because, they said, it was not an environmental, but a �community health� issue.

The fallacies of Big Green. Start with heuristics like rural versus urban, nature versus the social, and in the face of oppressive power you easily become complicit, or worse, in environmental injustice, in racism. Such simplistic urbophobic utopianism can unite the most nostalgic conservative, seeking solace in a national park with the most extropian post-hippy touting an eco-start-up.

For Lactantius, it was God who would heal a broken nature. This is a more secular age � sort of. But not everyone leaves such messianism aside: some incorporate it into a new, and newly vacuous, totality.

In 1968, Stewart Brand opened the first Whole Earth Catalogue with an image of the Blue Planet, Spaceship Earth, a survival pod in which we mutually cuddle. Beside it the text read, �We are as gods and might as well get good at it.�

Here, says the image, is a beautiful Gaian totality. Here, say the words, is the ecological subject: �We�. Which obviously leaves unanswered, in the famous punchline to the blistering, uneasy joke, Tonto�s question to the Lone Ranger: �Who is �we�?�

Faced with the scale of what�s coming, there�s a common and baleful propriety, a self-shackling green politeness. �Anything�, the argument goes, �is better than nothing.� Hence solutions to tempt business, and the pleading for ecologically-inflected economic rationality. Capitalism, we are told by Jonathan Porritt, an eminent British environmentalist, is the only game in town.

And businesses do adapt, according to their priorities. Whatever the barking of their pet deniers, the oil companies all have Climate Change Divisions � less to fight that change than to plan for profit during it. Companies extend into newly monetised territories. Thus the brief biofuels boom, and that supposed solution to the planet�s problems drives rapid deforestation and food riots, before the industry and market tanks. The invisible hand is supposed to clean up its own mess, with Emissions Trading Schemes and offsetting. Opportunities and incentives for shady deals and inflated baseline estimates increase, as, relentlessly, do the emissions. EU carbon bonds remain junk. New financial instruments proliferate: weather derivatives that make climate chaos itself profitable. What are called �catastrophe bonds� change hands in vast quantities, because one of the minor casualties of capitalism is shame.

Citizens fret about their own refuse, which we should, absolutely, minimise. But in the UK only ten percent of waste is down to households. Recall that the very concept of litter was an invention of the American packaging industry, in 1953, in response to a local ban on disposable bottles. The caul of atomised and privatised guilt under which we�re encouraged to labour is a quite deliberate act of misdirection.

At a grander scale, the most conciliatory green organizations obfuscate the nexus of ecological degradation, capitalism and imperialism in which they�re caught up. In 2013 the US Environmental Protection Agency presented its National Climate Leadership Award, for �tackling the challenge of climate change with practical, common-sense, and cost-saving solutions�, to Raytheon.

It isn�t clear whether Raytheon�s drones will be embossed with the award�s symbol, so their commitment to sustainability can flash like a proud goldfish fin as they rain death on Afghan villages.

In the service of profit, even husbanding trees supposedly to counteract emissions can be violence. Far worse than merely a failure, UN-backed emission-reduction forest offsetting schemes � known as REDD � legitimate monocultures and seize land, in the name of the planet, all so corporations can continue to pollute. In Uganda, 22,000 farmers are evicted for the UN-Accredited New Forests Company plans. In Kenya, Ogiek people are threatened with violent expulsion from the Mau Forest, in a project blessed by the UN. And in case we need an unsubtle metaphor, the Guaraquecaba Climate Action Project in Brazil, bankrolled by Chevron, General Motors and American Electric Power, locks the Guarani people away from their own forest, and to do so it employs armed guards called �Forca Verde� � Green Force.

This is environmentalism as dispossession, what the Indigenous Environmental Network calls Carbon Colonialism.

And stocks of heavy industry go up. The recent IPCC report left financial markets unmoved: the value such markets continue to grant oil, coal and gas reserves ignores the international targets according to which the bulk of such reserves not only are still in the earth, but mustremain so. This carbon bubble declaims that the choice is climate catastrophe or another financial one.

Or, of course, both.

Forget any spurious human totality: there is a very real, dangerous, other modern totality in commanding place, one with which too much environmentalism has failed to wrestle. As Jason Moore puts it, �Wall Street is a way of organizing Nature.�

The very term �Anthropocene�, which gives with one hand, insisting on human drivers of ecological shift, misleads with its implied �We�. After all, whether in the deforestation of what�s now Britain, the extinction of the megafauna in North America, or any of countless other examples, Homo sapiens, anthropos, has always fed back into its �cene, the ecology of which it is constituent, changing the world. Nor was what altered to make these previously relatively local effects planetary and epochal, warranting a new geochronological term, the birth (as if, in too many accounts, by some miracle) of heavy industry, but a shift in the political economy by which it and we are organised, an accelerating cycle of profit and accumulation.

Which is why Moore, among others, insists that this epoch of potential catastrophe is not the �Anthropocene�, but the �Capitalocene�.

Utopias are necessary. But not only are they insufficient: they can, in some iterations, be part of the ideology of the system, the bad totality that organises us, warms the skies, and condemns millions to peonage on garbage scree.

The utopia of togetherness is a lie. Environmental justice means acknowledging that there is no whole earth, no �we�, without a �them�. That we are not all in this together.

Which means fighting the fact that fines for toxic spills in predominantly white areas are five times what they are in minority ones. It means not only providing livings for people who survive by sifting through rejectamenta in toxic dumps but squaring up against the imperialism of garbage that put them there, against trash neoliberalism by which poor countries compete to become repositories of filth.

And it means standing directly against military power and violence. Three times as many land-rights and environmental activists were murdered in 2012 than a decade before. Environmental justice means facing down Shell not only for turning Nigeria�s Ogoniland into a hallucinatory sump, a landscape of petrochemical Ragnarok, but for arming the Nigerian state for years, during and after the rule of Sani Abacha.

Arms trading, dictatorships and murder are environmental politics.

Those punching down rely not on the quiescence, but on the weakness of those against whom they fight. The Cerrell Report is clear: �All socioeconomic groupings tend to resent the nearby siting of major facilities, but the middle and upper-socioeconomic strata possess better resources to effectuate their opposition.�

The poor should be targeted, in other words, not because they will not fight, but because, being poor, they will not win. The struggle for environmental justice is the struggle to prove that wrong.

-

So we start with the non-totality of the �we�. From there not only can we see the task but we can return to our utopias, to better honor the best of them.

Those rivers of milk and wine can stop being surplus. There�s nothing foolish about such yearnings: they are glimmerings in eyes set on human freedom, a leap from necessity. Far from being merely outlandish, these are abruptly aspects of a grounded utopia incorporating political economy, a yearning on behalf of those who strive without power. In the medieval peasant utopia Cockaigne it rains cheese. Charles Fourier imagined the seas turned to lemonade. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. These are dreams of sustenance out of reach of the dreamers, of the reduction of labour, of a world that will let exhausted humanity rest.

We can dispense with the most banal critiques of utopia. That it is unconvincing as a blueprint, as if that is what it should ever be. That it is drab, boring, faceless and colourless and always the same. The smear that the visionary aspiration for better things always makes things worse. These canards serve stasis.

There are sharper criticisms to be made, for the sake of our utopias themselves and of the day-to-day interventions without which they risk being � and this, itself, is one of those criticisms � valves to release pressure.

Utopia, for one thing, has never been the preserve of those who cleave to liberation. Settlers and expropriators have for centuries asserted their good environmental sense against the laziness of feckless natives, in realizing the potential of land spuriously designated empty, of making so-called deserts so-called bloom. Ecotopia has justified settlement and empire since long before the UN�s REDD schemes. It has justified murder.

There is a vision of the world as a garden, under threat. Choked with toxic growth. Gardening as war. And the task being one of �ruthlessly eliminating the weeds that would deprive the better plants of nutrition, the air, light, sun.�

Here the better plants are Aryans. The weeds are Jews.

SS-Obergruppenfuhrer and Reichsminister of Agriculture in the Third Reich, Walther Darr� coagulated soil science, nostalgia, pagan kitsch, imperialism, agrarian mystique and race hate in a vision of green renewal and earth stewardship predicated on genocide. He was the most powerful theorist of Blut und Boden, �Blood and Soil�, a Nazi ecotopia of organic farmlands and restocked Nordic forests, protected by the pure-blooded peasant-soldier.

The tree may not have grown as Darr� hoped, but its roots didn�t die. A whole variety of fascist groups across the world still proclaim their fidelity to ecological renewal, green world, and agitate ostentatiously against climate change, pollution and despoliation, declaring against those poisons in the service of another, the logic of race.

Of course reactionary apologists for Big Pollute routinely slander ecological activists as fascists. That doesn�t mean those committed to such activism should not be ruthless in ferreting out any real overlaps: very much the opposite.

Aspects of eliminationist bad utopia can be found much more widely than in the self-conscious Far Right. Swathes of ecological thinking are caught up with a nebulous, sentimentalised spiritualist utopia, what the ecofeminist Chaia Heller calls �Eco-la-la�. Crossbred with crude Malthusianism, in the combative variant called Deep Ecology, the tweeness of that vision can morph into brutality, according to which the problem is overpopulation, humanity itself. At its most cheerfully eccentric lies the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, advocating an end to breeding: at the most vicious are the pronouncements of David Foreman of Earth First!, faced with the Ethiopian famine of 1984: �[T]he worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give aid � the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let the people there just starve�.

This is an ecological utopia of mass death. That we could also call an apocalypse.

Apocalypse and utopia: the end of everything, and the horizon of hope. Far from antipodes, these two have always been inextricable. Sometimes, as in Lactantius, the imagined relationship is chronological, even of cause and effect. The one, the apocalypse, the end-times rending of the veil, paves the way for the other, the time beyond, the new beginning.

Something has happened: now they are more intimately imbricated than ever. �Today,� the bleak and sinister philosopher Emile Cioran announces, �reconciled with the terrible, we are seeing a contamination of utopia by apocalypse ... The two genres ... which once seemed so dissimilar to us, interpenetrate, rub off on each other, to form a third�. Such reconciliation with the terrible, such interpenetration, is vivid in these Deep Ecological hankerings for a world slashed and burned of humans. The scourging has become the dream.

This is not quite a dystopia: it�s a third form � apocatopia, utopalypse � and it�s all around us. We�re surrounded by a culture of ruination, dreams of falling cities, a peopleless world where animals explore. We know the clich�s. Vines reclaim Wall Street as if it belongs to them, rather than the other way round; trash vastness, dunes of garbage; the remains of some great just-recognizable bridge now broken to jut, a portentous diving board, into the void. Etcetera.

It�s as if we still hanker to see something better and beyond the rubble, but lack the strength. Or as if there�s a concerted effort to assert the �We� again, though negatively � �We� are the problem, and thus this We-lessness a sublime solution. The melancholy is disingenuous. There�s enthusiasm, a disavowed investment in these supposed warnings, these catastrophes. The apocalypse-mongers fool no one. Since long before Shelley imagined the day when �Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh�, these have been scenes of beauty.

We�ve all scrolled slack-mouthed through images of the Chernobyl zone, of Japan�s deserted Gunkanjima island, of the ruins of Detroit, through clickbait lists of Top Ten Most Awesomely Creepy Abandoned Places. This shouldn�t occasion guilt. Our horror at the tragedies and crimes behind some such images is real: it coexists with, rather than effaces, our gasp of awe. We don�t choose what catches our breath. Nor do the images that enthrall us read off reductively to particular politics. But certainly the amoral beauty of our apocatopias can dovetail with something brutal and malefic, an eliminationist disgust.

We can�t not read such camply symptomatic cultural matter diagnostically. What else can we do with the deluge of films of deluge, the piling up, like debris under Benjamin�s angel of history, of texts about the piling up of debris?

Symptoms morph with the world. One swallow, of however high a budget, does not a summer make, but one doesn�t have to be a �i�ek to diagnose a cultural shift when, in Guillermo Del Toro�s recent Pacific Rim, Idris Elba bellows, �Today we are cancelling the apocalypse.� Perhaps we�ve had our fill of the end, and with this line we usher in a different kind of aftermath � the apocalypse that fails. We�re back, with muscular new hope.

A similar shift is visible in the rise of geoengineering, ideas once pulp fiction and the ruminations of eccentrics. Now, planet-scale plans to spray acid into the stratosphere to become mirrored molecules to reflect radiation, to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, to bring up benthic waters to cool the oceans, are written up by Nobel laureates, discussed in the New Yorker and the MIT Technology Review. A new hope, a new can-do, the return of human agency, sleeves rolled up, fixing the problem. With Science.

This planet-hacking, however, is utterly speculative, controversial, and � according to recent work at Germany�s Helmholtz Centre � by the most generous possible projections thoroughly inadequate to halt climate chaos. It is, by any reasonable standards, absurd that such plans seem more rational than enacting the social measures to slash emissions that are entirely possible right now, but which would necessitate a transformation of our political system.

It�s a left clich� to prounounce that these days it�s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism: Andreas Malm points out that with the trope of geoengineering, it�s easier to imagine the deliberate transformation of the entire planet than of our political economy. What looks at first like a new Prometheanism is rather capitulation, surrender to the status quo. Utopia is here exoneration of entrenched power, the red lines of which are not to be crossed.

What price hope indeed?

-

Seventy percent of the staff at the mothballed Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India, had been docked pay for refusing to break safety routines. Staffing levels were inadequate, readings taken half as often as intended. None of the six safety systems worked as it should, if at all. The trade union had protested, and been ignored.

On 3 December 1984, twenty-seven tonnes of methyl isocyanate spewed from the plant. Between 8,000 and 10,000 people died that night. 25,000 have died since. Half a million were injured, around 70,000 permanently and hideously. The rate of birth defects in the area is vastly high. The groundwater still shows toxins massively above safe levels.

Initially, the Indian government demanded $3.3 billion in compensation, which Union Carbide spent $50 million fighting. At last, in 1989, the company settled out of court for $470 million, 15 percent of that initial sum. The survivors received, as lifetime compensation, between $300 and $500 each. In the words of Kathy Hunt, Dow-Carbide�s public affairs officer, in 2002, �$500 is plenty good for an Indian.�

Why rehearse these terrible, familiar facts? Not only because, as is well known, Warren Anderson, Carbide�s ex-CEO, has never been extradited to face Indian justice, despite an arrest warrant being issued. Nor because Carbide, and Dow Chemicals, which bought it in 2001, deny all responsibility, and refuse to clean the area or to respond to Indian court summonses. There is another reason.

In 1989, the Wall Street Journal reported that US executives were extremely anxious about this first major test of a US corporation�s liability for an accident in the developing world. At last, in October 1991, came the key moment for this discussion: the Indian Supreme Court upheld Carbide�s offer and dismissed all outstanding petitions against it, thereby offering the company legal protection. And its share price immediately spiked high. Because Wall Street knew its priorities had prevailed. That it was safe.

A real-world interpenetration of apocalypse and utopia. Apocalypse for those thousands who drowned on their own lungs. And for the corporations, now reassured that the poor, unlike profit, were indeed dispensable? An everyday utopia.

This is another of the limitations of utopia: we live in utopia; it just isn�t ours.

So we live in apocalypse too.

-

Earth: to be determined. Utopia? Apocalypse? Is it worse to hope or to despair? To that question there can only be one answer: yes. It is worse to hope or to despair.

Bad hope and bad despair are mutually constitutive. Capitalism gets you coming or going. �We� can fix the problem �we� made. And when �we�, geoengineers, fail, �we� can live through it, whisper �our� survivalist bad consciences, the preppers hoarding cans of beans.

Is there a better optimism? And a right way to lose hope? It depends who�s hoping, for what, for whom � and against whom. We must learn to hope with teeth.

We won�t be browbeaten by demands for our own bureaucratised proposals. In fact there is no dearth of models to consider, but the radical critique of the everyday stands even in the absence of an alternative. We can go further: if we take utopia seriously, as a total reshaping, its scale means we can�t think it from this side. It�s the process of making it that will allow us to do so. It is utopian fidelity that might underpin our refusal to expound it, or any roadmap.

We should utopia as hard as we can. Along with a fulfilled humanity we should imagine flying islands, self-constituting coraline neighborhoods, photosynthesizing cars bred from biospliced bone-marrow. Big Rock Candy Mountains. Because we�ll never mistake those dreams for blueprints, nor for mere absurdities.

What utopias are are new Rorschachs. We pour our concerns and ideas out, and then in dreaming we fold the paper to open it again and reveal startling patterns. We may pour with a degree of intent, but what we make is beyond precise planning. Our utopias are to be enjoyed and admired: they are made of our concerns and they tell us about our now, about our pre-utopian selves. They are to be interpreted. And so are those of our enemies.

To understand what we�re up against means to respect it. The Earth is not being blistered because the despoilers are stupid or irrational or making a mistake or have insufficient data. We should fight our case as urgently as we can, and win arguments, but we shouldn�t fool ourselves: whatever the self-delusion, guilt, or occasional tears of a CEO, in a profit-maximizing world it�s rational for the institutions of our status quo to do what they do. Individuals and even sometimes some organizations may resist that in specific cases, but only by refusing that system�s logic. Which the system itself of course cannot do.

The fight for ecological justice means a fight against that system, because there is massive profit in injustice. This battle won�t always be over catastrophic climate change or land expropriation: in neoliberalism, even local struggles for fleeting moments of green municipal life are ultimately struggles against power. The protests that shook the Turkish state in 2013 started with a government plan to build over Gezi Park, one of the last green spaces in the city.

Rather than touting togetherness, we fight best by embracing our not-togetherness. The fact that there are sides. Famously, we approach a tipping point. Rather than hoping for cohesion, our best hope lies in conflict. Our aim, an aspect of our utopianism, should be this strategy of tension.

There is bad pessimism as well as bad optimism. Against the curmudgeonly surrender of, say, James Lovegrove, there are sound scientific reasons to suggest that we�re not yet � quite � at some point of no return. We need to tilt at a different tipping point, into irrevocable social change, and that requires a different pessimism, an unflinching look at how bad things are.

Pessimism has a bad rap among activists, terrified of surrender. But activism without the pessimism that rigor should provoke is just sentimentality.

There is hope. But for it to be real, and barbed, and tempered into a weapon, we cannot just default to it. We have to test it, subject it to the strain of appropriate near-despair. We need utopia, but to try to think utopia, in this world, without rage, without fury, is an indulgence we can�t afford. In the face of what is done, we cannot think utopia without hate.

Even our ends-of-the-world are too Whiggish. Let us put an end to one-nation apocalypse. Here instead is to antinomian utopia. A hope that abjures the hope of those in power.

It is the supposedly sensible critics who are the most profoundly unrealistic. As Joel Kovel says, �we can have the accumulation of capital, and we can have ecological integrity, but we can�t have both of them together�. To believe otherwise would be quaint were it not so dangerous.

In 2003, William Stavropoulos, CEO of Dow � who has, recall, no responsibility to the chemically maimed of Bhopal � said in a press release, �Being environmentally responsible makes good business sense.�

And that, in the pejorative sense, is the most absurd utopia of all.

Revolution now, etc.

http://salvage.zone/mieville_all.html

Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Apr 12, 2018

# ? Apr 11, 2018 23:21

Trabisnikof: Dec 24, 2005

ChairMaster posted:

I mean if they can get enough power to places that don't get a lot of sun or wind then that'd be great, but it seems unlikely to me. Solar and wind are definitely preferable, and if they end up being good enough to work worldwide then nuclear wouldn't be necessary, but I've not seen much that shows that the current demand can be covered cleanly without nuclear, much less the rising demand of the future.

If anyone's got a link to a study or something i'd be interested to read it.

There are very few places with a grid large enough for a nuclear power plant and still small enough that they have not enough access to renewables for the majority of their supply.

But don�t get me wrong, super duper if a few places in the world need nukes, the reality is they don�t make much sense for the rest of us.

Which kind of study would you like? I can link you to peer reviewed studies of varying levels of renewables from the 100% WWS people to the NREL 90%+ penetration studies, to studies on wind penetration levels above 60% (just wind)

The costs on solar and wind have been decreasing faster than some of those older papers� estimates too. We�ve already reached 2050 price goals in some countries. Coupled with recent power electronics and storage which are allowing renewables to compete for a bunch of the ancillary services that usually make big capital intensive plants worthwhile.

# ? Apr 11, 2018 23:26

VideoGameVet: May 14, 2005; It is by caffeine alone I set my bike in motion. It is by the juice of Java that pedaling acquires speed, the teeth acquire stains, stains become a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my bike in motion.

Arglebargle III posted:

Revolution now, etc.

Link please.

# ? Apr 11, 2018 23:47

Venomous: Nov 7, 2011

https://twitter.com/serrels/status/984220359267250176?s=21

hooray

# ? Apr 12, 2018 09:20

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Venomous posted:

https://twitter.com/serrels/status/984220359267250176?s=21

hooray

If someone had told me as a kid that money mining would become a thing, I wouldn't have believed them.

Seriously, seeing this giant waste of energy happening hurts my soul. :argh:

# ? Apr 12, 2018 09:48

Ssthalar: Sep 16, 2007

Libluini posted:

Seriously, seeing this giant waste of energy happening hurts my soul.

It also kills the planet off faster. :suicide:

# ? Apr 12, 2018 10:20

Thug Lessons: Dec 14, 2006; I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

Trabisnikof posted:

Solar thermal + storage and PV + battery are already price competitive with nuclear for new build. I�d wager that under many alternative evaluation schema that holds true (since price and profit are your initial issue and I agree on that).

I don't think this is actually true. As far as I can tell, a 100kWh Tesla Powerpack retails for $45,000. If you want even a single GWh of storage, you'll be paying about half a billion dollars just for the batteries, before even getting into the infrastructure necessary to make that energy deliverable, or even the solar panels to charge it. Meanwhile your nuke plant, even if it costs $10 billion to build, is going to put out tens of thousands of GWh of reliable energy all year long. Diablo Canyon produces about 50 GWh per day. To get that with solar + storage, assuming they can discharge once a day, you'd need a $22 billion investment just for the batteries, with tens of billions in additional costs. Think how much solar capacity you're going to need to charge 50 GWh worth of batteries. It's not competitive with anything, even those ridiculous FOAK plants that have huge cost overruns.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 11:16

poopinmymouth: Mar 2, 2005; PROUD 2 B AMERICAN (these colors don't run)

I have a question about something I do not understand.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/11/critical-gulf-stream-current-weakest-for-1600-years-research-finds

The above article implies that Iceland will get much colder.

May'sPRfirm posted:

When it weakens, a large area of ocean around Iceland cools, as less warm water is brought north, and the waters off the east coast of the US get warmer.

https://twitter.com/ritholtz/status/966119046188957696/photo/1

This image of a 4C 2100 implies Iceland will be one of the few habitable places left.

The two concepts seem contradictory? Can someone explain what I'm missing?

# ? Apr 12, 2018 12:08

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

poopinmymouth posted:

I have a question about something I do not understand.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/11/critical-gulf-stream-current-weakest-for-1600-years-research-finds

The above article implies that Iceland will get much colder.

https://twitter.com/ritholtz/status/966119046188957696/photo/1

This image of a 4C 2100 implies Iceland will be one of the few habitable places left.

The two concepts seem contradictory? Can someone explain what I'm missing?

I think the answer is that no one really knows. There are a lot of weird "little" details which we know about, but which haven't been modeled together, and then there are the little details that we don't even realize might matter. And since some of these effects can basically switch from non-existent to full effect in a handful of years, you might have a scenario that looks like the one in the tweet one year, with Northern European climates being sorta central France-ish - but a handful of years later, Northern Europe is pulled into a different climate regime, much more akin to western Russia with its much greater highs and lows.

Note that this might apply in a (sorta) positive direction too - I've seen papers that point to the Earth's current climate as right near a tipping point between an ice age and equable climate that dramatically shifts how heat is distributed across the world - pushing far more equatorial-to-mid latitude heat into the high latitudes, making those regions not heat up as much while pushing trees all the way up into the high Arctic. Which sounds kinda good until you realize that ice caps and temperate climates don't really mix.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 12:50

StabbinHobo: Oct 18, 2002; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

poopinmymouth posted:

The two concepts seem contradictory? Can someone explain what I'm missing?

well for starters the first one is a relatively high quality news outlet quoting both scientists and studies, the second one appears to be from hashtag connectography (?) and retweeted by a investing podcast host. if this is a tough call for you... well then that's a perfect example of how hopeless things are.

short answer: the first is about ocean currents, the second is naive temperature-band shifting.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 13:22

poopinmymouth: Mar 2, 2005; PROUD 2 B AMERICAN (these colors don't run)

StabbinHobo posted:

well for starters the first one is a relatively high quality news outlet quoting both scientists and studies, the second one appears to be from hashtag connectography (?) and retweeted by a investing podcast host. if this is a tough call for you... well then that's a perfect example of how hopeless things are.

short answer: the first is about ocean currents, the second is naive temperature-band shifting.

that's just who's relinking it, the source is "New Scientist" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Scientist

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126971-700-how-to-survive-the-coming-century/ (found the original, but yes I get your point that this one is waaaay less sourced than the first)

What would be the most likely 10, 30, and 60 year scenarios for Iceland in terms of temperature change according to current research? Is it going to get hellishly cold from the collapse of AMOC, or will it be a few degrees warmer, but with wider swings in extremes? Or first the former then later the latter?

poopinmymouth fucked around with this message at 13:36 on Apr 12, 2018

# ? Apr 12, 2018 13:32

Thug Lessons: Dec 14, 2006; I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

I can't see anything at that link but there is no way that map could be of 2100. It has the West Antarctic Ice Sheet completely gone and replaced with "densely-populated high rises".

# ? Apr 12, 2018 13:35

90s Rememberer: Nov 30, 2017; by R. Guyovich

poopinmymouth posted:

that's just who's relinking it, the source is "New Scientist" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Scientist

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126971700-surviving-in-a-warmer-world/

What would be the most likely 10, 30, and 60 year scenarios for Iceland in terms of temperature change according to current research? Is it going to get hellishly cold from the collapse of AMOC, or will it be a few degrees warmer, but with wider swings in extremes? Or first the former then later the latter?

pop-sci is largely garbage

# ? Apr 12, 2018 13:35

poopinmymouth: Mar 2, 2005; PROUD 2 B AMERICAN (these colors don't run)

Thug Lessons posted:

I can't see anything at that link but there is no way that map could be of 2100. It has the West Antarctic Ice Sheet completely gone and replaced with "densely-populated high rises".

I'd prefer answers from sane posters, thanks.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 13:38

Thug Lessons: Dec 14, 2006; I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

poopinmymouth posted:

I'd prefer answers from sane posters, thanks.

Sorry for trying to get ideas through your thick skull, poopinmymouth.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 13:46

Nice piece of fish: Jan 29, 2008; Ultra Carp

poopinmymouth posted:

I'd prefer answers from sane posters, thanks.

I see Thug Lessons getting poo poo on a lot itt and from going back and reading his posts I don't really understand why that's necessary. I mean, I hardly agree with everything he's saying but a good portion of the posts are well reasoned and to my reading a good starting point for debate if anyone wants to disagree from an informed perspective. I enjoy reading informed rebuttals of his views, and while I'm significantly more concerned than he appears to be some of the things he posts are not incorrect.

Or have I just lost my mind or something? What am I missing?

# ? Apr 12, 2018 14:04

poopinmymouth: Mar 2, 2005; PROUD 2 B AMERICAN (these colors don't run)

Nice piece of fish posted:

I see Thug Lessons getting poo poo on a lot itt and from going back and reading his posts I don't really understand why that's necessary. I mean, I hardly agree with everything he's saying but a good portion of the posts are well reasoned and to my reading a good starting point for debate if anyone wants to disagree from an informed perspective. I enjoy reading informed rebuttals of his views, and while I'm significantly more concerned than he appears to be some of the things he posts are not incorrect.

Or have I just lost my mind or something? What am I missing?

For me it's because he is the epitome of the neoliberal centrist brigade. Paying lip service to the idea of climate change, but naysaying any possible legitimate route through this mess because he (and OOCC) don't like the sound of those policies, and substitute wishful thinking in order to present the concept that we can both survive the upcoming climate-pocolypse while sacrificing virtually nothing about modern western living/consumption.

In short, he and OOCC are the equivalent of "white moderates" from MLK's letter from the Birmingham jail, ie the real problem demographic to progress. (in this analogy the KKK = climate change denialist, at least you know they are never gonna come around)

poopinmymouth fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Apr 12, 2018

# ? Apr 12, 2018 14:08

StabbinHobo: Oct 18, 2002; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

yea its like the difference between how much you hate the enemy troops and how much you hate a traitor/saboteur

# ? Apr 12, 2018 14:23

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

poopinmymouth posted:

For me it's because he is the epitome of the neoliberal centrist brigade. Paying lip service to the idea of climate change, but naysaying any possible legitimate route through this mess because he (and OOCC) don't like the sound of those policies, and substitute wishful thinking in order to present the concept that we can both survive the upcoming climate-pocolypse while sacrificing virtually nothing about modern western living/consumption.

In short, he and OOCC are the equivalent of "white moderates" from MLK's letter from the Birmingham jail, ie the real problem demographic to progress. (in this analogy the KKK = climate change denialist, at least you know they are never gonna come around)

I mean, I sorta get what you're getting at, but it seems like the opposite of relevant to the post in question. A map that says large parts of Antarctica will be densely populated within the next 100 years is the kind of hyper optimistic scenario that you seem to be railing against otherwise, and Thug Lessons was pointing out that this didn't seem realistic at all. That's an entirely valid critique of the map, why reject it solely based on your dislike of the dude who posted it? (Unless his objection was the WAIS melting, and not the subsequent settling.)

A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Apr 12, 2018

# ? Apr 12, 2018 14:24

Thug Lessons: Dec 14, 2006; I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

poopinmymouth posted:

For me it's because he is the epitome of the neoliberal centrist brigade. Paying lip service to the idea of climate change, but naysaying any possible legitimate route through this mess because he (and OOCC) don't like the sound of those policies, and substitute wishful thinking in order to present the concept that we can both survive the upcoming climate-pocolypse while sacrificing virtually nothing about modern western living/consumption.

In short, he and OOCC are the equivalent of "white moderates" from MLK's letter from the Birmingham jail, ie the real problem demographic to progress. (in this analogy the KKK = climate change denialist, at least you know they are never gonna come around)

No one likes the sound of those policies. If your platform is based around impoverishing people it's dead on arrival. And this isn't just a Western issue any more. China emits more per capita than Europe now, and its total emissions are more than the US and EU combined. And India's right behind it, with a whole host a smaller poor and middle-income countries. Do you want those to stop developing? Do you think it's realistic to expect they will? That may not be what you want to hear but it's not neoliberalism; it's just reality.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 14:27

Thug Lessons: Dec 14, 2006; I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

I mean, I sorta get what you're getting at, but it seems like the opposite of relevant to the post in question. A map that says large parts of Antarctica will be densely populated within the next 100 years is the kind of hyper optimistic scenario that you seem to be railing against otherwise, and Thug Lessons was pointing out that this didn't seem realistic at all. That's an entirely valid critique of the map, why reject it solely based on your dislike of the dude who posted it? (Unless his objection was the WAIS melting, and not the subsequent settling.)

The WAIS will eventually melt at 4C but it'll take centuries to millenia. I'm not sure if 4C is enough to melt the whole thing though.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 14:28

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Thug Lessons posted:

No one likes the sound of those policies. If your platform is based around impoverishing people it's dead on arrival. And this isn't just a Western issue any more. China emits more per capita than Europe now, and its total emissions are more than the US and EU combined. And India's right behind it, with a whole host a smaller poor and middle-income countries. Do you want those to stop developing? Do you think it's realistic to expect they will? That may not be what you want to hear but it's not neoliberalism; it's just reality.

I think the reason you get called neoliberal is that you seem to see capitalism as part of the natural order, a base component of the fabric of reality that all solutions have to work within.

Thug Lessons posted:

The WAIS will eventually melt at 4C but it'll take centuries to millenia. I'm not sure if 4C is enough to melt the whole thing though.

What are the assumptions here? No chance that the climate around it could shift into something very different from what is seen now, that rapidly undermines the ice sheet? It's not like the ice actually has to melt where it is, it just has to break off and float somewhere where it will melt. The majority of the ice sheet isn't even on land as such, it's sitting beneath sea level, allowing "warm" sea water to infiltrate in ways that's not possible for land-based sheets.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 14:40

poopinmymouth: Mar 2, 2005; PROUD 2 B AMERICAN (these colors don't run)

A Buttery Pastry posted:

I mean, I sorta get what you're getting at, but it seems like the opposite of relevant to the post in question. A map that says large parts of Antarctica will be densely populated within the next 100 years is the kind of hyper optimistic scenario that you seem to be railing against otherwise, and Thug Lessons was pointing out that this didn't seem realistic at all. That's an entirely valid critique of the map, why reject it solely based on your dislike of the dude who posted it? (Unless his objection was the WAIS melting, and not the subsequent settling.)

I'm not married to that map, I was asking a question and the answer: "it's unsupported pop-sci garbage from 2009" is apparently the answer, and I'm grateful for the help.

I'm curious about what is likely to happen in Iceland in the coming decades and I just don't consider anything the two resident hand waving neoliberals post is worth the bother. I'd much rather listen to the other posters in this thread before those two, because I just don't think they have anything substantial to offer because of their ideological blindspots.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 14:57

Thug Lessons: Dec 14, 2006; I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

I think the reason you get called neoliberal is that you seem to see capitalism as part of the natural order, a base component of the fabric of reality that all solutions have to work within.

I don't, but I'm certainly not willing to premise climate policy on overthrowing the economic system, especially since the challenges are essentially the same even if we do.

quote:

What are the assumptions here? No chance that the climate around it could shift into something very different from what is seen now, that rapidly undermines the ice sheet? It's not like the ice actually has to melt where it is, it just has to break off and float somewhere where it will melt. The majority of the ice sheet isn't even on land as such, it's sitting beneath sea level, allowing "warm" sea water to infiltrate in ways that's not possible for land-based sheets.

The assumption is that if the WAIS collapses as we expect it will, it will take centuries or millennia. I've seen tentative proposals that it could collapse quicker through different mechanisms but I haven't seen anyone saying the entire WAIS is going to be gone by 2100.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 15:01

Nocturtle: Mar 17, 2007

poopinmymouth posted:

In short, he and OOCC are the equivalent of "white moderates" from MLK's letter from the Birmingham jail, ie the real problem demographic to progress. (in this analogy the KKK = climate change denialist, at least you know they are never gonna come around)

People with an overly rosy view of our future might be fooling themselves and those listening them, but I cannot accept that they're "the real problem demographic" preventing progress on climate change. There's a lot of polling data on this issue and it's pretty clear which demographics are holding up progress, it's the ones who don't accept the science, and vote for explicitly reactionary politicians who campaign on repealing environmental regulations while expanding fossil fuel usage. Against that insane backdrop I don't understand the need to direct vitriol against anyone who accepts the basic science of climate change. We need to treat climate change mitigation as an ecumenical matter.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 16:28

call to action: Jun 10, 2016; by FactsAreUseless

My favorite part is the constant use of racism as a cynical cudgel (e.g., 'we need to reduce population, preferably starting with people emitting the most carbon today' gets warped into 'i want to personally genocide anyone that can't pass the paper bag test' because someone feels guilty about having kids and travelling)

Nocturtle posted:

People with an overly rosy view of our future might be fooling themselves and those listening them, but I cannot accept that they're "the real problem demographic" preventing progress on climate change. There's a lot of polling data on this issue and it's pretty clear which demographics are holding up progress, it's the ones who don't accept the science, and vote for explicitly reactionary politicians who campaign on repealing environmental regulations while expanding fossil fuel usage. Against that insane backdrop I don't understand the need to direct vitriol against anyone who accepts the basic science of climate change. We need to treat climate change mitigation as an ecumenical matter.

The Koch Brothers? Definitely in the way of climate progress. But I think I'd rather try to convince a poor Trump voter about the reality of climate change and how it will affect their lives than an overeducated neolib like these other idiots.

There are definitely some conservatives that know the reality and are trying to set up society in such a way that they will win when the seas rise. But there are others that have been fooled or cultured/educated into not listening to these arguments by the constant propaganda against them. Those people are convincible in a way that a neoliberal never will be, because the neolibs have SEEN the data, they understand it, and poison every conversation about climate change by forcing it to be viewed through the window of the status quo (think Obamacare lovers telling single payer folks that it will 'never, ever happen' - gently caress them, I'd rather convince a non-voter).

call to action fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Apr 12, 2018

# ? Apr 12, 2018 16:40

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

poopinmymouth posted:

I'm not married to that map, I was asking a question and the answer: "it's unsupported pop-sci garbage from 2009" is apparently the answer, and I'm grateful for the help.

I'm curious about what is likely to happen in Iceland in the coming decades and I just don't consider anything the two resident hand waving neoliberals post is worth the bother. I'd much rather listen to the other posters in this thread before those two, because I just don't think they have anything substantial to offer because of their ideological blindspots.

I really think the answer is what my initial reply was then; we don't know. There are some mechanisms which slowly push Iceland towards a more temperate climate - but then there are other mechanisms that can rapidly drag it back into Little Ice Age territory within the span of a couple of years. So basically, you can have a few decades of Icelanders going "Nice, nice, gimme more of that climate change." immediately followed by "Oh no! This is not what I wanted at all!"

Thug Lessons posted:

I don't, but I'm certainly not willing to premise climate policy on overthrowing the economic system, especially since the challenges are essentially the same even if we do.

Same challenges, very different tools.

Thug Lessons posted:

The assumption is that if the WAIS collapses as we expect it will, it will take centuries or millennia. I've seen tentative proposals that it could collapse quicker through different mechanisms but I haven't seen anyone saying the entire WAIS is going to be gone by 2100.

I mean, if prevailing wisdom says centuries or millennia, and now with a bit more study we cut down the time frame significantly - I think it's worth considering the possibility that that prediction might also be overly conservative (especially if you can point out mechanisms that we don't know how to model, but do know are possibly.) Obviously, if you're sharing possible future scenarios you should make it clear that this is what you're doing - much like you should if you're aware that you're leaving out possibly feedbacks, looking at a small slice of the Earth and extrapolating to the rest, and so on.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 17:26

Trabisnikof: Dec 24, 2005

Thug Lessons posted:

I don't think this is actually true. As far as I can tell, a 100kWh Tesla Powerpack retails for $45,000. If you want even a single GWh of storage, you'll be paying about half a billion dollars just for the batteries, before even getting into the infrastructure necessary to make that energy deliverable, or even the solar panels to charge it. Meanwhile your nuke plant, even if it costs $10 billion to build, is going to put out tens of thousands of GWh of reliable energy all year long. Diablo Canyon produces about 50 GWh per day. To get that with solar + storage, assuming they can discharge once a day, you'd need a $22 billion investment just for the batteries, with tens of billions in additional costs. Think how much solar capacity you're going to need to charge 50 GWh worth of batteries. It's not competitive with anything, even those ridiculous FOAK plants that have huge cost overruns.

To reply to your napkin math, let me quote from the Lazard LCOE report:

https://www.lazard.com/media/450337/lazard-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-110.pdf

quote:

PV and battery system (and related bi-directional inverter, power control electronics, etc.) sized to compare with solar thermal with 10-hour storage on capacity factor basis (52%). Assumes storage nameplate �usable energy� capacity of ~400 MWhdc, storage power rating of 110 MWac and ~200 MWac PV system. Implied output degradation of ~0.40%/year (assumes PV degradation of 0.5%/year and battery energy degradation of 1.5%/year, which includes calendar and cycling degradation). Battery round trip DC efficiency of 90% (including auxiliary losses). Storage opex of ~$8/kWh-year and PV O&M expense of ~$9.2/kW DC-year, with 20% discount applied to total opex as a result of synergies (e.g., fewer truck rolls, single team, etc.). Total capital costs of ~$3,456/kW include PV plus battery energy storage system and selected other development costs. Assumes 20-year useful life, although in practice the unit may perform longer. Illustrative system located in Southwest U.S.

That comes to a LCOE of ~$82/MWh for utility scale PV and battery. LCOE for nuclear plants run between $122-$183 per MWh.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 17:42

Thug Lessons: Dec 14, 2006; I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

I mean, if prevailing wisdom says centuries or millennia, and now with a bit more study we cut down the time frame significantly - I think it's worth considering the possibility that that prediction might also be overly conservative (especially if you can point out mechanisms that we don't know how to model, but do know are possibly.) Obviously, if you're sharing possible future scenarios you should make it clear that this is what you're doing - much like you should if you're aware that you're leaving out possibly feedbacks, looking at a small slice of the Earth and extrapolating to the rest, and so on.

I think the main feedback loop at play here is confirmation bias. If you're really determined to melt all 5 quintillion tons of ice in the WAIS in a few decades you'll find a way, but that's not what we expect will happen. In fact no one has even found a way to make it thermodynamically possible. So IDK, worry about it if you want, but I'm not going to.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 17:52

Cingulate: Oct 23, 2012; by Fluffdaddy

Trabisnikof posted:

To reply to your napkin math, let me quote from the Lazard LCOE report:

https://www.lazard.com/media/450337/lazard-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-110.pdf

That comes to a LCOE of ~$82/MWh for utility scale PV and battery. LCOE for nuclear plants run between $122-$183 per MWh.

Can you explain what that means?

# ? Apr 12, 2018 17:56

Thug Lessons: Dec 14, 2006; I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

Trabisnikof posted:

To reply to your napkin math, let me quote from the Lazard LCOE report:

https://www.lazard.com/media/450337/lazard-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-110.pdf

That comes to a LCOE of ~$82/MWh for utility scale PV and battery. LCOE for nuclear plants run between $122-$183 per MWh.

Do you have any actual systems that we can compare? The best example I know of is the so-called "biggest battery in the world" that Tesla installed in Australia, which cost $50 million for 100MW/129MWh of storage, which is right in line with my napkin math, with the whole renewables operation costing $350 million. I don't think those LCOE numbers actually line up with what you'd need. Lazard's own summary report notes that "alternative energy systems alone will not be capable of meeting the baseload generation needs of a developed economy for the foreseeable future", and they also released a separate levelized cost of storage report which estimates a cost of ~$200-400/MWh, far above the $40 you'd assume from that report. If storage costs really are that low, then great, but I think that's a very optimistic number.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 18:24

Trabisnikof: Dec 24, 2005

Cingulate posted:

Can you explain what that means?

Levelized Cost of Energy/Electricity is a measure of the comparative costs to build a brand new plant of different types as dollars per MWh.

So it accounts for the varying types of costs associated with different plants and amortized capital costs for the lifetime of the plant.

The big caveat about LCOE is that it *doesn't* include additional generating services that generating stations perform, such as frequency control or spinning reserves. That can impact what needs to be built on the grid more than just price.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 18:25

Thug Lessons: Dec 14, 2006; I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

LCOE isn't really my area but from what I can tell what they did there was add additional CAPEX for installing and grid-integrating 400 MWh of storage for every 100 MWh of solar PV capacity. It nearly doubles the cost but it's bailed out by solar's LCOE being incredibly low to begin with. The economics for the batteries themselves are still terrible, as evidenced by Lazard's levelized cost of storage report. The solar is cheap but non-dispatchable and intermittent, while the storage is expensive and dispatchable, but there's still a need for a baseload source. Most likely that source is natural gas. In an all-renewables scenario you need a big expansion in hydro or biomass, both of which have huge potential ecological impacts which have to be weighed against the carbon benefit.

In short, I don't think those number are wrong, but they don't tell the whole story about whether it's more economical to build a ton of intermittent renewables + a ton of storage, a system that retains dispatchable sources like natural gas (maybe with CCS added), or even baseload nuclear + storage. I guess the proof will be in the pudding though and we'll get a pretty good idea of whether storage can compensate for renewable intermittency over the next 5-10 years, but I expect we'll live to regret neglecting the potential of nuclear in the face of cost overruns and inefficient management.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 20:28

Cingulate: Oct 23, 2012; by Fluffdaddy

Trabisnikof posted:

Levelized Cost of Energy/Electricity is a measure of the comparative costs to build a brand new plant of different types as dollars per MWh.

So it accounts for the varying types of costs associated with different plants and amortized capital costs for the lifetime of the plant.

The big caveat about LCOE is that it *doesn't* include additional generating services that generating stations perform, such as frequency control or spinning reserves. That can impact what needs to be built on the grid more than just price.

Ok, thanks. And the LCOE for "utility scale PV + battery" being lower than nuclear means if you add the batteries needed for solar to provide reliable coverage, it's still a bit cheaper than nuclear?

# ? Apr 12, 2018 20:33

Thug Lessons: Dec 14, 2006; I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

Cingulate posted:

Ok, thanks. And the LCOE for "utility scale PV + battery" being lower than nuclear means if you add the batteries needed for solar to provide reliable coverage, it's still a bit cheaper than nuclear?

They're not really concerned about with whether it provides reliable coverage. It's the cost for solar PV + 10 hours of storage. The amount of storage you need to make solar reliable (or specifically make up for solar's intermittency) depends on a ton of factors, from the climate to the amount of solar on your grid.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 20:37

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# ? May 15, 2024 08:04

Owlofcreamcheese: May 22, 2005; Can't post for 9 years!; Buglord

poopinmymouth posted:

For me it's because he is the epitome of the neoliberal centrist brigade. Paying lip service to the idea of climate change, but naysaying any possible legitimate route through this mess because he (and OOCC) don't like the sound of those policies, and substitute wishful thinking in order to present the concept that we can both survive the upcoming climate-pocolypse while sacrificing virtually nothing about modern western living/consumption.

Because you aren't presenting legitimate routes, you are presenting lame plans to wish for someone magically to come enforce global eternal massive austerity programs (but somehow in a non-authoritarian way I guess?) because presenting that as a bingo bongo simple as pie solution makes you feel good every time that continues to never ever be a thing that will ever happen and you can say "heh, told you so" as the environment gets worse and worse.

# ? Apr 12, 2018 20:38

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Climate Change: Post up your Phd. dissertation, coward

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