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Pretty stupid when the entire UC system would crumble without fossil fuels. Bill Gates makes a good point re: divestment.
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# ? Sep 18, 2019 06:27 |
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# ? Jun 12, 2024 09:05 |
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MomJeans420 posted:Pretty stupid when the entire UC system would crumble without fossil fuels. Bill Gates makes a good point re: divestment. McKibben makes a good point in his NewYorker piece that since it appears that politically we won't get any meaningful action on climate change so going after the funding for coal/gas/oil exploration is the best alternative we have to make change. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/money-is-the-oxygen-on-which-the-fire-of-global-warming-burns Unless of course you think > 6ºC warming is all good and fine.
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# ? Sep 18, 2019 17:49 |
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MomJeans420 posted:Pretty stupid when the entire UC system would crumble without fossil fuels. Bill Gates makes a good point re: divestment. Who is to say they won't steer that $80bn to clean techs and such? Not investing that into fossil fuels means they can direct it elsewhere. I don't think anyone sees it as a magic bullet to solve the crisis, to do that we needed global action 30 years ago. We aren't seeing that so this seems like a win overall even if minor.
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# ? Sep 18, 2019 18:01 |
MomJeans420 posted:Pretty stupid when the entire UC system would crumble without fossil fuels. Bill Gates makes a good point re: divestment. Buddy you might want to read the article you linked, it absolutely dunks on Gates’ position on this.
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# ? Sep 18, 2019 18:03 |
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MomJeans420 posted:Pretty stupid when the entire UC system would crumble without fossil fuels. Bill Gates makes a good point re: divestment. Ah yes, the Bill Gates that moaned about possibly having to pay taxes rather than only providing funding to his pet charity projects.
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# ? Sep 18, 2019 18:11 |
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MomJeans420 posted:Pretty stupid when the entire UC system would crumble without fossil fuels. Bill Gates makes a good point re: divestment. No one should ever do anything good unless that thing is perfect and solves all problems. So just sit down and starve to death.
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# ? Sep 18, 2019 18:56 |
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If only fossil fuel companies were investing billions in green energy, oh wait they are. At least the UC pension fund can always be funded by increasing tuition.
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# ? Sep 18, 2019 19:07 |
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MomJeans420 posted:If only fossil fuel companies were investing billions in green energy, oh wait they are. At least the UC pension fund can always be funded by increasing tuition. They’re actually funding pressure groups across the US to fight the rollout of charging stations by positioning the infrastructure charges as elitist. They’re on the side of angels apparently
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# ? Sep 18, 2019 20:41 |
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MomJeans420 posted:If only fossil fuel companies were investing billions in green energy, oh wait they are. At least the UC pension fund can always be funded by increasing tuition. ^^^ A post made by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
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# ? Sep 21, 2019 08:45 |
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MomJeans420 posted:If only fossil fuel companies were investing billions in green energy, oh wait they are. At least the UC pension fund can always be funded by increasing tuition. The only green thing I've seen in announcement they're investing into lubricants and cooling/heating liquids used by everything from wind turbines to electric vehicles. Which is undoubtedly a good thing and better than burning it off into the atmosphere but if that's all they did that's a completely different company.
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# ? Sep 22, 2019 02:15 |
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Giving fossil fuel companies credit for investing in clean energy is like giving Jeffrey Epstein credit for being a philanthropist.
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# ? Sep 22, 2019 02:38 |
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Platystemon posted:Giving fossil fuel companies credit for investing in clean energy is like giving Jeffrey Epstein credit for being a philanthropist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQJ9GUVxPl8
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# ? Sep 22, 2019 03:02 |
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Tab8715 posted:The only green thing I've seen in announcement they're investing into lubricants and cooling/heating liquids used by everything from wind turbines to electric vehicles. Which is undoubtedly a good thing and better than burning it off into the atmosphere but if that's all they did that's a completely different company. Some oil companies did invest in renewable energy as a response to the oil crisis in the 70s. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 11:44 on Sep 22, 2019 |
# ? Sep 22, 2019 11:37 |
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The annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WISNR) is...not optimistic re: nuclear.quote:In mid-2019, new wind and solar generators competed efficiently against even existing nuclear power plants in cost terms, and grew generating capacity faster than any other power type, the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) showed.
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# ? Sep 25, 2019 22:37 |
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ulmont posted:The annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WISNR) is...not optimistic re: nuclear. There isn't anything really surprising about this regarding price though? Building plants infrequently is going to lead to inflated costs. As for speed, nothing in wind in solar has matched France's roll out of nuclear in the past to my knowledge. The only two technologies which have led to decarbonization of electric grids so far are hydro power and nuclear power. If the claim is that we can't do what we did in the past, solving climate change without resolving the societal issues preventing large construction projects is laughable. Lots of impressive sounding numbers get waved around, but few actual big picture results. Edit: It is also misleading to compare wind costs to a decade ago, as the prices spiked around ~2008 and were much lower around ~2001. Smiling Demon fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Sep 26, 2019 |
# ? Sep 26, 2019 00:44 |
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"The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189." holy poo poo well, sucks for nucular, but that seems like good news for solar and wind at least, right?
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 01:14 |
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Yeah, cheep solar and wind is always good to see, even if I support nuclear. I do wish that we decomidified electricity and maybe didn't make the choices of what power plants to build based on cost per megawatt and ignoring climate change and pollution as we so often do, but I also realize that this makes me a dreamer.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 01:33 |
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Yeah, cheap solar and wind is awesome. But the problem is cheap solar and wind still doesn't have the density yet to end our carbon addiction. Which is where nuclear comes in. Solar and Wind are weaning us off, but we need cold turkey, and nuclear can do that.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 01:41 |
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Cheap wind and solar is awesome, and any nuclear advocate will be happy about that. The only problem is.... Cheap wind and solar makes it easy for people to wrongly believe that we don't need other generation technology to decarbonize power generation. That's an incorrect conclusion but it's already widely believed.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 01:46 |
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Taffer posted:Cheap wind and solar is awesome, and any nuclear advocate will be happy about that. Storage is really really really needed to get to where we want to go without nuclear. We should be dropping ridiculous amounts of money in r&d for grid storage.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 01:49 |
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CuriouMr Interweb posted:"The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189." Any idea how much it’s for natural gas and coal?
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 02:16 |
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Storage is really really really needed to get to where we want to go without nuclear. We should be dropping ridiculous amounts of money in r&d for grid storage. It still won't get us there. Your talking about replacing hundreds of terrawatts of generating capability, and storage is not going to add to total capacity, in fact its going to lower your renewable capacity during peak hours. Because for the most part, you are either full grid, or partially charging storage and partially grid. Storage is just shifting renewable grid capacity to times when its needed more, its not increasing capacity. And there are places where solar and wind are not going to be able to maximize their generating potential, you are going to need to include some sort of always on baseload generation.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 02:29 |
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I mean, we could also cut down on the need for storage by massively overbuilding solar and wind capacity, and using the fair weather surplus that's many times our needs to do things like pull carbon out of the air to burry or produce gasoline to fuel vehicles out of air and water. Storage is probably more economically feasible? I'm not sure. I think there might be a break even point where it's cheeper to overbuild by maybe, 50% so you can use half the storage capacity you would normally need, if the price of storage is high. (And our current batteries should be priced high, they're not the most environmentally friendly. I do think that could change with some of the other batteries I've seen that use less rare earths, and progress is made on that front.)
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 02:33 |
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We could also just build the drat nukes already instead of sitting on our thumbs burning "temporary" natural gas for the next 30 years. That would be cool.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 02:37 |
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fishmech posted:We could also just build the drat nukes already instead of sitting on our thumbs burning "temporary" natural gas for the next 30 years. That would be cool. Pretty much. Renewables are making great inroads, but unless we commit to a highly dense energy source, renewables will maybe get up to 50% capacity by....what, 2035-2045? We don't have that long.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 02:40 |
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The comparison should not be between the cost of solar/wind generation and nuclear’s cost of generation. The comparison should be about the cost of solar/wind generation and storage versus nuclear’s cost of generation.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 02:42 |
one would think that throwing money at any form of energy that reduces carbon output would be a good thing
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 05:34 |
perfect being enemy of good and all BUILD MORE POWER PLANTS
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 05:36 |
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Platystemon posted:The comparison should not be between the cost of solar/wind generation and nuclear’s cost of generation. This is the problem, at least where I live. Peak usage in socal is right when people get home from work in the summer, which is right as solar drops off. Re: the nuclear report - the authors are known to be strongly anti-nuclear, people more knowledgeable than I can chime in about their worst case assumptions. I don't have specific complaints because I'm not going to bother reading it, but something to keep in mind. That said, nuclear is really expensive to build in the US, but if the country decided to subsidize one standard design and do a slow roll out, you could get the cost down. You'd also need some kind of legislation passed to allow you to get past all the random lawsuits you'd face.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 05:47 |
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If we had a nationwide grid that didn't have to be in frequency sync, storage would be less of an issue. The swath of land from Texas to Canada is wind energy central and turbines don't take out food producing lands (you can farm around them)
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 16:43 |
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Here's a question I've been wondering if anybody would like to educate me: is running fuel cells off of hydrocarbons a viable solution? Alternately, could you get the hydrogen out of the hydrocarbons and have something usable left over?
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 17:02 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:Here's a question I've been wondering if anybody would like to educate me: is running fuel cells off of hydrocarbons a viable solution? Alternately, could you get the hydrogen out of the hydrocarbons and have something usable left over? I've seen methanol fuel cells so it may be possible but I suggest we just leave that stuff in the ground.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 17:06 |
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It's quite possible but various petrochemical fuels have things in them that poison the reaction fuel cells use, making them hard to do compared to just burning the fuel for power.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 18:36 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:Here's a question I've been wondering if anybody would like to educate me: is running fuel cells off of hydrocarbons a viable solution? A solution to what? Yes, there are fuel cells that run off of hydrocarbons.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 19:18 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:Here's a question I've been wondering if anybody would like to educate me: is running fuel cells off of hydrocarbons a viable solution? Alternately, could you get the hydrogen out of the hydrocarbons and have something usable left over? It's carbon-neutral if you create the fuel from water and atmospheric CO2, but that's only useful as a storage medium, and not a very efficient one. If we want to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, we have to extract it from the atmosphere and store it as hydrocarbons or biomass, and then leave it in the biosphere, unused, which costs energy, full stop.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 19:50 |
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Is air travel just completely worthless in a carbon neutral world? Even biofuels still emit carbon.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 20:06 |
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Phanatic posted:A solution to what? Yes, there are fuel cells that run off of hydrocarbons. Less carbon emissions.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 20:09 |
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Tab8715 posted:Is air travel just completely worthless in a carbon neutral world? Even biofuels still emit carbon.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 20:12 |
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Tab8715 posted:Is air travel just completely worthless in a carbon neutral world? Even biofuels still emit carbon. In a carbon *neutral* world, aircraft are fine, because you are offsetting the emissions elsewhere. In a world with no carbon emissions, all aircraft (save airships, which as I never tire of pointing out, would work really well with hydrogen fuel cells) are going to have problems.
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 20:14 |
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# ? Jun 12, 2024 09:05 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:In a carbon *neutral* world, aircraft are fine, because you are offsetting the emissions elsewhere. In a world with no carbon emissions, all aircraft (save airships, which as I never tire of pointing out, would work really well with hydrogen fuel cells) are going to have problems. So say you create anhydrous ammonia or even a carbon based fuel from hydrogen produced by renewables and run aircraft on that?
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# ? Sep 26, 2019 20:19 |