Coal, oil, gasoline, propane, natural gas, biodiesel, wood fired stoves, candles, its all the same; molecules made up of a bunch of carbon bonded together. Add heat and oxygen and the bonds break in order to bond with oxygen, creating co2 or carbon monoxide and releasing heat. Its always gonna emit a shit ton of greenhouse gases, the entirety of the fuel is being turned into one.
The carbon in the ground took atmospheric carbon too. Ancient plants and animals eating those plants. All of it is a matter of carbon being sequestered in a solid state or burned into a gaseous state.
Sure but the issue is that sequestered carbon from millions of years ago is being released. In the short term carbon from trees is comparatively neutral. There could be an issue if you start using firewood in a non sustainable way, however at the current scale it doesn’t seem to be the issue.
Is burning trees part of it? This is like eating a bunch of pizza to lose weight, because you can exercise it off. The pizza is only hurting your ability to lose weight, and burning trees is only hurting our ability to reduce greenhouse gases. You can grow trees without burning any.
No point. Its the diversified old-growth forests we need to protect. Planting more trees without achieving that is pointless. There is not enough wood-burning for heat and/or fuel happening to make a difference vs what we do grow though, as the vast majority of what we do grow goes into construction.
You want to stop indigenous peoples burning wood for heat and cooking? How about we stop paying them to burn down rainforests for farms and ranches first. If we can accomplish that, cracking down on campfires becomes a pointless endeavor.
The carbon footprint of the average person in Sub-Saharan Africa is nothing close to yours or mine. The idea that that article recommends eliminating wood-burning entirely is … not born-out in its text.
What do you think the biomass in “Efficient Biomass Cooking” is? Its wood. The carbon footprint of the transportation of any other fuel to these people alone would more than offset any criteria by which wood-burning falls short, until we can electrify the entire world, and/or get everyone using solar ovens for cooking.
The one positive point is that methane-burning power plants can be spun up in under an hour whereas coal plants usually need a week to power up. If the vast majority of power comes from solar/wind/batteries and gas is only used as (secondary) backup, this may make sense.
Fossil marketing pretty successfully tries to eradicate the caveats and nuances from the discussion of course.
Seriously, leaving that part out defeats the purpose of the article. News media is so up their own ass (and by extension, their republiQan overlords’ asses) that they refuse to speak the words that matter.
Mostly because the US has huge coal deposits but fairly limited coal exports. A lot of the discussion about LNG is whether it makes sense to use it to displace same-country coal extraction & use vs ship in LNG from far away.
Great, thanks! Why doesn’t the chart show costs of transportation of coal via ship as well? Do you have a link for the study mentioned in the graph by chance?
After all the changes the completely captured CPUC has made over the last 2 years, I would definitely NOT get solar today. The incentive is basically completely gone.
Saying this after having installed it 2 years ago.
Good, but the US should do better. I would support outlawing new construction of non-renewable energy. And strict timelines for utilities to become renewable.
I think we're past the point when we should just "encourage" or incentivize clean energy. We need to DEMAND it.
First thing I see on this chart is China understanding the next several decades of energy. Second this I see is corporate America willingly fuck the next few generations with their problems by refusing to to put lives before profits.
There is a wide range of renewable sources: Hydro, geothermal, biogas, different kinds to use wind and solar. I can understand why you would want diversification across that range. So that if one source is affected by circumstances, the others can continue delivering.
But what sense does it make to diversify between renewable and non-renewable, if you meant that? It’s certainly possible to lead this principle ad absurdum. Should we diversify between tested and untested methods, between cheap and expensive, between safe and dangerous?
we don’t know what tomorrow holds.
That’s a reason to diversify between different renewable methods, distribute them across different regions. If you really meant we should include fossil fuels, you might need to make that point explicit, because it is not self-explaining.
OK this article is infuriating, as is the product it’s hyping up.
If 2.5% of our emissions is going toward feeding 4 billion people then I’m totally fine with letting those emissions continue. This isn’t a thing we need to “solve,” this reeks of a capitalist looking at graphs of our emissions and going “we could cut emissions by 1% here and not have to actually change our habits at all!” This isn’t the problem causing climate change.
The energy sector accounts for over 70% of our emissions. Instead of trying to stop emitting less than 1% by pouring money into genetically manipulating plants to need less fertilizer, why don’t we instead cut 30% or more by replacing coal plants with solar, wind, and nuclear power?
Renewables will inevitably become cheaper than fossil fuels, as the resource dwindles. The problem is how to make energy abundant enough to satisfy our current needs and those of the rest of the world, who expects to reach our standards of living?
(A: it's not possible, nuclear can help, but only for a while, perhaps enough time for the demographic transition to complete)
US air travel can be decarbonized by replacing it with electrified passenger rail. Trains with a pantograph don’t need to store energy. Nearly all of the challenges of electrifying transportation are already solved and just require the infrastructure to be built.
Air travel should only be used for routes that cannot be serviced by electrified rail.
Burning fuel puts CO2 into the atmosphere. Yes, you might be at close to net zero if it’s a biofuel (e.g., the carbon in the atmosphere goes into the corn, when then goes into the airplane and back into the atmosphere), but we need to be at negative carbon, not net zero.
Hydrogen is made using fossil fuel energy. Compressing it to liquid is, I believe, an expensive and inefficient process. There’s no magic solution unfortunately.
You can make hydrogen from water, using electricity generated from hydro, solar, wind, or nuclear. But it’s not a cheap, efficient process. Fundamentally, we need to rethink travel.
TBH, I don’t think that it’s going to matter though. Too little, too late. I’ll fight to the bitter end as best I can, but the time to fix this was 40 years ago.
~60% efficiency, I believe? Not far off from pumped hydro in terms of overall efficiency.
The extraordinary cheapness of solar energy has actually made some real green hydrogen commercially viable in the US, especially in conjunction with IRA subsidies. It's hard to overstate how huge the inflation reduction act has been at promoting transition and renewable technology. The hopeful new tech developments in the field of green hydrogen would be "peaker" electrolyzers -- current economics make it pretty hard to have a viable electrolysis plant without having it operate at very high utilization rates. Truthfully, the issue is more one of financing than technology, though tech developments could change that picture. Far better to run electrolyzers than curtail a renewable generation source and I have no doubt this will be a major transition industry.
The bigger issue is that there are no remotely viable hydrogen aircraft. Theoretically, maybe one day, but maintaining liquid hydrogen tanks is impractical even for automobiles. It makes even less sense in the goddamn sky. Revolutionary new tech would need to happen before this was a viable option for airlines. So this kind of plant is probably smarter to be producing e.g., ammonia, especially since some major shipping companies have already signed contracts to build ammonia-fuel cargo ships so the demand will definitely exist.
Unfortunately, there's no carbon-free alternative to flying in the near future. Which is why the best approach is to minimize flying. The EU way is the right way; pick busy flight corridors and focus on them for high speed rail.
Now look at the top 3 US flight corridors. Last I looked, it was LA-Las Vegas, Hawai'i-Ohahu, and Atlanta-Orlando. Brightline is currently deploying high speed rail service for that first route. Flawed as hell service, but service nevertheless. The second is probably always going to be stuck to flight (but also, less tourism to the islands would benefit them tremendously either way). The third has huge potential to be built out into a rail corridor (Brightline Florida already has plans to expand to Jacksonville and an Atlanta-Savannah Amtrak route is already in development -- would not be hard to close that gap).
Thanks for the informative comment, much appreciated.
I’ve also heard talk of hydrogen cargo ships but I don’t know if that’s realistic.
There’s also a container technology that’s been developed at Sheffield University, I believe. Each hydrogen molecule is held within its own container and it effectively becomes a liquid. Great for storage and transfer.
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