Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumInteresting Bill McKibben Essay From New Yorker: "In A World On Fire, Stop Burning Things"
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The shift away from combustion is large and novel enough that it bumps up against everyones prior assumptionsenvironmentalists, too. The fight against nuclear power, for example, was an early mainstay of the green movement, because it was easy to see that if something went wrong it could go badly wrong. I applauded, more than a decade ago, when the Vermont legislature voted to close the states old nuclear plant at the end of its working life, but I wouldnt today. Indeed, for some years Ive argued that existing nuclear reactors that can still be run with any margin of safety probably should be, as were making the transitionthe spent fuel they produce is an evil inheritance for our descendants, but its not as dangerous as an overheated Earth, even if the scenes of Russian troops shelling nuclear plants added to the sense of horror enveloping the planet these past weeks. Yet the rapidly falling cost of renewables also indicates why new nuclear plants will have a hard time finding backers; its evaporating nuclear powers one big advantagethat its always on. Farmers Oxford team ran the numbers. If the cost of coal is flat, and the cost of solar is plummeting, nuclear is the rare technology whose cost is going up, he said. Advocates will argue that this is because safety fears have driven up the cost of construction. But the only place on Earth where you can find the cost of nuclear coming down is Korea, Farmer said. Even there, the rate of decline is one per cent a year. Compared to ten per cent for renewables, thats not enough to matter.
Accepting nuclear power for a while longer is not the only place environmentalists will need to bend. A reason I supported shutting down Vermonts nuclear plant was because campaigners had promised that its output would be replaced with renewable energy. In the years that followed, though, advocates of scenery, wildlife, and forests managed to put the states mountaintops off limits to wind turbines. More recently, the states public-utility commission blocked construction of an eight-acre solar farm on aesthetic grounds. Those of us who live in and love rural areas have to accept that some of that landscape will be needed to produce energy. Not all of it, or even most of itJacobsons latest numbers show that renewable power actually uses less land than fossil fuels, which require drilling fifty thousand new holes every year in North America alone. But we do need to see our landscape differentlyas Ezra Klein wrote this week in the Times, to conserve anything close to the climate weve had, we need to build as weve never built before.
Corn fields, for instance, are a classic American sight, but theyre also just solar-energy collectors of another sort. (And ones requiring annual applications of nitrogen, which eventually washes into lakes and rivers, causing big algae blooms.) More than half the corn grown in Iowa actually ends up as ethanol in the tanks of cars and trucksin other words, those fields are already growing fuel, just inefficiently. Because solar panels are far more efficient than photosynthesis, and because E.V.s are far more efficient than cars with gas engines, Jacobsons data show that, by switching from ethanol to solar, you could produce eighty times the amount of automobile mileage using an equivalent area of land. And the transition could bring some advantages: the market for electrons is predictable, so solar panels can provide a fairly stable income for farmers, some of whom are learning to grow shade-tolerant crops or to graze animals around and beneath them.
Another concession will strike many environmentalists more deeply even than accepting a degraded landscape, and thats the notion that reckoning with the climate crisis would force wholesale changes in the way that people live their lives. Remember, the long-held assumption was that renewable energy was going to be expensive and limited in supply. So, it was thought, this would move us in the direction of simpler, less energy-intensive ways of life, something that many of us welcomed, in part because there are deep environmental challenges that go beyond carbon and climate. Cheap new energy technologies may let us evade some of those more profound changes. Whenever I write about the rise of E.V.s, Twitter responds that wed be better off riding bikes and electric buses. In many ways we would be, and some cities are thankfully starting to build extensive bike paths and rapid-transit lanes for electric buses. But, as of 2017, just two per cent of passenger miles in this country come from public transportation. Bike commuting has doubled in the past two decadesto about one per cent of the total. We could (and should) quintuple the number of people riding bikes and buses, and even then wed still need to replace tens of millions of cars with E.V.s to meet the targets in the time the scientists have set to meet them. That time is the crucial variable. As hard as it will be to rewire the planets energy system by decades end, I think it would be harderimpossible, in factto sufficiently rewire social expectations, consumer preferences, and settlement patterns in that short stretch. So one way to look at the work that must be done with the tools we have at hand is as triage. If we do it quickly, we will open up more possibilities for the generations to come. Just one example: Farmer says that its possible to see the cost of nuclear-fusion reactors, as opposed to the current fission reactors, starting to come steeply down the cost curveand to imagine that a within a generation or two people may be taking solar panels off farm fields, because fusion (which is essentially the physics of the sun brought to Earth) may be providing all the power we need. If we make it through the bottleneck of the next decade, much may be possible.
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/in-a-world-on-fire-stop-burning-things
eppur_se_muova
(36,227 posts)If we wait for practical fusion reactors to save us, rescue will be way too late.
hatrack
(59,442 posts)I'll agree to be impressed (or count on that technology) when a fusion system can produce hundreds of megawatts of power for a period of weeks.
hunter
(38,264 posts)As a radical environmentalist I oppose all solar and wind energy projects on previously undeveloped landscapes and seascapes.
"We had to destroy the natural environment in order to save it!" is a rotten ideology.
Unless someone develops some magical aneutronic fusion scheme, fusion plants won't be any less troublesome than modern fission plants. The only difference between them is we already know how to build safe fission plants. The fusion plants are speculative.
Finishline42
(1,091 posts)Due to runaway population growth.