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The Guardian: Joe Biden must declare a climate emergency. And he must do so now
Joe Biden must declare a climate emergency. And he must do so nowPeter Kalmus
Biden had the last opportunity of any president to keep the world under 1.5C of heating. Instead he is squandering time we do not have
Thu 27 Jul 2023 06.13 EDT
We’ve passed into a ferocious new phase of global heating with much worse to come. Biden must declare a climate emergency.
I’m terrified by what’s being done to our planet. I’m also fighting to stop it. You, too, should be afraid while also taking the strongest action you can take. There has never been a summer like this in recorded history: shocking ocean heat, deadly land heat, unprecedented fires and smoke, sea ice melting faster than we’ve ever seen or thought possible. I’ve dreaded this depth of Earth breakdown for almost two decades, and, like many of my colleagues, I’ve been trying to warn you. As hard as I could. Now it’s here.
And mark my words: it’s all still just getting started. So long as we burn fossil fuels, far, far worse is on the way; and I take zero satisfaction in knowing that this will be proven right, too, with a certainty as non-negotiable and merciless as the physics behind fossil-fueled global heating. Instead, I only feel fury at those in power, and bottomless grief for all that I love. We are losing Earth on our watch. The Link to tweet
" target="_blank">Amazon rainforest may already be past its tipping point. Coral reefs as we know them will be gone from our planet by mid-century, and possibly much earlier given this surge in sea-surface temperatures. These are cosmic losses. And as a father, I grieve for my children.
Fossil fuels are causing this damage. Therefore, the only way out of this heat nightmare is to end them. No amount of tree planting, recycling, carbon offsetting, or wishful carbon-capture thinking will ever change this. The longer we allow the fossil fuel industry to exist, the more irreversible damage to Earth the people who profit from it will continue to knowingly cause. We are careening toward fossil-fueled heat waves that will kill over a million people in single events. And it will not plateau there: more fossil fuels, more heat, more death. The only way out is to end fossil fuels.
…
Biden had the last opportunity of any president to keep the world under 1.5C of heating. Instead he is squandering time we do not have
Thu 27 Jul 2023 06.13 EDT
We’ve passed into a ferocious new phase of global heating with much worse to come. Biden must declare a climate emergency.
I’m terrified by what’s being done to our planet. I’m also fighting to stop it. You, too, should be afraid while also taking the strongest action you can take. There has never been a summer like this in recorded history: shocking ocean heat, deadly land heat, unprecedented fires and smoke, sea ice melting faster than we’ve ever seen or thought possible. I’ve dreaded this depth of Earth breakdown for almost two decades, and, like many of my colleagues, I’ve been trying to warn you. As hard as I could. Now it’s here.
And mark my words: it’s all still just getting started. So long as we burn fossil fuels, far, far worse is on the way; and I take zero satisfaction in knowing that this will be proven right, too, with a certainty as non-negotiable and merciless as the physics behind fossil-fueled global heating. Instead, I only feel fury at those in power, and bottomless grief for all that I love. We are losing Earth on our watch. The Link to tweet
" target="_blank">Amazon rainforest may already be past its tipping point. Coral reefs as we know them will be gone from our planet by mid-century, and possibly much earlier given this surge in sea-surface temperatures. These are cosmic losses. And as a father, I grieve for my children.
Fossil fuels are causing this damage. Therefore, the only way out of this heat nightmare is to end them. No amount of tree planting, recycling, carbon offsetting, or wishful carbon-capture thinking will ever change this. The longer we allow the fossil fuel industry to exist, the more irreversible damage to Earth the people who profit from it will continue to knowingly cause. We are careening toward fossil-fueled heat waves that will kill over a million people in single events. And it will not plateau there: more fossil fuels, more heat, more death. The only way out is to end fossil fuels.
…
28 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
election time 2024, Biden will probably lose.
And there's little world needs more than much more expensive gas, with high taxes (not for FF company profits IOW) and that tax money being used to build out alternatives to FF's.
But people can't afford it. Petroleum and natural gas are LIFE, it's what this 8B strong throng is MADE of, basically. Without them, there must, by necessity, be many, many less of us.
I think BILLIONS of people dying in the next 50 or so years is baked into the cake at this stage of the game. Humanity dawdled, bought into fossil fuel propaganda (in no small part BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO), and now we're collectively fucked, along with so many innocent non-human species we're going to end up causing the extinction of 
We needed to start in earnest, oh, like 50 years ago.
Last edited Thu Jul 27, 2023, 10:31 PM - Edit history (2)
As for nuclear being a "mature seventy year old technology" we're not going to build plants like they did 70 years ago. We want to build “Gen IV” reactors, because they have all sorts of “fail-safe” features that we like.
Wikipedia: Generation IV reactor
How much experience do we have building “Gen IV” reactors? Zip, nada, zilch!
How many “Gen IV” reactor plans have been approved? (Anyone?)
How soon can you get one on-line? How soon can you get a fleet on-line, given that we’ve never built one before? Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed it or not, but the forests are burning all over the world!
Let's stop speculating, and ask the experts!
2. When will Gen IV reactors be built?
It will take at least two or three decades before the deployment of commercial Gen IV systems. In the meantime, a number of prototypes will need to be built and operated. The Gen IV concepts currently under investigation are not all on the same timeline and some might not even reach the stage of commercial exploitation.
Examples of advanced reactor prototypes (steps towards Gen IV designs) currently under construction:
It will take at least two or three decades before the deployment of commercial Gen IV systems. In the meantime, a number of prototypes will need to be built and operated. The Gen IV concepts currently under investigation are not all on the same timeline and some might not even reach the stage of commercial exploitation.
Examples of advanced reactor prototypes (steps towards Gen IV designs) currently under construction:
- Sodium-cooled reactor technology: BN-800 in Russia under construction at Beloyarsk NPP in Russia (start of operation expected in 2015).
- High-temperature reactor technology: HTR-PM in China under construction in Shidaowan, China (construction started in January 2013, and start of operation is expected towards the end of 2017).
(Did they make those dates?)
Q: “How long will we have to wait for that fleet of Gen IV reactors to be built?”
A: "Until the twelfth of Never, and that's a long long time!"
...energy that nuclear energy has been producing since the 1990's, between 28 and 30 Exajoules.
How much time do we have for the magic solar and wind junk to reach 30 Exajoules from the useless 12 EJ (5 EJ for solar and 7 EJ for wind) to be as effective as nuclear energy?
One of the biggest lies in energy is the lie that building solar and wind junk is faster than building nuclear.
My son, I'm proud to say, is a Ph.D. Student in nuclear materials, studying printing (additive manufacture) nuclear reactors. Most of his fellow graduate students are there to fight climate change, as opposed to lying around, picking lint out of their navels and pretending to give a shit about climate change as long giving a shit doesn't involve approving of stuff that actually works.
How much experience to antinukes have at making sense? How much experience do they have at arresting their stupid chants while the world burns?
Zero in either case.
Here's the numbers and the references:
Where would we be with CO2 without our 3.063 trillion dollar solar and wind infrastructure?
The figure, 3.062 trillion dollar figure in the title comes from this source: Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2020.
The publication information is as follows:
Frankfurt School-UNEP Centre/BNEF. 2020.
Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2020, http://www.fs-unep-centre.org (Frankfurt am Main)
Copyright © Frankfurt School of Finance & Management gGmbH 2020
Here is how I came up with the figures.
I referred to figure 42 on page 62 of the report.
It is reproduced here for convenience:
This table is available as a graphics object only, so I manually transcribed it into an Excel spreadsheet to do calculations.
Note that the time period covered is between 2004 and 2019. Far more money has been and is being squandered on solar and wind right up to the present day of course, but for the purpose of the counterfactual calculations here, this number should suffice.
The reader is invited to check my transcription of the numbers into a spreadsheet, but here they are:
For the numbers in the table, the total amount of money squandered on solar energy amounts to 1671.3 billion dollars, 1.6713 trillion dollars. The last number after the decimal point represents $300,000,000.
For wind, we have the amount of money squandered on it as being 1391.3 billion dollars, 1.3913 trillion dollars. The number after the decimal point represents $300,000,000, three hundred million dollars. That's the scale of the squandering.
The total amount squandered on these two forms of energy between 2004 and 2019 alone is thus 3062.6 billion dollars. (In the title, I rounded up, what's 400 billion dollars between friends?)
Here, from the 2022 World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency (IEA) is the amount of energy produced by all forms of primary energy on this planet, a table I often reproduce in this space:
Source: 2022 IEA World Energy Outlook Table A1a, page 435.
By 2021, at a cost of 1.6713 trillion dollars, solar energy was producing just 5 Exajoules of energy on a planet where 624 Exajoules of energy were being consumed.
By 2021, at a cost of 1.3913 trillion dollars, wind energy was producing just 7 Exajoules of energy on a planet where 624 Exajoules of energy were being consumed.
After 50 years, half a century, of mindless cheering, the entire combined solar and wind industry at 12 Exajoules built at these trillion dollar rates, was not even able to cover the increase in the use of dangerous natural gas, coal and oil from 2020 to 2021, an 11 Exajoule increase for dangerous oil, a 7 Exajoule increase for dangerous natural gas, and an 8 Exajoule increase in the use of dangerous coal.
Note that this table does not include reference to hydrogen or to batteries, the two schemes often the subject of popular stupidity designed to put a band aid on the disastrous unreliability of the solar and wind industry, making them even more environmentally odious than they already are.
The publication information is as follows:
Frankfurt School-UNEP Centre/BNEF. 2020.
Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2020, http://www.fs-unep-centre.org (Frankfurt am Main)
Copyright © Frankfurt School of Finance & Management gGmbH 2020
Here is how I came up with the figures.
I referred to figure 42 on page 62 of the report.
It is reproduced here for convenience:
This table is available as a graphics object only, so I manually transcribed it into an Excel spreadsheet to do calculations.
Note that the time period covered is between 2004 and 2019. Far more money has been and is being squandered on solar and wind right up to the present day of course, but for the purpose of the counterfactual calculations here, this number should suffice.
The reader is invited to check my transcription of the numbers into a spreadsheet, but here they are:
For the numbers in the table, the total amount of money squandered on solar energy amounts to 1671.3 billion dollars, 1.6713 trillion dollars. The last number after the decimal point represents $300,000,000.
For wind, we have the amount of money squandered on it as being 1391.3 billion dollars, 1.3913 trillion dollars. The number after the decimal point represents $300,000,000, three hundred million dollars. That's the scale of the squandering.
The total amount squandered on these two forms of energy between 2004 and 2019 alone is thus 3062.6 billion dollars. (In the title, I rounded up, what's 400 billion dollars between friends?)
Here, from the 2022 World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency (IEA) is the amount of energy produced by all forms of primary energy on this planet, a table I often reproduce in this space:
Source: 2022 IEA World Energy Outlook Table A1a, page 435.
By 2021, at a cost of 1.6713 trillion dollars, solar energy was producing just 5 Exajoules of energy on a planet where 624 Exajoules of energy were being consumed.
By 2021, at a cost of 1.3913 trillion dollars, wind energy was producing just 7 Exajoules of energy on a planet where 624 Exajoules of energy were being consumed.
After 50 years, half a century, of mindless cheering, the entire combined solar and wind industry at 12 Exajoules built at these trillion dollar rates, was not even able to cover the increase in the use of dangerous natural gas, coal and oil from 2020 to 2021, an 11 Exajoule increase for dangerous oil, a 7 Exajoule increase for dangerous natural gas, and an 8 Exajoule increase in the use of dangerous coal.
Note that this table does not include reference to hydrogen or to batteries, the two schemes often the subject of popular stupidity designed to put a band aid on the disastrous unreliability of the solar and wind industry, making them even more environmentally odious than they already are.
And what have we here? An antinuke shows up again after years, with the planet burning, crops failing, oceans dying, people dropping dead all over the world from extreme heat to talk about...um...um...um...Chernobyl?
Really?
Chernobyl took place in 1986. The rate of death from just one form of fossil fuel waste, air pollution, not even counting climate change, which may soon be comparable, is 19,000 human beings per day, around 7 million per year.
Reference: : Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.
Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:
The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).
That suggests somewhere between 200 million and 300 million dead in the 37 years that whiny antinukes have been carrying on about Chernobyl.
Chernobyl is in Ukraine. Which killed more people in Ukraine, Chernobyl or Putin's war funded by fossil fuel sales to that coal dependent antinuke hellhole Germany?
Now, how about we challenge our antinukes to show, using reputable references, that commercial nuclear power has led to as many deaths from radiation in its 70 year history as will be killed in the next 48 hours from air pollution, fossil fuel waste, that would be about 38,000 people about whom heads up the ass antinukes couldn't care less.
The United States built more than 100 nuclear reactors in about 25 years while providing the lowest cost electricity in the industrial world, and did so when the largest computers were less powerful than a modern cell phone. Many of them still operate, saving human lives.
It's interesting to see historic antinukes show up spewing garbage from barely literate journalists, this while the planet burns, handing out the same line of bull.
I have never thought that antinukes have ever demonstrated a shred of decency, but nothing, absolutely nothing, brings it home more clearly than a planet in flames and people acting as if on a scale of reality, the most important subjects are Chernobyl, Fukushima and even (yes this really happened here in the last couple of weeks) Three Mile Island.
Antinukes have no sense of decency. None. Zero. Zilch.
Nuclear energy need not be perfect nor without risk to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be better than everything else, which it is, certainly superior to the useless, ineffective, slow to build, fossil fuel dependent solar and wind junk.
Chernobyl...
Chernobyl...
The fucking planet is in flames, and still this is taken seriously?
No sense of decency. None.
Have a nice day.
Beloyarsk BN-800 fast reactor running on MOX
13 September 2022
Unit 4 of Beloyarsk nuclear power plant with a BN-800 fast reactor has been connected to the grid and resumed operations after being fully loaded with uranium-plutonium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel.
TVEL is the supplier of the MOX fuel to Beloyarsk 4 (Image: TVEL/Rosatom)
The plutonium for this was produced from uranium during the operation of other nuclear power plants and recovered from the used fuel assemblies through reprocessing.
MOX fuel is manufactured from plutonium recovered from used reactor fuel, mixed with depleted uranium which is a by-product from uranium enrichment.
“Full conversion of the BN-800 to MOX fuel is a long-anticipated milestone for the nuclear industry. For the first time in the history of Russian nuclear power, we proceed to operation of a fast neutron reactor with a full load of uranium-plutonium fuel and closed nuclear fuel cycle,” said Alexander Ugryumov, Senior Vice President for Research and Development at TVEL JSC.
“This is the original reason and target why the BN-800 was developed, and why Rosatom built the unique automated fuel fabrication facility at the Mining and Chemical Combine. Advanced technologies of fissile materials recycling and re-fabrication of nuclear fuel will make it possible to expand the resource feed-stock of the nuclear power, reprocess irradiated fuel instead of storing it, and to reduce the volumes of waste.”
The unit is a sodium-cooled fast reactor which produces about 820 MWe. It started operation in 2016 and in 2020 achieved a capacity factor of 82% despite having an experimental role in proving reactor technologies and fuels.
Unit 4 of Beloyarsk nuclear power plant with a BN-800 fast reactor has been connected to the grid and resumed operations after being fully loaded with uranium-plutonium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel.
TVEL is the supplier of the MOX fuel to Beloyarsk 4 (Image: TVEL/Rosatom)
The plutonium for this was produced from uranium during the operation of other nuclear power plants and recovered from the used fuel assemblies through reprocessing.
MOX fuel is manufactured from plutonium recovered from used reactor fuel, mixed with depleted uranium which is a by-product from uranium enrichment.
“Full conversion of the BN-800 to MOX fuel is a long-anticipated milestone for the nuclear industry. For the first time in the history of Russian nuclear power, we proceed to operation of a fast neutron reactor with a full load of uranium-plutonium fuel and closed nuclear fuel cycle,” said Alexander Ugryumov, Senior Vice President for Research and Development at TVEL JSC.
“This is the original reason and target why the BN-800 was developed, and why Rosatom built the unique automated fuel fabrication facility at the Mining and Chemical Combine. Advanced technologies of fissile materials recycling and re-fabrication of nuclear fuel will make it possible to expand the resource feed-stock of the nuclear power, reprocess irradiated fuel instead of storing it, and to reduce the volumes of waste.”
The unit is a sodium-cooled fast reactor which produces about 820 MWe. It started operation in 2016 and in 2020 achieved a capacity factor of 82% despite having an experimental role in proving reactor technologies and fuels.