What they said isn’t really news, is it?
I took this free course a few years ago. I don’t know if it’s up to date or not. There may be other options on Coursera or elsewhere.
Instructor also wrote a book. Kind of old (last edition 2011) now but the basics are the same. A used copy is cheap.
https://www.amazon.com/Global-Warming-Understanding-David-Archer/dp/0470943416
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Theres some cool stuff looking at mega chargers. Fast charging for trucks.
A normal charger is 10/20 kw. Fast charger 70 to 90kw. The mega chargers are 1 or 2 mw. For context a power station unit is 300 to 500 mw.
Don’t hold your breath. I think it was Sony that claimed they’d have a fuel cell powered cell phone to market within a year in the late 00s. I thought I was going to replace my Motorola Razr with it (haha). I see “racing to market” claims going back to 2001 in a quick search.
EU has just put together a plan to get a 55% reduction by 2030 with the carbon price to get there. (But other countries arent doing the same)
Investment in renewables has rising from nothing to about 700 billion per year (vs about 1.8 trillion per year needed)
Many of the countries going to glasgow in november are backing up their commitments with legislation (while others are not, or are dragging their heals)
Investment in carbon offsets and sequestration is about 0.2 gt CO2 equivelant per year. Which has been accelerating every year. (But it needs to accelerate twice as fast and get to 2gt by 2030)
Every other metric is a similar story. Massive investment and acceleration in many places, but still too slow.
This is not an impossible task. Its just a very very difficult one. Defeatism is not the answer.
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Your chart is 3 years out of date.
The last 3 years have seen a slight leveling off, followed by a drop (caused by covid) and a bounce back. Most forecasts now indicate that GHG will level off and deline slightly.
In my phone so cant find a great chart, but this is fairly typical.
Given that we are also seeing a massive increase in energy use in the developing world, this reflects a major drop in carbon intensity, i.e. the emissions per unit of energy.
Because thats the challenge, the developed world can probably cut fast enough, if the US gets on board, but can we cut globally AND drag the other 7 billion people out of poverty at the same time? This is why India didnt show up to climate talks two weeks ago.
I was interested in fuel cells a long long time ago, but it seems like they have been a bit of an intentional stalling tactic/diversion intended to kill electric cars.
I guess that could be true even if the development efforts have been in earnest. I don’t know much about them but I think the difficulty of the materials problems aren’t appreciated. A graduate student friend made a micromachined fuel cell for his MS thesis. It “worked” in that it produced a measurable output, but it was far from a practical device. When he graduated he said fuck this and went to work at a nuclear power plant as a safety engineer. Homer Simpson, basically.
There are a fair amount of fuel cell vehicles on the road, but…a client I had for solar worked for Toyota (pretty sure it was Toyota, but maybe Honda, but Toyota has a lot of corporate stuff near me) and iirc they said the motors were like $1M each. They were selling/leasing them out, but at a huge loss. Obviously that could change, but at this point there have been fuel cell vehicles for quite a while.
Meanwhile, lithium batteries get smaller, lighter, cheaper and safer every day…and they’re already pretty damn good.
Sad!
I scanned the wiki. It says the fuel cell was invented in 1838 by William Grove (whose name shows up in a few places in the history of electricity) and lists a couple of dozen types that have been developed since. A lot of work has gone into them over time.
For cars, it seems like if you can afford the platinum and are ok with a service life that gets you ~75k miles, fine. Otherwise, you’re back to looking for materials.
I wonder if Igor ever got nervous signing for that platinum sputtering target.
Well I dont see it in Germany. Regulations for renewables have become stricter. The candidate of the biggest party implemented new rules for wind turbines in his home state. During the floods he said that is not an event where you change your policies. We shut down our nuclear power stations during the upcoming years. We dont build the grid for getting wind energy from the coast to the south. If there would be such heavy investments they would brag about it but they dont so I assume Germany isnt really doing enough.
Where does your 800bn number come from? Bloomberg - Are you a robot? shows about 282bn for 2019. I am not sure that it increased that much through a covid plagued year 2020. Now we also have a shortage on raw materials.
There go another 30 billion to rebuild the stuff destroyed through the floods. We just never spent that kind of money on preventing it.
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For @anon10396289 if you’re still here.
https://twitter.com/ziontree/status/1425198405651996676?s=19
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No person in the US is going to decide when a nuclear plant shuts down on their own. Everyone can go vegan and not drive.
Conservatives using nuclear power as a cudgel to mock hippies (who’ve been right about the environmentalist movement since day 1) never gets old.
I agree but I am also sympathetic to arguments against pushing down stuff like climate action to the individual level. The whole heuristic that Everything Should Be An Individual Consumer Choice is one of several failed Reagan era conservative Big Ideas that still flourishes in spite of its irrefutable track record of failure. Let’s take every opportunity to keep shouting down people that advocate for it.
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Totally disagree. And consumer choices have been very impactful. And I’m going to keep shouting down people who say their individual choices don’t matter.
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And individuals conserving energy was Carter’s thing, not Reagans. I don’t recall Reagan saying anything like that or about consumer choices to do good for anything other than Make America Great Again.
I’m not saying consumer choices don’t matter, I’m saying that policy makers have an important role to play in shaping the conditions in which consumers make choices. Deregulation was a core pillar of Reagonomics and it continues to plague policy choices today.
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