Better satellites and other aerial survey data has determined that oil and gas related methane emissions are far, far higher than industry reports. Everywhere independent researchers look along the production, transmission, distribution and end use pipeline they find more leakage than has been assumed because industry has provided the numbers the assumptions are based on for years.
Along some particularly leaky production paths methane emissions are so great that the impact is greater than coal over 100 year timescale. For example, some parts of NM Permian have a 9% (!) leakage rate. When combusted methane releases about half the amount of CO2 that coal does. The eGHG potential of methane is 20x CO2 over 100 year timescale, so you have to add 180% to the total GHG potential, making it 40% worse than coal w/o even considering other leakage along the pipeline.
In Massachusetts, Lost and Unaccounted for Gas (LAUG) is estimated per mile of pipe, rather than evaluated by regulators or even industry. It is a simple multiplication problem with little bearing on reality. Consumers bear the cost of LAUG while the utilities are guaranteed a 10% profit on their infrastructure expenses. This, along with subsidies for leak prone pipe replacement, leads to needless investment in outmoded fossil fuel infrastructure (i.e., pipe replacement) being prioritized over leak repair.
>In Massachusetts, Lost and Unaccounted for Gas (LAUG) is estimated per mile of pipe, rather than evaluated by regulators or even industry. It is a simple multiplication problem with little bearing on reality
Isn't both ends of a pipe metered? Even if not every pope is metered, at the very least there should be metering at the point of bulk purchase (eg. from a LNG ship) to the end user (gas meter at a home). How hard is it to compare how much is put into the pipe vs how much comes out?
When accurate metering is called for we have the tech to do it just fine to far less than <1% error. This is a classic case where regulation is required. Rational capitalist enterprise is not going to fix this on their own. They don't currently have the right incentives.
To 1% volume, like rotary meters, but not 1% mass. At least not at reasonable cost.
But you are right that regulation is the answer, although personally I think direct leak detection is more realistic than measuring gas flows accurately in a system that's already built around low accuracy metering.
Coriolis flow meters in natural gas have been accurate and pretty inexpensive since the 1990s with accuracies better than 99% on the extreme low end and 99.5% on the high end.
Its easy to say that anything is 'too expensive' when the regulatory bar is set so low that it doesn't exist.
Right, you could put a combustible-gas-safe mass flow sensor on every gas line, high and low pressure, at a cost of roughly 100x current rotary and aperture flow meters, but then metering would become by far the largest cost in gas production.
This thread is in response to a user who commented above:
> Even if not every pope is metered, at the very least there should be metering at the point of bulk purchase (eg. from a LNG ship) to the end user (gas meter at a home).
Meanwhile in California, PG&E underfunded maintenance, perhaps because regulators squeezed too hard? Eventually we had things like the San Bruno gas explosion and wildfires so bad that PG&E went bankrupt.
Finding the optimal amount of regulation seems difficult. It seems like too blunt an instrument. Incentives are no substitute for technical people who want to do what's right.
I’m unconvinced that a change to new management, government-run or not, would automatically get technically competent people hired and give them the decision-making power to do things right. Sure, it might, but it’s hardly guaranteed.
I think a lot of this boils down to the fact that you can make large multiples of the amount you'd make working on this kind of thing by working on something relatively non-productive like finance, consulting, adtech, etc. A large percentage of my engineering class went into one of those. One of the smartest guys I knew there, who studied nuclear engineering, now does healthcare private equity.
The incentives are all messed up. We should do some combination of making these jobs more attractive and making those relatively extractive jobs less attractive.
Thank you for pointing out why it should be a public utility that does the right thing rather then a private company who was willing to burn the state down for profit.
Public utilities can also face perverse incentives, and be run poorly.
Commercial enterprises at least can face some competition! But with infrastructure like last-mile gas pipelines, it's tricky, and the companies end up being local monopolies. Hence the trouble: a monopoly has very different incentives than a company actually competing on the market.
lol. PG&E has had a culture of malfeasance since at least the 60’s - which is why all the records on those buried pipelines and power lines were missing or never recorded at all. Despite it being a regulatory requirement.
It just got worse as they passed more and more of it into investor pockets.
No. The current inventory of methane sources even with these upwards estimates for industry are unable to account for what is observed in the atmosphere. This is a big topic of current research.
Those 100 year timescale numbers are misleading as the impact is so front loaded. They only make sense when talking about an emissions that are constant through long timescales.
I've heard people argue that its both too aggressive and too conservative. I'm in the too conservative camp, we need to figure things out sooner than 100 years and the risk of a feedback loop is high with methane.
Its fine to assert that a single number doesn't capture the nuances of the situation. But we have to keep in mind that
1) the heat trapped by the methane stays trapped even after it has decayed
2) methane concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing significantly faster than co2
3) the more methane in the atmosphere the slower its rate of decay
3) It’s nonlinear, increasing methane concentrations also benefit methane scavenging bacteria which should increase the rate of breakdown as concentrations increase. OH only lasts around 1 second in the atmosphere so in theory it should be depleted by increasing atmospheric methane, but methane is only one of several things it reacts with so the difference is minimal without orders of magnitude change in Methane.
>1) the heat trapped by the methane stays trapped even after it has decayed
Not really. It would be present, but not trapped. Absent other factors, that would mean earth is above its equilibrium temperature and would cool once methane loss permits it to radiate heat more effectively. Either that or it shoots us in the face with a clathrate gun. There's really only one way to find out.
Ouch! They’re estimating 131 kt of methane! That’s equivalent to approx 3.93 Megatons of CO2 (in terms of its global warming impact over a century) or roughly equivalent to that of a small country like Iceland or Malta annually.
Take off, climb and circles before landng time use considerably more fuel than that of cruising time, so that needs to be considered. Also, as short haul fights generally don't climb as high, they lose the benefits of high altitude cruising.
Short haul flights use proportionally more fuel per mile flown because taking off is very fuel intensive. That said, no idea what average value the GP comment is basing their numbers off of.
From what I read, we can expect a 1 degree increase if we release somewhere in the ballpark of 100 billion tons of CO2. Using those figures, 3.93 megatons is 0.0000393 degrees.
As a point of comparison, humans release roughly 40 gigatons of CO2 per year; 3.93 megatons is 0.0098% of that.
As another point of comparison, around 550 gigatons of CO2 is released (and absorbed) by the planet "naturally". 3.93 megatons is 0.0007% of that.
40 / 550 is less than 10%. That's actually a huge number considering that the planet has an "equilibrium". Your actions can affect that balance and the whole planet goes into disarray. Not saying that's what will happen, though. The planet could also just absorb our extra CO2 (which is why it's becoming greener).
If you want to get really scared about methane leaks, sinkholes are forming across the tundra as global warming melts the permafrost, creating gigantic methane bubbles as the previously frozen organic material now rots. Those bubbles explode once big enough, creating massive pockmarks which fill in with water.
The amount of methane they leak is estimated to be gigantic, but without full coverage we'll never know.
The fact that we haven't solved the methane leak problem, despite methane being valuable, makes me think that carbon capture that involves pumping CO2 into caves or whatever will have zero chance of success. Anyone promoting such tech is, IMO, a fraud.
The description says this happened in 2023 June-to-November-ish in Kazakhstan. It sounds like this was a smaller version of Turkmenistan's crater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater
Short of China and India voluntarily holding themselves to the same standards as Western Europe and the US for free, we are not going to avoid catastrophic global warming.
The good news is, while we may not be able to prevent climate change, we are not powerless against it.
The Dutch know how to win the fight against sea level rise.
Middle Eastern architecture knows how to keep people cool even with >50°C air temperatures.
The Canadians know how to winterize an electric grid.
Sure, we may not have the optimal strategy for addressing some threats, like wildfires, right now, but the point is, we are not alone, and we are not helpless.
Countless human lives can be saved if we're willing to work together.
> Short of China and India voluntarily holding themselves to the same standards as Western Europe and the US
China and India emit significantly less CO2 per capita than Western Europe and the US [0] - and that's ignoring the fact they do all of our manufacturing.
>China and India emit significantly less CO2 per capita
Which would be great if CO2's heat trapping properties depended on the per capita emissions of their nation of origin. Unfortunately CO2 molecules don't know where they came from and can't adjust their heat trapping properties accordingly, and instead it's about absolute amounts as ppm of the atmosphere.
But there's a silver lining for China and India - which is that even small reductions in their per capita emissions cash out as massive reductions in absolute terms.
So in terms of bang for the buck per-capita wise, they are the top candidates for emissions savings.
Just no. In terms of bang for buck it's easier to reduce emissions in rich countries with high emissions per capita.
Unless by "buck" you mean the number of decisions that need to be made, but that's hardly the limiting factor.
Country sizes are arbitrary. With your logic if China was to split into a bunch of smaller nations their emissions wouldn't matter any more? Per-capita emissions is the only reasonable way to measure.
If the Earth's population was 1 billion, 10 billion, or 100 billion, but the emissions were the same, in each of those cases we would be cooked to death by our own atmosphere. Even though they have wildly different per capita emissions.
Or to put it a different way, if all I knew were the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, and all you knew were per capita consumption figures, I would know when the atmosphere was truly cooked and you wouldn't.
What's your point? This is not about "knowing if the atmosphere is cooked or not".
High emission countries/individuals are most responsible for the environmental damage, and most capable of reducing their emissions with the least impact on their living standard.
They collectively still emit substantially more than the US and Western Europe, and much more importantly, GHG emissions have been declining in the US and Western Europe for over two decades. In that same time period, they have done nothing but grow rapidly in China and India. All the information we have so far suggests that India will continue to grow rapidly in this regard even after China plateaus on carbon emissions.
We can play semantic games with per-capita consumption, but the fact of the matter remains that even if the entirety of the planet, except China and India, went 100% carbon neutral overnight, it would still be impossible to avoid hitting catastrophic climate change thresholds due to GHG emissions from those two countries alone.
They are both countries home to a rapidly rising broad middle class, and that middle class is going to want to enjoy the spoils of materialistic consumerism (the true root cause of human-induced climate change) just as much as our grandparents did, our parents did, and we do.
> We can play semantic games with per-capita consumption, but the fact of the matter remains that even if the entirety of the planet, except China and India, went 100% carbon neutral overnight, it would still be impossible to avoid hitting catastrophic climate change thresholds due to GHG emissions from those two countries alone.
Of all the countries China is doing the most to curb its emissions.
> Global annual renewable capacity additions increased by almost 50% to nearly 510 gigawatts (GW) in 2023, the fastest growth rate in the past two decades. [..] In 2023, China commissioned as much solar PV as the entire world did in 2022, while its wind additions also grew by 66% year-on-year. Globally, solar PV alone accounted for three-quarters of renewable capacity additions worldwide.
The western world is shifting away from China to India and the rest of Asia for manufacturing, so I think the desire for cheaper products and ‘national security’ are going to increase emissions somewhat. But even still, with the glut of renewables, and soon the glut of batteries, emissions free energy is going to be the cheapest option for manufacturing anyway
>Of all the countries China is doing the most to curb its emissions.
China "doing the most" to curb emissions is perfectly compatible with them "doing the most" of the actual emissions. At high enough scales, no matter what you're doing, you'll be doing "the most" of it, in both directions.
What matters at the end of the day is emissions in absolute terms.
> Of all the countries China is doing the most to curb its emissions.
False. They have good green PR to justify other governments funneling taxpayer money via subsidies but meanwhile they are building the most coal plants than any country and this has been only ramping up in recent years with more new fossil fuel power plants being approved year on year.
As I've explained in another comment, adding power stations and capacity doesn't mean running 100% all year. China is using coal as peakers much like other countries use gas for this purpose. Given that China is also installing the most energy storage, it's not long (at current growth, less than 10 years) before these plants are only used in emergency situations.
You explained wrong. literally no one uses coal as peaker ever, and they are building more coal plants than the rest of the world combined (the country is not even the most populous)
I can point to the data. Do you have anything to back yourself? Reputable sources? What are your convictions based on?
> literally no one uses coal as peaker ever
While these plants might be strained by having to adjust their output, they don’t need to have a long lifespan. On the current growth curve, 10 years max and batteries have taken over.
As for China building things that are redundant, look at the ghost cities. Their local governments are incentivized to hit quotas, and it ends up with useless crap being built
You claimed "they are peaking plants". This is obviously wrong (how many peaking coal power plants are anywhere in the world, I'd be surprised if there's even one) and you have not provided any sources.
A plant doesn't have to be expressly a 'peaking' plant to drop it's capacity or increase it. All coal plants have this capability. Certainly it takes longer for coal plants to do this vs a dedicated gas peaker plant.
At any rate, the data plainly shows that the percentage share of renewable electricity in China is going up. I've never denied that coal plants are being built in China, but the data shows that China is using renewables in preference to other sources of energy, with a very clear and sustained growth rate.
It's not about coal plants being built, it's about how many are being built and long term planning behind it. This interview with Hannah shows how difficult it is to make China look good (it looks like she tries hard though, for some reason) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/podcasts/transcript-ezra-....
They ban coal burning in houses and they move plants out of big cities where tourists go but they still build more and more plants. "oh but they'll use them less surely and burn less coal" would be great but sounds rosy
> using renewables in preference to other sources of energy, with a very clear and sustained growth rate.
Note that it's for electricity. How is it calculated? If it's used to power their pump based water energy storage then does it count? If it's used to heat then does it count? Does it rely on CCP provided metrics here while pollution, coal plants and fossil burning can be measured independently (just look at satellite based pollution map)
> that middle class is going to want to enjoy the spoils of materialistic consumerism (the true root cause of human-induced climate change) just as much as our grandparents did, our parents did, and we do.
The last 3 words is key there. WE also don't want to give up those spoils. And we want to enjoy them by outsourcing their production to the cheapest places and cheapest methods, like unsafe mining of minerals done by underpaid children. But hey, it's not happening in our country, so we're fine?
If a phone is made with minerals mined using safe Western mining standards, and made by factory workers earning decent wages, and it's CO2 neutral, and so on, it'll be more expensive, and will not sell well, because as long as there's another country producing the same phone but without all those "external" costs, the consumer will say "Look, this phone has the exact same specs but is way cheaper!".
You manage to make it look like no one can make a sane choice for themselves. Other countries can only do what we want (because WE want cheap products WE make them do bad stuff), and we can only do what they want (if they offer something that is cheaper then we automatically must buy it and not care about any damage or side-effects). It's a paradox isn't it?
In reality it is government's choice, to go for short term riches and maintaining power or act more ethically and think long term. And consumers pay more all the time for things like "no slave labour" (idk how well it's enforced, I just say it's a value), "ethically sourced materials", "recycled", "no spying malware", blahblahblah, just look at Android vs iPhone.
> You manage to make it look like no one can make a sane choice for themselves.
On average, the "sane" choice is to go for the cheapest option, or turn a blind eye to the child labor, etc.
Sure, some people want to live ethically and minimize their emissions, but there's not enough of them.
> In reality it is government's choice, to go for short term riches and maintaining power or act more ethically and think long term.
Yeah, Macron tried to tax fuel more and there were widespread protests by "average French citizen", and he got metaphorically beaten up in the last election. The EU incumbents watered down green projects because of fear of losing to the rightwing populists. It's the sane choice for them to make, because I'd rather be governed by the somewhat sane center-right than lying manipulative populist hard-right, but the sane choice meant stepping away from the path of an ecological future. The summary is, if you try to be ethical, you get voted out of office, god bless democracy! /s
> On average, the "sane" choice is to go for the cheapest option, or turn a blind eye to the child labor, etc.
People choose option with maximum utility and it's never as simple as "cheapest" (see iPhones, "vegan cars" etc etc)
> Macron tried to tax fuel more and there were widespread protests
Many people would support the government making green choices. They are not the kinds of people who would go about ransacking streets. Most affected are probably farmers. Also, European taxes on fuel are already bigger than generally in the world, democracy is OK
> if you try to be ethical, you get voted out of office
>But hey, it's not happening in our country, so we're fine?
No, but even if the US and Western Europe went net zero, that's still not enough to offset global GHG emissions coming out of China to prevent catastrophic climate change.
If you, a wealthy westerner, want to tell billions of people in China to stop enjoying middle class luxuries for the first time because it's bad for the environment, be my guest. I have no such desire.
> No, but even if the US and Western Europe went net zero, that's still not enough to offset global GHG emissions coming out of China to prevent catastrophic climate change.
Show me the math/source, if you want to claim this, please. US and W. Europe outsource their emissions because they buy their electronics and clothes from e.g. China and Bangladesh. What is a US/WE net zero? They stop buying Chinese product, and China stops producing them for US/WE?
One of them is GHG (CO2 equivalent) and the other one is just CO2 itself, right?
Does seem to change the numbers much, but it’s an additional difference between these metrics, right?
Why do you discount export emissions? Is it forced on them against their will or they don't profit from it? Shall we also adjust for things like how much of their emissions could have been green, etc?
I'm not the same commenter as above, but, why not? In the extreme hypothetical scenario, a country could be net-zero and have the newest iPhone every year, throw away their good PCs because Windows 11 needs a modern one with TPM 2.0, fast fashion, and steak for dinner every night, because everything's produced in the neighboring country. And then when the world says "We need to be better about our carbon output", your argument is like the country of Netzeroland saying "Well don't blame me, I'm net zero on CO2, blame Neighboristan over there! I don't need to change, they need to change!", when in fact its people also need to change their consumption habits.
Whether it's forced, it seems like a philosophical question about economics. Do you go to work willingly, or because you're forced to, because you want to be able to afford food, housing, and iPhone 17?
Or it's a tragedy of the commons scenario. If there's demand, and Neighboristan is able to but doesn't supply it, their citizens are forced by government to give up sources of income; meanwhile the citizens of We-Also-Build-iPhones-And-Make-Cheap-Shirts-ia are raking the money in and travelling around the world and taking selfies of their steak meals with their iPhones, and citizens of Neighboristan will get jealous and think "Why can't we do that?". And they'll either vote in a government that will allow this, or revolt.
And consumers in the West enable this behavior by wanting the cheapest bang for the buck. If China charges for CO2, your cheap Walmart toy gets more expensive, and you don't buy it, Walmart will say "we'll find a supplier in Vietnam/India/etc where there's no such CO2 fees."...
How you describe is not how demand & supply works. To think that every product China puts on Amazon and whatnot is there because there's demand for it doesn't make sense. A lot of the time existence of supply creates demand. I see it first hand all the time. Some new thing is put out (accessory, electronics, etc), everyone gets on the bandwagon and buys it. It also helps if there's fashionable aura and gov subsidies (EVs). If it was not made & sold, people would instead buy something else made locally even if it cost more or simply not buy.
Yes, part of it is consumer choice (and yes some consumers do choose to not buy if they think it supports environmental damage or such) but it's wrong to pretend one side is the one who makes all the choices and the other side is powerless to resist because it's convenient for your argument.
> because everything's produced in the neighboring country
Unless the first country dictates neighbouring country's policies, not sure it's that relevant.
> it seems like a philosophical question about economics. Do you go to work willingly, or because you're forced to, because you want to be able to afford food, housing, and iPhone 17?
Either there's freedom of choice or not. This logic can go to "I should deceive people or dump waste into rivers or use slave labour, because market & I want to afford a new fancy yacht or invade a country". Yes, I can choose not to work or do different work that is more or less friendly to environment and I use an old iPhone.
> their citizens are forced by government to give up sources of income
There's unlimited hypotheticals. Should we say we are forced to give up sources of income if they involve crime or morally wrong things that are discouraged?
> And consumers in the West enable this behavior by wanting the cheapest bang for the buck.
"Enabling" can be used to justify anything or assign any guilt. It's a bit narcissistic. It reminds me of "America started the war in Ukraine" a little.
> Or it's a tragedy of the commons scenario.
I agree there is some tragedy of the commons here.
> and that's ignoring the fact they do all of our manufacturing.
Any estimate of how much that constitutes? Like if US and EU had to produce themselves all the stuff they now get from China, how would their CO2 emissions change?
Not sure who you're replying to, but when you factor in trade, China is still a touch behind the EU and seems to be trending away. I see 2022 on the chart (you might have to make sure you have JS enabled)
Per capita is a proxy for discussing how much emissions they need. If you're not considering anyone's need, then you're basically telling them to go kill themselves and they'll likewise completely ignore anything you have to say. If we ignore China's/India's needs and what they actually can do while talking about what they should do, then the whole discussion is a waste of time.
And will you be happy if iPhones and Walmart toys cost, let's say 30% more, because of China mandating CO2 emissions compensation? (Although such a compensation is mostly mythical). Or that the shelves of Walmart are bare ("Sorry we can only produce 10% of what we're able to, emission caps"), and prices are sky-high because of the law of supply and demand? I bet you'll be moaning then too.
More people live in China and India. Their government is doing a better job at keeping emissions down, per person. Pollution doesn't care where you live.
According to a 2016 study, electricity theft and fraud in India can account for almost 20% of the country's total electricity generation. Other sources have reported that the percentage of lost electricity due to theft can range from 20% to 50%.
Electricity theft can be a result of poor governance, and power distribution companies (discoms) that are already in debt can face significant losses. Some say that the government needs to promote better governance in the sector to help manage the issue.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Of all the countries China is doing the most to curb its emissions. Not sure what else you expect them to do
> Global annual renewable capacity additions increased by almost 50% to nearly 510 gigawatts (GW) in 2023, the fastest growth rate in the past two decades. [..] In 2023, China commissioned as much solar PV as the entire world did in 2022, while its wind additions also grew by 66% year-on-year. Globally, solar PV alone accounted for three-quarters of renewable capacity additions worldwide.
China has emitted much less in absolute since the industrial revolution, less per capita today, they're poor, they're rapidly building out renewables faster than anyone, they're powering the world's transition to renewables with the cheapest solar panels and batteries, they're expected to hit their coal peak in the next two years, Xi has made it a publicly stated policy priority recently to decarbonise their economy, and they're the world's manufacturer which means their economy has to play on hard mode relative to a service economy like the US.
It's wrong to point the finger at them as some kind of uniquely bad actor. Yes they have to decarbonise, but so does everyone at at the same time, and this bad faith argument keeps being resurrected as an excuse to do nothing at home.
Per capita is misleading. China has over 1 billion people more than the US, the majority of them in abject poverty. Same for India; so their per capita number is artificially skewed downward.
Are you a time traveler from 1990? China effectively doesn't have anyone in extreme poverty ($1.50/day). They have about the same or lower rate than the US.
They do have people in poverty, 24% below $5.50/day ($2000/yr) line.
India has also decreased extreme poverty, down to 2% in 2023. At $3.20/day, they declined to 21%. At $5.50, they are at 81%. Most people are poor, but less poor than they were.
Not sure if your answer is intended to be serious or sarcastic. But there is a justifiable argument for it -- you have new humans to take care of, who have needs, and the same moral claim as anyone else in the world nto address those needs using fossil fuels.
On the other hand, there's no reason to think that an increase in the number of countries is a valid excuse to increase emissions.
Leading to the conclusion: those few people (government) who have the greatest influence over the problem (over the countries with the largest emissions in real terms, not per person) somehow don't have the responsibility.
It's true that if a country splits into two countries, that doesn't give them a right to emit more collectively. However, it does mean that each country now has little control over what the other one does, and less ability to actually solve the collective problem we want solving, which was the objective here.
It's great if China is genuinely going renewable. I read about this often. But I also read that they're the biggest producers of coal (confusingly both the biggest importers and exporters, and consumers). Still, maybe that's being phased out.
But why do you want to "slice up" emissions at all, if you're interested in reducing them? The problem is a big load of gas. So identify the biggest emitters (in total volume) with the most control over it. Don't say "oh San Marino, you're a really greedy country, with all your tax haven shenanigans and conspicuous consumption and more cars than people, you're the problem", because they really aren't. They may be really awful, but that wasn't the question and isn't something it's viable to fix, nor are they capable of helping more than minutely, unlike a giant authoritarian state with giant emissions, capable of helping a lot. And perhaps, as you point out, already doing so.
> But I also read that they're the biggest producers of coal (confusingly both the biggest importers and exporters, and consumers).
Yep. And their coal plants are less and less needed. They are essentially becoming peakers (in the same manner as many modern gas plants) for when the sun don't shine and the wind stops blowing. But in terms of the biggest producers of coal, Australia punches above its weight, but rarely does anyone single it out in these discussions. They also are the second biggest per-capita consumers in terms of CO2 emissions.
>Australia punches above its weight, but rarely does anyone single it out in these discussions. They also are the second biggest per-capita consumers in terms of CO2 emissions.
Our (Australia's) fuckwit right-wing politicians love to blame climate change on China and the USA, because their absolute emissions are way higher than ours and "we emit less than 1% of the world's emissions" so us taking the first step is pointless (says THEM).
Also, because our coal is relatively clean they say that stopping coal mining would actually make emissions worse, because then everyone would just switch to much more polluting foreign coal.
Every American in this thread who says "<China/India> have the most emissions, they need to reduce their CO2 output" needs to understand that the same logic can be and is used against them to justify us doing fuck-all about the climate. Stop enabling our fuckwits!
I'm not sure I come to that conclusion. At least, that's not how I think about responsibility.
I'd say that per capita emissions is a reasonable measure of scoring how much a country and its people are doing to make climate change worse (or better). And, while not perfectly so, it does a reasonable job as being an actionable metric for how sustainable a country's standard of living is. "America (14.4 t/cap/yr) should try to be more like Japan (8.6 t/cap/yr)" is a reasonable take on how the US can reduce its per-capita emissions, and what changes might take it there. "America (4.8 Gt/yr) should try to be more like the United Arab Emirates (220 Mt/yr)" ends up being rather bad advice.
And while the standard of living in Iceland is quite nice, I doubt that there's any practical way that either China or the United States could reduce their emissions to that level (3.5 Mt/yr) in the short term without millions of people starving to death in the process. It wouldn't be realistic or fair for Iceland to demand that the US cut its emissions to Icelandic levels on an absolute basis (but very fair and reasonable to demand that the US cut to Icelandic levels on a per-capita basis).
In terms of how much responsibility a government has, well... certainly governments that govern more people do have more leverage, and with larger total emissions, there are more opportunities to cut. But if there is any non-zero level that we may consider an acceptable emissions target, surely this level should be proportional to a country's population. And when it comes to international agreements, it's reasonable to ask China and India to make cuts, and it's very reasonable for China and India to say "OK we'll make cuts, but we expect small rich countries like Canada to pull their weight, and if they don't, we won't either".
And when that happens, per-capita emissions is the only sensible way to gauge if those countries are pulling their weight.
There are, after all, a lot of countries, and while the top four (China, US, India, Russia) emit 57% of the total, the rest emit the other 43% of that total, with no single country among them emitting over 2.9%. Even cutting China, the US, India, and Russia's emissions to zero would only cut global emissions in about half, and that's really still not enough to solve the problem, so the little countries will have to pitch in.
Who is 'they' here? Certainly there was a one-child policy. I don't think it could be said that the consequence of female abortion and infanticide was the intention (or even an expected consequence) of the policy.
It seems that many people in the comments are set on demonizing the country. For this I think better points to raise are the ethnic cleansing of the Uyghur 'reeducation' program, or the usurping of peaceful autonomous neighbors like Tibet and Hong Kong (maybe Taiwan later). But none of this has anything to do with obligations around CO2 emissions, which they are addressing more than any country on the planet, as I've commented elsewhere:
Rising sea levels, temperature change, and extreme weather are not the only problems. There is also crop failure, ocean acidification, and ecosystem collapse, the latter which is the most worrying to me, as it implies both our food and our oxygen will be impacted. Furthermore, high CO2 levels in the atmosphere have measurable impact on cognitive abilities, so we will all be dumber with the changes, making it even harder to solve the problem. A negative feedback loop it seems.
> Countless human lives can be saved if we're willing to work together.
The major problem is equatorial heat. After a certain point of wet bulb temperature, you either die or migrate a billion people away from the equator into Europe.
Billions can't afford air conditioning. An air conditioning unit is equal to their entire annual income. You don't even have an airtight room within which you can install the AC unit. Let alone a stable electrical grid during heatwaves.
Their state capacity and wealth just isn't there to plan for the worst, either. Their civic society would sooner collapse than mobilise to solve this problem.
My intention isn't to sound chauvinist, this is just a reality of the political fragility of poorer countries, combined with the extreme difficulty of mobilising large amounts of resources to solve long-term challenges.
What about countries with political strife like Myanmar? We can't hope that 100% of countries all experience significant growth, fast enough to outstrip the impact of rising temperatures. There will be laggards stuck on low GDP. Also, a lot of these economies rely on outdoor work, widespread AC can't help with that.
If we get to the 3-4C warming scenarios, these countries will be terrible to live in, regardless of AC, and I won't blame them when they all try to escape to colder Europe.
This is very true. Unfortunately India also houses 1.4 Billion people, most of whom are poor, and any attempt at policy change to limit industry quickly results in poverty-related mortalities by hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
Ignoring the tastelessness of this comment, the bulk of people living in climate threatened areas have land bridges to the broader world and are not principally threatened by rising sea levels
Populations are too big. We can't incorporate effective bodies fast enough or with enough authority to to implement sensible societal changes. Just when you need an adult, MTG shows up.
This data is good for cognitive behavioral therapy and not much else.
In that, the world is certainly not going to end, and maybe it's helpful to look at some data that trends positive in order to inspire hope. But we are committed now to living in a world that will be radically different and less pleasant for a lot of people. How fast these trends improve will determine the scope and magnitude of degraded pleasentness.
Regardless of any change, more extreme weather events more frequently will become more normal. The socioeconomic impacts that are likely to be the most jarring in the global north will probably surface from migration pressure as people from the global south are displaced due to heat and sea level rise.
It is optimistic to think that we'll be on track for 2 degrees of warming, let alone 1.5. At this point, the quiet part just starting to be said out loud is that we'll never hit 1.5. We'll probably never achieve any semblance of the paris agreement goals.
And even as we approach 2 degrees, 2050 looks hotter and more extreme than anything humans have ever experienced in the past.
Probably one of the only short term options between now and 2100 will be solar radiation management -- a largely untested tech that is surely a terrible outcome.
I'm just summarizing the latest IPCC synthesis report [1]. Adding a bit of editorialization in perceived outcomes. One of the most conservative organizations on earth, their assessment is bleak: systems are already permanently damaged, and they're likely to become more so in the near-to-distant future.
My goal is not to make anyone reading despondent. I just think these kind of short snipes of perceived positive trends bury the reality of the situation that we are living through.
If the goal is to assure us that the world's not going to end, it's quite a low bar to set. And there's quite a gradient of suffering between.
> Probably one of the only short term options between now and 2100 will be solar radiation management -- a largely untested tech that is surely a terrible outcome.
Maybe it's time to put a billion or two into testing all these untested techs then.
That's what I find so baffling. Why aren't we putting serious resources into geoengineering, adaptation and mitigation? It's so underfunded in comparison to what we're spending in a futile attempt at emission reduction.
Because there's no economic incentive. We can only create one with proper policies, but politics have been bootlegged by industry who only looks at short-term gains.
> Why aren't we putting serious resources into geoengineering, adaptation and mitigation?
Are you running for president of the US? What do you think would happen to either candidate if they made this central their platform in today's political environment?
Spoiler: rich old people will not suffer, if anything, they'll just stop moving to Florida and Arizona.
In the vein of “this is what people considered ‘comically fat’ as the punchline of a joke when the Simpsons started running”, it’s funny to look back at the “Toby ruins everything” video and look at what Aaron Sorkin considered “comically devastating” for climate change in 2012 in The Newsroom.
I agree with your comment, not because I don't think there is any hope, but because I see a situation were valid and viable hope is buried in the noise of feel-good-show hope and subsidy-ogling hope.
I am not saying it will be easy to build it, or cheap, or without any drawbacks, but...
It is physically possible to generate energy by cooling the planet.
Its cold in space, its cold up there. To run a heat engine you need 2 temperature baths at different temperatures.
Lets take for the higher temperature our surface temperature, and for the lower temperature the temperature at or slightly above the tropopause (say 11 km above surface, somewhere between polar and equatorial regions).
At that height temperatures might be say -50 deg C.
Now consider the following engineering challenge: a buoyant vessel holds taut ~12 km "atmosphere elevator", made of SCG (single crystal graphene). Along such cables could be suspended chimneys made of light fabric, or perhaps pipes conveying coolant up and down, ...
As a thought exercise: suppose the hook floating in the tropopause/bottom of stratosphere is used to heave up and down buckets of water (the same number of buckes going up and down, so apart from friction this transport costs no energy (think of a pulley).
as the water travels up it freezes, giving off heat at a higher layer, closer to dark cold space where it would end up anyway eventually, as the ice is lowered it absorbs heat from the lower layers. If the water/ice buckets were insulated, and only brought in thermal contact at the top or bottom of the structure, then it would dump the heat at the top only, above the CO2 and water blanket where it can more easily escape to space, and it would absorb heat only at the bottom. This means we could run a heat engine at the surface generating energy, without proliferation concerns (because when we do it its for energy, but when others do it it must be for weapons, or for gaining experience requisite for weapons)...
> But we are committed now to living in a world that will be radically different and less pleasant for a lot of people.
Committed?
We will have extra energy for carbon capture on the next decade. This is a problem we can solve. Not before it gets worse, but we can stop it from being permanent.
Sure it can. Why wouldn't it? Say you find a source of energy with zero cost. Now direct air carbon capture is free. "But you don't have a source with zero cost." Great, now we're talking numbers, how cheap does it have to be? So long as energy transport has inevitable losses, carbon capture stands a chance. In other words, IMO we should consider fossil fuel offsetting with carbon capture as a highly lossy energy transport technology that can reach any fossil fuel consumer on earth.
Energy is not the only cost. There are also massive material costs building the carbon capture infrastructure. A reasonable estimate for the scale required is the existing fossile fuel infrastructure.
That is, direct air carbon capture means investing an amount on the order of the value of the existing fossile fuel infrastructure to spend energy to achieve nothing of value (except offsetting the damage we caused by not switching to renewables earlier).
It's a complete nonstarter. Only a vehicle used by the fossile industry to delay the transition.
What extra energy? Energy consumption around the world is rising every year and will rise even higher because of climate change. And carbon capture is not a viable solution to climate change.
"According to the IPCC’s Working Group III report, carbon capture is one of the least-effective, most-expensive climate change mitigation options on Earth."
"Even today, some projects already operating around the world have not been as successful as planned. In Australia, the CCS project run by Chevron has not yet made its Gorgon project meet its target of 80% carbon dioxide capture.
A recent report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) on two Norwegian projects that store carbon dioxide under the seabed called into question the long-term viability of CCS."
"There are currently 42 operational commercial CCS and CCUS projects across the world with the capacity to store 49 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to the Global CCS Institute, which tracks the industry. That is about 0.13% of the world’s roughly 37 billion metric tons of annual energy and industry-related carbon dioxide emissions."
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
That’s significantly moving the goal post. Yes, it’s a given that biodiversity will take a hit for a pretty long time due to human activity but frankly, so what?
I personally care more about avoiding millions dying of starvation but you do you. I understand that said millions being mostly in Nigeria and India make some in the west care less about them that cute animals, but still.
Well we kill it for pleasure, to eat them and treat them horribly, and almost absolutely nobody ever bats an eye. Folks that visit slaughterhouse often don't eat meat for few weeks but then revert back. Don't expect miracles, humans are mostly still pretty primitive species driven largely by emotions which swing semi randomly, all wars are, if you drill deep enough caused by this and only this. Or check any elections.
One day, maybe not so long in future as many may think, our descendants will judge us as primitive barbaric savages. And they will be mostly right.
Great, now we need viable large scale carbon capture technology and enough loose funds to bribe an industry into existence globally. That 2nd part is the real trick.
If anything the Russian invasion of Ukraine diverted attention away from climate change to defence. Look at how many countries in Europe took the opportunity to cut climate progressive policies to reduce fuel prices during the price crunch after the invasion. The prices were temporarily inflated, and affected groups could have been supported by other means, but instead green policies were targeted and you bet they will not be re-introduced any time soon.
And yet, do you know when the hottest month on record was? It's easy to answer: last month.
It's been "last month" for the last 12 months at least. Basically, we've hit the J curve.
The "extraordinarily significant events" you cite amount to little more than a guy who jumped off a bridge thinking: "you know, I think I've changed my mind".
(And yet, we just bought $700 of seedlings and I spent my birthday, and many other days planting them. It's not a pointless exercise, it will improve things in my little corner, but it won't materially affect anything either).
And yet, this is baked into climate change models if you’ve been paying attention.
Unfortunately, yes, even after we hit a plateau of emissions, we’re going to see effects.
The important bit is that, yes, we are seeing changes, and yes, we are seeing dreadful environment effects, we’re making progress to slow this down.
We’re fortunate that the last few years gave us excuses to shift policy that otherwise would’ve had us keep going down this path for another decade+.
I would certainly hope those pushing the “doomerism” takes in this thread do not work for any AI companies, cloud computing, NVIDIA, or other organization responsible for insane datacenter power growth this past year.
2023 is 37.4, which is a fair increase on 2019. More importantly the chart that matters is total CO2 in atmosphere. You can't even see 2020 on here. That was a one off 5% decrease.
Imagine if you had $1,000,0000 in your bank account and were spending $100,000 per year, except one year you spent $95,000. That's 2020.
This methane news is on top of CO2 as it has its own added impact. Proper optimism that we can do it first requires taking stock of where we actually are. So far we haven't actually displaced any carbon energy and we are at the all time highest levels of both annually emissions and also CO2 in the atmosphere.
Interesting - thanks for the CO2 concentration link. I am curious what prior to 2019 looked like (eg: if it was a comparable size, yet dipped in 2019-2021) and is back to normal.
Have a look at the right hand chart. That shows the increase from 1960 until now. You couldn't spot 2020 by eyeballing the chart.
2020 was a 5% dip in the pace of the increase. It's like someone gained ten pounds in 2019, 9.5 pounds in 2020, and 10 pounds in 2021. CO2 emissions are analogous to a total gain, so a 5% one off cut isn't very meaningful.
The emissions, not the level. The level is increasing at the level of emissions (minus absorptions). We are accelerating as fast as 2019 towards the wall.
On the bright side for those that have always wanted to travel to other worlds and terraform them, we'll now have an opportunity to have that experience without the travel.
But the things to do to try to avert looming disaster are the same things to do to be a better person in times of no crisis.
Be kind and loving, develop compassion. That's pretty much it.
The point is not to make it or not. Entropy is the enemy and it will win in the end. So what? No one here gets out alive. The point is to be a better person, to help others, to make things better.
If we are going to make it we will make it though love and compassion.
If we don't make it, then at least we didn't waste the time we had.
I'm sympathetic to your view, but I feel you're talking science-fiction or perhaps religion. By definition the Heat Death means there's nothing left to be the substrate for sapience and intelligence, eh? (If you like to discuss metaphysics I'm game.)
Anyway, intelligence without love is less than pointless.
I'm sure he has his motivations that he has internally justified and made sense of.
Saying he has mental health issues because he supports Donald Trump because somehow Trump is pro oil and that'll massively hurt the EV industry sounds like a huge stretch, be honest. Even a casual reading of Elon a lot of us squint and make the conclusion that he supports Trump because he thinks it's what your country needs, heck like a lot of us do, EV industry be damned.
The left is clearly destructive with open borders and a lack of crime policing, even if it's noble, that it's very likely that everyone including Elon is choosing Trump as a correction to the arguably insane and self-destructive policies of the left.
Why on earth do you think America needs Trump? I'm honestly interested in your opinion. Why do you say that?
Even if as the other commenter said, it's about advancing business interests through bribes, it's a slippery, dangerous slope. Trump is the kind of person who might end up deciding his Son in Law should be running your company...based on his track record of appointing morons to high places.
I really still can't imagine what is going through his mind.
Trump is a deplorable person even if you think he is funny or entertaining.
Honestly, I think plain old sanity needs to prevail on some level to counteract the direction the US (and lots of the Western world) have been heading. And currently, sanity is taking the really weird form of Donald Trump and a lot of people are rallying behind him oddly. Do I like him? No, he's a weird dude and triggers a bunch of my own personal alarm bells. But if this is the only thing sanity can muster, then so be it. Obviously debate, processes, laws (!!), and discussions are not working (just look at the Biden thread happening right now on HN). Heck, one could arguably say that democratic processes such as majority-rule are also not working.
What exactly do you want a rational person to do? We have actual laws that are racist, and at the same time we have laws that are selectively enforced and ignored for political purposes. In that sort of environment, we're in the same field as dictatorships and when it comes time to protecting oneself and family, anything goes.
See where the debate is right now: You claim he might appoint his Son in Law as a form of nepotism. The other side counters with "but look at Hunter Biden, etc" and "Look how Biden appointed unqualified DEI hires, etc". It's all marketing spin, and we have no idea what's really happening. We're relying on trust and hearsay with N-levels of interpretation and motives to get to the truth.
US republicans and democrats have largely the same policies except for social wedge issues.
My bet is that Elon knows Trump is pliable if you come with an open checkbook, so there's real opportunity to advance your business interests if he's president.
I think this is true also, it's calculated to some degree, but shit can go really bad with this approach too, it's playing with fire. Ask Jack Ma about dealing with autocrats or those who "strongly admire" autocrats, as Trump has said repeatedly. He admires, Xi, he admires Putin, he admires Kim Jung Un. At some point he might decide some of your wealth, might just be some of his wealth.
It's wild, really wild, I can't believe this is America we're talking about.
It can decrease the solar exposure of the earth and potentially decrease temperature, doesn’t address fossil fuel pollution but it does mitigate the impacts of fossil fuel CO2.
I am not well versed but my impression is it’s essentially a bunch of tin foil and the main impediment are geopolitical reasons and cost to orbit, which SpaceX has been and continues to improve.
Okay, so having gone down this path I can tell you it is impossible. To reduce the output of the sun by 2% at L1 would require 20 MM tons of metal. In order to launch that much tonnage we would have needed to start launching mass 500 years ago. And that assumes no loss of material over time, which would mean even more launches.
> A more recent design has been proposed by Olivia Borgue and Andreas M. Hein in 2022, proposing a distributed sunshade with a mass on the order of 100,000 tons, composed of ultra-thin polymeric films and SiO2 nanotubes.[7] The author estimated that launching such mass would require 399 yearly launches of a vehicle such as SpaceX Starship for 10 years.[7]
100000 tons is 907184749 kgs and the max capacity of a starliner is 150000kgs. So to launch 100000 tons it would require 6048 launches or one launch a day for 16.5 years.
That would mean we'd have all the mass launched by 2040, if we started today. Nope, not feasible.
That's honestly not all that unfeasible if SpaceX gets Starship reuse down. Assuming we get launch costs down to a few million, it won't even be that expensive relative to the size of the problem. And launches can be parallelized pretty well - just build more launch pads.
The cool thing about reusable rockets is that even for a project like this you're not going to be rocket construction limited. If every rocket can launch 20 times (and that's pessimistic!) you only need to build 300 of them. And say you have ten launch pads, you only need to launch once a week per, to grind through the problem in a decade.
And that's all of course assuming SpaceX don't manage to scale the platform up further, improve cargo capacity etc.
It's a civilizational project, sure, but it wouldn't even be as expensive as the Apollo program.
Thank you for adding some numbers regarding the feasibility of launching the required materials into space. Do you have any thoughts/numbers about how "mining/construction" in-situ in space might affect those outcomes? E.g. Might we soon be able to "recycle" old in-orbit objects (trash/old_sats) into a slowly growing space mirror? Or several smaller ones over (richer/more_affected) areas?
So not really. Space mining is a very attractive idea but just not really feasible at the moment. I wrote a paper on attempting to capture the asteroid 433 Eros (a very attractive asteroid due to it's composition of rare metals [Data from the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft collected on Eros in December 1998 suggests that it could contain 20 billion tonnes of aluminum and similar amounts of metals that are rare on Earth, such as gold and platinum.]) and found that in order to knock it into an orbit around the moon we'd need something on the order of 1 THOUSAND or 10 THOUSAND (I could be off by even another magnitude, the numbers are fuzzy after all this time) tsar bomba grade weapons to effectively knock it out of the current orbit and back into one around the moon. Why the moon? Because throwing a planet killer sized object at the Earth just didn't seem reasonable.
I situ mining might make this more feasible, but that has all of its own complications. None of which I would feel confident in saying are feasible.
How so? Huge flooding in Brazil this year, they are not recovering any time soon. Poor countries lack the resources that rich countries literally burn for their luxury.
Say Brazil floods this year, and next year, and the year after that.
What do you think will happen next? What will happen is Brazil will start planning for it, and then they'll be fine. There will be an adjustment period, and then, life goes on.
This is what people don’t get about places like Florida. The people in Florida are in fact aware that it storms and floods, thats why the house is built on stilts with metal storm shutters.
Sure, but it’s expensive and it’s still devastated by storms etc. Like these building techniques works so well that insurers have left the Florida market because it’s unprofitable to rebuild everyone every couple years, so the state outlawed charging rates that account for the actual expense of it, and now people can’t get home insurance policies anymore.
Like literally it’s already too expensive to keep doing it without a massive funnel of taxpayer money into peoples beach houses. It’s literally only viable to keep doing that by leeching off the largesse of the taxpayer and other homeowners in less dangerous locales.
Florida also has the additional problem that it’s literally built on karst topology, it’s limestone riddled with tunnels and sinkholes so water comes right up under it, you can’t even pump the cities dry like the Netherlands.
Insurers have not left the florida market. The number of uninsured homes is estimated to be like 10-20%, probably what you'd expect given a certain percentage of holdout low income homeowning areas from before florida saw so much inflow in certain real estate markets. The national rate is a little under 10% for reference. Sometimes when headlines and assumptions seem absurd, like no insurance in florida, its worth looking into it a little bit.
Huh? Of course life goes on, but it will be a more resource constrained life, and that will make political negotiations more difficult. If those aren't implications worth worrying about, what would be?
Absolutely wrong. India, China and the more polluting poorer countries are the ones who'll always suffer more.
With >300 AQIs in most highly-populated areas, dirty water from rivers almost all of which are hazardously polluted, combined with a tropical climate that's already hot enough to kill thousands of people from heatstroke alone in summers - pollution-related misery in US and Europe isn't anywhere close enough to that in India. It just doesn't get called out because Indians have bigger existential concerns (many of which go directly against climate-friendliness).
You know that the extinction rate of species (which includes animals) is running at approximately 200 per day.
Unless you mean the vast majority of animals in the sense of numbers of individual animals, instead of diversity of species, then maybe you're right: the vast majority will be fine as the biomass of domestic animals now outweight the biomass of every other species.
Hmm, I'm really not sure about that. There are events in the geological record in which the vast majority of animals were not fine, and I'm not convinced that humans would be among those that make it, adjustments or not.
Humans aren't likely to die out directly, although scenarios where it all seems a bit pointless and the remaining few million humans stop reproducing are plausible.
There is going to be a point in the climate change phenomenon where we have to start taking aggressive measures and actually go after the biggest polluters no matter what nation they hide behind. Especially considering there will probably be forces working to undermine all of these climate goals. Maybe the US could throw some of that military budget around and use Seal team sappers to disable these polluting industrial plants? Now before people get guarded at that idea, just consider the US already does the same to kill actual people with such operations. Merely disabling infrastructure not only has some precedent, but also seems far more benign to me.
It is deeply ironic that the modern technological era provided both the means for destroying the planet and monitoring that destruction to minute detail.
It's a blowout. That means what it sounds like. An explosion and a fire. To fix it, you have to put out the fire. Once you put out the fire, you're still releasing methane.
Methane is flared instead of released under normal conditions if it's not being captured. A blowout is very much not normal conditions.
Single events just aren't that big against the background of global oil and gas production emissions, let alone overall global methane emissions. Its true that O & G emissions are higher than most governments report but most models take this into account in some fashion.
Its also a big topic of research to account for methane emissions because the measured amount is larger than models are predicting from known inventories. But its not thought to be from events like this.
The EU is getting ready to impose a carbon border price which will be in proportion to estimates of carbon emissions. So, there will be a price on carelessness if it can be measured by satellites.
Social Carbon is just marketing from fossil fuel companies to confuse people into thinking that its people's fault and for companies to shirk responsibility.
Along some particularly leaky production paths methane emissions are so great that the impact is greater than coal over 100 year timescale. For example, some parts of NM Permian have a 9% (!) leakage rate. When combusted methane releases about half the amount of CO2 that coal does. The eGHG potential of methane is 20x CO2 over 100 year timescale, so you have to add 180% to the total GHG potential, making it 40% worse than coal w/o even considering other leakage along the pipeline.
https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/methane-leaks-are-f...