Carbon neutral and CO2 emissions, etc

bennty
Thu, 09 Sep 2021 23:07:03 +0000

I think these are arguments worth turning over for a second look.

First, there’s not much in the way of imposition except to tell industry, for instance, that it must find ways of reducing certain emission types, or reach certain efficiencies. How they do that is up to them, and some solutions are heftily subsidized. If you look at CCS, for instance, that’s a massively expensive way of using fossil fuels: you spend nearly half the energy you generate capturing the carbon, and then you have to figure out what to do with it, store it somewhere. So there are massive federal subsidies for this. Of course, you’re also free to figure out how not to generate that much CO2 in the first place. An answer I’m starting to see some companies reach, surprisingly enough, is “make less money”. They still make money. But they accept making less money, at least in the near term, in order to find a less destructive way of doing business.

Renewable energy’s also come a long way in the last couple of decades. My modest solar array generates more than my house uses in a year, and it gets mighty darn cold where I live; winter days are short. Winter days don’t have air conditioning, though, and my electricity use in winter is much lower than it is in summer. Over time, the panels pay for themselves plus a bit extra, so yes, even if my fear was that I’d have to pay slightly more to avoid contributing to all the exciting weather we’re having and leaving the kids on a hot planet, I’d be assured. My boss, who insisted up and down for years that renewables made no financial sense, now has both solar and geothermal for her very large property, and again, we’re very far from volcanoes. (The main problem you run into with geothermal is oversaturation of an area, plus afaik you need a lot of land for the loops.) That’s the cottage-industry take, of course; electricity generated industrially from renewables doesn’t have to stay in the region where it’s produced.

Frankly, I’d prefer it if the utilities would work with the feds to organize this better. The only reason I’ve got panels on my roof is that it’s clear my local utility’s not going to let go of coal anytime soon, so I’ll reduce demand for it along with all the other people and organizations sticking panels up on their roofs. But I had no burning desire to mess with a grid and a grid connection that were working fine. As a country, we’ve got a lot of renewable resources, and can use more of them in a more sensitive way. Would it mean that owning a util wasn’t Midas-touch territory, maybe. But we used to have highly-regulated utilities in which part of the deal was that you got to make money. You just didn’t get to make all the money. I don’t see a problem with that.

Genuine curiosity, not JAQing: do you have a citation for that claim about battery manufacturing and cars?

I think one of the biggest problems right now is that there are so many potential solutions, all with different costs and payouts, so the amount of research and analysis it takes for any individual to do is just too much. You can help that somewhat with sherpas, like you see for ACA, but infrastructure that’s just there and does the job needs to happen in a lot more places. It doesn’t have to be technologically complex, either. The other day I was thinking about the issue with older people and bikes, and of course in places where old people routinely ride bikes for transport they’ve done it all their lives. And their towns are set up for that. We aren’t. Currently we have a quarter-mile string of minivans idling away every weekday waiting to pick up kids outside the schools; we could get rid of a lot of that if we had bike paths going from the neighborhoods to the schools, separated from traffic and clearly marked for children’s use, with lollipop guards at difficult crossings. You’d wind up with a mob of kids on bikes every day that wasn’t terrible weather, and even the worried moms would eventually let their kids ride, like they were begging to do because their friends did. The kids would grow up with a sense of independence and ability to get themselves around, would ride after school to each others’ houses, and would expect such infrastructure to be available when they got older.

A common way of funding such projects: block grants. Make them to municipalities, let local people come up with solutions that suit the locality.