this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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How Does Your State Make Electricity? America isn’t making electricity the way it did two decades ago. (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (4 children)

It's not as cheap as wind or solar at current upfront costs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I guess I should have clarified. When you do a cost analysis of per MW generation over the lifetime of the plant, it gets significantly cheaper. Cheaper than solar, or wind. The only issue is the large upfront cost of billions of dollars, like I previously stated. The cost of solar and wind is cheaper up front, but on a large generation scale, is lacking. Nuclear is the only solution right now to the climate. There is no other large scale generation that can sustain demand as clean as nuclear.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I'm talking about the exact same thing. Wind and solar are cheaper by that metric.

Nuclear is still cost-competitive with long-duration storage, so if that doesn't fall in price (which is what has been happening with storage recently) it might make sense to use for 10% or so of overall generation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That is inaccurate. You can look up LCOE for all of these and Nuclear is right up there with Gas. Also, you can't have 10% of your generation be nuclear with solar and wind making up the majority. You literally cannot produce that much electricity. Nuclear, being arguably the most efficient source of energy and the largest capacity, it makes sense for nuclear to be in place of our coal and gas plants with solar and wind supplements. But hey, that's just what I studied for a living.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I did. That was true 20 years ago. It's not now